“Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“Because she hasn’t been an active part of the investigation of a crime committed in Iberia Parish.”
“That’s pretty disingenuous, if you ask me.”
And in that mood, not speaking, we parked the cruiser in front of the house and walked through the side yard to the tennis court, where we could hear someone whocking balls that were being fired over the net by an automatic ball machine.
Carolyn was wearing blue sweatpants and a sports bra and was hitting the balls two-handed, her platinum hair shiny with perspiration, her skin sun-browned with freckles, her baby fat wedging over her waistband as she put all her weight into her swing.
She wiped her face and throat and underarms with a towel and flung it on a chair by a table set with a pitcher of lemonade and glasses. She asked if we wanted to sit down.
“Not really, Ms. Blanchet,” Helen said. “We wanted to offer our sympathies at your loss, and to ask you a couple of questions, then we’ll be gone.”
“How you doin’, Dave?” Carolyn said, sitting down, ignoring Helen’s statement, pouring herself a glass.
“Just fine, thanks. You chased off the feds?” I said.
“No, the federal court in New Orleans did. Layton left behind a mess. But it’s not my mess. If somebody else wants to clean it up, that’s fine, but they can do it somewhere else.”
“Ms. Blanchet—” Helen began.
“It’s Carolyn, please.”
“We’re still investigating the death of Herman Stanga,” Helen said.
“Who?”
“A black pimp who was shot and killed behind his home in New Iberia. We wondered if you know a St. Martin Parish sheriff’s deputy by the name of Emma Poche.”
“Offhand, I don’t recall hearing the name.”
“Offhand?” Helen repeated.
“Yes, that’s what I said. ‘Offhand.’ It’s a commonly used term.”
“Do you know any female deputies in the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department?”
“No. Should I?”
“But you know Kermit Abelard, don’t you?” Helen said.
“I’ve read his books. I’ve been to one or two of his book signings. What’s the issue here?”
“There is no ‘issue.’ Did he inscribe a book to you?”
I stared at Helen incredulously because I realized the direction she was headed in, one that would expose the source of our information.
“We’re trying to clear up a question about Kermit and his relationship to Layton and their mutual interest in biofuels,” I interjected.
“What you need to do is answer my question, Ms. Blanchet,” Helen said, her gaze drifting toward me irritably. “Did Kermit Abelard inscribe a book to you?”
“I just told you I attended his book signing. That’s what people do at book signings. They get their books signed by the author.”
“Then why is your autographed book in Emma Poche’s house if you don’t know Emma Poche?” Helen said.
I could feel my pulse beating in my wrists. “Carolyn, it’s obvious we’re looking at a deputy sheriff for reasons that make us uncomfortable,” I said. “Someone may have planted evidence at a homicide scene. We had reason to believe you might know this deputy. We didn’t come here to offend you.”
I paused and then took a chance, hoping to create a distraction from Alafair and possibly force an admission by Carolyn Blanchet. “We have a report you may have met with Emma Poche at a motel outside St. Martinville. Your private life is your private life, but you’re telling us things that don’t fit with what we know.”
Carolyn was shaking her head even before I finished speaking. “I should have known. There’s no end to it,” she said.
“End to what?” I said.
“My husband was a paranoid. He convinced himself I was having an affair—in part, I think, to assuage his own guilt for screwing women all over the United States and Latin America. Evidently he hired a fat idiot of a private detective to follow me around, and this is what we end up with.”
“How could you be at the motel with Emma Poche and not know her?” Helen said.
“I didn’t say I was,” Carolyn replied.
“I think you did,” I said.
She touched her temples. “I must be having an aneurysm.”
The sun was over the trees now, and I could feet the heat rising from the concrete. “Emma Poche has a way of showing up in too many places or with too many people that involve either Layton or you,” I said. “I don’t believe Layton shot himself, Carolyn. I believe he was murdered.”
“By whom?” she said.
“Let’s look at motivation,” I said. “Layton was a big liability. He was sick mentally and emotionally and seemed determined to go down with the Titanic. Who loses if the bank is broke? Who loses if the feds find out others were involved in Layton’s schemes?”
“I always liked you and treated you well, Dave. You’re saying ugly things about me, and I think I know the source. She’s standing right next to you. When you walked onto the court, you began talking about a book you found at this female deputy’s house. You served a warrant on her house in St. Martin Parish, where you have no jurisdiction?”
“We have various resources,” I said.
“You’re lying. Both of you are.” She knew Alafair had been our source, and she knew that we knew she knew. She stood up and adjusted the sweatband on her hair. She took a long drink from her glass and set it back down on the table, the ice sliding to the bottom. “I thought that bunch of federal nerds I just got rid of were inept,” she said. “But you two are establishing new standards.”
“I have morgue photos of two dead girls in my file cabinet,” I said. “Somehow their deaths are connected to the Abelards and your late husband and some properties in Jefferson Davis Parish. Both girls were abducted, and I believe both suffered terrible deaths. You can be clever from now to Judgment Day, Carolyn, but if you were mixed up in the murder of those girls, I’m going to hang you out to dry, woman or not.”
