The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 8

Helen had told me to find out why the murdered Canadian girl, Fern Michot, had come all the way from British Columbia to southwestern Louisiana. But where was I to start? For openers, we sent out her photo to every newspaper and television channel in the state. I also called up a local printer and had circulars made that contained her picture and the words underneath: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? CALL THE IBERIA PARISH SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. A twenty-four-hour number was printed at the bottom.

I spread all the material I had on Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais on top of my desk. I also opened up the file folders I had on the other women and girls who had died under suspicious circumstances in Jeff Davis Parish. But in actuality, what did I have? In general, the forensic connections were tenuous and perhaps even nonexistent. Some of the deaths may have been accidental, the kind of fate that often happens to marginalized girls and young women who find the wrong males and end up with an air bubble in a vein or who try to walk home dead drunk from a bar and never see the headlights they step in front of.

But there was one detail that was incontestable and would not go away. Bernadette Latiolais had bought two plastic teacups and saucers at the dollar store on the day of her disappearance. We had confirmed that the saucer and broken teacup buried with the body of the Canadian girl were of the same manufacture as the ones sold at the dollar store. There was little doubt that the two girls had been abducted and murdered or held in the same place by the same killer or killers.

But Bernadette did not fit the pattern of the other girls or women. She was not a runaway or a school dropout or a teenage addict or alcoholic. She had been an honor student who had won a scholarship to attend the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She had been happy and confident about her future and was known for the sweetness of her personality. Perhaps more important from an investigative perspective, she was the only person among the eight women or girls who evidently had contact outside the small world in which they all lived. Her brother, the convict Elmore Latiolais, had recognized the newspaper photo of Kermit Abelard as the man who had promised to make her rich. Bernadette’s grandmother had recognized the author’s jacket photo of Robert Weingart as the man she had seen buying boudin in a store with someone whose description fit Herman Stanga’s, which suggested at least the possibility that Bernadette had seen or known them.

But on what basis would Kermit Abelard or anyone else promise to make her rich? The grandmother had said Bernadette had inherited seven arpents of farmland that were part of an undivided estate. The arpent is the old French measure that is approximately one acre in size. Its value in that part of rural Louisiana was not great. In fact, Hurricane Rita, which struck the Louisiana coast three and a half weeks after Katrina, devastated the area.

Unfortunately, the story about Kermit Abelard’s promise to Bernadette had its origins with Elmore Latiolais, a thief and a liar who probably bore a lifetime’s enmity toward white people in general and cops in particular.

I twirled a ballpoint pen on my desk pad. Through my office window, I could see rain tumbling out of the sunlight onto the surface of Bayou Teche. In City Park, the old brick firehouse, now painted battleship gray, was deep inside the shadows of the oak trees. When I was a little boy, a French band used to play in the park on Saturday evenings, and the firemen, all friends of my father, boiled crabs behind the firehouse, and my mother and father would take me and my half brother, Jimmy, to eat with them. That was where I first listened to the song “La Jolie Blon,” sung with the same French lyrics that had been sung in France in the eighteenth century. It remains today the saddest lament I have ever heard, one that you hear once and never forget for the rest of your life.

Where did it all go? I asked myself.

But I had to remind myself that neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is. If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin. Bernadette Latiolais had been robbed of her young life, and all her joys and choices stolen from her. Her mouth had been stopped with dust, and her advocates were few. Regardless of my promise to Alafair, it was time to make Kermit Abelard accountable.

Clete Purcel had gotten up early and showered, shaved, and brushed his teeth, then fixed a bowl of cereal and strawberries and taken it and a pot of coffee out on a table under the oak trees at the end of the driveway that divided the stucco cottages in the 1940s motor court where he lived. He had not taken a drink since lunch the previous day and had slept soundly through the night and awakened with his mind clear and his metabolism free of booze. It was a fine morning to be alive and to feel like a player again. A blue heron was standing in the shallows of Bayou Teche, pecking at its feathers, its legs as thin and delicate as strokes from a bamboo brush. An elderly black man sitting on an inverted bucket was bobber-fishing with a cane pole among the lily pads, raising his baited hook up and down as though the movement would make it more attractive to the fish hiding there. And sitting proudly in the shade, its maroon finish gleaming, its starched white top as immaculate as ever, was Clete’s vintage Cadillac, just out of the repair shop.

He finished eating and washed his dishes, put on his porkpie hat, and went to the office with a song in his heart. Fifteen minutes after his arrival, he was reading a magazine article on Layton Blanchet and biofuels when his rosy-complected, top-heavy secretary, Hulga Volkmann, opened his door and leaned inside, her perfume drenching the room. “There’s somebody out here who says his name is Kiss-My-Ass-Fat-Man,” she said.

