“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.
CHAPTER
6
THAT AFTERNOON AN elderly cane farmer ten miles outside of New Iberia had been harrowing a field that was bordered by a coulee and a hedgerow of persimmon and gum trees. The lock on his gate had been broken by vandals driving ATVs, and the dirt road he used to get his machinery in and out of the field now gave access to dumpers who had thrown rubber tires and old furniture and raw garbage down the embankment of his coulee. He had called the sheriff’s office to complain and had tried to bury or haul away the trash, then finally had given up.
The breeze was warm and drowsy, and he felt himself nodding off in the tractor seat. Up ahead, a flock of crows clattered into the air above the persimmon and gum trees. The farmer cut his engine, and in the shade of a canvas umbrella he had fastened above the tractor seat, he opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of Kool-Aid. From inside the trees, he could hear horseflies buzzing and see them clustering on the ground and rising suddenly in the air. The wind shifted out of the south, and an odor struck his nostrils that made his throat clench.
He walked into the trees, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. At the lip of the coulee, someone had spaded the ground with a shovel and replaced the torn divots of grass with a rake, creating a broken pattern that made the farmer think of a root-bound plant in a cracked flowerpot. He found a long stick and began pushing the divots down the side of the levee, the clods of dirt rilling into the water.
Oh, bon Dieu, bon Dieu, he thought as the odor grew in strength and seemed to clutch at his face like a soiled hand. Then he touched something soft that made him drop the stick and step back, his eyes watering not from the odor but from what he thought he was about to see. He stumbled backward in the shade, away from the thing that was buried in the ground, unable to take his gaze from the hole his digging had created. But in the disturbed dirt, the only image he could make out was a plastic teacup that had a large piece broken out of it. The cup was painted with tiny lavender roses.
The coroner, the paramedics, a half-dozen uniformed deputies, two technicians from the Acadiana crime lab, and Helen and I all arrived at the scene within twenty minutes of one another. The body of the buried girl or woman was fully dressed and had been covered over by no more than a foot of soil. She was blond and about five and a half feet tall, and she wore the kind of tennis shoes a kid might, but because of the heat and the moisture in the ground and the piles of red ants that had been pushed into the depression with her, the decomposition was so dramatic that it was impossible to estimate her age.
Buried with her were two winter coats, an empty handbag, seven shoes, a polyester scarf, coils of costume jewelry, a tube of lipstick, two barrettes, a Bic lighter, and a saucer that matched the broken teacup the farmer had already unearthed.
The farmer had no idea when or how the body had gotten onto his land.
“Did you see any lights at night?” I asked.
“Kids running them ATVs all over my field. I called y’all fo’ times, but ain’t nobody done anything about it. You t’ink them kids done this?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m fixing to lose my farm. This land has been in the Delahoussaye family for a hundred and fifty years. I ain’t never seen anything like this. Why ain’t y’all done somet’ing?”
“You think someone has a grudge against you, sir?”
“You tell me. What it takes for a man to do his work and be let alone? Why ain’t y’all kept them people off my land?”
“Sir, if you didn’t want ATVs in your field, why didn’t you buy a new lock for your gate?” Helen said.
“They broke t’ree of them. What was I s’ppose to do? Weld a chain on my gate ’cause y’all cain’t do your job?” His face was wrinkled and brown and covered with sun moles, his eyes moist with tears. “She’s just a young girl.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I just seen the coroner take off her shoe. Her toenails is painted, like young girls is always doing.”
Helen and I looked at each other.
“I want you to think real hard about something, Mr. Delahoussaye,” I said. “Did you ever throw any dishware out here? Did you ever see somebody else do it? Did you ever see any lying around on the ground?”
“No, suh, I ain’t.”
“And the last time you were in the grove was two weeks back?”
“Yes, suh.”
“And the ground was undisturbed? There was no trash lying on top of it?”
This time he didn’t answer but simply walked away, like a man who no longer cared what the world thought or did not think about him.
“What’s the importance of the broken teacup?” Helen said.
“On the last day of Bernadette Latiolais’s life, she went into a dollar store and bought two teacups and saucers. The cups were painted with lavender flowers.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“I talked with a sheriff’s detective in Jeff Davis Parish. A clerk in the store said she was carrying the cups and saucers in a paper bag. She walked past a bar with them and was never seen alive again.”
