What bothered Clete most about Layton Blanchet was his manic level of energy and the power that seemed to flow through his arm when he shook hands, as though control of the other person was supposed to begin as soon as Layton’s fingers crawled up someone’s wrist. The freshness of Layton’s expensive clothes and the intense clarity of his eyes made Clete think of a sailing ship bursting through waves, or in a darker mode, of an avaricious Greek warrior dropping from inside a wooden horse into the silent streets of Troy.
“This is where you work, huh?” Layton said, seating himself in the umbrella’s shade without being asked. “Dave Robicheaux and I were talking about you not long ago. I’m glad you’re making it in New Iberia. It can be a tough town for outsiders, you know, and all that antebellum family crap. Where’d you get that bunch in the waiting room? You bus them in from detox?”
“Jerry Springer does referrals for me.”
But Layton didn’t laugh. He looked at the backs of his hands, then at the bayou and at the old convent building on the other side of the drawbridge, deep in the shadow of the oaks. “I think I got a problem with my wife,” he said. “One that’s eating my lunch.”
“You have security people who can handle that, Mr. Blanchet.”
“It’s Layton. ‘Mister’ is for the country club. My corporate employees don’t need to know my family business. Carolyn is a good girl, but I think she’s having an affair. Maybe it’s middle age. Maybe she thinks she’s losing her looks. Maybe she’s tired of a man who talks about money all the time, although she has no trouble spending boxcar-loads of it. But she’s getting it on with somebody, and I want to know who the guy is.”
“How do you know she’s unfaithful to you?”
“I can tell.”
“How?”
“Do I have to go into detail?”
“It doesn’t leave my office. It doesn’t go into a written file.”
“About nine o’clock she goes into the library and buries herself in a book. Or she’s got a stomachache. Or she pulled a muscle on the tennis court. Look, I’m a realist. I’m fifteen years older than she is. But if some guy is in my wife’s pants, he’s not going to be out there laughing at me behind my back. Get me?”
“Not exactly.”
“What is it I’m not clear about?” Layton asked.
“Are we talking about breaking somebody’s wheels?”
“What difference does it make? You give me the information, then you’re out of it.”
“I don’t like being party to a domestic homicide,” Clete said. “Let me share a secret with you. Sometimes clients with problems like yours come in and tell me only half of the story. They’re having affairs themselves, they’re full of guilt, and they transfer it to the wife. So they spend a lot of money and accuse me of colluding with their old lady when I come up with nothing.”
Layton stared out into the sunlight, his eyes as clear as blue glass. “You’re good at what you do, Mr. Purcel, or I wouldn’t be here. I don’t assault or kill people, and I don’t pay others to do it, either. As far as my own behavior is concerned, yeah, there have been instances when I haven’t always done the right thing. But that’s not the problem. I know my wife, and I know how she thinks, and I know she’s pumping it with somebody. Can you help me or not?”
“It’s a hundred and fifty dollars an hour and expenses.”
“Done.”
Clete rubbed at his mouth, wondering why Layton Blanchet had bothered him, wondering why a tuning fork was vibrating in his chest. The wind ruffled the canvas umbrella over his head. Layton continued to stare at Clete, either waiting for him to speak or taking his inventory or secretly savoring the moment after imposing his will on Clete. The Daily Iberian still lay on the tabletop. Its thickness was folded across the lead story. Clete flipped it open, exposing the headline. “That’s too bad, isn’t it?” he said to change the subject and end the conversation.
“What is?” Layton asked.
“Another young girl killed and dumped on a country road.”
“It’s going to continue till we get to the root of the problem.”
“Pardon?” Clete said.
“Welfare, illegitimacy, people with their hand out. That’s where it all starts. They’ve got their boy in the White House now. They’ll be lining up for every dollar they can stuff in their pockets. Most of them would strangle on their own spit if you didn’t swab out their throats for them.”
Clete kept his face empty. “I’ll give you a call when I have some information for you, Mr. Blanchet,” he said.
“It’s Layton.”
