Before she could speak again, he said, “You have your father’s features.”
“Dave is my foster parent. He pulled me from a submerged airplane when I was very small,” she said. “I think I was born in El Salvador, but I can’t be sure. My mother died in the plane crash.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Are you a citizen today?”
“In my opinion, I am.”
“Legality and morality are not always the same thing, is that it? That’s an interesting perception. How is your novel progressing?”
“Fine. Thank you for asking. What is all this about, Mr. Abelard?”
When he grinned, his mouth exposed an incisor tooth, and the sunlight seemed to pool in the eye that was smaller and more liquid than the other. “In part, it’s about what I just mentioned—morality as opposed to legality. This man named Vidor Perkins, a past associate of Robert Weingart, was hanging around the island. I had to run him off. Now Robert has informed me that Mr. Perkins is writing a book containing fabrications about my family. In the eyes of the law, this man has completed his prison sentence in the state of Texas, and legally, he has every right to be in our community. But in my view, he does not have the moral right, particularly when he slanders others. What are your feelings about that, Miss Robicheaux?”
“I don’t have any feelings about it at all. I have nothing to say about this man except that I didn’t bring him here.”
“But I did?”
She looked at the sunlight on the dead cypress trees in the lagoon and didn’t reply.
“Well, reticence is a statement in itself,” Abelard said. “My grandson is weak. But I suspect you’ve learned that.”
“Sir?”
“It’s not his fault. His parents died when he was a teenager, and I protected and spoiled him. He’s worked with his hands in the oil field and championed all kinds of leftist causes, but inside he’s always been a scared little boy. So he attached himself to Robert and thought that would give him the masculine dimension he doesn’t possess in his own right. Unfortunately for him, his dependency on Robert cost him his relationship with you, didn’t it?”
“I don’t dwell on it. I don’t think you should, either.”
“My hearing isn’t all that it should be. Would you repeat that?”
“No.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“No, I won’t repeat it. And I won’t talk about Kermit. You said your family’s honor had been sullied and you would have no peace unless you set something straight. If you’re telling me that somehow your family name has been tarred because of an offense committed against me, you’re seriously overrating the importance of your family. I couldn’t care less about what Kermit or Robert Weingart did or didn’t do. I feel sorry for Kermit, but he made his choice. As far as Robert Weingart is concerned, if you wanted him out of this community, he’d be gone in twenty-four hours. Why don’t you deal with your own culpability and stop demeaning your grandson?”
“You’re speaking to me as though I’m benighted. Or perhaps condemned by God for my sins and unworthy of respect.”
“I don’t know what your sins are.”
“Be assured they are many. But not of the kind you think—greed and misuse of power and all the kind of nonsense that liberals like to rave on and on about. If there is a great sin in my life for which I’ll be held to account, it lies in not accepting the rules of mortality.”
“Sir?”
“You’re not deaf, are you?” he said, smiling, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “Paul Gauguin wrote, ‘Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.’ I’ve tried to buy back my youth, with various degrees of success. They say it can’t be done, but they’re wrong. Youth isn’t a matter of physical appearance. It resides in one’s deeds. It doesn’t die until the heart and the brain and the glands die. Those who say different not only give up the joy of living but seek the grave.”
“You’ve found the secret to eternal youth?”
“No, it’s not eternal. But its pleasures can be magnified with age rather than surrendered.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because my grandson is a fool and didn’t know what he had.”
His mouth flexed slightly, and she saw the tip of his tongue wet his lip. An odor like menthol rub and dried perspiration seemed to rise from his clothes.
“I think I’ll go now.”
“I’ve offended you?”
“Not me. Perhaps God. But I’m not sure He would waste his time on you, Mr. Abelard.”
“You’re a mixture of Spaniard and Indian. Your heritage is the Inquisition and blood sacrifice on a stone altar. You think those are removed by a cleric splashing water on you? I read part of your novel, the one you gave to Kermit. You’re a talented and intelligent young woman. Why do you talk the theological rot of a fishwife?”
