Alafair went back to the gallery. Emma Poche was standing behind the screen door, backlit by a lamp she had turned on in the living room. She wore jeans and a blouse that exposed a bra strap. “What do you want?” she said, her hair in disarray, her breath rife with the odor of cigarettes and alcohol.
“You called my father this afternoon.”
“What about it?”
“You said someone was going to kill him and anybody he was with.”
“I have no memory of a conversation like that.”
In the glow of the lamp, Alafair could see the streaked makeup on Emma Poche’s face, the swollen eyes, the smear of lipstick on her teeth. “I answered the phone,” Alafair said. “I handed the receiver to my father. I listened while he talked to you. Don’t lie to me.”
“What did you say?”
“May I come in?”
“No, you can’t,” Emma replied, reaching for the latch on the screen.
But Alafair jerked open the door and went inside. “If you want to call 911 and report an intruder, you can use my cell.” When Emma didn’t reply, Alafair said, “Who was the person who just left?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything. Who do you think you are? Your father has hallucinations. Everybody knows it. He’s one of those dry alcoholics who would be better off drunk.”
“My father is the kindest, most decent human being you’ll ever meet. I feel sorry for you, Ms. Poche—”
“It’s Deputy Poche.”
“I advise you to shut your mouth and listen, Deputy Poche. I found out where you live from Clete Purcel. I also found out you were the woman who tried to set him up for the murder of Herman Stanga. That’s about as low as it gets. I had a hard time imagining what kind of woman could do that to a man like Clete. I tried to see you in my mind’s eye, but I couldn’t. Then I stood on your gallery and heard you begging affection from somebody to whom you’re obviously a throwaway fuck. If you weren’t so pathetic, I’d slap you all over your own house.”
“You little bitch, you can’t talk to me like that.”
“Who are the men who tried to kill Dave?”
“I don’t know.”
Involuntarily, Alafair raised her hand.
“You listen to me, girl,” Emma said. “We can die and become humps out in a field, and two days after we’re gone, nobody but our families will remember who we were. Look around you. You see the trailer slums on the bayou and the crack dealers on the street? You think Dave or you or me can change the way things work here? We’re little people. You think I’m the only person around here who’s a disposable fuck? You like the way you got treated by Kermit Abelard?”
“What do you know about Kermit?”
“Better question, what don’t I know about him? He used you. But while he was getting in your pants, he was taking it between the cheeks from Robert Weingart.”
Alafair used the full flat of her hand to slap Emma Poche across the face. She hit her so hard, spittle rocketed from Emma’s mouth.
Emma sat down on the couch, her left cheek glowing from the blow, her eyes out of focus. “You feel sorry for me? I have a high school degree. You’re a Stanford law student. Which one of us got used the worst? Which one of us shared her lover with a sleazy con man who date-rapes teenage girls? I could have you locked up and charged, but I’m gonna let you slide. Now get out of my house.”
Alafair’s gaze dropped to the coffee table. “What are you doing with this book?” she asked.
“Reading it?”
“Who just left here?”
“No one. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve imagined everything that’s happened here tonight.”
“You’re reading Kermit’s novel about the Battle of Shiloh?”
“You keep your hands off my book.”
“Did Kermit give you this, Ms. Poche?”
“Why would you think that? Why wouldn’t you assume I bought it at a store?”
“Because everything else on your bookshelf is trash.”
“You give me that,” Emma said, getting to her feet.
Alafair peeled back the book’s pages to the frontispiece. The inscription read:
To Carolyn,
With affection and gratitude to a champion on the courts and a champion of the heart. Thanks for your support of my work over the years.
Kermit Abelard
Carolyn?
I DID NOT see Alafair until the next morning, when I was fixing breakfast and she came into the kitchen in her bathrobe. I poured her a glass of orange juice and fixed her a cup of coffee and hot milk and set the glass and the coffee cup and saucer in front of her at the table. I didn’t ask her where she had gone the previous night or what she had done. I went outside and fed Snuggs and Tripod and came back in. Then she told me everything that had happened at Emma Poche’s house in St. Martinville.
