For just a second, he seemed to take heed of my words. “I can’t find my wife. She didn’t come home last night. But I found this in her dresser.” He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. “It’s Clete Purcel’s. There’s a phone number on the back. The phone number belongs to the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. How did Purcel’s business card get in my wife’s dresser drawer?”
“I don’t know.”
He threw the card at my chest. “I’ll tell you how. While I was paying him to follow her around, he was sleeping with her. That pile of offal was in the sack with my wife.”
“You’re dead wrong. Now get out of here.”
“I’ve got the goods on your friend, Robicheaux, and maybe you, too. I’ve got sources inside your department. They say Purcel is being investigated for the killing of that black pimp. The word is maybe you’re not above suspicion, either. Maybe the two of y’all capped the pimp together because he was about to send Purcel to Angola.”
I heard the bedroom window slide open. “What’s the trouble, Dave?” Molly said.
“It’s Layton Blanchet. He’s about to leave. Right, Layton?” I said.
“This doesn’t concern you. Close the window,” he said to Molly. He faced me, his feet spread slightly, his height and breadth and the corded tension in his body not to be taken lightly. “Where is Purcel? I’m not going to ask you again.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Molly’s face leave the window, then I heard the window close and the shade go down on it.
“I’m going inside now. I’ll call either a cab or a cruiser for you. Tell me which you prefer,” I said.
“You were a guest in my home. Carolyn fixed supper for you. What kind of people are you?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“You. All of you.”
His face was dilated, his breath rank, an odor like testosterone or dried sweat wafting off his body. His fists looked like big rocks at his sides.
I said, “I think you need help, partner. Clete hasn’t harmed you, and neither have I. I’ll drive you home myself. Maybe your wife will be there when you get back. Everybody has marital problems, but they pass. How about we let go of all this backyard bebop?”
Molly opened the screen door and came out on the steps, her robe cinched around her hips, her red hair hanging in her eyes. Layton turned and stared at her as though he had forgotten who she was or why she had come outside. She stepped into the yard, pushing her hair back with her fingers. “Listen to my husband, Mr. Blanchet,” she said. “He’s a truthful man, and he has nothing but good intentions toward you. You can leave or you can stay and have coffee with us, but you’re not going to come here and threaten people. That ends right now.”
He looked at her a long time, a behemoth of a man in a stained three-thousand-dollar suit, the shame of the cuckold as visible on his face as antlers painted on canvas in medieval portraiture. “Thank you,” he said.
“Do you want to come in?”
“No,” he replied. “No, I’m sorry for coming here like this. I’m sorry for many things.” He bent over and picked up Clete’s business card from the apron of bare ground around Tripod’s hutch. He stared at it blankly, then inserted it in his shirt pocket and walked down our driveway to his vehicle, brushing against the side of my pickup, oblivious to the muddy smear it left on his clothes. Molly continued to gaze down the driveway as Layton drove away. “You once quoted a convict about the relativity of doing time,” she said.
“His name was Dock Railroad. He was an old-time Pete man who did scores for Didoni Giacano. Clete and I caught him burning a safe in the back of Nig Rosewater’s bail bond agency. Dock was already a four-time loser. Clete offered him a cigarette and said, ‘Sorry about this, Dock. You’re probably going away on the bitch.’ Dock said, ‘Don’t worry about it, Purcel. Everybody stacks time. Inside the fence or outside the fence, we all stack the same time.’”
“Do you believe that?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
“Let’s fix some breakfast, troop. Then we can both use a little more sack time. Are you up for that?”
CHAPTER
11
WHEN I FOUND Clete that afternoon, he was polishing his Caddy at the motor court, dressed in a freshly ironed sport shirt printed with tropical birds and an outrageous pair of scarlet nylon Everlast boxing trunks that extended to his knees. He was humming a tune, passing a clean cotton rag back and forth across the dried wax on the finish, pausing to blow a bug off the starched top so he would not have to smack it and stain the immaculate starchlike whiteness of the canvas. Behind him, under the trees, a pork roast was cooking on his rotisserie barbecue pit. “How’s it hanging, big mon?” he said.
Without all the deleterious influences of booze and weed and cigarettes in his system, Clete looked ten years younger, his eyes clear, his skin rosy. I hated to ruin his day. “Layton Blanchet was in my backyard this morning. He seemed a little unhinged.”
“Tell me about it. He’s left a half-dozen messages on my machine.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I tried that. If you ask me, the guy is a head case. He’s got some other problems as well. I did a little checking on him. His bank in Mississippi is under SEC investigation. The fed I talked to said Blanchet has been running a Ponzi scheme since back in the nineties. He gets retirees to roll over their pension plans and SEP-IRAs into his bank and promises them a minimum of ten percent on their investment. Most of them are going to lose every penny they gave him.”
“He says he found your business card in his wife’s dresser.”
Clete had been polishing a back fin on the Caddy. He hand slowed and then stopped. He popped the rag clean and seemed to study the smoke drifting off his barbecue pit into the trees and the way the sunlight glittered like yellow diamonds on the bayou. “What would she be doing with my business card?” he asked.
