“What about him?”
“A body washed up on the shore at East Cote Blanche Bay last night. One hand is missing three fingers. The sheriff says they look like they were recently sutured. The deceased has a white scar cupped around one nostril like a piece of twine. Sound like anyone you know?”
IT HAS BEEN my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced—in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.
This story began with a visit to a penal work gang outside Natchez, Mississippi. Its denouement commenced late in the afternoon with a phone call from one of the players who had sweltered in the heat and humidity next to a brush fire that was so hot, a freshly lopped tree branch would burst instantly alight when it touched the flames. The caller was not a man I cared to hear from again.
Jimmy Darl Thigpin’s voice was like that of a man speaking through a rusty tin can. “I’m retired now and was in the neighborhood,” he said.
“I see,” I replied, actually not seeing anything, not wanting to even exchange a greeting with the gunbull who had shot and killed Elmore Latiolais.
“I’m up at a fish camp at Bayou Bijou. Come out and have a drink.”
“I’ve been off the hooch quite a while, Cap.”
“Got soda pop or whatever you want.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Need to give you a heads-up. I got to get some guilt off my conscience as well.”
“Why don’t you come into the office?”
“I don’t like being around officialdom anymore. The state of Mis’sippi give me a pension wouldn’t pay for the toilet paper in the state capitol building. Guess what color half the legislature is? I got a chicken smoking on my grill. It’s a twenty-minute ride, Mr. Robicheaux. Do an old man a favor, will you?”
After I got off the phone, I called Clete Purcel and told him of my conversation with Thigpin. “I’d blow it off,” he said.
“Why?”
“If he’s got anything to say, let him do it on the phone.”
“Maybe he’s not sure how much he wants to tell me. Maybe he was paid to kill Elmore Latiolais.”
“I say don’t trust him.”
“Check with you later.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Streak. These guys know you’ve got an invisible Roman collar around your neck. They use it against you.”
“Thigpin has chewing tobacco for brains. You give him too much credit.”
“You never listen.”
“Yeah, I do. I just don’t agree with you,” I said.
I called Molly and told her I’d be home for supper a little late. Then I drove down a long two-lane road between oak trees into a chain of freshwater bays that bordered the Atchafalaya Basin. I wasn’t worried about Thigpin. He may have been an anachronism, but I had known many like him. Most of them had become as institutionalized in their mind-set and way of life as the convicts they supervised. Some, when drunk or in a moment of moral clarity, admitted they had gone to work in the prison system before they ended up hoeing soybeans and chopping cotton themselves. Some, upon retirement, looked over their shoulders every day of their lives. Years ago, I knew a guard at Angola who had put men on anthills when they fell out on the work detail. He also shot and killed inmates on the Red Hat gang, sometimes for no other reason than pure meanness. The prison administration allowed him to work at the gate until he was almost eighty because there was not a town in Mississippi or Louisiana he could retire to. The day he was finally forced to leave Angola, he paid one week’s rent at a roominghouse in New Orleans, shut the windows, stuffed newspaper under the doors, and went to sleep with his head in the oven, the gas jets flowing.
I drove up on the levee, my windows down, to my left a wide bay dotted with cypress trees, to my right a string of fish camps on a green bib that sloped down to another bay, this one reddening with the sunset, the fluted trunks of the tupelo gums flaring at the waterline, moss lifting in their limbs. The road atop the levee bent into an arbor of trees where the shadows were thicker, the water along the shore skimmed with a gray film, the tracings of a cottonmouth zigzagging through the algae that had clustered among the storm trash left over from Rita.
I passed a yellow school bus with no wheels, all of its windows pocked by BB guns or .22 rounds, its sides scaled with vine. Then I saw a clapboard shack in the gloom, banana fronds bending over the tin roof, a bright red Coca-Cola machine sweating under the porte cochere, a deck built on pilings over the water, a small barbecue pit smoking greasily in the breeze.
