The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 20

Clete’s call asking me to run the tag of the Florida pickup had come in before Helen and I left the department for Carolyn Blanchet’s house outside Franklin. It had been no problem to run the tag; nor had it been a problem to call a friend in the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee and ask for a background check on Andy Swan. But I did not tell Helen what I had done until we were almost at the Blanchet home. My timing was not only bad, I think it contributed in the worst possible way to the events that were about to follow.

“Not only is Clete conducting his own investigation in St. Mary Parish, but you’re helping him, even asking a personal favor from the Florida state attorney’s office?” Helen said.

Her knuckles had whitened on the steering wheel. When I didn’t reply, she shot me a look, the cruiser slipping over the yellow stripe.

“We’re all on the same side, Helen.”

“Clete’s on his own side, and so are you.”

“Not so.”

“I’m really pissed off, Dave.”

“I gather that.”

“Not adequately. Believe me, we’ll talk more about it later.”

She turned off the four-lane and drove down a service road to the Blanchet property and the lovely green arbor in which Layton’s tribute to himself still rose through the oaks like a Tudor castle covered with cake icing. We were not the only people there. Two SUVs and a silver sedan with a United States government plate were coming toward us through the two columns of oaks that lined the driveway, the sedan out in front. Helen stuck her hand out the window and signaled the driver to stop.

“Helen Soileau, Iberia Parish sheriff,” she said. “What’s going on?”

The driver of the sedan was young and wore a white shirt and tie and had a fresh haircut. “Nothing now,” he said. “We just got served. Somebody ought to explain to you people that this isn’t 1865.”

“Carolyn Blanchet got an injunction against the United States government?” Helen said.

“You got it. We’ll be back later. Have fun, Sheriff,” the driver said.

I watched the convoy drive onto the service road. “She probably got a local judge to create some temporary obstacles for the IRS or the SEC. But they’ll cut through it with a couple of phone calls,” I said.

“Anything these guys wanted from her has already gone through a shredding machine. Carolyn Blanchet gets what she wants and makes few mistakes.”

I hated to ask the question that had been hanging in the air every time Carolyn Blanchet’s name was mentioned. “Helen, how well do you know her?”

“If you haven’t heard, Pops, when we’re on the job, I’m your boss. You don’t question your boss about her personal life. That said, when we’re off the job, you still do not question me about my personal life. Understood?”

“No.”

“You want to explain that?”

We were still stationary in the driveway, the sunlight spangling inside the oak canopy overhead. I kept my eyes straight ahead, the side of my face almost wrinkling under Helen’s gaze. “I think you know more about Carolyn than you’ve let on,” I said.

When I looked at her, I saw a level of anger in her face that made me wince. “I have a circle of friends in New Orleans you probably haven’t met,” she said. “Carolyn Blanchet has had relationships with some of them. All of them were the worse for it. She uses people and throws them away like Kleenex. She’s also a degenerate. Black leather, masks, chains, boots. Would you like more detail?”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“Because she hasn’t been an active part of the investigation of a crime committed in Iberia Parish.”

“That’s pretty disingenuous, if you ask me.”

And in that mood, not speaking, we parked the cruiser in front of the house and walked through the side yard to the tennis court, where we could hear someone whocking balls that were being fired over the net by an automatic ball machine.

Carolyn was wearing blue sweatpants and a sports bra and was hitting the balls two-handed, her platinum hair shiny with perspiration, her skin sun-browned with freckles, her baby fat wedging over her waistband as she put all her weight into her swing.

She wiped her face and throat and underarms with a towel and flung it on a chair by a table set with a pitcher of lemonade and glasses. She asked if we wanted to sit down.

“Not really, Ms. Blanchet,” Helen said. “We wanted to offer our sympathies at your loss, and to ask you a couple of questions, then we’ll be gone.”

“How you doin’, Dave?” Carolyn said, sitting down, ignoring Helen’s statement, pouring herself a glass.

“Just fine, thanks. You chased off the feds?” I said.

“No, the federal court in New Orleans did. Layton left behind a mess. But it’s not my mess. If somebody else wants to clean it up, that’s fine, but they can do it somewhere else.”

“Ms. Blanchet—” Helen began.

“It’s Carolyn, please.”

