“Which would mean they probably capped Stanga, huh? But why?”
“He knew too much. He’d dime them to save his own ass. He was disposable. He tried to extort them or to extort Layton. He should have brushed his teeth more often. Take your choice.”
“So I was bopping a switch-hitter who was setting me up to ride the needle for the woman she was banging? I’ve been taken over the hurdles a few times, but I don’t know if I can handle this.”
“Don’t fault yourself because you believe in people, Clete.”
“Right,” he said, his eyes looking at nothing. “I went to Morgan City and checked out this guy Andy Swan. He was telling the truth about working for a security service. But he didn’t arrive three days ago. He’s been around Morgan City at least three weeks. He could have been one of the guys who tried to pop you. You’re going to give that ligature I found in the Dumpster to the crime lab?”
“In the morning. But it’s out of context, Cletus.”
“Who cares? It’s evidence we didn’t have before.” Clete waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, his gaze fixed on my face. “You’re thinking about Alafair?”
“Of course I am. Helen blew it.”
“Look, Dave, Helen is right about one thing. Because the Blanchet woman knows Alafair found out about her affair with Emma doesn’t mean she’s going to put a hit on her. Sometimes we got to keep things in perspective.”
“Their building is burning down and they know it. That’s why Robert Weingart was transferring his money to a bank in Canada. You put scorpions in a box and shake it up, they sting everything in sight.”
“All right, let’s talk about Weingart a minute. What’s his involvement with Carolyn Blanchet? It’s biofuels, it’s Herman Stanga, it’s the Abelards, it’s what?”
“It’s all of what you just said. I just don’t know how it fits together.”
“Big mon, we’re not going to let anything happen to Alafair. You’re not giving her credit, either. Didn’t you say she had an IQ of 180 or something?”
“No, her IQ isn’t measurable. It’s off the scale.”
“It’s not genetic, either.”
“That’s supposed to be funny?”
The shadows were deepening inside the trees, and lights were going on in the houses high up on the slopes along the bayou. I heard the cogged wheels under the drawbridge clank together and saw the bridge separate in the center and rise into the air. I could see the running lights on a large boat coming out of the gloom, and I thought I heard a hissing sound like steam escaping a valve cover and water cascading behind the stern. The sunset had created a gold ribbon down the middle of the current. Against the silhouette of the uplifted bridge, I saw the bow and pilothouse of the boat nearing us, and black men working on the deck and a bearded skipper in a blue cap behind the wheel, a cob pipe clenched in his teeth. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrists, as though I were fatigued. Clete looked down the bayou, then back at me. “You okay?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied.
“Want to try and catch Andy Swan before he leaves town? I mean, since we now know he could have been one of the guys at the shoot-out.”
“He wasn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because the guys at the river weren’t state employees who work on execution teams.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Go after the guy whose age and infirmities have been giving him a free pass too long.”
I could see the connection come together in Clete’s eyes. “I’m not that keen on the idea,” he said.
“It was old men who sent us to war,” I said.
COCKROACHES DON’T LIKE sunlight. Despots and demagogues do not make appearances in environments they do not control. Elitists join clubs whose attraction is based not on their membership but on the types of people they are known to exclude. It wasn’t hard to find out where Timothy Abelard would probably be on Friday night of that particular week. I read an article in the Lafayette newspaper and called a couple of patriotic organizations and a congressional office and was told, in one instance, “Why, yes, Mr. Abelard wouldn’t miss this event for the world.” The “event” that seemed of such global importance was a fund-raiser to be held at seven P.M. at Lafayette’s Derrick and Preservation Club in the old Oil Center.
Clete and I dressed for the occasion. The waiters at the club were all white-jacketed middle-aged black men who could not be called obsequious but belonged culturally to another generation, one that knew how to be selectively deaf and to pretend that the clientele they served held them in high regard. The linen-covered buffet tables were lit by candles and sparkled with crystal glasses and silver bowls. The food was sumptuous, the quality you would expect at Antoine’s or Galatoire’s in New Orleans. The guest speaker was a retired army general who had helped subvert the democratically elected government in Chile and replace it with Augusto Pinochet, who turned the country into a giant torture chamber. He was also a practicing Catholic. When four American Catholic missionaries were raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers, he said at a news conference that maybe the victims had “tried to run a roadblock.”
The guests at the banquet and fund-raiser were an extraordinary group. Batistianos from Miami were there, as well as friends of Anastasio Somoza. The locals, if they could be called that, were a breed unto themselves. They were porcine and sleek and combed and brushed, and they jingled when they walked. Their accents were of that peculiar southern strain that is not Acadian nor influenced by what is called Tidewater or plantation English or the Scotch-Irish dialectical speech of the southern mountains. It’s an accent that seems to reflect a state of mind rather than a region. The vowels somehow get lost in the back of the throat or squeeze themselves through the nasal passages. The term “honky,” used by racist blacks, may be more accurate than we like to think. But their innocence is of a kind you cannot get angry at. They are not less brave than others, nor more sinful, nor lacking in the virtues we collectively admire. You just have the feeling when you are in their midst that all of them fear they are about to be found out, unmasked somehow, revealing God only knows what, because I am convinced their psychological makeup is a mystery even unto themselves.
Clete and I arrived early and went out to the parking lot, wondering if by chance a vehicle from the shoot-out on the river might show up. We wrote down perhaps a dozen license numbers, but we were firing in the well and knew it.
The decals in the windows left little doubt about the environmental and geopolitical convictions of the vehicles’ owners. They ranged from the flag wrapped around the beams of a Christian cross to a child urinating on “all Muslims and liberals” and an image of a bird falling from the blast of a shotgun, under which were the words “If it flies, it dies.” But these were the visual expressions of people who got up each morning trying to define who they were. The men at the shoot-out were pros who did not attract attention to themselves or serve perverse abstractions created for them by others. The men at the river had no quarrel with either the mercenary nature of their mission or the black flag under which they carried out their deeds. If you have ever met them, you are already aware they share a commonality that never varies: There is no light in their eyes. Search for it as long as you wish; you will not find it. And maybe that is why they are so good at not leaving behind any trace of themselves. Whatever they once were has long since disappeared from their lives.
It was breezy in the parking lot, and the oak trees that stood on the boulevard and in the Oil Center itself made a sweeping sound in the wind, their branches and leaves changing shape and color in the glow of the streetlamps. Clete stared at the southern sky and the flickers of lightning over the Gulf, his eyes like hard green marbles, his face taut. “It’s going to blow,” he said.
“It’s that time of year,” I said.
“I got a funny feeling.”
“It’s just a squall. It won’t be real hurricane season till mid-summer.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I saw something in your face when we were talking in City Park, on the bayou there.”
“Saw what?” I asked, avoiding his gaze.
“You were looking at something down the bayou. By the drawbridge. You rubbed your eyes like you were tired, but you were hiding something from me. There wasn’t anything down the bayou except the bridge. I looked, and there wasn’t anything there.”
