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“A guy who looks like a smiling dildo. He’s carrying a box about four feet long and four inches wide.”
The man in front of us turned around again. He was Clete’s height, well groomed, thick-shouldered, a flag pin in his lapel, indignation branded on his face.“I’m about to have you removed.”
Clete’s eyes were round green stones. “What for?”
“You used a word about a certain female instrument.”
“How about this? Shut your fucking mouth.” Clete handed me the binoculars. “In the corner, ten o’clock.”
I looked but saw nothing. Clete took back the binoculars and looked again. “He’s gone.”
“We’ll tell security on the way out.”
The shots were rapid, two pops, then nothing. One blew apart a vase full of flowers by Jimmy’s foot; the other hit the staff of an American flag, cutting it in half, toppling the flag on a plastic bush. Hundreds of people ducked under the seats; some ran. Jimmy didn’t move. Instead, he detached the microphone from the stand and raised his left hand in calming fashion. “It’s all right, friends. Do not panic. I’m fine. Look at me. They can’t stop us. Do you hear me? Sit down. We’re the people. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come can separate us from the love of God.”
The response was thunderous, on the level of an earthquake, an exorcism of fear and even mortality itself, an affirmation that the man they had chosen was indeed the apotheosis of all that was good. I opened my badge and held it high above my head and, with Clete behind me, began working my way up the stairs on the far side of the building. The entire audience was on its feet and shouting incoherently. Down below, the spotlights glowed on Jimmy’s white suit with an iridescence just this side of ethereal.
THIS TIME, THE shooter had left his brass, a pair of .223 casings that were probably from a scoped rifle modeled on the old M1 carbine. I picked them up with a pencil and put them into an empty candy box I found on the floor and turned them over to a Lafayette police detective. Clete described the man he had seen with the elongated cardboard carton, and that was the end of our official participation in the attempted assassination of Jimmy Nightingale.
Clete was silent most of the way to New Iberia. We were in the Caddy, the top up. He turned on the radio, then clicked it off and huffed air out his nose.
“What’s eating you?” I said.
“I don’t buy what we saw.”
I knew what he was going to say. But I didn’t want to taint his perceptions by speaking first.
“Sociopaths are all the same,” he said. “Every one of them is vain. They’ll go to the injection table rather than admit an imperfection.”
“Are you talking about the shooter or Nightingale?”
“Our .223 man put one round in a glass vase that was no more than five inches across. The second clipped the flagstaff dead center. He hit two small objects three seconds apart from seventy yards but couldn’t nail Nightingale? Who’s kidding who?”
“I think you’re right.”
“You think Lafayette PD or the state police will pick up on that?”
“People believe what they want to.”
“Nightingale is a hypocrite. He brought immigrants from Costa Rica to work in his casinos and hotels.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Cletus.”
“No, I’m not. You’re always making excuses for this guy.”
“Heroes are hard to find these days. That’s why we have the bargain-basement variety.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“How about Levon Broussard? I always respected him. Now he’s making a film with Tony Nine Ball, and Alafair is working with them.”
Clete took out his flask and chugged it to the bottom. “I don’t like to drink in front of you, Streak, but sometimes that’s the only way I can put up with this crap.”
* * *
I HAD A professional and ethical problem Monday morning. The previous day, in front of St. Edward’s Church, Babette Latiolais had in effect told me that Spade Labiche had struck her in the face. She also had told me that she would not file charges. If I reported Labiche to Helen, she would take him to task, and he would lie and later slap Babette all over her house.
I went into his cubbyhole of an office. “I’m going to a noon meeting. How about joining me?”<
