She handed the receiver to me and silently formed the words “Miss Jewel” with her mouth.
CHAPTER 21
The tremolo in Jewel’s voice was of the subdued kind that I always associated with people whose sleeplessness and worry and uncertainty had left them on a desolate beach. “I don’t want to be saying these t’ings, Mr. Dave, but when you showed us those pictures, I got sick inside, and I was hoping everyt’ing would get set straight then and there, but it didn’t, and that’s why I’m calling you.”
“Set straight where?” I said.
“There, outside the banquet room in the Oil Center. Wit’ the wind blowing and the shadows trembling on the concrete and all of us just standing there when that lie got tole.”
“Which lie?”
“I was looking down at those girls’ faces in the photographs when Mr. Timothy said what he said, and I didn’t believe that it was him talking, ’cause Mr. Timothy has got lots of faults, but lying isn’t one of them. Now his sin has become mine, ’cause I didn’t speak up. I waited for him to do it, but he didn’t.”
“I see.”
“No, suh, I don’t believe you do. I’m a nurse. I’ve worked on people who died in an emergency room with bullet holes in them you could stick your thumb in, the gunpowder burns still on their clothes, except the police report says they were shot while armed and fleeing. I’ve seen babies brought in by parents who said the stroller got knocked over accidentally or the baby pulled down a hot-water pan on itself. Those t’ings keep happening ’cause other people go along wit’ the lie. When I looked into the faces of those dead girls, it was like there were words sewn up inside their mouths like dry moths trying to get out, except nobody wanted to listen.”
She was on a cell phone, and I could hear the transmission starting to break up. I had the feeling that if she didn’t finish her statement to me, she never would. “Miss Jewel, tell me what Mr. Abelard should have said in the parking lot.”
“The one named Bernadette was at the house. She came there in the boat with Mr. Robert and Mr. Kermit. They’d been taking a ride out on the bay, and they tied up the boat at the dock and played croquet on the lawn. Mr. Timothy shook her hand. I saw him.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Maybe t’ree months back. I’m not sure.”
“Maybe he forgot,” I said.
“Mr. Timothy never forgets anyt’ing. Not a face, not an injury, not a weakness in someone, not a show of strength. He’s the same wit’ loyalty. He always say he gives every friend and every enemy whatever they’ve earned. He’s never been afraid. Those dagos from New Orleans, the Giacanos, used to come here and do business. They were scared of Mr. Timothy ’cause he always tole the troot’ and always kept his word. If the troot’ hurt him, he didn’t care. The dagos didn’t know how to deal wit’ him. He tole you I was his daughter, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“How many white men would do that?”
“But we haven’t gotten to the real issue. Why did your father lie, Miss Jewel?”
“I don’t know, suh. But I got to own up about somet’ing. The girl named Bernadette called the house. She wanted to talk to Mr. Robert.”
“Robert Weingart?”
“Yes, suh. I tole her he wasn’t here. I axed could I take a message. She said, ‘Tell Robert I saw him wit’ his pimp friend and their whores at the Big Stick club in Lafayette. Tell him I saw what he was doing wit’ one of them on the dance floor. Tell him I changed my mind about the land deal.’”
As she spoke, I was putting down on a notepad everything she told me. “What land deal, Miss Jewel?”
“I don’t know. She said somet’ing about conservation.”
“What, exactly?”
“I don’t know about those t’ings.”
“Just tell me what she said as closely as you can remember.”
“She said to tell Mr. Robert she gave his land to the conservatory or somet’ing.”
“Where are you now?”
“At my house.”
“Where is that?”
“In the quarters.”
“Okay, Miss Jewel. Don’t discuss this conversation with anyone. Everything you have told me is in confidence. You haven’t done anything wrong. You did everything you were supposed to do. At this point, your responsibility is over. You hearing me on this?”
“I should have called you a long time ago. I t’ink it was me that let that poor girl get killed.”