“Evidently he’s convinced himself that you and Carolyn Blanchet were getting it on while you were working for him.”
“Not that I wouldn’t like to, but he’s full of shit.”
“The number of the Monteleone Hotel was on the back of the card,” I said.
“Layton Blanchet thinks I hang out at the Monteleone on my income? What an idiot.”
“Where do you think she got the card?”
“From any one of half the lowlifes in South Louisiana.”
“He said a couple of other things, Clete. He says he has a source inside the department. He says you’re still getting looked at for the Stanga homicide, and maybe I am, too.”
“Because the shooter was using a forty-five?”
“That and a few remarks both you and I made about Stanga.”
“Blanchet knows I’m being looked at but you don’t? Does that make sense to you?”
“Helen Soileau doesn’t always take me into her confidence.”
“Well, that’s not my problem. Check out the day. Who cares about this stuff? We’re on the square, aren’t we? You know how many people have messed with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide and are now in the ground? Get me a Bud from the icebox and a Diet Doc for yourself. I don’t want to hear any more about Layton Blanchet.”
“Watch your back, Cletus.”
“And take away your job? What kind of guy do you think I am?” he said. He went back to polishing his car, his leviathan shoulders rolling inside his shirt. I went into the cottage and opened a Dr Pepper and a Budweiser, and we drank them in the shade.
ON MONDAY MORNING, when both Molly and I were at work and Tripod was in his hutch, his hind leg had begun to tremble for no reason. Alafair had folded a soft blanket in the bottom of a cardboard box and taken him to the vet. In the rearview mirror, she noticed a pale blue pickup truck turn behind her, then reappear a block later and make a second turn with her. When she parked in front of the veterinary clinic, the truck drove on by and caught the state road leading to a drawbridge in the distance.
Tripod had
a form of distemper, one that came and went and seemed to steal more of his life each time. The veterinarian gave him a shot and some medicine that was to be mixed with his food. Alafair put Tripod back in his box and placed the box on the passenger seat of her old Honda and headed home. It was a fine morning. A sun shower had left the streets damp and the trees dripping, and the new sugarcane was green in the fields and bending in the breeze. She rolled down the windows to let in the cool air, and Tripod popped his head out of the box, his nose pointed into the wind like a weathervane.
She passed a redbrick Catholic church with a spire and a cupola on the roof, and rumbled across the drawbridge and stopped at a fruit stand on the far side of the bayou. Next to the fruit stand, a man was selling shrimp and crawfish out of the back of a refrigerated truck. Alafair got out of her car and closed the door. “I’ll be right back, Pod,” she said.
But there were three people ahead of her who could not decide what they wanted, and she had to wait. The Amtrak passed on the railroad embankment behind her, and traffic stalled at the intersection. On the other side of the state road, known as Old Spanish Trail, was a dry canal that emptied into Bayou Teche. Along the banks of that same canal, unknown to most people driving by it, Confederate infantry had dug a skirmish line in the year 1863 to cover the evacuation of wounded from the Episcopalian church on the west end of the town. Kermit Abelard had been fascinated with the site and had climbed down into it with a spade and a metal detector in search of minié balls, in spite of Alafair’s warnings, streaking his skin with poison ivy. But that was months ago, when the Kermit she knew and loved was more boy than man, in the best possible way, unmarked by avarice or false pride or dependence on others. In her mind, there had been a purity about Kermit—in his vision of the world, in the books and stories he wrote about the antebellum South, in his conviction that he could change the lives of others for the better. Had she been totally wrong about him? Had the innocent boy in him died simply because of his association with Robert Weingart? Or had the innocent boy never existed except in Alafair’s imagination?
The sun had broken out from behind a rain cloud, and she had to shield her eyes against its brilliance. Across the road, the oak trees along the bayou were deep green from the rain and swelling with wind, the sound of car tires on the bridge steady and reassuring, like a testimony to a plan, perhaps a reminder that life was basically good and that she was surrounded by ordinary people who shared a common struggle. A vendor had broken open a sample watermelon that he said came from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and he cut a slice for Alafair and put it on a napkin and placed the napkin in her palm.
“I have a sick raccoon. He’ll love this,” she said. “Let me pay you.”
“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t take a dime for that,” he replied.
Wasn’t it time to forget about Kermit Abelard? she asked herself. To leave him in the past, as she had promised both him and herself? To enjoy the day, to work on her book, to take care of animals, to give up resentment of herself and the wrong choices she may have made, to forgive Kermit Abelard for being weak and not defending her, even forgive him for allowing himself to be demeaned and humiliated in public by a man as loathsome as Robert Weingart? If she could forgive Kermit for not being what she thought he was, and forgive herself for her excess of love and trust, then she could let go of both Kermit and the past. Wasn’t that how it worked?
No, it didn’t. The man she had loved may not have been real. But the man she had given herself to, imaginary or not, would always live on the edges of her consciousness. And for that reason alone, she would always feel self-deceived and robbed at the same time, as though she had cooperated with a thief in burglarizing her own home.
“You want some shrimp or crawfish?” the vendor with the refrigerator truck asked. He was a tiny man dressed in strap overalls, his white shirt buttoned at the wrists, his spine bowed in a hump.
