Was this aging, self-absorbed product of plastic surgery the sole perpetrator behind the death of the two girls? He was the white man’s answer to Herman Stanga, the man we love to hate. He was cruel, pernicious, and predatory. He exploited the faith and trust of uneducated people and forever blighted their lives. But he was also pathetic. He’d had his head shoved in a toilet bowl by Clete Purcel. He’d been humiliated and slapped across the side of the head by one of our deputies at the bank. Later that same day, Emma Poche had brought him to his knees with a baton and then had tormented him on the ground. Weingart reminded me of the high school hood who moves to a small town from a big city and scares the hell out of everybody until someone challenges him and discovers he’s a joke.
But what did I know about him specifically, other than his criminal history and his penchant for getting into it with people who didn’t do things by the rules?
He was pulling his money out of a local bank and transferring it to a bank in British Columbia. He was planning to either blow Dodge or set up another nefarious scheme or both. Timothy Abelard had shown Alafair a photo of himself and a man who resembled Robert Weingart sitting in a café on Lake Louise in Alberta, although Abelard had denied to Alafair that his companion was Weingart. What were they doing there? Was it land investment? Were the Abelards taking their long and sorry tradition of environmental abuse and human exploitation to one of the most beautiful places in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world?
What was the box? The term conjured up images I didn’t want to think about.
I walked onto the lawn and stood no more than fifteen feet behind Weingart. He rotated slowly in a circle, opening his eyes, a smirk breaking at the corner of his mouth. “Yes?” he said.
“I’m looking for a guy by the name of Gus Fowler.”
“Let me think. No, can’t place him.”
“Guy with a big wad of bandages wrapped around his hand. He’s probably doped up on painkillers. Has a pal from Taco-Tico Land, a guy who takes offense just because somebody called him a greaseball.”
“Sorry.”
“I blew Mr. Fowler’s fingers off. I thought you might have heard about it. I guess you’re not in the loop.”
“Apparently not.”
“Heading up to Canada? Maybe Trout Lake, someplace like that?”
“No.”
“You’ve been to Trout Lake, though, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Is that where you met Fern Michot?”
“The name doesn’t make bells clang.”
“She was a Canadian girl we dug out of a landfill. She was buried with some broken teacups that Bernadette Latiolais had purchased at a dollar store just before she was abducted. Of course, you remember Bernadette?”
“Many people come to my book signings. Was she one of those?” He never paused in his exercise, his upper body rotating at the hips, his arms gliding through the air as though he were underwater.
“She caught you at the Big Stick club in Lafayette with some of your skanks. Or were they Herman Stanga’s skanks?”
His eyes were roving over my face; a tiny laugh rose like a bubble in his throat. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.
“You don’t hang with skanks?” I said.
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to smile. But I’ve never seen a variation in the script.”
“Which script would that be, Mr. Weingart?”
“The outraged father figure always knocking other people’s sexual behavior. It’s classic. Daddy is always worrying about what other people are doing with their genitalia. Except Daddy’s little girl can’t keep her panties on.”
“Want to spell that out?”
“I’m not one to judge. Talk to Kermit about it. He said Alafair was jumping his stick on their first date. He also said she gives good head.”
He turned at an angle to me, his hands and fingers moving with the fluidity of snakes, the sun-bleached tips of his hair tousling in the wind, a smell like dried salt wafting off his skin.
I winked at him and said nothing. His eyes dropped to my waist. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“This?”
“Yeah.” He had stopped his martial arts routine.
“That’s the strap that holds my holster on my belt. I have to unsnap it to take off my holster.”
“Yeah, I know that. What are you doing with it?”
“You have to ask?”
“This isn’t Tombstone, Arizona, and you’re not Wyatt Earp.”
“You’re right. I don’t trust myself,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t like to carry a weapon when I was alone with Herman Stanga. Want to hold it? I brought it back from Saigon. I got it for twenty-five dollars from a prostitute in Bring Cash Alley. The prostitutes there were all VC. They dosed us with clap and sold us our own guns. Go ahead, get the feel of it. It’s a little heavy, but I bet you can handle it.”
His gaze shifted from me to the house, then to the empty road on the far side of the wood bridge. “You’re an old man. That’s what all this is about.”
“I’m old, but I can lift five hundred pounds across my shoulders. Did you know there’s a twitch in your face?” I stepped closer to him, smiling, touching the holstered grips of the .45 against his breastbone. “Go on. It won’t bite. You’ve been jailing all your life, fading the action inside and outside, taking on all comers. You know how to handle a gun.”
“Your problem is with Kermit, not me.”
“No, I want you to tell me some more about my daughter. You were just getting started.”
“No.”
“I really want you to. It will be a big favor to me. Hold on a second.” I walked to the cruiser and threw the .45 on the seat. “There. Now say whatever you wish. We’re all pals here, aren’t we?”
He shook his head, stepping back from me, his hands useless at his sides, his head turning to look at a motorboat out on the bay, a tiny wad of fear sliding down his windpipe.