“What’s he want?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

“Tell him the reparation issue for pygmies is off the table.”

“Pardon?”

“Does he look like he might have a blowgun on him?”

“I’m confused, Mr. Purcel.”

“Send him in, please.”

The boy, who was not over twelve, came in and sat in a deep chair in the corner, his baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He gazed at the antique firearms mounted on the walls. “You cain’t afford any kind of guns except junk?” he said.

“Your first name is Buford, right?”

“You can stick with Kiss-My-Ass. Or you can call me Mr. Kiss-My-Ass.”

“You know I beat the shit out of your cousin Herman Stanga, don’t you?”

“Yeah, at the Gate Mout’. I know all about it.”

“Then why are you here?”

“My cousin wasn’t no good. ’Cause I do what I do don’t mean I liked Cousin Herman.”

“I’m pretty busy, Kiss-My-Ass.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Reading a t’rowaway magazine takes up a lot of time. There’s a lady lives up the street from me on Cherokee. She’s Vietnamese. She’s a waitress at Bojangles. Know who I’m talking about?”

“No.”

“She’s a nice lady. She don’t need no trouble from the wrong kind of guy.”

“You got to be a little more specific.”

“I was on my corner, and this white guy in a Mustang come by and wanted to buy some roofies. I tole him I don’t handle that kind of stuff. So he axed me for some X. I tole him I don’t have no X, either. I tole him that maybe I had some breat’ mints ’cause that’s what he needed.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“’Cause I seen this same car and this same guy dropping off the Vietnamese lady at her house. She don’t need this guy slipping her roofies so he can do t’ings to her in his backseat.”

“You remember what I told you I’d do if I caught you slinging dope again?”

“No disrespect, but you can go fuck yourself, too. You gonna he’p me or not?”

“Don’t be surprised if you don’t reach your next birthday. What’s this cat’s name?”

“I don’t know, but I seen him before. He was at Cousin Herman’s house. Herman said he was in the pen over in Texas. Herman said he wrote a book about it.”

“Does the name Robert Weingart ring a bell?”

Buford shook his head.

“My fee is a hundred and fifty an hour. But we offer a pygmy discount,” Clete said. He waited. “That was a joke, Kiss-My-Ass.”

The boy gazed out the French doors at a tugboat passing on the bayou. “When the guy in the Mustang stopped by the corner, I wasn’t slinging. I was waiting on some friends to go to the pool. If you want to make fun of me, go do it. But tell me if you gonna he’p or not, ’cause that man is fixing to do bad t’ings to a lady that been nice to every kid in the neighborhood.”

“Why don’t you tell her this yourself?”

The bill of the boy’s cap was tilted downward, hiding his face. “’Cause maybe I sold roofies before. ’Cause maybe I ain’t proud about having to say that to somebody.”

Clete called me at the department after the boy left his office and told me of Robert Weingart’s attempt to buy the date-rape drug known on the street as “roofies.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Talk with the Vietnamese waitress and maybe chat up our celebrity ex-con scribbler.”

“The latter isn’t an option.”

“The First Amendment has been suspended and nobody told me?”

I got up from my desk and closed my office door and picked up the phone again. “Somebody did you a big favor when he helped Stanga into the next world. Don’t blow it.”

“Sounds a little cynical. You’re not lighting candles for Herman?”

“We’ll pick up Weingart and let him know his sexual behavior has come to our attention. In the meantime, you stay out of trouble. You’re the human equivalent of a wrecking ball, Clete. Except you do most of the damage to yourself. You’ve never figured that out.”

“My ex used to say the same thing. She used exactly the same words.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Take an aspirin. Think cool thoughts. Nobody rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”

Did you ever conduct a conversation with a vacant lot?

I had made an appointment to interview Kermit Abelard at his house. I could have had him come in to the department, but I wanted access once again to the Abelard compound and the bizarre and insular world in which they lived, maybe for reasons I didn’t want to admit to myself. Did I buy into the notion, as Clete had suggested, that the Abelards were players in an Elizabethan tragedy? No, I didn’t. They certainly created the affectation of royalty in exile, but I doubted if even they were convinced by it. Someone once said that had Sir Walter Scott not written his romantic accounts of medieval chivalry, there would have been no War Between the States. I doubted if that was true, either. I believed the legend of the Lost Cause was created after the fact, when the graves of Shiloh and Antietam became vast stone gardens reminding us forever that we imposed this suffering on ourselves.