“You shouldn’t say that about yourself. You’re a good person. It took courage for you to make this call.”
“No, you’re not understanding me. After I gave Mr. Robert the message the girl left, I heard him talking on his cell phone to somebody. He was standing on the lawn, looking out at the trees in the water. I don’t know who he was talking to, but he said somet’ing I don’t want to t’ink about, somet’ing that makes me wake up in the middle of the night. I tell myself maybe I didn’t hear right, that it was my imagination, but I keep seeing him standing against the sunlight flashing off the water, his face shaped just like a snake’s head, and I hear him saying, ‘I believe we have a candidate for the box.’”
The box?
* * *
On Monday morning I told Helen everything that had occurred at the fund-raiser in Lafayette. I also told her, almost word for word, everything Jewel had reported to me. When I finished, she propped her elbows on her desk blotter and touched her fingers to both sides of her forehead. “I’m having some trouble tracking all this. You took Clete Purcel with you on an unauthorized trip to Lafayette and got into it with Timothy and Kermit Abelard and their entourage?”
“No, I asked Mr. Abelard some questions, and he lied to me. That’s obstruction.”
Her eyelids fluttered as though the fluorescent lights in the room were short-circuiting. “All right, I’m not going to get into procedural problems here. The man with the bandage on his hand?”
“Gus Fowler.”
“This guy Fowler, you think he was one of the guys you shot on the river?”
“I can’t swear to it.”
“Did you run him?”
“He has no record of any kind.”
“Go to Abelard’s place and pick him up.”
“Pick him up for what?”
“I don’t care. Make up something. When has legality been a problem for you? I’ll talk to the sheriff in St. Mary.”
“What about Robert Weingart?”
“What about him?”
“Jewel said he told someone Bernadette Latiolais was a candidate for the box.”
She looked around the room, still blinking. “That’s disturbing. I can’t make sense of this. There’s a land swindle or scam of some kind involved, but there’s something perverse and sadistic going on as well. It doesn’t fit together.” She lifted her gaze, staring straight into my eyes. “Unless?”
“What?”
“I’m not objective. I’ve already proved that,” she said.
“Not objective about what, Helen?”
“Carolyn Blanchet.”
“Go on.”
“She’s a dominatrix. I’ve been told stories about her sessions in the French Quarter.”
In the silence, I could see a flush spreading across her throat.
“You think Carolyn is capable of murder?”
“You tell me. She was a bitch when she came out of the womb. I hate this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“All of it. Everything we do for a living. I’m tired of living in a sewer. I’m tired of seeing innocent people get hurt. Go see if you can find Gus Fowler. I’m going to talk to the state attorney’s office and try to get to the bottom of the land deal.”
She got up from her desk and looked out the window at the bayou, her back stiff with anger or revulsion, I couldn’t tell which.
“We’re still the good guys,” I said.
“You know how many unsolved female homicides there are in Louisiana?”
“No.”
“That’s the point. Nobody does. Not here, not anywhere. It’s open season on women and girls in this country. You bring that asshole in. If he falls down and leaves blood on the vehicle, all the better. His DNA becomes a voluntary submission.”
“Can you repeat that last part?”
“Call me when you’re at the Abelard place,” she said. “By the way, the ligature Clete found in the Abelards’ Dumpster was clean. Bring me something I can use, Dave. I want to put somebody’s head on a pike.”
* * *
But rhetoric is cheap stuff when you play by the rules and the other side does business with baseball bats. No one came to the Abelards’ door when I knocked. An elderly man whose race was hard to determine was pulling weeds in the flower bed. He said he had seen no one that morning. He also said he had never heard of anyone named Gus Fowler, nor did he remember seeing anyone who fit Fowler’s description. I asked where I might find Miss Jewel.
His eyes were blue-green and scaled with cataracts. They glowed in the indistinct way that light glows inside frosted glass. His skin was a yellowish-brown, leached pink and milk-white in places by a dermatologic disease that often afflicts people of color in the South. The tattered straw hat he wore made me think of pictures of convicts taken at the prison colony in French Guiana. “Jewel Laveau?” he said.
