He was also fairly certain he was going to die unless he did something to rid himself of the guilt that waited for him each dawn like a carrion bird perched on the foot of his bed. He couldn’t undo what he had done to the priest on the church house roof, and he couldn’t find the young black girl he and Eddy and Andre had raped in the Lower Nine. But somehow Fate had caused his path to intersect with Thelma Baylor’s, not once but twice, in New Orleans and now in New Iberia.
Making it up to Thelma Baylor and her family was the way out, he told himself. He had the power to make her family rich. Maybe they would never forgive him and still despise him, but they would be rich just the same and he would be free and the pain would go out of his stomach and he could start over again in California.
Fate was giving Bertrand a second chance. At least that was what he told himself. If his intuitions were not true, he knew he would die soon. That thought caused him a spasm of pain that made him grip his stomach muscles and close his eyes.
There was only one hitch in his desire to redeem himself: how was he supposed to do it?
He could write a letter of apology and tell the Baylors where to find the stones and leave it in their mailbox or under a door. But even as he started composing the sentences in his mind, he knew his prescription for his own redemption was too easy. He was going to have to look Thelma Baylor and her family in the face. That image, particularly when it came to looking the father in the face, made sweat break on his brow.
Why was everything so hard?
His first morning in the Loreauville Quarters he borrowed his grandmother’s car, a rusted-out hulk that oozed oil smoke from under the frame, and headed down the bayou toward New Iberia. The cane fields were wet and fog rolled off the bayou on the horse barns and spacious homes and oak-lined driveways of the people who were actually his neighbors, although they would never look upon him as such. He continued on down the state road into New Iberia and turned toward Jeanerette and the house where Thelma Baylor lived. He passed through both rural slums and immaculate acreage owned by the Louisiana State University agricultural school. He drove alongside rain ditches that were layered with trash and clumps of simple homes inside pecan trees. He passed a graveyard filled with crypts that reminded him of the cemeteries across from the New Orleans French Quarter.
But no matter what he looked at, he could not escape the fear that was like a cancerous tuber rooted in his chest. He tried every way possible to rationalize not confronting Thelma or her family directly. Wasn’t it enough simply to give them an amount of money that was probably beyond their wildest dreams? Wasn’t it enough that he was sorry, that his own health had been ruined, perhaps even his life made forfeit? How much was one guy supposed to suffer?
But besides his guilt over Thelma Baylor and the priest on the church roof and the young girl in the Lower Nine, he had another burden to carry. He had not only been slapped in Sidney Kovick’s flower store and had his pistol taken away from him by an unarmed man, he had proved himself a coward and had been treated as such, kicked between the buttocks, like a punk or a yard bitch, in view of passersby at the end of the alley.
He passed an eighteenth-century plantation home built of brick and saw a modest green house with a screened-in gallery ensconced inside shade trees. The numbers on the mailbox were the same as the ones he had gotten out of his grandmother’s directory. He drove to the drawbridge over the bayou, looking straight ahead in case anyone was watching. He rumbled across the bridge and turned his car around so he could have a full view of the Baylor house without anyone taking note of his interest. A light was on in the kitchen and steam was rising from the tin roof where the sunlight touched it. What if he just knocked on the door and announced who he was? If they wanted to shoot him, they could shoot him. If they wanted to have him busted, they could dial 911. What could be worse than watching his insides transformed into dissolving red clots in the toilet bowl?
He stayed parked for perhaps five minutes on the road’s shoulder, just on the other side of the bridge, blue oil smoke seeping through the floorboards. There was little traffic across the bridge this time of day. But when he glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw a white man who had an elongated, waxed head and indented face standing in front of a café, looking about innocuously, as a tourist might. When Bertrand glanced in the mirror a second time, the man was gone.
He shifted his grandmother’s car into gear and crawled across the bridge, turning back onto the state road that led past enormous plantation homes and the green one-story house of the girl he had raped and tormented. He slowed his car in the shadows across from the house and shifted the transmission into park. His head was spinning, either from his fear or the oil smoke rising through the floor. Then he had an idea. What if he wrote out the words he needed to say, and walked up to the door and knocked? In his mind, he saw Thelma Baylor and her father and mother answer his knock in unison, anxious for his apology, as though it were what they had waited for ever since the night she was taken into the hospital by paramedics.
Yeah, man, just read the statement and put the piece of paper in their hands and get in my grandmother’s lI’l car and rocket on down the road, he told himself.
He found a brown paper hand towel on the floor and a magazine on the seat. He flattened the hand towel on the magazine, propped the magazine on the steering wheel, and began to print with a ballpoint pen:
To Miss Thelma and the family of Miss Thelma,
I am sorrie for what I have did to her. I wasn’t alweys that kind of person. Or maybe I was. I am not sure. But I want to make it right even tho I know it is not going to ever be right with her or anybody who was hurt like she been hurt.