“Yes, I’m sorry. Two pounds of veined shrimp, please,” she said, opening her purse.
“You’re Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
He raised his eyes to hers, then looked past her in the direction of her Honda. “I saw you drive up in your li’l car,” he said.
“Yes?”
“You know that fella?”
“Which fellow?”
“That one there,” the man said, nodding toward her car, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.
She turned around. The skinned-up pale blue truck she had seen earlier was parked behind her Honda. A man was leaning inside the passenger window, his shoulder and elbow making a pulling and pushing motion. She left both the shrimp and her money on the vendor’s worktable and went to the car. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
The man straightened up. His hair was gelled into the shape of a cupcake, the skin fish-belly white where it was shaved above the ears. A strawberry birthmark bled out of his hairline into his collar. His mouth was a wide slit not unlike a frog’s, the upper lip duck-billed. There was a rolled newspaper in his hand. “I was playing with your pet,” he said.
“Were you poking him with that paper?”
“I don’t know if I’d call it that. No, I was just letting him paw and mouth it a little bit. I wasn’t poking him at all.”
“He’s sick and he’s old and he doesn’t need anyone messing with him. You step back from my car.”
“You don’t remember me?”
She gazed at him as one does at a pornographic image thrust unexpectedly before one’s eyes, not wanting to engage him, not wanting to enter the moral vacuity of his eyes, not wanting to look at the flare of his mouth and the wetness on his teeth and the yellowish discoloration in his skin that affected a suntan. “You were fishing out at the Abelard place,” she said.
“That’s right. My name is Vidor Perkins. I’m pleased to formally meet you. I’m one of the many unfortunates that is being he’ped by Robert Weingart and the St. Jude Project. I know a lot about coons. This one don’t look sick. If you ask me, he looks fat enough for roasting. Spoiled is what I’d call him. We’re not doing animals a favor when we spoil them.” He reached inside the window with the rolled newspaper and tapped it up and down between Tripod’s ears. “Bet he’s a twenty-pounder.”
“You get away from my animal or I’m going to slap you cross-eyed.”
“I’m just trying to be kindly. When critters are sick, and I mean real sick, like you’re telling me about this one, you got to put them down. Cheapest and best way to do it is with a burlap bag and some rocks.”
She reached in her purse for her cell phone.
“Calling your daddy? He burned up my gold watch, my cell phone, my sunglasses, and my cigarettes. Know why he did that? He was protecting that lesbian he works for. He thought she was gonna lose it and try to hit me upside the head. I admire a man like that.”
Alafair’s hand trembled as she punched in 911 on her phone.
“You’re a excitable thing, aren’t you?” he said. He wiped two fingers along her jaw and stuck them in his mouth, licking them from the knuckle to the nail as he removed them. “You doin’ anything tonight?”
TEN MINUTES LATER she was at my office, carrying Tripod with her, his head sticking out the top of the box. She told me everything that had just happened by the fruit stand. “I want to get a concealed-weapons permit,” she said.
“It’s not a bad idea,” I said.
“I stopped by the restroom and washed my face. My skin feels like a snail crawled across it. Are you going to have him picked up?”
She waited for my answer. I realized I was gazing at her without seeing her. “It’s what he wants,” I said. “It’s obvious Robert Weingart sicced him on you, but I think Weingart’s motive has less to do with you than me.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because they’re both con-wise. They have an agenda. It’s about the St. Jude Project or the deaths of the girls in Jeff Davis Parish or the Canadian girl
we found buried on the Delahoussaye property. It also involves the Abelards and, I think, Layton Blanchet. The connections are all there, but I can’t get a net over them.”
I saw Helen through the glass window in my door. She pointed at me and mouthed the words “My office,” then walked away.
“How dangerous is this guy Perkins?” Alafair asked.
“He has no moral bottom. He’s probably killed people. He and Weingart both jack-rolled Social Security recipients. He was a suspect in an apartment-house fire that killed a child.”
Her eyes filmed. “You’re telling me I’ve been a fool?”
“No, I’m saying you’re like most good people, Alafair. Our greatest virtue, our trust of our fellow man, is our greatest weakness.”
Tripod had started to climb out of his box. She picked him up and straightened his blanket and forced him to lie down again.
“I think he’s feeling better,” I said.
“How do I get the gun permit?”
I took an application form out of my desk drawer. Many years ago I had started keeping the forms there for one reason and for one reason only: I had finally stopped pretending to people who had been stalked, terrorized by mail and over the phone, sexually degraded, assaulted with a deadly weapon, tortured, and gang-raped. No, that’s badly stated. I had stopped lying about how our system works. Perpetrators of horrific crimes are often released on bond without either the victims or the witnesses being notified. Witnesses and victims are told they need only to testify in a truthful manner and the person who has made their lives a misery will be put away forever. In law enforcement, bromides of that kind are distributed with the blandness of someone offering an aspirin as a curative for pancreatic cancer. Visit a battered women’s shelter and come to your own conclusions about how successfully our system works. Or chat up a judge who releases child molesters to a counseling program and lectures a rape victim on her provocative way of dressing.