She stood up from the chair and took a breath. “I’m going to walk across your bridge and down your road. You can send Miss Jewel to pick me up and take me home. Or you can decide not to, whichever you prefer.”
“Stay,” he said, one hand reaching out toward her like a claw.
Then she saw the speedboat out on the bay, Robert Weingart at the wheel, Kermit being towed on skis in the wake.
“You lied,” she said.
“About what?”
“You told Miss Jewel to tell me they were away.”
“They were. Out on the boat. That’s what ‘away’ means. They weren’t here.”
“You had me fooled for a minute, Mr. Abelard,” she said. “I thought you might be a genuinely wicked man. Instead, you’re simply a cheap liar. Excuse me, sir, but you excite an emotion in me that I can only express as yuck.”
She began walking across the bridge, her purse on her shoulder, her dress swaying on the backs of her thighs, her shoes loud on the planks. For a moment she thought she could feel the eyes of Timothy Abelard burrowing into her back; then she went around a bend in the road bordered on each side by undergrowth and thick stands of timber. A solitary blue heron glided above her, its wings stenciled against the sky. It turned in a wide arc and landed in the shallows of a green pond that resembled a giant teardrop. Through the trees she could see it pecking at its feathers, unconcerned about her presence or the sound of her footfalls on the road or the motorboat with Robert Weingart at the wheel streaking across the bay. Somehow the sight of the bird and its ability to find the place it needed to be seemed to contain a lesson that perhaps she had forgotten. In moments, the easy rhythm of walking and the wind bending the gum trees and the slash pines had erased the exchange with Timothy Abelard from her mind, and she concentrated on trying to get service on her cell phone.
ALAFAIR WAS STILL up when Molly and I got home from the movie theater in Lafayette. She told us what had happened on the Abelards’ island.
“Abelard didn’t send a car to take you home?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“You had to walk all the way to the highway to get a cab?” I said.
“It wasn’t that far.” She was sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen, her shoes off, a bowl of ice cream in front of her.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Because I didn’t want to take you away from your evening out. Because it’s not a big deal.”
I went to the telephone on the counter and picked up the receiver, then set it down again. “I suspect Abelard’s number is unlisted. Do you have it?”
“He’s just an old man. Leave him alone,” she said.
“Don’t underestimate him.”
“He’s pathetic. You didn’t see him.”
“You know the term ‘the banality of evil’? When Adolf Eichmann was captured by Israeli commandos, he was working as a chrome polisher in an automobile plant, a guy who helped send six million people to their deaths.”
“Mr. Abelard is a shriveled-up worm and should be treated as nothing
less and nothing more,” she replied. “Put it in neutral, big guy.”
“Listen to Dave, Alafair,” Molly said. “Timothy Abelard bought politicians and the law most of his life. No one is sure what kinds of crimes he may have committed. If he had you brought out to his island, it may have been for a purpose you don’t want to think about.”
Alafair set down her spoon on a napkin and looked at it. She rubbed her temple and picked up her bowl of ice cream and placed it inside the freezer. “He showed me some pictures that were taken years ago in the Canadian Rockies. In one of them, he was sitting at a table with a man who looked like Robert Weingart. Except Mr. Abelard looked twenty years younger in the photo, and Robert looked like he does today.”
“Weingart has had plastic surgery. There’s no telling how old he is,” I said. “I’ve pulled his jacket in three states. He’s been giving different birth years throughout his entire criminal career.”
“You think Mr. Abelard showed me that photo by mistake, or he had an agenda?” she asked.
“I think he had one thing only on his mind, Alafair,” I said.
“I want to take another shower,” she said.
I went to the refrigerator and took Alafair’s bowl of ice cream out of the freezer as well as an unopened half gallon of French vanilla, then got a jar of blackberries from down below and placed two more bowls on the counter. “A pox on the Abelards and a pox on Robert Weingart,” I said. “Bring Tripod and Snuggs inside, and bring in their bowls, too.”
