“A pool cleaner found it at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool this morning.”
“What’s the pool cleaner doing at the house of a dead man?”
“Stanga had paid three months in advance for the service. Why is the first thing out of your mouth a question about the maintenance man rather than how the pen got in Stanga’s swimming pool?”
“Maybe Clete went to see him.”
“I talked with Clete two days after Stanga was murdered. He said he had been by Stanga’s house but had never been on the property. You look a little uncomfortable.”
“Clete wouldn’t shoot somebody in cold blood.”
“By his own admission, he was in a blackout the night Stanga died. He doesn’t know what he did. How is it that you do? Tell me how you acquired this great omniscience, Dave.”
“Don’t buy into this crap, Helen.”
“You get your damn head on straight. This pen puts Clete at the scene of a homicide. He denies ever having been there, but he admits he had a blackout the night of the crime. What if a perp said that to you?”
I tried to speak, but she interrupted me. “You’ve spent years attending meetings. Why do people usually have alcoholic blackouts?” she said.
“They’re caused by a chemical assault on the brain.”
“Try again.”
“Sometimes drunks can’t deal with what they’ve done.”
“Good. We got that out of the way. Now get out of here and do some serious casework and stop fronting points for Clete. I’m really tired of it.”
“Has the pen been to the lab?”
“Yeah, it has.”
I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “Whose prints are on it?” I said.
“Nobody’s.”
“That’s funny, isn’t it? Clete’s pen doesn’t have Clete’s prints on it? Maybe he was wearing latex when he put it in his pocket.” I could see her chest rising and falling, her irritation reaching critical mass, but I didn’t care. I went on, “Vidor Perkins put his hand on my daughter’s face this morning. At the fruit stand by the bayou.”
“Tell Alafair to file battery charges.”
“Maybe we should bust Perkins for littering as well.”
She picked up the Ziploc bag with the gold pen inside it and dropped it again. It hit the blotter with a sound like a rock falling. “You want to make clever and cynical statements? That’s fine. But this pen won’t go away. How do you think I feel about investigating an old friend like Clete? You think you’re the only person in the department with feelings?”
“What’s the name of the pool cleaner?” I asked.
* * *
I found him three hours later in St. Martinville, dragging an underwater vacuum on a telescopic pole along the bottom of a swimming pool behind a house owned by a black city councilman. I had known him for years. His name was Felton Leger, and he used to coach Little League baseball in New Iberia. He had a deformed foot and had to wear a special boot for it, but he had always been a man of good cheer and goodwill who was known for his decency and his loyalty to his family and friends. Why do I mention these things? Because I wanted the pool man to be someone else, someone whose word was suspect and who would be willing, if the price was right, to set up Clete Purcel.
But no such luck. Felton Leger was an honest man. “There was a lot of slash-pine needles on the bottom, big globs of them,” he said. “I almost didn’t see the pen. Then the vacuum sucked up a bunch of needles and I seen the pen lying there like a big gold bug. So I fished it out wit’ the seine and dumped it in a paper bag and called the sheriff’s department, ’cause I figured y’all would be wanting to look at it. I didn’t like the man who lived there. But it was the law’s job to get rid of him, not some killer.”
“Did you touch it or dry it off?”
“I knew better than to do that. I dropped it right in the bag.”
“You did the right thing, Felton. When was the last time you cleaned the pool?”
“One month ago.”
“Could the pen have been in there then?”
“No, sir. When I clean the pool, I clean the pool.”
“How many people know your schedule?”
“Just me. Sometimes I might tell my wife where I’m gonna be on a particular day.”
“How many people know you serviced Herman Stanga’s pool?”
“Maybe I said something to my wife. Maybe not. I don’t remember. The bank owns the house now. Stanga had borrowed a bunch of money on it and wasn’t making his payments.”
“Didn’t he always pay you in advance?”
“’Cause I made him. I knew he was a deadbeat. If you ax me, I think he was fixing to leave town. That’s why he let the lawn burn up and the dogs dump all over the place. He kept up the pool to entertain his chippies.”
“I see. Where’s your wife work?”
“At the sheriff’s department. She’s a night dispatcher.”
I tried to place her but couldn’t. “In New Iberia?”
“No, here in St. Martinville. This is where we live now,” he said.
* * *
It was after three P.M. when I got back to town. I called Clete’s office and was told by Hulga, his secretary, that he was at Baron’s health club. I found him in a back room alone, dressed in sweatpants, his T-shirt splitting on his back while he squatted and hoisted a two-hundred-pound bar above his head, his neck bulging, his face almost purple.
“Have you lost your mind? You’re going to slip a disk,” I said.
He dropped the bar on the floor, his breath escaping like air from a collapsed balloon. “Dave,” he gasped, unable to finish the statement.
“What?” I said.
“What? You ask what?” He sat on a bench and put his face in a towel. “Will you give me a break? I’d rather be married. You follow me everywhere I go. I get no peace. You’re worse than my ex.” He breathed slowly, in and out, sweat leaking out of his eyebrows. “What are you doing here?”