Helen put on her sunglasses and looked at the yellow crime-scene tape vibrating in the wind. There were tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. The paramedics were zipping up the body bag on the remains of the female who had been buried among the trees. Red ants were crawling on the outside of the bag; the paramedics averted their faces when they picked up the bag and set it on the gurney, then one of them bent over and gagged in the weeds. Our coroner, Koko Hebert, a huge, sweaty, fat man, was blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief. I could see Helen’s chest rising and falling, her hands opening and cl
osing at her sides. “The day it doesn’t bother you is the day you should quit,” I said.
“We’re going to get whoever did this,” she said.
THE NEXT MORNING Koko Hebert came into my office wheezing, a folder in his hand. When he sat down in a chair, his body seemed to deflate, like a giant air bladder collapsing upon itself. He smoked more cigarettes than anyone I had ever known, and he ate the most unhealthy food that was available in New Iberia’s restaurants. He waged war against his own body and seemed to take pleasure in alienating himself from others. After his son was vaporized by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Koko attended the funeral service in Virginia by himself and told no one where he was going. He also refused to acknowledge the condolences of friends and colleagues. He lived alone in a house that was sheathed with broken asbestos shingles, and often occupied his time driving his lawn tractor up and down his two-acre lot on the bayou, mowing great swaths through the buttercups that tried to bloom on his property.
“Mind if I smoke?”
“There’s no smoking anywhere in this building.”
“Somebody just spat tobacco in the water fountain. Which habit do you think is worse?”
I gazed out my window at Bayou Teche and at the live oak trees in City Park. A young mother was sailing a Frisbee with her children by one of the picnic shelters. The children were leaping in the air and rolling in the grass and chasing one another in the shade. Their voices made no sound coming across the water, as though their lives were completely sealed off from the work we did in our building. I looked back at Koko. When I dealt with him, I had to remind myself that no matter what happened in my life, I would probably never be as unhappy a man as he was.
He leaned forward and pitched the folder on my desk. “She was mush inside,” he said. “Approximate date of death is hard to say. My guess is she was in the ground at least two weeks. Age between nineteen and twenty-two. Evidence of rape? Not per se. Vaginal penetration? Almost any young girl these days has a train tunnel down there. A tattoo on the butt, one on the ankle, one on the shoulder. No traces of drugs. You got any coffee?”
I had to think before I could answer his question. “Downstairs.” I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I tried to hide my exasperation with both his callousness and his passive-aggressive behavior. I opened the folder on my desk blotter and glanced at autopsy forms he had filled out. His handwriting was indecipherable. “What’s the cause of death?”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want?”
“Because it’s take your choice. It wasn’t blunt trauma. She wasn’t shot or stabbed. Was she asphyxiated? Could be. But I doubt that’s what did her in. It could have been an aneurysm or heart failure, maybe brought on by prolonged fear, asphyxiation, and general abuse. The big word in there is ‘fear,’ as in scared shitless.” He was wearing an oversize Hawaiian shirt, and he began pulling at the fabric as though it was stuck to his body, shifting his shoulders around, putting on a performance. “Is your air-conditioning working?”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“It’s written there on the first page, if you care to look at it. She had ligature marks on her wrist, deep ones. I think she was bound up for a long time. Her stomach was empty. Whoever grabbed her didn’t feed her too good.”
“Why do you say ‘grabbed’?”
“She was obviously held against her will. That means she was probably abducted. Her tox screen was clear, which tells me she wasn’t a prostitute. So I suspect she was grabbed off the street or lured into a captive situation. Maybe she met a guy on the Internet. You know how many bimbos are out there now flirting with guys who can’t wait to tear them apart?”
“Koko, I just need the information. I don’t need an interpretation of it. I don’t need the drama, either.”
“You trying to tell me something?”
“Yeah, everybody experiences loss.”
He got up from the chair. His body had the sloping contours of a haystack. “Keep the file. I got the Xerox in my office,” he said.
“You test people. That’s all I was saying. It gets to be a drag.”
“You want my opinion of how she went out? The Bible says Jesus sweated blood. At a certain level of fear and depression, it can happen. The capillaries pop, and blood issues from the pores with a person’s sweat. You want to know if this girl suffered? You bet your ass.”
When he closed the door behind him, his odor clung to the furniture like a gray fog.
A half hour later, Mack Bertrand, our chief forensic chemist, called from the Acadiana crime lab. He believed the saucer and teacup and shoes and lipstick tube and handbag and winter coats and the other items retrieved from the burial site on the Delahoussaye property had been placed inside the grave with the girl’s remains and had not been dumped there earlier.
