The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 15

Molly and I attended four P.M. Mass in Loreauville that Saturday, with plans to go to dinner and a movie afterward in Lafayette. Alafair was at home by herself, working on her novel, when the phone rang. “Miss Alafair?” the voice said.

“Yes?” Alafair said.

“It’s Jewel, Mr. Timothy’s nurse.”

In her mind’s eye, Alafair saw the big, ubiquitous black woman in the starched white uniform who constantly attended Timothy Abelard in his home and took him everywhere he went. What was the rumor about her? That she was Abelard’s illegitimate daughter?

“Mr. Timothy axed if you’d come out to see him,” Jewel said.

“Then ask him to call me, Miss Jewel,” Alafair replied.

“He’s embarrassed.”

“Excuse me?”

“By the way you were treated by Mr. Robert. He knows all about it.”

“Miss Jewel, you’ve called me and done your job, so this isn’t a reflection upon you. But if Mr. Abelard wants to talk with me, he needs to call me personally. You tell him I said that, please.”

“Yes, ma’am. He said to tell you his son and Mr. Robert aren’t there right now.”

“I understand. Thanks for calling, Miss Jewel. Good-bye,” Alafair said. She replaced the receiver and went back to her room and began work on her manuscript again. Through the back window she could see the shadows growing in the trees, the afternoon sun ablaze like a bronze shield on the bayou. The phone rang in the kitchen once more. This time she checked the caller ID. It was blocked. “Hello,” she said, hoping it was not who she thought it was.

“Oh, hello, Miss Robicheaux. It’s Timothy Abelard. I hope I’m not bothering you,” the voice said.

“Miss Jewel gave me your message, Mr. Abelard. I appreciate your courtesy, but no apology is necessary regarding Kermit.”

“That’s very gracious of you. But I feel terrible about what’s occurred. I don’t know your father well, but I was quite an admirer of your grandfather, Big Aldous. He was an extraordinary individual, generous of spirit and always brave at heart. It saddens me that any member of my family or an associate of my family would offend his granddaughter in any fashion.”

Timothy Abelard’s voice and diction were as melodic and hypnotizing as branch water flowing over stone. The syllabic emphasis created an iambic cadence, like lines taken from an Elizabethan sonnet, and the r ’s were so soft they almost disappeared from the vowels and consonants surrounding them. If an earlier development of technology had allowed the recording of Robert E. Lee’s voice, Alafair suspected, it would sound like Timothy Abelard’s.

“How can I help you?” she found herself saying.

“Jewel is only a couple of blocks from you. Let her drive you to my home. My son and his friend Robert are away right now. We’ll have a cup of tea, and I promise Jewel will return you to New Iberia before dark.”

“I don’t know how that will serve any purpose, Mr. Abelard.”

“I’m elderly and bound to a wheelchair, and I don’t have many possessions I consider of value except the honorable name of my family. I feel, in this instance, it’s been sullied. I ask you to visit me for no more than a few minutes. I will have no peace until you do so.”

She thought about driving herself to the Abelard home, but her car was being serviced at the Texaco station down the street. “I’d be happy to come out,” she said.

Moments later, the nurse pulled a Lincoln Town Car into the driveway, the oak leaves drifting out of the sunset onto the shiny black surface.

Timothy Abelard was on the lawn in his wheelchair when Alafair arrived on the island where his home seemed to rise out of its own elegant decay. He was dressed in a beige suit and an open-necked crimson shirt, one that had a metallic sheen to it, his black tie-shoes buffed to a dull luster. Since Alafair’s last visit there, a landscape architect had hung baskets of flowers from the upstairs veranda and lined the walks and pathways with potted palms and orchid trees and flaming hibiscus, as though trying to import the season to a place where it would not take hold of its own accord. Against the backdrop of stricken trees in the lagoon and the termite infestation of the house, the transported floral ambience on the property made Alafair think of flowers scattered on a grave in an isolated woods.

“I’m so glad you could come,” Mr. Abelard said, extending his hand.