But if the Abelards and their peers were not created by the pen of an English novelist, what were they? Clete Purcel had said either their house or the old man smelled of death. Was that just his imagination? Except Clete was nobody’s fool and was not given to extravagant metaphors.

I signed out a cruiser and drove down to the watery rim of St. Mary Parish and thumped across the wood bridge onto the Abelard compound. The lagoon that surrounded the property was networked with algae, the moss in the dead cypress lifting in the wind off the Gulf, a solitary ventilated storm shutter slamming incessantly against an upstairs window. Out in the flooded cypress, I could see a man standing in a pirogue, his back to me, casting a lure in a long arc into the water. He was wearing a cap and a sleeveless denim shirt, and he had narrow shoulders and a suntan that had a strange yellow cast.

The black woman who let me in said Mr. Kermit was out in his boat but would be back momentarily; in the meantime, she said Mr. Timothy would like to see me out on the sunporch.

“You’re Miss Jewel?” I said.

“Yes, suh. That’s my name. I’ve taken care of Mr. Timothy for many years.”

“And you know my daughter, Alafair?”

“Yes, suh. She’s very nice.”

I took unfair advantage of my situation and asked a question I should not have asked. “I was trying to remember when Alafair was out here last. Do you recall?”

“I take care of Mr. Timothy. I don’t study on everyone who comes and goes, suh.”

She escorted me to the sunporch. Timothy Abelard was reading in his wheelchair, canted sideways to catch the sunlight on the page, his entire person bathed in the rainbow of color that shone through the stained-glass windows. He looked up at me, smiling, with the expectation one might associate with a tiny bird in the bottom of a nest. “It’s very nice of you to come out and talk with an elderly man,” he said.

I wondered if he was simply being polite or if he was confused about the purpose of my visit. But perhaps a bigger problem for me was that I wanted to like Mr. Abelard. In all ways, he was genteel and seemingly thoughtful. Yes, his eyes were like those of a hawk. But for the elderly, a mistake in judgment about other people can have dire consequences, and it’s hard to begrudge them their cautionary instincts in dealings with others. At least that was what I wanted to believe about this kindly old man.

“I’m here to see your grandson, sir,” I said.

“He didn’t run a traffic light, did he?”

“What are you reading?”

“I was just going to ask your opinion on it. Here, take a look. It’s Kermit’s new book.”

I didn’t want to see it, but he pressed it into my hand. The jacket was a wonderful collage of a plantation house burning against a plum-colored sky, a lovely woman holding the head of a wounded Confederate soldier in her lap, and a gallant officer with a plume in his hat rearing his horse in cannon smoke under the cross of St. Andrew. “Go ahead, read the first paragraph. Tell me what you think,” Mr. Abelard said.

I had read none of Kermit’s work, but I had to admit the opening scene in his new book was written by a very good writer. It described airbursts over Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, and a family of Negroes and one of poor whites trying to take cover in a cave they had dug in the bluffs with barrel staves. Kermit had even described the sound of hot shrapnel raining into the shallows of the Mississippi, a detail I would not expect a man with no war experience to know about.

“It’s impressive, sir. I’ll have to get a copy,” I said, returning the book to him.

“Will you tell me the purpose of your visit?”

“I’m trying to exclude some possibilities in an investigation.”

“Seems like you’re an expert in vagueness, Mr. Robicheaux. Have you considered a career in politics?”

I had sat down in one of his rattan chairs. The bamboo creaked under me in the silence. It is difficult to describe the accent and diction of the class of people represented by Mr. Abelard. Their dialect is called plantation English and was influenced largely by British tutors hired to teach the children of plantation society. Unlike the speech of yeomen, it does not vary through the states of the Old Confederacy. If you have heard the recorded voice of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren, you have heard the same pronunciations and linguistic cadence characteristic of Mr. Abelard’s generation in Louisiana. They could read from a phone book and you would swear you were listening to the cadences found inside a Shakespearean sonnet.

But well-spoken elderly gentleman or not, he had asked for it, I told myself. “In one way or another, my visit is related to your house guest, Robert Weingart. What kind of fellow would you say he is?”

“His prison background, that kind of thing?”

“For openers.”

“The man’s a mess. What else do you want to know?”

“Do you think it’s good for Kermit to be hanging around with a fellow like that?”

“That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?”

“Have you checked out Weingart’s criminal history?”