HELEN SOILEAU HAD told me to bring in Herman Stanga and put him in the box. But Herman was an elusive quarry. He was not at his house, nor down on Hopkins or Railroad Avenue in New Iberia’s old red-light district. I called the Gate Mouth club in St. Martinville, the place where Clete Purcel had broken open Herman Stanga’s head against an oak tree. The man who answered the phone said, “You got the Gate Mout’. What you need?”
“Is Herman there?” I said.
“Who wants to know?”
I hung up without replying and called my fellow A.A. member Emma Poche at the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department and asked her to sit on the club till I got there.
“Maybe this is providential,” she said. “I was thinking of calling you today.”
“About what?”
“Some twelve-step stuff.”
“You ought to take that up with your sponsor.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Don’t let Stanga go anywhere. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“You got a warrant?”
“He’s not under arrest. We just need a little information from him.”
“Sounds believable to me. Herman Stanga, friend of the court. Glad to hear about that,” she replied.
I checked out an unmarked car and drove into St. Martinville’s black district and pulled in behind Emma’s cruiser, which was parked two doors down from the Gate Mouth club. She was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette, the driver’s window half down. She was wearing shades and looked thoughtful and pretty with her hat pushed back on her head. Her cheeks were pooled with color, the sunlight catching in her gold hair. I got in her vehicle and choked on the smoke. “Stanga is still inside?” I said.
“Unless he grew wings. You got a minute?” she said.
“Sheriff Soileau is waiting on me.”
“I’ve got a situation on my conscience. I don’t want to drink over it. It goes beyond even that. I’m desperate, Dave.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, either. “You should be talking to a female sponsor. The two operative words there are ‘female’ and ‘sponsor.’”
“My sponsor is in jail. Guess what for. Driving under the influence. Top that.” She threw her cigarette into the street and rolled down the windows and turned on the air conditioner full blast. The sidewalk was empty, the front door of the club within easy view.
“I’ll try to help if I can,” I said.
“I’ve been seeing somebody. We had a relationship a long time ago, then we bumped into each other during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. We found out we were both going to the same party in the Quarter later, and we got pretty drunk and woke up at one in the afternoon the next day at the St. Charles Guest House. I’ve had bad hangovers, but never one that bad.”
“Have you been to a meeting since?”
“Yeah, I went to a couple.” She twisted her mouth into a button.
“Did you own up to a slip?”
“Not really.”
“You haven’t owned up to anyone?”
“That’s what I’m doing now, right?”
I was beginning to feel I had been played. “I don’t think you’re going to get any peace on this until you come clean at a meeting, Emma.”
“Last week my long-lost lover told me it was over. This was the same person who told me I smelled like the Caribbean and
that my climaxes were like strings of wet firecrackers. I have to make some choices, Dave.”
“I don’t think we need all this clinical detail. Look, every guy who cheats on his wife tells his girlfriend his marriage is over, his girlfriend is the best human being he’s ever met, that she has nothing to do with the breakup of his marriage, that she’s beautiful and spiritual and loving and she has no reason to feel guilty about anything. He also indicates he’s not sleeping with his wife. He usually says these things right up to the time he dumps his new pump of the week.”
Emma removed her shades and stared into the glare on the street. A drunk black man had stumbled off the sidewalk and was trying to cross through the traffic while cars blew their horns at him. Emma brushed at her nose. “Get Stanga out of the club and I’ll take care of the bowling pin out there.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Sometimes we lose. It’s nobody’s fault, not yours, not the other person’s. You just have to let it slide and say the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just have to say ‘fuck it.’”
“You like being used, Dave? Did anyone ever screw you until your eyes crossed and you woke up in the morning aching for them to do it again? Then one day in a public place, the same person tells you that you deserve someone much better than them, and you know the person has told you this in public so you can’t cry or break things or throw a drink in their face? When that happened to you, did you just say ‘Fuck it, sports fans, I think I’ll just go hit some tennis balls and go to a meeting’?”