I parked in the yard. Thigpin came out the back of the house and greeted me with a can of beer in his hand. He wore his tall-crown cowboy hat, the same one he was wearing when I interviewed Elmore Latiolais on the brush gang. Perhaps it was the diminished nature of the sunlight, but one side of Thigpin’s face seemed even more shriveled from skin cancer than the last time I had seen him, to the extent that his grin looked like a surgical wound in the corrupted tissue.
When he shook hands, his grip was too strong, biting into mine like that of a man whose energies are not quite under control. “I cain’t crack you a cold one?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“You in one of them twelve-step programs?” he said.
“That pretty well sums it up.”
He released my hand. “Nobody is looking. I got some Johnnie Walker, too.”
“You said you had a heads-up for me.”
“Come on in the kitchen. I got to get me a fresh beer. I’ll set out some plates for us.”
“I need to get on it, Cap.”
“Too bad. I was looking forward to dining with you.”
His eyebrows and sideburns were freshly clipped, his jaw shaved. I thought I could smell cologne on his skin. He didn’t strike me as a man who had spent much time at his fish camp. The only vehicle in the yard was a pristine Dodge Ram, the tires clean and thick-treaded, the dealer’s tag still in the back window. There was no boat in the water. I glanced at the barbecue pit. The chicken on it was black except for a pink slash where a drumstick had been torn off. “You coming?” he said over his shoulder.
I followed him inside and let the screen door slam shut behind me. The linoleum floor was cracked and wedged upward in places, spiderwebs feathering in the breeze along the jambs of the open windows. I waited for him to speak. Instead, he began clattering around in a cabinet, pulling out coffee cups and a coffeepot, fiddling with the feed on the propane stove. I stepped into his line of sight. “You said you had a problem of conscience of some kind. You want to tell me what this is about, or should I leave?”
He clanked the coffeepot down on the stove and released it as though the handle were burning his fingers. “I think Elmore Latiolais was aiming to kill me. I had it on good authority. He walked to the truck and reached inside. I told him to put his hands where I could see them and to back the hell off. He didn’t do it. So I punched his ticket.”
“From what ‘good authority’ did you get your information?” I asked.
“I got to be friends with a powerful man in Jackson. I invested my money with his bank. A lot of people lost their money in that bank. But I didn’t. I took this man hunting and fishing, and he treated me as a friend.” He was breathing audibly, the way ignorant and defensive people do when no one has challenged their statement.
“I think you’re talking about Layton Blanchet,” I said. “I think you were paid to kill Elmore Latiolais because he was bringing down too much heat on a coalition of lowlifes who are responsible for the deaths of two innocent girls. Is that the problem of conscience we’re talking about, Cap?”
“If you’re saying I was bribed, you’re a goddamn liar.” He still wore his hat; his profile was as chiseled as an Indian’s, his eyes as clear as glass. But even while he denied his guilt, his thoughts seemed elsewhere, as though he had already moved on in the conversation.
“What’
s the heads-up?” I asked.
“People like us do what we’re told. You go along, you get along.”
“Until you start killing people for hire.”
He was motionless, one hand resting on the corner of the stove, the other on a chopping table that had a single drawer. “The government is attaching the money I got from that failed bank. I worked over forty years for what I have. Now I’m supposed to live on a piss-pot state pension ’cause of what other people done? What would you do in that situation?”
I saw two fingers on his right hand jerk involuntarily, just inches above the metal handle on the drawer. I said, “I think I wouldn’t fault myself for a situation I didn’t create. I wouldn’t try to correct the past by serving the interests of the same people who cheated me out of my life savings.”
His jaw flexed, the skin on half his face wrinkling as coarsely as sandpaper. “You reckon hell is hot?”
“Since I don’t plan on going there, I haven’t speculated on it.”
“This ain’t my way. But they didn’t give me no choice, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You open that drawer, I’m going to smoke your sausage.”
“No, sir, you’re not. You’re a trusting man, which makes you a fool. Sorry to do this to you.”
With his left hand, he lifted up a double-barrel chrome-plated .32-caliber Derringer that he had probably slipped from his back pocket. It was aimed at a spot between my chin and breastbone.