“I watched your bud Vidor Perkins die,” I said. “I think he was hit by a toppling round. His brains exploded out of a big exit wound right above his eye. I watched a couple of guys in rain hoods pick him up like a sack of fertilizer and throw him in a van. Think that might happen to you, Mr. Weingart? I suspect you never met any cleaners inside. Know why that is? Cleaners don’t do time. They’re protected by the government or corporate people who use third-world countries to wipe their ass. Guys who are disposable do their time. You ready to go back inside for this bunch? How long has it been since you had your knee pads on?”
When you step on a snake, don’t expect him to run. Even in death, he’ll try to wrap his body around your ankle and sink his fangs in your foot. I had watched Weingart’s face shrink in the wind and become hard and tight, like the skin on an apple. But now he glanced upward at the clumps of pale red mimosa blooming against a blue sky, then fixed his gaze on me, his smirk once again crawling across his cheek, his fear in check.
“There’s something else Kermit mentioned,” he said. “Alafair is your adopted daughter, not your real daughter. Which is probably how you justified your visits into her bedroom when she was thirteen and just getting her menses. According to Kermit, Daddy helped her into her womanhood and kept helping her all the way through high school. Daddy is quite a guy.”
I took a stick of gum out of my shirt pocket and peeled the foil off and fed it into my mouth. “Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.
“Oh, really? What’s the profound implication there, Detective Robicheaux?”
“When I check out, I’m going to make sure you’re on board,” I said. “Kind of like a Viking funeral, know what I mean? A dead dog at the foot of the corpse. Welcome to the bow-wow club, podjo.”
* * *
That night I couldn’t sleep. The air was like wet cotton, the moon down, the clouds flaring with pools of yellow lightning that gave no sound. Also, I was haunted by the words of Jewel Laveau. Was she prescient or just superstitious
and grandiose, melodramatically laying claim to the powers of her ancestor, an iconic voodoo priestess who today is entombed in an oven off Basin Street? Don’t let anyone tell you that age purchases you freedom from fear of death. As Clete Purcel once said in describing his experience in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, it’s a sonofabitch. Men cry out for their mothers; they grip your hands with an intensity that can break bones; their breath covers your face like damp cobwebs and tries to draw you inside them. As George Orwell suggested long ago, if you can choose the manner of your death, let it be in hot blood and not in bed.
I got up at two in the morning and sat in the kitchen in the dark and listened to the wind in the trees and the clink of Tripod’s chain attached to a wire I had strung between two live oaks. The windows were open, and I could smell the heavy odor of the bayou and bream spawning under the clusters of lily pads along the bank. I heard an alligator flop in the water and the drawbridge opening upstream, the great cogged wheels clanking together, a boat with a deep draft laboring against the incoming tide.
I saw the night-light go on in our bedroom, then Molly’s silhouette emerge from the hallway. She stood behind me and placed one hand on my shoulder, her hip touching my back. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and fluffy slippers, and I could feel a level of heat and solidity in her presence that seemed to exist separately from her body. “Something bothering you, troop?” she said.
“I get wired up sometimes. You know how it is,” I replied. I put my arm across the broadness of her rump.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.
“That kind of talk doesn’t mean anything.”
“You said, ‘I’m not ready.’ Then you asked where Alafair was. You called her Alf.”
“I shouldn’t call her that. It makes her mad.”
“Dave, do you have a medical problem you’re not telling me about?”
“No, I’m fine. Did Alafair go somewhere tonight?”
“She’s asleep. She went to sleep before you did. You don’t remember?”
“I had a dream, that’s all.”
“About what?”
“You and she were on a dock. Tripod was there. I was watching you from across the water. You were saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear you.”
“Come back to bed.”
“I think I’ll sit here for a while. I’ll be along directly.”
“I’ll sit with you.”
“Molly—”
“Tell me.”
“Sometimes we have to adjust and go on.”
“What are you saying?”
Nothing is forever.
“The bridge is making all kinds of noise. It must be broken. Speak up,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
She felt my forehead, then my cheek. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
“I’m not drunk anymore. That’s all that counts. I’m going to check on Alf.”
“You can’t leave me with this kind of uncertainty. You tell me what it is.”
You know, I thought. You know, you know, you know.
Through the oaks I could see the clouds lighting and flashing and disappearing into blackness again. In the illumination through the windows, Molly’s face had the hollow-eyed starkness of someone staring down a long corridor in which all the side exits were chain-locked. I looked in on Alafair then closed the door so she couldn’t hear our voices. “Don’t pay attention to me,” I said to Molly. “Guys like us always do okay. We’re believers. We’ve never been afraid.”
Molly stood on the tops of my feet with her slippers and put her arms around my middle and pressed her head against my chest, as though the beating of my heart were a stay against all the nameless forces churning around us.