I realized I had never known Jewel’s last name. It was not an ordinary one, either. Anyone who ever read a history of old New Orleans or visited the St. Louis Cemetery on Basin Street would probably recognize it.
“If she ain’t wit’ the family, she’s most probably at her house in the quarters,” the gardener said.
“You know where I could find Robert Weingart?”
He smiled in a kindly fashion. “No, suh.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No, suh, what I mean is, I ain’t sure who that is. Even if I knew, I ain’t seen nobody.”
I understood that no amount of either coercion or bribery would ever cause this man to give up a teaspoon of information about the Abelards or the people who came and went through the front door. “Can you forget I was here?” I said.
“Suh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I drove east on a winding road between the bay and pastureland that had become a flood zone chained with ponds that were home to clouds of gnats and dragonflies and where, for no apparent reason, cranes or egrets or blue herons did not feed or nest. A gray skein of dead vegetation left by storm surges coated the branches of the persimmon and gum trees and slash pines, and on either side of the road, the rain ditches were strewn with trash, much of it in vinyl bags that had split when they were flung from automobiles. Up ahead, among a few slender palm trees stenciled against the sky like those on a Caribbean isle, I saw the tin roofs of the community where Miss Jewel lived.
The term “quarters,” in the plural, goes back to the plantation era, which did not end with the Civil War but perpetuated itself well into the mid-twentieth century. Harry Truman may or may not have been disliked in the South for integrating the United States Army, but there is no doubt about the enmity he incurred when he made ten-thousand-dollar loans available to southern sharecroppers and farmworkers at 1 percent interest. That one program broke the back of the corporate farm system and created the Dixiecrat Party and the career of Senator Strom Thurmond. But a culture does not transform itself in a few generations. Except for the automobiles and pickup trucks parked in the dirt yards, the quarters owned by the Abelard family had changed little since they were carpentered together in the 1880s.
They were painted yellow or blue and resembled wood boxcars with tin roofs and tiny galleries built onto them. They were often called shotgun houses because theoretically a person could fire a single-barrel twenty-gauge through the front door and send a load of birdshot out the back without bruising a wall. But Jewel’s house was different from the rest, located at the end of a dirt street still slick from an early-morning shower, its walls painted a deep purple, the window frames and gallery posts painted green, the gallery hung with Mardi Gras beads. On the tin mailbox out by the rain ditch was the name Laveau in large black letters. She was sitting on the gallery steps, wearing heavy Levi’s and an unironed men’s shirt she hadn’t bothered to tuck in and a bandanna wrapped tightly around her hair. She was reading a shopper’s guide of some kind, the pages folded back, clutching it with one hand, turning it to catch the light as though the words contained great significance. I walked up the path and stopped three feet from her, but she never raised her eyes from the shopper’s guide.
“Are you related to Marie Laveau, Miss Jewel?” I asked.
“She was my great-great-grandmother.”
“You don’t practice voodoo, do you?”
“She didn’t, either. People used that against her ’cause she was the most powerful woman in New Orleans.”
“I need to find the man with the bandaged hand, the one who calls himself Gus Fowler.”
“I t’ink he left.”
“Do you know where he went?”
She seemed to study the question. “No, he didn’t say. He just drove away.”
“We’re going to find him. We’d like to feel you’re on our side.”
“I don’t have anyt’ing to say about him or any of the t’ings you got on your mind.”
“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
“Your kind don’t give up easy.”
“No, you were waiting for me. Do you see into the future, Miss Jewel?”
She rolled her shopper’s guide into a cone and stuck it under her thigh and gazed at the shimmer on the dirt lane. “I’m not part of it anymore.”
“What’s ‘it’?”
“Anyt’ing outside of my job.”
“You told Mr. Abelard of our conversation?”
