“Why would I do that?”
“Because the photos you took of that little girl probably don’t meet the standard of prosecutable evidence. In a borderline case like this, you’ll probably skate. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to keep the pictures or put them on the Internet. What that means, Mr. Perkins, is you’re going to voluntarily destroy the memory card or the film or whatever is in your camera.”
“Come back with a warrant and you can discuss it with my attorney.”
“I see,” I said.
“You look like you got shit on your nose, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“We don’t come up against your kind every day, so you’ll have to excuse me. You’re pretty slick.”
He gazed at me a long time, his skin a chemical yellow in the sun’s glow, the wind puffing his shirt, his arrow notched now, his fingers relaxed on the string. “Your daughter could have filed battery charges, but she didn’t. Know why?” he said. “She don’t want to admit in a courtroom she cain’t handle a man’s attentions. They all got the same weakness. The big V. Vanity. Like the Bible says.”
I turned and walked out of the yard. “You cain’t touch me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he called at my back. “I’m floating outside your window like a hummingbird. I’ll always know where you and your family are at. But you won’t know where and when I might show up. Till one day I come peekaboo-ing by.”
I opened the door to my pickup and felt under the seat. The baton was an old one, the only souvenir I took with me when I was fired from the New Orleans Police Department. It was made of oak, knurled on the grip, lathe-troweled with three rings below the tip, drilled through the center and filled with a steel bolt, its black paint nicked, a leather thong threaded through the handle. In the old days, when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, a cop in trouble or chasing a perp would whang his baton on the pavement or a curb as a distress signal to other cops. There was no concrete in Vidor Perkins’s yard and no other cops in the vicinity. And no one else in his backyard except him and me. He had just fired an arrow at his target and didn’t hear me coming. I bent low when I swung the baton and caught him high up on the calf, right behind the knee. His mouth fell open and he dropped to the ground like a child genuflecting in church.
He breathed loudly through his mouth, as though his tongue had been scalded. Then he squeezed both hands behind his knee, his face splitting with a grin, his eyes closed in slits. “Oh, Lordy, that’s a mean stripe you lay on a man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He let out a gleeful howl as though blowing a storm out of his chest. “I understand she’s your foster kid. I hear that opens up the parameters. I bet when she was eighteen, a man had to tie a board acrost his rear end not to fall in.”
I could feel my fingers finding new purchase on the baton’s handle, the leather thong looped loosely on my wrist bones. I could feel a vein of black electricity crawling through my arm into my shoulder, down my right side, and through my back and chest. He made me think of a medieval jester mocking his executioner as he knelt before the chopping block. I could feel my whole body becoming a torqued spring that would find release only when I whipped the baton across Perkins’s temple and watched his eyes go senseless and dead. The procedural explanation was already available. I wouldn’t even have to use a throwdown. He had committed a crime upon a child. I had tried to search him before hooking him up. He had whirled and gotten his hands on his archer’s bow. The blows I’d delivered were in self-defense and not intended to be fatal. As I had these thoughts, I saw Vidor Perkins’s time on earth coming to an end.
Then I heard the little black girl. She was standing at the back corner of the house, weeping and hiccuping, shaking uncontrollably, unable to deal with what she had witnessed. “It’s okay, Clara,” I said.
“You lose again, Mr. Robicheaux,” Perkins said.
“I guess you could say that.”
“I ain’t hurt that little girl. Down deep inside you know it.”
“‘Better they fasten millstones about their necks and cast themselves into the sea.’ Know where that comes from, Mr. Perkins?”
“Jesus was talking about the scribes and Pharisees that misled the innocent, not the likes of me. I ain’t mussed a hair on that girl’s head. No, sir.”
“I’ll be around.”
“Come back any time.”
I went inside his house and came back out with a camera I found on the kitchen table. I set it on the back step and smashed it into junk with my foot. Perkins had pulled himself up by holding on to the trunk of a pine tree. He continued to grip it, like a man on board a pitching ship. He gazed at a black cloud moving across the sun. “The devil is fixing to beat his wife,” he said. “When you were looking at my jacket, did you check my IQ? My grammar may not be too hot, but my IQ is higher than Robert’s. Down the road, you’ll see who walks away with the most marbles. It ain’t gonna be Robert Weingart or them Abelards, either.”
I drove the little girl to her house and walked her inside just as a shower of hailstones clattered on her roof and danced on the dirt yard.
CHAPTER 12
Early the next morning, I went into Helen’s office and told her of my visit to Vidor Perkins’s house.
“Go over that last part again,” she said.
“Which part?”
“About the baton.”
I did, describing in detail how I pulled it from under the seat of my vehicle and went after him, whipping one leg out from under him. While she listened, she held my gaze, her face impassive. She took an Altoid out of a box on her desk blotter and put it in her mouth. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Because you need to know.”
“No, it’s because you think my office is a confessional.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s no maybe about it, Dave.”
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. I suspected she had reached that point in dealing with others when we finally accept people for what they are and stop contending with their character defects.
She sucked on the mint and pushed the box toward me. “You want me to bring him in?” she asked.
