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.”
“On some level, Stanga is dirty. I just don’t know how or why. Before this is over, I’m going to take him off the board.” Clete retrieved his spinner and flipped it out again, his face empty.
I didn’t want to hear what he had just said. “We’ll get out of this one way or another, Clete. I promise. Your friends aren’t going to let you down.”
“I’m not going to do time. Before I go inside, I’ll put a few guys in body bags or eat my gun.”
“Not a good way to think.”
“So I’ll skip the country instead.”
“How’s your love life?” I said, changing the subject.
“I don’t have one.”
“You need to find a new girlfriend. This time get one your own age.”
“Who wants a girlfriend my age?”
For the first time that evening we both laughed out loud, violating the stillness, as though three decades had not passed and we were both cops in uniform again, walking a beat with batons on Esplanade or Rampart. Then I saw the humor go out of Clete’s face.
“What are you looking at?” I said.
“That boat out in the channel. Somebody is using binoculars on us. There. See the light glint on the lenses?”
I looked back toward the landing. In the gloom I could barely make out a male figure seated in the stern of a speedboat. Then I saw him lean over and dip his hand into the water and begin retrieving his anchor from the mud. Across the water, we could hear the dull thunk of the anchor clank in the bottom of the boat, then the buzzing sound of the electric starter turning over. The man in the speedboat pointed the bow directly toward us and opened the throttle, a frothy yellow wake fanning out behind him.
Clete reeled in his spinner and set down his rod on the gunwale. He took a po’boy sandwich from the ice chest, unwrapped the waxed paper, and bit into the French bread and fried shrimp and sauce piquant and sliced tomatoes and onions inside it, pushing the food back into his mouth with his wrist, his eyes never leaving the speedboat.
The driver made a wide circle and approached us so the sun was at his back and shining directly into our eyes. Clete shifted around in his seat, watching the speedboat, wiping mayonnaise off his mouth with his fingers. He pulled his right trouser leg up over his sock, exposing the hideaway.25 that was Velcro-strapped to his ankle.
The man in the speedboat cut his gas feed and drifted toward us, his boat rising on its own wake. “One of you guys named Dave Robicheaux?” he asked. His face was lit with an idiot’s grin.
“What do you want?” I said.
“I want to know if I found the right man, the man I’ve been sent to find.”
“You found me.”
“My name is Vidor Perkins.” His tan looked like it had been induced with chemicals or acquired in a salon. His shoulders were narrow and his dark hair oiled and conked on top and mowed into the scalp above his ears, exposing a strawberry birthmark that bled down the back of his neck. But it was his eyes that caught your attention. They were pale blue and did not go with the rest of his face. They seemed to have no pupils and contained the kind of lidless inner concentration that anybody who is con-wise immediately recognizes. In every stockade, prison, or work camp, there is at least one inmate no one deliberately goes near. When you see him on the yard, he might be squatting on his haunches, smoking a cigarette, staring into his own smoke with the concentration of a scientist, his hands draped over his knees like banana peels. At first glance, he appears to be an innocuous creature taking a break in his day, but then you notice that the other inmates divide around him the way water flows around a sharp rock. If you’re wise, you do not make eye contact with this man or think you can be his friend. Nor, under any circumstances, do you ever challenge his pride.
The man who called himself Vidor Perkins fixed his mindless stare on Clete. “I bet you’re Mr. Purcel,” he said.
“We’d like to catch a fish before dark, provided this spot isn’t already ruined. You want to spit it out?” Clete said.
“Man up at the bait shop sent me out here. Your daughter called, Mr. Robicheaux. She said there was an emergency at your house.”
“Say that again,” I replied.
“That’s all I know. Sounded like a fire or something. I cain’t be sure. He said something about an ambulance.”
“Who said?” I asked.
“The man up at the bait shop. I just tole you.” He killed a mosquito on his neck, lifted it from his palm with two fingers, and dropped it into the water.
“Why didn’t you come straight out here? Why were you anchored?” Clete said.
“’Cause I didn’t know it was y’all.”
I pulled out my cell phone and opened it. There was no service. “Were you in the bait shop when the call came in?”
“As a matter of fact, I was. This fellow took the call at the counter. He said something about paramedics. Or the voice over the phone said something about paramedics. I didn’t get it all. If it was me, I’d haul freight on up there and see what the deal is.”
“Let’s see your ID,” Clete said. “In the meantime, wipe that grin off your face.”
The man in the speedboat gazed at the elevated highway and at the headlights streaming across it. He had a wide mouth that looked made of rubber, like the mouth of a frog or an inflatable doll, and his lips had taken on a purplish cast in the fading light. “I’d worry about my family and not about a fellow who’s just trying to do a good deed,” he said. “But I’m not you, am I?”
I got out my badge holder and opened it. “I want you to follow us in,” I said.
He began picking at his nails. The wind came up and lifted the leaves on the willow trees and wrinkled the water’s surface. Vidor Perkins pushed the button on his electric starter. “Bet I beat you there,” he said. “I hope your family is all right.”
Then he opened up his speedboat and rocketed across the bay, troweling a wide arc by the pilings under the highway, sliding across his own wake, his profile as pointed and cool as a hood ornament.
A minute later, he had disappeared down the channel, the darkness swallowing the yellow surge of mud rising in his wake.
The owner of the bait shop knew nothing of an emergency call; he also said the man in the speedboat had not been in his shop and had not used his concrete ramp to put his boat in the water.