“You hit her?” I said.
“She’s lucky that’s all I did.”
“You didn’t get a good look at the person going out the back door?”
“No, but I saw the boat. It looked like the one Kermit owns. I can’t be sure. When I saw his novel on her table, I thought maybe Kermit had left it. Except the inscription is to a tennis player named Carolyn. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, it does. Carolyn Blanchet, Layton Blanchet’s widow. She played on the tennis team at LSU. I think she’s still the seventh-ranked doubles amateur in the state.”
“Layton Blanchet, that guy who was running a Ponzi scheme of some kind? He shot himself at his camp?”
“I think Layton was probably murdered.”
“You think Carolyn Blanchet is involved with Emma Poche? That maybe she was the one who went out the back door?”
“It’s possible.”
“Like maybe they’re getting it on?”
“Could be. A lot of things about Emma would start to make sense.”
I set a plate of eggs and two strips of bacon in front of Alafair. She had been frowning, but now her expression was clear, her hands resting on top of the table, her long fingers slightly curled, her fingernails as pink as seashells. “I thought maybe—”
“That Kermit was Emma’s lover?”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t what bothered me. I thought maybe he was involved with something really dark. With killing Herman Stanga or setting up Clete. But it wasn’t Kermit who went out Emma’s back door, was it?”
“I’m not sure about anything when it comes to the Abelards,” I replied. “Their kind have been dictators in our midst for generations and admired for it. They created a culture in which sycophancy became a Christian virtue.”
But she was staring out the window, not listening to abstractions, her food growing cold. “No, it wasn’t Kermit. I’m sure of it now. My imagination was running overtime. Are you mad at me for going after Emma Poche?”
“I’ve never been mad at you for any reason, Alafair.”
“Never?”
“Not once.”
“Drink a cup of coffee with me.”
“You want to tell me something else?”
“No,” she said. “Look at Tripod. He just climbed up in the tree. He hasn’t done that in weeks. Don’t you love our home? I don’t know any place I would rather wake up in the morning.”
I COULDN’T CATCH Helen Soileau until she came out of an administrative meeting with the mayor after eleven A.M. I followed her into her office, but before I could speak, she gave me the results of her attempt to confirm my account about the shoot-out on the river in Jeff Davis Parish.
“Within the time frame we’re using, no hospital in the state has reported a gunshot wound that matches your description of the one you think you inflicted on the man by the river,” she said. “Nor has there been a report on any dumped bodies that would match those of Vidor Perkins or the guy you think caught a forty-five round through the lungs. No airports anywhere between Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans know anything about a crop duster flying around during the stor
m, either.”
“Crop dusters don’t need airports. They land in farm pastures every day. And I don’t think I shot those guys, Helen. I blew up their shit at almost point-blank range.”
“Does bwana want to be clever, or does bwana want to hear what I’ve found?”
“Sorry.”
“The locals found some bloody rags on the side of the road. There was a piece of flesh with part of a fingernail on it inside one of the rags.”
“Enough to get a print?”
“No. But enough to run a DNA search through the national database. So far we still don’t know who these guys are or where they’re from or who they work for. Timothy Abelard probably did business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. You don’t think they’re part of Didi Gee’s old crowd?”
“No, these guys were too sophisticated.”
“The Mob isn’t up to the challenge? They kidnapped Jimmy Hoffa in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon in front of a Detroit restaurant, and to this day no one has ever been in custody for it and no one has any idea where his body is. You think the guys who pulled that off were kitchen helpers in an Italian restaurant?”
“These guys were military.”
“You know that?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“How?”
“They never spoke. They didn’t have any visible jewelry. They wore the same hooded raincoats, like a uniform, so their enemy could not distinguish one of them from the other, so their impersonality would make them seem even more dangerous and formidable. ‘Black ops’ isn’t an arbitrary term and has more than one connotation.”
