“You wouldn’t bird-dog a fellow on Sunday morning, would you, Mr. Perkins?” I said.
“I was just taking a walk, not unlike yourself, Detective Robicheaux,” he said.
“You’re ten miles from your house, Mr. Perkins.”
“That’s true. But I love New Iberia’s downtown area. As long as you’re here, I’d like to ask you some questions regarding my book. I watched Miss Alafair at Mr. Abelard’s house through my field glasses yesterday.”
“You did what?”
“She was in no danger, sir. I had my eye on her the whole time she was there. If anything had happened, I would have called you right away. Or I might have taken action myself.”
“You’re spying on my daughter or the Abelards?”
“I’m not spying on nobody. I’m doing research on my book. But I have to admit I’ve taken a liking to you. Your daughter, too, yes, sir. You’re dealing with a dangerous bunch. You’re an educated and respectable man, so you see these people from the top down. I see them from the bottom up. I’m not sure what the bigger scheme is, but I know these people ain’t what they pretend to be. Robert Weingart thinks he’s got them outsmarted, but when they’re done with him, he’d best look out, that’s all I can say. What about you and me teaming up?”
“Say again?”
“We ain’t so different. You got a keen eye about people, Detective Robicheaux. You know the Abelards for what they are. Their kind wouldn’t spit in my mouth if I was dying of thirst in the Sahara. From what I hear, you grew up pretty much like I did. The Abelards and their ilk treat your folks pretty good?”
I gazed at the lunatical vacuity in his eyes and was convinced that whatever motives drove him, that whatever thoughts he actually had, that whatever his real life experience was, none of it would ever be known by anyone except God.
“Don’t follow me anymore, Mr. Perkins. If you do, I’ll have a cruiser pick you up,” I said.
“That downright hurts my feelings.”
“Call my business number if you need to. Or come by the office. Send me a postcard. But do not follow me or come near my house.”
“I been watching your back. Your daughter’s, too. Wake up and learn who your friends are. Maybe show a little humbleness and gratitude.”
I crossed the street and headed toward Clementine’s, hoping that an employee would be there and let me in and give me a cup of coffee and a beignet.
“Robert’s got two hundred thousand dollars stashed away. That’s the kind of money he’s siphoned off the deal they got going,” Perkins called after me.
I stopped and turned around again. I could see the drawbridge lifting in the fog, its girders beaded with moisture. “What deal?” I said.
“I don’t know. That’s why you and me got to team up. The weather is fixing to take a turn. The weatherman says a real frog stringer is about to blow in on us. I’d dress for it.”
“Get away from me,” I said.
I would find out later that my admonition had been neither wise nor fair.
WHEN I RETURNED home, Molly and Alafair were eating breakfast in the kitchen. Through the tree trunks and the gray-green shadows in our backyard, I could see the tidal flow of the bayou reversing itself, the surface undulating as though the current had been infused with a great cushion of air. I told Molly and Alafair that I was going to take a drive into Jeff Davis Parish and that I would be home after lunch.
“What for?” Molly said.
I didn’t want to explain, so I said, “I have to check out a couple of things about the Latiolais girl.”
“It’s Sunday. Why not do it on the clock?” Molly said.
“Helen is not a big fan of my investigating a homicide outside our jurisdiction.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“If you want,” I said, my gaze not meeting hers. “Look, I ran into Vidor Perkins on the street. I don’t think he intends us any harm. Evidently he’s convinced himself he’s an author. But I had Wally put a cruiser in front of the house until I get back.”
“What was he doing on East Main?” Alafair said.
“Following me.”
“Early Sunday morning?” she said.
“He’s a wack job. He says he was surveilling the Abelards’ compound yesterday and saw you there. But his agenda is with them and not us.”
“How do you know?” Molly asked.
“We don’t have anything he wants. I’ll be back in three hours.”
“Dave?” Molly said.
But I didn’t answer, in part because no matter how helpful Molly or Alafair wanted to be, I had to find an empty place in my head where I could see the detail I had missed, the image that had not recorded itself on my memory, the line of dialogue that had seemed inconsequential at the time, the finitely small symbol for the larger story that would explain the brutal murders of two innocent girls. Or maybe I would end up concluding that all my speculations were a vanity. Sometimes the clue is not there, or the case information is wrong, or somebody screwed up in the lab. But if Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais’s killer or killers went not caught or taken off the board in a more primitive fashion, it wouldn’t be because no one tried.
I took the old two-lane highway past Spanish Lake and turned onto I-10 in Lafayette and drove to Jennings, then down into the southern tip of the parish where the coastline dissolved into a marshy green haze and eventually became part of a saltwater bay. Just as I had placed Vidor Perkins into a much simpler category, one in which most miscreants have the wingspans of moths rather than pterodactyls, I tried to imagine the makeup of the person or persons who had murdered the two girls. I was sure that sex and misogyny were involved. But I was also sure that finance was as well. And when it came to the big score in Louisiana, from World War II to the present, what was the issue? Always? Without exception? I mean take-it-to-the-bank, lead-pipe cinch, what extractive opportunity in an instant created the sounds of little piggy feet stampeding for the trough?
How about oil? Its extraction and production in Louisiana had set us free from economic bondage to the agricultural oligarchy that had ruled the state from antebellum days well into the mid-twentieth century. But we discovered that our new corporate liege lord had a few warts on his face, too. Like the Great Whore of Babylon, Louisiana was always desirable for her beauty and not her virtue, and when her new corporate suitor plunged into things, he left his mark.
I didn’t revisit Bernadette’s grandmother; instead, I talked to people at a crossroads store, a bait shop, and a trailer settlement. Some of the damage done by Hurricane Rita was still visible: concrete foundations in empty fields, an automobile wedged upside down in a coulee, the wreckage of homes bulldozed in piles as high as small pyramids, and the tangled bones of livestock that had drowned by the tens of thousands, sometimes on rooftops or inside the second stories of farmhouses. But I was struck most by the riparian resilience of the land, the sawgrass that extended as far as the eye could see, the hummocks of gum and persimmon and hackberry and oak trees, the seagulls and brown pelicans that sailed over the mouth of a freshwater river flowing into the Gulf. In moments like these, I knew that Louisiana was still a magical place, not terribly different than it was when Jim Bowie and his business partner the pirate Jean Lafitte smuggled slaves illegally into the United States and kept them in a barracoon, somewhere close to the very spot I was standing on. If anyone doubts the history I’ve described, he can visit an island at the south end of this particular parish and perhaps find some of the skeletal remains for which it is known. The skulls and vertebrae and rib cages and femurs that have washed out of the sand belonged to a shipload of slaves abandoned by a blackbirder sea captain who left them to starve when he feared arrest. Louisiana is a poem, but as with the Homeric epic, it’s not good to examine its heroes too closely.
I parked my pickup at the end of the road and got out on the asphalt and looked southward. In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.
I could smell the salt out on the Gulf, the baitfish and shrimp in the waves, the warm and stagnant smell of
