“What’d you see on the bayou, Dave?”
I didn’t reply and squeezed his neck as though we were two boys in a wrestling match. Then we went inside, Clete behind me, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his behemoth physique about to split the seams of his clothes.
THE DINERS FILLED their plates and sat at big round tables in a banquet room, at the head of which was a podium and a microphone. Clete and I sat on folding chairs against the back wall. No one seemed to take particular notice of us. Clete kept leaning forward, his hands on his knees, studying the room, the diners, the men who drifted out to the bar and returned with a highball or a dessert for a wife or girlfriend. When the general was introduced and walked to the podium, the entire room rose and applauded. He was tall and wore a gray suit with stripes in it, and was erect in his carriage for a man his age. His clean features and the white strands in his hair gave him the genteel appearance of Wordsworth’s happy warrior, but there was a visceral Jacksonian edge about him, physical incongruities that suggested a humble background not altogether consistent with his dress and manner. His ears were too large for his head, and there were lumps of cartilage under his jaw. His hands were square and rough-looking, his wrists ridged with bone where they protruded from his white cuffs. His facial skin creased superficially with his smile, exposing his teeth, which looked tiny and sharp-edged in his mouth. But it was the martial light in his eyes that you remembered most. It was like that of a choleric man who kept his wounds green and treasured his anger and drew on it the way one turns up the heat register when necessary.
Clete watched him, biting on a hangnail, spitting it off the end of his tongue. “I saw that dude at Da Nang,” he said.
“What did you think of him?”
“I don’t remember,” he replied. “He was standing under an awning. We were standing in the rain. Yeah, I remember that. The rain falling on all those steel pots while he was talking to us.”
The general had a prepared speech in his hands. But before beginning it, he paused and stared into the crowd, his face brightening. “I know when I’m among the right kind of people,” he said. “I was walking through the parking lot a few minutes ago, and I saw a bumper sticker I must share with you. It said, ‘Earth First! We’ll drill the rest of the planets later!’”
The audience roared with laughter.
But Clete was not listening to the general’s joke and the audience’s appreciation of it. He was peering at a table in the corner where Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair, his grandson, Kermit, seated on one side of him and his caretaker, Jewel, on the other. Also at the table was a dark-skinned man who had a thin nose and wore a pencil mustache and whose lacquered black hair resembled a cap. The other man at the table had his back to us, and I could not see his face. His hair was boxed on the back of his neck, and his right shoulder seemed to hang lower than his left, as though he were uncomfortable in his chair or experiencing lower-back pain, trying to shift the pressure off his spine.
“I thought you said Kermit Abelard was the liberal in the family,” Clete said to me.
“Kermit is a sunshine patriot.”
“A what?”
“Read Thomas Paine.”
“I don’t need to. He treated Alafair dirty. He’s a four-flusher and a punk, if you ask me. Who’re the greaseball and the other guy at the table?”
“Who knows? The old man was famous on the cockfighting circuit. He used to fly in a DC-3 to Cuba and Nicaragua with his cocks. He was pals with Batista and the Somozas.”
“I need a drink. You want anything from the bar?” Clete said.
“Take it easy on the booze.”
“I wish I was stone drunk. I wish I was wearing a full-body condom. You think these chairs have been sprayed for crab lice?”
A man sitting in front of us turned around and gave us a look.
“You got a problem?” Clete said.
The man turned his back to us and didn’t reply. Clete leaned forward and punched him with one finger between the shoulder blades. “I asked if I could help you with something.”
“No, I’m fine,” the man said, looking at Clete from the side of his eye.
“Glad to hear it. Enjoy your evening,” Clete said. He went to the bar, scraping his chair loudly. When he returned, carrying a highball glass packed with ice that was dark with bourbon, his gaze was fixed on the Abelard table. “See the guy next to the greaseball, the one with his arm in a sling? There’s a cast or a big wad of bandages on his hand. You clipped a guy’s fingers off at the gig on the river?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“You remember his face at all?”
“I didn’t see any of their faces except the guy who got his ticket canceled.”
“The guy in the sling is hinky. He saw me looking at him and turned away real quick, like he’d made me.”
A different man in front of us turned in his chair, his brow furrowed. “Will you people be quiet?” he said.
“Mind your business,” Clete said.
“Sir?”
Clete leaned forward in his chair. “Call me ‘you people’ again and see what happens.”
I put my hand on Clete’s arm. He pushed it away and raised his glass and drank from it, his eyes already taking on an alcoholic luster, and I realized he had probably had a shot or two straight up before returning from the bar.
“What?” he said.
“Shut up.”
“These guys all smell like Brut. You know what Brut smells like? An armpit. Take a whiff. The barman could make a fortune selling gas masks.”
“Lower your voice.”
“I’m very collected and cool and simpatico. You need to lighten up.” Clete took a deep drink from his glass and filled his jaw with ice and began crunching it between his molars. He tapped the soles of his loafers, creating a staccato like a drumroll on linoleum. Then he said out of the side of his mouth, his eyes lowered, “The guy in the sling just turned around. He knows who we are. He was on the river. We need to get this guy in the box.”
