The Neon Rain

  “There was a worm right in the middle of the rose. Funny, huh?”

  I knew better than to say anything.

  “It’s like Smiley,” she said. “He’s out there, invisible, always ready to do harm.”

  “He’s just a guy, nothing more.”

  She sat back in her chair, her gaze receding. “You know better.”

  I wasn’t going to pursue the subject. I had known Red Cross personnel and American soldiers who had been at the liberation of Ravensbrück and Dachau. None of them was ever the same again. They also spent the rest of their lives trying to explain the nature and sources of evil. Cops fall easily into the same trap. A day comes when you see something that you never talk about again, and it lives with you the rest of your days.

  “We’ll get him,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about Smiley or whatever his name is. It’s something else. And I say ‘it’ deliberately.”

  “Keep it simple, Helen.”

  “Jimmy Nightingale is involved in this.”

  “That’s not what the evidence indicates.”

  “Maybe he didn’t rape Rowena Broussard, but I think he knew Kevin Penny did. Maybe he even sicced him on her.”

  “We’ll never prove that, Helen. Let it go.”

  “I saw him at the Winn-Dixie yesterday. People were lining up to shake his hand. He put his arm over my shoulders. I felt like I’d been molested.”

  I had never heard her talk like this. “You think he’s the third Antichrist in Nostradamus?”

  “No, I think he’s Huey Long on a national scale, and that scares the shit out of me.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT I drifted off to sleep while watching the local news. When I woke, I realized I was listening to the voice of Jimmy Nightingale. He was confessing to the satchel bombing of the Indian village in South America. There were tears in his eyes. He could have been a character actor in a medieval Everyman play. Out on the salt, he had told me the same story; I believed then and I believe now that he was at least partially contrite. But the man I saw on television that night was a man who could sell snow to Eskimos and electric blankets to the damned.

  * * *

  I DROVE TO baron’s Health Club in New Iberia at five-thirty the next morning and went to work on the speed bag.

  “I’m glad that’s not my face you’re hitting,” a voice behind me said.

  I turned around. “Visiting with the lumpen proletariat?”

  “I’ll buy you breakfast at Victor’s,” Jimmy said.

  “Forget it.”

  “What’d I do now?”

  “I caught your performance on the news last night.”

  “Performance?”

  I let my hands hang at my sides, my bag gloves tight on my knuckles, the blood hammering in my wrists. I could smell my own odor. “You and I talked about that situation in South America. I thought you were genuinely sorry for the bad choice you made.”

  “I like that terminology. Yeah, bad choice. It’s the kind of crap you hear in Hollywood.”

  “I didn’t finish. I think you’re using the suffering of the people you maimed and killed to further your career. That takes a special kind of guy.”

  “That’s pretty strong, Dave.” He rested one hand on my shoulder, even though my T-shirt was gray with sweat.

  “I don’t like people touching me.”

  He lowered his hand. “Take a shower. We’ll eat breakfast and talk. I always looked up to you. You know that.”

  “I have to go to work.”

  A kid was hitting the heavy bag, hard enough to make it jump on the chain.

  “Can you give us a minute?” Jimmy said.

  “Sure,” the kid replied awkwardly, as though he had done something wrong.

  “Hang on, podna,” I said. “Mr. Jimmy and I are going outside.”

  “I got to get to class at UL,” the kid said. “It’s all right.”

  After we were alone, Jimmy said, “You look like you want to drop me.”

  “You know the chief sign of narcissism, don’t you? Entitlement. That’s another word for self-important jerk.”

  “I want to offer you a job. Maybe Purcel, too.”

  “Doing security?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  “Arguing with me and telling me when I’m wrong. You know what LBJ said to Eric Sevareid when the two of them were watching Nixon’s inauguration on the tube?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘He’s made a mistake. He’s taken amateurs with him.’ I don’t want amateurs on my team.”

  “I’ll start now, free of charge. Stop lying.”

  “Liars own up on television to murdering defenseless Indians?”

  “Hump your own pack, Jimmy. How’d you know where I was?”

  “Your daughter was up. She’s back on the set, huh?”

  “What about it?”

  “I wish I was on it,” he said. “Hollywood is a magical place. I don’t care what people say about it.”

  “Don’t tell that to your constituency,” I said.

  “You think they don’t like movies? Who do you think has filled the theaters for the last hundred and sixteen years?”

  He clenched his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers sinking into the flesh, fusing with the oil and sweat running out of my hair, his eyes next to mine, his breath on my skin. One of his feet stepped on top of mine. “Work with me. You can have power you never guessed at. We’ll turn the world into the Garden of Eden.”

  As he walked away, I picked up a towel and wiped my face and neck and arms and hands, trying to cleanse his touch and the wetness of his mouth from my body and mind.

  ALL DAY I was troubled by thoughts about Jimmy Nightingale. And Levon Broussard. And the way Kevin Penny and Tony Nine Ball and Spade Labiche had gone out. I have always believed there is no mystery to human behavior. We’re the sum total of our deeds. But that wasn’t the way things had been working out.

