IN THE MORNING I used the Google search mechanism on the department computer to find the photograph that evidently Elmore Latiolais had seen in a newspaper. It took a while, since I had no cross-references except the mention by Elmore Latiolais’s convict buddy that the man in the photo was white and a famous humanitarian. Or perhaps someone who had been in the movies.
I typed in Robert Weingart’s name and got nothing but listings of book reviews and feature articles on the remarkable turnaround in the career of a lifetime felon whose autobiography had become the most celebrated literary work by a convict author since the publication of Soul on Ice.
Then I entered the name of Kermit Aloysius Abelard. The article and photograph I found had been published two weeks ago on the business page of a Mississippi newspaper. But the article was less about Kermit than his co-speaker at a civic gathering in Jackson, the state capital. The co-speaker was Layton Blanchet, one of those iconic, antithetically mixed personalities the American South has produced unrelentingly since Reconstruction. In the photograph, Kermit was seated at the speakers’ table, his face turned up attentively toward Blanchet, who stood at the podium, his size and power and visceral energy as palpable in the photo as they were in real life. The cutline below the photo stated, “Self-made investment tycoon shares vision of a nation shifting its energy needs from oil to biofuels.”
Layton had grown up in the little town of Washington, Louisiana, in St. Landry Parish, during an era when the sheriff and his political allies ran not only the gambling joints in the parish but one of the most notorious brothels in the South, known simply as Margaret’s. His parents, like mine, were illiterate Cajuns and spoke almost no English and picked cotton and broke corn for a living. Layton attended trade school and business college in Lafayette, and sold burial insurance door-to-door in black neighborhoods and pots and pans in blue-collar Cajun neighborhoods. He also managed to get his customers’ signatures on loan-company agreements that charged the highest interest rates possible under the law. Later, he worked at lower levels of law enforcement in both Lafayette and Iberia parishes, which was when I met him. Even then I felt Layton was less interested in a particular line of work than in determining where the sources of power and wealth lay inside a society, not unlike a blind man feeling his way through an unfamiliar room.
His singular gift was his ability to listen to every word people said to him, his blue eyes charged with energy and goodwill and curiosity, all in a way that was not feigned, his assimilation of other people’s experience and knowledge an ongoing epistemological osmosis. He never showed anger or irritability. His square jaw and big teeth and radiant smile seemed inseparable.
I never doubted that Layton Blanchet was on his way up. But no one could have guessed how high.
When the oil economy collapsed in the 1980s, he bought every closed business, foreclosed mortgage, and piece of untilled farm acreage he could get his hands on, often at a third of its earlier valuation. Usually the sellers were only too happy to salvage what they could from their ruined finances, and Layton sometimes threw in an extra thousand or two if their situation was especially dire. Like a carrion bird drifting on a warm wind, he coasted above a stricken land, one that had not been kind to his family, and his ability to smell mortality down below was not a theological offense but simply recognition that his time had come around at last.
Layton owned a bank in Mississippi, a savings-and-loan company in Houston, a second home in Naples, Florida, and a condominium in Vail. But the center of his life, perhaps his visual testimony to the success his humble birth normally would have denied him, was the restored antebellum home where he lived on a bend in Bayou Teche, just outside Franklin.
It was a huge home stacked with a second-story veranda and dormers and chimneys that poked through the canopy of the two-hundred-year-old live oaks that shaded the roof. Every other year Layton had the entire house repainted so that it gleamed like a wedding cake inside a green arbor. He entertained constantly and imported film and television stars to his lawn parties. Stories abounded about Layton’s generosity to his black servants and the Cajun families who farmed his sugarcane acreage. He was gregarious and expansive and wore his physicality in the way a powerful man wears a suit. I did not believe he was surreptitious or hypocritical, which is not to say he was the man he pretended to be. I think in truth Layton himself did not know the identity of the man who lived inside him.
Before quitting time, I called his house and asked if I could see him. “Drive on down. I’ll put a steak on the grill,” he said. “You still off the kickapoo juice? I always admired the way you handled your problem, Dave. I didn’t catch the issue. What was that again?”
“I thought you might be able to help me with some questions I have about a couple of local guys.”
“I’ll tell Carolyn you’re on your way.”
“Layton, I can’t eat. My wife is preparing a late dinner.”
Forty-five minutes later he met me at his front door, wearing a muscle shirt and tennis shoes and beltless slacks that hung low on his hips. His swollen deltoids and his flat-plated chest and the slabs on his shoulders were like those of a man thirty years his junior. “Dave, you look great,” he said.
Before I could reply, he called into the interior of the house, “Hey, Carolyn, Dave’s here. Start those rib eyes I laid out.”
