“He’s a celebrity ex-convict. He wrote a book called—”
“Yeah, I remember now. One of those books about how the world dumped on the author by making him rich.”
“You and Kermit are doing presentations on biofuels?”
Layton was still seated on the bench, his knees spread. He pulled at an earlobe. “Not exactly. You’re asking about the talk I gave in Jackson?”
“I saw something about it in a newspaper.”
“Yeah, Kermit Abelard was there. But I’m not making the connections here. What are we talking about?” He sneaked a glance at his wristwatch.
“You ever hear of the St. Jude Project?”
“In New Orleans? I thought Katrina shut down all the welfare projects.”
I didn’t know whether he was being cynical or not. After Katrina made landfall and the levees burst and drowned over one thousand people, a state legislator stated that God in His wisdom had solved the problems in the welfare developments that man had not. The state legislator was not alone in his opinion. I knew too many people whose resentment of blacks reached down into a part of the soul you don’t want to see. “The St. Jude Project is supposed to be a self-help program for people who have addiction problems. Junkies, hookers, homeless people, battered wives, whatever,” I said.
“The big addiction those people have is usually their aversion to work. Not always but most of the time. I’m not knocking them, but you and I didn’t have a charitable foundation to take care of us, did we?”
“Kermit Abelard never talked to you about the St. Jude Project?”
“Dave, I just said I’ve never heard of it. Hey, Carolyn, you got the meat on the fire?”
“You ever hear of Herman Stanga?”
“No, who is he?”
“A pimp and a dope dealer.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure. Before we go any farther with this, how about telling me what’s really on your mind?”
“Seven dead girls in Jeff Davis Parish.”
Layton’s hands were resting in his lap. He gazed at the back lawn. It had already fallen into deep shade, and the wind was flattening the azalea petals on the bushes. The sun had started to set on the far side of the trees, and its reflection inside the room had taken on the wobbling blue-green quality of refracted light at the bottom of a swimming pool. Then I realized that the change of color in the room had been brought about by the sun’s rays shining through a large dome-shaped panel of stained glass inset close to the ceiling.
“I’m not up on homicides in Jeff Davis Parish,” Layton said. “Kermit Abelard is mixed up in something like that?”
“I was wondering why Kermit is doing biofuel presentations with you.”
“He’s interested in saving the environment and rebuilding the coastline. He’s a bright kid. I get the sense he likes to be on the edge of new ideas. You drove all the way down here about Kermit Abelard? He’s a pretty harmless young guy, isn’t he? Jesus Christ, life must be pretty slow at the department.”
“You know the Abelard family well?”
“Not really. I respect them, but we don’t have a lot in common.”
“Why do you respect them? Their history of philanthropy?”
“You go to a lot of meetings?” Layton asked.
“Sometimes. Why?”
“I’ve heard that when alcoholics quit drinking, they develop obsessions that work as a substitute for booze. That’s why they go to meetings. No matter how crazy these ideas are, they stay high as a kite on them so they don’t have to drink again.”
“I was admiring your stained glass.”
“It came from a Scottish temple or church or something.”
“With unicorns and satyrs on it?”
“You got me. The architect stuck it in there. Dave, a conversation with you is like petting a porcupine. Ah, Carolyn with a cold beer. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You got some iced tea or a soft drink for Dave?”
His wife, Carolyn Blanchet, wore a halter and blue jeans and Roman sandals; she had platinum hair and the thick shoulders of a competitive tennis player. She had grown up in Lake Charles and had been a cheerleader and varsity tennis player at LSU. Now, twenty years down the road and a little soft around the edges, the flesh starting to sag under her chin, she still looked good, on the court and off, at mixed doubles or at a country-club dance.
Her laugh was husky, sometimes irreverent, perhaps even sybaritic, the kind you hear in educated southern women who seemed to signal their willingness to stray if the situation is right.
“I’m so happy you can have dinner with us, Dave. How’s Molly?”