“People know where I am. They know I talked with you,” I said.
“Don’t matter. Twelve hours from now, I’ll be fishing off the Yucatán coast. Turn around. Don’t make this no harder than it is.”
I could feel my mouth going dry, my scalp tightening. When I tried to swallow, my breath caught like a fish bone in my throat. In my mind’s eye, I saw a nocturnal landscape and the flicker of artillery on the horizon, and seconds later, I heard the rushing sound of a 105 round that was coming in short.
I forced myself to look at the Derringer, its two chrome-plated barrels set one on top of the other. The muzzles were black, the handles yellow, lost inside Thigpin’s grip. My head felt like a balloon about to burst. “You’re typical white trash, Thigpin. You’re a gutless thrall who’s spent his life abusing people who have no power. Go on and do it, you motherfucker. I’ll be standing by your deathbed.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Robicheaux. When you get down below with the Kennedys and all the other nigger lovers, give them my regards.”
My vision went out of focus. I raised my hand to my holster, but I knew my gesture was in vain, that my life was over, that I was going to be executed by a brutal, mindless human being whose pathological cruelty was so natural to him, he did not even recognize its existence. Then, through the distortion in my vision, I saw a man standing thirty feet from the kitchen window, aiming down the barrel of an AR-15, his huge shoulders almost tearing the seams of his Hawaiian shirt. He seemed frozen in time and space, his breath slowing, the squeeze of his trigger pull as slow and deliberate as the tiny serrated wheels of a watch meshing together. The report was dulled by the wind gusting in the trees, but the muzzle flash was as bright and sharp and beautiful as an electric arc. The round popped a hole in the screen and blew through one side of Thigpin’s neck and out the other, whipping a jet of blood across the stove’s enamel.
I suspect the round destroyed his trachea, because I heard a gasp deep down in his throat as if he were trying to suck air through a ruptured tube. But there was no mistaking the look in his eyes. He knew he was dying and he was determined to take me with him. Blood welled over his bottom lip as he lifted the Derringer toward my chin. That was when Clete Purcel squeezed off again and caught Jimmy Dale Thigpin just above the ear and sent him crashing to the floor. The top of the coffeepot rolled past his head like a coin, devolving into a tinny clatter on the linoleum.
CHAPTER
22
I HAD MY CELL phone open and was about to dial 911 when Clete came through the back door, the AR-15 held at an upper angle, his gaze fastened on Thigpin’s body. Until I had seen him through the kitchen window, just before he fired, I’d had no idea he followed me to the camp. “You calling it in?” he said.
I waited. A pool of blood was spreading outward from Thigpin’s head. I stepped aside.
“Bag him as a John Doe,” Clete said. “Let the guys who sent him wonder what happened to him. Weingart already seems to be coming apart. Let the Abelards or Weingart or Carolyn Blanchet or whoever is behind this think Thigpin is about to rat-fuck them.”
I closed my cell phone. “You warned me about Thigpin. I should have listened.”
“Think of it this way. What happens when I listen to my own advice?” He laughed without making any sound, his shirt shaking on his chest. “I need a drink.” He opened a cabinet and found Thigpin’s bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured four inches in a jelly glass. He saw me watching him. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you,” he said. “But I need a drink. I’m not like you. I don’t have your control or discipline. I don’t have your faith, either. So I’m going to put the tiger in the tank. I’ll be a lush right through the bottom of the ninth. Bombs away.”
He drank all four inches of it as though it were Kool-Aid, gin roses flaring in his cheeks, his eyes brightening, the world coming back into focus, becoming an acceptable place again.
“You saved my life, Clete. You’ll always remain the best guy I ever knew,” I said.
“That second shot? The one that flushed his grits?”
“What about it?”
“It was supposed to be my first shot. The one through the neck was five inches below where I aimed. I could have gotten you killed, big mon.”
“You pulled it off, didn’t you? You always pull it off. You’ve never let me down.”
