The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 21

The tremolo in Jewel’s voice was of the subdued kind that I always associated with people whose sleeplessness and worry and uncertainty had left them on a desolate beach. “I don’t want to be saying these t’ings, Mr. Dave, but when you showed us those pictures, I got sick inside, and I was hoping everyt’ing would get set straight then and there, but it didn’t, and that’s why I’m calling you.”

“Set straight where?” I said.

“There, outside the banquet room in the Oil Center. Wit’ the wind blowing and the shadows trembling on the concrete and all of us just standing there when that lie got tole.”

“Which lie?”

“I was looking down at those girls’ faces in the photographs when Mr. Timothy said what he said, and I didn’t believe that it was him talking, ’cause Mr. Timothy has got lots of faults, but lying isn’t one of them. Now his sin has become mine, ’cause I didn’t speak up. I waited for him to do it, but he didn’t.”

“I see.”

“No, suh, I don’t believe you do. I’m a nurse. I’ve worked on people who died in an emergency room with bullet holes in them you could stick your thumb in, the gunpowder burns still on their clothes, except the police report says they were shot while armed and fleeing. I’ve seen babies brought in by parents who said the stroller got knocked over accidentally or the baby pulled down a hot-water pan on itself. Those t’ings keep happening ’cause other people go along wit’ the lie. When I looked into the faces of those dead girls, it was like there were words sewn up inside their mouths like dry moths trying to get out, except nobody wanted to listen.”

She was on a cell phone, and I could hear the transmission starting to break up. I had the feeling that if she didn’t finish her statement to me, she never would. “Miss Jewel, tell me what Mr. Abelard should have said in the parking lot.”

“The one named Bernadette was at the house. She came there in the boat with Mr. Robert and Mr. Kermit. They’d been taking a ride out on the bay, and they tied up the boat at the dock and played croquet on the lawn. Mr. Timothy shook her hand. I saw him.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Maybe t’ree months back. I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he forgot,” I said.

“Mr. Timothy never forgets anyt’ing. Not a face, not an injury, not a weakness in someone, not a show of strength. He’s the same wit’ loyalty. He always say he gives every friend and every enemy whatever they’ve earned. He’s never been afraid. Those dagos from New Orleans, the Giacanos, used to come here and do business. They were scared of Mr. Timothy ’cause he always tole the troot’ and always kept his word. If the troot’ hurt him, he didn’t care. The dagos didn’t know how to deal wit’ him. He tole you I was his daughter, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“How many white men would do that?”

“But we haven’t gotten to the real issue. Why did your father lie, Miss Jewel?”

“I don’t know, suh. But I got to own up about somet’ing. The girl named Bernadette called the house. She wanted to talk to Mr. Robert.”

“Robert Weingart?”

“Yes, suh. I tole her he wasn’t here. I axed could I take a message. She said, ‘Tell Robert I saw him wit’ his pimp friend and their whores at the Big Stick club in Lafayette. Tell him I saw what he was doing wit’ one of them on the dance floor. Tell him I changed my mind about the land deal.’”

As she spoke, I was putting down on a notepad everything she told me. “What land deal, Miss Jewel?”

“I don’t know. She said somet’ing about conservation.”

“What, exactly?”

“I don’t know about those t’ings.”

“Just tell me what she said as closely as you can remember.”

“She said to tell Mr. Robert she gave his land to the conservatory or somet’ing.”

“Where are you now?”

“At my house.”

“Where is that?”

“In the quarters.”

“Okay, Miss Jewel. Don’t discuss this conversation with anyone. Everything you have told me is in confidence. You haven’t done anything wrong. You did everything you were supposed to do. At this point, your responsibility is over. You hearing me on this?”

“I should have called you a long time ago. I t’ink it was me that let that poor girl get killed.”

“You shouldn’t say that about yourself. You’re a good person. It took courage for you to make this call.”

“No, you’re not understanding me. After I gave Mr. Robert the message the girl left, I heard him talking on his cell phone to somebody. He was standing on the lawn, looking out at the trees in the water. I don’t know who he was talking to, but he said somet’ing I don’t want to t’ink about, somet’ing that makes me wake up in the middle of the night. I tell myself maybe I didn’t hear right, that it was my imagination, but I keep seeing him standing against the sunlight flashing off the water, his face shaped just like a snake’s head, and I hear him saying, ‘I believe we have a candidate for the box.’”

The box?

On Monday morning I told Helen everything that had occurred at the fund-raiser in Lafayette. I also told her, almost word for word, everything Jewel had reported to me. When I finished, she propped her elbows on her desk blotter and touched her fingers to both sides of her forehead. “I’m having some trouble tracking all this. You took Clete Purcel with you on an unauthorized trip to Lafayette and got into it with Timothy and Kermit Abelard and their entourage?”

“No, I asked Mr. Abelard some questions, and he lied to me. That’s obstruction.”

Her eyelids fluttered as though the fluorescent lights in the room were short-circuiting. “All right, I’m not going to get into procedural problems here. The man with the bandage on his hand?”

