“You’re just a visitor, Mr. Robicheaux. People such as you don’t make the cut.”
“Then why am I here?”
“I need you to help me.”
“Sir?”
“I was used to kill many people. I have no peace. The one I grieve over most is Leslie Rosenberg. She was totally innocent of any crime. I hate what I have done.”
“Any crimes you have committed were done with your own consent. I suggest you lose the ashes-and-sackcloth routine.”
“You won’t help me?”
“I’m not a theologian. Call up Father Julian.”
“Evil people are about to hurt him.”
“Mark Shondell?” I said.
“Don’t speak to me about the Shondells.”
“You were at his house,” I said. “Marcel LaForchette saw you there.”
“I will not discuss this.”
“You worked for him. Why denounce him now?”
“Don’t tempt me, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Then don’t be a hypocrite.”
“Be gone with you,” he said.
“Did you kill Firpo?”
“I kill no one. They kill themselves.”
“That’s a lie,” I said.
“I can do you great injury.”
“The words of a bully,” I said. “I thought better of you.”
His skin and the scales on it were luminous with an oily sweat. He raised his hand as though to strike me. I knew I was in mortal danger but could not move. Suddenly, Gideon and the galleon and the poor devils on it disappeared, and I was on the bank, deep in the shadow of the live oak, the air dank and cold and throbbing with frogs.
I walked home like a drunk man and woke in the morning facedown on the couch, my clothes on, the soles of my shoes rimmed with mud.
It wasn’t easy to tell Helen Soileau all this, but I did. As she listened, she flicked a ballpoint pen in a circle on her ink blotter. She had started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and had ended up my partner in Homicide in New Iberia. I believed several people lived inside Helen, both male and female, all of them complex. She was a good cop and a brave and loyal friend but also mercurial and sometimes violent.
After I finished, she propped her cheek and chin at an angle on her palm, as a teenager might. “There are a couple of things that bother me about your account, bwana. Number one, you said this character Gideon mentioned Vietnam and calling for air support.”
“That’s right. He knew things about me he could have no knowledge of.”
“But he used a phrase I’ve heard you use before: ‘Did he smile upon his work to see?’ Where’s that from?”
“William Blake’s poem about the nature of evil.”
“You and Gideon read the same books?”
“That’s a possibility,” I said.
“The other part that bothers me is you say you walked home like a drunk man.”
“I haven’t been drinking, Helen.”
“When was your last drink?”
“Nineteen months ago.”
She dropped her ballpoint in a drawer. “This story doesn’t just sound crazy, it scares the shit out of me,” she said. “I have to be honest, Streak. I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
“Is Clete having one? Is Leslie Rosenberg having one?”
“Ever hear of mass hysteria? How about Salem, 1692?”
“I told you what I saw and heard,” I said. “Do with it as you wish. I’ll see you later.”
“This morning I heard from Baton Rouge PD,” she said. “The sugar cubes from Father Julian’s refrigerator contained LSD. Second item: A friend of mine who works in the diocesan office says two anonymous callers have accused Father Julian of child molestation. A third caller said he tried to rape her.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“They have to deal with it. Father Julian has pissed off a lot of people, particularly these right-to-life fanatics.”
“I think this is Mark Shondell at work,” I said.
“Let Father Julian fight his own battles, bwana.”
“Great attitude,” I said.
“Have you ever considered the possibility Julian may not be innocent?”
“He killed Eddy Firpo? Stop it.”
“How did his stamps end up on Firpo’s shoe?” she said.
“They were planted.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Glad I’m on the side of the good guys,” I said.
I walked out of the office. She wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at my back. I walked back inside and picked it up and placed it on her desk. “Shame on you, Helen,” I said.
That night I ate by myself at Clementine’s. Outside, dust was swirling out of the streets, paper boxes and pieces of newspaper bouncing down the asphalt and the sidewalks. The light was strange, too, as though it were draining from the western sky into the earth, not to be seen again, robbing us of not only the day but the morrow as well. Of course, these feelings and perceptions are not uncommon in people my age. This was different. As I mentioned earlier, I have long believed that my generation is a transitional one and will be the last to remember what we refer to as traditional America. But somehow the fading of this particular evening seemed a harbinger of a sea change, perhaps a tectonic shift in the plates on which our civilization stood.
Vanity? That could be. But how do you just say fuck you to the culture and the people who kept Hitler and Tojo from shaking hands across the Mississippi?
The front door opened, and with a gust of rain-peppered wind at his back, Johnny Shondell walked past the bar and sat down across from me in the dining room, the candle on my table flickering on his white sport coat. “What’s happenin’, Mr. Dave?” he said.
“No haps, Johnny,” I said.
He looked his old youthful self, his system free of skag and tobacco and booze. His dark blue silk shirt was unbuttoned at the top, exposing his tan chest.
“Where’s Isolde?” I said. I didn’t know whether they were still on the run from Mark Shondell. I assumed they were not, since the uncle had been at the nightclub in Baton Rouge to hear Johnny and Isolde play when Eddy Firpo was slashed to death.
Johnny’s gaze roamed around the room. “She’s at the motel. We’re flying out to Nashville in the morning for a session at Martina and John McBride’s Blackbird Studios. It’s an album tribute to Hank Williams. Did you know he was the crossover guy to rock and roll, not Elvis? Listen to ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.’ Your neighbor told me you were probably here.”
“Can I help you with something?”
He looked over his shoulder and back at me. “Mr. Dave, you’re the only person who came to see me in rehab. I won’t ever forget that. So I thought maybe I could tell you about something that’s tearing me up, that I don’t understand, and that I can’t talk to other people about.”
“Does this have to do with your uncle Mark?”
“He wants me and Isolde to get involved with some of these college kids who want to take down the Confederate flag and the statues of the generals or some shit like that.” His eyes went away from mine as though he had said something obscene.
“When did your uncle become the John Brown of New Iberia?” I said.
“You mean the guy who tried to set the slaves free?”
“Yeah, that John Brown.”
“Uncle Mark has always treated black people okay. Right?”
Because to him, they’re not important enough to think about one way or another, I thought. “How do you feel about the issue?”
“A lot of our fans carry Styrofoam spit cups. Plus, they don’t come to a concert to beat each other up.”
“I’m not objective about your uncle,” I said. “But everyone in this town knows he does nothing that is not in his interest. They also know he will destroy anyone who gets in his way. Why would he want to help college kids tear down statues of people who have been dead for over a hundred years?”