“You don’t have to convince me of the evil that’s in this world, Mr. Robicheaux. I’ve dealt with it in every form for a lifetime. Do you have a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Jewel!” he called.

Immediately, the black woman was at the door, waiting, her eyes not quite meeting his, her muscular body held straight and motionless, as though the virtue of patience had been ironed into the starch of her uniform.

“Get me a cigarette. Don’t argue about it, either. Just bring me the cigarette and a match before Kermit comes back and starts fussing at me,” Mr. Abelard said. He turned to me. “Don’t get old, Mr. Robicheaux. Age is an insatiable thief. It steals the pleasures of your youth, then locks you inside your own body with your desires still glowing. Worse, it makes you dependent upon people who are a half century younger than you. Don’t let anyone tell you that it brings you peace, either, because that’s the biggest lie of all.”

Jewel returned and placed a single cigarette in his hand, then lit it for him with a paper match. He puffed on it, wetting the filter, seemingly more pleased by the acquisition of the cigarette than his smoking of it. He continued talking about almost every subject imaginable except the presence of a career criminal like Robert Weingart in his house. I looked at my watch. “Where’s your grandson, sir?”

“Out yonder, almost to the salt. They’ll be back momentarily,” Mr. Abelard said.

“They?” I said.

“Jewel, will you bring me an ashtray?” he called out.

“Sir, who is ‘they’?”

But he turned his attention away from me to acquiring the ashtray, then began fumbling with it until he had positioned it in his lap. “You’d think by this time the woman could figure out that a man in a wheelchair can’t smoke a cigarette without something to put the ashes in.”

I had given up trying to find out who was in the boat with Kermit. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. “Miss Jewel seems like a devoted caretaker,” I said.

“I wish Jewel had a better life than the one she was given. But how many of us see the consequences when we step over forbidden lines?”

“Pardon?” I said.

“The racial situation of the South is one we inherited, and for good or bad we did the best we could with it. I just wish I had shown more personal restraint when I was in my middle years.”

“I’m not following you, sir.”

“The woman is my daughter. What did you think I was talking about?”

There was a long silence, then I felt my stare break and I looked away at the flooded trees that had been killed by saltwater intrusion, the petrochemical sheen that glistened on his lagoon, the flaking paint on the pillars that supported his second-story veranda, the decay and sickness that seemed to infect the entirety of the Abelards’ property, and I wondered why we had concentrated so much of our lives on hating or envying or emulating people such as the Abelards and the oligarchy they represented. Then I saw a motorboat with two figures in it come across the bay and enter the cypress trees, riding on its wake, passing the man who was fishing in the pirogue. Kermit sat behind the wheel, wearing Ray-Bans and a sky-blue cap with a lacquered black brim tilted on the side of his head. Alafair was sitting next to him, her hair and face damp with salt spray.

I got up from the chair, keeping my face empty of expression. “I’ll walk down to your dock, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I enjoyed talking with you.”

“You seem offended.”

I looked at the boat and at Alafair sitting close to Kermit, clenching his arm. “You withheld information from me, Mr. Abelard.”

“What your daughter does or does not do isn’t my business, sir. I resented your indicating that it is.”

I looked at him a long time before I spoke. He was infirm and, I suspected, visited in his sleep by memories and deeds no one wishes to carry to his grave. Or perhaps I was endowing him with a level of humanity that he didn’t possess. Regardless, I had concluded that Timothy Abelard was not someone I would ever come to like or admire.

“Robert Weingart is in your home with your consent, sir,” I said. “You’re an intelligent man. That means his agenda is your agenda. That’s not a comforting thought.”

“Get out,” he replied.

I walked outside and down the slope of the yard toward a wood dock, where Kermit was mooring his boat. Alafair stepped off the bow onto the dock and came toward me. She was wearing white shorts and a black blouse and straw sandals; her skin was dark with tan in the sunlight, her hair blown in wet wisps across her cheek, her mouth lifted toward me.

“I’m here to see Kermit. It has nothing to do with you, Alafair,” I said.

“You gave me your word,” she said.

“I promised I wouldn’t interfere in your relationship. There’re some questions Kermit has to answer. He can talk to me or he can talk to Helen Soileau. Or he can wait until he’s contacted by the FBI.”

She walked past me without replying, glancing at me once, her eyes dead.

Kermit stood on his dock, his hands on his hips, gazing at the hammered bronze light on the bay and at the moss straightening on the cypress snags and at the man fishing in the pirogue. When he heard my footsteps behind him, he turned and extended his hand, but I didn’t take it. The smile went out of his face.

“Did you know Bernadette Latiolais?” I asked.

