“Who do you think might have murdered them?”
“It ain’t a pimp. A pimp don’t murder his stable. Check out their families. They probably been killing each other.” He glanced at his watch. It was gold and had a black face inset with tiny red stones. “I got people coming over. We t’rew wit’ this?”
The underwater lights in his swimming pool had just clicked on, creating a sky-blue clarity in the water that was so pristine I could see the silvery glint of a dime at the bottom of the deep end. Banana trees and a magnificent magnolia tree hung over the spiked fence that surrounded the pool. Potted plants bursting with flowers shaded his deck chairs and filled the air with a fragrance that was heavier than perfume.
“Your home is a study in contradictions. Your yard is carpeted with dog shit, and your house is being eaten to the foundation by termites. But your pool area is snipped right out of Southern Living. I don’t get it.”
“The uptown nigger who built this place wanted to be a character in Gone Wit’ the Wind. Except Whitey on the bayou don’t got no need for niggers pretending they’re white people. So I give them a real nigger to weep and moan about. I own t’ree rentals, a condo in Lake Charles, and a beach house in Panama City, but I use this house to wipe my ass on. Every day I’m here, the value of my neighbors’ property goes down. Guess who they gonna end up selling their houses to? That is, if I’m in the market for more houses.
“Know why there ain’t been no media coverage on them girls for four months? Nobody cares. This is still Lou’sana, Robo Man. Black or white, it don’t matter — if you got money, people will take your ten-inch on their knees. If you ain’t got money, they’ll cut it off.”
“I think I’ll let myself out.”
“Yeah, fuck you, too, man.”
“Say again?”
“Everyt’ing I tole you is true. But you cain’t deal wit’ it. And that’s your problem, motherfucker. It ain’t mine.”
* * *
I lived with my wife, Molly, who was a former Catholic nun, in a modest frame house with a peaked tin roof among live oaks and pecan trees and slash pines and windmill palms on East Main, a half block from the famous plantation home known as The Shadows. There was rust on the roof and in the rain gutters, and it turned orange and purple in the late-afternoon sunset. Our lot was one acre in size and part of a historical alluvial floodplain that sloped down to Bayou Teche. The topographical contour of the land along the bayou had never been altered, and as a consequence, even though we were located close to the water, the houses in our neighborhood never flooded, even during the worst of hurricanes. Equally important for one who lives in the tropics, our house stayed in deep shade most of the day, and by the front walk, where we got full sun, our camellias and hibiscus stayed in bloom almost year-round, and in the spring our azaleas powdered the lawn with petals that looked like pink confetti.
It was a fine house in which to live, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, the ceiling-high windows outfitted with ventilated storm shutters, our new veranda a grand place to sit in wood rockers among our potted plants and house pets.
Alafair, our adopted daughter, had graduated from Reed College with a degree in psychology, and now had taken off one semester from Stanford Law School to rewrite a novel she had been working on for three years. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed and was carrying a 3.9 GPA at Stanford. She was a good writer, too. I had no doubts about the level of professional success that awaited her, regardless of the field she entered. My concern for Alafair’s well-being was much more immediate and without any solution that I could see. In this case, the specific name of the concern was Kermit Abelard, the first man I believed Alafair was actually serious about.
“He’s coming over here? Now?” I said.
I had just come home from work and had parked my pickup under the porte cochere. She was sitting in the rocker on the veranda, wearing a flowery sundress and white shoes, her skin dark with tan, her Indian-black hair burned brown on the tips. “What do you have against him, Dave?”
“He’s too old for you.”
“He’s thirty-three. He calls it his crucifixion year.”
“I forgot. He’s also grandiose.”
“Give it a rest, big guy.”
“Is the convict coming with him?”
