The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 6

That afternoon an elderly cane farmer ten miles outside of New Iberia had been harrowing a field that was bordered by a coulee and a hedgerow of persimmon and gum trees. The lock on his gate had been broken by vandals driving ATVs, and the dirt road he used to get his machinery in and out of the field now gave access to dumpers who had thrown rubber tires and old furniture and raw garbage down the embankment of his coulee. He had called the sheriff’s office to complain and had tried to bury or haul away the trash, then finally had given up.

The breeze was warm and drowsy, and he felt himself nodding off in the tractor seat. Up ahead, a flock of crows clattered into the air above the persimmon and gum trees. The farmer cut his engine, and in the shade of a canvas umbrella he had fastened above the tractor seat, he opened his thermos and poured himself a cup of Kool-Aid. From inside the trees, he could hear horseflies buzzing and see them clustering on the ground and rising suddenly in the air. The wind shifted out of the south, and an odor struck his nostrils that made his throat clench.

He walked into the trees, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. At the lip of the coulee, someone had spaded the ground with a shovel and replaced the torn divots of grass with a rake, creating a broken pattern that made the farmer think of a root-bound plant in a cracked flowerpot. He found a long stick and began pushing the divots down the side of the levee, the clods of dirt rilling into the water.

Oh, bon Dieu, bon Dieu, he thought as the odor grew in strength and seemed to clutch at his face like a soiled hand. Then he touched something soft that made him drop the stick and step back, his eyes watering not from the odor but from what he thought he was about to see. He stumbled backward in the shade, away from the thing that was buried in the ground, unable to take his gaze from the hole his digging had created. But in the disturbed dirt, the only image he could make out was a plastic teacup that had a large piece broken out of it. The cup was painted with tiny lavender roses.

The coroner, the paramedics, a half-dozen uniformed deputies, two technicians from the Acadiana crime lab, and Helen and I all arrived at the scene within twenty minutes of one another. The body of the buried girl or woman was fully dressed and had been covered over by no more than a foot of soil. She was blond and about five and a half feet tall, and she wore the kind of tennis shoes a kid might, but because of the heat and the moisture in the ground and the piles of red ants that had been pushed into the depression with her, the decomposition was so dramatic that it was impossible to estimate her age.

Buried with her were two winter coats, an empty handbag, seven shoes, a polyester scarf, coils of costume jewelry, a tube of lipstick, two barrettes, a Bic lighter, and a saucer that matched the broken teacup the farmer had already unearthed.

The farmer had no idea when or how the body had gotten onto his land.

“Did you see any lights at night?” I asked.

“Kids running them ATVs all over my field. I called y’all fo’ times, but ain’t nobody done anything about it. You t’ink them kids done this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m fixing to lose my farm. This land has been in the Delahoussaye family for a hundred and fifty years. I ain’t never seen anything like this. Why ain’t y’all done somet’ing?”

“You think someone has a grudge against you, sir?”

“You tell me. What it takes for a man to do his work and be let alone? Why ain’t y’all kept them people off my land?”

“Sir, if you didn’t want ATVs in your field, why didn’t you buy a new lock for your gate?” Helen said.

“They broke t’ree of them. What was I s’ppose to do? Weld a chain on my gate ’cause y’all cain’t do your job?” His face was wrinkled and brown and covered with sun moles, his eyes moist with tears. “She’s just a young girl.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I just seen the coroner take off her shoe. Her toenails is painted, like young girls is always doing.”

Helen and I looked at each other.

“I want you to think real hard about something, Mr. Delahoussaye,” I said. “Did you ever throw any dishware out here? Did you ever see somebody else do it? Did you ever see any lying around on the ground?”

“No, suh, I ain’t.”

“And the last time you were in the grove was two weeks back?”

“Yes, suh.”

“And the ground was undisturbed? There was no trash lying on top of it?”

This time he didn’t answer but simply walked away, like a man who no longer cared what the world thought or did not think about him.

“What’s the importance of the broken teacup?” Helen said.

“On the last day of Bernadette Latiolais’s life, she went into a dollar store and bought two teacups and saucers. The cups were painted with lavender flowers.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I talked with a sheriff’s detective in Jeff Davis Parish. A clerk in the store said she was carrying the cups and saucers in a paper bag. She walked past a bar with them and was never seen alive again.”

