“She’s lucky that’s all I did.”
“You didn’t get a good look at the person going out the back door?”
“No, but I saw the boat. It looked like the one Kermit owns. I can’t be sure. When I saw his novel on her table, I thought maybe Kermit had left it. Except the inscription is to a tennis player named Carolyn. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Yeah, it does. Carolyn Blanchet, Layton Blanchet’s widow. She played on the tennis team at LSU. I think she’s still the seventh-ranked doubles amateur in the state.”
“Layton Blanchet, that guy who was running a Ponzi scheme of some kind? He shot himself at his camp?”
“I think Layton was probably murdered.”
“You think Carolyn Blanchet is involved with Emma Poche? That maybe she was the one who went out the back door?”
“It’s possible.”
“Like maybe they’re getting it on?”
“Could be. A lot of things about Emma would start to make sense.”
I set a plate of eggs and two strips of bacon in front of Alafair. She had been frowning, but now her expression was clear, her hands resting on top of the table, her long fingers slightly curled, her fingernails as pink as seashells. “I thought maybe-”
“That Kermit was Emma’s lover?”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t what bothered me. I thought maybe he was involved with something really dark. With killing Herman Stanga or setting up Clete. But it wasn’t Kermit who went out Emma’s back door, was it?”
“I’m not sure about anything when it comes to the Abelards,” I replied. “Their kind have been dictators in our midst for generations and admired for it. They created a culture in which sycophancy became a Christian virtue.”
But she was staring out the window, not listening to abstractions, her food growing cold. “No, it wasn’t Kermit. I’m sure of it now. My imagination was running overtime. Are you mad at me for going after Emma Poche?”
“I’ve never been mad at you for any reason, Alafair.”
“Never?”
“Not once.”
“Drink a cup of coffee with me.”
“You want to tell me something else?”
“No,” she said. “Look at Tripod. He just climbed up in the tree. He hasn’t done that in weeks. Don’t you love our home? I don’t know any place I would rather wake up in the morning.”
I COULDN’T CATCH Helen Soileau until she came out of an administrative meeting with the mayor after eleven A.M. I followed her into her office, but before I could speak, she gave me the results of her attempt to confirm my account about the shoot-out on the river in Jeff Davis Parish.
“Within the time frame we’re using, no hospital in the state has reported a gunshot wound that matches your description of the one you think you inflicted on the man by the river,” she said. “Nor has there been a report on any dumped bodies that would match those of Vidor Perkins or the guy you think caught a forty-five round through the lungs. No airports anywhere between Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans know anything about a crop duster flying around during the storm, either.”
“Crop dusters don’t need airports. They land in farm pastures every day. And I don’t
“Does bwana want to be clever, or does bwana want to hear what I’ve found?”
“Sorry.”
“The locals found some bloody rags on the side of the road. There was a piece of flesh with part of a fingernail on it inside one of the rags.”
“Enough to get a print?”
“No. But enough to run a DNA search through the national database. So far we still don’t know who these guys are or where they’re from or who they work for. Timothy Abelard probably did business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. You don’t think they’re part of Didi Gee’s old crowd?”
“No, these guys were too sophisticated.”
“The Mob isn’t up to the challenge? They kidnapped Jimmy Hoffa in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon in front of a Detroit restaurant, and to this day no one has ever been in custody for it and no one has any idea where his body is. You think the guys who pulled that off were kitchen helpers in an Italian restaurant?”
“These guys were military.”
“You know that?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“How?”
“They never spoke. They didn’t have any visible jewelry. They wore the same hooded raincoats, like a uniform, so their enemy could not distinguish one of them from the other, so their impersonality would make them seem even more dangerous and formidable. ‘Black ops’ isn’t an arbitrary term and has more than one connotation.”
She ticked her nails on her desk blotter. “I hope you’re wrong. We hardly have the resources to send our local morons to Angola. What’d you come in here to tell me?”
“Emma Poche called me up when she was loaded and told me I was in danger.”
“From?”
“I asked her that. She told me how dumb I was.”
“What else?”
“Alafair went to Emma’s house last night and confronted her.”
“To what degree do you mean ‘confronted’?”
“She slapped her. She also caught her with a lover. Maybe the lover is Carolyn Blanchet.”
I saw a glint catch in Helen’s eye like a sliver of flint. Then I remembered that she and Carolyn Blanchet had been at LSU at the same time, that something had happened involving a friend of Helen. Rejection by a sorority because of the friend’s sexual orientation? I couldn’t remember.
“Run that by me again,” Helen said.
“Somebody was in Emma’s house when Alafair was at the front door. Emma was delivering a litany of grief about her mistreatment at this person’s hands. But whoever it was left through the back without Alafair seeing him or her. Alafair said a copy of Kermit Abelard’s last novel was on the coffee table. It was inscribed to someone named Carolyn.”
“That doesn’t make it Carolyn Blanchet’s.”
“The inscription indicated this particular Carolyn was a champion tennis player and a longtime supporter of Kermit’s work. Carolyn once told me she was a big fan of Kermit’s books. I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think we’ve been looking in the wrong place.”
I had lost her attention. “That slut,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You and I need to take a ride.”
“I can handle it, Helen.”
“What you can do is get on the phone and tell Ms. Blanchet we’re on our way to her house and her prissy twat had better be there when we arrive.”
WHEN CLETE PURCEL was a patrolman in New Orleans and, later, a detective-grade plainclothes, he had been feared by the Mob as well as the hapless army of miscreants who dwelled like slugs on the underside of the city. But their fear of Clete had less to do with his potential for violence than the fact that he did not obey rules or recognize traditional protocol. More important, he seemed indifferent to his own fate. He was not simply the elephant in the clock shop. He was the trickster of folk legend, the psychedelic merry prankster, Sancho Panza stumbling out of the pages of Cervantes, willing to create scenes and situations in public that were so outrageous, pimps and porn actors and street dips who robbed church boxes were embarrassed by them. Whenever I hesitated, his admonition was always the same: “You got to take it to them with tongs, big mon. You got to spit in the lion’s mouth. Two thirds of these guys never completed toilet training. Come on, this is fun.”
