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“Maybe he was working my crank.”
I worked my way into a corner, far from the drink and food tables where most of the crowd was concentrating. “Why would Smiley drop one of Nightingale’s security people?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t an accident. The guy is too good a shot.”
“Smiley owes you?”
“Most of his victims were abused women or children or connected with people who abused women or children. Smiley tried to put a bomb in my car. He might have killed Homer. So maybe Smiley found out he got set up to kill a child and started cleaning the slate. Where’s Nightingale?”
“Forget about Nightingale,” I said.
“Like I can.”
“Did you call 911 on the shooting?”
“In New Orleans? NOPD would have me on the injection table.”
“Where are you now?”
“In a filling-station restroom, washing the splatter off me. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Drop it, Clete. Let’s go back to New Iberia.”
“That’s what you’re always trying to do, Dave. You don’t get it.”
“Pardon?”
“The place you remember isn’t there,” he said. “There’re no safe places anymore. Everyone knows that except you.”
* * *
NO, “EVERYONE” DID not. I had at least one partner in my grand illusion about the relativity of time and the melding together of the past and present and future and the possibility that the dead are still with us, like the boys in butternut marching through the flooded cypress at Spanish Lake, and the slaves who beckon us to remove the chains that bind them to the auction block, and all the wandering souls who want to scratch their names on a plaster wall so someone will remember their sacrifice, the struggle that began with the midwife’s slap of life and their long day’s journey into the grave.
I think madness is a matter of definition. But if you are afflicted by it, you thank God for those who share it with you. And that was why I was always drawn to Levon Broussard and, paradoxically, to Jimmy Nightingale. Neither accepted the world as it is, and neither was entirely rational. However, their difference lay elsewhere, and in this case the difference was critical not only to them but to us. Jimmy was a brilliant man who, of his own volition, chose to model himself on his benighted antecedents, demagogues who need no more mention. Conversely, Levon was the artist who enlisted in lost causes, flagellating himself because he could not change the nature of mankind.
After I finished talking to Clete, my cell phone throbbed again. It was Alafair.
* * *
“ROWENA AND LEVON Broussard just left our house,” she said. “You won’t believe this.”
“I probably will,” I replied.
“Rowena says she tortured and killed Kevin Penny.”
“Yep.”
“You’re not surprised?”
“What do they plan to do now?”
“They didn’t say. Rowena wanted to get it off her conscience. After Penny raped her, she thought he might be involved with the murder of the girls in Jeff Davis Parish. She thought she was going to get justice for them. And for herself.”
“What did she find out from Penny?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m not sure I believe her story. Maybe she’s muddying the water so Levon can skate. Maybe neither of them is involved.”