Helen put on her sunglasses and looked at the yellow crime-scene tape vibrating in the wind. There were tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. The paramedics were zipping up the body bag on the remains of the female who had been buried among the trees. Red ants were crawling on the outside of the bag; the paramedics averted their faces when they picked up the bag and set it on the gurney, then one of them bent over and gagged in the weeds. Our coroner, Koko Hebert, a huge, sweaty, fat man, was blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief. I could see Helen’s chest rising and falling, her hands opening and closing at her sides. “The day it doesn’t bother you is the day you should quit,” I said.

“We’re going to get whoever did this,” she said.

The next morning Koko Hebert came into my office wheezing, a folder in his hand. When he sat down in a chair, his body seemed to deflate, like a giant air bladder collapsing upon itself. He smoked more cigarettes than anyone I had ever known, and he ate the most unhealthy food that was available in New Iberia’s restaurants. He waged war against his own body and seemed to take pleasure in alienating himself from others. After his son was vaporized by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Koko attended the funeral service in Virginia by himself and told no one where he was going. He also refused to acknowledge the condolences of friends and colleagues. He lived alone in a house that was sheathed with broken asbestos shingles, and often occupied his time driving his lawn tractor up and down his two-acre lot on the bayou, mowing great swaths through the buttercups that tried to bloom on his property.

“Mind if I smoke?”

“There’s no smoking anywhere in this building.”

“Somebody just spat tobacco in the water fountain. Which habit do you think is worse?”

I gazed out my window at Bayou Teche and at the live oak trees in City Park. A young mother was sailing a Frisbee with her children by one of the picnic shelters. The children were leaping in the air and rolling in the grass and chasing one another in the shade. Their voices made no sound coming across the water, as though their lives were completely sealed off from the work we did in our building. I looked back at Koko. When I dealt with him, I had to remind myself that no matter what happened in my life, I would probably never be as unhappy a man as he was.

He leaned forward and pitched the folder on my desk. “She was mush inside,” he said. “Approximate date of death is hard to say. My guess is she was in the ground at least two weeks. Age between nineteen and twenty-two. Evidence of rape? Not per se. Vaginal penetration? Almost any young girl these days has a train tunnel down there. A tattoo on the butt, one on the ankle, one on the shoulder. No traces of drugs. You got any coffee?”

I had to think before I could answer his question. “Downstairs.” I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I tried to hide my exasperation with both his callousness and his passive-aggressive behavior. I opened the folder on my desk blotter and glanced at autopsy forms he had filled out. His handwriting was indecipherable. “What’s the cause of death?”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want?”

“Because it’s take your choice. It wasn’t blunt trauma. She wasn’t shot or stabbed. Was she asphyxiated? Could be. But I doubt that’s what did her in. It could have been an aneurysm or heart failure, maybe brought on by prolonged fear, asphyxiation, and general abuse. The big word in there is ‘fear,’ as in scared shitless.” He was wearing an oversize Hawaiian shirt, and he began pulling at the fabric as though it was stuck to his body, shifting his shoulders around, putting on a performance. “Is your air-conditioning working?”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“It’s written there on the first page, if you care to look at it. She had ligature marks on her wrist, deep ones. I think she was bound up for a long time. Her stomach was empty. Whoever grabbed her didn’t feed her too good.”

“Why do you say ‘grabbed’?”

“She was obviously held against her will. That means she was probably abducted. Her tox screen was clear, which tells me she wasn’t a prostitute. So I suspect she was grabbed off the street or lured into a captive situation. Maybe she met a guy on the Internet. You know how many bimbos are out there now flirting with guys who can’t wait to tear them apart?”

“Koko, I just need the information. I don’t need an interpretation of it. I don’t need the drama, either.”

“You trying to tell me something?”

“Yeah, everybody experiences loss.”

He got up from the chair. His body had the sloping contours of a haystack. “Keep the file. I got the Xerox in my office,” he said.

“You test people. That’s all I was saying. It gets to be a drag.”

“You want my opinion of how she went out? The Bible says Jesus sweated blood. At a certain level of fear and depression, it can happen. The capillaries pop, and blood issues from the pores with a person’s sweat. You want to know if this girl suffered? You bet your ass.”