* * *
Tuesday morning Alafair called me at the office. “I think I got a breakthrough on the seven arpents of land Bernadette Latiolais owned in Jeff Davis Parish,” she said.
“What are you doing, Alf?”
“Don’t call me that name.”
“What are you doing?” I repeated.
“Jewel Laveau told you Bernadette Latiolais was giving her land to a conservation group of some kind. I talked with a lawyer in New Orleans who does work for the Nature Conservancy. He said Bernadette Latiolais was going to have a covenant built into her deed so that the land could never be used for industrial purposes and would remain a wildlife habitat.”
“You found this on your own?”
“Yeah, after I made a few calls. Why?”
“We need to put you on the payroll. But I don’t want you at risk, Alafair. The Abelards and their minions have no bottom.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Dave. Here’s the rest of it. Lawyers for the estate of Layton Blanchet are trying to get Bernadette’s donation to the Nature Conservancy nullified. At the time of her death, she was only seventeen and not of legal age. Layton Blanchet was backing a group that was going to build a giant processing plant that would convert sugarcane into ethanol. If Timothy Abelard was a player, he was a minor one.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Dave, I think Carolyn Blanchet is at the center of all this.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. You have to stay out of it. For once in your life, will you listen to me?” I shut my eyes at the thought of what I had just said. I wanted to hit myself with the phone receiver.
“I thought you’d want the information,” she said.
“I do.”
“You have a peculiar way of showing it.”
“Where are you?”
“In my car. What difference does it make?”
“There’s little that I understand about this investigation. Timothy Abelard is surrounded by people who seem more connected with his past than his present. I’m talking about Caribbean dictators and paramilitary thugs. Mr. Abelard is a neocolonial and happens to live here rather than on the edge of an empire. But I’m convinced he’s ruthless and perhaps perverse. Why else would he abide a man like Robert Weingart?”
“It’s because of Kermit, Dave. Kermit is weak and dependent and probably can’t deal with the fact that he’s gay. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”
“Don’t buy into that.”
“You’re unteachable, but I love you anyway.”
“Don’t hang up.”
Too late.
I called her back, but she didn’t answer. I waited fifteen minutes and called home and got the message machine. Molly was at her office at a rural development foundation on the bayou, one that helped poor people build homes and start up small businesses. I dialed her number, then hung up before anyone could answer. Molly had enough worries without my adding to them. I went into Helen’s office and told her what Alafair had discovered.
“An ethanol plant? That’s what all this is about?” Helen said.
“Part of it, at least.”
“The local sugar growers are already trying to build one. This is a separate deal, though?”
“It’s just one more instance of the locals getting screwed by somebody who pretends to be their ally,” I said.
She clicked her nails on her blotter. “So maybe Carolyn Blanchet saw her husband’s fortunes going down the toilet and decided to blow his head off and take over his businesses. Think that’s possible?”
“Yeah, this might explain the motivation for the murder of Bernadette Latiolais, but what about Fern Michot?”
“You don’t know Carolyn Blanchet.”
“She’s not only a dominatrix but homicidal as well?”
“Want me to go into some details I’ve heard?”
“Not really.”
“There’s a world out there you don’t know about, Dave. I think it’s one you don’t want to hear about.”
“I don’t want my daughter to get hurt.”
“How is Alafair going to get hurt?”
“Because none of the lines in this investigation are simple, and both you and she think oth
erwise.”
“You really know how to win a girl’s heart. Okay, you asked for this.” Helen opened a desk drawer and threw a folder in front of me. “These were taken by a woman I used to be friends with in the Garden District. The woman in the mask with the whip is Carolyn. The leather fetters and chains are the real thing. How do you like the thigh-high boots?”
“I think that stuff is a joke.”
“A joke?”
“It’s the masquerade of self-deluded idiots who never grew out of masturbation. I have the feeling everyone in those photographs is a closet Puritan.”
“You’re too much, bwana.”
“No, I’m just a guy worried about his daughter. I’ll buy Carolyn Blanchet as a greedy, manipulative shrew capable of staging her husband’s suicide. But she’s not Eva Perón in Marquis de Sade drag.”
“How about Carolyn Blanchet and Emma Poche working together? Ever think of that? Or maybe Carolyn has a yen for young girls and Emma got jealous. I don’t have all the answers, Dave, but don’t accuse me of being simplistic or naive.”
“Timothy Abelard is a pterodactyl. To him, people like Carolyn Blanchet and Emma are insects.”
Helen replaced the black-and-white photos in the folder and dropped them in her desk drawer. “You give the Abelards dimensions they don’t have. I’m not fooled by them, but I don’t obsess about them, either.”
This time I made no reply.
“I was about to go down to your office when you came in,” she said. “That guy Gus Fowler?”
“What about him?”
“A body washed up on the shore at East Cote Blanche Bay last night. One hand is missing three fingers. The sheriff says they look like they were recently sutured. The deceased has a white scar cupped around one nostril like a piece of twine. Sound like anyone you know?”
* * *
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