“I told him it falls, whether anyone hears it or not. He laughed.”
“What do you think he was trying to say?”
“Earlier he had said something about the definition of a criminal being the physical record of the criminal. I think he was ridiculing us because we can’t find evidence of any criminal activity in his life. I think he just gave us his whole MO. He’s a sociopath who doesn’t get caught. Like Bundy or BTK and probably thousands of others, they burrow into the woodwork and nobody knows they’re there until the house falls down.”
“How do you want to play it?” she asked.
“This guy is a sexual nightmare. I suspect he hates women, particularly female authority figures.”
“Can you imagine that?” she replied.
We walked down to the interview room, a relatively small enclosure, with two oblong glassed slits in the wall that allowed someone in the hallway to look at the subject with a degree of invisibility.
“Check him out,” I said.
Helen peered through the glass. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
“Ready?”
“When you are,” she replied.
I opened the door and we went inside. Wally had brought Bledsoe at least four custard-filled doughnuts and a king-size paper cup of community coffee. He ate them as you would a hamburger, feeding the whole doughnut into his mouth, the yellow cream glistening on top of his nails.
“My name’s Ronald. What’s yours?” Bledsoe said to Helen. He partially rose from his chair and sat back down again.
“I’m Sheriff Soileau, Mr. Bledsoe. Appreciate you coming down.” She closed the door behind us and glanced up at the video camera on the wall. “Since this is just an informal conversation, I had that camera turned off.”
“I never noticed it.”
There were two empty chairs at the table, but Helen and I remained standing.
“Let’s get right to it,” she said. “Somebody broke into Detective Robicheaux’s home and vandalized his daughter’s computer and pissed in the wastebasket. You gave us your DNA voluntarily and we appreciate that. But we have a larger concern. What the hell are you doing here in New Iberia?”
The shift in her tone caught him off guard. He lifted his eyes into hers. They were as bright and green as emeralds. “I’m a private investigator in the employ of several insurance carriers.”
“Which carriers?”
“Confidentiality precludes my giving out their names.”
“I see. Do you know what obstruction of justice is?”
“I do.”
“You’ve factored yourself into a homicide investigation, Mr. Bledsoe. I’m talking about the shooting of two black men in front of Otis Baylor’s house in New Orleans.”
“Those men of color were looters. They stole from homes insured by my employers.”
“Otis Baylor is going to help you recover stolen property?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You know Sidney Kovick?”
“I know his name. Everyone in New Orleans does.”
“Do you work for him?”
“No, I’m a bond agent and an insurance investigator, not unlike Mr. Purcel, Mr. Robicheaux’s friend. Can you tell me why Mr. Purcel is not in custody, considering the amount of injury he did to Bobby Mack Rydel?”
“Our focus is on you, Mr. Bledsoe.”
“Do you have any more napkins? These are messy.”
“Is that what your mother told you? Don’t have messy hands?”
“What was that?” he said.
Helen leaned down and propped her fists on the table, only inches away from him. A tube of muscle stood out in the back of each upper arm. Her hair hung on her cheeks. Her physical presence was palpable, her scent like a mixture of flowers and male body heat. Bledsoe’s nostrils whitened around the edges. He shifted in his chair and placed his hands in front of him. His fingers were long and pale, as though they had been in water a long time.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Helen said.
He looked straight ahead and seemed to gather his body inside his clothes. “You don’t have the legal right to touch my person.”
“If I touched your person, Mr. Bledsoe, I would scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush. Is it true you get off scaring the hell out of working girls?”
He glanced up at the camera on the wall, clearly wondering if indeed it was turned off and if that was good or bad for him. “Does it seem logical that a man who hires prostitutes would want to scare off prostitutes?” he said.
“Yeah, if everything about him creeps them out,” Helen said.
For the first time I saw a darkness sweep across his face. Helen leaned closer to him, her hip brushing again him, her face intersecting his line of vision. “What did your mother do to you when you were a kid?”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“When you wet the bed, did she make you sleep in your own stink? Did she wash out your mouth with soap when you sassed her? Did she tell you your underwear was inside out and that skid marks were on it, that you made her ashamed you were her son, that you disgusted her?”
He started to get up from the chair.
“Sit down. I’m not through talking to you,” she said. “She did things to you in the dark, didn’t she? Your father wasn’t around and so you were the dildo. Did she ever hold your penis in her hand and then punish you for it later?”
The temperature in the room had grown warmer and I felt myself clearing my throat.
“You’re making this up. You don’t know me,” Bledsoe said.
“You made a mistake coming to this parish. You’re a sick man and you’ll be treated as such. Detective Robicheaux, go get him another cup of coffee. I want to talk to Mr. Bledsoe a little more privately.”
“I don’t want any. I want to return to my cottage now.”
“You know why you keep looking at that camera, Mr. Bledsoe?” she said. “It’s because your identity is self- manufactured and you’re nothing like the person you want the world to see. We know everything about you. You’re genetically and psychologically defective. People like you and Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy should have been flushed down the toilet with the afterbirth five minutes after y’all were born. Unfortunately your mommies didn’t do that and instead raised up big titty babies that everyone else has to take care of.”
I picked up his coffee cup from the table. “You want cream or sugar?”
His bottom lip trembled. Helen had delivered a cut that went to the bone.
“Answer him,” she said.
He sat up in the chair, his eyes blinking and refocusing, like a man who had just undergone a violent decompression inside a bathysphere. Then he huffed air out his nostrils and straightened his shoulders. I suspected that behind that jutting forehead he was rebuilding his mental fortifications a block at a time, a process he had learned in an environment most of us can only guess at. He bit into a doughnut and pushed the custard inside his mouth with his fingers.
“It’s been real nice y’all having me here,” he said. “I won’t hold your words against you. That’s not my way. My mother was a lovely, kind woman and you don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”
“You need to talk to us, Mr. Bledsoe,” I said.
“No, sir, I surely don’t. Very harsh things have been said here today.” He got up from the chair and took his pair of dark glasses from his pocket, the ones with the round white frames, and fitted them on his face. “Looks is only skin deep, Ms. Soileau. If you’re a Christian, maybe you should give more thought to the feelings of other people.”
With that, he walked out of the room, down the hall, and out of the courthouse.
“Do you believe that?” Helen said.