  I was fairly certain Labiche had been on a pad for Tony and was told to set up a situation with T. J. Dartez that would put me either in prison or on the injection table. Other than that, I had no idea who’d killed Penny or who was pulling the strings on the surreal hit man known only as Smiley.

  At the center of it all were Jimmy Nightingale and his foil, Levon Broussard. I suspected an analyst would say both of them had borderline personality disorder. Or maybe a dissociative personality disorder. Unfortunately, those terms would apply to most drunks, addicts, fiction writers, and actors.

  Both men descended from prominent families in a state where Shintoism in its most totalitarian form was not only a given but most obvious in its sad influence on the poor and uneducated, who accepted their self-abasing roles with the humility of serfs. But there was an existential difference between the two families. For the Nightingales, manners and morality were interchangeable. For Levon Broussard and his ancestors, honor was a religion, more pagan than Christian in concept, the kind of mind-set associated with a Templar Knight or pilots in the Japanese air force.

  For the Broussards, honor was a virtue that, once tarnished, could never be restored. They may have been aristocrats and slave owners who lived inside a fable, but they still heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux and accepted genteel poverty and isolation if necessary but would be no more capable of changing their vision of the world and themselves than Robert E. Lee could have become a used-car salesman.

  That was why I had a hard time believing that Levon could have tortured and murdered Kevin Penny. I had even greater difficulty believing he would throw in his lot with Tony Nemo in order to weigh the balance in his upcoming trial in Jefferson Davis Parish.

  On Monday morning, I got a call at my office from Sherry Picard. “I need your help,” she said.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked, trying to suppress my feelings about Clete’s involvement with younger women in general and this one in particular.
>
  “Catch you at the wrong time?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I still have prints from the Penny homicide scene that I believe are significant. The fast-food trash. Penny kept the area around his motorcycle clean. That means the person who left it there was on the property the day Penny died.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” I said.

  “I want to fingerprint the Nightingale employees. I’m not getting anywhere.”

  “St. Mary Parish was teleported from the fourteenth century. Historians come from far away to study it.”

  “Did I do something to offend you?”

  “I can’t help you in St. Mary.”

  “How about with Levon Broussard?”

  “What about him?”

  “I want to fingerprint his wife. I think she may have been an accomplice.”

  “I’m not convinced Levon is guilty, much less his wife.” I could feel her resentment coming through the phone. I tried again. “What makes you suspicious about his wife?”

  “Her general attitude. I think she needs a flashlight shined up her ass.”

  How about that?

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Absolutely what?”

  “That I heard you,” I said.

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Are you pissed off because of Clete and me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We called it off. That’s why you’ve got your tally whacker in the hay baler?”

  “I’ll talk with Levon, Ms. Picard.”

  “Detective Picard.”

  I softly replaced the receiver in the cradle.

  * * *

  THE PHONE RANG three minutes later. I thought she was calling back. I felt embarrassed as I picked up the receiver and wished I hadn’t hung up on her. Surprise time.

  “I heard you used to live in New Or-yuns,” a voice said. “You were a police officer in the Quarter.”

  I sat up in my chair. “That’s right.”

  “I had an artist friend who knew you. He painted people’s pictures in Jackson Square. He said you were an honest police officer.”

  I waved my arm at a cop in uniform passing in the hallway. He looked through the glass. I pointed at the receiver. He nodded and disappeared down the hallway.

  “What’s your name?” I said. “I’ll help you if I can.”

  “I think you know who I am.”

  “Not for sure. Are you visiting in New Iberia?”

  “Some people call me Smiley.”

  “That doesn’t ring bells.”

  “I want to ask you a question.”

  “Yes, sir, go right ahead.”

  Helen was at the glass in my door now. I mouthed the word “Smiley.”

  “Does the man named Purcel have a boy?”

  “You mean Clete Purcel?”

  “A boy lives with him?” he said.

  “Clete doesn’t have a birth son, but he takes care of an orphan. Is that the boy you’re talking about?”

  He cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

  “You there, Smiley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you want to tell me something?”

  “What’s the boy’s name?”

  “Homer.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Homer Penny is his full name.”

  I waited in the silence. I had given up information I normally wouldn’t. But this situation was outside the parameters of any in my career.

  “Did you try to hurt Clete, Smiley?”

  “This call is a relay. It won’t help you to trace it.”

  “I figured. That means we can talk as long as you want. Where’d you get your nickname?”

  No answer.

  “Know who your accent reminds me of?” I said. “Tennessee Williams. He said ‘New Or-yuns’ just like you. I knew him when he lived in the Quarter.”

  I could hear him breathing against the mouthpiece, as though deciding whether or not to hang up. “I don’t care about him.”

  “Have you been to Algiers?” I said. “A couple of bad black dudes got their grits splattered over there.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Between you and me, I think they probably had it coming. You hear anything about that?”

  “They were bad to a colored lady. Her name was Miss Birdie.”

  “Did you smoke these dudes?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “If you’re bad or treacherous with me, I’ll smoke you, too.”

  “I believe you. But I’d rather be friends with you.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he said, his voice downshifting.