But I was caught in my old vanity—namely, that I could convince Clete Purcel of his own goodness and heroism and the fact that the real angels in our midst always have tarnished wings. He sat down in a straight-back chair and looked wearily out the screen door at the sun setting on the bay. “We can’t keep running on luck, Dave,” he said.
“We’ve done pretty well so far, haven’t we?”
“You don’t understand. It’s like General Giáp said. He defeated the French with the shovel, not the gun. We keep playing by the rules while the other guys use a flamethrower.”
“What do you recommend?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling I can’t get rid of. Killing a piece of shit like Thigpin doesn’t change anything. He was just a tool. Right now people out there are planning our death. Maybe the guys in the rain hoods. We don’t know. That’s it, we don’t know.”
I sat down across from him. Thigpin’s cell phone was on the table. I picked it up and accessed its call lists. Then I closed it and placed it back on the table.
“What’d you find?” Clete asked.
“Nothing. It’s clean.”
“That’s my point,” he said. “We took a sack of shit off the board that nobody could care less about.”
HELEN NOT ONLY agreed with Clete’s suggestion about tagging Thigpin as a John Doe, DOA, she suppressed all information regarding the shooting and got Koko Hebert, our coroner, to tell an aggressive local reporter, “Yes, the body of a fisherman has been found. We’re trying to determine the cause of death as we speak. We’ll get back to you on that, muy pronto. This story definitely has Pulitzer potential.”
The next morning I received a phone call from a plainclothes NOPD detective by the name of Dana Magelli. He was a good cop, as straight as they come, and always a loyal friend. He was also a family man, one who didn’t rattle easily but who walked away when he heard a colleague telling a vulgar joke or using gratuitous profanity. This morning it was obvious he was not happy about the task he had been given.
“You remember No Duh Dolowitz?” he said.
Who could forget No Duh, once known as the Merry Prankster of the New Orleans Mob? He put dog shit in the sandwiches at a Teamsters conven
tion. He tried to cut up a safe with an acetylene torch in Metairie and burned down half of a shopping center. He helped Clete Purcel fill up a mobster’s customized convertible with concrete; he also helped with the deconstruction of a Magazine Avenue snitch by the name of Tommy Fig. The deconstruction involved the freeze-drying and wrapping of Tommy’s parts, which were then hung from the blades of an overhead fan in Tommy’s butcher shop. But No Duh went through a life change when he creeped a house on Lake Pontchartrain owned by one of Didi Gee’s nephews, who put seven dents in No Duh’s head with a ball-peen hammer.
“No Duh is running a pawnshop over in Algiers,” Dana said. “Some of the items in it are a little warm. A guy came in there three days ago and sold No Duh a DVD player for twenty bucks. There was a disk in it. Out of curiosity, No Duh put it on the screen in his store. At first he thought he was watching a Friday the 13th or Halloween film of some kind. Then he realized what it was and called us.”
“No Duh called the cops?”
“He’s got his parameters. I recognized the two girls in the film, Dave. I’m sure they’re the same girls in the photos y’all sent us. I’m going to download and e-mail you the DVD. I’ve got the feeling you’re emotionally involved in this one. I’m sorry to do this.”
“What’s in it?” I said.
“See for yourself. I don’t want to talk about it,” he replied.
I went into Helen’s office and told her of Dana Magelli’s call. “I want Clete to see the video with us,” I said.
“What for?”
“This investigation is as much his as it is ours. I’ll put it another way: Outside of you and me, he’s one of the few people who cares about the fate of those girls.”
“Call him,” she said.
It took Clete only ten minutes to drive from his office to the department. We went into Helen’s office and dropped the blinds on the windows and the door. Then she hit the download button on Magelli’s e-mail attachment.
People wonder why cops get on the hooch or pills or become sex addicts or eventually eat their guns. It would be facile and self-serving to say there is one answer to that question. But even among the most degraded of police officers, unless they are sociopaths themselves, there are moments when we witness a manifestation of human evil for which no one is prepared, one that causes us to wonder if some individuals in our midst are diabolically possessed. That is what we wish to believe, because the alternative conclusion robs us forever of our faith in our fellow man.