“Mr. Timothy never forgets anyt’ing. Not a face, not an injury, not a weakness in someone, not a show of strength. He’s the same wit’ loyalty. He always say he gives every friend and every enemy whatever they’ve earned. He’s never been afraid. Those dagos from New Orleans, the Giacanos, used to come here and do business. They were scared of Mr. Timothy ’cause he always tole the troot’ and always kept his word. If the troot’ hurt him, he didn’t care. The dagos didn’t know how to deal wit’ him. He tole you I was his daughter, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“How many white men would do that?”
“But we haven’t gotten to the real issue. Why did your father lie, Miss Jewel?”
“I don’t know, suh. But I got to own up about somet’ing. The girl named Bernadette called the house. She wanted to talk to Mr. Robert.”
“Robert Weingart?”
“Yes, suh. I tole her he wasn’t here. I axed could I take a message. She said, ‘Tell Robert I saw him wit’ his pimp friend and their whores at the Big Stick club in Lafayette. Tell him I saw what he was doing wit’ one of them on the dance floor. Tell him I changed my mind about the land deal.’”
As she spoke, I was putting down on a notepad everything she told me. “What land deal, Miss Jewel?”
“I don’t know. She said somet’ing about conservation.”
“What, exactly?”
“I don’t know about those t’ings.”
“Just tell me what she said as closely as you can remember.”
“She said to tell Mr. Robert she gave his land to the conservatory or somet’ing.”
“Where are you now?”
“At my house.”
“Where is that?”
“In the quarters.”
“Okay, Miss Jewel. Don’t discuss this conversation with anyone. Everything you have told me is in confidence. You haven’t done anything wrong. You did everything you were supposed to do. At this point, your responsibility is over. You hearing me on this?”
“I should have called you a long time ago. I t’ink it was me that let that poor girl get killed.”
“You shouldn’t say that about yourself. You’re a good person. It took courage for you to make this call.”
“No, you’re not understanding me. After I gave Mr. Robert the message the girl left, I heard him talking on his cell phone to somebody. He was standing on the lawn, looking out at the trees in the water. I don’t know who he was talking to, but he said somet’ing I don’t want to t’ink about, somet’ing that makes me wake up in the middle of the night. I tell myself maybe I didn’t hear right, that it was my imagination, but I keep seeing him standing against the sunlight flashing off the water, his face shaped just like a snake’s head, and I hear him saying, ‘I believe we have a candidate for the box.’”
The box?
ON MONDAY MORNING I told Helen everything that had occurred at the fund-raiser in Lafayette. I also told her, almost word for word, everything Jewel had reported to me. When I finished, she propped her elbows on her desk blotter and touched her fingers to both sides of her forehead. “I’m having some trouble tracking all this. You took Clete Purcel with you on an unauthorized trip to Lafayette and got into it with Timothy and Kermit Abelard and their entourage?”
“No, I asked Mr. Abelard some questions, and he lied to me. That’s obstruction.”
Her eyelids fluttered as though the fluorescent lights in the room were short-circuiting. “All right, I’m not going to get into procedural problems here. The man with the bandage on his hand?”
“Gus Fowler.”
“This guy Fowler, you think he was one of the guys you shot on the river?”
“I can’t swear to it.”
“Did you run him?”
“He has no record of any kind.”
“Go to Abelard’s place and pick him up.”
“Pick him up for what?”
“I don’t care. Make up something. When has legality been a problem for you? I’ll talk to the sheriff in St. Mary.”
“What about Robert Weingart?”
“What about him?”
“Jewel said he told someone Bernadette Latiolais was a candidate for the box.”
She looked around the room, still blinking. “
“What?”
“I’m not objective. I’ve already proved that,” she said.
“Not objective about what, Helen?”
“Carolyn Blanchet.”
“Go on.”
“She’s a dominatrix. I’ve been told stories about her sessions in the French Quarter.”
In the silence, I could see a flush spreading across her throat.
“You think Carolyn is capable of murder?”
“You tell me. She was a bitch when she came out of the womb. I hate this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“All of it. Everything we do for a living. I’m tired of living in a sewer. I’m tired of seeing innocent people get hurt. Go see if you can find Gus Fowler. I’m going to talk to the state attorney’s office and try to get to the bottom of the land deal.”
She got up from her desk and looked out the window at the bayou, her back stiff with anger or revulsion, I couldn’t tell which.
“We’re still the good guys,” I said.
“You know how many unsolved female homicides there are in Louisiana?”
“No.”
“That’s the point. Nobody does. Not here, not anywhere. It’s open season on women and girls in this country. You bring that asshole in. If he falls down and leaves blood on the vehicle, all the better. His DNA becomes a voluntary submission.”
“Can you repeat that last part?”
“Call me when you’re at the Abelard place,” she said. “By the way, the ligature Clete found in the Abelards’ Dumpster was clean. Bring me something I can use, Dave. I want to put somebody’s head on a pike.”
BUT RHETORIC IS cheap stuff when you play by the rules and the other side does business with baseball bats. No one came to the Abelards’ door when I knocked. An elderly man whose race was hard to determine was pulling weeds in the flower bed. He said he had seen no one that morning. He also said he had never heard of anyone named Gus Fowler, nor did he remember seeing anyone who fit Fowler’s description. I asked where I might find Miss Jewel.
His eyes were blue-green and scaled with cataracts. They glowed in the indistinct way that light glows inside frosted glass. His skin was a yellowish-brown, leached pink and milk-white in places by a dermatologic disease that often afflicts people of color in the South. The tattered straw hat he wore made me think of pictures of convicts taken at the prison colony in French Guiana. “Jewel Laveau?” he said.
I realized I had never known Jewel’s last name. It was not an ordinary one, either. Anyone who ever read a history of old New Orleans or visited the St. Louis Cemetery on Basin Street would probably recognize it.