She made a face that feigned exasperation. Kermit Abelard, whose family at one time had owned almost half of St. Mary Parish, could not be accused of decadence or living on his family name. He had gone to acting school in New York and had published three novels, one of which had been adapted as a film. He had worked in the oil field when he could have been playing tennis and fishing for marlin in the Keys. Unfortunately, his egalitarian attitudes sometimes required others to pay a price, as was the case when he encouraged the entire crew on his drilling rig to join the union and got them and himself fired. Two years past, he had managed to work a parole from the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville for a celebrity convict author, a man who had been in and out of reformatories and jails since he was sixteen.
“Have you read The Green Cage?” Alafair asked.
“I have. I got it from the library. I didn’t buy it.”
“You don’t think it’s a brilliant piece of writing?”
“Yeah, it is, for reasons the author and his admirers don’t seem to understand.”
She wasn’t taking the bait, so I slogged on. “It’s a great look inside the mind of a sociopath and narcissist and manipulator. Count the number of times the pronouns ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ and ‘myself’ appear in each paragraph.”
“Somebody must have liked it. Robbie was a finalist in the National Book Awards.”
“Robbie?”
“Argue with someone else, Dave.”
I looked out at the evening traffic, at the birds gathering in the trees against a mauve-colored sunset. “Want to go for a run?” I said.
“I’m going to the park with Kermit. He’s reading the revision I did on the last chapter in my novel.”
I went inside the house. Molly had left a note on the kitchen table to the effect she was in Lafayette and would bring supper home. I changed into my gym shorts and a T-shirt and my running shoes, and in the backyard, under the supervision of our warrior cat, Snuggs, and our elderly raccoon, Tripod, I did fifty push-ups with my feet propped on a picnic bench, five reps of sixty-pound curls, three reps of military presses, and one hundred stomach crunches. It was cool and warm at the same time inside the shade of the trees, and the wind was blowing through the bamboo that separated our property from the next-door neighbor’s, and wisteria was blooming in big blue and lavender clumps on the side of her garage. I had almost forgotten my worries regarding Alafair and her willingness to trust people she shouldn’t; then I heard Kermit Abelard’s black Saab convertible pull into the driveway and a car door open and close. I did not hear it open and close and then open and close again. Which meant Kermit Abelard did not get out of his vehicle and approach the gallery and walk Alafair back to the car and open the car door for her. In my view, no one could accuse Kermit Abelard of going out of his way to be a gentleman.
I walked to the edge of the backyard so I could see through the porte cochere into the front. Kermit was backing into the street, the top down on his convertible, the dappled shade sliding off the hand-waxed surfaces, as though the cooling of the day and the attenuation of the light had been arranged especially for him. Alafair sat next to him on the rolled-leather seat. In back was a man whose face I had seen only on the flap of a book jacket.
I jogged down East Main, under the canopy of live oaks that spanned the entirety of the street, past The Shadows and the bed-and-breakfast that had been the residence of the plantation’s overseer, past the massive old brick post office and the Evangeline Theater, across the drawbridge at Burke Street and into City Park, where people were barbecuing under the shelters along the bayou and high school kids were playing a work-up softball game on the ball diamond.
I jogge
d for four miles, circling twice through the park. At the end of the second lap I hit it hard toward home, my blood oxygenated now, my breath coming regular, my heart strong, the sweaty glaze on my skin a reminder that once in a while you’re allowed to reclaim a libidinal moment or two from your youth. Then I saw Kermit Abelard’s Saab parked by the tin pavilion, checkered cloth and newspapers spread on a table, a mound of boiled crawfish and artichokes and corn on the cob piled in the center.
I didn’t want to stop, but Alafair and her friends Kermit Abelard and the convict-author whose name was Robert Weingart had seen me, and now Alafair was waving, her face full of joy and pride. I tried to shine her on, to pretend I was committed to my run and couldn’t stop. But under what circumstances do you embarrass your daughter in front of her companions, or indulge your enmity toward them at her expense? Or pass her by when perhaps she needs your presence for reasons she may not be able to acknowledge, even to herself?
I slowed to a walk, wiping my face with the towel I carried.
