sling just turned around. He knows who we are. He was on the river. We need to get this guy in the box.”
In his own mind, Clete was still a cop. His mistakes at NOPD, his flight from the country on a murder beef, the security work he did for the Mob in Vegas and Reno, his history of addiction and vigilantism and involvement with biker girls and junkie strippers and street skells of every stripe all seemed to disappear from his memory, as though the justice of his cause were absolution enough and his misdeeds were simply burnt offerings that should not be held against him.
But he was not alone in his naivete. I was out of my jurisdiction, my judgment suspect, my behavior perhaps driven more by obsession than by dedication. I was a neocolonial who had walked in the footprints of German- speaking French legionnaires and whose mark was as transient as tracks blowing in a Mesopotamian desert. My life, as Clete’s, was a folly in the eyes of others. And here we were, the court jesters of Acadiana, with neither evidence nor personal cachet, about to take on forces that our peers found not only normal but even laudable.
I went into the men’s room and used my cell phone to call a detective-grade cop in the Lafayette Police Department by the name of Bertrand Viator. “I’m at the Derrick and Preservation Club,” I said. “There’s a guy here who might be a suspect in a homicide in Jeff Davis Parish.”
“I’m not up on this,” Bertrand said. “What homicide are we talking about?”
“It’s kind of complicated. I saw the homicide. Nobody else did.”
The line was silent. Then my friend evidently chose not to attempt working through what I had just told him. “What do you need, Streak?”
“Can you get me some backup? I don’t have a warrant, and I’m out of my jurisdiction.”
“What’s the name of the suspect?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you want to bring him in?”
“I’m not sure. The guy is sitting at a table with Timothy Abelard. I’m going to have a talk with Abelard and a couple of his friends. I’d like to have a degree of legal authority behind me when I do it.”
“You’re by yourself?”
“Clete Purcel is with me.”
There was another pause. “Sorry, I can’t help on this, Dave.”
“Want to tell me why?” I asked.
“I don’t fault Purcel for being his own man. I just don’t want to take his fall. You might give that some thought.”
When I got back to the banquet room, the general was finishing his speech. The audience rose and applauded, then applauded some more. Through the crowd I saw Timothy Abelard looking at me, his face lit with goodwill, two fingers raised in a wave.
“Where’ve you been?” I heard Clete say.
“Trying to get us some backup.”
“No dice?”
“They’ve got their own problems,” I said.
I felt his eyes examining my face. “They gave you some flak about something?”
“We don’t need pencil pushers.”
Clete turned his attention back to Timothy Abelard and the man with the bandaged hand. “What do you want to do?”
“Wait till it thins out,” I replied.
“Then what?”
I touched a manila envelope that I had rolled into a cone and stuck in my coat pocket. “We give them a look at some unpleasant realities they won’t find in a family newspaper,” I said.
But the Abelards and their retinue did not wait for the party to end. Without fanfare, Jewel pushed Timothy Abelard in his wheelchair down a corridor toward an exit, and the other people from the table followed, the man with the injured hand glancing back once over his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Clete swallowed the bourbon-stained ice melt in the bottom of his glass, his cheeks blooming. We walked out into the parking lot, no more than thirty feet behind the Abelard party, the oak trees swelling with wind against the glow of the streetlamps. “Excuse me,” I called out.
But no one among the Abelard party chose to hear me.
“I’d like to have a word with you, Mr. Timothy,” I said. “It’s a matter that concerns your grandson and possibly one of your friends here.”
He raised his hand, signaling everyone around him to stop. I walked to a spot between the wheelchair and an enormous SUV that he and the others had been preparing to enter. His bronze-tinted hair was blowing on his pate, dry and loose, like a baby’s. When he turned his face up at me, I thought of a tiny bird.
“You’re a ubiquitous presence, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “You pop up like a jack-in-the-box. I didn’t realize you were an admirer of my friend the general.”
“I’m not.”
“So our meeting here is more than coincidental? Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. As I recall, your father was a persistent man. He could lay them flat out, couldn’t he? What is it about my grandson or my friends that has you so concerned?”
I looked at the man whose hand was wrapped in a wad of gauze and tape as big as a boxing glove. His face was as taut as latex, his eyes liquid with resentment, a scar like a piece of white string cupped on the rim of one nostril. The man with the oiled black hair had turned at an angle toward me, his coat open and pushed back loosely, his nose thinner than it should have been, as though it had been destroyed by disease of some kind and reconstructed by an inept plastic surgeon.
“Your man with his arm in the sling, is he missing some fingers?” I asked Abelard.
“Not to my knowledge. He slammed a door on his hand.”
“No, I think I shot him. I think I blew his fingers all over a tree. I suspect he’s still in considerable pain,” I said. Then I laughed. “I also killed one of his friends.”
“You must tell us about this sometime. But right now we need to be going. Good night to you,” Abelard said.
“No, I’d like for you to glance at a few photos,” I said, pulling the manila folder from my coat pocket and opening it in front of him so it caught the light. “That first shot was taken at an exhumation by the Iberia-St. Martin Parish line. Her name was Fern Michot. She was from British Columbia and eighteen years old at the time of her death. Here, this other shot shows her in her Girl Scout uniform when she was sixteen. It gives you a better idea what she looked like. There was a lot of water and decaying garbage in the grave where her killer dumped her.
“This other girl is Bernadette Latiolais. The knife cut across her throat almost decapitated her, which caused her to bleed out and the muscles in her face to collapse, so it’s probably pretty hard to recognize her. Does she look familiar to you? Kermit says he knew her, so I’ll bet he remembers how beautiful and happy she was before a degenerate and sadist kidnapped and murdered her.”
“What Mr. Robicheaux is trying to say is the girl received a scholarship we created at UL, Pa’pere,” Kermit said. “I might have met her at an honors ceremony, but I didn’t know her. Mr. Robicheaux is still resentful because of my breakup with Alafair.”
“Is that true, Mr. Robicheaux? You resent my grandson?” Abelard said.
“No, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Kermit,” I said. “Here, look at these close-up photos of the ligature marks on Fern Michot’s wrists and ankles. She may have died from asphyxiation, or she may have been frightened to death. In your opinion, what kind of man or men would do this to a young girl, Mr. Timothy? You have any speculations?”
“Yes, I do. I think you should seek counseling,” he replied.
“Did you know these girls, Mr. Abelard? Have you ever seen them?”
“No, I haven’t. And I hope that settles the matter for you.”
“You think you can act like this to an elderly gentleman? Who are you?” the man with the mustache said to me.