“We’re still investigating the death of Herman Stanga,” Helen said.

“Who?”

“A black pimp who was shot and killed behind his home in New Iberia. We wondered if you know a St. Martin Parish sheriff’s deputy by the name of Emma Poche.”

“Offhand, I don’t recall hearing the name.”

“Offhand?” Helen repeated.

“Yes, that’s what I said. ‘Offhand.’ It’s a commonly used term.”

“Do you know any female deputies in the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department?”

“No. Should I?”

“But you know Kermit Abelard, don’t you?” Helen said.

“I’ve read his books. I’ve been to one or two of his book signings. What’s the issue here?”

“There is no ‘issue.’ Did he inscribe a book to you?”

I stared at Helen incredulously because I realized the direction she was headed in, one that would expose the source of our information.

“We’re trying to clear up a question about Kermit and his relationship to Layton and their mutual interest in biofuels,” I interjected.

“What you need to do is answer my question, Ms. Blanchet,” Helen said, her gaze drifting toward me irritably. “Did Kermit Abelard inscribe a book to you?”

“I just told you I attended his book signing. That’s what people do at book signings. They get their books signed by the author.”

“Then why is your autographed book in Emma Poche’s house if you don’t know Emma Poche?” Helen said.

I could feel my pulse beating in my wrists. “Carolyn, it’s obvious we’re looking at a deputy sheriff for reasons that make us uncomfortable,” I said. “Someone may have planted evidence at a homicide scene. We had reason to believe you might know this deputy. We didn’t come here to offend you.”

I paused and then took a chance, hoping to create a distraction from Alafair and possibly force an admission by Carolyn Blanchet. “We have a report you may have met with Emma Poche at a motel outside St. Martinville. Your private life is your private life, but you’re telling us things that don’t fit with what we know.”

Carolyn was shaking her head even before I finished speaking. “I should have known. There’s no end to it,” she said.

“End to what?” I said.

“My husband was a paranoid. He convinced himself I was having an affair — in part, I think, to assuage his own guilt for screwing women all over the United States and Latin America. Evidently he hired a fat idiot of a private detective to follow me around, and this is what we end up with.”

“How could you be at the motel with Emma Poche and not know her?” Helen said.

“I didn’t say I was,” Carolyn replied.

“I think you did,” I said.

She touched her temples. “I must be having an aneurysm.”

The sun was over the trees now, and I could feet the heat rising from the concrete. “Emma Poche has a way of showing up in too many places or with too many people that involve either Layton or you,” I said. “I don’t believe Layton shot himself, Carolyn. I believe he was murdered.”

“By whom?” she said.

“Let’s look at motivation,” I said. “Layton was a big liability. He was sick mentally and emotionally and seemed determined to go down with the Titanic. Who loses if the bank is broke? Who loses if the feds find out others were involved in Layton’s schemes?”

“I always liked you and treated you well, Dave. You’re saying ugly things about me, and I think I know the source. She’s standing right next to you. When you walked onto the court, you began talking about a book you found at this female deputy’s house. You served a warrant on her house in St. Martin Parish, where you have no jurisdiction?”

“We have various resources,” I said.

“You’re lying. Both of you are.” She knew Alafair had been our source, and she knew that we knew she knew. She stood up and adjusted the sweatband on her hair. She took a long drink from her glass and set it back down on the table, the ice sliding to the bottom. “I thought that bunch of federal nerds I just got rid of were inept,” she said. “But you two are establishing new standards.”

“I have morgue photos of two dead girls in my file cabinet,” I said. “Somehow their deaths are connected to the Abelards and your late husband and some properties in Jefferson Davis Parish. Both girls were abducted, and I believe both suffered terrible deaths. You can be clever from now to Judgment Day, Carolyn, but if you were mixed up in the murder of those girls, I’m going to hang you out to dry, woman or not.”

I saw Helen turn and stare at me.

We walked back through the side yard, past the heavy, warm fragrance of the flower beds and the smell of chemical fertilizer and the odor of something dead under the house, neither of us speaking, a sound like wind roaring in my ears. Helen started the cruiser, and we headed down the driveway toward the service road. In the silence, I could hear tiny pieces of gravel clicking in the tire treads.

“I screwed it up. I’m sorry,” she said.