“My vote is we ignore him for the time being. He’s energized by attention. Leave him alone, and I think he’ll offer us a deal of some kind on Robert Weingart. My guess is they were buds in Huntsville, and now Weingart is an international celebrity, while Perkins gets treated like toe jam. I suspect Perkins is driven by greed and envy and resentment. I think he wants to make the big score at Weingart’s expense.”
“What is it we’re not talking about here, Dave?”
“Pardon?”
“For want of a better word, duh. The gold pen. The one that has Clete’s name on it that ended up at a homicide scene.”
“He doesn’t remember where he put it, and he doesn’t remember the last time he saw it. He says a number of people may have had access to it, including Layton Blanchet. Also, a number of women have been visitors at his cottage.”
“Like which women?”
I had to wonder for a second if Helen’s curiosity went beyond the professional. Years ago she and Clete had become involved romantically and had crossed lines in ways that surprised even them.
“The only one he mentioned was Emma Poche,” I replied.
“From NOPD?”
“She’s a deputy in St. Martin Parish now. What do you know about her?”
“Not much. As I recall, she had a history as a boozer.” Her eyes slipped off mine, and I knew there was something she wasn’t saying.
“What else do you know about her?” I asked.
“She sleeps around. Or she used to. Let’s talk about the gold pen.”
“Somebody planted it on Stanga’s property. You know it, Helen, and so do I. Drunk or not, Clete Purcel wouldn’t shoot down an unarmed man, even one he hated.”
“That might be true, but Clete invites chaos and self-destruction into his life at every turn. In this case, he’s making us do his enemies’ dirt
y work. I don’t want to be part of the script any longer.”
“I can’t blame you.”
She got up from her desk. Her windowsill was lined with potted flowers. A motorized houseboat was passing on the bayou, its deck dotted with people from a movie company who were looking for sites they could use in their film production. Helen leaned on the windowsill and gazed at the boat, her back as hard-looking as iron against her shirt. “That’s what we should all be doing,” she said. “Having fun, enjoying our lives, riding on a boat with people we like. How’d we let dope and pimps and degenerates get into our communities?”
“They’ve always been here,” I said. “They come out of the woodwork when they have sanction.”
“My ass,” she said.
You’re wrong, I thought. But I didn’t say it.
“You want to add something?” she asked.
“Nope.”
Then Helen made one of those remarks that always atomized my defenses and left me feeling that maybe I’d done something right: “You think you’re tough-minded, bwana, but your heart gets in your way. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”
* * *
I went back to my office and stared at my file cabinet where the crime-scene and coroner’s photographs of Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais were tucked inside case folders. My file cabinet did not function simply as a place where I put things. In this instance, the sightless eyes and decomposed features of two homicide victims had disappeared from my view and were pressed between departmental forms and Xeroxes from the authorities in Jeff Davis Parish and fax and Internet printouts from Baton Rouge and time logs and sheets of lined paper torn from my notebook and legal pad. And all of it was encased in a rectangle of darkness bordered by the metal drawer and the shell of the file cabinet, not unlike the contents inside the sliding refrigerated tray used in a mortuary storage area, all of it safely sequestered, the degree of the victims’ suffering placed in abeyance, so I would not have to reflect upon what the world had done to them.
But I could hear their voices, even though I had never known either girl. Their killers (I was convinced now that more than one individual was involved) did not understand that the dead find a conduit into the minds of the living, particularly when they have been robbed of their lives and all the promise and happiness that had awaited them. When Bernadette’s executioners wired her body to chunks of concrete and sank her in a pond, and shoveled dirt into the eyes and mouth and over the brow and hair of Fern Michot, they had not appreciated the enormity of the theft they had just committed. I do not believe the rage the dead experience can be contained by the grave. How many people can understand what it means for an eighteen-year-old girl to be in love, to wake every morning and feel that something extraordinary and beautiful is about to happen on that particular day? How many understand the joy a young girl experiences when she is kissed on the mouth and eyes by a man who loves her, or the sensual pleasure of dancing barefoot on a lawn at an open-air concert, throwing her rump around in an innocent celebration of her sexuality, to see her own skin glow in the mirror, to see her breasts swell, and to hear her heart’s blood race when she says the man’s name in the silence of her bedroom?
How can all of that be ripped loose from a young woman’s chest in moments, unexpectedly, through guile and treachery, without a psychic scream leaving the soul, a scream that is so loud it wraps itself around the world?
I closed the blinds on my windows and my office door and clicked off the overhead lighting and sat in the air-conditioned gloom, my arms motionless on top of my desk blotter. What were the two girls trying to tell me?
But I knew, in the way that all fathers who raise a teenage girl know. At a juncture in their lives, Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot had trusted a man they thought was special. He was probably handsome, older, better educated than they, and wise in the ways of the world. He was confident and reassuring and seemed to dismiss or solve problems in a magical fashion. At some point in their association with him, he had performed an act, seemingly unknown to himself, that was both kind and strong. After that moment, they made a compact with themselves and decided he was the one to whom they would give their entire heart and soul.