Someone had already placed a beach umbrella in a metal stand on the lawn, and under it a chair for her to sit in. Timothy Abelard was sitting in the shade of the umbrella, a photo album open on his lap. When Alafair sat down, she found herself unconsciously pinching her knees together, her hands folded. Mr. Abelard smiled, his eyes examining her, one eye a bit smaller and brighter than the other. “I was just looking at some photos taken when I was a bit younger,” he said. “In Banff and at Lake Louise, in Alberta. Here, take a look.”

He turned the scrapbook around so she could see the photos in detail. In one, Abelard was standing on a great stone porch of some kind, perhaps on the back of a hotel. Behind him were banks of flowers that were so thick and variegated in color that they dazzled the eyes. In the distance were dark blue mountains razored against the sky, their snowcapped tops so high they disappeared into the clouds. In another photo, Abelard was eating on a terrace not far from a green lake surrounded by golden poppies. A glacier stood at the headwaters of the lake, and at the table where Abelard was dining sat a man with patent-leather-black hair. He was suntanned and wearing shades and a black shirt unbuttoned on his chest.

“That’s Robert Weingart,” she said.

Abelard turned the scrapbook back around on his lap. “No, you’re mistaken. That fellow is someone else.”

Before she could speak again, he said, “You have your father’s features.”

“Dave is my foster parent. He pulled me from a submerged airplane when I was very small,” she said. “I think I was born in El Salvador, but I can’t be sure. My mother died in the plane crash.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Are you a citizen today?”

“In my opinion, I am.”

“Legality and morality are not always the same thing, is that it? That’s an interesting perception. How is your novel progressing?”

“Fine. Thank you for asking. What is all this about, Mr. Abelard?”

When he grinned, his mouth exposed an incisor tooth, and the sunlight seemed to pool in the eye that was smaller and more liquid than the other. “In part, it’s about what I just mentioned — morality as opposed to legality. This man named Vidor Perkins, a past associate of Robert Weingart, was hanging around the island. I had to run him off. Now Robert has informed me that Mr. Perkins is writing a book containing fabrications about my family. In the eyes of the law, this man has completed his prison sentence in the state of Texas, and legally, he has every right to be in our community. But in my view, he does not have the moral right, particularly when he slanders others. What are your feelings about that, Miss Robicheaux?”

“I don’t have any feelings about it at all. I have nothing to say about this man except that I didn’t bring him here.”

“But I did?”

She looked at the sunlight on the dead cypress trees in the lagoon and didn’t reply.

“Well, reticence is a statement in itself,” Abelard said. “My grandson is weak. But I suspect you’ve learned that.”

“Sir?”

“It’s not his fault. His parents died when he was a teenager, and I protected and spoiled him. He’s worked with his hands in the oil field and championed all kinds of leftist causes, but inside he’s always been a scared little boy. So he attached himself to Robert and thought that would give him the masculine dimension he doesn’t possess in his own right. Unfortunately for him, his dependency on Robert cost him his relationship with you, didn’t it?”

“I don’t dwell on it. I don’t think you should, either.”

“My hearing isn’t all that it should be. Would you repeat that?”

“No.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“No, I won’t repeat it. And I won’t talk about Kermit. You said your family’s honor had been sullied and you would have no peace unless you set something straight. If you’re telling me that somehow your family name has been tarred because of an offense committed against me, you’re seriously overrating the importance of your family. I couldn’t care less about what Kermit or Robert Weingart did or didn’t do. I feel sorry for Kermit, but he made his choice. As far as Robert Weingart is concerned, if you wanted him out of this community, he’d be gone in twenty-four hours. Why don’t you deal with your own culpability and stop demeaning your grandson?”

“You’re speaking to me as though I’m benighted. Or perhaps condemned by God for my sins and unworthy of respect.”

“I don’t know what your sins are.”

