The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 11

When I found Clete that afternoon, he was polishing his Caddy at the motor court, dressed in a freshly ironed sport shirt printed with tropical birds and an outrageous pair of scarlet nylon Everlast boxing trunks that extended to his knees. He was humming a tune, passing a clean cotton rag back and forth across the dried wax on the finish, pausing to blow a bug off the starched top so he would not have to smack it and stain the immaculate starchlike whiteness of the canvas. Behind him, under the trees, a pork roast was cooking on his rotisserie barbecue pit. “How’s it hanging, big mon?” he said.

Without all the deleterious influences of booze and weed and cigarettes in his system, Clete looked ten years younger, his eyes clear, his skin rosy. I hated to ruin his day. “Layton Blanchet was in my backyard this morning. He seemed a little unhinged.”

“Tell me about it. He’s left a half-dozen messages on my machine.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“I tried that. If you ask me, the guy is a head case. He’s got some other problems as well. I did a little checking on him. His bank in Mississippi is under SEC investigation. The fed I talked to said Blanchet has been running a Ponzi scheme since back in the nineties. He gets retirees to roll over their pension plans and SEP-IRAs into his bank and promises them a minimum of ten percent on their investment. Most of them are going to lose every penny they gave him.”

“He says he found your business card in his wife’s dresser.”

Clete had been polishing a back fin on the Caddy. He hand slowed and then stopped. He popped the rag clean and seemed to study the smoke drifting off his barbecue pit into the trees and the way the sunlight glittered like yellow diamonds on the bayou. “What would she be doing with my business card?” he asked.

“Evidently he’s convinced himself that you and Carolyn Blanchet were getting it on while you were working for him.”

“Not that I wouldn’t like to, but he’s full of shit.”

“The number of the Monteleone Hotel was on the back of the card,” I said.

“Layton Blanchet thinks I hang out at the Monteleone on my income? What an idiot.”

“Where do you think she got the card?”

“From any one of half the lowlifes in South Louisiana.”

“He said a couple of other things, Clete. He says he has a source inside the department. He says you’re still getting looked at for the Stanga homicide, and maybe I am, too.”

“Because the shooter was using a forty-five?”

“That and a few remarks both you and I made about Stanga.”

“Blanchet knows I’m being looked at but you don’t? Does that make sense to you?”

“Helen Soileau doesn’t always take me into her confidence.”

“Well, that’s not my problem. Check out the day. Who cares about this stuff? We’re on the square, aren’t we? You know how many people have messed with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide and are now in the ground? Get me a Bud from the icebox and a Diet Doc for yourself. I don’t want to hear any more about Layton Blanchet.”

“Watch your back, Cletus.”

“And take away your job? What kind of guy do you think I am?” he said. He went back to polishing his car, his leviathan shoulders rolling inside his shirt. I went into the cottage and opened a Dr Pepper and a Budweiser, and we drank them in the shade.

On Monday morning, when both Molly and I were at work and Tripod was in his hutch, his hind leg had begun to tremble for no reason. Alafair had folded a soft blanket in the bottom of a cardboard box and taken him to the vet. In the rearview mirror, she noticed a pale blue pickup truck turn behind her, then reappear a block later and make a second turn with her. When she parked in front of the veterinary clinic, the truck drove on by and caught the state road leading to a drawbridge in the distance.

Tripod had a form of distemper, one that came and went and seemed to steal more of his life each time. The veterinarian gave him a shot and some medicine that was to be mixed with his food. Alafair put Tripod back in his box and placed the box on the passenger seat of her old Honda and headed home. It was a fine morning. A sun shower had left the streets damp and the trees dripping, and the new sugarcane was green in the fields and bending in the breeze. She rolled down the windows to let in the cool air, and Tripod popped his head out of the box, his nose pointed into the wind like a weathervane.

She passed a redbrick Catholic church with a spire and a cupola on the roof, and rumbled across the drawbridge and stopped at a fruit stand on the far side of the bayou. Next to the fruit stand, a man was selling shrimp and crawfish out of the back of a refrigerated truck. Alafair got out of her car and closed the door. “I’ll be right back, Pod,” she said.