Her face was as dark and smooth as melted chocolate, her eyes devoid of emotion. The sorrow and contrition she said she had felt about the deaths of Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot seemed to have burned away with the morning mist.
“What did your father say when you told him you called me?” I said.
She waited a long time before she spoke. “He axed me to sit down and have dinner wit’ him. He stood up from his wheelchair on a cane and held my chair for me. That’s the first time I ever sat at the table wit’ Mr. Timothy. He tole me it didn’t matter what I did, I was still his daughter.”
“This may be a surprise, but I’m not interested in Mr. Abelard’s spiritual generosity.”
“Don’t talk about him like that, suh.”
“I think he’s an evil man and should be treated as such. I think you’re making a mistake in trusting him.”
“I don’t care what you say.”
“What’s ‘the box,’ Jewel?”
“I don’t know, me.”
“You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t try to hide behind a dialectical disguise.”
“You can go now, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Think about the faces of those girls in the photographs. You’re a highly trained medical person. You know the pain and despair those girls experienced when they died. They had no one to comfort them, to hold their hand, to tell them they were loved by God and their fellow man. But you called me on your own and stood up for them. Don’t undo a brave and noble deed, Miss Jewel. Don’t rob yourself of your own virtue.”
I saw her lips form a bitter line; she looked like a person making a choice between two evils and deciding upon the one that hurt her the most, as though her self-injury brought with it a degree of forgiveness. “I got to do my wash,” she said.
“Those girls are going to haunt you,” I said. “In your sleep. In a crowd. At Mass. In a movie theater. Across the table from you at McDonald’s. The dead carry a special kind of passport, and they go anywhere they want.”
She stared into the humidity glistening on the road and at the tin roofs of the other houses. The wind swayed the palms overhe
ad and rattled the Mardi Gras beads that hung from the eaves of her gallery. I walked back to the cruiser, wondering at the harshness of my language, wondering if my oath to protect and serve had not finally drained my heart of pity and left only rage and a thirst for vengeance. Then I heard her voice behind me, muted against the wind and the rustling of the beads. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears. Her gaze was fixed strangely on my face, her eyes lit with a bizarre luminosity, her teeth white against the darkness of her tongue, her skin sparkling with moisture.
“I didn’t hear you. Say that over,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“About saying it. I didn’t mean to say it. Don’t pay me any mind.”
“Say what?”
“Go back home. Pretend you weren’t here. Keep yourself and your family away from us.”
“Tell me what you said.”
“Don’t make me.”
“You say it, damn you.”
“Somebody is fixing to die at your house.”
She took a deep breath, as though a large, thick-bodied bird had just taken flight from her chest.
* * *
I drove back down the winding two-lane to the Abelard home, on the odd chance I would catch someone there before I returned to New Iberia. As I neared the wood bridge that gave access to the Abelards’ island, I saw Robert Weingart in a pair of Speedos on the lawn between the boathouse and a blooming mimosa, performing a martial arts exercise of some kind. Like a flamingo pecking at its feathers, he torqued his body in one direction and then the other, his hands moving delicately in the air, his eyes closed, the breeze caressing his face and the glaze of tan and sweat on his skin.
If I ever saw a man for whom his own body was a holy grail, it was Weingart. His armpits were shaved and powdered like a woman’s. His black Speedos clung wetly to the buttermilk texture of his buttocks, his phallus outlined like a rhinoceros’s horn. His eyelids were lowered as though he was enjoying the sun through the filter of his own skin. He gave no notice of my tires rumbling across the bridge, nor did he look behind him when I parked and got out of the cruiser and stood silently watching him across the top of the roof. I had to admire his concentration and his indifference. Weingart had mastered the ethos of the cynic and, in my opinion, had successfully scrubbed every trace of decency and humanity from his soul. If he had any feelings at all, I suspected they were connected entirely with the satisfaction of his desires, and they had nothing to do with the rest of us.
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