He held his eyes on mine, more steadily than was natural, never blinking. “The name is familiar,” he said.

“It should be. You were photographed with her.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “One of the scholarship girls, I believe.”

“She was a murder victim. She said you were going to make her rich. How were you planning to do that?”

“Wait a minute. There’s some confusion here.”

“Are you telling me you weren’t photographed with her?” The truth was I had never seen the photo, and I knew of its possible existence only because Bernadette’s brother, Elmore, said she had shown it to him when she visited him at the work camp in Mississippi.

“I’m saying I remember her name because my family belongs to the UL alumni association, and I was at the ceremony at Bernadette’s high school when she was awarded a scholarship that we endow. At least if we’re talking about the same person. Why don’t you check it out?”

“I don’t have to.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you’re lying. I think you have blood splatter all over you, podna, and I’m going to nail you to the wall.”

“I don’t care if you’re Alafair’s father or not, you have no right to talk to me like that.”

“Who’s the dude in the pirogue?” I asked.

“He looks like a fisherman.”

“His name is Vidor Perkins. He did a stretch in Huntsville Pen with Robert Weingart, the guy who’s made you his bunkie. He was also in the Flat Top in Raiford. That’s where they keep the guys they couldn’t legally lobotomize. In Alabama he cut up the face of a female convenience-store clerk with a string knife. He was also arrested for the rape of a five-year-old girl. If that man comes close to my daughter, your grandfather won’t be able to protect you, Kermit.”

“Say that stuff about a ‘bunkie’ again?”

“That’s prison parlance for ‘regular punch.’”

The veins in his forearms were pumped with blood, his hands opening and closing at his sides, his cheeks flaming. “You’re old and you’re a guest in our home. Otherwise, I’d knock your teeth down your throat.”

“At my age, I don’t have a lot to lose, kid. You’re a good judge of character. Look at my face. Tell me I’m lying.”

Clete Purcel had parked his Caddy a hundred yards down the two-lane from the motel in St. Martin Parish where Carolyn Blanchet, Layton Blanchet’s wife, had rented a room. It had not been a productive day for Clete. After Herman Stanga’s little cousin Buford, also known as Kiss-My-Ass-Fat-Man, had visited Clete’s office to tell him of his fears that Robert Weingart was planning to drug and seduce a Vietnamese waitress at Bojangles, Clete had gone to the girl’s house and tried to warn her. He had tried to warn her in language that would not alarm or offend her. The mother, who spoke little English, thought he was a bill collector and told him to get out. The girl followed him outside, and Clete tried again.

“You know what Rohypnol is? It’s a very powerful tranquilizer,” he said. “It’s called the date-rape drug. It takes only twenty or thirty minutes to turn a person into Play-Doh. The effects can last several hours.”

“Robbie wants to do this to me?”

“‘Robbie’ is a douchebag and a bum. He has spent most of his life in prison for serious crimes. He made a black girl at Ruby Tuesday pregnant, then told her to get an abortion if she didn’t want the kid. Here’s my business card. If he bothers you, call me.”

“You make me scared, Mr. Purcel.”

“I’m not the one to be afraid of. Don’t cry. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re a good person, you hear me? That’s why I’m here. Robert Weingart should have been ground into fish chum a long time ago. I’m sorry for upsetting you. Come on, don’t do that. I apologize for the way I say things. My best friend tells me I have the sophistication of a junkyard falling down a staircase.”

His attempt at humor did not work. “I think you’re a nice man, but you must go back to your work now,” she said.

“You’re going out with this loser?”

“It isn’t right to condemn people without giving them a chance to defend themselves.”

She turned and went back into her house.

I tried, Kiss-My-Ass, Clete said to himself. But his words seemed self-mocking and were of poor consolation to him.

Now, in the twilight and the throbbing of birds in the trees, he was looking through his binoculars at a lounge with a blue-white neon champagne glass glowing over its entrance. He saw no one he recognized going in and out of the lounge. The motel was set behind the lounge and had a stucco arch over its driveway. At 7:13 P.M. Carolyn Blanchet emerged from her room in a swimsuit and dove into the pool, swimming cleanly through the water, taking long, powerful strokes, her platinum hair dark at the roots. She climbed up the steps in the shallow end, spread her feet slightly, and began cross-touching the tips of her toes, the backs of her thighs flexing, her bottom tightening against her swimsuit. Close by, two men playing cards at a table suddenly developed problems in their concentration.