“Dave, do you think Timothy Abelard killed those girls?” Alafair asked.
“Do I think he’s capable of it?” I said. “I’m not sure. Mr. Abelard is a shadow, not a presence. I don’t think he’s like the rest of us. But I have no idea what or who he is.”
ONCE IN A while, even the slowest of us has an epiphany, a brief glimpse through the shroud when we see the verities reduced to a simple equation. For someone whose profession requires him to place himself inside the mind of aberrant people, the challenge is often daunting. Then, as if you’re tripping on a rock in the middle of a foot-worn, clay-smooth path, you suddenly become aware that the complexity you wish to unravel exists to a greater degree in your own mind than in the problem itself.
Early Sunday morning, while Molly and Alafair were still asleep, I walked down East Main in the fog, past The Shadows, hoping to find a breakfast spot open. On the far side of The Shadows, where a gravel drive leads down to the bayou between a long wall of green bamboo and the old brick Ford dealership that has been converted into law offices, I thought I heard footsteps behind me. When I turned around, I could see nothing but fog puffing through the piked fence on The Shadows’ lawn, swallowing the streetlamps, rising into the live oaks overhead. I crossed the gravel drive and continued down the street toward the drawbridge, where I could hear a boat blowing its horn to gain the tender’s attention. Then I heard footsteps behind me again. This time, when I turned around, I held my ground and waited, my gaze fastened on the figure walking out of the mist toward me.
A small pink digital camera, one that a woman might own, hung on a strap from one shoulder. A leather carrying case, one that could have held either binoculars or just odds and ends, hung from the other. Notebooks and several pens were stuffed in his shirt pockets. He wore a flat-brimmed straw hat that had a black band around the crown, the kind a nineteenth-century planter might have worn. But his shirt was tucked in and he wasn’t wearing a coat and his hands were empty, and I thought it unlikely he had a weapon on his person.
What is the lesson that most cops and traditional mainline cons have learned since the 1960s regarding America’s prisons? It’s simple. With the exception of those caught up in the three-strikes-and-you’re-out legislation of the 1990s, almost anyone who does time today either is incurably defective or wants to be inside. If you don’t believe me, check out who’s on the yard. The swollen deltoids and shaved heads and outrageous one-color tats are cosmetic. The first thing a frightened pagan does is paint his face blue and disfigure his skin. The simian brow and the wide-set eyes and the mouth that is like a raw slit tell the story of the crowd on the yard much more accurately. From the time most of them threw a curbstone through a window or set fire to their middle school or boosted a car and drove it across spike strips at one hundred miles an hour, they were looking for a way to punch a hole in the dimension and return to a place where people grunted in front of their caves and knocked down their food with a rock. I can’t say I blame them. We’re running out of space. But I think the crowd by the weight sets on the yard would be the first to say that societal injustice has little to do with the factors that put them in prison.
“You wouldn’t bird-dog a fellow on Sunday morning, would you, Mr. Perkins?” I said.
“I was just taking a walk, not unlike yourself, Detective Robicheaux,” he said.
“You’re ten miles from your house, Mr. Perkins.”
“That’s true. But I love New Iberia’s downtown area. As long as you’re here, I’d like to ask you some questions regarding my book. I watched Miss Alafair at Mr. Abelard’s house through my field glasses yesterday.”
“You did what?”
“She was in no danger, sir. I had my eye on her the whole time she was there. If anything had happened, I would have called you right away. Or I might have taken action myself.”
“You’re spying on my daughter or the Abelards?”
“I’m not spying on nobody. I’m doing research on my book. But I have to admit I’ve taken a liking to you. Your daughter, too, yes, sir. You’re dealing with a dangerous bunch. You’re an educated and respectable man, so you see these people from the top down. I see them from the bottom up. I’m not sure what the bigger scheme is, but I know these people ain’t what they pretend to be. Robert Weingart thinks he’s got them outsmarted, but when they’re done with him, he’d best look out, that’s all I can say. What about you and me teaming up?”
“Say again?”
