For good or bad, Otis Baylor was not one of these.
IN A NUMBER of well-written movie scripts, a forensic psychologist undoes the maniacal workings of a serial killer by somehow placing himself inside the killer’s head. As a consequence, the forensic psychologist goes a bit mad himself.
This makes for great entertainment. But I don’t think it has anything to do with reality. What goes on in the mind of a sociopath? No one knows. Without exception, they take their secrets to the grave and lie about their deeds and the whereabouts of their victims, even when they have nothing to gain. The only group I know to be as secretive are conjurors or, in South Louisiana, what we call “traiteurs.” They claim to be healers who receive their power from the forces of good. If you press them on the question, they’ll add that a traiteur can pass on his power at the hour of his death to a member of the opposite sex and only to a member of the opposite sex. Press them further and you will probably get a lesson in buried hostility. Why are they defensive? They never say. And that is what’s most disturbing about them.
On Thursday morning Alafair walked to her volunteer job at the evacuee shelter in City Park and Molly drove to her job at the Catholic self-help foundation on the bayou, and because the day was such a fine one, I walked the few blocks from my house to the sheriff’s department. At noon I checked out a cruiser and drove it home for lunch. As I pulled into the driveway behind Molly’s car, I saw Molly come around the back side of the house. She had just gotten home.
“Dave, come look at this,” she said.
I got out of the cruiser and followed her into the backyard. “What’s up?”
She pointed at the screen door. We usually latched it when we were gone to prevent Snuggs or Tripod from pawing it open and entering the house through the pet flap in the hard door. The screen had been cut and the latch unhooked from the eyelet screwed into the jamb. The lock on the hard door had been pried loose with a flat-bladed screwdriver.
“Have you been inside?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Wait here,” I said, and unsnapped the leather strap on my .45.
I went through the kitchen into the living room and main bedroom, the .45 still holstered, my palm resting on the butt. Then I looked into the bathroom and walked down the hall and into Alafair’s room.
Her manuscript had been torn into long strips and scattered on the floor and on her bedspread. The screen on the monitor had been broken in the center with what I suspected was a ball-peen hammer. The keyboard hung in two pieces by its connection wire on the back of her chair. The metal housing on the computer had been punched with holes, peeled back from the frame, and the innards torn out and stomped into the wood floor. Her laser printer, which she had bought in Portland with money she had made working in the college bookstore, had been crushed flat, probably by someone standing on top of it.
Her backup floppy disks had been scissored into small pieces. Her two notebooks and the hundreds of pages of blue calligraphy on them floated in a half inch of dark yellow urine at the bottom of a waste can. I opened my cell and punched in 911. When I finished the call, Molly was standing in the doorway.
“Ronald Bledsoe?” she said.
“Take it to the bank,” I replied.
I PARKED UNDER the live oaks in front of the recreation building in City Park and went inside. The floor of the basketball court was lined with cots, many of them piled with personal belongings, as though the cot itself had become a residence. Alafair was reading a book to a group of children who were sitting in a circle on the floor. I tried to seem relaxed as I walked toward her.
“Got a minute?” I said.
She put a marker in her book and went outside with me. I told her what had happened, my hand touching her arm. While I spoke, she stared down the slope at our house on the far side of the bayou, her face never changing expression.
“He destroyed everything?” she said.
“That’s the way it looks,” I replied.
“But there’s no evidence it’s Bledsoe? nobody saw him?”
“I talked with the neighbors. Nobody saw anything.”
“He urinated on my notebooks?”
“He’s a sick man. Why even talk about him?”
“You don’t have to tell me what he is.”
“We’re going to Lafayette this evening and buy a new computer and printer. In the meantime, the crime lab is at the house.”
“This guy’s a jerk, Dave. I send my work-in-progress file every day to a friend in Portland. I also send one to Ernest Gaines. My notebooks are in a floppy disk on top of my bookshelf. Did he get into my bookshelf?”
“No.”
“Like I said, he’s a jerk.”
“You’re quite a gal, Alf.”
“Don’t call me that name. Seriously, I hate that name,” she replied.
A TECHNICIAN FROM the Acadiana Crime Lab lifted full and partial prints from Alafair’s desk and computer but found none that matched the thumbprint Bledsoe had left on Clete’s license tag. Just before quitting time, Clete called me at the office.
“You won’t believe this. Bledsoe is back at his cottage,” he said.
“I believe it. Did you talk to him?”
“He invited me to dinner. He’s barbecuing on a grill under the trees. Jesus Christ, he just waved at me.”
I heard Clete pull the curtains.
“Somebody broke in our house today and tore up Alafair’s computer,” I said. “The perp also destroyed her work materials and put her notebooks in a waste can and urinated on them.”
“This guy is overdue for a home call.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I heard him fooling with the cell phone, as though he had walked from the window and was trying to organize his thoughts. “I got something real bad on my conscience, Streak. It’s eating my lunch,” he said.
“Courtney Degravelle’s death is not your fault, partner.”
“There’s something I didn’t tell you. We put all the insurance money in a mailbox like you suggested. I mean, almost all of it.”