“I have to head back home in a few minutes. I apologize for bothering you during suppertime.”
“No, you got to eat something. Come in back while I finish my workout. You still pump iron? You look like you could tear the butt out of a rhinoceros. On that subject, how’s Purcel? What a character. I tell people about him, but nobody believes me.”
I followed him to the rear of the house, where he had turned a sunroom into a center for his Nautilus machines and dumbbells and weight benches. “Excuse me, all this fabric makes me feel like I’m inside mummy wrap,” he said, working off his shirt, dropping it on the floor.
He lay back on a bench and lowered a two-hundred-pound bar from the rack onto his sternum. His straightened his arms, his tendons quivering, his shaved armpits stiff with tension, the outline of his phallus printed against his slacks, an easy smile on his mouth as he lifted the bar higher into the air. Then he lowered it to within an inch of his sternum and lifted the bar nine more times, his chest blooming with veins.
He notched the bar back on the rack, sat up, and put his shirt on, breathing through his nose, his eyes radiant. “Who are these guys you have questions about?”
“Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart.”
“I wouldn’t say I know Kermit Abelard well, but I do know him. I never heard of the other guy.”
“He’s a celebrity ex-convict. He wrote a book called-”
“Yeah, I remember now. One of those books about how the world dumped on the author by making him rich.”
“You and Kermit are doing presentations on biofuels?”
Layton was still seated on the bench, his knees spread. He pulled at an earlobe. “Not exactly. You’re asking about the talk I gave in Jackson?”
“I saw something about it in a newspaper.”
“Yeah, Kermit Abelard was there. But I’m not making the connections here. What are we talking about?” He sneaked a glance at his wristwatch.
“You ever hear of the St. Jude Project?”
“In New Orleans? I thought Katrina shut down all the welfare projects.”
I didn’t know whether he was being cynical or not. After Katrina made landfall and the levees burst and drowned over one thousand people, a state legislator stated that God in His wisdom had solved the problems in the welfare developments that man had not. The state legislator was not alone in his opinion. I knew too many people whose resentment of blacks reached down into a part of the soul you don’t want to see. “The St. Jude Project is supposed to be a self-help program for people who have addiction problems. Junkies, hookers, homeless people, battered wives, whatever,” I said.
“The big addiction those people have is usually their aversion to work. Not always but most of the time. I’m not knocking them, but you and I didn’t have a charitable foundation to take care of us, did we?”
“Kermit Abelard never talked to you about the St. Jude Project?”
“Dave, I just said I’ve never heard of it. Hey, Carolyn, you got the meat on the fire?”
“You ever hear of Herman Stanga?”
“No, who is he?”
“A pimp and a dope dealer.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure. Before we go any farther with this, how about telling me what’s really on your mind?”
“Seven dead girls in Jeff Davis Parish.”
Layton’s hands were resting in his lap. He gazed at the back lawn. It had already fallen into deep shade, and the wind was flattening the azalea petals on the bushes. The sun had started to set on the far side of the trees, and its reflection inside the room had taken on the wobbling blue-green quality of refracted light at the bottom of a swimming pool. Then I realized that the change of color in the room had been brought about by the sun’s rays shining through a large dome-shaped panel of stained glass inset close to the ceiling.
“I’m not up on homicides in Jeff Davis Parish,” Layton said. “Kermit Abelard is mixed up in something like that?”
“I was wondering why Kermit is doing biofuel presentations with you.”
“He’s interested in saving the environment and rebuilding the coastline. He’s a bright kid. I get the sense he likes to be on the edge of new ideas. You drove all the way down here about Kermit Abelard? He’s a pretty harmless young guy, isn’t he? Jesus Christ, life must be pretty slow at the department.”
“You know the Abelard family well?”
“Not really. I respect them, but we don’t have a lot in common.”
“Why do you respect them? Their history of philanthropy?”
“You go to a lot of meetings?” Layton asked.
“Sometimes. Why?”
“I’ve heard that when alcoholics quit drinking, they develop obsessions that work as a substitute for booze. That’s why they go to meetings. No matter how crazy these ideas are, they stay high as a kite on them so they don’t have to drink again.”
“I was admiring your stained glass.”
“It came from a Scottish temple or church or something.”
“With unicorns and satyrs on it?”
“You got me. The architect stuck it in there. Dave, a conversation with you is like petting a porcupine. Ah, Carolyn with a cold beer. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You got some iced tea or a soft drink for Dave?”
His wife, Carolyn Blanchet, wore a halter and blue jeans and Roman sandals; she had platinum hair and the thick shoulders of a competitive tennis player. She had grown up in Lake Charles and had been a cheerleader and varsity tennis player at LSU. Now, twenty years down the road and a little soft around the edges, the flesh starting to sag under her chin, she still looked good, on the court and off, at mixed doubles or at a country-club dance.