I saw Helen turn and stare at me.
We walked back through the side yard, past the heavy, warm fragrance of the flower beds and the smell of chemical fertilizer and the odor of something dead under the house, neither of us speaking, a sound like wind roaring in my ears. Helen started the cruiser, and we headed down the driveway toward the service road. In the silence, I could hear tiny pieces of gravel clicking in the tire treads.
“I screwed it up. I’m sorry,” she said.
I looked out at the shade on the lawn and at a shaft of sunlight shining through the trees on a sundial.
“She figured out Alafair was our source, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to do anything about it,” Helen said. “Trust me, Carolyn doesn’t let her emotions get in the way of her agenda.”
“Someone who practices sadomasochism? Someone who may have murdered her husband or had someone do it for her? Someone you call a degenerate and a slut who uses and discards people like Kleenex?”
“You don’t take prisoners, do you, Streak?”
“No, I don’t,” I replied.
I didn’t speak again until we were back at the department, and then it was only to ask the time because my watch had stopped.
THAT EVENING CLETE and I drove across the drawbridge in the Caddy and sat down in one of the picnic shelters in City Park down by the water in the gloaming of the day, the air dense, the sky purple and pink and marbled with fire-lit clouds in the west. “So you figure Emma is in the sack with Carolyn Blanchet and maybe the two of them planted my gold pen in Stanga’s swimming pool?” he said.
“I’d call it a strong possibility,” I replied.
“Which would mean they probably capped Stanga, huh? But why?”
“He knew too much. He’d dime them to save his own ass. He was disposable. He tried to extort them or to extort Layton. He should have brushed his teeth more often. Take your choice.”
“So I was bopping a swit
ch-hitter who was setting me up to ride the needle for the woman she was banging? I’ve been taken over the hurdles a few times, but I don’t know if I can handle this.”
“Don’t fault yourself because you believe in people, Clete.”
“Right,” he said, his eyes looking at nothing. “I went to Morgan City and checked out this guy Andy Swan. He was telling the truth about working for a security service. But he didn’t arrive three days ago. He’s been around Morgan City at least three weeks. He could have been one of the guys who tried to pop you. You’re going to give that ligature I found in the Dumpster to the crime lab?”
“In the morning. But it’s out of context, Cletus.”
“Who cares? It’s evidence we didn’t have before.” Clete waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, his gaze fixed on my face. “You’re thinking about Alafair?”
“Of course I am. Helen blew it.”
“Look, Dave, Helen is right about one thing. Because the Blanchet woman knows Alafair found out about her affair with Emma doesn’t mean she’s going to put a hit on her. Sometimes we got to keep things in perspective.”
“Their building is burning down and they know it. That’s why Robert Weingart was transferring his money to a bank in Canada. You put scorpions in a box and shake it up, they sting everything in sight.”
“All right, let’s talk about Weingart a minute. What’s his involvement with Carolyn Blanchet? It’s biofuels, it’s Herman Stanga, it’s the Abelards, it’s what?”
“It’s all of what you just said. I just don’t know how it fits together.”
“Big mon, we’re not going to let anything happen to Alafair. You’re not giving her credit, either. Didn’t you say she had an IQ of 180 or something?”
“No, her IQ isn’t measurable. It’s off the scale.”
“It’s not genetic, either.”
“That’s supposed to be funny?”
The shadows were deepening inside the trees, and lights were going on in the houses high up on the slopes along the bayou. I heard the cogged wheels under the drawbridge clank together and saw the bridge separate in the center and rise into the air. I could see the running lights on a large boat coming out of the gloom, and I thought I heard a hissing sound like steam escaping a valve cover and water cascading behind the stern. The sunset had created a gold ribbon down the middle of the current. Against the silhouette of the uplifted bridge, I saw the bow and pilothouse of the boat nearing us, and black men working on the deck and a bearded skipper in a blue cap behind the wheel, a cob pipe clenched in his teeth. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrists, as though I were fatigued. Clete looked down the bayou, then back at me. “You okay?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied.
“Want to try and catch Andy Swan before he leaves town? I mean, since we now know he could have been one of the guys at the shoot-out.”
“He wasn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because the guys at the river weren’t state employees who work on execution teams.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Go after the guy whose age and infirmities have been giving him a free pass too long.”
I could see the connection come together in Clete’s eyes. “I’m not that keen on the idea,” he said.
“It was old men who sent us to war,” I said.
COCKROACHES DON’T LIKE sunlight. Despots and demagogues do not make appearances in environments they do not control. Elitists join clubs whose attraction is based not on their membership but on the types of people they are known to exclude. It wasn’t hard to find out where Timothy Abelard would probably be on Friday night of that particular week. I read an article in the Lafayette newspaper and called a couple of patriotic organizations and a congressional office and was told, in one instance, “Why, yes, Mr. Abelard wouldn’t miss this event for the world.” The “event” that seemed of such global importance was a fund-raiser to be held at seven P.M. at Lafayette’s Derrick and Preservation Club in the old Oil Center.