“Gus Fowler.”

“This guy Fowler, you think he was one of the guys you shot on the river?”

“I can’t swear to it.”

“Did you run him?”

“He has no record of any kind.”

“Go to Abelard’s place and pick him up.”

“Pick him up for what?”

“I don’t care. Make up something. When has legality been a problem for you? I’ll talk to the sheriff in St. Mary.”

“What about Robert Weingart?”

“What about him?”

“Jewel said he told someone Bernadette Latiolais was a candidate for the box.”

She looked around the room, still blinking. “That’s disturbing. I can’t make sense of this. There’s a land swindle or scam of some kind involved, but there’s something perverse and sadistic going on as well. It doesn’t fit together.” She lifted her gaze, staring straight into my eyes. “Unless?”

“What?”

“I’m not objective. I’ve already proved that,” she said.

“Not objective about what, Helen?”

“Carolyn Blanchet.”

“Go on.”

“She’s a dominatrix. I’ve been told stories about her sessions in the French Quarter.”

In the silence, I could see a flush spreading across her throat.

“You think Carolyn is capable of murder?”

“You tell me. She was a bitch when she came out of the womb. I hate this stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“All of it. Everything we do for a living. I’m tired of living in a sewer. I’m tired of seeing innocent people get hurt. Go see if you can find Gus Fowler. I’m going to talk to the state attorney’s office and try to get to the bottom of the land deal.”

She got up from her desk and looked out the window at the bayou, her back stiff with anger or revulsion, I couldn’t tell which.

“We’re still the good guys,” I said.

“You know how many unsolved female homicides there are in Louisiana?”

“No.”

“That’s the point. Nobody does. Not here, not anywhere. It’s open season on women and girls in this country. You bring that asshole in. If he falls down and leaves blood on the vehicle, all the better. His DNA becomes a voluntary submission.”

“Can you repeat that last part?”

“Call me when you’re at the Abelard place,” she said. “By the way, the ligature Clete found in the Abelards’ Dumpster was clean. Bring me something I can use, Dave. I want to put somebody’s head on a pike.”

But rhetoric is cheap stuff when you play by the rules and the other side does business with baseball bats. No one came to the Abelards’ door when I knocked. An elderly man whose race was hard to determine was pulling weeds in the flower bed. He said he had seen no one that morning. He also said he had never heard of anyone named Gus Fowler, nor did he remember seeing anyone who fit Fowler’s description. I asked where I might find Miss Jewel.

His eyes were blue-green and scaled with cataracts. They glowed in the indistinct way that light glows inside frosted glass. His skin was a yellowish-brown, leached pink and milk-white in places by a dermatologic disease that often afflicts people of color in the South. The tattered straw hat he wore made me think of pictures of convicts taken at the prison colony in French Guiana. “Jewel Laveau?” he said.

I realized I had never known Jewel’s last name. It was not an ordinary one, either. Anyone who ever read a history of old New Orleans or visited the St. Louis Cemetery on Basin Street would probably recognize it.

“If she ain’t wit’ the family, she’s most probably at her house in the quarters,” the gardener said.

“You know where I could find Robert Weingart?”

He smiled in a kindly fashion. “No, suh.”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“No, suh, what I mean is, I ain’t sure who that is. Even if I knew, I ain’t seen nobody.”

I understood that no amount of either coercion or bribery would ever cause this man to give up a teaspoon of information about the Abelards or the people who came and went through the front door. “Can you forget I was here?” I said.

“Suh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

I drove east on a winding road between the bay and pastureland that had become a flood zone chained with ponds that were home to clouds of gnats and dragonflies and where, for no apparent reason, cranes or egrets or blue herons did not feed or nest. A gray skein of dead vegetation left by storm surges coated the branches of the persimmon and gum trees and slash pines, and on either side of the road, the rain ditches were strewn with trash, much of it in vinyl bags that had split when they were flung from automobiles. Up ahead, among a few slender palm trees stenciled against the sky like those on a Caribbean isle, I saw the tin roofs of the community where Miss Jewel lived.

The term “quarters,” in the plural, goes back to the plantation era, which did not end with the Civil War but perpetuated itself well into the mid-twentieth century. Harry Truman may or may not have been disliked in the South for integrating the United States Army, but there is no doubt about the enmity he incurred when he made ten-thousand-dollar loans available to southern sharecroppers and farmworkers at 1 percent interest. That one program broke the back of the corporate farm system and created the Dixiecrat Party and the career of Senator Strom Thurmond. But a culture does not transform itself in a few generations. Except for the automobiles and pickup trucks parked in the dirt yards, the quarters owned by the Abelard family had changed little since they were carpentered together in the 1880s.