But there were three people ahead of her who could not decide what they wanted, and she had to wait. The Amtrak passed on the railroad embankment behind her, and traffic stalled at the intersection. On the other side of the state road, known as Old Spanish Trail, was a dry canal that emptied into Bayou Teche. Along the banks of that same canal, unknown to most people driving by it, Confederate infantry had dug a skirmish line in the year 1863 to cover the evacuation of wounded from the Episcopalian church on the west end of the town. Kermit Abelard had been fascinated with the site and had climbed down into it with a spade and a metal detector in search of minié balls, in spite of Alafair’s warnings, streaking his skin with poison ivy. But that was months ago, when the Kermit she knew and loved was more boy than man, in the best possible way, unmarked by avarice or false pride or dependence on others. In her mind, there had been a purity about Kermit — in his vision of the world, in the books and stories he wrote about the antebellum South, in his conviction that he could change the lives of others for the better. Had she been totally wrong about him? Had the innocent boy in him died simply because of his association with Robert Weingart? Or had the innocent boy never existed except in Alafair’s imagination?

The sun had broken out from behind a rain cloud, and she had to shield her eyes against its brilliance. Across the road, the oak trees along the bayou were deep green from the rain and swelling with wind, the sound of car tires on the bridge steady and reassuring, like a testimony to a plan, perhaps a reminder that life was basically good and that she was surrounded by ordinary people who shared a common struggle. A vendor had broken open a sample watermelon that he said came from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and he cut a slice for Alafair and put it on a napkin and placed the napkin in her palm.

“I have a sick raccoon. He’ll love this,” she said. “Let me pay you.”

“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t take a dime for that,” he replied.

Wasn’t it time to forget about Kermit Abelard? she asked herself. To leave him in the past, as she had promised both him and herself? To enjoy the day, to work on her book, to take care of animals, to give up resentment of herself and the wrong choices she may have made, to forgive Kermit Abelard for being weak and not defending her, even forgive him for allowing himself to be demeaned and humiliated in public by a man as loathsome as Robert Weingart? If she could forgive Kermit for not being what she thought he was, and forgive herself for her excess of love and trust, then she could let go of both Kermit and the past. Wasn’t that how it worked?

No, it didn’t. The man she had loved may not have been real. But the man she had given herself to, imaginary or not, would always live on the edges of her consciousness. And for that reason alone, she would always feel self-deceived and robbed at the same time, as though she had cooperated with a thief in burglarizing her own home.

“You want some shrimp or crawfish?” the vendor with the refrigerator truck asked. He was a tiny man dressed in strap overalls, his white shirt buttoned at the wrists, his spine bowed in a hump.

“Yes, I’m sorry. Two pounds of veined shrimp, please,” she said, opening her purse.

“You’re Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

He raised his eyes to hers, then looked past her in the direction of her Honda. “I saw you drive up in your li’l car,” he said.

“Yes?”

“You know that fella?”

“Which fellow?”

“That one there,” the man said, nodding toward her car, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.

She turned around. The skinned-up pale blue truck she had seen earlier was parked behind her Honda. A man was leaning inside the passenger window, his shoulder and elbow making a pulling and pushing motion. She left both the shrimp and her money on the vendor’s worktable and went to the car. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

The man straightened up. His hair was gelled into the shape of a cupcake, the skin fish-belly white where it was shaved above the ears. A strawberry birthmark bled out of his hairline into his collar. His mouth was a wide slit not unlike a frog’s, the upper lip duck-billed. There was a rolled newspaper in his hand. “I was playing with your pet,” he said.

“Were you poking him with that paper?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. No, I was just letting him paw and mouth it a little bit. I wasn’t poking him at all.”

“He’s sick and he’s old and he doesn’t need anyone messing with him. You step back from my car.”

“You don’t remember me?”