I looked out at the shade on the lawn and at a shaft of sunlight shining through the trees on a sundial.

“She figured out Alafair was our source, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to do anything about it,” Helen said. “Trust me, Carolyn doesn’t let her emotions get in the way of her agenda.”

“Someone who practices sadomasochism? Someone who may have murdered her husband or had someone do it for her? Someone you call a degenerate and a slut who uses and discards people like Kleenex?”

“You don’t take prisoners, do you, Streak?”

“No, I don’t,” I replied.

I didn’t speak again until we were back at the department, and then it was only to ask the time because my watch had stopped.

That evening Clete and I drove across the drawbridge in the Caddy and sat down in one of the picnic shelters in City Park down by the water in the gloaming of the day, the air dense, the sky purple and pink and marbled with fire-lit clouds in the west. “So you figure Emma is in the sack with Carolyn Blanchet and maybe the two of them planted my gold pen in Stanga’s swimming pool?” he said.

“I’d call it a strong possibility,” I replied.

“Which would mean they probably capped Stanga, huh? But why?”

“He knew too much. He’d dime them to save his own ass. He was disposable. He tried to extort them or to extort Layton. He should have brushed his teeth more often. Take your choice.”

“So I was bopping a switch-hitter who was setting me up to ride the needle for the woman she was banging? I’ve been taken over the hurdles a few times, but I don’t know if I can handle this.”

“Don’t fault yourself because you believe in people, Clete.”

“Right,” he said, his eyes looking at nothing. “I went to Morgan City and checked out this guy Andy Swan. He was telling the truth about working for a security service. But he didn’t arrive three days ago. He’s been around Morgan City at least three weeks. He could have been one of the guys who tried to pop you. You’re going to give that ligature I found in the Dumpster to the crime lab?”

“In the morning. But it’s out of context, Cletus.”

“Who cares? It’s evidence we didn’t have before.” Clete waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, his gaze fixed on my face. “You’re thinking about Alafair?”

“Of course I am. Helen blew it.”

“Look, Dave, Helen is right about one thing. Because the Blanchet woman knows Alafair found out about her affair with Emma doesn’t mean she’s going to put a hit on her. Sometimes we got to keep things in perspective.”

“Their building is burning down and they know it. That’s why Robert Weingart was transferring his money to a bank in Canada. You put scorpions in a box and shake it up, they sting everything in sight.”

“All right, let’s talk about Weingart a minute. What’s his involvement with Carolyn Blanchet? It’s biofuels, it’s Herman Stanga, it’s the Abelards, it’s what?”

“It’s all of what you just said. I just don’t know how it fits together.”

“Big mon, we’re not going to let anything happen to Alafair. You’re not giving her credit, either. Didn’t you say she had an IQ of 180 or something?”

“No, her IQ isn’t measurable. It’s off the scale.”

“It’s not genetic, either.”

“That’s supposed to be funny?”

The shadows were deepening inside the trees, and lights were going on in the houses high up on the slopes along the bayou. I heard the cogged wheels under the drawbridge clank together and saw the bridge separate in the center and rise into the air. I could see the running lights on a large boat coming out of the gloom, and I thought I heard a hissing sound like steam escaping a valve cover and water cascading behind the stern. The sunset had created a gold ribbon down the middle of the current. Against the silhouette of the uplifted bridge, I saw the bow and pilothouse of the boat nearing us, and black men working on the deck and a bearded skipper in a blue cap behind the wheel, a cob pipe clenched in his teeth. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrists, as though I were fatigued. Clete looked down the bayou, then back at me. “You okay?” he said.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Want to try and catch Andy Swan before he leaves town? I mean, since we now know he could have been one of the guys at the shoot-out.”

“He wasn’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because the guys at the river weren’t state employees who work on execution teams.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“Go after the guy whose age and infirmities have been giving him a free pass too long.”

I could see the connection come together in Clete’s eyes. “I’m not that keen on the idea,” he said.

“It was old men who sent us to war,” I said.

