Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“I’m not being honest. Earlier, Penny told me about what a sleaze Nightingale was. You think Nightingale is a gentleman or something, but I know better. Nonetheless, I was going to take the deal with him. I didn’t want to lose my place in the Quarter. Whatever principles I have, I was willing to sell them out.”

“So what did this guy Penny tell you?”

“He delivered coke to Nightingale’s house. And a girl or two.”

“Every one of these guys has a story like that. They’ve sold dope to George W. Bush or set up trysts for John Kennedy. Don’t buy into this crap, Clete.”

“Penny says he’s deposited money in a bank account of a company owned by Nightingale. He was even taught how to structure it. To make the deposits in amounts of less than ten thousand so the bank doesn’t report it to the IRS.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Those eight women who were killed,” Clete said. “They haunt me.”

He wasn’t alone. I had worked with a task force on some of those homicides in Jeff Davis Parish. Eight young women, all of them poor, all of them involved with drugs and prostitution, were found with their throats cut, or so badly decomposed in a swamp that the cause of death couldn’t be determined. At the same time, there was a series of kidnappings and murders in East and West Baton Rouge parishes. Those victims were also dumped in wetlands areas. We thought we had the killers. In fact, Clete and I helped take them off the board.

We were wrong. The murders in Jeff Davis Parish came out of a culture that many Americans would not be able to understand, an aggregate of corrupt cops, ignorance, greed, misogyny, cruelty, sexual degradation, drug addiction, and ultimately, collective indifference toward the fate of people who have neither power nor voice. I’m talking about a new social class, one that is not racially defined. They come out of the womb addicted to crack and booze, have only a semblance of a family, drift from town to town selling themselves or dealing dope or stealing to buy it. The irony is they’re not criminals, not in the traditional sense. They’re pitiful, sad, and vulnerable, gathered up in bus stations like grunion at high tide.

“Have you eaten?” I said.

“My stomach’s not right,” Clete said.

“Come inside.”

“Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you back on the sauce?”

“I have some potato salad and cold chicken inside.”

“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said.

I walked ahead of him into the kitchen and clicked on the light. I thought I saw a raccoon on the window ledge, staring through the screen. When I looked outside, the yard was empty and windswept, tormented by shadows.

* * *

EARLY THE NEXT morning I got a call I didn’t expect.

“Is that you, Robicheaux?”

“Who’s calling?” I said.

“How many people got pustules in their throat and sound like a rusty sewer pipe?”

“Tony?”

“Tell the maid to give you a blow job.”

“How did you get this number?”

“It cost me a dollar ninety-five on the Internet. I think I got fucked. Speaking of which, you put a posthole digger up my ass.”

“In what way?”

“Jimmy Nightingale said he was gonna get that Civil War sword appraised. Now he tells me he gave it to Levon Broussard, but he’ll give me ten thousand reimbursement. I told him to change his ten grand into nickels and shove them up his nose. Why’d you do this to me?”

“Do what?”