When he told me, he was right, I couldn’t believe him. The actor was well known and respected; he’d received a Golden Globe Award and other nominations.
“I told him Alafair was doing the script,” Tony said. “She’s gonna love working with him.”
“I can’t tell quite how I feel at this moment.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Where do you get off using Alafair’s name in your business dealings?”
“I’m giving her a break.”
“The only break here is going to be in your fat neck,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
“Maximo went out hard, Tony. Think about the implications. Ten years ago nobody would have touched one of your guys.”
“Put her on the phone.”
“Are you listening? My daughter is never going to work with you.”
“Yeah? My lawyer already talked with Levon Broussard in the can. He wants Alafair to do the script.”
“Levon wants to work with you?”
“Not exactly. But he will. He wants to get even with Nightingale. This is gonna be like a telephone pole with spikes in it kicked right up Nightingale’s ass.”
“I thought you were going to put him in the White House.”
“Nightingale is a Benedict Arnold. I kept the unions off his back, introduced him to people with billions of dollars, got him a girlfriend or two. Then one day I’m the stink on shit.”
“A heads-up, Tony: If a guy who talks like Elmer Fudd and has lips like red licorice shows up at your house, don’t invite him in.”
“I’m supposed to be afraid of a guy who escaped from a Bugs Bunny cartoon?”
“I think he capped two black guys in Algiers and blew a cop’s brains out in St. Mary Parish. For a while I thought he might be working for you. Now I think you’re a target.”
“You know why you’re a cop? You’re dumb and can’t do anything else. For years Maximo had a thing for little boys. One of his victims caught up with him. Fade to black.”
“Sounds more like your epitaph, Tony.”
“My dork in your ear, Robicheaux,” he replied, and hung up.
In the morning, the judge who had remanded Levon Broussard changed his mind and released him on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail.
* * *
I DIDN’T KNOW what to make of Levon’s story about Kevin Penny. Levon had deduced that Kevin Penny had probably raped his wife but had allowed us to continue our prosecution of an innocent man. Then Levon had gone on his own to Penny’s trailer, supposedly to confront him, and had left his fingerprints on the electric drill that had taken Penny’s life, supposedly while trying to save him from drowning in his own vomit. But he hadn’t called 911. Why hadn’t he? He wasn’t the kind of man who panicked. His account was a hard sell.
Maybe Levon didn’t care whether Jimmy was guilty of the actual rape. He blamed Jimmy regardless. As for most of us who seek revenge, his anger and need probably had their origins in the past, and the present situation was a surrogate for an injury that had occurred long ago. Levon’s wife had been raped and then abandoned by the system in Wichita, Kansas. I also believed his liberal sentiments and his commitment to civil rights were sorely tested by the fact that the rapists were black.
Two hours after his release from a lockdown unit in Jennings, I found him in his backyard, unshaven, red-eyed, dirty, and still smelling of jail. He was flinging baseballs at a wooden box he had nailed to the side of his carriage house. I had forgotten that he’d played American Legion ball. I had also forgotten that he’d attended a military academy in Mississippi, if only for one year, at the end of which he had been expelled for knocking down an instructor who insulted his family.
The ground was littered with baseballs. A cooler with a corked bottle of white wine pushed down in the ice rested on a picnic table.
“Pretty good forkball,” I said.
He looked at me blankly. “There’s a soda in the box, if you want one.”