In his own mind, Clete was still a cop. His mistakes at NOPD, his flight from the country on a murder beef, the security work he did for the Mob in Vegas and Reno, his history of addiction and vigilantism and involvement with biker girls and junkie strippers and street skells of every stripe all seemed to disappear from his memory, as though the justice of his cause were absolution enough and his misdeeds were simply burnt offerings that should not be held against him.
But he was not alone in his naïveté. I was out of my jurisdiction, my judgment suspect, my behavior perhaps driven more by obsession than by dedication. I was a neocolonial who had walked in the footprints of German-speaking French legionnaires and whose mark was as transient as tracks blowing in a Mesopotamian desert. My life, as Clete’s, was a folly in the eyes of others. And here we were, the court jesters of Acadiana, with neither evidence nor personal cachet, about to take on forces that our peers found not only normal but even laudable.
I went into the men’s room and used my cell phone to call a detective-grade cop in the Lafayette Police Department by the name of Bertrand Viator. “I’m at the Derrick and Preservation Club,” I said. “There’s a guy here who might be a suspect in a homicide in Jeff Davis Parish.”
“I’m not up on this,” Bertrand said. “What homicide are we talking about?”
“It’s kind of complicated. I saw the homicide. Nobody else did.”
The line was silent. Then my friend evidently chose not to attempt working through what I had just told him. “What do you need, Streak?”
“Can you get me some backup? I don’t have a warrant, and I’m out of my jurisdiction.”
“What’s the name of the suspect?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you want to bring him in?”
“I’m not sure. The guy is sitting at a table with Timothy Abelard. I’m going to have a talk with Abelard and a couple of his friends. I’d like to have
a degree of legal authority behind me when I do it.”
“You’re by yourself?”
“Clete Purcel is with me.”
There was another pause. “Sorry, I can’t help on this, Dave.”
“Want to tell me why?” I asked.
“I don’t fault Purcel for being his own man. I just don’t want to take his fall. You might give that some thought.”
When I got back to the banquet room, the general was finishing his speech. The audience rose and applauded, then applauded some more. Through the crowd I saw Timothy Abelard looking at me, his face lit with goodwill, two fingers raised in a wave.
“Where’ve you been?” I heard Clete say.
“Trying to get us some backup.”
“No dice?”
“They’ve got their own problems,” I said.
I felt his eyes examining my face. “They gave you some flak about something?”
“We don’t need pencil pushers.”
Clete turned his attention back to Timothy Abelard and the man with the bandaged hand. “What do you want to do?”
“Wait till it thins out,” I replied.
“Then what?”
I touched a manila envelope that I had rolled into a cone and stuck in my coat pocket. “We give them a look at some unpleasant realities they won’t find in a family newspaper,” I said.
But the Abelards and their retinue did not wait for the party to end. Without fanfare, Jewel pushed Timothy Abelard in his wheelchair down a corridor toward an exit, and the other people from the table followed, the man with the injured hand glancing back once over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Clete swallowed the bourbon-stained ice melt in the bottom of his glass, his cheeks blooming. We walked out into the parking lot, no more than thirty feet behind the Abelard party, the oak trees swelling with wind against the glow of the streetlamps. “Excuse me,” I called out.
But no one among the Abelard party chose to hear me.
“I’d like to have a word with you, Mr. Timothy,” I said. “It’s a matter that concerns your grandson and possibly one of your friends here.”
He raised his hand, signaling everyone around him to stop. I walked to a spot between the wheelchair and an enormous SUV that he and the others had been preparing to enter. His bronze-tinted hair was blowing on his pate, dry and loose, like a baby’s. When he turned his face up at me, I thought of a tiny bird.
“You’re a ubiquitous presence, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You pop up like a jack-in-the-box. I didn’t realize you were an admirer of my friend the general.”
“I’m not.”
“So our meeting here is more than coincidental? Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. As I recall, your father was a persistent man. He could lay them flat out, couldn’t he? What is it about my grandson or my friends that has you so concerned?”
I looked at the man whose hand was wrapped in a wad of gauze and tape as big as a boxing glove. His face was as taut as latex, his eyes liquid with resentment, a scar like a piece of white string cupped on the rim of one nostril. The man with the oiled black hair had turned at an angle toward me, his coat open and pushed back loosely, his nose thinner than it should have been, as though it had been destroyed by disease of some kind and reconstructed by an inept plastic surgeon.
“Your man with his arm in the sling, is he missing some fingers?” I asked Abelard.
“Not to my knowledge. He slammed a door on his hand.”
“No, I think I shot him. I think I blew his fingers all over a tree. I suspect he’s still in considerable pain,” I said. Then I laughed. “I also killed one of his friends.”
“You must tell us about this sometime. But right now we need to be going. Good night to you,” Abelard said.
“No, I’d like for you to glance at a few photos,” I said, pulling the manila folder from my coat pocket and opening it in front of him so it caught the light. “That first shot was taken at an exhumation by the Iberia–St. Martin Parish line. Her name was Fern Michot. She was from British Columbia and eighteen years old at the time of her death. Here, this other shot shows her in her Girl Scout uniform when she was sixteen. It gives you a better idea what she looked like. There was a lot of water and decaying garbage in the grave where her killer dumped her.