“She’s fine. But I can’t stay. I’m sorry if I gave that impression,” I said.
“Your steak is on the grill,” Layton said.
“Another time.”
“She made a big salad, Dave,” Layton said.
“Molly is waiting dinner for me.”
“That’s all right. We’ll invite y’all out on another evening,” Carolyn said. “I heard you talking about Kermit Abelard. Did you read his last novel?”
“No, I haven’t had the chance.”
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s about the Civil War and Reconstruction in this area. It’s about this slave girl who was the illegitimate daughter of the man who founded Angola Penitentiary. A white Confederate soldier from New Iberia teaches her how to read and write. But more than anything, the black girl wants the recognition and love of her father. Do you know Kermit Abelard?”
“He’s gone out with my daughter from time to time.”
“I’ve never met him. But his father gave Layton the stained glass up there. At sunrise it fills the room with every color of the rainbow.”
“I think the architect got that from Mr. Abelard, Carolyn. Mr. Abelard didn’t give that directly to us,” Layton said.
“Yes, that’s what I meant.”
“I’d better go now,” I said.
Layton sipped from his beer, taking my measure. “Sorry you can’t eat with us. You’re missing out on a fine piece of beef.”
He laid his arm across his wife’s shoulders and squeezed her against him, his eyes as bright as a butane flame, the sweat stain in his armpit inches from his wife’s cheek.
* * *
On Saturday morning I drove to the rural community south of Jennings, where Bernadette Latiolais had lived with her grandmother. It had been raining hard for two hours. The ditches in the entire neighborhood were brimming with water and floating trash, the fields sodden, the sky gray from horizon to horizon. Few of the mailboxes had legible names or numbers, and I couldn’t find the grandmother’s house. At a crossroads, I went into a clapboard store that had a pool table in back and a drive-by daiquiri window cut in one wall. Through the rear window I could see rain swirling in great vortexes across a rice field that had been turned into a crawfish farm. I could see an abandoned Acadian cottage, its windows boarded, the gallery sagging, hay bales stacked inside the doorless entranceway. I could see a rusted tractor that seemed to shimmer to life when lightning splintered the sky. I could see thick stands of trees along a river that was blanketed with fog, the canopy green and thrashing inside the grayness of the day. I could see all these things like a transitional photograph of the Louisiana where I had been born and where now I often felt like a visitor.
One wall of the store was stacked from floor to ceiling with cartons of cigarettes. I bought a cup of coffee and started to ask directions to the grandmother’s house from the woman behind the cash register. I had my badge holder in my hand, but I had not unfolded it. She interrupted me and waited on a car full of black men who had already ordered frozen daiquiris through the service window. She gave them their drinks and their change and shut the window hard, holding it firm for a second with the heel of her hand. Her arms and the front of her shirt were damp with mist, her physique bovine, her face stark, like that of someone caught unexpectedly in the flash of a camera. I identified myself and asked again for directio
ns to the grandmother’s house. She glanced at my badge and back at me. “All the daiquiris was sealed,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Ain’t no law been broken long as I seal the cups. I know what they do when they leave here, but it ain’t me that’s broke the law.”
“I understand. I just need directions to the home of Eunice Latiolais.”
“The law says the driver ain’t s’ppose to have an open container. That’s all the law says.”
“Will you give me the directions to the Latiolais house, please?”
“Go sout’ a half mile and turn at the fo’ corners, and you’ll see it down by the river. People been dumping there. There’s mattresses and washing machines all back in the trees. If you ax me, the people been doing this is the kind that just left here. I’m talking about the dumping.” She paused. Her hands were pressed flat on the counter. She had run out of words. She looked out at the rain and at the backs of her hands. “This is about Bernadette?”
“Did you know her?”
“She use to come in for her Ho Hos every afternoon. The school bus goes close by her house, but she’d get off early for her Ho Hos and then walk the rest of the way.”