  “I know what you mean. There’s nothing worse than the abuse of children or animals. That’s why Clete takes care of Homer. Clete had a hard upbringing.”

  “I’m sorry. Tell him that.”

  “Tell Clete?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know about the boy.”

  “I read you loud and clear, partner. Know anything about Kevin Penny, Smiley?”

  “He was a bad man.”

  “You didn’t help him do the Big Exit, did you?”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “Not me. I’m not that smart. You’re like a shadow. You come and go, and nobody has a clue. Who was your artist friend?”

  “He was my friend for a while. Then he wasn’t my friend anymore.”

  “Could we work out a way to communicate when both of us have more time? I’m pretty tied up right now.”

  “I can come by your house.”

  He had me. I could almost see him grinning. “You’re calling the shots. Did you ever hear Louie Prima and Sam Butera play at the Dream Room on Bourbon?”

  “You want to know how old I am? Remember fifteen years ago when a house was torn down on Calliope and a body fell out of the wall? It had been in there long enough not to smell anymore. This man was bad to somebody who trusted him and got walled up with his paintbrushes stuffed in his mouth. He was a very bad boy. Bye-bye.”

  The line went dead. I looked blankly at Helen through the glass. I had witnessed two deaths by electrocution in the Red Hat House at Angola. On both occasions I’d felt that I was watching an element in the human gene pool for which there was no remedy, and I mean the desire to kill, either on the part of individuals or the state. I took a Kleenex from a drawer in my desk and cleared my throat and spat in it, then dropped it into the waste can.

  * * *

  AT NOON, I took Clete to lunch at Bon Creole out on East St. Peter Street. We ordered fried-oyster po’boys and sat at a table under a blue-and-silver marlin mounted on the wall.

  “You couldn’t make the trace?” he said.

  “The signal was probably relayed off two or three towers,” I said.

  “You checked out the story about the artist in the wall?”

  “His name was Pierre Louviere. Evidently, he was an eccentric guy who hung out with a weird crowd in the Quarter.”

  “How’d he go out?”

  “Not easy.”

  “You think Smiley did Penny?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He would have said so. He doesn’t have any guilt about the people he kills.”

  “Psychopaths lie for the sake of lying,” Clete said.

  “He was obviously bothered about putting a bomb in a car that would kill a child.”

  The waitress put our food on the table. She looked uncomfortable, obviously having overheard our conversation.

  “Don’t pay attention to us,” I said.

  She tried to smile but had a hard time with it. She walked away, blinking.

  “Go on,” Clete said to me.

  “I think Smiley feels he got set up.”

  “No idea who he’s working for?”

  “None. Sherry Picard called.”

  Clete l
ooked at a place six inches from the side of my face. “Yeah?”

  “She said y’all aren’t hanging out anymore.”

  “It’s more like she flushed me. No big deal.”

  Right. I avoided looking at his eyes. He put a cracker into his mouth and chewed. He hadn’t touched his sandwich.

  “She’s off the wall, Clete.”

  “I’m old, she’s young. You warned me. End of subject.”

  “Age is not a factor. She has the grace of a chain saw.”

  Wrong choice. Three things about Clete Purcel: Since I’d first met him, he’d never once used God’s name in vain; referred to a woman in a profane way; or criticized a woman who’d dumped him, unless you counted the postcard he sent me from El Sal when he skipped the country on a murder beef and asked me to tell his ex, who’d cheated on him, that he wanted her to have the toothbrush he’d left in the bathroom.

  He wadded up a napkin and lobbed it into a trash can by the cold-drink dispenser. “Smiley say anything about Jimmy Nightingale?”

  “No. But I had a strange experience with Jimmy at Baron’s Health Club.”

  “Like what?”

  “I was hitting the speed bag and pretty sweaty and dirty. He squeezed the back of my neck and whispered in my ear. He was standing on my foot.”

  Clete’s gaze went away from mine, then came back. “He’s AC/DC?”

  “He was talking about making the world into the Garden of Eden.”

  “You’re making this up?”

  “Jimmy isn’t the same guy I used to know,” I said. “But that’s not what bothers me. I couldn’t scrub his touch off my skin. Helen said the same thing about him.”

  Clete looked into space. “I think I’m going back to the Big Sleazy for a few days. Start putting junk in my arm, hanging out at bottomless clubs, go to a Crisco party at a steam room, do something healthy for a change.”

  “It’s not funny, Clete.”

  “None of this is,” he replied. “I didn’t give you the whole gen on Sherry. She called one of her sniper targets a sand nigger. She tried to take it back, but it made me think about her relationship to Kevin Penny.”

  “She might have decided to get rough?”

  “Sherry wouldn’t make a good Maryknoll.”

  * * *

  CLETE WENT TO Walmart that afternoon. On the way out, he ran into Swede Jensen, the Nightingale chauffeur, whom he’d helped get a job as an extra in Levon’s film adaptation. Swede was wearing white Bermuda shorts with bananas on them and a sleeveless golf shirt, his tan as dark as saddle leather, his armpit hair stiff and bleached by the sun. His concave face always reminded Clete of a hominid replica he had seen in a natural history museum.