Cockroaches don’t like sunlight. Despots and demagogues do not make appearances in environments they do not control. Elitists join clubs whose attraction is based not on their membership but on the types of people they are known to exclude. It wasn’t hard to find out where Timothy Abelard would probably be on Friday night of that particular week. I read an article in the Lafayette newspaper and called a couple of patriotic organizations and a congressional office and was told, in one instance, “Why, yes, Mr. Abelard wouldn’t miss this event for the world.” The “event” that seemed of such global importance was a fund-raiser to be held at seven P.M. at Lafayette’s Derrick and Preservation Club in the old Oil Center.

Clete and I dressed for the occasion. The waiters at the club were all white-jacketed middle-aged black men who could not be called obsequious but belonged culturally to another generation, one that knew how to be selectively deaf and to pretend that the clientele they served held them in high regard. The linen-covered buffet tables were lit by candles and sparkled with crystal glasses and silver bowls. The food was sumptuous, the quality you would expect at Antoine’s or Galatoire’s in New Orleans. The guest speaker was a retired army general who had helped subvert the democratically elected government in Chile and replace it with Augusto Pinochet, who turned the country into a giant torture chamber. He was also a practicing Catholic. When four American Catholic missionaries were raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers, he said at a news conference that maybe the victims had “tried to run a roadblock.”

The guests at the banquet and fund-raiser were an extraordinary group. Batistianos from Miami were there, as well as friends of Anastasio Somoza. The locals, if they could be called that, were a breed unto themselves. They were porcine and sleek and combed and brushed, and they jingled when they walked. Their accents were of that peculiar southern strain that is not Acadian nor influenced by what is called Tidewater or plantation English or the Scotch-Irish dialectical speech of the southern mountains. It’s an accent that seems to reflect a state of mind rather than a region. The vowels somehow get lost in the back of the throat or squeeze themselves through the nasal passages. The term “honky,” used by racist blacks, may be more accurate than we like to think. But their innocence is of a kind you cannot get angry at. They are not less brave than others, nor more sinful, nor lacking in the virtues we collectively admire. You just have the feeling when you are in their midst that all of them fear they are about to be found out, unmasked somehow, revealing God only knows what, because I am convinced their psychological makeup is a mystery even unto themselves.

Clete and I arrived early and went out to the parking lot, wondering if by chance a vehicle from the shoot-out on the river might show up. We wrote down perhaps a dozen license numbers, but we were firing in the well and knew it.

The decals in the windows left little doubt about the environmental and geopolitical convictions of the vehicles’ owners. They ranged from the flag wrapped around the beams of a Christian cross to a child urinating on “all Muslims and liberals” and an image of a bird falling from the blast of a shotgun, under which were the words “If it flies, it dies.” But these were the visual expressions of people who got up each morning trying to define who they were. The men at the shoot-out were pros who did not attract attention to themselves or serve perverse abstractions created for them by others. The men at the river had no quarrel with either the mercenary nature of their mission or the black flag under which they carried out their deeds. If you have ever met them, you are already aware they share a commonality that never varies: There is no light in their eyes. Search for it as long as you wish; you will not find it. And maybe that is why they are so good at not leaving behind any trace of themselves. Whatever they once were has long since disappeared from their lives.

It was breezy in the parking lot, and the oak trees that stood on the boulevard and in the Oil Center itself made a sweeping sound in the wind, their branches and leaves changing shape and color in the glow of the streetlamps. Clete stared at the southern sky and the flickers of lightning over the Gulf, his eyes like hard green marbles, his face taut. “It’s going to blow,” he said.

“It’s that time of year,” I said.

“I got a funny feeling.”

“It’s just a squall. It won’t be real hurricane season till mid-summer.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I saw something in your face when we were talking in City Park, on the bayou there.”

“Saw what?” I asked, avoiding his gaze.

“You were looking at something down the bayou. By the drawbridge. You rubbed your eyes like you were tired, but you were hiding something from me. There wasn’t anything down the bayou except the bridge. I looked, and there wasn’t anything there.”

“That’s right, there wasn’t.”

“Then what were you hiding from me?”

“I don’t remember that happening, Clete,” I said.

He rotated his head as though his collar was too tight, his eyes uplifted at the sky and the electricity playing in the clouds. “I had a dream last night. There was a big clock on my nightstand, one of those windup jobs. The cover on the face was gone. Then some guy came in the room. I tried to see who he was, but all I could see were his eyes looking at me out of a hood. I kept saying to him, ‘Who are you?’ but he wouldn’t answer. I tried to get my piece off the dresser, but something was holding me down on the bed, like somebody was sitting on my chest. He walked over to the nightstand and picked up the clock and broke off the hands. Then he put the clock back down and walked out of the room. I still never saw who he was.”