It was not a time to be completely honest. I told him what had happened to Alafair at the fruit stand and made no mention of the gold pen that had been found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s pool, one inscribed to him by the FBI agent Alicia Rosecrans. He listened quietly, wiping his throat and the back of his neck with the towel. “Say that last part again. He put his hand on her cheek and licked his fingers?”
“Something like that,” I replied.
“Let me shower and get dressed and we’ll pay him a visit.”
“I’ll handle it.”
He looked at me from under his brow. “Like how?”
“I’m not sure yet. When Helen and I rousted him at his house, he seemed to suggest he could be a friend to the department, like he knew about the inner workings of an operation that was larger in importance than he and Robert Weingart were.”
“You ever know a meltdown who was different? They bypassed toilet training and shoe tying, but they’re experts on everything from brain surgery to running the White House. Why would Perkins want to help y’all? He’s not on parole, and he doesn’t have any charges hanging over his head. This guy wouldn’t lift a toilet seat unless there was something in it for him.”
“Money.”
“From who?”
I let the thread die. I still had not broached the question about the gold pen, primarily because I was in the position of investigating a friend I wanted to protect against the consequences of the investigation I was conducting. I tried to convince myself I was “excluding” Clete as a suspect in the death of Herman Stanga. But Clete’s history of violence, even though most of it was on the side of justice, indicated a level of rage that had little connection to the miscreants he visited it upon and everything to do with a young boy who was not allowed to eat supper and was forced to kneel for hours on rice grains and, with regularity, feel his father’s razor strop whipped savagely across his buttocks. The thought of Clete Purcel in a blackout, in proximity to a sneering misogynistic pimp
like Herman Stanga, made me shudder. The fact that Stanga had publicly gloated over the prospect of sending Clete to Angola made me wonder if indeed the most logical suspect on the planet for the Stanga homicide wasn’t sitting three feet from me.
I went back to the entrance of the barbell room and shut the door. I saw the expression change in Clete’s face. “What’s the deal?” he asked.
“Where’s the gold pen Alicia Rosecrans gave you?”
His T-shirt was gray with sweat. He pulled it loose from his neck and shook the fabric to cool himself, his green eyes empty. “I don’t know. Maybe at my office. Or in my dresser,” he said. “I don’t like to think about Alicia a lot. I thought maybe she and I would be together for a while. Like always, that didn’t happen. What’s so important about the pen?”
“When is the last time you saw it?”
“I don’t remember. What is this crap?”
“It showed up in an unlikely place. Stop avoiding the question, Clete.”
“I don’t remember where I put it. I didn’t want to see it again. I wish I had thrown it away. Every time I looked at it, it made me feel bad.”
“Who had access to it?”
“How do I know when I don’t remember where I put it?” Then, illogically, he said, “My secretary comes in my office. The skells come in my office. People visit my cottage. The cleaning woman. Look, I remember Wee Willie Bimstine borrowing it once. Maybe he didn’t give it back. Or maybe it was Nig who borrowed it.”
“It was found at the bottom of Herman Stanga’s swimming pool.”
He widened his eyes and squeezed his mouth with one hand and wiped his hand on his pants. “Who found it?”
“The pool cleaner. He’s a straight-up guy.”
We were both silent. Somebody opened the door and started to come in. “We’re tied up in here right now,” I said.
The door closed and the person went away. “Helen says you told her you were never on Stanga’s property,” I said.
“That’s right, I was never there.”
“Who might have taken the pen out of your office or your cottage?”
“Layton Blanchet came to my office when he hired me to follow his wife around. I’ve had a couple of female guests at the cottage. I’m not necessarily talking about the boom-boom express, maybe just for drinks or something to eat before we went to the casino.”
“Emma Poche was one of them?”
“Definitely.”
“But what?”
“That was the boom-boom express — in the sack, on the furniture, in the shower, maybe on the ceiling. I crashed into the wall with her and cracked the plaster. She deserves her own zip code down there. It was like swimming in the Caribbean. I told her she was part mermaid.”
“Will you stop that?”
“I’m trying to tell you we were occupied. She wasn’t rifling my dresser or closet or whenever I lost that damn pen.”
“You didn’t sleep?”
“I think both of us kind of passed out.”
“So you don’t know what she did?”
“She’s not that kind of person, Dave.”
“Yeah, I know. You told me she’s cute because she has a tattoo on her butt.”
“You ought to see it.”
“When are you going to grow up? Don’t you realize how serious this is?”
“What am I supposed to do, go into mourning for myself? I don’t care if I was blacked out or not. I didn’t pop Stanga. If other people don’t believe me, that’s their problem. How about I treat you and Molly and Alafair to dinner at the casino tonight? You’re giving me a headache here.”
* * *
I left the health club and called Molly and said I was working late and that I was not sure when I would be home.
“Alafair told me about her encounter with that creep Perkins,” she said. “Is this related?”
“I’m not sure where he is right now.”
“Is Clete with you?”
“No, I just left him at the health club.”
“Let Helen and the department handle this.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“If you’re going after this guy, I want to be with you.”
“I’ll call you back later. Everything is fine. I just got a little behind in my schedule today.”