He paused, waiting for my reaction. But this time I refused to fill in the blanks for him.
“See, Courtney was broke. Her insurance company was screwing her on her claim. She was already two months behind on her mortgage. She wanted to hold back a grand and wash it at a casino in Shreveport. I didn’t see the harm.”
I rubbed one temple and stared wanly out the window, stupefied by his lack of judgment.
“So that’s what she did. She and her sister drove up to Shreveport and unloaded the grand and won about seven hundred on top of it,” he said.
I didn’t want to hear it. Also, I didn’t want to fall into my old role as Clete’s enabler, either. But what do you do when your best friend is bleeding inside?
“Tommy the Whale dimed you with Sidney Kovick. Then Sidney’s goons found out you and Courtney were an item. It was easier to take her down than come after you. Washing the money didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.
“We both know better.”
I let it go. Courtney Degravelle had fallen into the hands of men who of their own volition dwell in the Abyss. Perhaps Clete had contributed to her fate. I was his friend. She was dead and so was Andre Rochon. With luck, we or someone else would nail the guys who killed them. What else was there to say?
I HAD OTHER problems to deal with, and choices to make that no cop on the square wants to make. Ronald Bledsoe had remained untouchable. Now he had invaded my home and left his ugly stain on my daughter’s life. We could roust and threaten him, but our best efforts would be of no value. Bledsoe was in our midst for the long haul, taunting us, pressing the stone deeper into the bruise with each passing day. Is it dishonorable to fight a war under a black flag in defense of those who cannot protect themselves? I thought not. Or at least that’s what I told myself as I considered my options regarding Ronald Bledsoe. Chapter 21
I T WAS RAINING Friday night and Alafair and Mo
lly were at a movie when Otis Baylor parked his car in front of our house and knocked on my door.
“You busy, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.
“No, sir, come in,” I said.
He sat down in a stuffed chair in our living room and looked out the window at the rain falling in the light on top of our philodendron. “I’ve given some thought to a few things I’ve said to you. My manner has been abrasive and uncalled for. I think you were trying to be as forthright as you could. I should have given you a little more credit.”
“You were under pressure—” I said.
He interrupted me. “Your daughter told Thelma about the scrape she had with this fellow Bledsoe. She also told Thelma about the break-in at your house. It was him, wasn’t it?”
“That’s my belief.”
“Alafair says you can’t do much about it.”
“No, so far I haven’t been able to.”
“I’ve been in your shoes and I know the kind of thoughts you’re having.”
“I was never that good on going into other people’s heads, Mr. Baylor, so in turn I ask that they not tell me what my own thoughts are.”
“My family has a violent history. My father and his brother did things I’m ashamed of. Some of their violent tendencies have lived on in me. That means I can recognize it when I see it in others. I think you and I are cut out of the same burlap. If you go after Bledsoe on your own, you’ll be playing his game.”
“Oh?”
“In the insurance business all policies are written in terms of risk and percentages. It’s not guesswork, either. The only other industry as good at calculating profit and loss is the gambling industry. That’s why it’s not a ‘gambling’ industry. The player loses, the house wins. There’s no exception to the rule. You following me?”
“No.”
“Bledsoe didn’t file charges against Alafair, did he?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because he put his hand on her person. Because he made offensive sexual remarks to her.”
“That’s right. And in a local court his potential for a successful prosecution would be at about thirty percent. But what happens if Alafair’s father decides to take the law in his own hands? My guess is Bledsoe’s chances for prevailing in court go up to about eighty percent. His chances of winning a civil suit would probably be over ninety.”
I was sitting across the coffee table from him. The windows were open and through the screen I could hear the rain clicking on the plants in the flower bed.
“Who shot the looters, Mr. Baylor?”
“Put it this way. The DNA evidence from my daughter’s rape kit was lost in the storm, so I’ll never know for sure those guys were the ones who attacked her. But if they were, they got what was coming to them and I’m glad they’re not around to hurt anyone else. I hope the one on the loose gets his comeuppance, too.”
“That might be poor consolation for an innocent man hoeing soybeans in the shadow of a mounted gunbull,” I said.
“Don’t let me regret I came here, Mr. Robicheaux.”
And don’t argue with people who are uneducable, I thought to myself. “Not for the world, sir. Thanks for coming by,” I said.
Most people who stack time make a series of decisions that ensure their eventual confinement, just like dry drunks finding ways to get back inside saloons. I wondered what tragedy or violent event or reservoir of anger was compelling a good-hearted rotary club man to wend his way into the belly of the beast.
As I watched his car drive away, his back tires spinning on a layer of blackened leaves in the gutter, I said a brief prayer for Otis Baylor. I had a feeling he would need all the help he could get.
BERTRAND MELANCON could not remember a time when he was not afraid. He feared his mother for the men she brought home and he feared even more her unpredictable mood changes. She would strike him in the face as easily as she would place a bowl of breakfast cereal in front of him, or perhaps do both within a ten-second time frame. Conversely, most of the men were not mean or violent and in fact would sometimes take him to ball games or give him money to pick up cigarettes or beer for them at the corner package store. But often his mother and the man with her would tell him and Eddy to stay out in the yard until they were called in for dinner. As Bertrand watched them drop the blinds, he knew his house did not belong to him and neither did his mother, and the realization of that fact was worse than his mother’s hand across his face.
