I went from tree trunk to tree trunk, running my hands over the bark. I looked down the slope. The Teche was a tidal stream that swelled up on the banks each day and receded with the influences of the moon. The surface was yellow and swollen and churning with mud and leaves and tree branches scattered by the same high winds that had swept through the area earlier in the day. A rowboat was tied to a cypress root a few feet down the bank. On the far side of the bayou was a weathered boathouse with a sagging dock. I got into the boat and rowed across.
Sometimes you get lucky. A bullet was lodged in the door. I opened my pocketknife and eased it out of the wood. The nose was flattened, the sides morphed out of shape, like a piece of bent licorice. The striations were intact. I wrapped the bullet in a handkerchief and wadded up the handkerchief and put it into my pocket, then rowed back across the bayou.
I called Helen and told her what I had found.
“Take it to the lab,” she said.
“Want me to check in with the locals?”
“In St. Mary Parish?” she said.
“I may make a stop before I head back.”
“Stop where?”
“Maybe the shooter was on an errand and McVane messed up his plan.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Jimmy Nightingale’s place is just down the road. Maybe he was a target.”
“Why?”
“Jimmy’s predecessors are Huey Long and George Wallace. I think he’ll come to the same end.”
“It’s your case. Talk to you later,” she said.
Even after Jimmy had told me about the bombing of the Indian village, I did not want to believe he was an evil man. Even though I had concluded in my report that he’d attacked Rowena Broussard, I believed his mind had been addled by booze and hash and driven more by desire than by sadistic intent. Why did I not want to believe these things? Like most of us who subscribe to the egalitarian traditions of Jefferson and Lincoln, I did not want to believe that a basically likable man could, with indifference and without provocation, commit deeds that were not only wicked but destroyed the lives of defenseless people. I also reminded myself that Jimmy was haunted by guilt, which is not the trademark of the unredeemable.
As I pulled up to the Nightingale mansion on the bayou, I did not realize I was about to see a drama that could have come from the stage of the Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames. I heard shouting on the patio and walked around the side of the house and saw Bobby Earl and Emmeline Nightingale four feet apart, red-faced and hurling invective at each other. Down the slope, Jimmy was calmly whocking golf balls high into the sky, watching them drop into the bayou. His chauffeur, the peroxided one with the steroid-puffed physique and caved-in face, stood by his side, waiting to put a fresh tee and ball on the grass. None of them saw me.
Earl’s face was trembling. “He denounced me on national television. Do you know what this has done to me? I went to prison for our cause.”
“You went to prison for tax evasion,” Emmeline said.
“I gave him my constituency.”
“You don’t have one. Now get off our property.”
“You’re a poisonous creature, Emmeline. The Great Whore of Babylon in the making.”
“And you’re a self-important public fool. Good God, I don’t know how Jimmy stands you.”
“Hello?” I said.
They both looked at me as though awakening from a dream.
“What do you want, Mr. Robicheaux?” Emmeline asked.
“A word with you and Jimmy,” I said. “Bobby doesn’t need to hang around.”
Earl’s face was full of hurt, like a child’s. This was the same man who had inflamed the passions of the great unwashed, then disavowed their actions when they burned and bombed and lynched. But I realized that, instead of the devil, I was looking at a moth batting its wings around a light that had grown cold.
He had a pot stomach, like a balloon filled with water; his face was lined, his eyes tired. There was a pout on his mouth. “You remember that time you hit me?”
“I do,” I replied.
“It was a sucker punch. I had no chance to defend myself.”
“You asked for it, and you were looking me straight in the face.”
His eyes were wet. “The Nightingales wouldn’t let you clean their bathroom, Dave.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “And don’t call me Dave.”
Jimmy walked up the slope, his golf club propped on his shoulder. “I must have missed out on quite a discussion.”
“I told Bobby to leave,” Emmeline said.
“Better do as she says, Bobby,” Jimmy said. “She’s tough.”
“You’ve betrayed me,” Earl said.
“Two paths diverged in a woods,” Jimmy said. “You should have followed mine, not yours.”
“A pox on both y’all,” Earl said.
“Work on your accent,” Emmeline said. “Everyone knows you’re from Kansas.”
Earl’s face seemed to dissolve. He walked away, trying to hold himself erect. When he got into his car, he looked back at the patio. By then Emmeline was removing a pitcher of iced tea and the glasses from the table, and Jimmy was wiping off the mahogany head of his club with a rag. I had the feeling that if there is an invisible hell people carry with them, Earl had found it.
“What puts you at our door, Dave?” Jimmy said.
“A cop was shot and killed not far from your home. We don’t know why. Nor do we have anything on the shooter.”
“And?”
“You’re a famous man,” I said.
“I heard the cop didn’t have a big fan club.”
“The people he abused are not the kind who smoke cops.”
“I don’t think this fellow’s demise has anything to do with me. Want to hit some balls?”
“Listen to him, Jimmy,” Emmeline said.
“This is how I feel about death,” he said. “I’ve had a good life. If a stranger walks up to me and parks one in my brain, I’ll thank him for waiting as long as he did.”
“The cop’s name was McVane,” I said. “Did you know him?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“I thought maybe he took a bullet for you. But who knows? Maybe the guy was trafficking. Or maybe an ex-lover got him. You never know.”
“There are people out there who want to hurt Jimmy, but not because he’s running for office,” Emmeline said. “That gangster in New Orleans is actually putting together an adaptation of Levon Broussard’s work.”
“Tony Nemo?”
“Yes, the same obscene pile you people could never put in jail,” she said. “Jimmy had everything ready to go, then you went along with Rowena Broussard’s lies and destroyed Jimmy’s chances of producing the film. When this is over, I’m going to personally sue you into oblivion.”
“Thank you for telling me that,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m mortgaged up to my eyes and not worth suing.”
I saw Jimmy laugh silently behind her back.
“What, you think that’s funny?” she said to me.
“No,” I said, barely able to stifle a grin.
I hated to admit Jimmy Nightingale still had a hold on me. I guess that’s just the way it was, growing up in a place like Louisiana, where pagan deities sometimes hide among us and we secretly champion rogues who get even for the rest of us.
The round was a .357 Magnum. We got a priority in processing at the National Crime Information Center because the round had been recovered from a homicide scene. The weapon that had probably killed McVane was an electronic match with six other bullets fired from the same weapon over a seven-year period, most recently in Algiers, where two black men were shot to death in the kitchen of a rented house full of crack paraphernalia.
I spent the next three days talking to cops in Orleans Parish, Tampa, Key West, Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Other than the two crack dealers, the victims were a retired button man from Yonkers, a bartender who shilled for a craps game, a serial pedophile, and a shylock. The obvious common denominator in the victims was criminality. But if these were Mob-connected hits, the usual pattern wasn’t there. Button men (so known because they pushed the “off” button on their victims) didn’t use the same weapon repeatedly. They also favored a smaller-caliber handgun, because the bullet slowed more quickly and bounced around inside the brain pan. Their classic execution featured one round through the forehead, one in the mouth, and one in the ear. Our shooter seemed spontaneous and left wounds all over the map. He had a way of painting the walls in public, too, without anyone ever getting a good description of him.