English and was influenced largely by British tutors hired to teach the children of plantation society. Unlike the speech of yeomen, it does not vary through the states of the Old Confederacy. If you have heard the recorded voice of William Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren, you have heard the same pronunciations and linguistic cadence characteristic of Mr. Abelard’s generation in Louisiana. They could read from a phone book and you would swear you were listening to the cadences found inside a Shakespearean sonnet.
But well-spoken elderly gentleman or not, he had asked for it, I told myself. “In one way or another, my visit is related to your house guest, Robert Weingart. What kind of fellow would you say he is?”
“His prison background, that kind of thing?”
“For openers.”
“The man’s a mess. What else do you want to know?”
“Do you think it’s good for Kermit to be hanging around with a fellow like that?”
“That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?”
“Have you checked out Weingart’s criminal history?”
“You don’t have to convince me of the evil that’s in this world, Mr. Robicheaux. I’ve dealt with it in every form for a lifetime. Do you have a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Jewel!” he called.
Immediately, the black woman was at the door, waiting, her eyes not quite meeting his, her muscular body held straight and motionless, as though the virtue of patience had been ironed into the starch of her uniform.
“Get me a cigarette. Don’t argue about it, either. Just bring me the cigarette and a match before Kermit comes back and starts fussing at me,” Mr. Abelard said. He turned to me. “Don’t get old, Mr. Robicheaux. Age is an insatiable thief. It steals the pleasures of your youth, then locks you inside your own body with your desires still glowing. Worse, it makes you dependent upon people who are a half century younger than you. Don’t let anyone tell you that it brings you peace, either, because that’s the biggest lie of all.”
Jewel returned and placed a single cigarette in his hand, then lit it for him with a paper match. He puffed on it, wetting the filter, seemingly more pleased by the acquisition of the cigarette than his smoking of it. He continued talking about almost every subject imaginable except the presence of a career criminal like Robert Weingart in his house. I looked at my watch. “Where’s your grandson, sir?”
“Out yonder, almost to the salt. They’ll be back momentarily,” Mr. Abelard said.
“They?” I said.
“Jewel, will you bring me an ashtray?” he called out.
“Sir, who is ‘they’?”
But he turned his attention away from me to acquiring the ashtray, then began fumbling with it until he had positioned it in his lap. “You’d think by this time the woman could figure out that a man in a wheelchair can’t smoke a cigarette without something to put the ashes in.”
I had given up trying to find out who was in the boat with Kermit. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. “Miss Jewel seems like a devoted caretaker,” I said.
“I wish Jewel had a better life than the one she was given. But how many of us see the consequences when we step over forbidden lines?”
“Pardon?” I said.
“The racial situation of the South is one we inherited, and for good or bad we did the best we could with it. I just wish I had shown more personal restraint when I was in my middle years.”
“I’m not following you, sir.”
“The woman is my daughter. What did you think I was talking about?”
There was a long silence, then I felt my stare break and I looked away at the flooded trees that had been killed by saltwater intrusion, the petrochemical sheen that glistened on his lagoon, the flaking paint on the pillars that supported his second-story veranda, the decay and sickness that seemed to infect the entirety of the Abelards’ property, and I wondered why we had concentrated so much of our lives on hating or envying or emulating people such as the Abelards and the oligarchy they represented. Then I saw a motorboat with two figures in it come across the bay and enter the cypress trees, riding on its wake, passing the man who was fishing in the pirogue. Kermit sat behind the wheel, wearing Ray-Bans and a sky-blue cap with a lacquered black brim tilted on the side of his head. Alafair was sitting next to him, her hair and face damp with salt spray.
I got up from the chair, keeping my face empty of expression. “I’ll walk down to your dock, if you don’t mind,” I said. “I enjoyed talking with you.”
“You seem offended.”
I looked at the boat and at Alafair sitting close to Kermit, clenching his arm. “You withheld information from me, Mr. Abelard.”
“What your daughter does or does not do isn’t my business, sir. I resented your indicating that it is.”
I looked at him a long time before I spoke. He was infirm and, I suspected, visited in his sleep by memories and deeds no one wishes to carry to his grave. Or perhaps I was endowing him with a level of humanity that he didn’t possess. Regardless, I had concluded that Timothy Abelard was not someone I would ever come to like or admire.
“Robert Weingart is in your home with your consent, sir,” I said. “You’re an intelligent man. That means his agenda is your agenda. That’s not a comforting thought.”
“Get out,” he replied.
I walked outside and down the slope of the yard toward a wood dock, where Kermit was mooring his boat. Alafair stepped off the bow onto the dock and came toward me. She was wearing white shorts and a black blouse and straw sandals; her skin was dark with tan in the sunlight, her hair blown in wet wisps across her cheek, her mouth lifted toward me.
“I’m here to see Kermit. It has nothing to do with you, Alafair,” I said.
“You gave me your word,” she said.
“I promised I wouldn’t interfere in your relationship. There’re some questions Kermit has to answer. He can talk to me or he can talk to Helen Soileau. Or he can wait until he’s contacted by the FBI.”
She walked past me without replying, glancing at me once, her eyes dead.
Kermit stood on his dock, his hands on his hips, gazing at the hammered bronze light on the bay and at the moss straightening on the cypress snags and at the man fishing in the pirogue. When he heard my footsteps behind him, he turned and extended his hand, but I didn’t take it. The smile went out of his face.
“Did you know Bernadette Latiolais?” I asked.
He held his eyes on mine, more steadily than was natural, never blinking. “The name is familiar,” he said.
“It should be. You were photographed with her.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “One of the scholarship girls, I believe.”
“She was a murder victim. She said you were going to make her rich. How were you planning to do that?”
“Wait a minute. There’s some confusion here.”
“Are you telling me you weren’t photographed with her?” The truth was I had never seen the photo, and I knew of its possible existence only because Bernadette’s brother, Elmore, said she had shown it to him when she visited him at the work camp in Mississippi.
“I’m saying I remember her name because my family belongs to the UL alumni association, and I was at the ceremony at Bernadette’s high school when she was awarded a scholarship that we endow. At least if we’re talking about the same person. Why don’t you check it out?”
“I don’t have to.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re lying. I think you have blood splatter all over you, podna, and I’m going to nail you to the wall.”
“I don’t care if you’re Alafair’s father or not, you have no right to talk to me like that.”
“Who’s the dude in the pirogue?” I asked.
“He looks like a fisherman.”
“His name is Vidor Perkins. He did a stretch in Huntsville Pen with Robert Weingart, the guy who’s made you