“Be assured they are many. But not of the kind you think — greed and misuse of power and all the kind of nonsense that liberals like to rave on and on about. If there is a great sin in my life for which I’ll be held to account, it lies in not accepting the rules of mortality.”

“Sir?”

“You’re not deaf, are you?” he said, smiling, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “Paul Gauguin wrote, ‘Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.’ I’ve tried to buy back my youth, with various degrees of success. They say it can’t be done, but they’re wrong. Youth isn’t a matter of physical appearance. It resides in one’s deeds. It doesn’t die until the heart and the brain and the glands die. Those who say different not only give up the joy of living but seek the grave.”

“You’ve found the secret to eternal youth?”

“No, it’s not eternal. But its pleasures can be magnified with age rather than surrendered.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because my grandson is a fool and didn’t know what he had.”

His mouth flexed slightly, and she saw the tip of his tongue wet his lip. An odor like menthol rub and dried perspiration seemed to rise from his clothes.

“I think I’ll go now.”

“I’ve offended you?”

“Not me. Perhaps God. But I’m not sure He would waste his time on you, Mr. Abelard.”

“You’re a mixture of Spaniard and Indian. Your heritage is the Inquisition and blood sacrifice on a stone altar. You think those are removed by a cleric splashing water on you? I read part of your novel, the one you gave to Kermit. You’re a talented and intelligent young woman. Why do you talk the theological rot of a fishwife?”

She stood up from the chair and took a breath. “I’m going to walk across your bridge and down your road. You can send Miss Jewel to pick me up and take me home. Or you can decide not to, whichever you prefer.”

“Stay,” he said, one hand reaching out toward her like a claw.

Then she saw the speedboat out on the bay, Robert Weingart at the wheel, Kermit being towed on skis in the wake.

“You lied,” she said.

“About what?”

“You told Miss Jewel to tell me they were away.”

“They were. Out on the boat. That’s what ‘away’ means. They weren’t here.”

“You had me fooled for a minute, Mr. Abelard,” she said. “I thought you might be a genuinely wicked man. Instead, you’re simply a cheap liar. Excuse me, sir, but you excite an emotion in me that I can only express as yuck.”

She began walking across the bridge, her purse on her shoulder, her dress swaying on the backs of her thighs, her shoes loud on the planks. For a moment she thought she could feel the eyes of Timothy Abelard burrowing into her back; then she went around a bend in the road bordered on each side by undergrowth and thick stands of timber. A solitary blue heron glided above her, its wings stenciled against the sky. It turned in a wide arc and landed in the shallows of a green pond that resembled a giant teardrop. Through the trees she could see it pecking at its feathers, unconcerned about her presence or the sound of her footfalls on the road or the motorboat with Robert Weingart at the wheel streaking across the bay. Somehow the sight of the bird and its ability to find the place it needed to be seemed to contain a lesson that perhaps she had forgotten. In moments, the easy rhythm of walking and the wind bending the gum trees and the slash pines had erased the exchange with Timothy Abelard from her mind, and she concentrated on trying to get service on her cell phone.

Alafair was still up when Molly and I got home from the movie theater in Lafayette. She told us what had happened on the Abelards’ island.

“Abelard didn’t send a car to take you home?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“You had to walk all the way to the highway to get a cab?” I said.

“It wasn’t that far.” She was sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen, her shoes off, a bowl of ice cream in front of her.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Because I didn’t want to take you away from your evening out. Because it’s not a big deal.”

I went to the telephone on the counter and picked up the receiver, then set it down again. “I suspect Abelard’s number is unlisted. Do you have it?”

“He’s just an old man. Leave him alone,” she said.

“Don’t underestimate him.”

“He’s pathetic. You didn’t see him.”

“You know the term ‘the banality of evil’? When Adolf Eichmann was captured by Israeli commandos, he was working as a chrome polisher in an automobile plant, a guy who helped send six million people to their deaths.”

“Mr. Abelard is a shriveled-up worm and should be treated as nothing less and nothing more,” she replied. “Put it in neutral, big guy.”