Clete and I dressed for the occasion. The waiters at the club were all white-jacketed middle-aged black men who could not be called obsequious but belonged culturally to another generation, one that knew how to be selectively deaf and to pretend that the clientele they served held them in high regard. The linen-covered buffet tables were lit by candles and sparkled with crystal glasses and silver bowls. The food was sumptuous, the quality you would expect at Antoine’s or Galatoire’s in New Orleans. The guest speaker was a retired army general who had helped subvert the democratically elected government in Chile and replace it with Augusto Pinochet, who turned the country into a giant torture chamber. He was also a practicing Catholic. When four American Catholic missionaries were raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers, he said at a news conference that maybe the victims had “tried to run a roadblock.”
The guests at the banquet and fund-raiser were an extraordinary group. Batistianos from Miami were there, as well as friends of Anastasio Somoza. The locals, if they could be called that, were a breed unto themselves. They were porcine and sleek and combed and brushed, and they jingled when they walked. Their accents were of that peculiar southern strain that is not Acadian nor influenced by what is called Tidewater or plantation English or the Scotch-Irish dialectical speech of the southern mountains. It’s an accent that seems to reflect a state of mind rather than a region. The vowels somehow get lost in the back of the throat or squeeze themselves through the nasal passages. The term “honky,” used by racist blacks, may be more accurate than we like to think. But their innocence is of a kind you cannot get angry at. They are not less brave than others, nor more sinful, nor lacking in the virtues we collectively admire. You just have the feeling when you are in their midst that all of them fear they are about to be found out, unmasked somehow, revealing God only knows what, because I am convinced their psychological makeup is a mystery even unto themselves.
Clete and I arrived early and went out to the parking lot, wondering if by chance a vehicle from the shoot-out on the river might show up. We wrote down perhaps a dozen license numbers, but we were firing in the well and knew it.
The decals in the windows left little doubt about the environmental and geopolitical convictions of the vehicles’ owners. They ranged from the flag wrapped around the beams of a Christian cross to a child urinating on “all Muslims and liberals” and an image of a bird falling from the blast of a shotgun, under which were the words “If it flies, it dies.” But these were the visual expressions of people who got up each morning trying to define who they were. The men at the shoot-out were pros who did not attract attention to themselves or serve perverse abstractions created for them by others. The men at the river had no quarrel with either the mercenary nature of their mission or the black flag under which they carried out their deeds. If you have ever met them, you are already aware they share a commonality that never varies: There is no light in their eyes. Search for it as long as you wish; you will not find it. And maybe that is why they are so good at not leaving behind any trace of themselves. Whatever they once were has long since disappeared from their lives.
It was breezy in the parking lot, and the oak trees that stood on the boulevard and in the Oil Center itself made a sweeping sound in the wind, their branches and leaves changing shape and color in the glow of the streetlamps. Clete stared at the southern sky and the flickers of lightning over the Gulf, his eyes like hard green marbles, his face taut. “It’s going to blow,” he said.
“It’s that time of year,” I said.
“I got a funny feeling.”
“It’s just a squall. It won’t be real hurricane season till mid-summer.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I saw something in your face when we were talking in City Park, on the bayou there.”
“Saw what?” I asked, avoiding his gaze.
“You were looking at something down the bayou. By the drawbridge. You rubbed your eyes like you were ti
red, but you were hiding something from me. There wasn’t anything down the bayou except the bridge. I looked, and there wasn’t anything there.”
“That’s right, there wasn’t.”
“Then what were you hiding from me?”
“I don’t remember that happening, Clete,” I said.
He rotated his head as though his collar was too tight, his eyes uplifted at the sky and the electricity playing in the clouds. “I had a dream last night. There was a big clock on my nightstand, one of those windup jobs. The cover on the face was gone. Then some guy came in the room. I tried to see who he was, but all I could see were his eyes looking at me out of a hood. I kept saying to him, ‘Who are you?,’ but he wouldn’t answer. I tried to get my piece off the dresser, but something was holding me down on the bed, like somebody was sitting on my chest. He walked over to the nightstand and picked up the clock and broke off the hands. Then he put the clock back down and walked out of the room. I still never saw who he was.”
“It was just a dream,” I said, trying to keep my face empty, trying to forget the room I had rented in Natchez with a clock that had no cover and no hands.
“Dave, we need to get rid of this Abelard gig. It stank from the jump. Nobody is interested in those dead girls except us. I say we smoke the guys who tried to hurt us and let somebody else add up the score. If we bend the rules, screw it. The guy who clicks off your switch is always the one you never see coming. I don’t want to buy it like that.”
“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “We always come through things, don’t we?”
“It’s waiting for us. Out there. I can feel it.” He waved his hand at the air as though swatting away insects. “It’s like a red laser dot crawling all over us.”
“You never rattled. Not in the Channel or the Desire. Not even in Nam or El Sal.”
“You don’t get it. I’m not talking about me. It’s you. I can see it in your eyes when you think nobody is looking. You see it coming. Stop jerking me around.”
I hooked my arm around his neck. “Let’s go back inside and check out these guys,” I said. “Maybe give them something to remember.”