Kermit was a stocky man of medium height, with vascular, short arms and a cleft in his chin. He was built more like a dockhand than a descendant of local aristocracy. The top of his shirt was unbuttoned, his tanned, smooth skin exposed for others to look at. He had wide, square hands and fingers that were blunt on the tips. They were the hands of a workingman, but incongruously, the red stone of a Kappa Sigma ring twinkled on his finger.
“Come meet Robert, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.
“I’m pretty overheated. I’d better not get too close to you guys,” I said.
Robert Weingart was sitting on top of the wood table, smiling good-naturedly, his alpine-booted feet planted solidly on the bench. He had fine cheekbones, a small mouth, and dark hair that was clipped neatly and wet-combed with a part that created a straight gray line through his scalp. His eyes were hazel and elongated, his cheeks slightly sunken. His hands were relaxed on his knees, his fingers tapered, like a pianist’s. He conveyed the sense that he was a man with no hidden agenda, with no repressed tensions or problems of conscience. He seemed to be a man at peace with the world.
But it was the lack of balance or uniformity in his physiognomy that bothered me. He didn’t blink, the way screen actors never blink. His mouth was too small, too quick to smile, his jaw too thin for the size of his cranium. His eyes stayed fastened brightly on mine. I kept waiting for him to blink. But he didn’t.
“Looks like you’ve been pouring it on,” he said.
“Not really.”
“I thought your speed was pretty impressive.”
“Have I seen you in the movies?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You remind me of an actor. I can’t call his name to mind.”
“No, I’m just a scribbler.” He got up from the table, extending his hand. “Rob Weingart. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“It’s not Robbie?”
“Just call me Rob if you like.”
His handshake was boneless, unthreatening, cool and dry to the touch. There was a white shine on his teeth. He picked up a peeled crawfish and put it in his mouth, his cheekbones working slowly, his gaze never leaving my face. He touched at his lips with a paper napkin, his expression as benign as the weather was temperate, a bit like a man thinking of a private joke. “Is there something on your mind I can help you with?” he asked.
“I got it. It wasn’t an actor. You remind me of Chet Baker,” I said.
“The musician?”
“That’s right. A tragic one, at that. His addictions ate him alive. You like jazz, Mr. Weingart? Have you done any professional performing? I’m sure I’ve seen you in a professional capacity.”
“Let me fix you a plate, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit said.
“No, I never was a performer,” Robert Weingart said. “Why would you think that?”
“I just admire people who can teach themselves not to blink. When a person doesn’t blink, you can’t read his thoughts. All you see is one undecipherable expression. It’s like staring into electrified silk.”
“That’s quite an image,” he said to Kermit. “One of us ought to borrow that and give Mr. Robicheaux a footnote.”
“You can just take it and use it in any fashion you choose. It’s free,” I said.
Kermit Abelard touched my forearm with a loaded paper plate.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’d better get back on my run.”
“You’re a police officer,” Robert Weingart said.
“Alafair told you?”
“Usually I can spot a police officer. It used to be part of my curriculum vitae. But in this case I think your daughter told me. I’m almost sure of it.”
“You think? But you don’t know?”
Alafair’s face was burning.
“Is my plate ready? I could eat a whale,” Robert Weingart said, looking around, suppressing his amusement at the situation that swirled about him.
* * *
“I can’t believe you. Why didn’t you punch him in the face while you were at it?” Alafair said to me after she returned home.
“That’s a possibility,” I replied.
“What did he do? The man was just sitting there.”
“He’s a mainline recidivist, Alf. Don’t be taken in.”
“Don’t call me that stupid name. How can you know somebody five seconds and make judgments like that?”
“Anybody who’s con-wise can spot a dude like that five blocks away.”
“The real problem is you always want to control other people. Instead of being honest about your own self-centered agenda, you go after Kermit’s friend.”
“You’re right, I don’t know him.”
“Why do you blame Kermit for what his family may have done? It’s not fair to him, Dave, and it’s not fair to me.”
“There’s no ‘may have done’ about it. The Abelards are dictators. If they had their way, we’d all be doing their grunt work for minimum wage, if that.”