I opened the door of the cruiser and got out on the sidewalk. The drunk black man had made it safely to the other side of the street. “I’m going to try to talk Stanga out of the club. If he gives me trouble, I want you there as a witness,” I said. “If you can’t do that for me, I need to call for backup. Tell me what you want to do, Emma.”
She got out of the cruiser and slipped her baton through the ring on her belt. She removed her shades from her shirt pocket and put them back on. Her face looked hot and glazed. Her mouth was a tight line before she spoke. “I forgot you belong to that great fraternity of all-knowing A.A. swinging dicks. If I forget again, remind me,” she said.
We found Herman Stanga at the back of the bar, where he was sipping from a demitasse of coffee, a tiny spoon and a single sugar cube on his saucer, his thin mustache winking with each sip. A big dressing was taped over the split Clete had put in his forehead, but otherwise he looked surprisingly well. “Hey, what is it, Robo?” he said. “Give my man a seltzer and ice and a lime slice, and wash out the glass good so it don’t have no alcohol in it. You ain’t got the Elephant Man out there, have you?”
“My boss wants to talk to you,” I said.
“The champ of the Muff Diver ’69 Olympics? How she been doing?”
“I wouldn’t get on her wrong side.”
“Man, I ain’t getting on no side of that broad,” he said. He looked at the bartender and laughed.
“Want to take a ride with me or sit in the cooler in St. Martinville while we work out legalities?”
Then he surprised me again. “Anyt’ing to he’p. You hear about my suit against that fat cracker? I’m gonna take both of his bidnesses, the apartment he owns in New Orleans, his car, his life insurance policy, his savings account, his guns, his furniture, and the waterfront lot in Biloxi he’s making payments on in his ex-wife’s name. When I get finished wit’ him, he’s gonna have a toot’brush and, if he’s lucky, the tube of toot’paste that goes wit’ it.”
“You’re the man, Herman,” I said.
“You got that right, Jack. You kill me, Robo Man.” He looked again at the bartender and laughed loudly, slapping the bar with the flat of his hand.
Emma Poche went back to the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department, and Herman Stanga rode with me back to New Iberia. I didn’t like sitting next to him or talking to him or even acknowledging his presence. He smelled of hair cream and the decayed food in his teeth and the deodorant he used to overlay the sweat in his armpits. I cracked the window and kept my eyes on the road and wondered at the level of the enmity I felt toward him.
At the city limits, we entered a long corridor of oak trees. On the right-hand side of the road, set in deep shade, was a two-story antebellum home with a wide veranda, built out of wood in imitation of the columned brick Greek revival mansions down the Teche. The veranda sagged in the middle from either termite damage or settling in the foundation. The paint had turned gray in the smoke of stubble fires or dust blown out of the fields. A wash line was strung across the side yard, the clothes flapping in the wind.
“The man who built that house was a free man of color named Labiche,” I said. “He owned a brick factory in town. He also owned slaves. He got rich selling out his own people. What do you think about that, Herman?”
“Say again? I was just starting to catch some Z’s.”
“The guy who built that home back there was a mulatto who bought and sold slaves and used them to make bricks that went into the construction of the biggest homes in this area before the Civil War. Some people would probably say he was just a creature of his times. My feeling is that he was probably an opportunist and a Judas. Since you’re a man of considerable experience in racial matters, I wondered what your opinion is.”
“What I t’ink is you couldn’t find your own dick if you had a string tied to it. Wake me up when we’re there,” he replied.
It was almost five P.M. when I drove down East Main and turned in to the long driveway that led past the city library to the spacious brick building that served as both City Hall and the sheriff’s department. Between the library and the wall of bamboo was a grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. The street and the buildings and the grotto were already deep in shadow under the oak trees. A crowd was gathered around the grotto, and at first I thought they were tourists or religious people; then I recognized Layton Blanchet in their midst and remembered he was a member of a live oak or historical preservation society, the kind of group that he would probably find useful in his machinations.
As I drove past him, he raised his hand in recognition, but I pretended not to see him. I put Herman Stanga in one of our interview rooms and went to Helen’s office and told her I had delivered the freight. “Where you going?” she said.
