As sober drunks say, there are no big deals in A.A.
Early Tuesday morning, while I was shaving and Alafair was on her jog, someone twisted the bell on the gallery. I walked into the living room and looked through the window screen. Spade Labiche stood four feet away, staring at a squirrel on the lawn. I resumed shaving. Two minutes later, he was at the back door.
“What do you want, partner?” I said.
“To get something straight.”
“See you in my office.”
“I know we’re not on the best of terms. But I’m going to tell you what I told Helen. You can look at the sign-out sheet. I went to interview Penny. I lost my lighter somewhere. It must have been at his trailer.”
“Could be,” I said.
“I got a call from this broad in Jennings. She ran my prints. She wants to interview me.”
“Sherry Picard?”
“Yeah, that’s her name. She sounds like a real cunt.”
“You delivered your message, Spade.”
“Can’t we be friends, shake hands or something? I shoot off my mouth sometimes.”
“No problem. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay. You got it,” he said.
I watched him walk away, obviously confident that he had righted the universe. I wondered how much time would pass before he tried to give it to me between the shoulder blades.
That afternoon I was just leaving my office when Sherry Picard came up the stairs and walked toward me. Her badge holder and a small holstered revolver were hooked on her belt; a pair of cuffs was pulled through the back. Two deputies at the water cooler couldn’t take their eyes off her.
“Got a minute?” she said to me.
“Sure,” I said.
Behind her, one of the deputies pretended to draw two pistols and fire at either me or her. I let her walk ahead of me into my office. I closed the door.
“Tell the two needle dicks at the cooler that I heard their comments,” she said.
“Report them to Sheriff Soileau. She doesn’t put up with that kind of thing.”
“There’re no helpful prints inside the trailer,” she said.
“How about on the fast-food trash you picked up by the shed?”
“They’re not in the system.”
“What did you get off the drill?”
“The latents aren’t in the system.”
I twiddled a ballpoint on my desk pad. “Why are you here, Detective?”
“The social worker, Carolyn Ardoin, she and Purcel are an item, right?”
“Anybody who knows Clete will tell you he’s not capable of doing something like this. I won’t even discuss it.”
“Where is he now?”
“I’m not his keeper.”
“That’s a joke.”
She was sitting in front of my desk. She wore starched, Cloroxed jeans and a white snap-button western shirt. Her hair was thick and had the same purplish-black sheen in it as Alafair’s. “I’ve seen Purcel’s sheet. He has a way of settling scores on his own.”
This time I grinned and said nothing.
She looked away, her frustration obvious. I suspected she didn’t get a lot of support from her peers in Jennings.
“I’d start with Fat Tony Nemo and a couple of guys named Maximo Soza and JuJu Ladrine,” I said.
“With respect, you don’t know shit about this case, Detective Robicheaux. Kevin Penny was a confidential informant for the FBI.”
“How do you know this?”
“An agent told me. Penny set up his wife’s brother. The brother hanged himself in his cell. The agent told me Penny couldn’t have cared less.”
“So maybe Tony Nemo is your guy.”
“I knew Tony when I was with the St. Bernard Sheriff’s Department. He’s not stupid enough to torture and kill a federal CI.”
“What else can I tell you?” I said.
“Evidently, you worked a couple of the Jeff Davis Eight cases,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“You just shut the drawer on them?”
“Nobody shuts the drawer on a corpse, particularly a young girl’s.”
“What a laugh.”
She got up to go. The two deputies who had made comments about her walked past the door glass. She dropped her business card onto the chair. “I think you’re in the right place.”
Rather than take overtime pay, I took Wednesday off and went fishing in my boat just north of Marsh Island. The wind was up, and a hard chop was slapping the hull, and few boats were out. I didn’t mind being alone. Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death. I put the statement in the third person for a reason. I don’t believe I ever achieved these things with any appreciable degree of success. But there are moments when we understand that the earth and the sky and the presences that may lie behind them are always with us.
The coastline was a heartbreaking green inside the mist. Flying fish broke from the bay’s surface and sailed above the water like pink-gilded, winged creatures, in defiance of evolutionary probability. The salt spray breaking on my bow was cold and fresh and smelled of resilience and the mysterious powers the earth contains. My boat seemed to float on a cushion of air rising from the same primeval soup that gave birth to the first living creatures.
I saw a burnt-orange pontoon plane come in low out of a pale yellow sun, the pilot seated in an open cockpit. The plane swooped by, then circled and set down in the chop, blowing water in a huge cloud. The pilot cut the prop and let his plane drift toward me. He pulled up his goggles with his thumb, smearing grease below his eye, like the World War I aviator he obviously wanted to be. He threw me a rope. “Hope I didn’t chase off your catch,” Jimmy Nightingale said.
“Lose your way home?” I said.
“Sheriff Soileau told me where you’d be. Can I come aboard?” He jumped onto the bow without waiting for me to answer. “This is the life. You got any coffee or sandwiches?” I pointed to my cooler. He pulled off the lid. “Man, I love fried chicken,” he said.
“Fang it down.”
He sat on a cushion behind the console and bit into a drumstick. “I’m out here to make a confession.”
“I watched you pitch a number of times, Jimmy. You had a nasty habit.”
“Like what?”
“Spitting on baseballs.”
“Think I’d throw you a slider?”
I didn’t answer. He began talking about marlin fishing, Washington politics, benchmark oil prices, everything except what was on his mind. Then he said, “Maybe I did get it on with her. But it was consensual. I had more to drink than I was willing to admit. We were both out of it. I also happened to have a bowl of Afghan skunk on hand. She probably didn’t tell you about that.”
“You’re talking about you and Rowena Broussard?”
“Who else?”
“We’ve gone from denial of rape, to denial of any physical contact at all, to consensual. It’s hard to keep up with you, Jimmy.”
“It’s the truth.”
“You confess but you don’t confess.”
“You’re right. That’s not what’s on my mind.” He stared at the water, the tide slapping against the hull. “You saw some bad things in Vietnam?”
“Can’t remember. It’s odd.”
“Be honest.”
“Nope. I’m a total blank on it,” I said.
“I did something I’d like to stick in an envelope and mail to Mars.”
I didn’t want to be the repository for all the evil in the world. Like Clete, I had too many videos of my own. They may not have been of my making, but nonetheless I had to carry them. I was determined not to add Jimmy Nightingale’s burden to my own.
“Take your bullshit somewhere else,” I said.