“So what? That doesn’t mean Kermit is like the rest of his family. John and Robert Kennedy weren’t like their father.”
“What’s with you two? I could hear you all the way out in the driveway,” Molly said, coming through the back door, both arms loaded with groceries.
“Ask Dave, if you can get him to pull his head out of his ass,” Alafair said.
“That’s the second time someone has said that to me today. The other person was a meltdown on a road gang in Mississippi.”
Molly tried to make it to the counter with the grocery bags. But it was too late. One of them caved, and most of our delicatessen supper splattered on the linoleum.
That’s when Clete Purcel tapped on the back screen. “Am I interrupting anything?” he said.
CHAPTER 2
It was through Clete Purcel that I had been over in Jeff Davis Parish asking about the seven girls and young women whose bodies had been found in ditches and swamp areas since 2005. Two weeks ago the remains of one of his bail skips were found in the bottom of a recently drained canal, her decomposed features webbed with dried algae, as though she had been wrapped in a sheet of dirty plastic. The pathologist said she had died of massive physical trauma. Perhaps she had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. Perhaps not.
Clete operated a private investigative service out of two offices, one on St. Ann in the French Quarter and the other on Main Street, here in New Iberia. His daily routine was one of ennui coupled with an almost visceral disdain for the people he routinely hooked up and delivered to two bondsmen in New Orleans by the names of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine, both of whom had been bankrupted after Katrina when FEMA transported their bonded-out clientele to faraway cities all over the United States. At one time Clete had been the best cop I ever knew, both as a patrolman and as a detective-grade investigator with the NOPD. But booze and pills and his predilection for damaged women had been his undoing, and he’d been forced to blow the country on a murder beef and hide out in El Salvador and Guate
mala, where, as a mercenary, he got to see the murder of civilians on a scale that was greater than he had seen in Vietnam.
Insatiability seemed to have been wired into his metabolism. He fought his hangovers with uppers and vodka and tomato juice and a celery stick in a tumbler of crushed ice, convinced himself that four fingers of Scotch sheathed in a glass of milk would not harm his liver, and clanked iron daily to compensate for the deep-fried soft-shell crabs and oyster po’boy sandwiches and gallons of gumbo he consumed on a weekly basis. His courage and his patriotism and his sense of personal honor and his loyalty to his friends had no peer. I never knew a better and braver man. But threaded through all of his virtues was his abiding conviction that he was not worthy of a good woman’s love and that somehow his father, the milkman who had made his son kneel on grains of rice, always stood somewhere close by, his face knotted with disapproval.
Clete was the libidinous trickster of folklore, the elephantine buffoon, the bane of the Mob and all misogynists and child molesters, the brain-scorched jarhead who talked with a dead mamasan on his fire escape, the nemesis of authority figures and anyone who sought power over others, a one-man demolition derby who had driven an earth-grader through the walls of a mobster’s palatial home on Lake Pontchartrain and systematically ground the entire building into rubble. Or at least that was the persona he created for the world to see. But in reality Clete Purcel was a tragedy. His enemies were many: gangsters, vindictive cops, and insurance companies who wanted him off the board. Klansmen and neo-Nazis had tried to kill him. A stripper he had befriended dosed him with the clap. He had been shanked, shot, garroted, and tortured. A United States congressman tried to have him sent to Angola. But all of the aforementioned were amateurs when it came to hurting Clete Purcel. Clete’s most dangerous adversary lived in his own breast.
I walked outside with him, into the coolness of the evening and the wind blowing through the bamboo that grew along the driveway. His skin was inflamed with fresh sunburn, and he was wearing a tropical shirt and mirrored shades that reflected the trees and clouds and his restored maroon Caddy with the starch-white top. He put his arm inside the driver’s window and lifted an open can of beer off the dashboard, then stuck a filter-tip cigarette into the corner of his mouth and prepared to light it with his Zippo. I removed the cigarette and stuck it in his shirt pocket.
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