She gazed at him as one does at a pornographic image thrust unexpectedly before one’s eyes, not wanting to engage him, not wanting to enter the moral vacuity of his eyes, not wanting to look at the flare of his mouth and the wetness on his teeth and the yellowish discoloration in his skin that affected a suntan. “You were fishing out at the Abelard place,” she said.

“That’s right. My name is Vidor Perkins. I’m pleased to formally meet you. I’m one of the many unfortunates that is being he’ped by Robert Weingart and the St. Jude Project. I know a lot about coons. This one don’t look sick. If you ask me, he looks fat enough for roasting. Spoiled is what I’d call him. We’re not doing animals a favor when we spoil them.” He reached inside the window with the rolled newspaper and tapped it up and down between Tripod’s ears. “Bet he’s a twenty-pounder.”

“You get away from my animal or I’m going to slap you cross-eyed.”

“I’m just trying to be kindly. When critters are sick, and I mean real sick, like you’re telling me about this one, you got to put them down. Cheapest and best way to do it is with a burlap bag and some rocks.”

She reached in her purse for her cell phone.

“Calling your daddy? He burned up my gold watch, my cell phone, my sunglasses, and my cigarettes. Know why he did that? He was protecting that lesbian he works for. He thought she was gonna lose it and try to hit me upside the head. I admire a man like that.”

Alafair’s hand trembled as she punched in 911 on her phone.

“You’re a excitable thing, aren’t you?” he said. He wiped two fingers along her jaw and stuck them in his mouth, licking them from the knuckle to the nail as he removed them. “You doin’ anything tonight?”

Ten minutes later she was at my office, carrying Tripod with her, his head sticking out the top of the box. She told me everything that had just happened by the fruit stand. “I want to get a concealed-weapons permit,” she said.

“It’s not a bad idea,” I said.

“I stopped by the restroom and washed my face. My skin feels like a snail crawled across it. Are you going to have him picked up?”

She waited for my answer. I realized I was gazing at her without seeing her. “It’s what he wants,” I said. “It’s obvious Robert Weingart sicced him on you, but I think Weingart’s motive has less to do with you than me.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because they’re both con-wise. They have an agenda. It’s about the St. Jude Project or the deaths of the girls in Jeff Davis Parish or the Canadian girl we found buried on the Delahoussaye property. It also involves the Abelards and, I think, Layton Blanchet. The connections are all there, but I can’t get a net over them.”

I saw Helen through the glass window in my door. She pointed at me and mouthed the words “My office,” then walked away.

“How dangerous is this guy Perkins?” Alafair asked.

“He has no moral bottom. He’s probably killed people. He and Weingart both jack-rolled Social Security recipients. He was a suspect in an apartment-house fire that killed a child.”

Her eyes filmed. “You’re telling me I’ve been a fool?”

“No, I’m saying you’re like most good people, Alafair. Our greatest virtue, our trust of our fellow man, is our greatest weakness.”

Tripod had started to climb out of his box. She picked him up and straightened his blanket and forced him to lie down again.

“I think he’s feeling better,” I said.

“How do I get the gun permit?”

I took an application form out of my desk drawer. Many years ago I had started keeping the forms there for one reason and for one reason only: I had finally stopped pretending to people who had been stalked, terrorized by mail and over the phone, sexually degraded, assaulted with a deadly weapon, tortured, and gang-raped. No, that’s badly stated. I had stopped lying about how our system works. Perpetrators of horrific crimes are often released on bond without either the victims or the witnesses being notified. Witnesses and victims are told they need only to testify in a truthful manner and the person who has made their lives a misery will be put away forever. In law enforcement, bromides of that kind are distributed with the blandness of someone offering an aspirin as a curative for pancreatic cancer. Visit a battered women’s shelter and come to your own conclusions about how successfully our system works. Or chat up a judge who releases child molesters to a counseling program and lectures a rape victim on her provocative way of dressing.

These aren’t hyperbolic examples. They’re as common as someone spitting out his bubble gum on a sidewalk.

“You’re not going to bring Perkins in?” Alafair said.

“I’m not sure. While you fill this out, I need to talk to Helen.”

“About bringing in Perkins?”

“So far we haven’t found any handles on these guys, Alf.”

