you could. But I think the motivation is more than simple jealousy. You guys want to become known as victims of police harassment because you know you’re going to be suspects in a homicide investigation. Let me take my theory one step further. You have a personal agenda, and it involves selling out both the Abelards and your jailhouse podjo and maybe even Layton Blanchet.”
“Cain’t say as I know Mr. Blanchet, although I’ve heard his name. But I’ll give your words some study and get back to you on that.”
“My daughter has applied for a concealed-weapons permit. In the meantime, I’m giving her a Smith and Wesson Airweight thirty-eight. If you come near her again, she’s going to blow your head off. If she doesn’t, I will. We’ll sort out the legalities later. But you won’t be there to see it.”
He took another arrow from his quiver but did not notch it on the bow string. He blew on the feathers, then stroked them into shape with his fingers. “She smells like peaches when you peel the skin off,” he said. “Must be a treat to have something like that around the house.”
“I want you to go inside now and get your camera and bring it back out here.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because the photos you took of that little girl probably don’t meet the standard of prosecutable evidence. In a borderline case like this, you’ll probably skate. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to keep the pictures or put them on the Internet. What that means, Mr. Perkins, is you’re going to voluntarily destroy the memory card or the film or whatever is in your camera.”
“Come back with a warrant and you can discuss it with my attorney.”
“I see,” I said.
“You look like you got shit on your nose, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“We don’t come up against your kind every day, so you’ll have to excuse me. You’re pretty slick.”
He gazed at me a long time, his skin a chemical yellow in the sun’s glow, the wind puffing his shirt, his arrow notched now, his fingers relaxed on the string. “Your daughter could have filed battery charges, but she didn’t. Know why?” he said. “She don’t want to admit in a courtroom she cain’t handle a man’s attentions. They all got the same weakness. The big V. Vanity. Like the Bible says.”
I turned and walked out of the yard. “You cain’t touch me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he called at my back. “I’m floating outside your window like a hummingbird. I’ll always know where you and your family are at. But you won’t know where and when I might show up. Till one day I come peekaboo-ing by.”
I opened the door to my pickup and felt under the seat. The baton was an old one, the only souvenir I took with me when I was fired from the New Orleans Police Department. It was made of oak, knurled on the grip, lathe-troweled with three rings below the tip, drilled through the center and filled with a steel bolt, its black paint nicked, a leather thong threaded through the handle. In the old days, when Clete and I walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, a cop in trouble or chasing a perp would whang his baton on the pavement or a curb as a distress signal to other cops. There was no concrete in Vidor Perkins’s yard and no other cops in the vicinity. And no one else in his backyard except him and me. He had just fired an arrow at his target and didn’t hear me coming. I bent low when I swung the baton and caught him high up on the calf, right behind the knee. His mouth fell open and he dropped to the ground like a child genuflecting in church.
He breathed loudly through his mouth, as though his tongue had been scalded. Then he squeezed both hands behind his knee, his face splitting with a grin, his eyes closed in slits. “Oh, Lordy, that’s a mean stripe you lay on a man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. He let out a gleeful howl as though blowing a storm out of his chest. “I understand she’s your foster kid. I hear that opens up the parameters. I bet when she was eighteen, a man had to tie a board acrost his rear end not to fall in.”
I could feel my fingers finding new purchase on the baton’s handle, the leather thong looped loosely on my wrist bones. I could feel a vein of black electricity crawling through my arm into my shoulder, down my right side, and through my back and chest. He made me think of a medieval jester mocking his executioner as he knelt before the chopping block. I could feel my whole body becoming a torqued spring that would find release only when I whipped the baton across Perkins’s temple and watched his eyes go senseless and dead. The procedural explanation was already available. I wouldn’t even have to use a throwdown. He had committed a crime upon a child. I had tried to search him before hooking him up. He had whirled and gotten his hands on his archer’s bow. The blows I’d delivered were in self-defense and not intended to be fatal. As I had these thoughts, I saw Vidor Perkins’s time on earth coming to an end.
Then I heard the little black girl. She was standing at the back corner of the house, weeping and hiccuping, shaking uncontrollably, unable to deal with what she had witnessed. “It’s okay, Clara,” I said.
“You lose again, Mr. Robicheaux,” Perkins said.
“I guess you could say that.”
“I ain’t hurt that little girl. Down deep inside you know it.”
“‘Better they fasten millstones about their necks and cast themselves into the sea.’ Know where that comes from, Mr. Perkins?”
“Jesus was talking about the scribes and Pharisees that misled the innocent, not the likes of me. I ain’t mussed a hair on that girl’s head. No, sir.”
“I’ll be around.”
“Come back any time.”
I went inside his house and came back out with a camera I found on the kitchen table. I set it on the back step and smashed it into junk with my foot. Perkins had pulled himself up by holding on to the trunk of a pine tree. He continued to grip it, like a man on board a pitching ship. He gazed at a black cloud moving across the sun. “The devil is fixing to beat his wife,” he said. “When you were looking at my jacket, did you check my IQ? My grammar may not be too hot, but my IQ is higher than Robert’s. Down the road, you’ll see who walks away with the most marbles. It ain’t gonna be Robert Weingart or them Abelards, either.”
I drove the little girl to her house and walked her inside just as a shower of hailstones clattered on her roof and danced on the dirt yard.
CHAPTER 12
EARLY THE NEXT morning, I went into Helen’s office and told her of my visit to Vidor Perkins’s house.
“Go over that last part again,” she said.
“Which part?”
“About the baton.”
I did, describing in detail how I pulled it from under the seat of my vehicle and went after him, whipping one leg out from under him. While she listened, she held my gaze, her face impassive. She took an Altoid out of a box on her desk blotter and put it in her mouth. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“Because you need to know.”
“No, it’s because you think my office is a confessional.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s no maybe about it, Dave.”
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. I suspected she had reached that point in dealing with others when we finally accept people for what they are and stop contending with their character defects.
She sucked on the mint and pushed the box toward me. “You want me to bring him in?” she asked.
“My vote is we ignore him for the time being. He’s energized by attention. Leave him alone, and I think he’ll offer us a deal of some kind on Robert Weingart. My guess is they were buds in Huntsville, and now Weingart is an international celebrity, while Perkins gets treated like toe jam. I suspect Perkins is driven by greed and envy and resentment. I think he wants to make the big score at Weingart’s expense.”
“What is it we’re not talking about here, Dave?”
“Pardon?”
“For want of a better word,
“He doesn’t remember where he put it, and he doesn’t remember the last time he saw it. He says a number of