“It was just a dream,” I said, trying to keep my face empty, trying to forget the room I had rented in Natchez with a clock that had no cover and no hands.

“Dave, we need to get rid of this Abelard gig. It stank from the jump. Nobody is interested in those dead girls except us. I say we smoke the guys who tried to hurt us and let somebody else add up the score. If we bend the rules, screw it. The guy who clicks off your switch is always the one you never see coming. I don’t want to buy it like that.”

“We’re going to be okay,” I said. “We always come through things, don’t we?”

“It’s waiting for us. Out there. I can feel it.” He waved his hand at the air as though swatting away insects. “It’s like a red laser dot crawling all over us.”

“You never rattled. Not in the Channel or the Desire. Not even in Nam or El Sal.”

“You don’t get it. I’m not talking about me. It’s you. I can see it in your eyes when you think nobody is looking. You see it coming. Stop jerking me around.”

I hooked my arm around his neck. “Let’s go back inside and check out these guys,” I said. “Maybe give them something to remember.”

“What’d you see on the bayou, Dave?”

I didn’t reply and squeezed his neck as though we were two boys in a wrestling match. Then we went inside, Clete behind me, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his behemoth physique about to split the seams of his clothes.

The diners filled their plates and sat at big round tables in a banquet room, at the head of which was a podium and a microphone. Clete and I sat on folding chairs against the back wall. No one seemed to take particular notice of us. Clete kept leaning forward, his hands on his knees, studying the room, the diners, the men who drifted out to the bar and returned with a highball or a dessert for a wife or girlfriend. When the general was introduced and walked to the podium, the entire room rose and applauded. He was tall and wore a gray suit with stripes in it, and was erect in his carriage for a man his age. His clean features and the white strands in his hair gave him the genteel appearance of Wordsworth’s happy warrior, but there was a visceral Jacksonian edge about him, physical incongruities that suggested a humble background not altogether consistent with his dress and manner. His ears were too large for his head, and there were lumps of cartilage under his jaw. His hands were square and rough-looking, his wrists ridged with bone where they protruded from his white cuffs. His facial skin creased superficially with his smile, exposing his teeth, which looked tiny and sharp-edged in his mouth. But it was the martial light in his eyes that you remembered most. It was like that of a choleric man who kept his wounds green and treasured his anger and drew on it the way one turns up the heat register when necessary.

Clete watched him, biting on a hangnail, spitting it off the end of his tongue. “I saw that dude at Da Nang,” he said.

“What did you think of him?”

“I don’t remember,” he replied. “He was standing under an awning. We were standing in the rain. Yeah, I remember that. The rain falling on all those steel pots while he was talking to us.”

The general had a prepared speech in his hands. But before beginning it, he paused and stared into the crowd, his face brightening. “I know when I’m among the right kind of people,” he said. “I was walking through the parking lot a few minutes ago, and I saw a bumper sticker I must share with you. It said, ‘Earth First! We’ll drill the rest of the planets later!’”

The audience roared with laughter.

But Clete was not listening to the general’s joke and the audience’s appreciation of it. He was peering at a table in the corner where Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair, his grandson, Kermit, seated on one side of him and his caretaker, Jewel, on the other. Also at the table was a dark-skinned man who had a thin nose and wore a pencil mustache and whose lacquered black hair resembled a cap. The other man at the table had his back to us, and I could not see his face. His hair was boxed on the back of his neck, and his right shoulder seemed to hang lower than his left, as though he were uncomfortable in his chair or experiencing lower-back pain, trying to shift the pressure off his spine.

“I thought you said Kermit Abelard was the liberal in the family,” Clete said to me.

“Kermit is a sunshine patriot.”

“A what?”

“Read Thomas Paine.”

“I don’t need to. He treated Alafair dirty. He’s a four-flusher and a punk, if you ask me. Who’re the greaseball and the other guy at the table?”

“Who knows? The old man was famous on the cockfighting circuit. He used to fly in a DC-3 to Cuba and Nicaragua with his cocks. He was pals with Batista and the Somozas.”