When I entered Helen’s office and saw her face, I knew we were not going to be talking about Alafair’s encounter with Vidor Perkins. A gold pen, inside a small Ziploc bag, was sitting on top of Helen’s desk blotter. “Recognize that?” she asked.

“Not offhand.”

“Look at it closely.”

I picked up the Ziploc bag and, with two fingers, held it up against the light from the window.

“Can you read the inscription?” she said.

“It says ‘Love to Clete from Alicia.’”

“Who’s Alicia?” she asked.

“Alicia Rosecrans, an FBI agent Clete was involved with in Montana.”

“Involved with?”

“They were an item for a while. What’s the big deal about the pen?”

“A pool cleaner found it at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool this morning.”

“What’s the pool cleaner doing at the house of a dead man?”

“Stanga had paid three months in advance for the service. Why is the first thing out of your mouth a question about the maintenance man rather than how the pen got in Stanga’s swimming pool?”

“Maybe Clete went to see him.”

“I talked with Clete two days after Stanga was murdered. He said he had been by Stanga’s house but had never been on the property. You look a little uncomfortable.”

“Clete wouldn’t shoot somebody in cold blood.”

“By his own admission, he was in a blackout the night Stanga died. He doesn’t know what he did. How is it that you do? Tell me how you acquired this great omniscience, Dave.”

“Don’t buy into this crap, Helen.”

“You get your damn head on straight. This pen puts Clete at the scene of a homicide. He denies ever having been there, but he admits he had a blackout the night of the crime. What if a perp said that to you?”

I tried to speak, but she interrupted me. “You’ve spent years attending meetings. Why do people usually have alcoholic blackouts?” she said.

“They’re caused by a chemical assault on the brain.”

“Try again.”

“Sometimes drunks can’t deal with what they’ve done.”

“Good. We got that out of the way. Now get out of here and do some serious casework and stop fronting points for Clete. I’m really tired of it.”

“Has the pen been to the lab?”

“Yeah, it has.”

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “Whose prints are on it?” I said.

“Nobody’s.”

“That’s funny, isn’t it? Clete’s pen doesn’t have Clete’s prints on it? Maybe he was wearing latex when he put it in his pocket.” I could see her chest rising and falling, her irritation reaching critical mass, but I didn’t care. I went on, “Vidor Perkins put his hand on my daughter’s face this morning. At the fruit stand by the bayou.”

“Tell Alafair to file battery charges.”

“Maybe we should bust Perkins for littering as well.”

She picked up the Ziploc bag with the gold pen inside it and dropped it again. It hit the blotter with a sound like a rock falling. “You want to make clever and cynical statements? That’s fine. But this pen won’t go away. How do you think I feel about investigating an old friend like Clete? You think you’re the only person in the department with feelings?”

“What’s the name of the pool cleaner?” I asked.

I found him three hours later in St. Martinville, dragging an underwater vacuum on a telescopic pole along the bottom of a swimming pool behind a house owned by a black city councilman. I had known him for years. His name was Felton Leger, and he used to coach Little League baseball in New Iberia. He had a deformed foot and had to wear a special boot for it, but he had always been a man of good cheer and goodwill who was known for his decency and his loyalty to his family and friends. Why do I mention these things? Because I wanted the pool man to be someone else, someone whose word was suspect and who would be willing, if the price was right, to set up Clete Purcel.

But no such luck. Felton Leger was an honest man. “There was a lot of slash-pine needles on the bottom, big globs of them,” he said. “I almost didn’t see the pen. Then the vacuum sucked up a bunch of needles and I seen the pen lying there like a big gold bug. So I fished it out wit’ the seine and dumped it in a paper bag and called the sheriff’s department, ’cause I figured y’all would be wanting to look at it. I didn’t like the man who lived there. But it was the law’s job to get rid of him, not some killer.”

“Did you touch it or dry it off?”

“I knew better than to do that. I dropped it right in the bag.”

“You did the right thing, Felton. When was the last time you cleaned the pool?”

“One month ago.”

“Could the pen have been in there then?”