Her laugh was husky, sometimes irreverent, perhaps even sybaritic, the kind you hear in educated southern women who seemed to signal their willingness to stray if the situation is right.
“I’m so happy you can have dinner with us, Dave. How’s Molly?”
“She’s fine. But I can’t stay. I’m sorry if I gave that impression,” I said.
“Your steak is on the grill,” Layton said.
“Another time.”
“She made a big salad, Dave,” Layton said.
“Molly is waiting dinner for me.”
“That’s all right. We’ll invite y’all out on another evening,” Carolyn said. “I heard you talking about Kermit Abelard. Did you read his last novel?”
“No, I haven’t had the chance.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s about the Civil War and Reconstruction in this area. It’s about this slave girl who was the illegitimate daughter of the man who founded Angola Penitentiary. A white Confederate soldier from New Iberia teaches her how to read and write. But more than anything, the black girl wants the recognition and love of her father. Do you know Kermit Abelard?”
“He’s gone out with my daughter from time to time.”
“I’ve never met him. But his father gave Layton the stained glass up there. At sunrise it fills the room with every color of the rainbow.”
“I think the architect got that from Mr. Abelard, Carolyn. Mr. Abelard didn’t give that directly to us,” Layton said.
“Yes, that’s what I meant.”
“I’d better go now,” I said.
Layton sipped from his beer, taking my measure. “Sorry you can’t eat with us. You’re missing out on a fine piece of beef.”
He laid his arm across his wife’s shoulders and squeezed her against him, his eyes as bright as a butane flame, the sweat stain in his armpit inches from his wife’s cheek.
ON SATURDAY MORNING I drove to the rural community south of Jennings, where Bernadette Latiolais had lived with her grandmother. It had been raining hard for two hours. The ditches in the entire neighborhood were brimming with water and floating trash, the fields sodden, the sky gray from horizon to horizon. Few of the mailboxes had legible names or numbers, and I couldn’t find the grandmother’s house. At a crossroads, I went into a clapboard store that had a pool table in back and a drive-by daiquiri window cut in one wall. Through the rear window I could see rain swirling in great vortexes across a rice field that had been turned into a crawfish farm. I could see an abandoned Acadian cottage, its windows boarded, the gallery sagging, hay bales stacked inside the doorless entranceway. I could see a rusted tractor that seemed to shimmer to life when lightning splintered the sky. I could see thick stands of trees along a river that was blanketed with fog, the canopy green and thrashing inside the grayness of the day. I could see all these things like a transitional photograph of the Louisiana where I had been born and where now I often felt like a visitor.
One wall of the store was stacked from floor to ceiling with cartons of cigarettes. I bought a cup of coffee and started to ask directions to the grandmother’s house from the woman behind the cash register. I had my badge holder in my hand, but I had not unfolded it. She interrupted me and waited on a car full of black men who had already ordered frozen daiquiris through the service window. She gave them their drinks and their change and shut the window hard, holding it firm for a second with the heel of her hand. Her arms and the front of her shirt were damp with mist, her physique bovine, her face stark, like that of someone caught unexpectedly in the flash of a camera. I identified myself and asked again for directions to the grandmother’s house. She glanced at my badge and back at me. “All the daiquiris was sealed,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Ain’t no law been broken long as I seal the cups. I know what they do when they leave here, but it ain’t me that’s broke the law.”
“I understand. I just need directions to the home of Eunice Latiolais.”
“The law says the driver ain’t s’ppose to have an open container. That’s all the law says.”
“Will you give me the directions to the Latiolais house, please?”
“Go sout’ a half mile and turn at the fo’ corners, and you’ll see it down by the river. People been dumping there. There’s mattresses and washing machines all back in the trees. If you ax me, the people been doing this is the kind that just left here. I’m talking about the dumping.” She paused. Her hands were pressed flat on the counter. She had run out of words. She looked out at the rain and at the backs of her hands. “This is about Bernadette?”
“Did you know her?”
“She use to come in for her Ho Hos every afternoon. The school bus goes close by her house, but she’d get off early for her Ho Hos and then walk the rest of the way.”
“What kind of friends did she have?”
“Her kind ain’t got friends.”
“Ma’am?”
“There ain’t no reg’lar kids anymore. One’s drunk, one’s smoking dope, one’s trying to steal rubbers out of the machine in the bat’room. A girl like Bernadette is on her own. Come in here in the afternoon and see the bunch that gets off the bus. Listen to the kind of language they use.”
“She was a good girl?”
“She was an honor student. She never got in no trouble. She was always polite and said ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am.’ She wasn’t like the others.”