They were painted yellow or blue and resembled wood boxcars with tin roofs and tiny galleries built onto them. They were often called shotgun houses because theoretically a person could fire a single-barrel twenty-gauge through the front door and send a load of birdshot out the back without bruising a wall. But Jewel’s house was different from the rest, located at the end of a dirt street still slick from an early-morning shower, its walls painted a deep purple, the window frames and gallery posts painted green, the gallery hung with Mardi Gras beads. On the tin mailbox out by the rain ditch was the name Laveau in large black letters. She was sitting on the gallery steps, wearing heavy Levi’s and an unironed men’s shirt she hadn’t bothered to tuck in and a bandanna wrapped tightly around her hair. She was reading a shopper’s guide of some kind, the pages folded back, clutching it with one hand, turning it to catch the light as though the words contained great significance. I walked up the path and stopped three feet from her, but she never raised her eyes from the shopper’s guide.

“Are you related to Marie Laveau, Miss Jewel?” I asked.

“She was my great-great-grandmother.”

“You don’t practice voodoo, do you?”

“She didn’t, either. People used that against her ’cause she was the most powerful woman in New Orleans.”

“I need to find the man with the bandaged hand, the one who calls himself Gus Fowler.”

“I t’ink he left.”

“Do you know where he went?”

She seemed to study the question. “No, he didn’t say. He just drove away.”

“We’re going to find him. We’d like to feel you’re on our side.”

“I don’t have anyt’ing to say about him or any of the t’ings you got on your mind.”

“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”

“Your kind don’t give up easy.”

“No, you were waiting for me. Do you see into the future, Miss Jewel?”

She rolled her shopper’s guide into a cone and stuck it under her thigh and gazed at the shimmer on the dirt lane. “I’m not part of it anymore.”

“What’s ‘it’?”

“Anyt’ing outside of my job.”

“You told Mr. Abelard of our conversation?”

Her face was as dark and smooth as melted chocolate, her eyes devoid of emotion. The sorrow and contrition she said she had felt about the deaths of Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot seemed to have burned away with the morning mist.

“What did your father say when you told him you called me?” I said.

She waited a long time before she spoke. “He axed me to sit down and have dinner wit’ him. He stood up from his wheelchair on a cane and held my chair for me. That’s the first time I ever sat at the table wit’ Mr. Timothy. He tole me it didn’t matter what I did, I was still his daughter.”

“This may be a surprise, but I’m not interested in Mr. Abelard’s spiritual generosity.”

“Don’t talk about him like that, suh.”

“I think he’s an evil man and should be treated as such. I think you’re making a mistake in trusting him.”

“I don’t care what you say.”

“What’s ‘the box,’ Jewel?”

“I don’t know, me.”

“You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t try to hide behind a dialectical disguise.”

“You can go now, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Think about the faces of those girls in the photographs. You’re a highly trained medical person. You know the pain and despair those girls experienced when they died. They had no one to comfort them, to hold their hand, to tell them they were loved by God and their fellow man. But you called me on your own and stood up for them. Don’t undo a brave and noble deed, Miss Jewel. Don’t rob yourself of your own virtue.”

I saw her lips form a bitter line; she looked like a person making a choice between two evils and deciding upon the one that hurt her the most, as though her self-injury brought with it a degree of forgiveness. “I got to do my wash,” she said.

“Those girls are going to haunt you,” I said. “In your sleep. In a crowd. At Mass. In a movie theater. Across the table from you at McDonald’s. The dead carry a special kind of passport, and they go anywhere they want.”

She stared into the humidity glistening on the road and at the tin roofs of the other houses. The wind swayed the palms overhead and rattled the Mardi Gras beads that hung from the eaves of her gallery. I walked back to the cruiser, wondering at the harshness of my language, wondering if my oath to protect and serve had not finally drained my heart of pity and left only rage and a thirst for vengeance. Then I heard her voice behind me, muted against the wind and the rustling of the beads. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears. Her gaze was fixed strangely on my face, her eyes lit with a bizarre luminosity, her teeth white against the darkness of her tongue, her skin sparkling with moisture.

“I didn’t hear you. Say that over,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“About what?”

“About saying it. I didn’t mean to say it. Don’t pay me any mind.”

“Say what?”

“Go back home. Pretend you weren’t here. Keep yourself and your family away from us.”

“Tell me what you said.”

“Don’t make me.”

“You say it, damn you.”

“Somebody is fixing to die at your house.”

She took a deep breath, as though a large, thick-bodied bird had just taken flight from her chest.

I drove back down the winding two-lane to the Abelard home, on the odd chance I would catch someone there before I returned to New Iberia. As I neared the wood bridge that gave access to the Abelards’ island, I saw Robert Weingart in a pair of Speedos on the lawn between the boathouse and a blooming mimosa, performing a martial arts exercise of some kind. Like a flamingo pecking at its feathers, he torqued his body in one direction and then the other, his hands moving delicately in the air, his eyes closed, the breeze caressing his face and the glaze of tan and sweat on his skin.