“No, sir. When I clean the pool, I clean the pool.”

“How many people know your schedule?”

“Just me. Sometimes I might tell my wife where I’m gonna be on a particular day.”

“How many people know you serviced Herman Stanga’s pool?”

“Maybe I said something to my wife. Maybe not. I don’t remember. The bank owns the house now. Stanga had borrowed a bunch of money on it and wasn’t making his payments.”

“Didn’t he always pay you in advance?”

“’Cause I made him. I knew he was a deadbeat. If you ax me, I think he was fixing to leave town. That’s why he let the lawn burn up and the dogs dump all over the place. He kept up the pool to entertain his chippies.”

“I see. Where’s your wife work?”

“At the sheriff’s department. She’s a night dispatcher.”

I tried to place her but couldn’t. “In New Iberia?”

“No, here in St. Martinville. This is where we live now,” he said.

It was after three P.M. when I got back to town. I called Clete’s office and was told by Hulga, his secretary, that he was at Baron’s health club. I found him in a back room alone, dressed in sweatpants, his T-shirt splitting on his back while he squatted and hoisted a two-hundred-pound bar above his head, his neck bulging, his face almost purple.

“Have you lost your mind? You’re going to slip a disk,” I said.

He dropped the bar on the floor, his breath escaping like air from a collapsed balloon. “Dave,” he gasped, unable to finish the statement.

“What?” I said.

“What? You ask what?” He sat on a bench and put his face in a towel. “Will you give me a break? I’d rather be married. You follow me everywhere I go. I get no peace. You’re worse than my ex.” He breathed slowly, in and out, sweat leaking out of his eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”

It was not a time to be completely honest. I told him what had happened to Alafair at the fruit stand and made no mention of the gold pen that had been found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s pool, one inscribed to him by the FBI agent Alicia Rosecrans. He listened quietly, wiping his throat and the back of his neck with the towel. “Say that last part again. He put his hand on her cheek and licked his fingers?”

“Something like that,” I replied.

“Let me shower and get dressed and we’ll pay him a visit.”

“I’ll handle it.”

He looked at me from under his brow. “Like how?”

“I’m not sure yet. When Helen and I rousted him at his house, he seemed to suggest he could be a friend to the department, like he knew about the inner workings of an operation that was larger in importance than he and Robert Weingart were.”

“You ever know a meltdown who was different? They bypassed toilet training and shoe tying, but they’re experts on everything from brain surgery to running the White House. Why would Perkins want to help y’all? He’s not on parole, and he doesn’t have any charges hanging over his head. This guy wouldn’t lift a toilet seat unless there was something in it for him.”

“Money.”

“From who?”

I let the thread die. I still had not broached the question about the gold pen, primarily because I was in the position of investigating a friend I wanted to protect against the consequences of the investigation I was conducting. I tried to convince myself I was “excluding” Clete as a suspect in the death of Herman Stanga. But Clete’s history of violence, even though most of it was on the side of justice, indicated a level of rage that had little connection to the miscreants he visited it upon and everything to do with a young boy who was not allowed to eat supper and was forced to kneel for hours on rice grains and, with regularity, feel his father’s razor strop whipped savagely across his buttocks. The thought of Clete Purcel in a blackout, in proximity to a sneering misogynistic pimp like Herman Stanga, made me shudder. The fact that Stanga had publicly gloated over the prospect of sending Clete to Angola made me wonder if indeed the most logical suspect on the planet for the Stanga homicide wasn’t sitting three feet from me.

I went back to the entrance of the barbell room and shut the door. I saw the expression change in Clete’s face. “What’s the deal?” he asked.

“Where’s the gold pen Alicia Rosecrans gave you?”

His T-shirt was gray with sweat. He pulled it loose from his neck and shook the fabric to cool himself, his green eyes empty. “I don’t know. Maybe at my office. Or in my dresser,” he said. “I don’t like to think about Alicia a lot. I thought maybe she and I would be together for a while. Like always, that didn’t happen. What’s so important about the pen?”

“When is the last time you saw it?”

