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“?‘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?”