“What kind of friends did she have?”
“Her kind ain’t got friends.”
“Ma’am?”
“There ain’t no reg’lar kids anymore. One’s drunk, one’s smoking dope, one’s trying to steal rubbers out of the machine in the bat’room. A girl like Bernadette is on her own. Come in here in the afternoon and see the bunch that gets off the bus. Listen to the kind of language they use.”
“She was a good girl?”
“She was an honor student. She never got in no trouble. She was always polite and said ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am.’ She wasn’t like the others.”
“Which others?”
“The other ones that’s been killed. The others was always in trouble with men and dope. Her brother and sister wasn’t no good, but Bernadette was sweet-sweet, all the way t’rew. She had the sweetest smile I ever seen on a young girl. The man who done that to her is going to hell. The man who killed her don’t deserve no mercy. If he ever comes in here and I know it’s him, he better look out.”
“Do you know a man by the name of Herman Stanga?”
“No. Who’s he?”
“A local character in New Iberia.”
“Then keep him in New Iberia.”
A palpable bitterness seemed to rise from her person, like a nimbus given off by a dead fire.
I followed her directions to the home of Bernadette Latiolais. The house was wood-frame, with fresh white paint and a peaked tin roof, set up on cinder blocks inside a grove of pecan trees and water oaks that had not yet gone into leaf. On the gallery were chalk animals of a kind given as prizes at carnivals, and coffee cans planted with begonias and petunias. One of the Jefferson Davis sheriff’s detectives who had been assigned the case had given me as many details over the phone as he could. On a cold, sunlit Saturday afternoon, Bernadette Latiolais had entered the dollar store and bought two plastic teacups and saucers decorated with tiny lavender roses. After she paid, she walked out the door and crossed a parking lot and passed a bar with a sign in a window that said PAY CHECKS CASHED. She was five miles from her home with no apparent means of transportation. She was wearing a light pink sweater, jeans, a white blouse, and tennis shoes without socks. She was carrying the teacups and saucers in a paper bag. One week later, her body was found at the bottom of a pond, weighted with chunks of concrete. The knife wound to her throat was so deep she had almost been decapitated.
I picked up a paper bag off the seat that contained two books I had bought earlier that morning at Barnes & Noble in Lafayette. The grandmother invited me in, holding the screen with one arm as I entered. She was a big, overweight woman, obviously in poor health. She waddled as she returned to the couch where she had been sitting, as though she were on board a ship. When she sat down, she pressed the flat of her hand against her bosom, wheezing. “I’m s’ppose to be breathing my oxygen, but sometimes I try to get by wit’out it,” she said.
“I’m very sorry about your granddaughter’s death, Mrs. Latiolais. I’m also sorry about the death of your grandson Elmore,” I said. “I interviewed him in Mississippi. Later he sent me a message about a photograph he’d seen in a newspaper. Elmore believed a man in the photograph was the same man who had told Bernadette he was going to make you and her rich. Did somebody tell you all that? That somebody was going to make you rich?”
“I didn’t hear nothing about that, me,” Mrs. Latiolais said. “It don’t sound right.”
I was sitting on a wood chair on the opposite side of a coffee table from her. I removed the two books I had bought and showed her the jacket photo on Kermit Abelard’s novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction in Louisiana. “Do you know this man?” I asked.
She leaned over the book and brushed at the photo with her fingers, as though removing a glaze from it. “Who is he?”
“A writer who lives in St. Mary Parish.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Look again. This is the man Elmore recognized in the newspaper photograph. He said Bernadette had had her picture taken with him. She showed it to Elmore when she visited him in jail.”
“I ain’t never seen him.”
I pulled out the flap on my copy of The Green Cage and showed her the author photo. She looked at it for a long time. She tapped her finger on it. “That one I know,” she said.
“You do? From where?”