“I need a drink. You want anything from the bar?” Clete said.

“Take it easy on the booze.”

“I wish I was stone drunk. I wish I was wearing a full-body condom. You think these chairs have been sprayed for crab lice?”

A man sitting in front of us turned around and gave us a look.

“You got a problem?” Clete said.

The man turned his back to us and didn’t reply. Clete leaned forward and punched him with one finger between the shoulder blades. “I asked if I could help you with something.”

“No, I’m fine,” the man said, looking at Clete from the side of his eye.

“Glad to hear it. Enjoy your evening,” Clete said. He went to the bar, scraping his chair loudly. When he returned, carrying a highball glass packed with ice that was dark with bourbon, his gaze was fixed on the Abelard table. “See the guy next to the greaseball, the one with his arm in a sling? There’s a cast or a big wad of bandages on his hand. You clipped a guy’s fingers off at the gig on the river?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“You remember his face at all?”

“I didn’t see any of their faces except the guy who got his ticket canceled.”

“The guy in the sling is hinky. He saw me looking at him and turned away real quick, like he’d made me.”

A different man in front of us turned in his chair, his brow furrowed. “Will you people be quiet?” he said.

“Mind your business,” Clete said.

“Sir?”

Clete leaned forward in his chair. “Call me ‘you people’ again and see what happens.”

I put my hand on Clete’s arm. He pushed it away and raised his glass and drank from it, his eyes already taking on an alcoholic luster, and I realized he had probably had a shot or two straight up before returning from the bar.

“What?” he said.

“Shut up.”

“These guys all smell like Brut. You know what Brut smells like? An armpit. Take a whiff. The barman could make a fortune selling gas masks.”

“Lower your voice.”

“I’m very collected and cool and simpatico. You need to lighten up.” Clete took a deep drink from his glass and filled his jaw with ice and began crunching it between his molars. He tapped the soles of his loafers, creating a staccato like a drumroll on linoleum. Then he said out of the side of his mouth, his eyes lowered, “The guy in the sling just turned around. He knows who we are. He was on the river. We need to get this guy in the box.”

In his own mind, Clete was still a cop. His mistakes at NOPD, his flight from the country on a murder beef, the security work he did for the Mob in Vegas and Reno, his history of addiction and vigilantism and involvement with biker girls and junkie strippers and street skells of every stripe all seemed to disappear from his memory, as though the justice of his cause were absolution enough and his misdeeds were simply burnt offerings that should not be held against him.

But he was not alone in his naïveté. I was out of my jurisdiction, my judgment suspect, my behavior perhaps driven more by obsession than by dedication. I was a neocolonial who had walked in the footprints of German-speaking French legionnaires and whose mark was as transient as tracks blowing in a Mesopotamian desert. My life, as Clete’s, was a folly in the eyes of others. And here we were, the court jesters of Acadiana, with neither evidence nor personal cachet, about to take on forces that our peers found not only normal but even laudable.

I went into the men’s room and used my cell phone to call a detective-grade cop in the Lafayette Police Department by the name of Bertrand Viator. “I’m at the Derrick and Preservation Club,” I said. “There’s a guy here who might be a suspect in a homicide in Jeff Davis Parish.”

“I’m not up on this,” Bertrand said. “What homicide are we talking about?”

“It’s kind of complicated. I saw the homicide. Nobody else did.”

The line was silent. Then my friend evidently chose not to attempt working through what I had just told him. “What do you need, Streak?”

“Can you get me some backup? I don’t have a warrant, and I’m out of my jurisdiction.”

“What’s the name of the suspect?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you want to bring him in?”

“I’m not sure. The guy is sitting at a table with Timothy Abelard. I’m going to have a talk with Abelard and a couple of his friends. I’d like to have a degree of legal authority behind me when I do it.”

“You’re by yourself?”

“Clete Purcel is with me.”

There was another pause. “Sorry, I can’t help on this, Dave.”

“Want to tell me why?” I asked.

“I don’t fault Purcel for being his own man. I just don’t want to take his fall. You might give that some thought.”

When I got back to the banquet room, the general was finishing his speech. The audience rose and applauded, then applauded some more. Through the crowd I saw Timothy Abelard looking at me, his face lit with goodwill, two fingers raised in a wave.