When he closed the door behind him, his odor clung to the furniture like a gray fog.

A half hour later, Mack Bertrand, our chief forensic chemist, called from the Acadiana crime lab. He believed the saucer and teacup and shoes and lipstick tube and handbag and winter coats and the other items retrieved from the burial site on the Delahoussaye property had been placed inside the grave with the girl’s remains and had not been dumped there earlier.

“How do you know?”

“Her body fluids are on every item we ran. Outside the immediate disturbed area, we found no buried garbage or debris of any kind.”

“What do you have in the way of prints?”

“Either rainwater or mud ruined anything that might have been there. If this is any help to you, the winter coats had levels of mold inside them that indicates they were stored a long time, probably in a damp place, before they went into the ground.”

I called the sheriff’s department in Jeff Davis Parish and then went into Helen’s office and told her of the information I had gotten from Koko Hebert and the crime lab. “Has Jeff Davis Parish got a missing girl that fits the description of the vic?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Why did the perp bury her here?”

“Who knows? People dump dead animals out there. No one is going to pay attention to carrion birds circling around.”

“Think we have a serial killer, a guy with a fetish?”

“Guys with a fetish don’t give up their souvenirs. They move their hiding place around, but they don’t give up their trophies.”

She turned her swivel chair toward the window. Across the bayou, the children had gone and the park was empty. A birthday balloon, the air half gone, the painted face on the Mylar surface shriveled into a grimace, floated out of a tree onto the water.

“We need somebody in the box,” Helen said. “This all started with that convict over in Mississippi, what’s-his-name—”

“Elmore Latiolais.”

“Right, the guy who was trying to dime Herman Stanga. Pick up Stanga.”

“For what?”

“His front yard is covered with dog shit. He didn’t brush his teeth this morning. His mother should have had herself sterilized. Any of those will do.”

Clete Purcel’s office was located on Main, in a refurbished nineteenth-century brick building that had a steel colonnade attached to the front wall. He was proud of his office, and on the flagstone patio in back, he had placed a glass-topped table inset with an umbrella, and when life with his clientele was too much, he sat on the patio among the banana fronds and enjoyed a snack and read the newspaper or enjoyed the fine view of Bayou Teche and the drawbridge at Burke Street. When he went onto his patio, he entered his private domain, and his secretary was instructed not to bother him with any of the miscreants, addicts, and marginal hookers who visited and left and returned to his waiting room as though it were a social center.

If a client became disruptive or experienced a psychotic episode or began throwing furniture, the secretary called Clete on his cell phone. Otherwise, he ate his snack and gazed at the flowers and caladiums and oak trees and flooded elephant ears along the banks of the bayou and the passing tugs and workboats that were headed for the Gulf of Mexico. On this day in particular, Clete had resolved he would stop thinking about Herman Stanga and the jail time he might have to do for tearing the man up behind the Gate Mouth club. He had just set aside his copy of The Daily Iberian and nodded off in his chair when his secretary opened the French doors that gave onto the patio. “Mr. Layton Blanchet is outside,” she said.

“What does he want?”

“He says he has an appointment. He said he called this morning.”

Clete thought about it. “Yeah, he called, but he didn’t have an appointment.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

Clete put a mint in his mouth and took his comb out of his pocket. He widened his eyes to wake himself up. “Send him on through,” he said.

The nature of Clete’s vocation did not allow him selectivity. Daily he came in contact with bail skips, pathological liars, bill collectors, loan-company operatives who ran sales scams in slums, wife batterers, runaway girls who had been raped by their fathers and brothers, attorneys who were kept on retainers by pimps and drug dealers, and insurance reps who convinced doped-up accident victims in hospital beds to sign claim waivers. The subculture that provided his livelihood was predatory and Darwinian and often without mercy, but to those who lived inside it, it was as natural a way of life as a zoning board licensing porn theaters and massage parlors in a residential neighborhood comprised primarily of elderly and poor people.

Clete dealt with problematic situations among his clientele in the way a field surgeon would treat a gangrenous wound, or perhaps in the way a nurse in a third-world typhus ward would treat her patients. He clicked off a switch in his head and did not think about what his eyes saw and what his thoughts told him and what his hands were required by necessity to do.

