wind and rain blow in my face. I breathed in the damp cleanness of the air and the smell of fish spawn and humus and wet trees back in the swamp. None of it cost five cents, and that was a thought I hoped to keep in the forefront of my mind as long as I lived.
SOMETIMES IN POLICE work you get an undeserved break. Or the bad guys do something that’s really dumb. Or the bad guys turn out to be more deranged than you thought they were. The day after Layton Blanchet’s death, our dispatcher buzzed my extension. “There’s a guy out here to see you,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
Wally, our three-hundred-pound hypertensive dispatcher, was known as the department’s comedian and professional cynic. Essentially he was a good soul, but he invested most of his energy in trying to convince people otherwise. “He won’t give his name. He says he’ll only talk to you.”
“What’s he look like?”
He thought about it. “I’d say he looks like the bore brush you run through a gun barrel. He’s also got a birthmark running out of his hair down the back of his neck, like maybe a bird with the red shits sat on his head.”
“What’s this fellow doing now?”
“Eating a Big Mac and drinking a soda and wiping his mout’ on the paper towels he got out of our can.”
“Get a deputy to escort him up here. Also tell Helen that Mr. Vidor Perkins is in the building.”
Then Wally said something that was unusual even for him. “Dave, who is this guy?”
“The real deal, Wally.”
When Vidor Perkins sat down in front of my desk, he was holding a clipboard in one hand and a ballpoint in the other, his idiot’s grin firmly in place. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “Let me explain the purpose of my visit.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“I’m writing my own book. Folks have always tole me I have a flair for it.”
“That’s interesting. How can I help you with that?”
Aside from their moral vacuity, Perkins’s eyes had another abiding and singular characteristic: The pupils seem to remain the size of pinheads, regardless of where he was. I remembered something Elmore Latiolais had said when I interviewed him on the prison work gang in Mississippi: “There’s no money in selling cooze no more. Herman Stanga is into meth.”
“Where were you educated, Mr. Robicheaux?” Perkins asked, crossing his legs at the knee, his expression anticipatory, respectful, his pen poised over his clipboard.
“I don’t think my background will be of great interest to your readership.”
“Don’t underestimate either yourself or my book. This is gonna be a humdinger of a story. I’ll let you in on a secret. Rob Weingart’s book got wrote mostly by his female attorney. Mine is gonna be written by my own hand, without no he’p from people who have no idea how things really work.”
I looked at his eyes and the manic way he smiled and the twitches under his facial skin, and I had little doubt that Vidor Perkins not only had an addiction but that it had moved into overdrive. “Something happen between you and Weingart?” I said.
“I wouldn’t say exactly between me and him. More like between me and that nasty old man.”
“Mr. Abelard?”
“He tole Rob he don’t need the likes of me hanging around his island. I bet you think that’s ’cause of my prior troubles with the law.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Over his shoulder, I saw Helen look through the glass in my office door. Then her face went away.
“It don’t have anything to do with my history. It’s because of the class of people I come from. In Mr. Abelard’s mind, I’m po’ white trash from a tenant farm in north Alabama. It’s in my diction and my frame of reference. For a man like Mr. Abelard, those things are worse than the mark of Cain. It ain’t much different here’bouts, is it?”
“I have no idea what goes on in Mr. Abelard’s mind.”
“Let me set y’all straight on a couple of things. I never intentionally harmed a person in my whole life.”
“Your sheet seems to indicate otherwise.”
He nodded as though agreeing with me. “When we lived in the projects, I took Social Security checks from some old people’s mailboxes. But it was two other boys done the beating up on them, not me. And I got a lot of gone between me and them boys later on.”
“You were also arrested in an arson that killed three people. One of them was a child.”
“No, sir, I had nothing to do with that fire. I knew who did, but I kept my mouth shut. That wasn’t easy for a boy who was fifteen years old and getting hit upside the head with the Birmingham telephone directory.”
“Why are you here, Mr. Perkins?”
As he gazed around my office, his pale blue eyes shone with the self-satisfied pleasure of a man who knew that he was one of the very few who understood the complexity of the world. “You think I’m trying to fool you about my book. I called a literary agent. Man from the William Morris Agency. Same man your daughter had dinner with when he was visiting here. He said soon as I’m done to fire off my manuscript to him. What do you think about that? Your daughter and me might end up colleagues.”
“That last part isn’t going to happen.”
“Maybe not. But I know a bunch of people that’s going down. And I’m gonna put it all in my book. I’ll give you a little tidbit here, Mr. Robicheaux. About twenty years back, Kermit Abelard’s parents disappeared from their yacht out in the Bermuda Triangle, didn’t they?”
“The story is they were lost in a storm off Bimini.”
“‘Story’ is the word. That nasty old man who don’t want me on his island was doing business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. Their business was running weed and coke into Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Mr. Abelard didn’t pay his tab with the dagos, and the dagos had both his son and his daughter-in-law wrapped with chains and sunk in about sixty feet of water.”
“Was Weingart mixed up with this?”
“Ask him, or read my book when it comes out. Now, tell me a little bit about your education and service record and war experiences, if you’ve had any. Stuff I can kind of soup up the description with.”
“Who killed the Canadian girl and Bernadette Latiolais, Mr. Perkins?”
He gazed earnestly into space. “I’m a blank on that one.”
“I just noticed the time. I’m sorry, I have an appointment. Here’s my business card. Give me a call whenever you want.”
He pointed a finger at me playfully. “You know what, you’re not a bad fella.”
After he was gone, I opened the windows, then went down to Helen’s office and told her what had happened. “You think he’s just nuts?” she said.
“I think he’s a psychopath and typical white trash who hates people like the Abelards. I think he wants to hang Robert Weingart out to dry as well.”
She massaged her upper arm, a tinge of fatigue in her face. “You think Perkins killed the girls?”
“Maybe.”
“For what motive?”
“A guy like that doesn’t need one,” I replied.
“You see the newspaper this morning?”
“No.”
“Layton Blanchet’s death is being called a suicide.”
“Well, it’s bullshit.”
“Cut loose of it, bwana. We have only one homicide to concentrate on in our jurisdiction-the murder of the Canadian girl, Fern Michot.”
“Everything we’ve talked about is part of one package. You know it, and so do I,” I replied.
“Yeah, I do, but our limitations are our limitations. That’s the way it is.”
I started to speak, but she went back to her paperwork and didn’t look up again until I was outside her door.