“Which others?”
“The other ones that’s been killed. The others was always in trouble with men and dope. Her brother and sister wasn’t no good, but Bernadette was sweet-sweet, all the way t’rew. She had the sweetest smile I ever seen on a young girl. The man who done that to her is going to hell. The man who killed her don’t deserve no mercy. If he ever comes in here and I know it’s him, he better look out.”
“Do you know a man by the name of Herman Stanga?”
“No. Who’s he?”
“A local character in New Iberia.”
“Then keep him in New Iberia.”
A palpable bitterness seemed to rise from her person, like a nimbus given off by a dead fire.
I followed her directions to the home of Bernadette Latiolais. The house was wood-frame, with fresh white paint and a peaked tin roof, set up on cinder blocks inside a grove of pecan trees and water oaks that had not yet gone into leaf. On the gallery were chalk animals of a kind given as prizes at carnivals, and coffee cans planted with begonias and petunias. One of the Jefferson Davis sheriff’s detectives who had been assigned the case had given me as many details over the phone as he could. On a cold, sunlit Saturday afternoon, Bernadette Latiolais had entered the dollar store and bought two plastic teacups and saucers decorated with tiny lavender roses. After she paid, she walked out the door and crossed a parking lot and passed a bar with a sign in a window that said PAY CHECKS CASHED. She was five miles from her home with no apparent means of transportation. She was wearing a light pink sweater, jeans, a white blouse, and tennis shoes without socks. She was carrying the teacups and saucers in a paper bag. One week later, her body was found at the bottom of a pond, weighted with chunks of concrete. The knife wound to her throat was so deep she had almost been decapitated.
I picked up a paper bag off the seat that contained two books I had bought earlier that morning at Barnes & Noble in Lafayette. The grandmother invited me in, holding the screen with one arm as I entered. She was a big, overweight woman, obviously in poor health. She waddled as she returned to the couch where she had been sitting, as though she were on board a ship. When she sat down, she pressed the flat of her hand against her bosom, wheezing. “I’m s’ppose to be breathing my oxygen, but sometimes I try to get by wit’out it,” she said.
“I’m very sorry about your granddaughter’s death, Mrs. Latiolais. I’m also sorry about the death of your grandson Elmore,” I said. “I interviewed him in Mississippi. Later he sent me a message about a photograph he’d seen in a newspaper. Elmore believed a man in the photograph was the same man who had told Bernadette he was going to make you and her rich. Did somebody tell you all that? That somebody was going to make you rich?”
“I didn’t hear nothing about that, me,” Mrs. Latiolais said. “It don’t sound right.”
I was sitting on a wood chair on the opposite side of a coffee table from her. I removed the two books I had bought and showed her the jacket photo on Kermit Abelard’s novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Louisiana. “Do you know this man?” I asked.
She leaned over the book and brushed at the photo with her fingers, as though removing a glaze from it. “Who is he?”
“A writer who lives in St. Mary Parish.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Look again. This is the man Elmore recognized in the newspaper photograph. He said Bernadette had had her picture taken with him. She showed it to Elmore when she visited him in jail.”
“I ain’t never seen him.”
I pulled out the flap on my copy of The Green Cage and showed her the author photo. She looked at it for a long time. She tapped her finger on it. “That one I know,” she said.
“You do? From where?”
“He was wit’ a black man. The two of them was in the sto’ buying some boudin. The white man wanted it warmed up, but the micro was broke and he was complaining about it. He wasn’t from around here. He sounded like he was from up nort’. He said, ‘I understand why y’all say t’ank God for Mis’sippi.’ He said it like the people standing around him didn’t have ears or feelings.”
“Who was the black man?”
“I ain’t seen him befo’. He had a li’l mustache, like a li’l black bird under his nose. He was wearing a pink tie and a brown suit wit’ stripes in it, what a downtown man would wear.”
“Why would anyone tell your granddaughter he was going to make y’all rich, Mrs. Latiolais?”
“That’s why I said it don’t make sense. I own this house, but it ain’t wort’ a lot. Bernadette inherited seven arpents of land from her father. It’s part of a rice field down sout’ of us. Maybe somebody wanted to buy it a while back, but I don’t remember. She wasn’t gonna sell it, though. She said she was gonna save the bears.”
“The bears?”
“That’s the way Bernadette talked. She was always dreaming about saving t’ings, being a part of some kind of movement, being different from everybody else. I tole her them seven arpents was for her to go to colletch. She said she didn’t need no money to go to colletch. She’d won a scholarship to UL in Lafayette. She was gonna be a nurse.”