Since being retained by Carolyn’s husband, Clete had pieced off the job to a private investigator who operated out of Morgan City. The Morgan City PI had followed Carolyn in a rainstorm to a houseboat in the Atchafalaya Basin, where she had gotten into a shouting argument with someone who had been waiting for her. The other person had left in an outboard, wearing a raincoat that had a hood on it. The PI could not make out the person’s face through his binoculars. The houseboat was owned by Carolyn’s husband.

The next day the PI followed Carolyn to a hotel on the Vermilion River in Lafayette, except he didn’t get into the lobby fast enough to see which floor her elevator had stopped on. On the odd chance he might get lucky, he prowled the hallways but saw no sign of her. The desk clerk said no one using her name was registered at the hotel. The Morgan City PI waited in his automobile for three hours. When Carolyn came out of the hotel, a beach bag swinging from her arm, she was by herself. His surveillance had been a waste. Plus, she had stared straight at him, boldly, through his windshield, giving him a triumphant look.

The next afternoon the PI tailed Carolyn to the motel outside St. Martinville. He called Clete and asked him what he wanted to do.

“You’re doing a good job. Stay on it,” Clete said.

“I think she’s made me. If you ask me, she’s had a lot of experience at this.”

“I’ll relieve you. Fax me your notes and hours, okay?”

“You got it. When you find out who the guy is, let me know.”

“What for?” Clete asked.

“Maybe I can get on as his bodyguard. You ever hear the story about the football coach over in Texas that made a pass at her?”

“No.”

“They took it outside and fought in the street. Blanchet blinded him. It cost him millions.”

Clete looked through the binoculars again. Carolyn was reclining in a beach chair, a towel spread from her thighs to her breasts, her eyes closed. She seemed to doze off, then turned on her side, her hands pressed together and inserted under her cheek as though she were at prayer. Her mouth was soft-looking, her eyelashes long, the tops of her breasts white below her tan line.

But where was the lover? Clete resolved that this would be the last time he would do scut work for jealous cuckolds or wives who wanted their husbands photographed in flagrante delicto. Why anyone romanticized the life of a PI was beyond him. Jobs like this one made him feel he was one cut above a voyeur. Second, the information he was paid to deliver ruined lives. Maybe the involved parties brought it on themselves, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was he who loaded the gun.

He also felt his work made him a hypocrite. His own marriage had been a nightmare of pills and booze and weed and infidelity. He tried to blame his problems on his wife, who had fallen under the influence of an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Colorado. Then he tried to blame his problems on the fact that he worked Vice and lived in an amoral netherworld that was not of his making. He blamed the basket of snakes he brought back from Vietnam and even blamed the mamasan he accidentally killed in a hooch in the Central Highlands and whose forgiveness he still sought in his sleep. He blamed the corrupt cops who pressured a young patrolman into going along with them when they planted a throwdown on an unarmed black man they had shot and killed. He blamed the bookies and Shylocks he owed, the tab he didn’t have to pay at a couple of skin joints owned by the Giacanos, the script doctor who gave him unlimited amounts of downers, the watch supervisor who told him he either went on a pad for the greaseballs or he got assigned a beat at the Desire. And more than any of these, he blamed the easy female access that yawned open on Bourbon Street when his wife locked the bedroom door and said she could no longer live with a man who slept with a.357 Magnum and threatened to use it on himself because he believed the downdraft of helicopter gunships was shaking the plaster out of their apartment walls.

The light was tea-colored on the sugarcane fields and the oak trees along the Teche. A truck had parked next to the lounge, obscuring Clete’s view of the swimming pool and the reclining figure of Carolyn Blanchet. He started up his Caddy and drove on the berm the hundred yards down the road to the lounge and parked by the side of the building so he could see both the entrance to the motel and the row of rooms that gave onto the pool.

He hadn’t eaten since lunch, nor had he brought along his cooler that he usually kept stocked with po’boy sandwiches, Gatorade, a Ziploc bag of hard-boiled eggs, a jar of fresh orange juice, a pint of vodka, and a mixed dozen of longnecks and sixteen-ounce cans of Bud. This Layton Blanchet gig was a nuisance growing into a migraine that he didn’t need. What was even worse, he told himself, he had taken the job out of pride rather than financial need because he didn’t want to feel he couldn’t handle a self-inflated manipulator like Blanchet. It was like mashing down the sole of your shoe on bubble gum to prove you weren’t afraid of it.

What a fool he had been. Not only with Blanchet but with almost everything he touched. He’d lost it with Herman Stanga and had set himself up for a civil suit and criminal prosecution. Now he was running on dumb luck, a liver that he tried to revitalize with handfuls of vitamin B, and what he called the hypertension buzz, which produced a sound in his head like a fallen power line lying in a pool of water.