He paused, his heart beating, and looked at what he had written. For some reason, the words made him feel better than he had felt in a long time. Behind him, he heard the sound of tires rumbling over the drawbridge and automatically he looked in the rearview mirror. A truck had just crossed the bridge and turned down the bayou, in the opposite direction from Bertrand. But it was not the truck that got his attention. The white man with the long head and indented face had parked a gleaming blue Mercury under shade trees in front of a historical plantation house on the corner. The man was standing on the shoulder, the driver’s door open between him and Bertrand, his forearms propped on the car’s roof, evidently admiring the huge white facade and stone columns of the building.
Definitely a weird-looking motherfucker, Bertrand thought.
He went back to his letter. Suddenly the front door of the Baylor home opened, and Thelma and a heavyset man and a blond, sun-browned woman stepped out into their yard, their faces turned up like flowers into the sunlight.
Bertrand was petrified. He had bathed last night in his grandmother’s claw-footed tub, but a vinegary smell rose from his armpits. He wanted to get out of the car, to wave his unfinished letter at them, to make them listen to his offer of restitution. It couldn’t be that hard. Just do it, he told himself.
Then the Baylor family backed out of the driveway, into the road, and drove away as though he were not there.
Bertrand opened his car door and spit on the ground. The wind blew in his face and puffed his shirt, but he knew that once again there would be no respite from his fear and that failure and self-loathing would lay claim to every moment of his day. He wanted to weep.
He got out of his car and wandered down the slope by the bayou, his legs almost caving. The man who had been studying the antebellum home under the oaks roared down the asphalt toward New Iberia, glancing once at Bertrand as he passed.
The man’s face looked exactly like the back of a thumb, a pale white thumb, Bertrand thought. He could not remember ever seeing anyone who looked as strange. Then he sat down in the leaves and put his face in his hands.
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON I drove to Bo Wiggins’s office in the old Lafayette Oil Center. Actually it was more than an office. He had purchased the entire building and had placed a sign that read “James Boyd Wiggins Industri
es” over the front entrance. He was not there and neither was his statuesque secretary with the white-gold hair. The receptionist was talking on the phone. A magazine lay open on her lap and she kept looking down at it while she spoke, shifting her legs so the page wouldn’t flip over and cause her to lose her place. After she hung up, I asked her where I might find Bo and his secretary. She bit on a nail and developed a faraway look in her eyes. “Houston?” she said.
“You’re asking me?” I said.
“No, it’s Miami. They went on his private jet. With some other guys.”
“Which guys?”
“Some contractors.”
“Which contractors?”
“The ones who’re hauling all that storm junk out of New Orleans?”
She had turned a declarative sentence into a question again.
“When will they be back?” I asked.
“Tomorrow, I think.”
I decided this was a conversation to exit as soon as possible. I gave her my business card and drove back to Lafayette in a downpour that left hailstones smoking on the highway.
THURSDAY MORNING Helen Soileau called me back into her office. “What I said to you yesterday about departmental resources was straight up. But that doesn’t change the fact Bledsoe is a dangerous man and has no business in our parish.”
I waited.
“Get him in the box. Let’s see what he’s made of,” she said.
“On what grounds?”
“We want to interview and continue our exclusion of him as a suspect in the break-in at your house.”
“I’ve been that route.”
“Tell him the sheriff of Iberia Parish wants to meet him.”
“What if he doesn’t want to come?”
“If he is what you say he is, he’ll come.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because he wants to show us he’s smarter than we are.”
Helen knew our clientele. Sociopaths and most mainline recidivists share certain characteristics. They are megalomaniacs, narcissists, and manipulators. No matter how ignorant and uneducated they are, they believe they are more intelligent than law-abiding people. They also believe they can intuit the thoughts of others. It’s not coincidence they often wear a corner-of-the-mouth smirk. I’ve always suspected their behavior and general manner have something to do with the origin of the term “wiseguys.”
I found Ronald Bledsoe sitting in a deck chair in front of his cottage, wearing Bermuda shorts, a short-sleeved shirt printed with green flowers, and dark glasses with big round white frames. He was drinking a glass of iced tea and reading the newspaper, one hairless pink leg crossed on his knee.
“Sheriff Soileau would like for you to come down and talk to her, Mr. Bledsoe,” I said. “It’s purely voluntary. By the way, sorry about that fracas the other night.”
He folded his newspaper and tilted his head, his eyes unreadable behind his glasses. “I’ve heard a lot about your sheriff. I hear she’s an interesting person. I think I’d be delighted to meet her. Can we go in your vehicle?”
I didn’t overtly try to engage him in conversation on our way back to the department. He seemed to enjoy riding in a cruiser, and he kept asking questions about the various pieces of technology on the console and along the dashboard. Then he removed his glasses and I felt his eyes probing the side of my face.
“Know what the de facto definition of a criminal is, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“A man with a demonstrable record of criminality.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s hard to argue with.”
“You appear to be an educated person, as your daughter does. You ever run across the term ‘solipsism’ in a philosophy course when you were in college?”