“Listen to Dave, Alafair,” Molly said. “Timothy Abelard bought politicians and the law most of his life. No one is sure what kinds of crimes he may have committed. If he had you brought out to his island, it may have been for a purpose you don’t want to think about.”

Alafair set down her spoon on a napkin and looked at it. She rubbed her temple and picked up her bowl of ice cream and placed it inside the freezer. “He showed me some pictures that were taken years ago in the Canadian Rockies. In one of them, he was sitting at a table with a man who looked like Robert Weingart. Except Mr. Abelard looked twenty years younger in the photo, and Robert looked like he does today.”

“Weingart has had plastic surgery. There’s no telling how old he is,” I said. “I’ve pulled his jacket in three states. He’s been giving different birth years throughout his entire criminal career.”

“You think Mr. Abelard showed me that photo by mistake, or he had an agenda?” she asked.

“I think he had one thing only on his mind, Alafair,” I said.

“I want to take another shower,” she said.

I went to the refrigerator and took Alafair’s bowl of ice cream out of the freezer as well as an unopened half gallon of French vanilla, then got a jar of blackberries from down below and placed two more bowls on the counter. “A pox on the Abelards and a pox on Robert Weingart,” I said. “Bring Tripod and Snuggs inside, and bring in their bowls, too.”

“Dave, do you think Timothy Abelard killed those girls?” Alafair asked.

“Do I think he’s capable of it?” I said. “I’m not sure. Mr. Abelard is a shadow, not a presence. I don’t think he’s like the rest of us. But I have no idea what or who he is.”

Once in a while, even the slowest of us has an epiphany, a brief glimpse through the shroud when we see the verities reduced to a simple equation. For someone whose profession requires him to place himself inside the mind of aberrant people, the challenge is often daunting. Then, as if you’re tripping on a rock in the middle of a foot-worn, clay-smooth path, you suddenly become aware that the complexity you wish to unravel exists to a greater degree in your own mind than in the problem itself.

Early Sunday morning, while Molly and Alafair were still asleep, I walked down East Main in the fog, past The Shadows, hoping to find a breakfast spot open. On the far side of The Shadows, where a gravel drive leads down to the bayou between a long wall of green bamboo and the old brick Ford dealership that has been converted into law offices, I thought I heard footsteps behind me. When I turned around, I could see nothing but fog puffing through the piked fence on The Shadows’ lawn, swallowing the streetlamps, rising into the live oaks overhead. I crossed the gravel drive and continued down the street toward the drawbridge, where I could hear a boat blowing its horn to gain the tender’s attention. Then I heard footsteps behind me again. This time, when I turned around, I held my ground and waited, my gaze fastened on the figure walking out of the mist toward me.

A small pink digital camera, one that a woman might own, hung on a strap from one shoulder. A leather carrying case, one that could have held either binoculars or just odds and ends, hung from the other. Notebooks and several pens were stuffed in his shirt pockets. He wore a flat-brimmed straw hat that had a black band around the crown, the kind a nineteenth-century planter might have worn. But his shirt was tucked in and he wasn’t wearing a coat and his hands were empty, and I thought it unlikely he had a weapon on his person.

What is the lesson that most cops and traditional mainline cons have learned since the 1960s regarding America’s prisons? It’s simple. With the exception of those caught up in the three-strikes-and-you’re-out legislation of the 1990s, almost anyone who does time today either is incurably defective or wants to be inside. If you don’t believe me, check out who’s on the yard. The swollen deltoids and shaved heads and outrageous one-color tats are cosmetic. The first thing a frightened pagan does is paint his face blue and disfigure his skin. The simian brow and the wide-set eyes and the mouth that is like a raw slit tell the story of the crowd on the yard much more accurately. From the time most of them threw a curbstone through a window or set fire to their middle school or boosted a car and drove it across spike strips at one hundred miles an hour, they were looking for a way to punch a hole in the dimension and return to a place where people grunted in front of their caves and knocked down their food with a rock. I can’t say I blame them. We’re running out of space. But I think the crowd by the weight sets on the yard would be the first to say that societal injustice has little to do with the factors that put them in prison.

