I doubted we would catch any fish that evening, but if possible, I wanted to get Clete out of his funk and his conviction that he was going to prison. The problem was, I thought that perhaps this time his perceptions were correct. I told him of my visit to the home of Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother. I also told him she had recognized the photo of Robert Weingart and that she had seen him with a black man who had a small mustache and wore a suit and a pink tie.
Clete flung a small spinner baited with a wriggler on the edge of the lily pads, his skin rosy in the waning light. “You think the black dude was Herman Stanga?”
“The grandmother said he looked like a ‘downtown man.’ She even said his mustache looked like a little black bird under his nose.”
“What’s this stuff about seven arpents of land?”
“It sounds like part of an undivided estate of some kind. Clete, maybe the Latiolais girl was just randomly abducted. Maybe her death doesn’t have anything to do with Stanga or Robert Weingart. She was walking past a bar in broad daylight, and then she was gone. Maybe the wrong guy came out of the bar at the wrong time and offered her a ride. Maybe Bernadette Latiolais’s death doesn’t have anything to do with the deaths of the other victims.”
“My money is still on Stanga,” he said.
“Maybe he’s involved, but I don’t think he’s the chief perpetrator.”
“Because Stanga is kind to animals?”
“Because he has ice water in his veins. Stanga doesn’t do anything unless it’s of direct benefit to him. There is no known connection between him and the girl.”
“On some level, Stanga is dirty. I just don’t know how or why. Before this is over, I’m going to take him off the board.” Clete retrieved his spinner and flipped it out again, his face empty.
I didn’t want to hear what he had just said. “We’ll get out of this one way or another, Clete. I promise. Your friends aren’t going to let you down.”
“I’m not going to do time. Before I go inside, I’ll put a few guys in body bags or eat my gun.”
“Not a good way to think.”
“So I’ll skip the country instead.”
“How’s your love life?” I said, changing the subject.
“I don’t have one.”
“You need to find a new girlfriend. This time get one your own age.”
“Who wants a girlfriend my age?”
For the first time that evening we both laughed out loud, violating the stillness, as though three decades had not passed and we were both cops in uniform again, walking a beat with batons on Esplanade or Rampart. Then I saw the humor go out of Clete’s face.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
“That boat out in the channel. Somebody is using binoculars on us. There. See the light glint on the lenses?”
I looked back toward the landing. In the gloom I could barely make out a male figure seated in the stern of a speedboat. Then I saw him lean over and dip his hand into the water and begin retrieving his anchor from the mud. Across the water, we could hear the dull thunk of the anchor clank in the bottom of the boat, then the buzzing sound of the electric starter turning over. The man in the speedboat pointed the bow directly toward us and opened the throttle, a frothy yellow wake fanning out behind him.
Clete reeled in his spinner and set down his rod on the gunwale. He took a po’boy sandwich from the ice chest, unwrapped the waxed paper, and bit into the French bread and fried shrimp and sauce piquant and sliced tomatoes and onions inside it, pushing the food back into his mouth with his wrist, his eyes never leaving the speedboat.
The driver made a wide circle and approached us so the sun was at his back and shining directly into our eyes. Clete shifted around in his seat, watching the speedboat, wiping mayonnaise off his mouth with his fingers. He pulled his right trouser leg up over his sock, exposing the hideaway .25 that was Velcro-strapped to his ankle.
The man in the speedboat cut his gas feed and drifted toward us, his boat rising on its own wake. “One of you guys named Dave Robicheaux?” he asked. His face was lit with an idiot’s grin.
“What do you want?” I said.
“I want to know if I found the right man, the man I’ve been sent to find.”
“You found me.”
