Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“Pardon?” Helen said.

“In Afghanistan.”

“Let’s take a walk,” I said to both of them.

We crossed the road and walked several hundred yards to a spot where a heavy vehicle had parked and then backed in a semicircle and driven away on its own tire marks. The ground was soft and moist, the impressions sharply stenciled. There were shoeprints by the tire tracks.

Helen got on her radio. “We need some tape in the field.”

“This is my guess,” Sherry said. “The shooter set up a bipod on his vehicle and fired through a space in the traffic. That means he’s very good. The first shot was high. The second and third were on the mark. The M107 is a semi-auto. Unless he fired from inside the truck, the brass must have hit the ground.”

But there was no brass on the ground. If the shooter used a semi-auto outside the truck, he had picked up his spent cartridges, which only cops and professional hitters do.

“You got any idea who this guy is?” Helen said to Sherry.

“Somebody who doesn’t care if he drills a hole in a house one mile away and kills a child in a high chair,” Sherry answered.

* * *

OUR LITTLE TOWN was not emotionally equipped to deal with the presence of a contract killer. Oh, yes, we’re a libertine and atavistic people with a patina of Christianity, but by and large, our self-indulgence is that of children and perhaps even an expansion of Christ’s recommendation to abide Caesar. Fear spread throughout the town, and Bobby Earl tried to insert himself into the mix, appearing on local television, speculating that Islamic terrorism was at the root of things. But Earl was an amateur, a race-baiter who had faded away with the Klan and the sweaty redneck demagogues shouting through megaphones on the bed of a cotton wagon.

Jimmy Nightingale, however, had found his voice. He, too, appeared on television, usually with police officials or a respected politician at his side. He was avuncular and assuring. He praised law enforcement, the Constitution, our way of life, our people in uniform overseas. As I looked at him on the screen, I believed Jimmy’s time had come around.

Another figure showed up prominently, as is usual when we lose faith in ourselves and reach out for the worst members of our species. Tony Nemo was back in town, in a chauffeured steel-gray limo with charcoaled windows that hid the identities of either celebrities or individuals who would make small-town souls uncomfortable. He reserved the old Evangeline Theater, built on Main Street in 1929, for what he told The Daily Iberian was “a screening” of his work. The two films were The Attack of the Worm People and Ninja Surf Vixens.

After the screening, he threw a grand party in City Park, with barbecue and dirty rice and kegs of beer and crawfish boiling in caldrons filled with artichokes and corn on the cob. The oaks were strung with Japanese lanterns; a Cajun band played “La Jolie Blon” and “Allons à Lafayette” and Clifton Chenier’s signature song, “Ay-Te Te Fee.” I sat in my backyard and watched it from across the bayou. A few feet away, I could see the hooded eyes of an alligator among the cattails. Mon Tee Coon was eating from a can of cat food on the picnic table. The band played “La Jolie Blon” a second time. For me, there is no more haunting ballad in the world. Its origins go back to the eighteenth century, but the rendition by Harry Choates is the one that never leaves you.

Harry was born in either Rayne, Louisiana, or New Iberia, no one ever knew. He composed and sang in French but didn’t know how to speak it. He sold his song for a hundred dollars and a bottle of booze and died drunk or was beaten to death by cops in the Austin city jail. The oddity of Harry’s song is that you don’t have to speak French to understand it. You know immediately it’s about mortality and a lost way of life. Cajun culture is parodied and ridiculed; it is also treated as quaint and commercially exploited and vulgarized. But the travail of the Acadians was real, and so was the love affair of Evangeline on the banks of Bayou Teche, written about by Longfellow. Whenever someone asks me what southern Louisiana used to look like, and what has been despoiled by industrial polluters and Louisiana’s corrupt politicians, I suggest they listen to Harry’s lament. In my opinion, anyone who can be indifferent to this song has a spiritual affliction.

I heard Alafair behind me. Mon Tee Coon glanced up and went back to eating. Alafair picked up a pecan that was still in the husk and tossed it at the alligator’s head. He ducked under the lily pads, his tail slapping water on the bank.

“What’s the haps, Baby Squanto?” I said.

“We have Visigoths in the driveway.”

I waited, dreading the rest of it.

“Tony Nemo,” she said.

“Who’s with him?”

“Levon Broussard.”

“Are you going to work with these guys, Alf?”

“I’ll do the adaptation with Levon. I won’t be on the set.”

Ouch, I thought. “What’s Nemo want?”

“I didn’t ask. They’re drinking champagne in the back of the limo. You want me to blow them off?”

I got up from my deck chair. “Nope.” I walked into the front yard. The limo was the color of a shark. The back door was open. Levon was standing on the grass, his tie pulled loose, a dark green bottle in his hand. “I’ve got a table by the band. I thought you might like to sit with Rowena and me.”

I could see Tony’s dark massivity piled in the backseat. “No, thanks.”

“I owe you an amends. Isn’t that what you twelve-step people call it?”

“You don’t owe me anything.”