“When’s the last time you burned your leaves?” I said.
“A couple of years ago. Why?”
“No reason. Emmeline Nightingale has been bugging Alafair.”
He hefted a giant sheaf of compressed leaves and dropped them into the flames, his face swelling in the heat. “What does that have to do with us?”
“Maybe nothing. Except Tony Nemo is on Clete Purcel’s back and also in my face, directly or indirectly because of a sword your great-grandfather carried. At least that’s where all this started.”
“So you’ve come out here to tell me my great-grandfather’s sword is the origin of your problems?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then why are you upset?” he asked.
“I’m not upset.”
“You could fool me,” he said.
“Have you ever been knocked down in your own backyard?”
He began packing more leaves in the barrels, his armpits looped with sweat, ash raining down on his head and bare forearms.
“Levon?”
“Go home.”
“I’m an officer of the law. This isn’t a courtesy call.”
I waited for him to respond. He jabbed the leaves into the flames with the butt of the rake.
“Sir, don’t you turn your back to me,” I said.
“I’ll do what I damn please.”
“No, you will not.” I put my hand on his arm and turned him around. “This case isn’t about just you and your wife. It concerns Tony Nine Ball, and something Jimmy Nightingale did in South America, and a lowlife named Kevin Penny, and something you’re not telling me about your wife.”
“That’s a goddamn lie.”
“What is?”
“All your bullshit, Dave. I don’t have anything to do with gangsters or lowlifes or friends of yours. Rowena was raped. End of fucking story.”
“It’s just the beginning.”
“If it wasn’t for your age, I’d pop you one.”
“Really? Then you have my dispensation. Forget I’m a cop, too.”
He looked away, his hands balling. “Come inside.”
“What for?”
“I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade in my office. Keep it quiet, though. Rowena is asleep.”
He unlocked the French doors on the patio and waited for me to walk ahead of him. A pitcher and a glass sat on a folding table by his desk. He filled the glass and wrapped it with a paper napkin and handed it to me, then went to the kitchen and got a glass for himself. For the first time, behind the door, I saw a sun-faded Confederate battle flag mounted on the wall in a glass case. He came back into the room.
“A fourteen-year-old boy carried that up the slope on Beauregard’s left flank at Shiloh,” Levon said. “They were supposed to be supported by the founder of Angola Penitentiary, but he didn’t show up. Forty percent were casualties in fifteen minutes.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. I disliked people who thought war was a glorious endeavor, and I disliked those who enjoyed talking about it. I despised those who had not seen war yet espoused it and lived vicariously through the suffering of others and never gave a thought to the civilians and children who died in burn wards or were buried under collapsed buildings.
Levon was not one of these. He had gone unarmed and with a leftist reputation into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua when bodies were dumped off trucks with the morning garbage. Yet here we stood in reverence before an iconic flag that retained the pink stain of a farm boy’s blood, and whether anybody would admit it or not, the cause it represented was the protection and furtherance of human bondage.
“You have nothing to say about it?” he asked.
“Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. The statement doesn’t make the poor man any less honorable or brave.”
“You don’t give an inch, do you.”
“No.”
“That’s not a compliment,” he said.
“I didn’t think it was. How’s your wife?”
“On painkillers.”
He sat down in a swivel chair behind his desk and opened a bottom drawer and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and let it drop on top of the desk. “You on or off the grog?”
“No, thanks.”
He poured three inches into his glass. I watched the lemonade change color, the ice rise frosty and thick. He took a long pull, watching me, then wiped his mouth. “Nightingale and his sister or whatever she is have one agenda. They want to kill the rape story in the bud. They’re using you to do it.”
“No, they’re not.”
“Nightingale is a master manipulator, Dave. He fleeces uneducated and compulsive people in his casinos, pretending to be their friend, when in reality he wouldn’t take time to piss in their mouths if they were dying of thirst. This guy might be our next United States senator. He might even end up in the White House. Think about that for a minute.”
“What is it you’re not telling me about your wife?”
“What makes you think I’m hiding something?”
“Because you’re a smart man who allowed his wife to destroy the forensic evidence that would have made the case against Nightingale.”
His eyes went away from me. “My wife is bipolar. She’s also barren. Occasionally, she does things that are irrational. But none of that alters the fact that she was assaulted by that son of a bitch over in St. Mary Parish.”
I was sitting on the couch a few feet from him. “I might be indicted in the death of the man who killed my wife.”
“Why are you telling me that now?”
“I know what it feels like to be disbelieved.”
“You didn’t do it?”
“That’s the irony. I don’t know. The last person I can trust or believe is me.”
He leaned back in his chair. “You should have told me.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes I feel like a fraud. That’s something no one can ever accuse you of.” He drank his glass to the bottom and looked out the window at the three live oaks he had named for Confederate officers. “What a pile of shit.”
Then, without saying another word, he left me in his office and went outside and resumed stuffing mounds of leaves in the waste barrels, throwing a jelly glass full of gasoline onto the fire, indifferent to the whoosh of heat that must have singed his eyebrows.
Almost two weeks went by without any change in the status of the Dartez homicide or the sexual assault charges filed by Rowena Broussard. Clete Purcel took Carolyn Ardoin to dinner and a movie in Lafayette. Then the next night to a movie in Lake Charles. Then three days later to a street dance and crawfish boil in Abbeville.
“You’re going to wear me out,” she said on their way back to Jennings.
“I’ve been keeping you up too late?”
“It’s grand being out with you, Clete.”
The top of his Caddy was up, and her skin looked warm and rosy in the glow of the dash lights. He liked everything about her. The way she shook all over when she laughed, the happy shine in her eyes, her manners and all the books she had read. He turned in to her neighborhood, not wanting the night to end.
The houses were small and clapboard with tin roofs, the yards neat and without fences, the driveways nothing more than gravel tracks. If the contemporary automobiles were taken away, the year could have been 1935. He pulled up to the curb. She had not left her porch light on.
He went around to the passenger side and opened the door. When she got out, she looked him directly in the face and smiled. He could smell the gardenias and the two magnolia trees in her yard. She touched his arm when she stood up from the leather seat.
“I’ll walk you up to the steps,” he said. “I’ve sure enjoyed the evening.”
“As I, Clete.” She looked at the sky. There was a rain ring around the moon. “Tomorrow is Saturday.”