“My name is Vidor Perkins.” His tan looked like it had been induced with chemicals or acquired in a salon. His shoulders were narrow and his dark hair oiled and conked on top and mowed into the scalp above his ears, exposing a strawberry birthmark that bled down the back of his neck. But it was his eyes that caught your attention. They were pale blue and did not go with the rest of his face. They seemed to have no pupils and contained the kind of lidless inner concentration that anybody who is con-wise immediately recognizes. In every stockade, prison, or work camp, there is at least one inmate no one deliberately goes near. When you see him on the yard, he might be squatting on his haunches, smoking a cigarette, staring into his own smoke with the concentration of a scientist, his hands draped over his knees like banana peels. At first glance, he appears to be an innocuous creature taking a break in his day, but then you notice that the other inmates divide around him the way water flows around a sharp rock. If you’re wise, you do not make eye contact with this man or think you can be his friend. Nor, under any circumstances, do you ever challenge his pride.
The man who called himself Vidor Perkins fixed his mindless stare on Clete. “I bet you’re Mr. Purcel,” he said.
“We’d like to catch a fish before dark, provided this spot isn’t already ruined. You want to spit it out?” Clete said.
“Man up at the bait shop sent me out here. Your daughter called, Mr. Robicheaux. She said there was an emergency at your house.”
“Say that again,” I replied.
“That’s all I know. Sounded like a fire or something. I cain’t be sure. He said something about an ambulance.”
“Who said?” I asked.
“The man up at the bait shop. I just tole you.” He killed a mosquito on his neck, lifted it from his palm with two fingers, and dropped it into the water.
“Why didn’t you come straight out here? Why were you anchored?” Clete said.
“’Cause I didn’t know it was y’all.”
I pulled out my cell phone and opened it. There was no service. “Were you in the bait shop when the call came in?”
“As a matter of fact, I was. This fellow took the call at the counter. He said something about paramedics. Or the voice over the phone said something about paramedics. I didn’t get it all. If it was me, I’d haul freight on up there and see what the deal is.”
“Let’s see your ID,” Clete said. “In the meantime, wipe that grin off your face.”
The man in the speedboat gazed at the elevated highway and at the headlights streaming across it. He had a wide mouth that looked made of rubber, like the mouth of a frog or an inflatable doll, and his lips had taken on a purplish cast in the fading light. “I’d worry about my family and not about a fellow who’s just trying to do a good deed,” he said. “But I’m not you, am I?”
I got out my badge holder and opened it. “I want you to follow us in,” I said.
He began picking at his nails. The wind came up and lifted the leaves on the willow trees and wrinkled the water’s surface. Vidor Perkins pushed the button on his electric starter. “Bet I beat you there,” he said. “I hope your family is all right.”
Then he opened up his speedboat and rocketed across the bay, troweling a wide arc by the pilings under the highway, sliding across his own wake, his profile as pointed and cool as a hood ornament.
A minute later, he had disappeared down the channel, the darkness swallowing the yellow surge of mud rising in his wake.
The owner of the bait shop knew nothing of an emergency call; he also said the man in the speedboat had not been in his shop and had not used his concrete ramp to put his boat in the water.
I used the bait shop phone to call home. Alafair answered. “I
s everything okay there?” I said.
“We’re fine. Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Clete and I are running a little late. I was just checking in.”
“Something happen?” she said.
“You ever hear of a guy named Vidor Perkins?”
“No, who is he?”
“A meltdown I ran into. Don’t let anybody in the house till I get home.”
“What’s going on, Dave?”
“I wish I knew.”
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING I went to the office and put through a priority request with the National Crime Information Center for everything they had on Robert Weingart and the man who had given his name as Vidor Perkins. The electronic files and photographs that downloaded on my screen contained more information than I wanted or could possibly sort through. Perkins and Weingart had both been at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville at the same time. Whether they knew each other was a matter of conjecture. Perkins had served time in Alabama and Florida as well as Texas. Before Weingart went down for armed robbery in Texas, he had been arrested eleven times in Nevada, California, and Oregon, starting when he was sixteen years old. Unlike the majority of recidivists, neither man seemed to have a penchant for narcotics or alcohol. Most of their arrests involved fraud, robbery, or physical violence. As young men, both had been arrested on charges involving the jackrolling of elderly people and theft of the mails, which usually meant theft of Social Security checks. As a teenager, Weingart had been arrested for cruelty to animals and kept in a psychiatric facility for eight months. When he was nineteen, Vidor Perkins had been a suspect in an apartment-house arson that killed three people, one of them a child.