“We ain’t so different. You got a keen eye about people, Detective Robicheaux. You know the Abelards for what they are. Their kind wouldn’t spit in my mouth if I was dying of thirst in the Sahara. From what I hear, you grew up pretty much like I did. The Abelards and their ilk treat your folks pretty good?”
I gazed at the lunatical vacuity in his eyes and was convinced that whatever motives drove him, that whatever thoughts he actually had, that whatever his real life experience was, none of it would ever be known by anyone except God.
“Don’t follow me anymore, Mr. Perkins. If you do, I’ll have a cruiser pick you up,” I said.
“That downright hurts my feelings.”
“Call my business number if you need to. Or come by the office. Send me a postcard. But do not follow me or come near my house.”
“I been watching your back. Your daughter’s, too. Wake up and learn who your friends are. Maybe show a little humbleness and gratitude.”
I crossed the street and headed toward Clementine’s, hoping that an employee would be there and let me in and give me a cup of coffee and a beignet.
“Robert’s got two hundred thousand dollars stashed away. That’s the kind of money he’s siphoned off the deal they got going,” Perkins called after me.
I stopped and turned around again. I could see the drawbridge lifting in the fog, its girders beaded with moisture. “What deal?” I said.
“I don’t know. That’s why you and me got to team up. The weather is fixing to take a turn. The weatherman says a real frog stringer is about to blow in on us. I’d dress for it.”
“Get away from me,” I said.
I would find out later that my admonition had been neither wise nor fair.
WHEN I RETURNED home, Molly and Alafair were eating breakfast in the kitchen. Through the tree trunks and the gray-green shadows in our backyard, I could see the tidal flow of the bayou reversing itself, the surface undulating as though the current had been infused with a great cushion of air. I told Molly and Alafair that I was
going to take a drive into Jeff Davis Parish and that I would be home after lunch.
“What for?” Molly said.
I didn’t want to explain, so I said, “I have to check out a couple of things about the Latiolais girl.”
“It’s Sunday. Why not do it on the clock?” Molly said.
“Helen is not a big fan of my investigating a homicide outside our jurisdiction.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“If you want,” I said, my gaze not meeting hers. “Look, I ran into Vidor Perkins on the street. I don’t think he intends us any harm. Evidently he’s convinced himself he’s an author. But I had Wally put a cruiser in front of the house until I get back.”
“What was he doing on East Main?” Alafair said.
“Following me.”
“Early Sunday morning?” she said.
“He’s a wack job. He says he was surveilling the Abelards’ compound yesterday and saw you there. But his agenda is with them and not us.”
“How do you know?” Molly asked.
“We don’t have anything he wants. I’ll be back in three hours.”
“Dave?” Molly said.
But I didn’t answer, in part because no matter how helpful Molly or Alafair wanted to be, I had to find an empty place in my head where I could see the detail I had missed, the image that had not recorded itself on my memory, the line of dialogue that had seemed inconsequential at the time, the finitely small symbol for the larger story that would explain the brutal murders of two innocent girls. Or maybe I would end up concluding that all my speculations were a vanity. Sometimes the clue is not there, or the case information is wrong, or somebody screwed up in the lab. But if Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais’s killer or killers went not caught or taken off the board in a more primitive fashion, it wouldn’t be because no one tried.
I took the old two-lane highway past Spanish Lake and turned onto I-10 in Lafayette and drove to Jennings, then down into the southern tip of the parish where the coastline dissolved into a marshy green haze and eventually became part of a saltwater bay. Just as I had placed Vidor Perkins into a much simpler category, one in which most miscreants have the wingspans of moths rather than pterodactyls, I tried to imagine the makeup of the person or persons who had murdered the two girls. I was sure that sex and misogyny were involved. But I was also sure that finance was as well. And when it came to the big score in Louisiana, from World War II to the present, what was the issue? Always? Without exception? I mean take-it-to-the-bank, lead-pipe cinch, what extractive opportunity in an instant created the sounds of little piggy feet stampeding for the trough?