“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
“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