“Where’ve you been?” I heard Clete say.

“Trying to get us some backup.”

“No dice?”

“They’ve got their own problems,” I said.

I felt his eyes examining my face. “They gave you some flak about something?”

“We don’t need pencil pushers.”

Clete turned his attention back to Timothy Abelard and the man with the bandaged hand. “What do you want to do?”

“Wait till it thins out,” I replied.

“Then what?”

I touched a manila envelope that I had rolled into a cone and stuck in my coat pocket. “We give them a look at some unpleasant realities they won’t find in a family newspaper,” I said.

But the Abelards and their retinue did not wait for the party to end. Without fanfare, Jewel pushed Timothy Abelard in his wheelchair down a corridor toward an exit, and the other people from the table followed, the man with the injured hand glancing back once over his shoulder.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Clete swallowed the bourbon-stained ice melt in the bottom of his glass, his cheeks blooming. We walked out into the parking lot, no more than thirty feet behind the Abelard party, the oak trees swelling with wind against the glow of the streetlamps. “Excuse me,” I called out.

But no one among the Abelard party chose to hear me.

“I’d like to have a word with you, Mr. Timothy,” I said. “It’s a matter that concerns your grandson and possibly one of your friends here.”

He raised his hand, signaling everyone around him to stop. I walked to a spot between the wheelchair and an enormous SUV that he and the others had been preparing to enter. His bronze-tinted hair was blowing on his pate, dry and loose, like a baby’s. When he turned his face up at me, I thought of a tiny bird.

“You’re a ubiquitous presence, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You pop up like a jack-in-the-box. I didn’t realize you were an admirer of my friend the general.”

“I’m not.”

“So our meeting here is more than coincidental? Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. As I recall, your father was a persistent man. He could lay them flat out, couldn’t he? What is it about my grandson or my friends that has you so concerned?”

I looked at the man whose hand was wrapped in a wad of gauze and tape as big as a boxing glove. His face was as taut as latex, his eyes liquid with resentment, a scar like a piece of white string cupped on the rim of one nostril. The man with the oiled black hair had turned at an angle toward me, his coat open and pushed back loosely, his nose thinner than it should have been, as though it had been destroyed by disease of some kind and reconstructed by an inept plastic surgeon.

“Your man with his arm in the sling, is he missing some fingers?” I asked Abelard.

“Not to my knowledge. He slammed a door on his hand.”

“No, I think I shot him. I think I blew his fingers all over a tree. I suspect he’s still in considerable pain,” I said. Then I laughed. “I also killed one of his friends.”

“You must tell us about this sometime. But right now we need to be going. Good night to you,” Abelard said.

“No, I’d like for you to glance at a few photos,” I said, pulling the manila folder from my coat pocket and opening it in front of him so it caught the light. “That first shot was taken at an exhumation by the Iberia — St. Martin Parish line. Her name was Fern Michot. She was from British Columbia and eighteen years old at the time of her death. Here, this other shot shows her in her Girl Scout uniform when she was sixteen. It gives you a better idea what she looked like. There was a lot of water and decaying garbage in the grave where her killer dumped her.

“This other girl is Bernadette Latiolais. The knife cut across her throat almost decapitated her, which caused her to bleed out and the muscles in her face to collapse, so it’s probably pretty hard to recognize her. Does she look familiar to you? Kermit says he knew her, so I’ll bet he remembers how beautiful and happy she was before a degenerate and sadist kidnapped and murdered her.”

“What Mr. Robicheaux is trying to say is the girl received a scholarship we created at UL, Pa’pere,” Kermit said. “I might have met her at an honors ceremony, but I didn’t know her. Mr. Robicheaux is still resentful because of my breakup with Alafair.”

“Is that true, Mr. Robicheaux? You resent my grandson?” Abelard said.

“No, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Kermit,” I said. “Here, look at these close-up photos of the ligature marks on Fern Michot’s wrists and ankles. She may have died from asphyxiation, or she may have been frightened to death. In your opinion, what kind of man or men would do this to a young girl, Mr. Timothy? You have any speculations?”

“Yes, I do. I think you should seek counseling,” he replied.

“Did you know these girls, Mr. Abelard? Have you ever seen them?”

