She was standing behind her desk, not quite looking at me, her thoughts hidden. A cassette player rested on her desk blotter. “The only witness we have wasn’t at the crime scene,” she said.
“Repeat that?”
“Monroe Fontenot, Stanga’s cousin. Herman left two messages on Monroe’s answering machine early last night, then made a third call that was recorded while the shooter was on the grounds. Here, listen.” She pushed a button on the cassette player.
I had hated Herman Stanga, but I doubted that any civilized human being could take pleasure in the naked fear of a small, uneducated, pitiful man who had grown up carrying buckets filled with the washed-out product of other people’s lust. While the tape played, I walked to the window and watched the rain dance on the surface of Bayou Teche. The last sounds on the tape were gunfire and the voice of Herman Stanga’s cousin shouting into the phone. Helen pushed the eject button on the cassette player.
“We found only one slug,” she said. “It hit the corner of the house. It’s in pretty bad shape, but the lab says it’s probably from a forty-five auto. There were no shell casings.”
I nodded and didn’t reply.
“What kind of shooters pick up their brass, Dave?” she said.
“Professional killers?”
“Who else?”
“All cops.”
“Who else?”
“Ex-cops.”
“Which leads us to a bad question. Maybe it’s one you and I wouldn’t ask, but somebody probably will.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“Who had the most motivation to blow Herman Stanga out of his socks?”
“Anyone who had the misfortune to know him.”
“Wrong. Herman did business around here for a quarter century. He made money for lots of people. He greased cops and politicians and didn’t make enemies of anyone who had the power to hurt him.”
“I know that, Helen.”
“Was Clete with you last night?”
“Ask him.”
“I asked you.”
“No, Clete was not with me.”
“You said something to me yesterday that won’t go out of my head.”
“What’s that?”
“You said the only thing Stanga understood was a bullet in the mouth.”
“What about it?”
“Most of Stanga’s jaw was blown off. Who saw you at Henderson Swamp last night, Pops? Don’t break my heart.”
“Nobody saw me. And I’m through with this conversation,” I said.
* * *
At noon I found Clete sitting at the bar in Clementine’s, a po’boy fried-oyster sandwich on a plate in front of him, a Bloody Mary in a big tumbler with a celery stalk stuck in it by his elbow. His loafers were shined and his slacks and Hawaiian shirt pressed, but the back of his neck looked oily and hot, and behind his shades, the skin at the corners of his eyes was white and threaded with lines. I rested my hand on his shoulder. It felt as hard as concrete.
“Helen Soileau wants you to come in,” I said.
“For what?” he said, studying my reflection in the mirror behind the bar.
“She wants to know where you were last night.”
“When I find out, I’ll tell her.”
“Rough night?”
“Probably. I don’t remember. I woke up in the backseat of my rental, behind a filling station in Morgan City. My wallet was empty.”
“You know about Herman Stanga?”
“I saw it in the paper.”
“Helen just wants to exclude you.”
“Good. Let me know when she does that,” he said.
I tightened my hand around the back of his neck. “Come stay with us.”
“I look homeless?”
“Just for a while, until we get through this stuff.”
“I’m fine. I’m getting my Caddy out of the shop today. Everything is copacetic, Dave.”
The waiter brought him a bowl of gumbo. Clete dipped the end of his po’boy sandwich into the bowl and began eating, drinking from his Bloody Mary, filling his mouth with French bread, oysters, lettuce and tomatoes, red sauce, and mayonnaise, stopping only long enough to wipe his chin with a white napkin. He took off his shades and turned toward me. His face looked poached and twenty years older than his age. “Stop staring at me like that,” he said. “I’m not going to burn my own kite. You stop acting like I’m the walking wounded. Did you hear me, big mon? I can’t take it.”
Out of politeness, the bartender walked away from us. I went back outside, into the smell of wet trees and raindrops striking warm concrete, wondering at what point you have to honor the self-destructive request of the best friend you ever had.
At one P.M. Helen called me back into her office and told me that AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, had found a match for the girl we exhumed at the Delahoussaye farm. “She was a Canadian runaway, from a place called Trout Lake, British Columbia. She’d been picked up in North Dakota and returned to a foster home in B.C.” Helen opened a folder that was filled with printouts from both the National Crime Information Center and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Her name was Fern Michot. I talked with an inspector with the RCMP. She seemed to have been a good kid, until her parents were killed in a car wreck and she got placed with a family that probably abused her. The social worker assigned to her case thinks the father in the family might have raped her. Anyway, here’s a picture that was taken of her two years ago at age sixteen.”
In police work, you see many kinds of photos, some taken in booking rooms, others at crime scenes, some in morgues. But the kind you’re never prepared for is the picture of either the victim or the perpetrator when he or she was a child. The photo Helen handed me was of a beautiful blue-eyed, blond girl dressed in a Girl Scout uniform that had a maple leaf sewn on the sleeve. The girl was smiling and looked younger than her years, as though perhaps she hadn’t outgrown her baby fat. She looked like a girl who had been loved and who believed the world was a good place where the joy of young womanhood waited for her with each sunrise.
“How did she end up down here?” I said.
“She had run away from British Columbia twice before. She must have run away again and crossed the border and this time kept going.”
“But why here? How did she fall into the hands of the person who killed her?”
Helen put the photo back in the folder and placed the folder in my hand. “Find out,” she said.
I turned to go.
“Streak?”
I hated what I knew was coming next.
“Did you talk to Clete?” she said.
“He was drunk last night. All he remembers is waking up in the backseat of his rental car in Morgan City.”
“He has a blackout the same night Stanga is killed? What are the odds of that happening?”
“Clete is going through a bad time in his life. Why don’t you cut him some slack?”
“All right, let’s talk about you. You think I was too hard on you this morning, asking you where you were last night?”
“I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”
“Everyone knows you carry a forty-five auto, Dave. Everybody knows your feelings about Herman Stanga. Your best friend was about to be financially ruined and sent to Angola by a pimp you despised. You and Clete have been trashing legal procedure and stringing feces through courtrooms for decades. Both of you act like the world is a huge O.K. Corral. But I’m supposed to ignore all that to protect your sensibilities?”
“Why is it people remember Wyatt Earp’s and Doc Holliday’s names but not the names of the guys they shot?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she replied.
“My vote is still for Doc and the Earps.”
“That’s because you’re unteachable,” she said. “God!”
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 sou
thwestern 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.
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