If I ever saw a man for whom his own body was a holy grail, it was Weingart. His armpits were shaved and powdered like a woman’s. His black Speedos clung wetly to the buttermilk texture of his buttocks, his phallus outlined like a rhinoceros’s horn. His eyelids were lowered as though he was enjoying the sun through the filter of his own skin. He gave no notice of my tires rumbling across the bridge, nor did he look behind him when I parked and got out of the cruiser and stood silently watching him across the top of the roof. I had to admire his concentration and his indifference. Weingart had mastered the ethos of the cynic and, in my opinion, had successfully scrubbed every trace of decency and humanity from his soul. If he had any feelings at all, I suspected they were connected entirely with the satisfaction of his desires, and they had nothing to do with the rest of us.

Was this aging, self-absorbed product of plastic surgery the sole perpetrator behind the death of the two girls? He was the white man’s answer to Herman Stanga, the man we love to hate. He was cruel, pernicious, and predatory. He exploited the faith and trust of uneducated people and forever blighted their lives. But he was also pathetic. He’d had his head shoved in a toilet bowl by Clete Purcel. He’d been humiliated and slapped across the side of the head by one of our deputies at the bank. Later that same day, Emma Poche had brought him to his knees with a baton and then had tormented him on the ground. Weingart reminded me of the high school hood who moves to a small town from a big city and scares the hell out of everybody until someone challenges him and discovers he’s a joke.

But what did I know about him specifically, other than his criminal history and his penchant for getting into it with people who didn’t do things by the rules?

He was pulling his money out of a local bank and transferring it to a bank in British Columbia. He was planning to either blow Dodge or set up another nefarious scheme or both. Timothy Abelard had shown Alafair a photo of himself and a man who resembled Robert Weingart sitting in a café on Lake Louise in Alberta, although Abelard had denied to Alafair that his companion was Weingart. What were they doing there? Was it land investment? Were the Abelards taking their long and sorry tradition of environmental abuse and human exploitation to one of the most beautiful places in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world?

What was the box? The term conjured up images I didn’t want to think about.

I walked onto the lawn and stood no more than fifteen feet behind Weingart. He rotated slowly in a circle, opening his eyes, a smirk breaking at the corner of his mouth. “Yes?” he said.

“I’m looking for a guy by the name of Gus Fowler.”

“Let me think. No, can’t place him.”

“Guy with a big wad of bandages wrapped around his hand. He’s probably doped up on painkillers. Has a pal from Taco-Tico Land, a guy who takes offense just because somebody called him a greaseball.”

“Sorry.”

“I blew Mr. Fowler’s fingers off. I thought you might have heard about it. I guess you’re not in the loop.”

“Apparently not.”

“Heading up to Canada? Maybe Trout Lake, someplace like that?”

“No.”

“You’ve been to Trout Lake, though, haven’t you?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Is that where you met Fern Michot?”

“The name doesn’t make bells clang.”

“She was a Canadian girl we dug out of a landfill. She was buried with some broken teacups that Bernadette Latiolais had purchased at a dollar store just before she was abducted. Of course, you remember Bernadette?”

“Many people come to my book signings. Was she one of those?” He never paused in his exercise, his upper body rotating at the hips, his arms gliding through the air as though he were underwater.

“She caught you at the Big Stick club in Lafayette with some of your skanks. Or were they Herman Stanga’s skanks?”

His eyes were roving over my face; a tiny laugh rose like a bubble in his throat. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.

“You don’t hang with skanks?” I said.

“Excuse me. I don’t mean to smile. But I’ve never seen a variation in the script.”

“Which script would that be, Mr. Weingart?”

“The outraged father figure always knocking other people’s sexual behavior. It’s classic. Daddy is always worrying about what other people are doing with their genitalia. Except Daddy’s little girl can’t keep her panties on.”

“Want to spell that out?”

“I’m not one to judge. Talk to Kermit about it. He said Alafair was jumping his stick on their first date. He also said she gives good head.”

He turned at an angle to me, his hands and fingers moving with the fluidity of snakes, the sun-bleached tips of his hair tousling in the wind, a smell like dried salt wafting off his skin.

I winked at him and said nothing. His eyes dropped to my waist. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“This?”

“Yeah.” He had stopped his martial arts routine.

“That’s the strap that holds my holster on my belt. I have to unsnap it to take off my holster.”

“Yeah, I know that. What are you doing with it?”

“You have to ask?”

“This isn’t Tombstone, Arizona, and you’re not Wyatt Earp.”

“You’re right. I don’t trust myself,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t like to carry a weapon when I was alone with Herman Stanga. Want to hold it? I brought it back from Saigon. I got it for twenty-five dollars from a prostitute in Bring Cash Alley. The prostitutes there were all VC. They dosed us with clap and sold us our own guns. Go ahead, get the feel of it. It’s a little heavy, but I bet you can handle it.”

His gaze shifted from me to the house, then to the empty road on the far side of the wood bridge. “You’re an old man. That’s what all this is about.”

“I’m old, but I can lift five hundred pounds across my shoulders. Did you know there’s a twitch in your face?” I stepped closer to him, smiling, touching the holstered grips of the .45 against his breastbone. “Go on. It won’t bite. You’ve been jailing all your life, fading the action inside and outside, taking on all comers. You know how to handle a gun.”

“Your problem is with Kermit, not me.”

“No, I want you to tell me some more about my daughter. You were just getting started.”

