When I first met Molly, she had been a nun, although she had not taken vows. She had been working with a relief organization that constructed homes for the poor and helped empower fisherpeople and victims of natural calamities. But she and her fellow nuns were of a different stripe than their antecedents, and they didn’t confine themselves to the type of charitable activities that are usually considered laudatory but of no threat or consequence to corporate-scale enterprises. Molly and her friends began to organize the sugarcane workers. The workers who joined the union discovered they had twenty-four hours to get out of their company-owned houses. And that was just for openers.
Where did this happen?
You got it. In the medieval fiefdom of the Abelard family, St. Mary Parish.
Molly sat back down at the table and resumed eating, her thoughts hidden, the candlelight carving her features, flickering on her red hair and the strange brown luminosity of her eyes.
“I’m going to take him to the vet tomorrow,” I said. “I think he might have distemper.”
“I’ll take him,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let him get wet this afternoon. I was late getting home, and his chain was wrapped around the tree. Where were you?”
We had gotten to the subject I didn’t want to broach. “Clete and I took a ride to the Abelard home, down in St. Mary.”
I heard Alafair stop eating. “Why would you want to go to the Abelard house, Dave?” she asked.
“A pimp by the name of Herman Stanga claims to be working for the St. Jude Project. Kermit Abelard says that’s not so. His friend Robert Weingart claims he never heard of Herman Stanga. I think Weingart is a liar and a full-time mainline wiseass. Clete is hanging by a thread over the fire. He may go to prison because of Stanga, Alafair.”
“Go to prison for what?”
“Stanga spat on him, and Clete did something he shouldn’t have.”
“So it’s Kermit’s fault?”
“I think Kermit is deliberately naive. He chooses not to see evil in men who are genuinely wicked. He told me he had talked to you about his contacts with Stanga.”
“Kermit has a good heart. Maybe you’d find that out if you gave him a chance,” she said.
The rain had slackened, and the light on the bayou was a dense green, the wake from a passing tugboat swelling over the banks into the roots of the cypress and oak trees. Our windows were open, and the air was cool and fresh, and I could smell the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou and the wet trees and the soaked ground, and I didn’t want to talk about Herman Stanga and the Abelard family. No, that’s not true. I did not want to hear my daughter speak as an advocate for the Abelards.
“I warned Kermit not to drag you into his association with Herman Stanga,” I said.
“You did what?”
“Don’t start, you two,” Molly said.
“I’m not supposed to say anything when Dave insults my friends and patronizes me?” Alafair said. “You actually threatened Kermit? I can’t believe you.”
“I didn’t threaten him.”
“Then what did you say to him?”
“Weingart came to the table in a robe and a thong. He called Clete a gelatinous handful. This man is a walking regurgitant. Clete and I are not the problem.”
“I am? That’s the inference?”
I got up from the table and set my plate on the drainboard, half of my food uneaten. I took a carton of ice cream from the freezer and removed three bowls from the cupboard, unsure what I was doing. I opened the solid door to the back porch, letting in the wind. I could hear frogs croaking and rain leaking out of the oaks and pecan trees into the yard. “Do y’all want strawberries with your ice cream?” I said.
“Why do you try to control other people, Dave? Why do you ruin everything?” Alafair said.
Molly reached across the table and grasped Alafair’s hand. “Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not supposed to defend my friends or myself?”
“Don’t,” Molly repeated, shaking Alafair’s palm in hers.
I put on my rain hat and walked downtown in the twilight. Customers were having drinks under the colonnade in front of Clementine’s restaurant, and across the street, at the Gouguenheim bed-and-breakfast, guests were enjoying the evening on the balcony, and farther down the block a crowd was waiting under the colonnade to go inside Bojangles. I walked to the drawbridge over the Teche at Burke Street and leaned on the rail and looked down the long corridor of trees that was barely visible in the gloaming of the day. What is the proper way for a father to talk to his daughter when she has reached adulthood but is determined to trust men who will only bring her injury? Do you lecture her? Do you indicate that she has no judgment and is not capable of conducting her own life? It’s not unlike telling a drunkard that he is weak and morally deficient because he drinks, then expecting him to stop. How do you tell your daughter that all your years of protecting and caring for her can be stolen in a blink by a man like Robert Weingart? The answer is you cannot.
I could not tell Alafair that I remembered moments out of her childhood that she considered of little consequence today or didn’t remember at all: the burning day I pulled her from the submerged wreck of an airplane piloted by a priest who was flying war refugees out of El Salvador and Guatemala; her pride in the Donald Duck cap with the quacking bill we bought at Disney World; her first pair of tennis shoes, which she wore to bed at night, embossed on the appropriate tips in big rubber letters with the words “left” and “right”; her ongoing war with Batist, the black man who ran our bait shop and boat rental, because Tripod would not stay out of Batist’s fried pies and candy bars; her horse, Tex, who threw her end over end into our tomato plants; Alafair, at age six, mallet-smashing boiled crabs at a screened-in restaurant by Vermilion Bay, splattering everyone at the table; Alafair, at age nine, fishing with me in the Gulf, casting two-handed with a heavy rod and saltwater reel like it was a samurai sword, almost knocking me unconscious with the lead weights and smelt-baited treble hook.