“This other girl is Bernadette Latiolais. The knife cut across her throat almost decapitated her, which caused her to bleed out and the muscles in her face to collapse, so it’s probably pretty hard to recognize her. Does she look familiar to you? Kermit says he knew her, so I’ll bet he remembers how beautiful and happy she was before a degenerate and sadist kidnapped and murdered her.”
“What Mr. Robicheaux is trying to say is the girl received a scholarship we created at UL, Pa’pere,” Kermit said. “I might have met her at an honors ceremony, but I didn’t know her. Mr. Robicheaux is still resentful because of my breakup with Alafair.”
“Is that true, Mr. Robicheaux? You resent my grandson?” Abelard said.
“No, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Kermit,” I said. “Here, look at these close-up photos of the ligature marks on Fern Michot’s wrists and ankles. She may have died from asphyxiation, or she may have been frightened to death. In your opinion, what kind of man or men would do this to a young girl, Mr. Timothy? You have any speculations?”
“Yes, I do. I think you should seek counseling,” he replied.
“Did you know these girls, Mr. Abelard? Have you ever seen them?”
“No, I haven’t. And I hope that settles the matter for you.”
“You think you can act like this to an elderly gentleman? Who are you?” the man with the mustache said to me.
“Stay out of it, buddy,” Clete said.
“Where is your identification? Where is your authority to do this?”
“Here’s mine,” Clete said, opening his badge holder. “Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. If you want to find yourself in handcuffs and sitting on the curb over there, open your mouth one more time.”
“It’s all right, Emiliano,” Abelard said.
“No, it is not all right,” Emiliano said. “Who are these crazy people? This is the United States.”
I don’t know if it was the booze, or Clete’s hypertension, or the angst over the lifetime of damage he had done to his career and himself, but it was obvious that once again we were about to give up the high ground and load the cannon for our enemies. “You just don’t listen, do you, greaseball?” Clete said.
“I have a son at West Point. I have another son who graduated from the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. You will not address me that way.”
Then I heard the voice of someone I had completely forgotten about. It was soft, almost a whisper, humble and deferential, the voice of someone who had been taught for a lifetime that her interests were secondary to those of other people. “Mr. Timothy?”
“What it is, Jewel?” Abelard answered, looking up at the woman who was both his nurse and his daughter.
“Mr. Timothy?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Timothy?”
“Will you please say it?”
“Please, suh,” she said, her eyes glistening.
“You’re not making any sense, woman,” Abelard said. “To damnation with all of you. Get us out of here. I’m sick of this.”
There was nothing for it. We had taken on the roles of anachronisms making shrill noises on a stage set in front of an empty theater. We all stood motionless in the parking lot, the trees swelling and bending, our shadows trembling on the asphalt because the streetlamps were vibrating in the wind, none of us speaking, the photos of the dead girls clenched in my hand. But before leaving, I wanted to write my signature on someone’s forehead, if for no other reason than pride.
“What’s your name?” I said to the man with the bandaged hand.
“Gus,” he replied.
“Gus what?”
??
?Fowler.”
“You don’t hide your feelings very well, Mr. Fowler. You were one of the dudes down at the river. You’re also a nickel-and-dime fuckup who probably couldn’t burn shit barrels without a diagram. Here’s your flash for the day: Your mutilated hand was a first installment. I’ll be talking to you down the track.” I gave him the thumbs-up sign and winked at him.
Then Clete and I drove away in his Caddy, down old Pinhook Road under a canopy of live oaks that had been planted by slaves, the moon racing through the branches. Clete was steering recklessly with one hand, his big chest rising and falling, his face white around the eyes. “We gave it up too soon,” he said. “You had the old man in a corner. Why’d you let up?”
I remained silent, listening to the tires whirring on the asphalt.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“What you’re doing. Don’t stonewall me, Dave.”
“The tent was burning down.”
“Because I called the guy a greaseball?”
“The cops in Jeff Davis found skin tissue and bloody rags on the road by the shoot-out. We’re going to get a DNA sample from this guy Fowler. If we’d gotten into it with either him or the Hispanic guy, we’d have been in custody ourselves.”
“Fowler will be on a plane by midnight.”
Maybe Clete was right, but I was too tired to care. All I wanted to do was go home and fall asleep and not think anymore about the Abelards and the faces of the girls whose photos were rolled inside the manila folder in my coat pocket. I understood Clete’s disappointment and anger, but I wasn’t up to dealing with it. The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him. We weren’t going to bring the Abelards down with physical force or intimidation. I was beginning to believe that the photos of the dead girls and all my case notes and faxes and autopsy forms and Internet printouts would eventually find their way into a cold-case file and end up behind a locked door in a storage room, one that nobody entered without a sense of guilt and failure.
I had no idea I would receive a phone call from someone whose importance in the investigation I had treated in a cavalier fashion, maybe because of a racial or cultural bias of my own. In the era in which I was raised, people of color never gave up the secrets of their white employers. Their silence had nothing to do with loyalty, either. It was based on fear.