Dealing with people from the mainstream presented a different kind of challenge. Non-felons, people who attended church and ran businesses and belonged to civic clubs, upscale women whose faces wore the ceramic glaze of Botox, came to him in almost secretive fashion, explaining their problems in meticulous detail, keeping the wounds green and festering as they talked about seeking justice. Almost always they attributed the origins of their problems to the misdeeds of others. They considered themselves normal and without blinking lied both to him and to themselves. At the end of their relationship with Clete, no matter how positive the outcome, they had a way of not recognizing him on the street.

What bothered Clete most about Layton Blanchet was his manic level of energy and the power that seemed to flow through his arm when he shook hands, as though control of the other person was supposed to begin as soon as Layton’s fingers crawled up someone’s wrist. The freshness of Layton’s expensive clothes and the intense clarity of his eyes made Clete think of a sailing ship bursting through waves, or in a darker mode, of an avaricious Greek warrior dropping from inside a wooden horse into the silent streets of Troy.

“This is where you work, huh?” Layton said, seating himself in the umbrella’s shade without being asked. “Dave Robicheaux and I were talking about you not long ago. I’m glad you’re making it in New Iberia. It can be a tough town for outsiders, you know, and all that antebellum family crap. Where’d you get that bunch in the waiting room? You bus them in from detox?”

“Jerry Springer does referrals for me.”

But Layton didn’t laugh. He looked at the backs of his hands, then at the bayou and at the old convent building on the other side of the drawbridge, deep in the shadow of the oaks. “I think I got a problem with my wife,” he said. “One that’s eating my lunch.”

“You have security people who can handle that, Mr. Blanchet.”

“It’s Layton. ‘Mister’ is for the country club. My corporate employees don’t need to know my family business. Carolyn is a good girl, but I think she’s having an affair. Maybe it’s middle age. Maybe she thinks she’s losing her looks. Maybe she’s tired of a man who talks about money all the time, although she has no trouble spending boxcar-loads of it. But she’s getting it on with somebody, and I want to know who the guy is.”

“How do you know she’s unfaithful to you?”

“I can tell.”

“How?”

“Do I have to go into detail?”

“It doesn’t leave my office. It doesn’t go into a written file.”

“About nine o’clock she goes into the library and buries herself in a book. Or she’s got a stomachache. Or she pulled a muscle on the tennis court. Look, I’m a realist. I’m fifteen years older than she is. But if some guy is in my wife’s pants, he’s not going to be out there laughing at me behind my back. Get me?”

“Not exactly.”

“What is it I’m not clear about?” Layton asked.

“Are we talking about breaking somebody’s wheels?”

“What difference does it make? You give me the information, then you’re out of it.”

“I don’t like being party to a domestic homicide,” Clete said. “Let me share a secret with you. Sometimes clients with problems like yours come in and tell me only half of the story. They’re having affairs themselves, they’re full of guilt, and they transfer it to the wife. So they spend a lot of money and accuse me of colluding with their old lady when I come up with nothing.”

Layton stared out into the sunlight, his eyes as clear as blue glass. “You’re good at what you do, Mr. Purcel, or I wouldn’t be here. I don’t assault or kill people, and I don’t pay others to do it, either. As far as my own behavior is concerned, yeah, there have been instances when I haven’t always done the right thing. But that’s not the problem. I know my wife, and I know how she thinks, and I know she’s pumping it with somebody. Can you help me or not?”

“It’s a hundred and fifty dollars an hour and expenses.”

“Done.”

Clete rubbed at his mouth, wondering why Layton Blanchet had bothered him, wondering why a tuning fork was vibrating in his chest. The wind ruffled the canvas umbrella over his head. Layton continued to stare at Clete, either waiting for him to speak or taking his inventory or secretly savoring the moment after imposing his will on Clete. The Daily Iberian still lay on the tabletop. Its thickness was folded across the lead story. Clete flipped it open, exposing the headline. “That’s too bad, isn’t it?” he said to change the subject and end the conversation.

“What is?” Layton asked.

“Another young girl killed and dumped on a country road.”

“It’s going to continue till we get to the root of the problem.”

“Pardon?” Clete said.