“No, I haven’t. And I hope that settles the matter for you.”

“You think you can act like this to an elderly gentleman? Who are you?” the man with the mustache said to me.

“Stay out of it, buddy,” Clete said.

“Where is your identification? Where is your authority to do this?”

“Here’s mine,” Clete said, opening his badge holder. “Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. If you want to find yourself in handcuffs and sitting on the curb over there, open your mouth one more time.”

“It’s all right, Emiliano,” Abelard said.

“No, it is not all right,” Emiliano said. “Who are these crazy people? This is the United States.”

I don’t know if it was the booze, or Clete’s hypertension, or the angst over the lifetime of damage he had done to his career and himself, but it was obvious that once again we were about to give up the high ground and load the cannon for our enemies. “You just don’t listen, do you, greaseball?” Clete said.

“I have a son at West Point. I have another son who graduated from the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. You will not address me that way.”

Then I heard the voice of someone I had completely forgotten about. It was soft, almost a whisper, humble and deferential, the voice of someone who had been taught for a lifetime that her interests were secondary to those of other people. “Mr. Timothy?”

“What it is, Jewel?” Abelard answered, looking up at the woman who was both his nurse and his daughter.

“Mr. Timothy?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Timothy?”

“Will you please say it?”

“Please, suh,” she said, her eyes glistening.

“You’re not making any sense, woman,” Abelard said. “To damnation with all of you. Get us out of here. I’m sick of this.”

There was nothing for it. We had taken on the roles of anachronisms making shrill noises on a stage set in front of an empty theater. We all stood motionless in the parking lot, the trees swelling and bending, our shadows trembling on the asphalt because the streetlamps were vibrating in the wind, none of us speaking, the photos of the dead girls clenched in my hand. But before leaving, I wanted to write my signature on someone’s forehead, if for no other reason than pride.

“What’s your name?” I said to the man with the bandaged hand.

“Gus,” he replied.

“Gus what?”

“Fowler.”

“You don’t hide your feelings very well, Mr. Fowler. You were one of the dudes down at the river. You’re also a nickel-and-dime fuckup who probably couldn’t burn shit barrels without a diagram. Here’s your flash for the day: Your mutilated hand was a first installment. I’ll be talking to you down the track.” I gave him the thumbs-up sign and winked at him.

Then Clete and I drove away in his Caddy, down old Pinhook Road under a canopy of live oaks that had been planted by slaves, the moon racing through the branches. Clete was steering recklessly with one hand, his big chest rising and falling, his face white around the eyes. “We gave it up too soon,” he said. “You had the old man in a corner. Why’d you let up?”

I remained silent, listening to the tires whirring on the asphalt.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“What you’re doing. Don’t stonewall me, Dave.”

“The tent was burning down.”

“Because I called the guy a greaseball?”

“The cops in Jeff Davis found skin tissue and bloody rags on the road by the shoot-out. We’re going to get a DNA sample from this guy Fowler. If we’d gotten into it with either him or the Hispanic guy, we’d have been in custody ourselves.”

“Fowler will be on a plane by midnight.”

Maybe Clete was right, but I was too tired to care. All I wanted to do was go home and fall asleep and not think anymore about the Abelards and the faces of the girls whose photos were rolled inside the manila folder in my coat pocket. I understood Clete’s disappointment and anger, but I wasn’t up to dealing with it. The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him. We weren’t going to bring the Abelards down with physical force or intimidation. I was beginning to believe that the photos of the dead girls and all my case notes and faxes and autopsy forms and Internet printouts would eventually find their way into a cold-case file and end up behind a locked door in a storage room, one that nobody entered without a sense of guilt and failure.

I had no idea I would receive a phone call from someone whose importance in the investigation I had treated in a cavalier fashion, maybe because of a racial or cultural bias of my own. In the era in which I was raised, people of color never gave up the secrets of their white employers. Their silence had nothing to do with loyalty, either. It was based on fear.

Early Sunday morning I heard the phone ring and Alafair pick up in the kitchen. “You’re where? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well,” she said. “My father is right here. I’m sure he’ll be able to help. No, it’s not too early. It’s good to hear from you. Hang on.”

She handed the receiver to me and silently formed the words “Miss Jewel” with her mouth.