I talked to the grandmother for another fifteen minutes but got nowhere. The grandmother was not only afflicted with emphysema but was on kidney dialysis. Her life had been one of privation and hardship and loss, to the degree that she seemed to think of suffering as the natural state of humankind. The one bright prospect in her life had been taken from her. I have never agreed with the institution of capital punishment, primarily because its application is arbitrary and selective, but that morning I had to concede that the killer or killers of Bernadette Latiolais belonged in a special category, one that can cause a person to wonder if his humanity was misplaced.
THAT EVENING I hooked my boat trailer to my truck and picked up Clete Purcel at his motor court, and in the sunset drove the two of us up Bayou Teche to Henderson Swamp. The water in the swamp was high and flat, the islands of willow and cypress trees backlit by a molten sun, the carpets of floating hyacinths undisturbed by any fish that would normally be feeding at the end of day. No other boats were on the water. In the silence we could hear the rain ticking out of the trees and the whirring sound of automobile tires on the elevated highway that traversed the swamp. Up on the levee, which was covered with buttercups, the flood lamps of a bait shop and seafood restaurant went on, and I could see small waves from our wake sliding through the pilings into the shadows. When I cut the engine and let our boat drift between two willow islands that had turned dark against the sun, I felt that Clete and I were the only two people on the planet.
I doubted we would catch any fish that evening, but if possible, I wanted to get Clete out of his funk and his conviction that he was going to prison. The problem was, I thought that perhaps this time his perceptions were correct. I told him of my visit to the home of Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother. I also told him she had recognized the photo of Robert Weingart and that she had seen him with a black man who had a small mustache and wore a suit and a pink tie.
Clete flung a small spinner baited with a wriggler on the edge of the lily pads, his skin rosy in the waning light. “You think the black dude was Herman Stanga?”
“The grandmother said he looked like a ‘downtown man.’ She even said his mustache looked like a little black bird under his nose.”
“What’s this stuff about seven arpents of land?”
“It sounds like part of an undivided estate of some kind. Clete, maybe the Latiolais girl was just randomly abducted. Maybe her death doesn’t have anything to do with Stanga or Robert Weingart. She was walking past a bar in broad daylight, and then she was gone. Maybe the wrong guy came out of the bar at the wrong time and offered her a ride. Maybe Bernadette Latiolais’s death doesn’t have anything to do with the deaths of the other victims.”
“My money is still on Stanga,” he said.
“Maybe he’s involved, but I don’t think he’s the chief perpetrator.”
“Because Stanga is kind to animals?”
“Because he has ice water in his veins. Stanga doesn’t do anything unless it’s of direct benefit to him. There is no known connection between him and the girl.”
“On some level, Stanga is dirty. I just don’t know how or why. Before this is over, I’m going to take him off the board.” Clete retrieved his spinner and flipped it out again, his face empty.
I didn’t want to hear what he had just said. “We’ll get out of this one way or another, Clete. I promise. Your friends aren’t going to let you down.”
“I’m not going to do time. Before I go inside, I’ll put a few guys in body bags or eat my gun.”
“Not a good way to think.”
“So I’ll skip the country instead.”
“How’s your love life?” I said, changing the subject.
“I don’t have one.”
“You need to find a new girlfriend. This time get one your own age.”
“Who wants a girlfriend my age?”
For the first time that evening we both laughed out loud, violating the stillness, as though three decades had not passed and we were both cops in uniform again, walking a beat with batons on Esplanade or Rampart. Then I saw the humor go out of Clete’s face.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
“That boat out in the channel. Somebody is using binoculars on us. There. See the light glint on the lenses?”
I looked back toward the landing. In the gloom I could barely make out a male figure seated in the stern of a speedboat. Then I saw him lean over and dip his hand into the water and begin retrieving his anchor from the mud. Across the water, we could hear the dull thunk of the anchor clank in the bottom of the boat, then the buzzing sound of the electric starter turning over. The man in the speedboat pointed the bow directly toward us and opened the throttle, a frothy yellow wake fanning out behind him.
Clete reeled in his spinner and set down his rod on the gunwale. He took a po’boy sandwich from the ice chest, unwrapped the waxed paper, and bit into the French bread and fried shrimp and sauce piquant and sliced tomatoes and onions inside it, pushing the food back into his mouth with his wrist, his eyes never leaving the speedboat.
The driver made a wide circle and approached us so the sun was at his back and shining directly into our eyes. Clete shifted around in his seat, watching the speedboat, wiping mayonnaise off his mouth with his fingers. He pulled his right trouser leg up over his sock, exposing the hideaway.25 that was Velcro-strapped to his ankle.
The man in the speedboat cut his gas feed and drifted toward us, his boat rising on its own wake. “One of you guys named Dave Robicheaux?” he asked. His face was lit with an idiot’s grin.
“What do you want?” I said.