“How do you know?”
“Her body fluids are on every item we ran. Outside the immediate disturbed area, we found no buried garbage or debris of any kind.”
“What do you have in the way of prints?”
“Either rainwater or mud ruined anything that might have been there. If this is any help to you, the winter coats had levels of mold inside them that indicates they were stored a long time, probably in a damp place, before they went into the ground.”
I called the sheriff’s department in Jeff Davis Parish and then went into Helen’s office and told her of the information I had gotten from Koko Hebert and the crime lab. “Has Jeff Davis Parish got a missing girl that fits the description of the vic?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Why did the perp bury her here?”
“Who knows? People dump dead animals out there. No one is going to pay attention to carrion birds circling around.”
“Think we have a serial killer, a guy with a fetish?”
“Guys with a fetish don’t give up their souvenirs. They move their hiding place around, but they don’t give up their trophies.”
She turned her swivel chair toward the window. Across the bayou, the children had gone and the park was empty. A birthday balloon, the air half gone, the painted face on the Mylar surface shriveled into a grimace, floated out of a tree onto the water.
“We need somebody in the box,” Helen said. “This all started with that convict over in Mississippi, what’s-his-name—”
“Elmore Latiolais.”
“Right, the guy who was trying to dime Herman Stanga. Pick up Stanga.”
“For what?”
“His front yard is covered with dog shit. He didn’t brush his teeth this morning. His mother should have had herself sterilized. Any of those will do.”
CLETE PURCEL’S OFFICE was located on Main, in a refurbished nineteenth-century brick building that had a steel colonnade attached to the front wall. He was proud of his office, and on the flagstone patio in back, he had placed a glass-topped table inset with an umbrella, and when life with his clientele was too much, he sat on the patio among the banana fronds and enjoyed a snack and read the newspaper or enjoyed the fine view of Bayou Teche and the drawbridge at Burke Street. When he went onto his patio, he entered his private domain, and his secretary was instructed not to bother him with any of the miscreants, addicts, and marginal hookers who visited and left and returned to his waiting room as though it were a social center.
If a client became disruptive or experienced a psychotic episode or began throwing furniture, the secretary called Clete on his cell phone. Otherwise, he ate his snack and gazed at the flowers and caladiums and oak trees and flooded elephant ears along the banks of the bayou and the passing tugs and workboats that were headed for the Gulf of Mexico. On this day in particular, Clete had resolved he would stop thinking about Herman Stanga and the jail time he might have to do for tearing the man up behind the Gate Mouth club. He had just set aside his copy of The Daily Iberian and nodded off in his chair when his secretary opened the French doors that gave onto the patio. “Mr. Layton Blanchet is outside,” she said.
/> “What does he want?”
“He says he has an appointment. He said he called this morning.”
Clete thought about it. “Yeah, he called, but he didn’t have an appointment.”
“What do you want me to tell him?”
Clete put a mint in his mouth and took his comb out of his pocket. He widened his eyes to wake himself up. “Send him on through,” he said.
The nature of Clete’s vocation did not allow him selectivity. Daily he came in contact with bail skips, pathological liars, bill collectors, loan-company operatives who ran sales scams in slums, wife batterers, runaway girls who had been raped by their fathers and brothers, attorneys who were kept on retainers by pimps and drug dealers, and insurance reps who convinced doped-up accident victims in hospital beds to sign claim waivers. The subculture that provided his livelihood was predatory and Darwinian and often without mercy, but to those who lived inside it, it was as natural a way of life as a zoning board licensing porn theaters and massage parlors in a residential neighborhood comprised primarily of elderly and poor people.
Clete dealt with problematic situations among his clientele in the way a field surgeon would treat a gangrenous wound, or perhaps in the way a nurse in a third-world typhus ward would treat her patients. He clicked off a switch in his head and did not think about what his eyes saw and what his thoughts told him and what his hands were required by necessity to do.
Dealing with people from the mainstream presented a different kind of challenge. Non-felons, people who attended church and ran businesses and belonged to civic clubs, upscale women whose faces wore the ceramic glaze of Botox, came to him in almost secretive fashion, explaining their problems in meticulous detail, keeping the wounds green and festering as they talked about seeking justice. Almost always they attributed the origins of their problems to the misdeeds of others. They considered themselves normal and without blinking lied both to him and to themselves. At the end of their relationship with Clete, no matter how positive the outcome, they had a way of not recognizing him on the street.