“He was wit’ a black man. The two of them was in the sto’ buying some boudin. The white man wanted it warmed up, but the micro was broke and he was complaining about it. He wasn’t from around here. He sounded like he was from up nort’. He said, ‘I understand why y’all say t’ank God for Mis’sippi.’ He said it like the people standing around him didn’t have ears or feelings.”
“Who was the black man?”
“I ain’t seen him befo’. He had a li’l mustache, like a li’l black bird under his nose. He was wearing a pink tie and a brown suit wit’ stripes in it, what a downtown man would wear.”
“Why would anyone tell your granddaughter he was going to make y’all rich, Mrs. Latiolais?”
“That’s why I said it don’t make sense. I own this house, but it ain’t wort’ a lot. Bernadette inherited seven arpents of land from her father. It’s part of a rice field down sout’ of us. Maybe somebody wanted to buy it a while back, but I don’t remember. She wasn’t gonna sell it, though. She said she was gonna save the bears.”
“The bears?”
“That’s the way Bernadette talked. She was always dreaming about saving t’ings, being a part of some kind of movement, being different from everybody else. I tole her them seven arpents was for her to go to colletch. She said she didn’t need no money to go to colletch. She’d won a scholarship to UL in Lafayette. She was gonna be a nurse.”
I talked to the grandmother for another fifteen minutes but got nowhere. The grandmother was not only afflicted with emphysema but was on kidney dialysis. Her life had been one of privation and hardship and loss, to the degree that she seemed to think of suffering as the natural state of humankind. The one bright prospect in her life had been taken from her. I have never agreed with the institution of capital punishment, primarily because its application is arbitrary and selective, but that morning I had to concede that the killer or killers of Bernadette Latiolais belonged in a special category, one that can cause a person to wonder if his humanity was misplaced.
* * *
That evening I hooked my boat trailer to my truck and picked up Clete Purcel at his motor court, and in the sunset drove the two of us up Bayou Teche to Henderson Swamp. The water in the swamp was high and flat, the islands of willow and cypress trees backlit by a molten sun, the carpets of floating hyacinths undisturbed by any fish that would normally be feeding at the end of day. No other boats were on the water. In the
silence we could hear the rain ticking out of the trees and the whirring sound of automobile tires on the elevated highway that traversed the swamp. Up on the levee, which was covered with buttercups, the flood lamps of a bait shop and seafood restaurant went on, and I could see small waves from our wake sliding through the pilings into the shadows. When I cut the engine and let our boat drift between two willow islands that had turned dark against the sun, I felt that Clete and I were the only two people on the planet.
I doubted we would catch any fish that evening, but if possible, I wanted to get Clete out of his funk and his conviction that he was going to prison. The problem was, I thought that perhaps this time his perceptions were correct. I told him of my visit to the home of Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother. I also told him she had recognized the photo of Robert Weingart and that she had seen him with a black man who had a small mustache and wore a suit and a pink tie.
Clete flung a small spinner baited with a wriggler on the edge of the lily pads, his skin rosy in the waning light. “You think the black dude was Herman Stanga?”
“The grandmother said he looked like a ‘downtown man.’ She even said his mustache looked like a little black bird under his nose.”
“What’s this stuff about seven arpents of land?”
“It sounds like part of an undivided estate of some kind. Clete, maybe the Latiolais girl was just randomly abducted. Maybe her death doesn’t have anything to do with Stanga or Robert Weingart. She was walking past a bar in broad daylight, and then she was gone. Maybe the wrong guy came out of the bar at the wrong time and offered her a ride. Maybe Bernadette Latiolais’s death doesn’t have anything to do with the deaths of the other victims.”
“My money is still on Stanga,” he said.
“Maybe he’s involved, but I don’t think he’s the chief perpetrator.”
“Because Stanga is kind to animals?”
“Because he has ice water in his veins. Stanga doesn’t do anything unless it’s of direct benefit to him. There is no known connection between him and the girl.”
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