running a Ponzi scheme since back in the nineties. He gets retirees to roll over their pension plans and SEP-IRAs into his bank and promises them a minimum of ten percent on their investment. Most of them are going to lose every penny they gave him.”
“He says he found your business card in his wife’s dresser.”
Clete had been polishing a back fin on the Caddy. He hand slowed and then stopped. He popped the rag clean and seemed to study the smoke drifting off his barbecue pit into the trees and the way the sunlight glittered like yellow diamonds on the bayou. “What would she be doing with my business card?” he asked.
“Evidently he’s convinced himself that you and Carolyn Blanchet were getting it on while you were working for him.”
“Not that I wouldn’t like to, but he’s full of shit.”
“The number of the Monteleone Hotel was on the back of the card,” I said.
“Layton Blanchet thinks I hang out at the Monteleone on my income? What an idiot.”
“Where do you think she got the card?”
“From any one of half the lowlifes in South Louisiana.”
“He said a couple of other things, Clete. He says he has a source inside the department. He says you’re still getting looked at for the Stanga homicide, and maybe I am, too.”
“Because the shooter was using a forty-five?”
“That and a few remarks both you and I made about Stanga.”
“Blanchet knows I’m being looked at but you don’t? Does that make sense to you?”
“Helen Soileau doesn’t always take me into her confidence.”
“Well, that’s not my problem. Check out the day. Who cares about this stuff? We’re on the square, aren’t we? You know how many people have messed with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide and are now in the ground? Get me a Bud from the icebox and a Diet Doc for yourself. I don’t want to hear any more about Layton Blanchet.”
“Watch your back, Cletus.”
“And take away your job? What kind of guy do you think I am?” he said. He went back to polishing his car, his leviathan shoulders rolling inside his shirt. I went into the cottage and opened a Dr Pepper and a Budweiser, and we drank them in the shade.
ON MONDAY MORNING, when both Molly and I were at work and Tripod was in his hutch, his hind leg had begun to tremble for no reason. Alafair had folded a soft blanket in the bottom of a cardboard box and taken him to the vet. In the rearview mirror, she noticed a pale blue pickup truck turn behind her, then reappear a block later and make a second turn with her. When she parked in front of the veterinary clinic, the truck drove on by and caught the state road leading to a drawbridge in the distance.
Tripod had a form of distemper, one that came and went and seemed to steal more of his life each time. The veterinarian gave him a shot and some medicine that was to be mixed with his food. Alafair put Tripod back in his box and placed the box on the passenger seat of her old Honda and headed home. It was a fine morning. A sun shower had left the streets damp and the trees dripping, and the new sugarcane was green in the fields and bending in the breeze. She rolled down the windows to let in the cool air, and Tripod popped his head out of the box, his nose pointed into the wind like a weathervane.
She passed a redbrick Catholic church with a spire and a cupola on the roof, and rumbled across the drawbridge and stopped at a fruit stand on the far side of the bayou. Next to the fruit stand, a man was selling shrimp and crawfish out of the back of a refrigerated truck. Alafair got out of her car and closed the door. “I’ll be right back, Pod,” she said.
But there were three people ahead of her who could not decide what they wanted, and she had to wait. The Amtrak passed on the railroad embankment behind her, and traffic stalled at the intersection. On the other side of the state road, known as Old Spanish Trail, was a dry canal that emptied into Bayou Teche. Along the banks of that same canal, unknown to most people driving by it, Confederate infantry had dug a skirmish line in the year 1863 to cover the evacuation of wounded from the Episcopalian church on the west end of the town. Kermit Abelard had been fascinated with the site and had climbed down into it with a spade and a metal detector in search of minie balls, in spite of Alafair’s warnings, streaking his skin with poison ivy. But that was months ago, when the Kermit she knew and loved was more boy than man, in the best possible way, unmarked by avarice or false pride or dependence on others. In her mind, there had been a purity about Kermit-in his vision of the world, in the books and stories he wrote about the antebellum South, in his conviction that he could change the lives of others for the better. Had she been totally wrong about him? Had the innocent boy in him died simply because of his association with Robert Weingart? Or had the innocent boy never existed except in Alafair’s imagination?
The sun had broken out from behind a rain cloud, and she had to shield her eyes against its brilliance. Across the road, the oak trees along the bayou were deep green from the rain and swelling with wind, the sound of car tires on the bridge steady and reassuring, like a testimony to a plan, perhaps a reminder that life was basically good and that she was surrounded by ordinary people who shared a common struggle. A vendor had broken open a sample watermelon that he said came from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and he cut a slice for Alafair and put it on a napkin and placed the napkin in her palm.
“I have a sick raccoon. He’ll love this,” she said. “Let me pay you.”
“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t take a dime for that,” he replied.
Wasn’t it time to forget about Kermit Abelard? she asked herself. To leave him in the past, as she had promised both him and herself? To enjoy the day, to work on her book, to take care of animals, to give up resentment of herself and the wrong choices she may have made, to forgive Kermit Abelard for being weak and not defending her, even forgive him for allowing himself to be demeaned and humiliated in public by a man as loathsome as Robert Weingart? If she could forgive Kermit for not being what she thought he was, and forgive herself for her excess of love and trust, then she could let go of both Kermit and the past. Wasn’t that how it worked?
No, it didn’t. The man she had loved may not have been real. But the man she had given herself to, imaginary or not, would always live on the edges of her consciousness. And for that reason alone, she would always feel self-deceived and robbed at the same time, as though she had cooperated with a thief in burglarizing her own home.
“You want some shrimp or crawfish?” the vendor with the refrigerator truck asked. He was a tiny man dressed in strap overalls, his white shirt buttoned at the wrists, his spine bowed in a hump.
“Yes, I’m sorry. Two pounds of veined shrimp, please,” she said, opening her purse.
“You’re Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
He raised his eyes to hers, then looked past her in the direction of her Honda. “I saw you drive up in your li’l car,” he said.
“Yes?”
“You know that fella?”
“Which fellow?”
“That one there,” the man said, nodding toward her car, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.
She turned around. The skinned-up pale blue truck she had seen earlier was parked behind her Honda. A man was leaning inside the passenger window, his shoulder and elbow making a pulling and pushing motion. She left both the shrimp and her money on the vendor’s worktable and went to the car. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
The man straightened up. His hair was gelled into the shape of a cupcake, the skin fish-belly white where it was shaved above the ears. A strawberry birthmark bled out of his hairline into his collar. His mouth was a wide slit not unlike a frog’s, the upper lip duck-billed. There was a rolled newspaper in his hand. “I was playing with your pet,” he said.
“Were you poking him with that paper?”
“I don’t know if I’d call it that. No, I was just letting him paw and mouth it a little bit. I wasn’t poking him at all.”
“He’s sick and he’s old and he doesn’t need anyone messing with him. You step back from my car.”