He was over the hill and lived alone and had no pension plan except a small SEP-IRA. The last woman he had loved and slept with had been an Amerasian FBI agent he had met in Montana. She had come to New Orleans with him, but as always happened with a younger woman, the discrepancy between youth and age finally had its way, and in this instance, the languid, subtropical heat and pagan excesses of southern Louisiana were no match for the techno-predictability of southern California, where she had grown up.

A woman in her mid-thirties came out the back door of the lounge and began walking toward the motel. She had gold hair that was cut short and wore jeans and suede half-topped boots and a canary-yellow cowboy shirt with purple roses sewn on it. She was looking straight ahead; then she saw the Caddy and Clete behind the wheel and smiled hesitantly, as though uncertain whether to approach the car or to continue on toward the motel. Finally, she walked to the driver’s window and propped her hand on the roof. “Remember me?” she asked.

“It’s Emma, right?” he said.

“Yeah, Emma Poche. I’m the deputy who called Dave Robicheaux the night you got brought in for that deal involving Herman Stanga at the Gate Mouth club. Looks like you got your car fixed.”

“Yeah, look, Emma—”

“You on the job?”

“Something like that.”

“My uncle is visiting from California. I’m supposed to meet him at the lounge, but he must have got lost. A guy has the phone tied up inside. I was gonna use the phone in the motel. Can I borrow your cell?”

He handed it to her. She went around the corner of the building and then came back to the Caddy, this time leaning down inside the passenger’s window. She dropped his cell phone on the seat. “Thanks. You get loose, come have a drink. My uncle is a no-show. What a drag, huh?”

Clete sat for another forty-five minutes in the Caddy. The sunset turned into long strips of maroon clouds, backdropped by a moment of robin’s-egg blueness on the earth’s rim, then the light drained from the sky and he could hear frogs croaking in a field down by the bayou and the first mosquitoes of the evening droning inside his vehicle.

He started the engine and rolled up all his windows and turned on his air conditioner full blast. Carolyn Blanchet got up from the recliner and went back inside her room. No one joined her. Twenty minutes later, she reemerged fully dressed, a fabric tote bag hanging from her shoulder. She opened a compact and studied her reflection in the mirror. She closed the compact and dropped it back in her bag. Then she got in her Lexus and drove away, the taillights disappearing in the gloom.

Clete picked up his cell phone off the seat and speed-dialed the private number Layton Blanchet had given him. He hoped he would get Blanchet’s voice mail so he would not have to talk personally with the man again. No such luck.

“What do you want?” Blanchet said.

“Maybe I should call another time. Or just send you a fax. I can do that,” Clete said.

“Sorry to sound short. I’m a little jammed up these days. You got something for me?”

“No, I’ve found nothing that could be considered significant. There’s no charge for my time. I’ll send you a bill for expenses and for the hours another guy put in. So this call in effect terminates my situation with you.”

“Hold on there. What do you mean you’re terminating the situation? What do you mean when you say you didn’t find anything ‘significant’?”

“Nothing we’ve uncovered puts your wife with another man. You know what I suggest sometimes in situations like this? I tell the husband to take his wife out to dinner. Buy her flowers. Put some music on the stereo and dance with her on the patio. Pay more attention to her and forget all this other bullshit. It’s not worth it, Mr. Blanchet. Not financially, not emotionally. If our marriages are flushed, they’re flushed. If they’re salvageable, we salvage them.”

“You said you were sending me a bill for another guy’s hours. You shared this information with other people?”

“Yeah, I pieced off the job. That’s how it works. I’m one guy, not the CIA.”

“Then I want the names of everybody involved.”

“We’re done on this.”

“Oh, no, we’re not.”

“My sympathies to your wife,” Clete said, and clicked off his cell phone. He rubbed the ennui and fatigue out of his face and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. The air-conditioning was cold on his skin, the air freshener that the repair people had hung from his mirror smelling of lilacs, of spring, of youth itself. He remembered the excitement and romance of being twenty-three and returning home in Marine Corps tropicals, a recipient of the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts, riding the Ferris wheel high above Pontchartrain Beach, the rifles in a shooting gallery popping far below him, the waves of the lake capping on the sand, a young woman clinging tightly to his arm.

But youth was a decaying memory, and no matter what a song lyricist might say, you couldn’t put time in a bottle.