“I want to know if I found the right man, the man I’ve been sent to find.”
“You found me.”
“My name is Vidor Perkins.” His tan looked like it had been induced with chemicals or acquired in a salon. His shoulders were narrow and his dark hair oiled and conked on top and mowed into the scalp above his ears, exposing a strawberry birthmark that bled down the back of his neck. But it was his eyes that caught your attention. They were pale blue and did not go with the rest of his face. They seemed to have no pupils and contained the kind of lidless inner concentration that anybody who is con-wise immediately recognizes. In every stockade, prison, or work camp, there is at least one inmate no one deliberately goes near. When you see him on the yard, he might be squatting on his haunches, smoking a cigarette, staring into his own smoke with the concentration of a scientist, his hands draped over his knees like banana peels. At first glance, he appears to be an innocuous creature taking a break in his day, but then you notice that the other inmates divide around him the way water flows around a sharp rock. If you’re wise, you do not make eye contact with this man or think you can be his friend. Nor, under any circumstances, do you ever challenge his pride.
The man who called himself Vidor Perkins fixed his mindless stare on Clete. “I bet you’re Mr. Purcel,” he said.
“We’d like to catch a fish before dark, provided this spot isn’t already ruined. You want to spit it out?” Clete said.
“Man up at the bait shop sent me out here. Your daughter called, Mr. Robicheaux. She said there was an emergency at your house.”
“Say that again,” I replied.
“That’s all I know. Sounded like a fire or something. I cain’t be sure. He said something about an ambulance.”
“Who said?” I asked.
“The man up at the bait shop. I just tole you.” He killed a mosquito on his neck, lifted it from his palm with two fingers, and dropped it into the water.
“Why didn’t you come straight out here? Why were you anchored?” Clete said.
“’Cause I didn’t know it was y’all.”
I pulled out my cell phone and opened it. There was no service. “Were you in the bait shop when the call came in?”
“As a matter of fact, I was. This fellow took the call at the counter. He said something about paramedics. Or the voice over the phone said something about paramedics. I didn’t get it all. If it was me, I’d haul freight on up there and see what the deal is.”
“Let’s see your ID,” Clete said. “In the meantime, wipe that grin off your face.”
The man in the speedboat gazed at the elevated highway and at the headlights streaming across it. He had a wide mouth that looked made of rubber, like the mouth of a frog or an inflatable doll, and his lips had taken on a purplish cast in the fading light. “I’d worry about my family and not about a fellow who’s just trying to do a good deed,” he said. “But I’m not you, am I?”
I got out my badge holder and opened it. “I want you to follow us in,” I said.
He began picking at his nails. The wind came up and lifted the leaves on the willow trees and wrinkled the water’s surface. Vidor Perkins pushed the button on his electric starter. “Bet I beat you there,” he said. “I hope your family is all right.”
Then he opened up his speedboat and rocketed across the bay, troweling a wide arc by the pilings under the highway, sliding across his own wake, his profile as pointed and cool as a hood ornament.
A minute later, he had disappeared down the channel, the darkness swallowing the yellow surge of mud rising in his wake.
The owner of the bait shop knew nothing of an emergency call; he also said the man in the speedboat had not been in his shop and had not used his concrete ramp to put his boat in the water.
I used the bait shop phone to call home. Alafair answered. “Is everything okay there?” I said.
“We’re fine. Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Clete and I are running a little late. I was just checking in.”
“Something happen?” she said.
“You ever hear of a guy named Vidor Perkins?”
“No, who is he?”
“A meltdown I ran into. Don’t let anybody in the house till I get home.”
“What’s going on, Dave?”
“I wish I knew.”
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING I went to the office and put through a priority request with the National Crime Information Center for everything they had on Robert Weingart and the man who had given his name as Vidor Perkins. The electronic files and photographs that downloaded on my screen contained more information than I wanted or could possibly sort through. Perkins and Weingart had both been at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville at the same time. Whether they knew each other was a matter of conjecture. Perkins had served time in Alabama and Florida as well as Texas. Before Weingart went down for armed robbery in Texas, he had been arrested eleven times in Nevada, California, and Oregon, starting when he was sixteen years old. Unlike the majority of recidivists, neither man seemed to have a penchant for narcotics or alcohol. Most of their arrests involved fraud, robbery, or physical violence. As young men, both had been arrested on charges involving the jackrolling of elderly people and theft of the mails, which usually meant theft of Social Security checks. As a teenager, Weingart had been arrested for cruelty to animals and kept in a psychiatric facility for eight months. When he was nineteen, Vidor Perkins had been a suspect in an apartment-house arson that killed three people, one of them a child.