“I don’t remember. What is this crap?”

“It showed up in an unlikely place. Stop avoiding the question, Clete.”

“I don’t remember where I put it. I didn’t want to see it again. I wish I had thrown it away. Every time I looked at it, it made me feel bad.”

“Who had access to it?”

“How do I know when I don’t remember where I put it?” Then, illogically, he said, “My secretary comes in my office. The skells come in my office. People visit my cottage. The cleaning woman. Look, I remember Wee Willie Bimstine borrowing it once. Maybe he didn’t give it back. Or maybe it was Nig who borrowed it.”

“It was found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool.”

He widened his eyes and squeezed his mouth with one hand and wiped his hand on his pants. “Who found it?”

“The pool cleaner. He’s a straight-up guy.”

We were both silent. Somebody opened the door and started to come in. “We’re tied up in here right now,” I said.

The door closed and the person went away. “Helen says you told her you were never on Stanga’s property,” I said.

“That’s right, I was never there.”

“Who might have taken the pen out of your office or your cottage?”

“Layton Blanchet came to my office when he hired me to follow his wife around. I’ve had a couple of female guests at the cottage. I’m not necessarily talking about the boom-boom express, maybe just for drinks or something to eat before we went to the casino.”

“Emma Poche was one of them?”

“Definitely.”

“But what?”

“That was the boom-boom express — in the sack, on the furniture, in the shower, maybe on the ceiling. I crashed into the wall with her and cracked the plaster. She deserves her own zip code down there. It was like swimming in the Caribbean. I told her she was part mermaid.”

“Will you stop that?”

“I’m trying to tell you we were occupied. She wasn’t rifling my dresser or closet or whenever I lost that damn pen.”

“You didn’t sleep?”

“I think both of us kind of passed out.”

“So you don’t know what she did?”

“She’s not that kind of person, Dave.”

“Yeah, I know. You told me she’s cute because she has a tattoo on her butt.”

“You ought to see it.”

“When are you going to grow up? Don’t you realize how serious this is?”

“What am I supposed to do, go into mourning for myself? I don’t care if I was blacked out or not. I didn’t pop Stanga. If other people don’t believe me, that’s their problem. How about I treat you and Molly and Alafair to dinner at the casino tonight? You’re giving me a headache here.”

I left the health club and called Molly and said I was working late and that I was not sure when I would be home.

“Alafair told me about her encounter with that creep Perkins,” she said. “Is this related?”

“I’m not sure where he is right now.”

“Is Clete with you?”

“No, I just left him at the health club.”

“Let Helen and the department handle this.”

“Sure.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“If you’re going after this guy, I want to be with you.”

“I’ll call you back later. Everything is fine. I just got a little behind in my schedule today.”

“Don’t you hang up on me.”

“I’m losing the signal,” I said.

My statement to Molly had not been a total lie. In truth, I had no plan about Vidor Perkins. He was obviously a psychopath, inured to threats and pain and deprivation by a lifetime of institutionalization. Worse, he delighted in attention, particularly when he had an audience. Any con who turns down parole from a joint like Huntsville and of his own volition does twenty-seven months in a cotton field under the tender and loving supervision of mounted Texas gunbulls has demonstrated a degree of toughness that cannot be dismissed easily. Also, I still believed that Perkins had an agenda that may have involved betrayal of either the Abelards or Layton Blanchet or Robert Weingart. But I couldn’t be sure. In fact, I could not be sure about anything in this case, except that Perkins had to leave my daughter alone.

I drove down Old Jeanerette Road through fields of waving sugarcane and past the whitewashed crypts that stood in a shady copse, the ground green with lichen that looked as soft as felt, all of it five feet from a bend in the road, like an abiding visual reminder, at least for me, of the earth’s gravitational claim upon the quick.

