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I HEADED FOR new Orleans in my pickup, the rain twisting out of a gaseous-green sky. Just as I approached the bridge at Des Allemands, my cell phone vibrated on the seat. It was Sherry Picard.
“Clete left me a message,” she said. “Something about him being sorry for his part in it, and if he didn’t see me again, I was a great woman, blah-blah-blah.”
“Clete isn’t into blah-blah-blah.”
“Whatever. He sounded like he was on a banzai mission.
”
“He says he’s going to take down Jimmy Nightingale,” I said. “In whatever fashion he can. Nightingale has a rally at the Superdome tonight.”
“Shit,” she said. “Clete’s talking about capping him?”
“I didn’t say that.” I was atop the bridge now. I could see houseboats anchored at a wooded island, the bayou flowing into a chain of lakes, the rain denting the water. Somehow I knew what was coming, and I didn’t want to hear it.
“Here’s the gen,” she said. “Remember the fast-food trash by Kevin Penny’s motorcycle shed? I matched the prints. They belong to Rowena Broussard.”
“I thought she wasn’t in the system.”
“She visited her husband when he was temporarily locked up. I gave her a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup.”
“The match might put her at the scene, but not at the time of Penny’s death.”
“It gets worse, at least from a prosecutor’s perspective. The prints of Herb Smith, a social worker, were at the scene.”
“I don’t remember the name,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. His niece was one of the Jeff Davis Eight. Starting to get the picture?”
“You think Rowena did it, but there’s no way she’ll be convicted?”
“That’s right.”
“And Levon won’t, either, because people around here think he walks on water?”
“You got it.”
“What does this have to do with Clete?” I asked.
“He’s convinced himself Jimmy Nightingale is partly responsible for the Jeff Davis Eight and for Penny’s death and for the attempt to put a bomb in his car. I don’t think Nightingale has anything to do with any of it.”
“I wouldn’t rule Nightingale out, Miss Sherry. At least not entirely.”
“Lose the Gone with the Wind stuff, will you? I can’t take that plantation cutesy talk.”
“You know who else told me that?” I asked.
“No.”
“Rowena Broussard,” I said.
“See you at the Dome, hotshot.”
* * *
FOR FIVE DAYS in August 2005, the Superdome had been shelter for more than thirty thousand people during and after Hurricane Katrina. Do not let the term “shelter” mislead you. The Dome became an introduction to hell on earth. The storm stripped off huge chunks of the roof; the power and water supply failed; toilets and urinals overflowed and layered the floors with feces. The food in the refrigerators rotted. The heat and humidity and stench caused television reporters to gag on-camera. Every inch of concrete surrounding the Dome was covered with garbage, clothing, and people sweltering under a white sun. Black people who tried to leave the area by crossing the Danziger Bridge were shot by people officers. One of those who died was a mentally disabled man.
But our excursion into the Garden of Gethsemane had slipped into history, the incompetence and cynicism and villainy of its perpetrators largely unpunished, the bravery and self-sacrifice of its heroes, such as the United States Coast Guard, largely unremembered. Jimmy’s rally was more like Mardi Gras than a political event, even though most of the crowd knew about the murder of his sister. The purple and green columns of light surrounding the Dome were an ode to the ancient world, a pagan display presided over by a rotund and garlanded and sybaritic man who understood his constituency’s love of shared power and empire and blood sports and the opportunity to participate and glory in them.