“Welfare, illegitimacy, people with their hand out. That’s where it all starts. They’ve got their boy in the White House now. They’ll be lining up for every dollar they can stuff in their pockets. Most of them would strangle on their own spit if you didn’t swab out their throats for them.”

Clete kept his face empty. “I’ll give you a call when I have some information for you, Mr. Blanchet,” he said.

“It’s Layton.”

Helen Soileau had told me to bring in Herman Stanga and put him in the box. But Herman was an elusive quarry. He was not at his house, nor down on Hopkins or Railroad Avenue in New Iberia’s old red-light district. I called the Gate Mouth club in St. Martinville, the place where Clete Purcel had broken open Herman Stanga’s head against an oak tree. The man who answered the phone said, “You got the Gate Mout’. What you need?”

“Is Herman there?” I said.

“Who wants to know?”

I hung up without replying and called my fellow A.A. member Emma Poche at the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department and asked her to sit on the club till I got there.

“Maybe this is providential,” she said. “I was thinking of calling you today.”

“About what?”

“Some twelve-step stuff.”

“You ought to take that up with your sponsor.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Don’t let Stanga go anywhere. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“You got a warrant?”

“He’s not under arrest. We just need a little information from him.”

“Sounds believable to me. Herman Stanga, friend of the court. Glad to hear about that,” she replied.

I checked out an unmarked car and drove into St. Martinville’s black district and pulled in behind Emma’s cruiser, which was parked two doors down from the Gate Mouth club. She was sitting behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette, the driver’s window half down. She was wearing shades and looked thoughtful and pretty with her hat pushed back on her head. Her cheeks were pooled with color, the sunlight catching in her gold hair. I got in her vehicle and choked on the smoke. “Stanga is still inside?” I said.

“Unless he grew wings. You got a minute?” she said.

“Sheriff Soileau is waiting on me.”

“I’ve got a situation on my conscience. I don’t want to drink over it. It goes beyond even that. I’m desperate, Dave.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, either. “You should be talking to a female sponsor. The two operative words there are ‘female’ and ‘sponsor.’”

“My sponsor is in jail. Guess what for. Driving under the influence. Top that.” She threw her cigarette into the street and rolled down the windows and turned on the air conditioner full blast. The sidewalk was empty, the front door of the club within easy view.

“I’ll try to help if I can,” I said.

“I’ve been seeing somebody. We had a relationship a long time ago, then we bumped into each other during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. We found out we were both going to the same party in the Quarter later, and we got pretty drunk and woke up at one in the afternoon the next day at the St. Charles Guest House. I’ve had bad hangovers, but never one that bad.”

“Have you been to a meeting since?”

“Yeah, I went to a couple.” She twisted her mouth into a button.

“Did you own up to a slip?”

“Not really.”

“You haven’t owned up to anyone?”

“That’s what I’m doing now, right?”

I was beginning to feel I had been played. “I don’t think you’re going to get any peace on this until you come clean at a meeting, Emma.”

“Last week my long-lost lover told me it was over. This was the same person who told me I smelled like the Caribbean and that my climaxes were like strings of wet firecrackers. I have to make some choices, Dave.”

“I don’t think we need all this clinical detail. Look, every guy who cheats on his wife tells his girlfriend his marriage is over, his girlfriend is the best human being he’s ever met, that she has nothing to do with the breakup of his marriage, that she’s beautiful and spiritual and loving and she has no reason to feel guilty about anything. He also indicates he’s not sleeping with his wife. He usually says these things right up to the time he dumps his new pump of the week.”

Emma removed her shades and stared into the glare on the street. A drunk black man had stumbled off the sidewalk and was trying to cross through the traffic while cars blew their horns at him. Emma brushed at her nose. “Get Stanga out of the club and I’ll take care of the bowling pin out there.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Sometimes we lose. It’s nobody’s fault, not yours, not the other person’s. You just have to let it slide and say the short version of the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes you just have to say ‘fuck it.’”

“You like being used, Dave? Did anyone ever screw you until your eyes crossed and you woke up in the morning aching for them to do it again? Then one day in a public place, the same person tells you that you deserve someone much better than them, and you know the person has told you this in public so you can’t cry or break things or throw a drink in their face? When that happened to you, did you just say ‘Fuck it, sports fans, I think I’ll just go hit some tennis balls and go to a meeting’?”