“You wouldn’t bird-dog a fellow on Sunday morning, would you, Mr. Perkins?” I said.

“I was just taking a walk, not unlike yourself, Detective Robicheaux,” he said.

“You’re ten miles from your house, Mr. Perkins.”

“That’s true. But I love New Iberia’s downtown area. As long as you’re here, I’d like to ask you some questions regarding my book. I watched Miss Alafair at Mr. Abelard’s house through my field glasses yesterday.”

“You did what?”

“She was in no danger, sir. I had my eye on her the whole time she was there. If anything had happened, I would have called you right away. Or I might have taken action myself.”

“You’re spying on my daughter or the Abelards?”

“I’m not spying on nobody. I’m doing research on my book. But I have to admit I’ve taken a liking to you. Your daughter, too, yes, sir. You’re dealing with a dangerous bunch. You’re an educated and respectable man, so you see these people from the top down. I see them from the bottom up. I’m not sure what the bigger scheme is, but I know these people ain’t what they pretend to be. Robert Weingart thinks he’s got them outsmarted, but when they’re done with him, he’d best look out, that’s all I can say. What about you and me teaming up?”

“Say again?”

“We ain’t so different. You got a keen eye about people, Detective Robicheaux. You know the Abelards for what they are. Their kind wouldn’t spit in my mouth if I was dying of thirst in the Sahara. From what I hear, you grew up pretty much like I did. The Abelards and their ilk treat your folks pretty good?”

I gazed at the lunatical vacuity in his eyes and was convinced that whatever motives drove him, that whatever thoughts he actually had, that whatever his real life experience was, none of it would ever be known by anyone except God.

“Don’t follow me anymore, Mr. Perkins. If you do, I’ll have a cruiser pick you up,” I said.

“That downright hurts my feelings.”

“Call my business number if you need to. Or come by the office. Send me a postcard. But do not follow me or come near my house.”

“I been watching your back. Your daughter’s, too. Wake up and learn who your friends are. Maybe show a little humbleness and gratitude.”

I crossed the street and headed toward Clementine’s, hoping that an employee would be there and let me in and give me a cup of coffee and a beignet.

“Robert’s got two hundred thousand dollars stashed away. That’s the kind of money he’s siphoned off the deal they got going,” Perkins called after me.

I stopped and turned around again. I could see the drawbridge lifting in the fog, its girders beaded with moisture. “What deal?” I said.

“I don’t know. That’s why you and me got to team up. The weather is fixing to take a turn. The weatherman says a real frog stringer is about to blow in on us. I’d dress for it.”

“Get away from me,” I said.

I would find out later that my admonition had been neither wise nor fair.

When I returned home, Molly and Alafair were eating breakfast in the kitchen. Through the tree trunks and the gray-green shadows in our backyard, I could see the tidal flow of the bayou reversing itself, the surface undulating as though the current had been infused with a great cushion of air. I told Molly and Alafair that I was going to take a drive into Jeff Davis Parish and that I would be home after lunch.

“What for?” Molly said.

I didn’t want to explain, so I said, “I have to check out a couple of things about the Latiolais girl.”

“It’s Sunday. Why not do it on the clock?” Molly said.

“Helen is not a big fan of my investigating a homicide outside our jurisdiction.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

“If you want,” I said, my gaze not meeting hers. “Look, I ran into Vidor Perkins on the street. I don’t think he intends us any harm. Evidently he’s convinced himself he’s an author. But I had Wally put a cruiser in front of the house until I get back.”

“What was he doing on East Main?” Alafair said.

“Following me.”

“Early Sunday morning?” she said.

“He’s a wack job. He says he was surveilling the Abelards’ compound yesterday and saw you there. But his agenda is with them and not us.”

“How do you know?” Molly asked.

“We don’t have anything he wants. I’ll be back in three hours.”