“No.”

“I really want you to. It will be a big favor to me. Hold on a second.” I walked to the cruiser and threw the .45 on the seat. “There. Now say whatever you wish. We’re all pals here, aren’t we?”

He shook his head, stepping back from me, his hands useless at his sides, his head turning to look at a motorboat out on the bay, a tiny wad of fear sliding down his windpipe.

“I watched your bud Vidor Perkins die,” I said. “I think he was hit by a toppling round. His brains exploded out of a big exit wound right above his eye. I watched a couple of guys in rain hoods pick him up like a sack of fertilizer and throw him in a van. Think that might happen to you, Mr. Weingart? I suspect you never met any cleaners inside. Know why that is? Cleaners don’t do time. They’re protected by the government or corporate people who use third-world countries to wipe their ass. Guys who are disposable do their time. You ready to go back inside for this bunch? How long has it been since you had your knee pads on?”

When you step on a snake, don’t expect him to run. Even in death, he’ll try to wrap his body around your ankle and sink his fangs in your foot. I had watched Weingart’s face shrink in the wind and become hard and tight, like the skin on an apple. But now he glanced upward at the clumps of pale red mimosa blooming against a blue sky, then fixed his gaze on me, his smirk once again crawling across his cheek, his fear in check.

“There’s something else Kermit mentioned,” he said. “Alafair is your adopted daughter, not your real daughter. Which is probably how you justified your visits into her bedroom when she was thirteen and just getting her menses. According to Kermit, Daddy helped her into her womanhood and kept helping her all the way through high school. Daddy is quite a guy.”

I took a stick of gum out of my shirt pocket and peeled the foil off and fed it into my mouth. “Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.

“Oh, really? What’s the profound implication there, Detective Robicheaux?”

“When I check out, I’m going to make sure you’re on board,” I said. “Kind of like a Viking funeral, know what I mean? A dead dog at the foot of the corpse. Welcome to the bow-wow club, podjo.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. The air was like wet cotton, the moon down, the clouds flaring with pools of yellow lightning that gave no sound. Also, I was haunted by the words of Jewel Laveau. Was she prescient or just superstitious and grandiose, melodramatically laying claim to the powers of her ancestor, an iconic voodoo priestess who today is entombed in an oven off Basin Street? Don’t let anyone tell you that age purchases you freedom from fear of death. As Clete Purcel once said in describing his experience in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, it’s a sonofabitch. Men cry out for their mothers; they grip your hands with an intensity that can break bones; their breath covers your face like damp cobwebs and tries to draw you inside them. As George Orwell suggested long ago, if you can choose the manner of your death, let it be in hot blood and not in bed.

I got up at two in the morning and sat in the kitchen in the dark and listened to the wind in the trees and the clink of Tripod’s chain attached to a wire I had strung between two live oaks. The windows were open, and I could smell the heavy odor of the bayou and bream spawning under the clusters of lily pads along the bank. I heard an alligator flop in the water and the drawbridge opening upstream, the great cogged wheels clanking together, a boat with a deep draft laboring against the incoming tide.

I saw the night-light go on in our bedroom, then Molly’s silhouette emerge from the hallway. She stood behind me and placed one hand on my shoulder, her hip touching my back. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and fluffy slippers, and I could feel a level of heat and solidity in her presence that seemed to exist separately from her body. “Something bothering you, troop?” she said.

“I get wired up sometimes. You know how it is,” I replied. I put my arm across the broadness of her rump.

“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.

“That kind of talk doesn’t mean anything.”

“You said, ‘I’m not ready.’ Then you asked where Alafair was. You called her Alf.”

“I shouldn’t call her that. It makes her mad.”

“Dave, do you have a medical problem you’re not telling me about?”

“No, I’m fine. Did Alafair go somewhere tonight?”

“She’s asleep. She went to sleep before you did. You don’t remember?”

“I had a dream, that’s all.”

“About what?”

“You and she were on a dock. Tripod was there. I was watching you from across the water. You were saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear you.”

“Come back to bed.”

“I think I’ll sit here for a while. I’ll be along directly.”

“I’ll sit with you.”

“Molly—”

“Tell me.”

“Sometimes we have to adjust and go on.”

“What are you saying?”

Nothing is forever.

“The bridge is making all kinds of noise. It must be broken. Speak up,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

She felt my forehead, then my cheek. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“I’m not drunk anymore. That’s all that counts. I’m going to check on Alf.”

“You can’t leave me with this kind of uncertainty. You tell me what it is.”

You know, I thought. You know, you know, you know.

Through the oaks I could see the clouds lighting and flashing and disappearing into blackness again. In the illumination through the windows, Molly’s face had the hollow-eyed starkness of someone staring down a long corridor in which all the side exits were chain-locked. I looked in on Alafair then closed the door so she couldn’t hear our voices. “Don’t pay attention to me,” I said to Molly. “Guys like us always do okay. We’re believers. We’ve never been afraid.”