“Don’t you hang up on me.”
“I’m losing the signal,” I said.
My statement to Molly had not been a total lie. In truth, I had no plan about Vidor Perkins. He was obviously a psychopath, inured to threats and pain and deprivation by a lifetime of institutionalization. Worse, he delighted in attention, particularly when he had an audience. Any con who turns down parole from a joint like Huntsville and of his own volition does twenty-seven months in a cotton field under the tender and loving supervision of mounted Texas gunbulls has demonstrated a degree of toughness that cannot be dismissed easily. Also, I still believed that Perkins had an agenda that may have involved betrayal of either the Abelards or Layton Blanchet or Robert Weingart. But I couldn’t be sure. In fact, I could not be sure about anything in this case, except that Perkins had to leave my daughter alone.
I drove down Old Jeanerette Road through fields of waving sugarcane and past the whitewashed crypts that stood in a shady copse, the ground green with lichen that looked as soft as felt, all of it five feet from a bend in the road, like an abiding visual reminder, at least for me, of the earth’s gravitational claim upon the quick.
I pulled into Perkins’s gravel driveway. His stucco bungalow was already deep in shadow inside the pecan trees and slash pines that surrounded it, his pickup truck parked under the porte cochere. His flower beds were mulched and blooming with azaleas and impatiens and rosebushes. A water bird jittered a rainbowlike haze across the front lawn. On the far side of the two-lane, the property extended all the way down to the Teche, a long grassy slope pooled with the shade of giant live oaks that were silhouetted against a red sun. It was an idyllic scene except for the little black girl who sat on the front steps, her knees pinched close together, her hands knotted in her lap.
I got out of my pickup and walked toward her. From the backyard, I could hear a thick, whapping sound, like a hard object striking a canvas or plastic cover. The little girl was the same one Helen and I had told not to visit Vidor Perkins’s home by herself again.
“Remember me?” I said.
“Yes, suh. You and the lady drove me home,” she replied.
“You promised us you wouldn’t come back here without your mommy.”
“She dropped me off. She takes care of a sick lady. My auntie couldn’t keep me.” She spoke in a monotone, her face empty.
I sat down on the steps, one step lower than she was. I gazed at the bayou. “Your name is Clara?”
“Yes, suh.”
“Did something bad happen at Mr. Vidor’s house today, Clara?”
In the silence, I could hear the slash pines swaying in the wind, the pine needles tinkling on the rain gutters.
“Clara, nothing bad will happen to you for telling the truth. Did Mr. Vidor do something he shouldn’t have?”
“I want to go back home now.”
“I’ll take you there, I promise. But you need to tell me what Mr. Vidor did.”
“Took my picture.”
“In what way?”
“Suh?”
“How were you dressed when he took your picture?” I heard the whapping sound from the backyard again. “Were you wearing your dress and your shirt just like you are now?”
“Mr. Vidor tole me to lie on the couch. He tole me to put my thumb in my mout’. Then he tole me to put my hands behind my head.”
“How many pictures did he take of you, Clara?”
“Two or t’ree.”
“Did Mr. Vidor touch you at all in a place he shouldn’t have?”
“No, suh. He just took the pictures. I tole him I did
n’t want to do that no more, and he stopped.”
“Okay, Clara. I want you to wait here while I straighten out a couple of things with Mr. Vidor. Then I’ll take you home and a lady will come out from the sheriff’s department and stay with you until your mommy gets off work. But you remember what I say: You’re a good little girl. You’ve helped out a police officer, and that’s what good guys do. You’re one of the good guys, do you understand that?”
I walked around the side of the house just as Vidor Perkins pulled back an archer’s bow and drove an arrow into a plastic bull’s-eye draped across a stack of hay bales. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then pulled another arrow from the quiver on his back and fitted the shaft on the bow string. “I figured you’d be along directly,” he said. He lifted the bow, pulling back the string, his shoulders taut with tension. A second after he released the shaft, it whapped dead center in the target, quivering with a sound like a twanged bobby pin.
“Help me out here, Mr. Perkins,” I said. “I think Robert Weingart told you to give my daughter the worst time you could. But I think the motivation is more than simple jealousy. You guys want to become known as victims of police harassment because you know you’re going to be suspects in a homicide investigation. Let me take my theory one step further. You have a personal agenda, and it involves selling out both the Abelards and your jailhouse podjo and maybe even Layton Blanchet.”
“Cain’t say as I know Mr. Blanchet, although I’ve heard his name. But I’ll give your words some study and get back to you on that.”
“My daughter has applied for a concealed-weapons permit. In the meantime, I’m giving her a Smith and Wesson Airweight thirty-eight. If you come near her again, she’s going to blow your head off. If she doesn’t, I will. We’ll sort out the legalities later. But you won’t be there to see it.”
He took another arrow from his quiver but did not notch it on the bow string. He blew on the feathers, then stroked them into shape with his fingers. “She smells like peaches when you peel the skin off,” he said. “Must be a treat to have something like that around the house.”
“I want you to go inside now and get your camera and bring it back out here.”
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