“Dave?” Molly said.

But I didn’t answer, in part because no matter how helpful Molly or Alafair wanted to be, I had to find an empty place in my head where I could see the detail I had missed, the image that had not recorded itself on my memory, the line of dialogue that had seemed inconsequential at the time, the finitely small symbol for the larger story that would explain the brutal murders of two innocent girls. Or maybe I would end up concluding that all my speculations were a vanity. Sometimes the clue is not there, or the case information is wrong, or somebody screwed up in the lab. But if Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais’s killer or killers went not caught or taken off the board in a more primitive fashion, it wouldn’t be because no one tried.

I took the old two-lane highway past Spanish Lake and turned onto I-10 in Lafayette and drove to Jennings, then down into the southern tip of the parish where the coastline dissolved into a marshy green haze and eventually became part of a saltwater bay. Just as I had placed Vidor Perkins into a much simpler category, one in which most miscreants have the wingspans of moths rather than pterodactyls, I tried to imagine the makeup of the person or persons who had murdered the two girls. I was sure that sex and misogyny were involved. But I was also sure that finance was as well. And when it came to the big score in Louisiana, from World War II to the present, what was the issue? Always? Without exception? I mean take-it-to-the-bank, lead-pipe cinch, what extractive opportunity in an instant created the sounds of little piggy feet stampeding for the trough?

How about oil? Its extraction and production in Louisiana had set us free from economic bondage to the agricultural oligarchy that had ruled the state from antebellum days well into the mid-twentieth century. But we discovered that our new corporate liege lord had a few warts on his face, too. Like the Great Whore of Babylon, Louisiana was always desirable for her beauty and not her virtue, and when her new corporate suitor plunged into things, he left his mark.

I didn’t revisit Bernadette’s grandmother; instead, I talked to people at a crossroads store, a bait shop, and a trailer settlement. Some of the damage done by Hurricane Rita was still visible: concrete foundations in empty fields, an automobile wedged upside down in a coulee, the wreckage of homes bulldozed in piles as high as small pyramids, and the tangled bones of livestock that had drowned by the tens of thousands, sometimes on rooftops or inside the second stories of farmhouses. But I was struck most by the riparian resilience of the land, the sawgrass that extended as far as the eye could see, the hummocks of gum and persimmon and hackberry and oak trees, the seagulls and brown pelicans that sailed over the mouth of a freshwater river flowing into the Gulf. In moments like these, I knew that Louisiana was still a magical place, not terribly different than it was when Jim Bowie and his business partner the pirate Jean Lafitte smuggled slaves illegally into the United States and kept them in a barracoon, somewhere close to the very spot I was standing on. If anyone doubts the history I’ve described, he can visit an island at the south end of this particular parish and perhaps find some of the skeletal remains for which it is known. The skulls and vertebrae and rib cages and femurs that have washed out of the sand belonged to a shipload of slaves abandoned by a blackbirder sea captain who left them to starve when he feared arrest. Louisiana is a poem, but as with the Homeric epic, it’s not good to examine its heroes too closely.

I parked my pickup at the end of the road and got out on the asphalt and looked southward. In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.

I could smell the salt out on the Gulf, the baitfish and shrimp in the waves, the warm and stagnant smell of wet sand and dead vegetation and ponded water in the marsh, and the distant hint of rain and electricity in the clouds. It was a grand place to be. Did the seven arpents of land that Bernadette had inherited from her father have anything to do with her death? Her grandmother had said Bernadette wanted to save the bears. The people I spoke to on the south end of the parish said they knew nothing of any attempt to save bears, nor were they sure where Bernadette’s seven arpents might have been located, although they said that many years ago some of the Latiolais family had farmed some rice acreage that had been turned into commercial crawfish ponds. But the ponds had been abandoned because of the importation of Chinese crawfish, and the land was now little more than a soggy swamp.

Plus, Louisiana’s land areas had been drilled and redrilled and offered little in the way of further exploration. The money was in offshore drilling, and to my knowledge, no new refineries were being built in Louisiana. What possible value could Bernadette’s seven arpents have possessed?

