“Stay out of it, buddy,” Clete said.
“Where is your identification? Where is your authority to do this?”
“Here’s mine,” Clete said, opening his badge holder. “Dave Robicheaux is a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. If you want to find yourself in handcuffs and sitting on the curb over there, open your mouth one more time.”
“It’s all right, Emiliano,” Abelard said.
“No, it is not all right,” Emiliano said. “Who are these crazy people? This is the United States.”
I don’t know if it was the booze, or Clete’s hypertension, or the angst over the lifetime of damage he had done to his career and himself, but it was obvious that once again we were about to give up the high ground and load the cannon for our enemies. “You just don’t listen, do you, greaseball?” Clete said.
“I have a son at West Point. I have another son who graduated from the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. You will not address me that way.”
Then I heard the voice of someone I had completely forgotten about. It was soft, almost a whisper, humble and deferential, the voice of someone who had been taught for a lifetime that her interests were secondary to those of other people. “Mr. Timothy?”
“What it is, Jewel?” Abelard answered, looking up at the woman who was both his nurse and his daughter.
“Mr. Timothy?”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Timothy?”
“Will you please say it?”
“Please, suh,” she said, her eyes glistening.
“You’re not making any sense, woman,” Abelard said. “To damnation with all of you. Get us out of here. I’m sick of this.”
There was nothing for it. We had taken on the roles of anachronisms making shrill noises on a stage set in front of an empty theater. We all stood motionless in the parking lot, the trees swelling and bending, our shadows trembling on the asphalt because the streetlamps were vibrating in the wind, none of us speaking, the photos of the dead girls clenched in my hand. But before leaving, I wanted to write my signature on someone’s forehead, if for no other reason than pride.
“What’s your name?” I said to the man with the bandaged hand.
“Gus,” he replied.
“Gus what?”
“Fowler.”
“You don’t hide your feelings very well, Mr. Fowler. You were one of the dudes down at the river. You’re also a nickel-and-dime fuckup who probably couldn’t burn shit barrels without a diagram. Here’s your flash for the day: Your mutilated hand was a first installment. I’ll be talking to you down the track.” I gave him the thumbs-up sign and winked at him.
Then Clete and I drove away in his Caddy, down old Pinhook Road under a canopy of live oaks that had been planted by slaves, the moon racing through the branches. Clete was steering recklessly with one hand, his big chest rising and falling, his face white around the eyes. “We gave it up too soon,” he said. “You had the old man in a corner. Why’d you let up?”
I remained silent, listening to the tires whirring on the asphalt.
“Don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“What you’re doing. Don’t stonewall me, Dave.”
“The tent was burning down.”
“Because I called the guy a greaseball?”
“The cops in Jeff Davis found skin tissue and bloody rags on the road by the shoot-out. We’re going to get a DNA sample from this guy Fowler. If we’d gotten into it with either him or the Hispanic guy, we’d have been in custody ourselves.”
“Fowler will be on a plane by midnight.”
Maybe Clete was right, but I was too tired to care. All I wanted to do was go home and fall asleep and not think anymore about the Abelards and the faces of the girls whose photos were rolled inside the manila folder in my coat pocket. I understood Clete’s disappointment and anger, but I wasn’t up to dealing with it. The system shaves the dice on the side of those with money and power, and anyone who believes otherwise deserves anything that happens to him. We weren’t going to bring the Abelards down with physical force or intimidation. I was beginning to believe that the photos of the dead girls and all my case notes and faxes and autopsy forms and Internet printouts would eventually find their way into a cold-case file and end up behind a locked door in a storage room, one that nobody entered without a sense of guilt and failure.
I had no idea I would receive a phone call from someone whose importance in the investigation I had treated in a cavalier fashion, maybe because of a racial or cultural bias of my own. In the era in which I was raised, people of color never gave up the secrets of their white employers. Their silence had nothing to do with loyalty, either. It was based on fear.
Early Sunday morning I heard the phone ring and Alafair pick up in the kitchen. “You’re where? I’m sorry, I can’t hear you very well,” she said. “My father is right here. I’m sure he’ll be able to help. No, it’s not too early. It’s good to hear from you. Hang on.”
She handed the receiver to me and silently formed the words “Miss Jewel” with her mouth.
CHAPTER 21
THE TREMOLO IN Jewel’s voice was of the subdued kind that I always associated with people whose sleeplessness and worry and uncertainty had left them on a desolate beach. “I don’t want to be saying these t’ings, Mr. Dave, but when you showed us those pictures, I got sick inside, and I was hoping everyt’ing would get set straight then and there, but it didn’t, and that’s why I’m calling you.”
“Set straight where?” I said.
“There, outside the banquet room in the Oil Center. Wit’ the wind blowing and the shadows trembling on the concrete and all of us just standing there when that lie got tole.”
“Which lie?”
“I was looking down at those girls’ faces in the photographs when Mr. Timothy said what he said, and I didn’t believe that it was him talking, ’cause Mr. Timothy has got lots of faults, but lying isn’t one of them. Now his sin has become mine, ’cause I didn’t speak up. I waited for him to do it, but he didn’t.”
“I see.”
“No, suh, I don’t believe you do. I’m a nurse. I’ve worked on people who died in an emergency room with bullet holes in them you could stick your thumb in, the gunpowder burns still on their clothes, except the police report says they were shot while armed and fleeing. I’ve seen babies brought in by parents who said the stroller got knocked over accidentally or the baby pulled down a hot-water pan on itself. Those t’ings keep happening ’cause other people go along wit’ the lie. When I looked into the faces of those dead girls, it was like there were words sewn up inside their mouths like dry moths trying to get out, except nobody wanted to listen.”
She was on a cell phone, and I could hear the transmission starting to break up. I had the feeling that if she didn’t finish her statement to me, she never would. “Miss Jewel, tell me what Mr. Abelard should have said in the parking lot.”
“The one named Bernadette was at the house. She came there in the boat with Mr. Robert and Mr. Kermit. They’d been taking a ride out on the bay, and they tied up the boat at the dock and played croquet on the lawn. Mr. Timothy shook her hand. I saw him.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Maybe t’ree months back. I’m not sure.”
“Maybe he forgot,” I said.
