Chapter 45

45

“Is he even sorry?” Annie asked after Nick had told her the tale of Robbie Fontenot and the Mercier brothers.

They sat on a bench under an oak tree in the meticulously tended gardens of Our Lady of Mercy. It was late enough in the day that the fairy lights had come on like lightning bugs in the tree branches and the ground lighting had come on along the paths. It was a place meant to give comfort, and Annie surely needed that after this day.

“For himself,” Nick said. “I imagine other people’s feelings are an abstract concept to him, for the most part. At least in comparison to his own sense of self-preservation. And I think deep down, he knows what he is. There’s a certain fear at the core of him. He knows the Marc everyone loves and adores is a construction, a mask. The one person he could never sell that lie to is himself.”

They had each come to the hospital separately as their last official task of the day. Annie to check on Tulsie Parcelle and talk to her about what would happen next for her and for Izzy, and to give her as much assurance as she could that there would be people willing to help them through it. Nick had come to see Dozer Cormier and take his statement about the things that happened that morning and the things that had happened on Halloween.

“That’s a sad, screwed-up life,” Annie said. “I could almost feel sorry for him if the context was different.”

Nick nodded. “If I hadn’t watched him hack a man with an axe in the attempt to save his own ass…Poor Dozer. Pauvre bête . All Dozer ever wanted was a friend. He was just a tool to Marc.”

“Did he say why he picked that night to talk to Robbie?”

“I think it was a combination of opportunity and alcohol. Donnie Bichon had been pushing him to get right with himself, admit his wrongs and make amends.”

“Ten years later.”

“Took him that long to find the courage, I reckon. And I gather Robbie wasn’t around here all that much over the years. They didn’t run in the same circles. Whatever the case may be, that was the night.”

“Timing,” Annie murmured. “So many little pieces had to fall into place for those three people to all be in that exact spot on that night at that time.”

She would have given anything to turn back the clock to that night and make Robbie turn left instead of right, leave five minutes earlier or stay ten minutes later. After all his struggles with drugs and petty crime; in and out of rehab, in and out of jail, in and out of the lives of his family; he had died in an alley at the hands of old friends because of a selfish decision made a decade earlier by a kid desperate for a future away from his past.

That the Mercier brothers had killed him and disposed of him like so much trash was unfathomable to her, even though she had seen such things before. At least the knowledge that she could still feel shock at what people would do to one another reassured her of her own humanity.

“How am I gonna get through telling B’Lynn this?” she asked. “She fought so hard for him for so long…”

“I’ll tell her, bébé ,” Nick said, tightening his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll go together, and I’ll tell her.”

“Thank you,” Annie murmured, tucking herself into his side as close as she could get.

With the sun almost gone, the day had grown chilly. B’Lynn would have a fire going in the fireplace of her cozy, feminine sitting room, with soft music playing. She had already resigned herself to the idea that Robbie was likely dead, but intellectually accepting something and hearing that the worst had actually happened were two different things.

“I’m sure she thought having a police detective suffer a mental breakdown and threaten to kill himself in her home was the worst thing that would happen today,” Annie said. “I can tell you I did not have that one on my shit show bingo card. Dewey Rivette. Who would have thought?”

“No one,” Nick said. “We never know what someone else might be going through. We see what we want to see, what we know.”

They had both seen Dewey as…just there. An average man, a mediocre cop. He was just a placeholder in life, like the character in a movie who didn’t warrant having a name when the credits rolled, just a title, a label. Annie felt a little ashamed now that she had not bothered to know anything about him as a person.

“He told me he hurt his back about a year ago,” Annie said. “He thought he could manage the pain meds. He only took them when he was off duty. But he built up a tolerance, needed more drugs. He wasn’t sleeping, then he needed something to wake him up in the morning and get him through the day, and he still thought he had it under control.”

That was the story of so many people. No one set out to become an addict.

“He was running Robbie as his CI. Robbie found out Danny Perry was dealing, then he found out Danny was supplying Dewey. Robbie had them both by the short hairs.”

“That’s where that money came from?” Nick said. “He was shaking them both down?”

“Yes, but he had an ulterior motive. Robbie told Eli McVay he was investigating police corruption. He said it as a joke, but Wynn spent the afternoon going over his computer from the house, looking at photos, videos, Word documents. He was gathering evidence. He was building a story. He kept a log of every dollar they gave him. He hadn’t spent one red cent of it. He was building a case. He would have taken it to the media.

“He really was trying to turn his life around,” Annie said. She shook her head. “And then he dies in an alley for no good reason at all.”

“Life is under no obligation to make sense to us, ’Toinette,” Nick said. “That irony never escapes me. Fiction has to be logical. All the loose ends of a novel have to tie up in a nice bow. But real life is messy and confusing and ugly, and it doesn’t have to mean a damn thing.”

He brushed her hair back from her face and looked into her eyes. “All we can do is write our own story and try to make our own happy ending if we can.”

And appreciate every precious moment, Annie thought, because there were no guarantees of more to come.

She thought again of B’Lynn, imagining her younger, watching her little boy play in the backyard of the lovely home of her lovely family. No guarantees.

“Let’s go, then,” she said on a sigh. “Get the bad news over with, and go home. I want to spend tonight with my husband and my son.”