At lunchtime I gave up my odyssey and went back to a crossroads service station where I had stopped earlier. I sat on a chair outside facing the Gulf and ate two microwaved lengths of white boudin and a pile of dirty rice and potato salad off a paper plate. Then I went back inside and bought a fried pie and a cup of Community coffee and ate the pie and drank the coffee while I looked out the window at a shrimp boat moving down a canal through the sawgrass, seagulls whirling and dipping over its wake.

“Find out any more about that property you were looking for, Mr. Robicheaux?” the clerk said. He was in his mid-twenties and wore a crew cut and striped strap overalls and a brown T-shirt.

“Not much,” I said. “I’ll probably go to the courthouse and check the records tomorrow.”

“After you left, another man came in and asked me about that property. No, not exactly about the property, but about the girl, the one who was killed?”

“Bernadette Latiolais.”

“Yeah, a man came in and said didn’t that girl come from a family that had a rice or crawfish farm here’bouts.”

“What did this fellow look like?” I asked.

“‘Strange’ is the word I’d use.”

“Strange in what way?”

“His eyes, they didn’t have any pupils.”

“What color were they?”

“Blue. And he had black hair combed up on his head.”

“What else do you remember about him?”

“He had a country accent, but not one from around here. He was grinning all the time, like there was some kind of joke going on between us. Except I couldn’t figure out what the joke was. He had a binocular case hanging from his arm.”

“What kind of car was he driving?”

“I didn’t pay it much mind, sir.”

“What did you tell this fellow?”

“Same thing I told you. I was in the army for the last six years and haven’t kept up much with the news at home. You know this guy?”

“Yes, I do.” I wrote my cell phone number on the back of my business card and gave it to the clerk. “If you see him again, call me. Don’t try to detain him and don’t provoke him.”

“He’s dangerous?”

“Maybe, maybe not. His name is Vidor Perkins. Personally, I wouldn’t touch him with a soiled Q-tip. But that’s just one man’s opinion.”

“A soiled Q-tip?” the ex-soldier said. He shook his head and stuck my card under the corner of his register.

I washed my hands in a sink outside the men’s room and dried them on a paper towel. Through the window I saw a semi go through the intersection, hauling huge machinery of some kind that was snugged down on the flatbed with boomer chains. A low-slung white car, one with charcoal-tinted windows, was following close behind it. The hood was painted with primer so that it resembled a blackened tooth inset in the car body. The driver was obviously irritated by the slow momentum of the semi and kept gunning his engine, swinging out to pass, then ducking back behind the semi’s rear bumper, so close he couldn’t adequately see the road. His engine was loud and sounded too powerful for the vehicle. When he gained a clear spot on the road, he floored the accelerator, his vehicle sinking low and flat on the springs, blowing dust and newspaper in his wake, ripping a strip of gravel out of the road shoulder.

There was a Florida plate on the vehicle, the numbers obscured with dirt. There was also orange rust around the bottoms of the doors and fenders, the kinds of patterns you see in automobiles that have been exposed over a long period of time to a saltwater environment. Any Florida-licensed automobile, particularly one built for high speed, is suspect along the I-10 corridor that runs from Jacksonville all the way to Los Angeles. But for those who transport narcotics, and for the cops who try to put them out of business, the area of concern begins at I-95 in Miami. I-95 feeds into I-10 just north of Lake City, Florida, and a westward journey from that point on allows the transporter to make drop-offs in Tallahassee, Mobile, Biloxi, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Beaumont, and Houston. Like the modern equivalent of Typhoid Mary, one transporter can string systemic misery and death across 20 percent of the country.

Except the transporters have a problem they didn’t anticipate. I-10 is heavily patrolled by narcs in the state of Louisiana, particularly in Iberville Parish. As a consequence, transporters often swing off the interstate and use Old Highway 90 or any number of parish roads that are not patrolled.

