Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“Why would either Clete or I dime you, Detective?” I said.

“Because I told him we’re not right for each other. It was fun and now we move on. It was nothing personal. I thought he was a sweet guy.”

“Rejection is not personal. That’s wonderful.”

“You’d better stay out of my life and my career,” she said.

“Be assured I will.”

“I have a second reason for calling. Levon Broussard just came into the prosecutor’s office and confessed to torturing Penny to death. What do you think of that, slick?”

THAT WAS NOT all Levon did. After confessing to an ADA in the Jeff Davis courthouse, he went out the side door, drove to a low-bottom joint north of Four Corners in Lafayette, got plowed out of his head, and at sunset drove across his lawn to the gallery on the front of his house and announced to his wife, “Hi, honey, I’m home.”

Helen called me on my cell. “Get over to Levon Broussard’s place. It looks like he’s lost it.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Who knows? His wife called in the 911. He’s in the yard with a Confederate flag and a sword, ranting at the sky. He fired a flare pistol across the bayou and asked some people in a boat to come in for a drink. I think they’re still emptying out their shoes.”

I drove to his house. The sky was a red-and-black ink wash, the oaks he had named for Confederate officers chattering with birds. A patrol car was parked in the neighbor’s drive; another was parked by the tennis courts across the two-lane highway. I got out of my pickup and walked around the side of the house and through a line of camellia bushes into the backyard. He was sitting at a folding table under a huge oak by the bayou, the faded battle flag he had kept encased in glass hanging from an overhead branch. It looked like cheesecloth against the sunset. The dried blood of the drummer boy reminded me of the coppery stains on the Shroud of Turin.

Levon lifted a bottle of Cold Duck above his head. “Welcome to Chaucer’s blue-collar good knight. Or is it Everyman I see? Wrong evening for bromides, Davey.”

His face was oily and dissolute with booze. He had stabbed his great-grandfather’s sword into the sod by his foot. His teeth were stained with wine.

“Looks like you’ve had quite a day,” I said.

“How’s that, Davey?”

“Confessing to an ADA in Jennings. Scaring your friends in New Iberia.”

“Not so about scaring my friends.”

I nodded at the flag lifting in the breeze above us. “That should be in a controlled environment, shouldn’t? Protected from dust and humidity?”

“It survived Yankee artillery at Owl Creek. That’s where the Eighteenth Louisiana got torn to pieces. In fifteen minutes, forty percent were casualties.”

“You can’t win on yesterday’s box score. Why lose because of it?”

“That one zipped by me.”

“The past has no reality. The world belongs to the living.”

“You know better. You see them in the mists out at Spanish Lake.”

“See whom?”

“I love you for your diction, if nothing else. The boys in butternut. You see them slogging through the cypresses.”

“Who told you that?”

“They did,” he replied.

I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.

“Why did you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?” I asked.

“You don’t believe me capable of killing the man who raped my wife?”