She ticked her nails on her desk blotter. “I hope you’re wrong. We hardly have the resources to send our local morons to Angola. What’d you come in here to tell me?”
“Emma Poche called me up when she was loaded and told me I was in danger.”
“From?”
“I asked her that. She told me how dumb I was.”
“What else?”
“Alafair went to Emma’s house last night and confronted her.”
“To what degree do you mean ‘confronted’?”
“She slapped her. She also caught her with a lover. Maybe the lover is Carolyn Blanchet.”
I saw a glint catch in Helen’s eye like a sliver of flint. Then I remembered that she and Carolyn Blanchet had been at LSU at the same time, that something had happened involving a friend of Helen. Rejection by a sorority because of the friend’s sexual orientation? I couldn’t remember.
“Run that by me again,” Helen said.
“Somebody was in Emma’s house when Alafair was at the front door. Emma was delivering a litany of grief about her mistreatment at this person’s hands. But whoever it was left through the back without Alafair seeing him or her. Alafair said a copy of Kermit Abelard’s last novel was on the coffee table. It was inscribed to someone named Carolyn.”
“That doesn’t make it Carolyn Blanchet’s.”
“The inscription indicated this particular Carolyn was a champion tennis player and a longtime supporter of Kermit’s work. Carolyn once told me she was a big fan of Kermit’s books. I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think we’ve been looking in the wrong place.”
I had lost her attention. “That slut,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You and I need to take a ride.”
“I can handle it, Helen.”
“What you can do is get on the phone and tell Ms. Blanchet we’re on our way to her house and her prissy twat had better be there when we arrive.”
WHEN CLETE PURCEL was a patrolman in New Orleans and, later, a detective-grade plainclothes, he had been feared by the Mob as well as the hapless army of miscreants who dwelled like slugs on the underside of the city. But their fear of Clete had less to do with his potential for violence than the fact that he did not obey rules or recognize traditional protocol. More important, he seemed indifferent to his own fate. He was not simply the elephant in the clock shop. He was the trickster of folk legend, the psychedelic merry prankster, Sancho Panza stumbling out of the pages of Cervantes, willing to create scenes and situations in public that were so outrageous, pimps and porn actors and street dips who robbed church boxes were embarrassed by them. Whenever I hesitated, his admonition was always the same: “You got to take it to them with tongs, big mon. You got to spit in the lion’s mouth. Two thirds of these guys never completed toilet training. Come on, this is fun.”
Maybe because of his visceral hatred of Robert Weingart, or his conviction that Timothy Abelard trailed the vapors of the crypt from his wheelchair, Clete decided to take a ride down to the Abelard compound on the southern rim of St. Mary Parish. It was a fine day for it, he told himself. The rain had quit; the clouds were soft and white against a blue sky; the oaks along Bayou Teche looked washed and thick with new leaves. What was there to lose? His gold pen had been stolen from him and used to set him up for the killing of Herman Stanga. He still had resisting-arrest charges against him because of his flight from the St. Martin cops the night he busted up Herman Stanga behind the Gate Mouth club. His best friend had almost been clipped in that gig down by the river in Jeff Davis Parish, then had been dissed by the local cops. In the meantime, Clete had watched a pattern that seemed to characterize his experience in law enforcement for over three decades: The puppeteers got blow jobs while their throwaway minions stacked time or got their wicks snuffed.
He put down the top on his Caddy, made a stop at a convenience store for a six-pack of Bud and a grease-stained bag of white boudin still warm from the microwave, and motored on down the road, Jerry Lee Lewis blaring “Me and Bobby McGee” from the stereo.