“Did you ever see that white car that just went south through the intersection?” I asked the clerk.

“It’s funny you mention it. He drove by here a couple of times. Once right after the guy with the binoculars was in here.”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

“No, sir, I didn’t. I only noticed him because of how loud his engine was.”

“If he comes back and you get a look at his tag number, give me a call, will you?”

“Yes, sir, I can do that. What’s the problem with this guy?”

“Probably nothing,” I said.

I drove north on the road, retracing my route, my radio on, my windows down. The air was balmy, the cow pastures on either side of the road emerald-green and dotted with buttercups and pooled with shadows. But I couldn’t shake a feeling that had occurred periodically in my life for decades, often without cause. It was like the tension in a banjo or guitar string that is wrapped too tightly on the peg. Or a tremolo that can travel through the fuselage of an airplane just before you glance out the window and see engine oil blow back across the wing. Or perhaps the cold vapor that wraps around your heart on a night trail, one sown with Bouncing Betties and Chinese toe poppers, or the peculiar distortion in your vision when you climb down into a spider hole and realize you have just touched a thin strand of trip wire attached to a booby-trapped 105 dud.

Years ago I could rid myself of my apprehensions with VA dope and Beam straight up and a Jax back. But I didn’t have my old parachute anymore. So I said the Serenity Prayer that is recited in unison at the beginning of every A.A. meeting in the world. If that didn’t work, I would use the short form of the same prayer, which is “Fuck it” and is not meant as an irreverent statement.

I pulled to the side of the road and took a deep breath. The wind was cool, and gulls were cawing overhead. Not far away, a black family was cane-fishing in a canal, swinging their bobbers onto the edge of the cattails. It was Sunday, I told myself. A day of rest. A respite from anxiety and fear and ambition and greed and all the other forces that seem to drive our lives. A truck pulling an empty cane wagon rattled past me, then a delivery van with a cargo door. A red airplane that looked like a crop sprayer came in low over a field and, just before it reached a power line, gained altitude again and disappeared beyond a windbreak that had been created by a hedgerow of gum trees.

Now the road was totally empty, both behind and ahead of me. I realized that although my radio was still on, I was unaware of what was being broadcast. It was a baseball game. I clicked off the switch and put my truck in gear. I had accomplished virtually nothing on my trip to Jefferson Parish. Maybe I should at least drop by the home of Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother, I thought. If nothing else, I could offer to drive her somewhere or do a chore for her that she could not do for herself. Something good could come out of my trip.

I parked in front of the grandmother’s white frame house and tapped on the screen door, but no one answered. One of the coffee cans planted with petunias had been blown or knocked off the gallery into the yard. I opened the screen and knocked on the inside door. Then I twisted the handle. The door was locked. I walked around the side of the house and into the backyard. The rear door was locked as well, and all the curtains were closed. No vehicle was parked in the yard. I returned to the front yard and stared at the house. The pecan trees and water oaks on the sides of the house were in partial leaf, and the shadows they cast looked like rain running down the walls and tin roof. I picked up the spilled coffee can and repacked the dirt and uprooted petunias with my fingers, then replaced the can on the porch. Hard by the circular spot where the can had originally stood was a muddy smear, the kind the bottom of a shoe or a boot would make.

I was letting it get away from me. Maybe the grandmother had gone to the home of relatives for Sunday dinner. Maybe she was sick and in the hospital. Maybe she had died. I could not think of any reason she would be in danger.

Unless the seven arpents of land owned by Bernadette Latiolais had automatically reverted upon Bernadette’s death to the grandmother.

I sat down on the steps and dialed 911 on my cell phone and told the dispatcher who and where I was. “Can you send out a cruiser? I’m a little worried about Mrs. Latiolais,” I said.

“What’s the nature of your emergency?”

“I’m not sure there is one. But I’m out of my jurisdiction, and I’d like somebody from your department to help me check things out.”

“We’ll send someone as soon as—” the dispatcher began.

I heard the door open behind me.