As with all sociopaths, the factual language used to describe their crimes said little if anything about their backgrounds or the influences that made them permanent members of an underclass that has one agenda—namely, to scratch their names on a wall in a way the rest of us will never forget. Maybe they grew up in shitholes. Maybe their fathers were violent drunks and their mothers wanted them aborted. Maybe they were crack babies, or they were born ugly or poor or stupid or were poorly educated and denied access to a better life. But when you have seen the handiwork of their kind up close and personal, none of the aforementioned seems to offer an adequate explanation for their behavior.
For some repeat offenders, jailing is an end in itself. They don’t break out of jails; they break into them. But I doubted that was the case with either Weingart or Perkins. Actually, the only surprise in the electronic files I downloaded was Weingart’s date of birth. He looked no older than thirty, but he was actually fifty-two. Either he shared much in common with Dorian Gray, or he had undergone a very good face-lift.
Monday morning I went into Helen Soileau’s office with printouts of both men’s rap sheets. I told her about my encounter with Vidor Perkins at Henderson Swamp and the lie he had told me about an emergency at my house. “Where’s Perkins now?” she said.
“He has a rental house on Old Jeanerette Road.”
“How’d you find him?” She was sitting behind her desk, her hands spread on top of the two rap sheets, her expression neutral.
“Called information and asked for new listings.”
“You think he’s delivering a warning on behalf of Robert Weingart?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She stood up and looked at me, thinking thoughts whose nature I could only guess at, her eyes not really seeing me. “The thread on this is going to lead back to the Abelard house in St. Mary Parish, isn’t it?” she said.
“If it does, it’s because the Abelards are up to doing what they do best—screwing their fellow man.”
She blew her breath up into her face. “Bring the cruiser around. Don’t make me regret this, Pops.”
We drove down Old Jeanerette Road through sugarcane acreage and meadowland, the wind riffling Bayou Teche in the sunlight, the rain ditches on either side of us littered with trash of every kind. We passed through a rural slum, then an experimental farm operated by the state, and rounded a bend where an old cemetery stood in a shady grove, the whitewashed crypts sunk at odd angles into the softness of the earth. Up ahead, just before the drawbridge, I could see Alice Plantation, built in 1796, and farther on a second antebellum home, one that is arguably among the most beautiful in the Deep South.
Across the drawbridge stood a trailer slum that looked like it was transported from Bangladesh and reconstructed on the banks of Bayou Teche. The house where Vidor Perkins had taken up residence was located back in a grove of slash pines and cedar trees, and offered a fine view of the economic juxtaposition that has always defined the culture in which I grew up. I doubted that Perkins was a student of history or sociology, or was even cognizant of what went on beyond the dermal wrap that probably constituted the outer layer of his universe. But the fact that he had moved into a comfortable bungalow in the midst of a breezy stand of trees situated between the two extremes of wealth and poverty in our state seemed more than coincidence. Or maybe that was just my fanciful way of looking upon an evil presence that had come into our midst, a phenomenon that was not without precedent.
His speedboat was parked on its trailer under a porte cochere, the trailer hitched to a pale blue paint-skinned pickup truck. In back, I could hear a radio playing and the sound of a rake being scraped across leaves and dirt. Helen and I walked into the backyard and saw a little black girl sitting in a swing that hung from a pecan tree. Vidor Perkins was hefting up great piles of leaves and pine needles and dumping them into an oil barrel that boiled with smoke. He was bare-chested and his skin was networked with rivulets of sweat, even though the morning was still cool. The little girl wore a pinafore and tiny patent-leather shoes powdered with dust. She was eating half of an orange Popsicle, watching us curiously.