Outside Franklin, he drove south on the two-lane through a corridor of gum and hackberry trees and slash pines that grew along the edge of flooded sawgrass and expanses of saltwater intrusion where the grass had turned the color of urine. As he neared the Abelard compound, he saw a pickup truck backed into a cleared area that contained a cast-iron Dumpster. The top of the Dumpster was open, and a large black woman wearing rubber boots was standing in the truck bed, hefting a series of plastic garbage bags and flinging them into the Dumpster.
Abelard’s nurse, he thought. What was her name? Had Dave said she was Abelard’s out-of-wedlock daughter? A white man was sitting in the cab of the truck reading a sports magazine, his door open to catch the breeze.
Clete turned in to the clearing, cut the engine, and set his can of Bud on the floor. “Need a hand with that?” he said.
The black woman paused in her work, studying Clete, trying to place him. “No, suh, we got it,” she said. She flung a heavy sack with both hands into the Dumpster.
Clete got out of the Caddy and removed his shades and stuck them in his shirt pocket. His shoes were shined, his golf slacks ironed with sharp creases, his flowery sport shirt still crisp from the box. “It’s Miss Jewel, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, suh. You came out for lunch one day with Mr. Robicheaux.”
Clete glanced at the white man behind the wheel. His hair was peroxided and clipped short, the sideburns long and as exact as a ruler’s edge, his jaw square. He never lifted his eyes from the magazine. Clete picked up two large vinyl bags and walked them to the Dumpster and tossed them inside.
“I got the rest of them, suh. It’s not any trouble,” Jewel said.
Clete nodded and put an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth and gazed across the road at the wood bridge that led to the Abelard compound. A blue heron was rising from the lily pads that grew in the water by the bridge, the edges of its wings rippling in the wind. “Got a match?” he said to the man behind the steering wheel.
“Don’t smoke,” the man said, not looking up.
“Got a lighter in there?”
“It doesn’t work.”
Clete nodded again. “Have I seen you somewhere?”
This time the man held Clete’s gaze. “I couldn’t say.” He sucked on a mint. His eyes were of a kind that Clete had seen bef
ore, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes in memory. They didn’t blink; they didn’t probe; they contained no curiosity about the external world. They made Clete think of cinders that had been consumed by their own heat.
“You a military man?” Clete asked.
“No.”
“But you were in, right?”
“Ruptured disk.”
Clete pulled his unlit cigarette from his mouth and held it up like an exclamation point. “I got it. That’s why you couldn’t help Miss Jewel out.”
The man dropped his eyes to the magazine, then seemed to give it up, as though his few minutes of retreat from the distractions of the world had been irreparably damaged. He closed the door and started the engine, his mouth working on the mint while he waited for the black woman to get in.
“You know where I think I’ve seen you?” Clete said.
“Couldn’t even guess.”
“I was looking through some binoculars. You were in a field down by a river in Jeff Davis Parish. It was raining. Ring any bells? Some heavy shit went down. Maybe a couple of your friends got their lasagna slung all over the bushes. I never forget a face.”
“Sorry, I’m from Florida. I think you’re confused.”
“It wasn’t you? I would swear it was. You guys know how to kick ass. It was impressive.”
“Watch your foot.”
Clete stepped back as the man cut the wheel and turned in a circle, opening the passenger door for the black woman. Clete pointed his finger at the driver. “Airborne, I bet. That’s how you got that ruptured disk. You’re doing scut work for the Abelards and Robert Weingart now? That must be like drinking out of a spittoon. I bet you’ve got some stories to tell.”
As the truck crossed the two-lane and turned onto the wood bridge that spanned the moat around the Abelard house, Clete memorized the tag and dialed a number on his cell phone. Then he lost service and had to punch in the number a second time. The call went into voice mail. “Dave, it’s Clete. I’m outside the Abelard place. I need you to run a Florida tag. It belongs to a real piece of work, maybe one of the shitbags from the gig on the river. I tried to rattle him but didn’t have any luck.” He closed his eyes and said the tag number into the cell. “Get back to me, noble mon. Out.”