I pulled into Perkins’s gravel driveway. His stucco bungalow was already deep in shadow inside the pecan trees and slash pines that surrounded it, his pickup truck parked under the porte cochere. His flower beds were mulched and blooming with azaleas and impatiens and rosebushes. A water bird jittered a rainbowlike haze across the front lawn. On the far side of the two-lane, the property extended all the way down to the Teche, a long grassy slope pooled with the shade of giant live oaks that were silhouetted against a red sun. It was an idyllic scene except for the little black girl who sat on the front steps, her knees pinched close together, her hands knotted in her lap.

I got out of my pickup and walked toward her. From the backyard, I could hear a thick, whapping sound, like a hard object striking a canvas or plastic cover. The little girl was the same one Helen and I had told not to visit Vidor Perkins’s home by herself again.

“Remember me?” I said.

“Yes, suh. You and the lady drove me home,” she replied.

“You promised us you wouldn’t come back here without your mommy.”

“She dropped me off. She takes care of a sick lady. My auntie couldn’t keep me.” She spoke in a monotone, her face empty.

I sat down on the steps, one step lower than she was. I gazed at the bayou. “Your name is Clara?”

“Yes, suh.”

“Did something bad happen at Mr. Vidor’s house today, Clara?”

In the silence, I could hear the slash pines swaying in the wind, the pine needles tinkling on the rain gutters.

“Clara, nothing bad will happen to you for telling the truth. Did Mr. Vidor do something he shouldn’t have?”

“I want to go back home now.”

“I’ll take you there, I promise. But you need to tell me what Mr. Vidor did.”

“Took my picture.”

“In what way?”

“Suh?”

“How were you dressed when he took your picture?” I heard the whapping sound from the backyard again. “Were you wearing your dress and your shirt just like you are now?”

“Mr. Vidor tole me to lie on the couch. He tole me to put my thumb in my mout’. Then he tole me to put my hands behind my head.”

“How many pictures did he take of you, Clara?”

“Two or t’ree.”

“Did Mr. Vidor touch you at all in a place he shouldn’t have?”

“No, suh. He just took the pictures. I tole him I didn’t want to do that no more, and he stopped.”

“Okay, Clara. I want you to wait here while I straighten out a couple of things with Mr. Vidor. Then I’ll take you home and a lady will come out from the sheriff’s department and stay with you until your mommy gets off work. But you remember what I say: You’re a good little girl. You’ve helped out a police officer, and that’s what good guys do. You’re one of the good guys, do you understand that?”

I walked around the side of the house just as Vidor Perkins pulled back an archer’s bow and drove an arrow into a plastic bull’s-eye draped across a stack of hay bales. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then pulled another arrow from the quiver on his back and fitted the shaft on the bow string. “I figured you’d be along directly,” he said. He lifted the bow, pulling back the string, his shoulders taut with tension. A second after he released the shaft, it whapped dead center in the target, quivering with a sound like a twanged bobby pin.

“Help me out here, Mr. Perkins,” I said. “I think Robert Weingart told you to give my daughter the worst time you could. But I think the motivation is more than simple jealousy. You guys want to become known as victims of police harassment because you know you’re going to be suspects in a homicide investigation. Let me take my theory one step further. You have a personal agenda, and it involves selling out both the Abelards and your jailhouse podjo and maybe even Layton Blanchet.”

“Cain’t say as I know Mr. Blanchet, although I’ve heard his name. But I’ll give your words some study and get back to you on that.”

“My daughter has applied for a concealed-weapons permit. In the meantime, I’m giving her a Smith and Wesson Airweight thirty-eight. If you come near her again, she’s going to blow your head off. If she doesn’t, I will. We’ll sort out the legalities later. But you won’t be there to see it.”

He took another arrow from his quiver but did not notch it on the bow string. He blew on the feathers, then stroked them into shape with his fingers. “She smells like peaches when you peel the skin off,” he said. “Must be a treat to have something like that around the house.”

“I want you to go inside now and get your camera and bring it back out here.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because the photos you took of that little girl probably don’t meet the standard of prosecutable evidence. In a borderline case like this, you’ll probably skate. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to keep the pictures or put them on the Internet. What that means, Mr. Perkins, is you’re going to voluntarily destroy the memory card or the film or whatever is in your camera.”