Molly stood on the tops of my feet with her slippers and put her arms around my middle and pressed her head against my chest, as though the beating of my heart were a stay against all the nameless forces churning around us.

Tuesday morning Alafair called me at the office. “I think I got a breakthrough on the seven arpents of land Bernadette Latiolais owned in Jeff Davis Parish,” she said.

“What are you doing, Alf?”

“Don’t call me that name.”

“What are you doing?” I repeated.

“Jewel Laveau told you Bernadette Latiolais was giving her land to a conservation group of some kind. I talked with a lawyer in New Orleans who does work for the Nature Conservancy. He said Bernadette Latiolais was going to have a covenant built into her deed so that the land could never be used for industrial purposes and would remain a wildlife habitat.”

“You found this on your own?”

“Yeah, after I made a few calls. Why?”

“We need to put you on the payroll. But I don’t want you at risk, Alafair. The Abelards and their minions have no bottom.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, Dave. Here’s the rest of it. Lawyers for the estate of Layton Blanchet are trying to get Bernadette’s donation to the Nature Conservancy nullified. At the time of her death, she was only seventeen and not of legal age. Layton Blanchet was backing a group that was going to build a giant processing plant that would convert sugarcane into ethanol. If Timothy Abelard was a player, he was a minor one.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“Dave, I think Carolyn Blanchet is at the center of all this.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think. You have to stay out of it. For once in your life, will you listen to me?” I shut my eyes at the thought of what I had just said. I wanted to hit myself with the phone receiver.

“I thought you’d want the information,” she said.

“I do.”

“You have a peculiar way of showing it.”

“Where are you?”

“In my car. What difference does it make?”

“There’s little that I understand about this investigation. Timothy Abelard is surrounded by people who seem more connected with his past than his present. I’m talking about Caribbean dictators and paramilitary thugs. Mr. Abelard is a neocolonial and happens to live here rather than on the edge of an empire. But I’m convinced he’s ruthless and perhaps perverse. Why else would he abide a man like Robert Weingart?”

“It’s because of Kermit, Dave. Kermit is weak and dependent and probably can’t deal with the fact that he’s gay. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”

“Don’t buy into that.”

“You’re unteachable, but I love you anyway.”

“Don’t hang up.”

Too late.

I called her back, but she didn’t answer. I waited fifteen minutes and called home and got the message machine. Molly was at her office at a rural development foundation on the bayou, one that helped poor people build homes and start up small businesses. I dialed her number, then hung up before anyone could answer. Molly had enough worries without my adding to them. I went into Helen’s office and told her what Alafair had discovered.

“An ethanol plant? That’s what all this is about?” Helen said.

“Part of it, at least.”

“The local sugar growers are already trying to build one. This is a separate deal, though?”

“It’s just one more instance of the locals getting screwed by somebody who pretends to be their ally,” I said.

She clicked her nails on her blotter. “So maybe Carolyn Blanchet saw her husband’s fortunes going down the toilet and decided to blow his head off and take over his businesses. Think that’s possible?”

“Yeah, this might explain the motivation for the murder of Bernadette Latiolais, but what about Fern Michot?”

“You don’t know Carolyn Blanchet.”

“She’s not only a dominatrix but homicidal as well?”

“Want me to go into some details I’ve heard?”

“Not really.”

“There’s a world out there you don’t know about, Dave. I think it’s one you don’t want to hear about.”

“I don’t want my daughter to get hurt.”

“How is Alafair going to get hurt?”

“Because none of the lines in this investigation are simple, and both you and she think otherwise.”

“You really know how to win a girl’s heart. Okay, you asked for this.” Helen opened a desk drawer and threw a folder in front of me. “These were taken by a woman I used to be friends with in the Garden District. The woman in the mask with the whip is Carolyn. The leather fetters and chains are the real thing. How do you like the thigh-high boots?”

“I think that stuff is a joke.”

“A joke?”

“It’s the masquerade of self-deluded idiots who never grew out of masturbation. I have the feeling everyone in those photographs is a closet Puritan.”

“You’re too much, bwana.”

“No, I’m just a guy worried about his daughter. I’ll buy Carolyn Blanchet as a greedy, manipulative shrew capable of staging her husband’s suicide. But she’s not Eva Perón in Marquis de Sade drag.”

“How about Carolyn Blanchet and Emma Poche working together? Ever think of that? Or maybe Carolyn has a yen for young girls and Emma got jealous. I don’t have all the answers, Dave, but don’t accuse me of being simplistic or naive.”

“Timothy Abelard is a pterodactyl. To him, people like Carolyn Blanchet and Emma are insects.”

Helen replaced the black-and-white photos in the folder and dropped them in her desk drawer. “You give the Abelards dimensions they don’t have. I’m not fooled by them, but I don’t obsess about them, either.”

This time I made no reply.

“I was about to go down to your office when you came in,” she said. “That guy Gus Fowler?”

“What about him?”

“A body washed up on the shore at East Cote Blanche Bay last night. One hand is missing three fingers. The sheriff says they look like they were recently sutured. The deceased has a white scar cupped around one nostril like a piece of twine. Sound like anyone you know?”