Do you approach your daughter and tell her that no man has the right to track his feet through a father’s memories of his daughter’s young life?
I walked home in the dark. The streetlamps were back on and the wind was up, and the frenetic shadows of the live oaks and the moss in their limbs made me think of soldiers running from tree trunk to tree trunk in a nocturnal woods, but I had no explanation why.
* * *
The phone rang at shortly after two in the morning. The caller sounded drunk and black and belligerent. I told him he must have misdialed, and started to hang up on him.
“No, I got the right number. Elmore said to call you. He’s got to talk to you again,” the caller said.
“You’re talking about Elmore Latiolais who’s in prison in Mississippi?”
“Yeah, I was in there wit’ him. I got out yesterday.”
“So you stopped by a bar and got loaded, then decided to call me up in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t mean no kind of disrespect, but I’m going out of my way to make this call. Elmore seen a picture of a white guy in the newspaper. He said he was sure this white guy had been around his sister’s house.”
“What’s the significance of the white guy?” I said.
“Again, I ain’t meaning to disrespect you, but Elmore’s sister was Bernadette. She was killed. This guy tole Bernadette he was gonna make her and her grandmother rich. She come to visit Elmore in jail, and she showed Elmore a picture of her and this white guy together. He’s a famous guy, maybe a great humanitarian or somet’ing like that. Maybe he’s been in the movies. I ain’t sure.”
“Elmore thinks Herman Stanga killed his sister. What’s the white guy got to do with anything?”
“Elmore says the white guy knows Herman. I got to take a leak, man. You got what you need?”
“Give me your name. I’ll meet you tomorrow in a place of your choosing.”
“Lookie here, Elmore said send you a kite. That’s wha
t I done. Elmore showed the picture to Captain Thigpin and axed him to call you again. You ain’t had no call from Captain Thigpin, have you?”
“No.”
“’Cause Captain Thigpin ain’t gonna be he’ping a black man on his road gang to bring down a rich white man. In the meantime, Elmore is going crazy in there. He keeps saying nobody cares about his sister. He says he’s got to get out and find the people that cut her t’roat. ‘She was just seventeen.’ That’s what he keeps saying over and over, ‘She was just seventeen.’”
At this point I expected the caller to hang up. He had probably told me all he knew and was obviously tired, in need of a restroom, and wanting another drink.
“Lookie, the reason Elmore axed me to call you and not somebody else is simple,” the caller said. “You said you was sorry for his loss. Ain’t none of the hacks tole him that, but you did. I tole Elmore he better quit doing what he’s doing or they gonna cool his ass out. But Elmore ain’t a listener.”
I WENT TO work early the next morning determined not to be drawn into problems outside my jurisdiction. Three years ago parish and city law enforcement had merged for budgetary reasons, and my office was now located in City Hall, on Bayou Teche, with a grand view of a religious grotto and wonderful oak trees next to the city library and, across the water, the urban forest that we call City Park. The sky was blue, the azaleas still blooming, wisteria hanging in clumps on the side of the grotto. I picked up my mail, poured a cup of coffee, and started in on the paperwork that waited daily for me in my in-basket.
But I could not get my two A.M. caller off my mind. In my wallet I found the cell-phone number of Captain Jimmy Darl Thigpin and punched it into my desk phone. My call went instantly to voice mail. I left a message. By eleven A.M. I had not received a reply. I tried again. At three in the afternoon I tried again. This time he picked up, but he offered no explanation for not having returned my earlier calls. “Is this about Latiolais?” he said.
“Yes, sir. I had a call last night from a man who says Latiolais has some new information regarding his sister’s homicide.”
“How does a convict on a brush gang come up with ‘new information’? Isn’t it about time to give this a rest, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“The caller said Elmore Latiolais had seen a newspaper photo of a white man who knew his sister and is connected with a pimp and drug dealer here by the name of Herman Stanga.”
“I don’t know anything about this.”
“Latiolais didn’t tell you about the photo?”
“No.”
“He made no mention of it to you?”
There was a pause. “I usually say things once. I do that because I tell the truth and I’m not used to having my word questioned.”
“Can I talk with Latiolais?”
“You want me to put a nigra inmate on my cell phone?”
“Or you can have him call me collect on a landline.”
“He’s in lockup.”
“There’s no phone in your facility?”
“He doesn’t have phone privileges there. That’s why we call it lockup.”
“Why is he in lockup?”
“He was acting like he had some jackrabbit in him.”
“I need to speak to him, Cap.”
“If you want to believe that boy’s lies, that’s your right. But I got a half-dozen inmates on my gang who would cut your throat for a dollar and lick the cut clean for an extra fifty cents, and I don’t have time to be worrying about that little halfwit. I hope this is the last conversation we have on the subject.”
“We can’t promise that, Cap. We were hoping to get your cooperation.”
“Who is ‘we’?” he said. Then the line went dead.