Who was the man who fit all the criteria? I saw his face float in front of me like a chimera painted on air. I saw the slyness in his eyes, the plastic surgery that had tugged his flesh back placidly on the bone, the lips that were slightly puckered to hide the smirk flickering on his cheek.
I had to blink to make sure I was not actually looking into Robert Weingart’s face. Unconsciously, I brushed my right hand against the checkered grips of my holstered .45. I lifted my hand back onto the desk, like a child in puberty obsessed with concerns about impure thoughts and touches.
I jerked open the blinds and did not let myself dwell upon the choices that I was making already, my hand clenching and unclenching at my side.
* * *
Over the years, I had come to believe that almost all homicides, to one degree or another, are premeditated. A man who enters a convenience store with a loaded pistol has already made a decision about its possible use. A person who commits an abduction, knowing nothing about the victim’s heart condition or that of the victim’s loved ones, has already decided on the side of self-interest and is not worried about the fate of others. Even a man in a barroom fight, when he continues to kick a downed opponent trapped on the floor, knows exactly what he is doing.
In my view, there is an explicit motivation in almost every homicide, even one committed in apparent blind rage. Was the motivation in the death of the two girls sexual? Possibly, but I doubted it. Robert Weingart was in the mix, and I believed the Abelards were, too, and possibly even Layton Blanchet. Sex was not a primary issue in their lives. Money was. When it comes to money, power and sex are secondary issues. Money buys both of them, always.
But what was to be gained financially by the deaths of two innocent girls? Perhaps the answer lay in what I considered a long tradition among people like the Abelards. Historically, they had acquired their wealth off the backs and sweat of others. Nor, when push came to shove, were they above the use of the lash and branding iron and selling off families to different parts of the country. In their journey from the role of newly arrived colonials escaping from Old World despots to a time when they themselves became slave owners, they managed to do considerable damage to the earth as well, burning out the soil by not rotating crops and turning old-growth forests into stump farms.
But how could two teenage girls with no apparent agenda, from poor families, be an obstruction in someone’s monetary scheme to the extent that their lives would become forfeit? It made little sense. I suspected the answer lay in the obvious, perhaps a detail I had missed or already passed over. As an addendum to this reflection, the word “motivation” suggests complexity that is often not there. Ask any detective who has heard the confession of a murderer. When the killer finally explains his rationale for committing the worst act of which human beings are capable, the speciousness and absurdity of his thinking is of such a mind-numbing magnitude that the detective’s response is usually one of silence and blank-faced disbelief. Fortunately, he often has a legal pad and felt pen close by, almost like stage props that he can slide across the table to the suspect while he says, simply and quietly, “Write it down.”
At 11:23 A.M., Helen opened my office door without knocking. “Layton Blanchet and his wife just T-boned a black woman’s car with their Lexus at Burke Street and the drawbridge,” she said.
“So?”
“They’re trying to leave the scene.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“The Blanchets aren’t going to smash up somebody’s car in our parish and drive away like their shit doesn’t stink. I’ll meet you out front.”
The drive to the accident scene was only three blocks down East Main, past The Shadows and the old Evangeline Theater where a street named for a pioneer Irishwoman fed into
the drawbridge. Coincidentally, the accident scene was a short distance from the back of the brick building where Clete Purcel kept his office.
Two cruisers had arrived ahead of us. A Mazda had been crushed against a telephone pole, its passenger-side doors driven into the seats. Glass and strips of chrome molding lay in the street. Amazingly, the woman driving it was unharmed; she was sitting in the backseat of a cruiser, talking to a paramedic who kept moving a finger back and forth in front of her face.
If anyone was injured or impaired by the accident, it was Layton Blanchet. While his wife argued with a sheriff’s deputy, Layton sat behind the steering wheel of his Lexus with both the driver’s and passenger’s doors open to let in the breeze. He looked like a man afflicted with a fatal disease. Helen and I parked in front of the domino parlor on Burke Street and walked toward the accident. As soon as Carolyn Blanchet saw me, she disengaged from her argument with the deputy. “Dave, thank God you’re here. Can you do anything for us?” she said.
“Like what?”
“Layton is having a nervous breakdown. I was taking him to Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette,” she said.
“He’s having a breakdown but you let him drive the car?” I said.
“It was the only way I could get him out of the house,” she replied.
“So why were you downtown and not on the highway to Lafayette?” I asked. Inside the shade at the back of the brick building, I could see the umbrella on Clete’s office patio ruffling in the breeze. Carolyn’s eyes followed mine, and I knew that whatever information she was about to give me would come a teaspoon at a time and would reveal only enough to ensure that her account was credible.
“He wanted to talk to your friend Clete Purcel. About a business matter of some kind,” she said.
Carolyn had shown no acknowledgment of Helen’s presence.
“Have you met Sheriff Soileau?” I asked.
“Hi,” Carolyn said, and returned her attention to me. “I’ve got to get him to this psychiatrist who’s waiting for us at Lourdes. The black woman ran the stop sign. No one is injured. I don’t want to see her ticketed or hurt financially. We’ll fix our own car. Maybe Layton will even fix hers. But we didn’t cause this, and we don’t have time for a lot of paperwork and stupid questions. Now, are we done here?”
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