Perkins squinted at Helen and me through the smoke, as though he couldn’t recognize me or guess the nature of our visit. Then he pointed at me good-naturedly. “Mr. Robicheaux! Was everything okay at your house?”
“What was your purpose in trying to alarm me, Mr. Perkins?” I said.
“I didn’t do no such thing. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But it was obvious that he was less interested in me than he was in Helen. His gaze kept drifting to her, as though he were sneaking a look at a carnival attraction.
“I’m Sheriff Soileau. Filing a false police report is a felony in this state,” she said.
A grin spread across his face. “A false police report? That’s a good one. Y’all trying to play a prank on me?”
“You told a sheriff’s detective about an emergency that didn’t exist,” she said. “Are you saying you didn’t do that?”
“If the emergency didn’t exist, that’s not my fault. I was tole by the man up on the levee to carry a message to Mr. Robicheaux. Tell me the crime in that.”
“Except the man up at the bait shop denies even seeing you,” Helen said.
“Did I say which man give me the message? I most certainly did not. Maybe this fellow was some kind of jokester. Y’all want a cold drink or a Popsicle?”
“What are you doing in our parish?” Helen asked.
“Vacationing, looking for business opportunities and such.” He was beaming as he stared at Helen, his gaze roving over her body in the way that ignorant and stupid people do when they’re amused by a handicapped or minority person.
“You a friend of Robert Weingart?” she asked.
“The writer? I know who he is. Is he living here’bouts now?”
“He was in Huntsville the same time you were. You never buddied around with him?” she said.
“I spent most of my free time at Huntsville in the chapel or the library.”
“Who’s the little girl?” Helen asked.
“Her mother cleans for me. They’re from right up the road, where all those trailers are at.”
Helen went over to the swing. “Is your mommy home?” she said to the little girl.
“She’s at work.”
“Why’d she leave you here?”
“Mr. Vidor took me to buy clothes.”
“Is somebody else at home right now?”
“My auntie.”
“I want you to wait out front for us. We need to talk with Mr. Vidor. We’ll drive you home in a few minutes. You’re not to come back here again unless your mother is with you.”
“Ma’am, you cain’t tell that little girl what to do,” Perkins said.
Helen lifted one finger toward Perkins, then looked back at the child. “You haven’t done anything wrong. But you should be with your family and not in the home of a man you don’t know well. You understand that?”
Perkins bit on a thumbnail, his grin gone. He stuffed a huge pile of blackened leaves and moldy pecan husks into the barrel, curls of smoke rising into his face. His conked hair was oily with sweat or grease or both, and the strawberry birthmark that bled like a tail out of his hairline seemed to have darkened in the shade.
Helen waited until the little girl had left the yard. “Here are the rules,” she said. “You don’t get near any children in this parish. If you try to harass a member of my department, if you look cross-eyed at somebody on the street, if you spit on a sidewalk, if you throw a gum wrapper out a car window, I’m going to turn your life into an exquisite agony.”
He leaned on his rake, the sweat on his ridged stomach running into the waistband of his underwear. “No, you won’t,” he said. “Check my jacket. On my last jolt, I went out max time. I did twenty-seven months chopping cotton under the gun, just so I wouldn’t have some twerp of a PO telling me what I could and couldn’t do. You got no say in my life, Sheriff, ’cause I ain’t broke no laws, and I don’t plan to, either. Empty wagons always make the loudest rattle.”
Helen brushed at her nose, the smoke starting to get to her. “You have anything you want to say to Mr. Perkins?” she asked me.
“You called Clete Purcel by name at Henderson Swamp. How’d you know who he was?” I said.
“He’s got his big cheeks spread on a stool at Clementine’s every time I go in there. He’s usually drunk,” Perkins said.
“When you see Robert Weingart—” I began.