I opened the door of the cruiser and got out on the sidewalk. The drunk black man had made it safely to the other side of the street. “I’m going to try to talk Stanga out of the club. If he gives me trouble, I want you there as a witness,” I said. “If you can’t do that for me, I need to call for backup. Tell me what you want to do, Emma.”

She got out of the cruiser and slipped her baton through the ring on her belt. She removed her shades from her shirt pocket and put them back on. Her face looked hot and glazed. Her mouth was a tight line before she spoke. “I forgot you belong to that great fraternity of all-knowing A.A. swinging dicks. If I forget again, remind me,” she said.

We found Herman Stanga at the back of the bar, where he was sipping from a demitasse of coffee, a tiny spoon and a single sugar cube on his saucer, his thin mustache winking with each sip. A big dressing was taped over the split Clete had put in his forehead, but otherwise he looked surprisingly well. “Hey, what is it, Robo?” he said. “Give my man a seltzer and ice and a lime slice, and wash out the glass good so it don’t have no alcohol in it. You ain’t got the Elephant Man out there, have you?”

“My boss wants to talk to you,” I said.

“The champ of the Muff Diver ’69 Olympics? How she been doing?”

“I wouldn’t get on her wrong side.”

“Man, I ain’t getting on no side of that broad,” he said. He looked at the bartender and laughed.

“Want to take a ride with me or sit in the cooler in St. Martinville while we work out legalities?”

Then he surprised me again. “Anyt’ing to he’p. You hear about my suit against that fat cracker? I’m gonna take both of his bidnesses, the apartment he owns in New Orleans, his car, his life insurance policy, his savings account, his guns, his furniture, and the waterfront lot in Biloxi he’s making payments on in his ex-wife’s name. When I get finished wit’ him, he’s gonna have a toot’brush and, if he’s lucky, the tube of toot’paste that goes wit’ it.”

“You’re the man, Herman,” I said.

“You got that right, Jack. You kill me, Robo Man.” He looked again at the bartender and laughed loudly, slapping the bar with the flat of his hand.

Emma Poche went back to the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department, and Herman Stanga rode with me back to New Iberia. I didn’t like sitting next to him or talking to him or even acknowledging his presence. He smelled of hair cream and the decayed food in his teeth and the deodorant he used to overlay the sweat in his armpits. I cracked the window and kept my eyes on the road and wondered at the level of the enmity I felt toward him.

At the city limits, we entered a long corridor of oak trees. On the right-hand side of the road, set in deep shade, was a two-story antebellum home with a wide veranda, built out of wood in imitation of the columned brick Greek revival mansions down the Teche. The veranda sagged in the middle from either termite damage or settling in the foundation. The paint had turned gray in the smoke of stubble fires or dust blown out of the fields. A wash line was strung across the side yard, the clothes flapping in the wind.

“The man who built that house was a free man of color named Labiche,” I said. “He owned a brick factory in town. He also owned slaves. He got rich selling out his own people. What do you think about that, Herman?”

“Say again? I was just starting to catch some Z’s.”

“The guy who built that home back there was a mulatto who bought and sold slaves and used them to make bricks that went into the construction of the biggest homes in this area before the Civil War. Some people would probably say he was just a creature of his times. My feeling is that he was probably an opportunist and a Judas. Since you’re a man of considerable experience in racial matters, I wondered what your opinion is.”

“What I t’ink is you couldn’t find your own dick if you had a string tied to it. Wake me up when we’re there,” he replied.

It was almost five P.M. when I drove down East Main and turned in to the long driveway that led past the city library to the spacious brick building that served as both City Hall and the sheriff’s department. Between the library and the wall of bamboo was a grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. The street and the buildings and the grotto were already deep in shadow under the oak trees. A crowd was gathered around the grotto, and at first I thought they were tourists or religious people; then I recognized Layton Blanchet in their midst and remembered he was a member of a live oak or historical preservation society, the kind of group that he would probably find useful in his machinations.

As I drove past him, he raised his hand in recognition, but I pretended not to see him. I put Herman Stanga in one of our interview rooms and went to Helen’s office and told her I had delivered the freight. “Where you going?” she said.