As with all sociopaths, the factual language used to describe their crimes said little if anything about their backgrounds or the influences that made them permanent members of an underclass that has one agenda-namely, to scratch their names on a wall in a way the rest of us will never forget. Maybe they grew up in shitholes. Maybe their fathers were violent drunks and their mothers wanted them aborted. Maybe they were crack babies, or they were born ugly or poor or stupid or were poorly educated and denied access to a better life. But when you have seen the handiwork of their kind up close and personal, none of the aforementioned seems to offer an adequate explanation for their behavior.
For some repeat offenders, jailing is an end in itself. They don’t break out of jails; they break into them. But I doubted that was the case with either Weingart or Perkins. Actually, the only surprise in the electronic files I downloaded was Weingart’s date of birth. He looked no older than thirty, but he was actually fifty-two. Either he shared much in common with Dorian Gray, or he had undergone a very good face-lift.
Monday morning I went into Helen Soileau’s office with printouts of both men’s rap sheets. I told her about my encounter with Vidor Perkins at Henderson Swamp and the lie he had told me about an emergency at my house. “Where’s Perkins now?” she said.
“He has a rental house on Old Jeanerette Road.”
“How’d you find him?” She was sitting behind her desk, her hands spread on top of the two rap sheets, her expression neutral.
“Called information and asked for new listings.”
“You think he’s delivering a warning on behalf of Robert Weingart?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She stood up and looked at me, thinking thoughts whose nature I could only guess at, her eyes not really seeing me. “The thread on this is going to lead back to the Abelard house in St. Mary Parish, isn’t it?” she said.
“If it does, it’s because the Abelards are up to doing what they do best-screwing their fellow man.”
She blew her breath up into her face. “Bring the cruiser around. Don’t make me regret this, Pops.”
We drove down Old Jeanerette Road through sugarcane acreage and meadowland, the wind riffling Bayou Teche in the sunlight, the rain ditches on either side of us littered with trash of every kind. We passed through a rural slum, then an experimental farm operated by the state, and rounded a bend where an old cemetery stood in a shady grove, the whitewashed crypts sunk at odd angles into the softness of the earth. Up ahead, just before the drawbridge, I could see Alice Plantation, built in 1796, and farther on a second antebellum home, one that is arguably among the most beautiful in the Deep South.
Across the drawbridge stood a trailer slum that looked like it was transported from Bangladesh and reconstructed on the banks of Bayou Teche. The house where Vidor Perkins had taken up residence was located back in a grove of slash pines and cedar trees, and offered a fine view of the economic juxtaposition that has always defined the culture in which I grew up. I doubted that Perkins was a student of history or sociology, or was even cognizant of what went on beyond the dermal wrap that probably constituted the outer layer of his universe. But the fact that he had moved into a comfortable bungalow in the midst of a breezy stand of trees situated between the two extremes of wealth and poverty in our state seemed more than coincidence. Or maybe that was just my fanciful way of looking upon an evil presence that had come into our midst, a phenomenon that was not without precedent.
His speedboat was parked on its trailer under a porte cochere, the trailer hitched to a pale blue paint-skinned pickup truck. In back, I could hear a radio playing and the sound of a rake being scraped across leaves and dirt. Helen and I walked into the backyard and saw a little black girl sitting in a swing that hung from a pecan tree. Vidor Perkins was hefting up great piles of leaves and pine needles and dumping them into an oil barrel that boiled with smoke. He was bare-chested and his skin was networked with rivulets of sweat, even though the morning was still cool. The little girl wore a pinafore and tiny patent-leather shoes powdered with dust. She was eating half of an orange Popsicle, watching us curiously.
Perkins squinted at Helen and me through the smoke, as though he couldn’t recognize me or guess the nature of our visit. Then he pointed at me good-naturedly. “Mr. Robicheaux! Was everything okay at your house?”
“What was your purpose in trying to alarm me, Mr. Perkins?” I said.
“I didn’t do no such thing. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But it was obvious that he was less interested in me than he was in Helen. His gaze kept drifting to her, as though he were sneaking a look at a carnival attraction.
“I’m Sheriff Soileau. Filing a false police report is a felony in this state,” she said.
A grin spread across his face. “A false police report? That’s a good one. Y’all trying to play a prank on me?”
“You told a sheriff’s detective about an emergency that didn’t exist,” she said. “Are you saying you didn’t do that?”
“If the emergency didn’t exist, that’s not my fault. I was tole by the man up on the levee to carry a message to Mr. Robicheaux. Tell me the crime in that.”
“Except the man up at the bait shop denies even seeing you,” Helen said.
“Did I say which man give me the message? I most certainly did not. Maybe this fellow was some kind of jokester. Y’all want a cold drink or a Popsicle?”