It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced — in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.

This story began with a visit to a penal work gang outside Natchez, Mississippi. Its denouement commenced late in the afternoon with a phone call from one of the players who had sweltered in the heat and humidity next to a brush fire that was so hot, a freshly lopped tree branch would burst instantly alight when it touched the flames. The caller was not a man I cared to hear from again.

Jimmy Darl Thigpin’s voice was like that of a man speaking through a rusty tin can. “I’m retired now and was in the neighborhood,” he said.

“I see,” I replied, actually not seeing anything, not wanting to even exchange a greeting with the gunbull who had shot and killed Elmore Latiolais.

“I’m up at a fish camp at Bayou Bijou. Come out and have a drink.”

“I’ve been off the hooch quite a while, Cap.”

“Got soda pop or whatever you want.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Need to give you a heads-up. I got to get some guilt off my conscience as well.”

“Why don’t you come into the office?”

“I don’t like being around officialdom anymore. The state of Mis’sippi give me a pension wouldn’t pay for the toilet paper in the state capitol building. Guess what color half the legislature is? I got a chicken smoking on my grill. It’s a twenty-minute ride, Mr. Robicheaux. Do an old man a favor, will you?”

After I got off the phone, I called Clete Purcel and told him of my conversation with Thigpin. “I’d blow it off,” he said.

“Why?”

“If he’s got anything to say, let him do it on the phone.”

“Maybe he’s not sure how much he wants to tell me. Maybe he was paid to kill Elmore Latiolais.”

“I say don’t trust him.”

“Check with you later.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret, Streak. These guys know you’ve got an invisible Roman collar around your neck. They use it against you.”

“Thigpin has chewing tobacco for brains. You give him too much credit.”

“You never listen.”

“Yeah, I do. I just don’t agree with you,” I said.

I called Molly and told her I’d be home for supper a little late. Then I drove down a long two-lane road between oak trees into a chain of freshwater bays that bordered the Atchafalaya Basin. I wasn’t worried about Thigpin. He may have been an anachronism, but I had known many like him. Most of them had become as institutionalized in their mind-set and way of life as the convicts they supervised. Some, when drunk or in a moment of moral clarity, admitted they had gone to work in the prison system before they ended up hoeing soybeans and chopping cotton themselves. Some, upon retirement, looked over their shoulders every day of their lives. Years ago, I knew a guard at Angola who had put men on anthills when they fell out on the work detail. He also shot and killed inmates on the Red Hat gang, sometimes for no other reason than pure meanness. The prison administration allowed him to work at the gate until he was almost eighty because there was not a town in Mississippi or Louisiana he could retire to. The day he was finally forced to leave Angola, he paid one week’s rent at a roominghouse in New Orleans, shut the windows, stuffed newspaper under the doors, and went to sleep with his head in the oven, the gas jets flowing.

I drove up on the levee, my windows down, to my left a wide bay dotted with cypress trees, to my right a string of fish camps on a green bib that sloped down to another bay, this one reddening with the sunset, the fluted trunks of the tupelo gums flaring at the waterline, moss lifting in their limbs. The road atop the levee bent into an arbor of trees where the shadows were thicker, the water along the shore skimmed with a gray film, the tracings of a cottonmouth zigzagging through the algae that had clustered among the storm trash left over from Rita.

I passed a yellow school bus with no wheels, all of its windows pocked by BB guns or .22 rounds, its sides scaled with vine. Then I saw a clapboard shack in the gloom, banana fronds bending over the tin roof, a bright red Coca-Cola machine sweating under the porte cochere, a deck built on pilings over the water, a small barbecue pit smoking greasily in the breeze.

I parked in the yard. Thigpin came out the back of the house and greeted me with a can of beer in his hand. He wore his tall-crown cowboy hat, the same one he was wearing when I interviewed Elmore Latiolais on the brush gang. Perhaps it was the diminished nature of the sunlight, but one side of Thigpin’s face seemed even more shriveled from skin cancer than the last time I had seen him, to the extent that his grin looked like a surgical wound in the corrupted tissue.

When he shook hands, his grip was too strong, biting into mine like that of a man whose energies are not quite under control. “I cain’t crack you a cold one?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

“You in one of them twelve-step programs?” he said.

“That pretty well sums it up.”

He released my hand. “Nobody is looking. I got some Johnnie Walker, too.”

“You said you had a heads-up for me.”

“Come on in the kitchen. I got to get me a fresh beer. I’ll set out some plates for us.”

“I need to get on it, Cap.”

“Too bad. I was looking forward to dining with you.”

His eyebrows and sideburns were freshly clipped, his jaw shaved. I thought I could smell cologne on his skin. He didn’t strike me as a man who had spent much time at his fish camp. The only vehicle in the yard was a pristine Dodge Ram, the tires clean and thick-treaded, the dealer’s tag still in the back window. There was no boat in the water. I glanced at the barbecue pit. The chicken on it was black except for a pink slash where a drumstick had been torn off. “You coming?” he said over his shoulder.