“To my office, if you don’t mind,” I replied.
“I mind.”
“Talking to Stanga is a waste of time.”
“Humor me.”
“The truth is, everyone would be a lot happier if Clete had taken him off at the neck. Stanga gets high on being rousted. He’ll probably file a harassment charge against us and use it in his suit against Clete. The only thing Stanga understands is a club upside his head or a bullet in the mouth.”
“Bwana no run the department. Bwana shut up. Bwana go into the interview room now.”
Earlier in the day I had given Helen all my notes on the death of Bernadette Latiolais, my interview with her brother on the work gang outside Natchez, and my interview with the store clerk and Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother in Jeff Davis Parish. I also had given her my files on Robert Weingart and Vidor Perkins. When we entered the interview room, Stanga was sitting at the table, gazing out the window at a speedboat that was towing a girl on skis down the bayou. He put an Altoid in his mouth and sucked on it. “I got about fifteen minutes for this, then I need a ride back to my car. Y’all cool wit’ that?”
“We appreciate your coming in,” Helen said. “You knew a convict in Mississippi by the name of Elmore Latiolais?”
“I been over that wit’ Robo Man here. The answer is yeah, I knew that lying nigger for twenty years. He got hisself capped. Do I know why? Let me guess. He shot off his mout’ to a peckerwood guard and ate a load of buckshot. Do I know anyt’ing about these girls that has gotten themselves killed? Let me guess again. They was working independent and messed wit’ the wrong john and had the kind of date they wasn’t expecting.”
“Why were you
over in Jeff Davis Parish with Robert Weingart?”
“The writer?”
“Yeah, the writer,” Helen said.
“Who says I was?”
“A half-dozen people,” she lied.
He opened his hands in disbelief. “What would I be doing wit’ a writer? That’s like axing me if I’m hanging out with the IRS.”
“Maybe you were doing some work for the St. Jude Project.”
“Yeah, I he’p out the St. Jude, but I don’t know this writer. If you say I know him, then write that in my file. But I don’t know him, and I don’t know nothing about him except I seen him signing books at Books Along the Teche, and I’m tired of y’all getting in my face about this.”
“Here’s our problem, Herman,” she said. “No matter what avenue we take into this investigation, your name comes up.”
“What investigation? All them crimes, if there ever was any crimes, was in Jeff Davis Parish. But RoboCop and his friend Dumbo the flying beer barrel been trying to find a reason to drag their shit into my life.”
“We had a body dumped in our parish, and we think the victim was connected to the homicides in Jeff Davis, Herman,” Helen said, sitting on the corner of the table, her hands folded on one thigh. “If you’re not involved in this, you have a good idea who is. Most people around here have one of two attitudes about you. A lot of them just laugh when your name is mentioned, like you’re a funny hobgoblin that got loose from Railroad Avenue. Others say you’re not at fault for what you are, that you never had a father and your mother had to turn tricks in a shack behind Broussard’s bar and you grew up a raggedy-ass little boy who had to carry out the whores’ pails from the back of the cathouses on Hopkins. But I always thought you were a smart man. I don’t like what you do for a living, but there’s no denying you’re intelligent. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a smart man, aren’t you, Herman? I knew your mother well. You were born premature, out in the hallway at Charity Hospital. I remember your mother’s words: ‘He wasn’t no bigger than a squirrel.’”
Herman Stanga’s face looked feverish, the skin moist, his eyelids stitched to his forehead. “Y’all t’ink you run t’ings. Y’all ain’t nothing but a bunch of ants running around on a wet log, pretending y’all in charge, when the people that’s running t’ings wouldn’t let y’all squat on their commodes. But I got you, Robo Man. Your peckerwood friend is going to Angola. When he gets in there, he’s gonna be the gift that keeps on giving. And Lady Hermaphrodite here is gonna keep using you to wipe her ass while I’m laughing at the bunch of y’all. I fucked you good, man, and you can t’ink about that all the way to your grave.”