“What are you doing in our parish?” Helen asked.
“Vacationing, looking for business opportunities and such.” He was beaming as he stared at Helen, his gaze roving over her body in the way that ignorant and stupid people do when they’re amused by a handicapped or minority person.
“You a friend of Robert Weingart?” she asked.
“The writer? I know who he is. Is he living here’bouts now?”
“He was in Huntsville the same time you were. You never buddied around with him?” she said.
“I spent most of my free time at Huntsville in the chapel or the library.”
“Who’s the little girl?” Helen asked.
“Her mother cleans for me. They’re from right up the road, where all those trailers are at.”
Helen went over to the swing. “Is your mommy home?” she said to the little girl.
“She’s at work.”
“Why’d she leave you here?”
“Mr. Vidor took me to buy clothes.”
“Is somebody else at home right now?”
“My auntie.”
“I want you to wait out front for us. We need to talk with Mr. Vidor. We’ll drive you home in a few minutes. You’re not to come back here again unless your mother is with you.”
“Ma’am, you cain’t tell that little girl what to do,” Perkins said.
Helen lifted one finger toward Perkins, then looked back at the child. “You haven’t done anything wrong. But you should be with your family and not in the home of a man you don’t know well. You understand that?”
Perkins bit on a thumbnail, his grin gone. He stuffed a huge pile of blackened leaves and moldy pecan husks into the barrel, curls of smoke rising into his face. His conked hair was oily with sweat or grease or both, and the strawberry birthmark that bled like a tail out of his hairline seemed to have darkened in the shade.
Helen waited until the little girl had left the yard. “Here are the rules,” she said. “You don’t get near any children in this parish. If you try to harass a member of my department, if you look cross-eyed at somebody on the street, if you spit on a sidewalk, if you throw a gum wrapper out a car window, I’m going to turn your life into an exquisite agony.”
He leaned on his rake, the sweat on his ridged stomach running into the waistband of his underwear. “No, you won’t,” he said. “Check my jacket. On my last jolt, I went out max time. I did twenty-seven months chopping cotton under the gun, just so I wouldn’t have some twerp of a PO telling me what I could and couldn’t do. You got no say in my life, Sheriff, ’cause I ain’t broke no laws, and I don’t plan to, either. Empty wagons always make the loudest rattle.”
Helen brushed at her nose, the smoke starting to get to her. “You have anything you want to say to Mr. Perkins?” she asked me.
“You called Clete Purcel by name at Henderson Swamp. How’d you know who he was?” I said.
“He’s got his big cheeks spread on a stool at Clementine’s every time I go in there. He’s usually drunk,” Perkins said.
“When you see Robert Weingart-” I began.
“I don’t see him,” he said.
“Tell Weingart that for a mainline con, he’s made a major mistake,” I said.
Perkins laughed under his breath and bent to his work, dropping a rake-load of leaves and wet pine needles into the fire. Then he said something into the smoke.
“What’d you say?” Helen said, stepping toward him.
Perkins walked out of the smoke, blowing out his breath as though thinking of the right words to use. “I said maybe y’all ain’t so damn smart. Maybe y’all are gonna wish you had me for a friend.”
“Want to take the collard greens out of your mouth?” I said.
“I’m saying maybe I’m not the worst huckleberry in the patch. I’m saying there’s some out yonder that is a lot worse than me,” he replied. “They’re homegrown, too, not brought from somewhere else.” He peeled a stick of gum and rolled it in a ball and placed it behind his teeth, savoring the taste, his eyes filling with mirth as he stared Helen directly in the face. He began chewing, barely able to repress his amusement at Helen, his lips purple in the shade.
“You want to tell me why I interest you so?” she said.
“You put me in mind of a woman I knew in Longview. She could pick up a hog and throw it over a fence. She had a butch haircut that looked like the head of a toothbrush. It felt just like bristles when you ran your hand acrost it. I was sweet on her for a long time.”
“Wait for me in the cruiser, Dave,” she said.
“I’d better stay here.”
“Dave?” she said. She waited. When I didn’t move, she widened her eyes at me, her anger clearly growing. I walked close to Perkins, my face within inches of his, my back to Helen. I could see the tiny red vessels in the whites of his eyes, the dried mucus at the corner of his mouth, the strawberry birthmark that was slick with sweat.
“You get the fuck in your house,” I said.
“Or what?”
Perkins’s denim shirt was spread on the surface of a spool table. On top of his shirt he had placed his sunglasses, gold watch, cigarettes, and cell phone. I rolled them all in the shirt and tied it in a ball with the sleeves and dropped it into the flames. The denim burst alight and sank with its contents into the fire. “Welcome to Louisiana, Mr. Perkins. I love your place,” I said.