Bertrand woke each morning with a nameless fear that was like a hungry animal eating a hole through his stomach. The images from his dreams followed him into the day, ill defined, without origin, like the reflection at night of faces in a streetcar window that told him he was of no value.
Eddy said he worried too much. But Eddy started getting drunk on short-dogs in the fourth grade, sometimes on the school bus at 7:30 a.m. Eddy got wiped out on glue in the boys’ bathroom and set fire to a girl’s locker. When he was twelve he was carrying a shank and claimed he had used it on a kid who had tried to take his tennis shoes at the park.
Bertrand and Eddy pulled their first armed robbery when they were in middle school. An old Vietnamese man was closing up his register in the tiny grocery store he operated when Eddy shot him in the face with a paintball gun. Not only did they clean out the register, Eddy threw canned goods through the glass windows in the wall coolers. Later Bertrand asked his brother why he had taken time to start throwing cans at the coolers when the old man was about to punch in numbers on the telephone. Eddy frowned and said, “Don’t know. Just felt like it.”
They never planned their scores or their strong-arm takedowns. The events seemed to present themselves of their own accord and were not of anyone’s manufacture, in the same way a storm can blow through a house or a match can turn a pool of gasoline into a whoosh of flame under a parked car. Stuff happened, that’s all. The hands trembling on the money drawer, the averted eyes, the broken mouth, the gashed scalp, these were images that receded into memory, like tiny bits of paper drifting to the bottom of a well, unplanned, undirected, ultimately inconsequential.
Eddy was never bothered by what they did. In the St. John the Baptist Parish jail it was Eddy who paid a cook four decks of smokes to put roach paste in the food of a wolf who bragged he was going to turn out both Eddy and his brother. It was Eddy who got Andre to pull the van up to the curb and talk to the young girl who was walking home from a street fair with a stuffed animal clutched to her breast. It was Eddy who tied her up in back. It was always Eddy who started it but who somehow got Bertrand to finish it or clean it up. Eddy thrived. Bertrand’s stomach stayed on fire. The two of them were joined at the hip, one incomplete without the other, each serving compulsions and insatiable desires neither could explain to himself.
Now, in the wake of Katrina, Bertrand’s nameless fear had a face on it. In a shelter in Des Allemands, someone had left a copy of the Times-Picayune scattered on the floor of a toilet stall. On the society page was a photograph of Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Kovick repairing the damage done to their historical home by both looters and the hurricane. The cutline contained no mention of the bullet that plowed through Eddy’s throat and Kevin’s skull.
Bertrand could not take his eyes off Sidney Kovick’s face. It made something shrivel inside him. Silently it told him of his insignificance, his failure, the disdain in his mother’s eyes, the loathing and disgust in the face of the white girl he had raped and tormented.
When he left the toilet stall, he was convinced there was only one way to end the fear and self-hatred that roiled his stomach and poisoned his blood: He had to destroy the face that hid like a reflection in a darkened window glass wherever he went. He had to kill Sidney Kovick.
SIDNEY LOVED GOING to work at his flower store. The interior of the shop was snug and full of color and fragrance, and the people who came into the shop respected him for his knowledge of flowers and his ability to select or create the right bouquet for the occasion. He alw
ays dressed formally when he went to the shop, and he always stood while he worked and only sat down at lunchtime or when he had to use his desk. He believed a good salesman was a good listener, and usually it did not take him long to divine what his customers needed. Few seemed to care about his reputation outside the shop. When a customer wrote a check, Sidney never asked for ID. His product and his prices were good, and so were his customers. Sidney was a gentleman.
Sidney also loved his wife, Eunice. When they first began dating, he showed her his home in Metairie, his yacht at Des Allemands, and his fishing camp in the Florida Keys. He told her he was in the life, but he didn’t deal in dope or pornography. When Eunice asked what he did deal in, he replied, “Anything that’s consensual and that makes money. End of story.” Eunice had grown up in a culture of corruption. Sidney’s explanation about his business affairs was enough.
Then their little boy was run over and killed by a drunken neighbor. Through use of an attorney, the neighbor managed to avoid a sobriety test until the next day. He pleaded no contest to reckless endangerment and was required to drive with a restricted license for one year. He did not attend the little boy’s funeral and he did not apologize for running over and killing him. Some said he was afraid; others said he believed the problem was legal in nature and had been resolved in the court. But everyone agreed that the neighbor’s decision to do nothing was a bad choice.
When the neighbor disappeared six months later, his wife put her house on the market and moved to Omaha. She had not been a person of means, but she bought a condo with cash and lived comfortably on the money she realized from the sale of her house in Metairie. She never complained to either the FBI or local authorities about their inability to find her husband.
Eunice never asked Sidney if the rumors about the neighbor’s fate were true. But sometimes when they were alone in the darkness, after making love in their upstairs bedroom, she would raise herself up on one elbow and look directly into his eyes.