“To my office, if you don’t mind,” I replied.

“I mind.”

“Talking to Stanga is a waste of time.”

“Humor me.”

“The truth is, everyone would be a lot happier if Clete had taken him off at the neck. Stanga gets high on being rousted. He’ll probably file a harassment charge against us and use it in his suit against Clete. The only thing Stanga understands is a club upside his head or a bullet in the mouth.”

“Bwana no run the department. Bwana shut up. Bwana go into the interview room now.”

Earlier in the day I had given Helen all my notes on the death of Bernadette Latiolais, my interview with her brother on the work gang outside Natchez, and my interview with the store clerk and Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother in Jeff Davis Parish. I also had given her my files on Robert Weingart and Vidor Perkins. When we entered the interview room, Stanga was sitting at the table, gazing out the window at a speedboat that was towing a girl on skis down the bayou. He put an Altoid in his mouth and sucked on it. “I got about fifteen minutes for this, then I need a ride back to my car. Y’all cool wit’ that?”

“We appreciate your coming in,” Helen said. “You knew a convict in Mississippi by the name of Elmore Latiolais?”

“I been over that wit’ Robo Man here. The answer is yeah, I knew that lying nigger for twenty years. He got hisself capped. Do I know why? Let me guess. He shot off his mout’ to a peckerwood guard and ate a load of buckshot. Do I know anyt’ing about these girls that has gotten themselves killed? Let me guess again. They was working independent and messed wit’ the wrong john and had the kind of date they wasn’t expecting.”

“Why were you over in Jeff Davis Parish with Robert Weingart?”

“The writer?”

“Yeah, the writer,” Helen said.

“Who says I was?”

“A half-dozen people,” she lied.

He opened his hands in disbelief. “What would I be doing wit’ a writer? That’s like axing me if I’m hanging out with the IRS.”

“Maybe you were doing some work for the St. Jude Project.”

“Yeah, I he’p out the St. Jude, but I don’t know this writer. If you say I know him, then write that in my file. But I don’t know him, and I don’t know nothing about him except I seen him signing books at Books Along the Teche, and I’m tired of y’all getting in my face about this.”

“Here’s our problem, Herman,” she said. “No matter what avenue we take into this investigation, your name comes up.”

“What investigation? All them crimes, if there ever was any crimes, was in Jeff Davis Parish. But RoboCop and his friend Dumbo the flying beer barrel been trying to find a reason to drag their shit into my life.”

“We had a body dumped in our parish, and we think the victim was connected to the homicides in Jeff Davis, Herman,” Helen said, sitting on the corner of the table, her hands folded on one thigh. “If you’re not involved in this, you have a good idea who is. Most people around here have one of two attitudes about you. A lot of them just laugh when your name is mentioned, like you’re a funny hobgoblin that got loose from Railroad Avenue. Others say you’re not at fault for what you are, that you never had a father and your mother had to turn tricks in a shack behind Broussard’s bar and you grew up a raggedy-ass little boy who had to carry out the whores’ pails from the back of the cathouses on Hopkins. But I always thought you were a smart man. I don’t like what you do for a living, but there’s no denying you’re intelligent. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a smart man, aren’t you, Herman? I knew your mother well. You were born premature, out in the hallway at Charity Hospital. I remember your mother’s words: ‘He wasn’t no bigger than a squirrel.’”

Herman Stanga’s face looked feverish, the skin moist, his eyelids stitched to his forehead. “Y’all t’ink you run t’ings. Y’all ain’t nothing but a bunch of ants running around on a wet log, pretending y’all in charge, when the people that’s running t’ings wouldn’t let y’all squat on their commodes. But I got you, Robo Man. Your peckerwood friend is going to Angola. When he gets in there, he’s gonna be the gift that keeps on giving. And Lady Hermaphrodite here is gonna keep using you to wipe her ass while I’m laughing at the bunch of y’all. I fucked you good, man, and you can t’ink about that all the way to your grave.”

Helen got up from the table and stood at the window, her back to us. She was silent a long time, the heel of her hand resting on the windowsill, her fingers tapping without sound on the wood. In the distance, I heard the whine of the speedboat fading, disappearing around a bend in the bayou. Without turning around, Helen said, “Make sure he gets back to his car all right.”