He went inside the lounge. Emma Poche was sitting by herself at a table in the corner, her canary-yellow western shirt lit by the glow of the jukebox. She had put on fresh lipstick, and her eyes were warm with an alcoholic sheen. “Sit down, handsome, and tell me about your life,” she said.

He pulled out a chair and signaled the waitress. Emma was drinking out of a tall Collins glass, one packed with crushed ice and cherries and an orange slice. “I thought you knew Dave through the program,” he said.

“Not really. Our ties go back to NOPD.”

“You’re not in the program?”

“I’ve tried it on and off. I got tired of listening to the same stories over and over. Were you ever in A.A.?”

“Not me.”

“Yeah, stop drinking today and gone tomorrow. Why not party a little bit while you have the opportunity?”

“That’s the way you feel about it?”

“I’m gonna die no matter how I feel about any of it, so I say ‘bombs away.’ If you ask me, sobriety sucks.”

He tried to reason through what she had just said, but the jukebox was playing and the long day had landed on him like an anvil. The waitress came to the table and Emma ordered a vodka Collins and Clete a schooner of draft and a shot of Jack. He poured the whiskey into his beer and watched it rise in a mysterious cloud and flatten inside the foam. He tilted the schooner to his mouth and drank until it was almost half empty. He let out his breath, his eyes coming back into focus, like those of a man who had just gotten off a roller coaster. “Wow,” he said.

“You don’t fool around,” she said.

“I spent most of the day firing in the well, then having a conversation with a world-class asshole. Plus I have complications with a dude by the name of Robert Weingart. Know anything about him?”

“I read his book. Weingart is the asshole?”

“Weingart is an asshole, all right, but I was talking about a client. Have you heard anything in St. Martin Parish about girls getting doped with roofies before they’re raped?”

“I’ve heard about it in Lafayette but not around here. Weingart is doing that?”

“I’m not sure.” Clete finished his boilermaker and ordered a refill. When it came, he sipped the whiskey from the shot glass and chased it with the beer.

“Your stomach lining must look like Swiss cheese,” she said.

“My stomach is fine. My liver is the size of a football.”

“Maybe you ought to ease up.”

He could feel the alcohol taking hold in his system, restoring coherence to his thoughts, driving the gargoyles back to an unlighted place in his mind, releasing the cord of tension that often bound his chest and pressed the air out of his lungs. “I appreciated you calling Dave when I was in that holding cell. Some of those guys in St. Martin Parish carry resentments. That was a stand-up thing to do.”

“You had the same kind of trouble at NOPD as me and Dave. The unholy trinity, huh?” she said, watching him lift the shot glass to his mouth again.

“I brought most of my trouble on myself.”

“Save it for Oprah. I worked with those shitheads. What was the deal outside there?”

“What deal?”

“In your Cadillac. You were on a stakeout?”

“I wouldn’t give it that kind of depth. Anyway, I pulled the plug on it.”

“You like being a PI?”

“I don’t think about it a lot.”

“That’s a good way to be. My job is okay, but I miss life in the Big Sleazy.” She put her hand on his wrist when he started to lift his schooner again. “Better eat something.”

“Yeah, maybe.” His eyes moved sleepily over her face. She pretended to be looking at the bar, but he knew she was aware he was staring at her with more than curiosity. His gaze drifted to her ring finger. “You ever been married?”

“I woke up once with a rock-and-roll drummer who said we’d gotten hitched in Juárez, but I never saw a certificate. The guy got hit by a train, anyway. I was seventeen. I always call that part of my life the downside of that old-time rock and roll.”

She looked back at the bar, straightening her shoulders slightly, her breasts stiffening against her shirt. Clete studied the clearness of her complexion and her pug nose and the pools of color in her cheeks and the redness of her mouth and the cuteness of her profile. She removed a strand of hair from her eyebrow and looked him in the face. “Something wrong?” she said.

“Did you have dinner yet?”

“No, I was supposed to eat with my uncle.”

“Let’s have another round and I’ll buy you supper at Possum’s.”

“Dutch treat,” she said.

“No, it’s going on my expense tab, and I’m sending it to the world-class asshole.”

“Who is he?”

He upended his shot glass and winked at her. When she sipped from her vodka Collins, her mouth looked cold and hard and lovely. She fished a cherry out of the ice and held it by the stem and placed it behind her teeth. When she bit into it, the juice ran over her lip. She caught it on one knuckle, smiling. She wiped her hand on a paper napkin. “I’m a mess,” she said.

“You look good to me.”

“Ready to rock, big guy?” she said. She bit down on the corner of her lip, her eyes fixed on his.