Through my open door I saw the sheriff, Helen Soileau, pass in the corridor. She came back and propped one arm on the jamb. She was a trim, firm-bodied woman, attractive in an androgynous way, her expressions often enigmatic, as though she were vacillating between two lives even while she was looking into your face. “I was at a function in Lafayette last night,” she said. “Timothy Abelard was there. He said you and Clete had been out to his house yesterday.”
“That’s true.”
“What was Clete doing with you?”
“He came along for the ride.”
She stepped inside the office and closed the door behind her, then sat down on the corner of my desk. She was wearing tan slacks and a pink shirt and her gun belt and half-top brown suede boots. “Clete is in a lot of trouble, Dave. But this time he’s not going to drag his problems into our workday. Got me?” she said.
“My trip to the Abelards was off the clock.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You know anything about this guy Robert Weingart?” I asked.
“He’s a writer. What about him?”
“He and Kermit Abelard are involved with the St. Jude Project. Herman Stanga claims he is, too.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“The fact that Weingart breathes our air is a crime.”
“I like the way you leave your personal feelings at the front door when you come to work in the morning.”
“I interviewed a convict in Mississippi who said Stanga is mixed up with the homicides in Jeff Davis Parish.”
“When did you go to Mississippi?”
“When I took those two days’ vacation time.”
She lifted a strand of hair out of her eyes. “What are we going to do with you, bwana?”
“Weingart is a piece of shit. I think he has Kermit Abelard under his control. I think we’re going to hear a lot more from him.”
She was shaking her head, holding back something she didn’t want to say.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Go ahead, what?”
“Say what’s on your mind.”
“Isn’t Alafair seeing Kermit Abelard?”
“I don’t know what the word ‘seeing’ means. It’s like a lot of words people use today. I can’t relate to their meaning. Does ‘see’ mean look at someone? Or sleep with someone? Alafair thinks both Abelard and Weingart are great writers. I heard Weingart’s female lawyer rewrote most of his manuscript and got it published for him and that Weingart couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper bag. I think Kermit is probably bisexual and in this guy’s thrall.”
“When you figure out how that translates into the commission of a crime, let me know.”
“Why be everybody’s punch?” I said.
“Want to rephrase that?”
“Bloodsuckers of every stripe come here and wipe their feet on us. We’ve turned victimhood into an art form. Weingart is a parasite if not a predator.”
“Go back to that part about Abelard’s bisexuality. I’d like to know how that figures into all this.”
“I wasn’t making a judgment about it.”
Her eyes roamed over my face. “Tell Clete he’s on a short tether. I always love chatting with you, Dave,” she said. She winked at me and went out the door, closing it carefully behind her, like someone who does not want to be in the emotional debt of another.
* * *
Two days passed and I began to think less and less about the deaths of the women in Jefferson Davis Parish. The absence of news coverage about their deaths and the general lack of fear or outrage that their deaths should have provoked may seem bizarre or symptomatic of inhumanity among our citizenry. But serial killers abound in this country, and they often kill scores of people for a span of several decades before they are caught, if they ever are. Most of their victims come from the great uprooted, faceless population that drifts via Greyhound or gas-guzzler or motorcycle or thumb through trailer slums, battered women’s shelters, Salvation Army missions, migrant worker camps, and inner-city areas that have the impersonality of war zones. The vagueness of the term “homeless” is unintentionally appropriate for many of the people inside this group. We have no idea who they are, how many of them are mentally ill or just poor, or how many of them ar
e fugitives. In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of them were dumped on the streets or refused admission by federal hospitals. The mendicant culture they established is still with us, although our problem of conscience regarding their welfare seems to have faded.
A local bluesman by the name of Lazy Lester once said, “Don’t ever write your name on the jailhouse wall.” Today it might not be a bad idea.
On Wednesday, just before quitting time, Helen came into my office with a back section of the Baton Rouge Advocate folded in her hand. “What was the name of the convict you interviewed in Mississippi?”
“Elmore Latiolais.”
“I shouldn’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Help you drag somebody else’s problem into our workload.” She dropped the newspaper on my desk pad.
I picked up the paper and read the story. It was four paragraphs in length. It was the kind of news story that any journalist or educated cop instantly recognizes as one that replicated a press handout or a statement made by a public information officer rather than an account based on an eyewitness interview. It was written in the passive voice and avoided specifics other than the fact that Elmore Latiolais, a man with a long criminal history, had been shot to death when he stole a pistol from a prison vehicle and threatened to kill a prison guard.
“Latiolais was a check writer and a bigamist and a thief. I don’t see this guy threatening prison personnel with a stolen firearm.”
“Pops, let the state of Mississippi deal with it.”
“So why bring me the news story?”
“Because you have a right to see it. That doesn’t mean you have a right to act on it.”
“You brought it to me because you know this story sucks.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Listen, Helen—”
She walked out the door, shaking her head, probably more at herself than at me.
I called Jimmy Darl Thigpin on his cell phone, expecting my call to go immediately to voice mail. But it didn’t.
“Thigpin,” a voice said.
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