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.
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