I followed him inside and let the screen door slam shut behind me. The linoleum floor was cracked and wedged upward in places, spiderwebs feathering in the breeze along the jambs of the open windows. I waited for him to speak. Instead, he began clattering around in a cabinet, pulling out coffee cups and a coffeepot, fiddling with the feed on the propane stove. I stepped into his line of sight. “You said you had a problem of conscience of some kind. You want to tell me what this is about, or should I leave?”

He clanked the coffeepot down on the stove and released it as though the handle were burning his fingers. “I think Elmore Latiolais was aiming to kill me. I had it on good authority. He walked to the truck and reached inside. I told him to put his hands where I could see them and to back the hell off. He didn’t do it. So I punched his ticket.”

“From what ‘good authority’ did you get your information?” I asked.

“I got to be friends with a powerful man in Jackson. I invested my money with his bank. A lot of people lost their money in that bank. But I didn’t. I took this man hunting and fishing, and he treated me as a friend.” He was breathing audibly, the way ignorant and defensive people do when no one has challenged their statement.

“I think you’re talking about Layton Blanchet,” I said. “I think you were paid to kill Elmore Latiolais because he was bringing down too much heat on a coalition of lowlifes who are responsible for the deaths of two innocent girls. Is that the problem of conscience we’re talking about, Cap?”

“If you’re saying I was bribed, you’re a goddamn liar.” He still wore his hat; his profile was as chiseled as an Indian’s, his eyes as clear as glass. But even while he denied his guilt, his thoughts seemed elsewhere, as though he had already moved on in the conversation.

“What’s the heads-up?” I asked.

“People like us do what we’re told. You go along, you get along.”

“Until you start killing people for hire.”

He was motionless, one hand resting on the corner of the stove, the other on a chopping table that had a single drawer. “The government is attaching the money I got from that failed bank. I worked over forty years for what I have. Now I’m supposed to live on a piss-pot state pension ’cause of what other people done? What would you do in that situation?”

I saw two fingers on his right hand jerk involuntarily, just inches above the metal handle on the drawer. I said, “I think I wouldn’t fault myself for a situation I didn’t create. I wouldn’t try to correct the past by serving the interests of the same people who cheated me out of my life savings.”

His jaw flexed, the skin on half his face wrinkling as coarsely as sandpaper. “You reckon hell is hot?”

“Since I don’t plan on going there, I haven’t speculated on it.”

“This ain’t my way. But they didn’t give me no choice, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“You open that drawer, I’m going to smoke your sausage.”

“No, sir, you’re not. You’re a trusting man, which makes you a fool. Sorry to do this to you.”

With his left hand, he lifted up a double-barrel chrome-plated.32-caliber Derringer that he had probably slipped from his back pocket. It was aimed at a spot between my chin and breastbone.

“People know where I am. They know I talked with you,” I said.

“Don’t matter. Twelve hours from now, I’ll be fishing off the Yucatán coast. Turn around. Don’t make this no harder than it is.”

I could feel my mouth going dry, my scalp tightening. When I tried to swallow, my breath caught like a fish bone in my throat. In my mind’s eye, I saw a nocturnal landscape and the flicker of artillery on the horizon, and seconds later, I heard the rushing sound of a 105 round that was coming in short.

I forced myself to look at the Derringer, its two chrome-plated barrels set one on top of the other. The muzzles were black, the handles yellow, lost inside Thigpin’s grip. My head felt like a balloon about to burst. “You’re typical white trash, Thigpin. You’re a gutless thrall who’s spent his life abusing people who have no power. Go on and do it, you motherfucker. I’ll be standing by your deathbed.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Robicheaux. When you get down below with the Kennedys and all the other nigger lovers, give them my regards.”

My vision went out of focus. I raised my hand to my holster, but I knew my gesture was in vain, that my life was over, that I was going to be executed by a brutal, mindless human being whose pathological cruelty was so natural to him, he did not even recognize its existence. Then, through the distortion in my vision, I saw a man standing thirty feet from the kitchen window, aiming down the barrel of an AR-15, his huge shoulders almost tearing the seams of his Hawaiian shirt. He seemed frozen in time and space, his breath slowing, the squeeze of his trigger pull as slow and deliberate as the tiny serrated wheels of a watch meshing together. The report was dulled by the wind gusting in the trees, but the muzzle flash was as bright and sharp and beautiful as an electric arc. The round popped a hole in the screen and blew through one side of Thigpin’s neck and out the other, whipping a jet of blood across the stove’s enamel.

I suspect the round destroyed his trachea, because I heard a gasp deep down in his throat as if he were trying to suck air through a ruptured tube. But there was no mistaking the look in his eyes. He knew he was dying and he was determined to take me with him. Blood welled over his bottom lip as he lifted the Derringer toward my chin. That was when Clete Purcel squeezed off again and caught Jimmy Dale Thigpin just above the ear and sent him crashing to the floor. The top of the coffeepot rolled past his head like a coin, devolving into a tinny clatter on the linoleum.