“My people don’t do those kinds of things.”
“If the price were right, your people would work at Auschwitz.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
“None of your business.”
“I need to talk to her about the script. You’re not gonna believe who I got to play the role of the Confederate soldier.”
When he told me, he was right, I couldn’t believe him. The actor was well known and respected; he’d received a Golden Globe Award and other nominations.
“I told him Alafair was doing the script,” Tony said. “She’s gonna love working with him.”
“I can’t tell quite how I feel at this moment.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Where do you get off using Alafair’s name in your business dealings?”
“I’m giving her a break.”
“The only break here is going to be in your fat neck,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
“Maximo went out hard, Tony. Think about the implications. Ten years ago nobody would have touched one of your guys.”
“Put her on the phone.”
“Are you listening? My daughter is never going to work with you.”
“Yeah? My lawyer already talked with Levon Broussard in the can. He wants Alafair to do the script.”
“Levon wants to work with you?”
“Not exactly. But he will. He wants to get even with Nightingale. This is gonna be like a telephone pole with spikes in it kicked right up Nightingale’s ass.”
“I thought you were going to put him in the White House.”
“Nightingale is a Benedict Arnold. I kept the unions off his back, introduced him to people with billions of dollars, got him a girlfriend or two. Then one day I’m the stink on shit.”
“A heads-up, Tony: If a guy who talks like Elmer Fudd and has lips like red licorice shows up at your house, don’t invite him in.”
“I’m supposed to be afraid of a guy who escaped from a Bugs Bunny cartoon?”
“I think he capped two black guys in Algiers and blew a cop’s brains out in St. Mary Parish. For a while I thought he might be working for you. Now I think you’re a target.”
“You know why you’re a cop? You’re dumb and can’t do anything else. For years Maximo had a thing for little boys. One of his victims caught up with him. Fade to black.”
“Sounds more like your epitaph, Tony.”
“My dork in your ear, Robicheaux,” he replied, and hung up.
In the morning, the judge who had remanded Levon Broussard changed his mind and released him on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail.
I didn’t know what to make of Levon’s story about Kevin Penny. Levon had deduced that Kevin Penny had probably raped his wife but had allowed us to continue our prosecution of an innocent man. Then Levon had gone on his own to Penny’s trailer, supposedly to confront him, and had left his fingerprints on the electric drill that had taken Penny’s life, supposedly while trying to save him from drowning in his own vomit. But he hadn’t called 911. Why hadn’t he? He wasn’t the kind of man who panicked. His account was a hard sell.
Maybe Levon didn’t care whether Jimmy was guilty of the actual rape. He blamed Jimmy regardless. As for most of us who seek revenge, his anger and need probably had their origins in the past, and the present situation was a surrogate for an injury that had occurred long ago. Levon’s wife had been raped and then abandoned by the system in Wichita, Kansas. I also believed his liberal sentiments and his commitment to civil rights were sorely tested by the fact that the rapists were black.
Two hours after his release from a lockdown unit in Jennings, I found him in his backyard, unshaven, red-eyed, dirty, and still smelling of jail. He was flinging baseballs at a wooden box he had nailed to the side of his carriage house. I had forgotten that he’d played American Legion ball. I had also forgotten that he’d attended a military academy in Mississippi, if only for one year, at the end of which he had been expelled for knocking down an instructor who insulted his family.
The ground was littered with baseballs. A cooler with a corked bottle of white wine pushed down in the ice rested on a picnic table.
“Pretty good forkball,” I said.
He looked at me blankly. “There’s a soda in the box, if you want one.”
“The prosecutor’s office is a bit upset.”
“Because they’ll have to drop charges against Nightingale?”
I didn’t answer.
“That’s their problem.” He took a windup and fired the ball into the center of the wooden box, putting his shoulder and hip into it, whipping his wrist just before releasing his fingers.
“You and Jimmy have a lot in common.”
“No, we don’t.”
“You both played ball, and you both went to military school.”
“I didn’t know that. You know why boys get sent to military school? Their parents don’t want them.”
“Are you going in on a movie deal with Tony Nemo?”
“If Alafair does the adaptation.”
“What you do with Fat Tony is your business. But I don’t want you dragging my daughter into it.”
He tossed a baseball up and down in his hand, then let it fall to the grass. “Alafair is my friend. You think I’d hurt her?”
“Not intentionally.”
“Then give me some credit.”
“Nemo is an evil man. Don’t darken your life with this guy.”
“Nightingale knows how to place his thumb on the pulse of an unhappy electorate. Individuals don’t change history. History finds the individual. John Steinbeck said that.”
“So let the electorate fall in their own shit.”
“I don’t doubt Nemo got me sprung. If Alafair will do the first draft, I’m going to make a movie with him. I’ll tell you the reason why. My best novel is the least popular of my books. Maybe this is vanity on my part, but I believe we owe the dead a debt. We have to give them breath and voice, even though their mouths are stopped with dirt. If we don’t, they allow us no rest. I think they’re out there in the mist. Sometimes I see them.”
I felt a wind blow through my chest, as though he had pirated my thoughts.
“How’s your wife doing?” I asked.
“Not good.”
“Can I ask you something straight up, off the record?”
“Shoot.”
“Is it fair to say you’re still hanging on to the events in Wichita?”
“Events?”
“The rape of your wife by the two black guys.”
“No, I let go of that a long time ago.”
“I don’t believe you. People’s emotions don’t work like that.”
He slid the wine bottle out of the ice and uncorked it and took a drink from the bottle. “One of them was knifed to death in the Alabama state pen. A store owner shot and killed the other one during a robbery. They got what they had coming.”
“But they skated in Wichita,” I said.
“So that’s on the DA’s office in Wichita. Fuck them.”
“Good attitude. But my experience is that survivors of violent crimes tend to become gun enthusiasts.”
He winked. “I throw baseballs.”
“Jimmy hits golf balls into the bayou.”
“May I visit Alafair at your house?”
“Anytime,” I replied.
I walked back to my pickup. Rowena was sitting in a rocking chair on the gallery. “Mr. Robicheaux?”
I tried to keep my face pleasant, but I didn’t speak.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“All of it. I got drunk with another man when I should have been home with my husband. I gave you people the wrong information. I caused Levon to go to Kevin Penny’s trailer. These things are all my doing.”
“Forget it,” I said. “You’re a nice lady, Miss Rowena.”
There was a smile in her eyes. It’s strange how much a kind word can do.