“Come back with a warrant and you can discuss it with my attorney.”

“I see,” I said.

“You look like you got shit on your nose, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“We don’t come up against your kind every day, so you’ll have to excuse me. You’re pretty slick.”

He gazed at me a long time, his skin a chemical yellow in the sun’s glow, the wind puffing his shirt, his arrow notched now, his fingers relaxed on the string. “Your daughter could have filed battery charges, but she didn’t. Know why?” he said. “She don’t want to admit in a courtroom she cain’t handle a man’s attentions. They all got the same weakness. The big V. Vanity. Like the Bible says.”

I turned and walked out of the yard. “You cain’t touch me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he called at my back. “I’m floating outside your window like a hummingbird. I’ll always know where you and your family are at. But you won’t know where and when I might show up. Till one day I come peekaboo-ing by.”

I opened the door to my pickup and felt under the seat. The baton was an old one, the only souvenir I took with me when I was fired from the New Orleans Police Department. It was made of oak, knurled on the grip, lathe-troweled with three rings below the tip, drilled through the center and filled with a steel bolt, its black paint nicked, a leather thong threaded through the handle. In the old days, when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, a cop in trouble or chasing a perp would whang his baton on the pavement or a curb as a distress signal to other cops. There was no concrete in Vidor Perkins’s yard and no other cops in the vicinity. And no one else in his backyard except him and me. He had just fired an arrow at his target and didn’t hear me coming. I bent low when I swung the baton and caught him high up on the calf, right behind the knee. His mouth fell open and he dropped to the ground like a child genuflecting in church.

He breathed loudly through his mouth, as though his tongue had been scalded. Then he squeezed both hands behind his knee, his face splitting with a grin, his eyes closed in slits. “Oh, Lordy, that’s a mean stripe you lay on a man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He let out a gleeful howl as though blowing a storm out of his chest. “I understand she’s your foster kid. I hear that opens up the parameters. I bet when she was eighteen, a man had to tie a board acrost his rear end not to fall in.”

I could feel my fingers finding new purchase on the baton’s handle, the leather thong looped loosely on my wrist bones. I could feel a vein of black electricity crawling through my arm into my shoulder, down my right side, and through my back and chest. He made me think of a medieval jester mocking his executioner as he knelt before the chopping block. I could feel my whole body becoming a torqued spring that would find release only when I whipped the baton across Perkins’s temple and watched his eyes go senseless and dead. The procedural explanation was already available. I wouldn’t even have to use a throwdown. He had committed a crime upon a child. I had tried to search him before hooking him up. He had whirled and gotten his hands on his archer’s bow. The blows I’d delivered were in self-defense and not intended to be fatal. As I had these thoughts, I saw Vidor Perkins’s time on earth coming to an end.

Then I heard the little black girl. She was standing at the back corner of the house, weeping and hiccuping, shaking uncontrollably, unable to deal with what she had witnessed. “It’s okay, Clara,” I said.

“You lose again, Mr. Robicheaux,” Perkins said.

“I guess you could say that.”

“I ain’t hurt that little girl. Down deep inside you know it.”

“‘Better they fasten millstones about their necks and cast themselves into the sea.’ Know where that comes from, Mr. Perkins?”

“Jesus was talking about the scribes and Pharisees that misled the innocent, not the likes of me. I ain’t mussed a hair on that girl’s head. No, sir.”

“I’ll be around.”

“Come back any time.”

I went inside his house and came back out with a camera I found on the kitchen table. I set it on the back step and smashed it into junk with my foot. Perkins had pulled himself up by holding on to the trunk of a pine tree. He continued to grip it, like a man on board a pitching ship. He gazed at a black cloud moving across the sun. “The devil is fixing to beat his wife,” he said. “When you were looking at my jacket, did you check my IQ? My grammar may not be too hot, but my IQ is higher than Robert’s. Down the road, you’ll see who walks away with the most marbles. It ain’t gonna be Robert Weingart or them Abelards, either.”

I drove the little girl to her house and walked her inside just as a shower of hailstones clattered on her roof and danced on the dirt yard.