“I don’t think I did.” We were still on East Main, headed into the historical district. In less than five minutes we would be at the courthouse parking lot and in all probability Bledsoe would stop speaking on a personal level, something I didn’t want to happen. “What is ‘solipsism,’ exactly?”
“The belief that reality exists only in ourselves and our own perceptions.”
“That’s a new one.”
“Let me ask you the age-old puzzle: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, has it really fallen? Tell me your opinion on that and I’ll tell you mine.”
“I’d say it had fallen.”
He laughed to himself and watched the blocks of antebellum and Victorian and shotgun homes slip by the window.
“So what’s your opinion?” I said.
“I’ve already told you. You just weren’t paying attention.” He punched me in the arm with one finger.
His eyes were merry, a liquid green under his thick, half-moon, Curious George eyebrows and jutting forehead. “Is it true your sheriff is a hermaphrodite?”
We went through the back door of the courthouse and I took him directly to the interview room. Several uniformed cops turned around and looked at us as we passed them in the hallway.
“I’ll tell Sheriff Soileau you’re here. How about some coffee and doughnuts?”
“I like doughnuts.”
“Coming up,” I said.
I left him in the interview room and asked Wally to take him some doughnuts and a cup of Community coffee, then I told Helen that he was here.
“How did he behave coming over?” she said.
“He asked me if I was familiar with solipsism.”
“With what?”
“It’s a philosophical view that the only reality is one our minds generate. Then he asked me the riddle about a tree falling in the forest.”
“If no one hears it, does it really fall?” she said.
“I told him it falls, whether anyone hears it or not. He laughed.”
“What do you think he was trying to say?”
“Earlier he had said something about the definition of a criminal being the physical record of the criminal. I think he was ridiculing us because we can’t find evidence of any criminal activity in his life. I think he just gave us his whole MO. He’s a sociopath who doesn’t get caught. Like Bundy or BTK and probably thousands of others, they burrow into the woodwork and nobody knows they’re there until the house falls down.”
“How do you want to play it?” she asked.
“This guy is a sexual nightmare. I suspect he hates women, particularly female authority figures.”
“Can you imagine that?” she replied.
We walked down to the interview room, a relatively small enclosure, with two oblong glassed slits in the wall that allowed someone in the hallway to look at the subject with a degree of invisibility.
“Check him out,” I said.
Helen peered through the glass. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
“Ready?”
“When you are,” she replied.
I opened the door and we went inside. Wally had brought Bledsoe at least four custard-filled doughnuts and a king-size paper cup of community coffee. He ate them as you would a hamburger, feeding the whole doughnut into his mouth, the yellow cream glistening on top of his nails.
“My name’s Ronald. What’s yours?” Bledsoe said to Helen. He partially rose from his chair and sat back down again.
“I’m Sheriff Soileau, Mr. Bledsoe. Appreciate you coming down.” She closed the door behind us and glanced up at the video camera on the wall. “Since this is just an informal conversation, I had that camera turned off.”
“I never noticed it.”
There were two empty chairs at the table, but Helen and I remained standing.
“Let’s get right to it,” she said. “Somebody broke into Detective Robicheaux’s home and vandalized his daughter’s computer and pissed in the wastebasket. You gave us your DNA voluntarily and we appreciate that. But we have a larger concern. What the hell are you doing here in New Iberia?”
The shift in her tone caught him off guard. He lifted his eyes into hers. They were as bright and green as emerald
s. “I’m a private investigator in the employ of several insurance carriers.”
“Which carriers?”
“Confidentiality precludes my giving out their names.”
“I see. Do you know what obstruction of justice is?”
“I do.”
“You’ve factored yourself into a homicide investigation, Mr. Bledsoe. I’m talking about the shooting of two black men in front of Otis Baylor’s house in New Orleans.”
“Those men of color were looters. They stole from homes insured by my employers.”
“Otis Baylor is going to help you recover stolen property?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You know Sidney Kovick?”
“I know his name. Everyone in New Orleans does.”
“Do you work for him?”
“No, I’m a bond agent and an insurance investigator, not unlike Mr. Purcel, Mr. Robicheaux’s friend. Can you tell me why Mr. Purcel is not in custody, considering the amount of injury he did to Bobby Mack Rydel?”
“Our focus is on you, Mr. Bledsoe.”
“Do you have any more napkins? These are messy.”
“Is that what your mother told you? Don’t have messy hands?”
“What was that?” he said.
Helen leaned down and propped her fists on the table, only inches away from him. A tube of muscle stood out in the back of each upper arm. Her hair hung on her cheeks. Her physical presence was palpable, her scent like a mixture of flowers and male body heat. Bledsoe’s nostrils whitened around the edges. He shifted in his chair and placed his hands in front of him. His fingers were long and pale, as though they had been in water a long time.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Helen said.
He looked straight ahead and seemed to gather his body inside his clothes. “You don’t have the legal right to touch my person.”