people may have had access to it, including Layton Blanchet. Also, a number of women have been visitors at his cottage.”
“Like which women?”
I had to wonder for a second if Helen’s curiosity went beyond the professional. Years ago she and Clete had become involved romantically and had crossed lines in ways that surprised even them.
“The only one he mentioned was Emma Poche,” I replied.
“From NOPD?”
“She’s a deputy in St. Martin Parish now. What do you know about her?”
“Not much. As I recall, she had a history as a boozer.” Her eyes slipped off mine, and I knew there was something she wasn’t saying.
“What else do you know about her?” I asked.
“She sleeps around. Or she used to. Let’s talk about the gold pen.”
“Somebody planted it on Stanga’s property. You know it, Helen, and so do I. Drunk or not, Clete Purcel wouldn’t shoot down an unarmed man, even one he hated.”
“That might be true, but Clete invites chaos and self-destruction into his life at every turn. In this case, he’s making us do his enemies’ dirty work. I don’t want to be part of the script any longer.”
“I can’t blame you.”
She got up from her desk. Her windowsill was lined with potted flowers. A motorized houseboat was passing on the bayou, its deck dotted with people from a movie company who were looking for sites they could use in their film production. Helen leaned on the windowsill and gazed at the boat, her back as hard-looking as iron against her shirt. “That’s what we should all be doing,” she said. “Having fun, enjoying our lives, riding on a boat with people we like. How’d we let dope and pimps and degenerates get into our communities?”
“They’ve always been here,” I said. “They come out of the woodwork when they have sanction.”
“My ass,” she said.
You’re wrong, I thought. But I didn’t say it.
“You want to add something?” she asked.
“Nope.”
Then Helen made one of those remarks that always atomized my defenses and left me feeling that maybe I’d done something right: “You think you’re tough-minded, bwana, but your heart gets in your way. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”
I WENT BACK to my office and stared at my file cabinet where the crime-scene and coroner’s photographs of Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais were tucked inside case folders. My file cabinet did not function simply as a place where I put things. In this instance, the sightless eyes and decomposed features of two homicide victims had disappeared from my view and were pressed between departmental forms and Xeroxes from the authorities in Jeff Davis Parish and fax and Internet printouts from Baton Rouge and time logs and sheets of lined paper torn from my notebook and legal pad. And all of it was encased in a rectangle of darkness bordered by the metal drawer and the shell of the file cabinet, not unlike the contents inside the sliding refrigerated tray used in a mortuary storage area, all of it safely sequestered, the degree of the victims’ suffering placed in abeyance, so I would not have to reflect upon what the world had done to them.
But I could hear their voices, even though I had never known either girl. Their killers (I was convinced now that more than one individual was involved) did not understand that the dead find a conduit into the minds of the living, particularly when they have been robbed of their lives and all the promise and happiness that had awaited them. When Bernadette’s executioners wired her body to chunks of concrete and sank her in a pond, and shoveled dirt into the eyes and mouth and over the brow and hair of Fern Michot, they had not appreciated the enormity of the theft they had just committed. I do not believe the rage the dead experience can be contained by the grave. How many people can understand what it means for an eighteen-year-old girl to be in love, to wake every morning and feel that something extraordinary and beautiful is about to happen on that particular day? How many understand the joy a young girl experiences when she is kissed on the mouth and eyes by a man who loves her, or the sensual pleasure of dancing barefoot on a lawn at an open-air concert, throwing her rump around in an innocent celebration of her sexuality, to see her own skin glow in the mirror, to see her breasts swell, and to hear her heart’s blood race when she says the man’s name in the silence of her bedroom?
How can all of that be ripped loose from a young woman’s chest in moments, unexpectedly, through guile and treachery, without a psychic scream leaving the soul, a scream that is so loud it wraps itself around the world?
I closed the blinds on my windows and my office door and clicked off the overhead lighting and sat in the air- conditioned gloom, my arms motionless on top of my desk blotter. What were the two girls trying to tell me?
But I knew, in the way that all fathers who raise a teenage girl know. At a juncture in their lives, Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot had trusted a man they thought was special. He was probably handsome, older, better educated than they, and wise in the ways of the world. He was confident and reassuring and seemed to dismiss or solve problems in a magical fashion. At some point in their association with him, he had performed an act, seemingly unknown to himself, that was both kind and strong. After that moment, they made a compact with themselves and decided he was the one to whom they would give their entire heart and soul.
Who was the man who fit all the criteria? I saw his face float in front of me like a chimera painted on air. I saw the slyness in his eyes, the plastic surgery that had tugged his flesh back placidly on the bone, the lips that were slightly puckered to hide the smirk flickering on his cheek.
I had to blink to make sure I was not actually looking into Robert Weingart’s face. Unconsciously, I brushed my right hand against the checkered grips of my holstered.45. I lifted my hand back onto the desk, like a child in puberty obsessed with concerns about impure thoughts and touches.
I jerked open the blinds and did not let myself dwell upon the choices that I was making already, my hand clenching and unclenching at my side.
OVER THE YEARS, I had come to believe that almost all homicides, to one degree or another, are premeditated. A man who enters a convenience store with a loaded pistol has already made a decision about its possible use. A person who commits an abduction, knowing nothing about the victim’s heart condition or that of the victim’s loved ones, has already decided on the side of self-interest and is not worried about the fate of others. Even a man in a barroom fight, when he continues to kick a downed opponent trapped on the floor, knows exactly what he is doing.
In my view, there is an explicit motivation in almost every homicide, even one committed in apparent blind rage. Was the motivation in the death of the two girls sexual? Possibly, but I doubted it. Robert Weingart was in the mix, and I believed the Abelards were, too, and possibly even Layton Blanchet. Sex was not a primary issue in their lives. Money was. When it comes to money, power and sex are secondary issues. Money buys both of them, always.
But what was to be gained financially by the deaths of two innocent girls? Perhaps the answer lay in what I considered a long tradition among people like the Abelards. Historically, they had acquired their wealth off the backs and sweat of others. Nor, when push came to shove, were they above the use of the lash and branding iron and selling off families to different parts of the country. In their journey from the role of newly arrived colonials escaping from Old World despots to a time when they themselves became slave owners, they managed to do considerable damage to the earth as well, burning out the soil by not rotating crops and turning old-growth forests into stump farms.
But how could two teenage girls with no apparent agenda, from poor families, be an obstruction in someone’s monetary scheme to the extent that their lives would become forfeit? It made little sense. I suspected the answer lay in the obvious, perhaps a detail I had missed or already passed over. As an addendum to this reflection, the word “motivation” suggests complexity that is often not there. Ask any detective who has heard the confession of a murderer. When the killer finally explains his rationale for committing the worst act of which human beings are capable, the speciousness and absurdity of his thinking is of such a mind-numbing magnitude that the detective’s response is usually one of silence and blank-faced disbelief. Fortunately, he often has a legal pad and felt pen close by, almost like stage props that he can slide across the table to the suspect while he says, simply and quietly, “Write it down.”
At 11:23 A.M., Helen opened my office door without knocking. “Layton Blanchet and his wife just T-boned a
