“If she ain’t wit’ the family, she’s most probably at her house in the quarters,” the gardener said.
“You know where I could find Robert Weingart?”
He smiled in a kindly fashion. “No, suh.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No, suh, what I mean is, I ain’t sure who that is. Even if I knew, I ain’t seen nobody.”
I understood that no amount of either coercion or bribery would ever cause this man to give up a teaspoon of information about the Abelards or the people who came and went through the front door. “Can you forget I was here?” I said.
“Suh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I drove east on a winding road between the bay and pastureland that had become a flood zone chained with ponds that were home to clouds of gnats and dragonflies and where, for no apparent reason, cranes or egrets or blue herons did not feed or nest. A gray skein of dead vegetation left by storm surges coated the branches of the persimmon and gum trees and slash pines, and on either side of the road, the rain ditches were strewn with trash, much of it in vinyl bags that had split when they were flung from automobiles. Up ahead, among a few slender palm trees stenciled against the sky like those on a Caribbean isle, I saw the tin roofs of the community where Miss Jewel lived.
The term “quarters,” in the plural, goes back to the plantation era, which did not end with the Civil War but perpetuated itself well into the mid-twentieth century. Harry Truman may or may not have been disliked in the South for integrating the United States Army, but there is no doubt about the enmity he incurred when he made ten-thousand-dollar loans available to southern sharecroppers and farmworkers at 1 percent interest. That one program broke the back of the corporate farm system and created the Dixiecrat Party and the career of Senator Strom Thurmond. But a culture does not transform itself in a few generations. Except for the automobiles and pickup trucks parked in the dirt yards, the quarters owned by the Abelard family had changed little since they were carpentered together in the 1880s.
They were painted yellow or blue and resembled wood boxcars with tin roofs and tiny galleries built onto them. They were often called shotgun houses because theoretically a person could fire a single-barrel twenty- gauge through the front door and send a load of birdshot out the back without bruising a wall. But Jewel’s house was different from the rest, located at the end of a dirt street still slick from an early-morning shower, its walls painted a deep purple, the window frames and gallery posts painted green, the gallery hung with Mardi Gras beads. On the tin mailbox out by the rain ditch was the name Laveau in large black letters. She was sitting on the gallery steps, wearing heavy Levi’s and an unironed men’s shirt she hadn’t bothered to tuck in and a bandanna wrapped tightly around her hair. She was reading a shopper’s guide of some kind, the pages folded back, clutching it with one hand, turning it to catch the light as though the words contained great significance. I walked up the path and stopped three feet from her, but she never raised her eyes from the shopper’s guide.
“Are you related to Marie Laveau, Miss Jewel?” I asked.
“She was my great-great-grandmother.”
“You don’t practice voodoo, do you?”
“She didn’t, either. People used that against her ’cause she was the most powerful woman in New Orleans.”
“I need to find the man with the bandaged hand, the one who calls himself Gus Fowler.”
“I t’ink he left.”
“Do you know where he went?”
She seemed to study the question. “No, he didn’t say. He just drove away.”
“We’re going to find him. We’d like to feel you’re on our side.”
“I don’t have anyt’ing to say about him or any of the t’ings you got on your mind.”
“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
“Your kind don’t give up easy.”
“No, you were waiting for me. Do you see into the future, Miss Jewel?”
She rolled her shopper’s guide into a cone and stuck it under her thigh and gazed at the shimmer on the dirt lane. “I’m not part of it anymore.”
“What’s ‘it’?”
“Anyt’ing outside of my job.”
“You told Mr. Abelard of our conversation?”
Her face was as dark and smooth as melted chocolate, her eyes devoid of emotion. The sorrow and contrition she said she had felt about the deaths of Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot seemed to have burned away with the morning mist.
“What did your father say when you told him you called me?” I said.
She waited a long time before she spoke. “He axed me to sit down and have dinner wit’ him. He stood up from his wheelchair on a cane and held my chair for me. That’s the first time I ever sat at the table wit’ Mr. Timothy. He tole me it didn’t matter what I did, I was still his daughter.”
“This may be a surprise, but I’m not interested in Mr. Abelard’s spiritual generosity.”
“Don’t talk about him like that, suh.”
“I think he’s an evil man and should be treated as such. I think you’re making a mistake in trusting him.”
“I don’t care what you say.”
“What’s ‘the box,’ Jewel?”
“I don’t know, me.”
“You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t try to hide behind a dialectical disguise.”
“You can go now, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Think about the faces of those girls in the photographs. You’re a highly trained medical person. You know the pain and despair those girls experienced when they died. They had no one to comfort them, to hold their hand, to tell them they were loved by God and their fellow man. But you called me on your own and stood up for them. Don’t undo a brave and noble deed, Miss Jewel. Don’t rob yourself of your own virtue.”
I saw her lips form a bitter line; she looked like a person making a choice between two evils and deciding upon the one that hurt her the most, as though her self-injury brought with it a degree of forgiveness. “I got to do my wash,” she said.
“Those girls are going to haunt you,” I said. “In your sleep. In a crowd. At Mass. In a movie theater. Across the table from you at McDonald’s. The dead carry a special kind of passport, and they go anywhere they want.”
She stared into the humidity glistening on the road and at the tin roofs of the other houses. The wind swayed the palms overhead and rattled the Mardi Gras beads that hung from the eaves of her gallery. I walked back to the cruiser, wondering at the harshness of my language, wondering if my oath to protect and serve had not finally drained my heart of pity and left only rage and a thirst for vengeance. Then I heard her voice behind me, muted against the wind and the rustling of the beads. I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears. Her gaze was fixed strangely on my face, her eyes lit with a bizarre luminosity, her teeth white against the darkness of her tongue, her skin sparkling with moisture.
“I didn’t hear you. Say that over,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“About saying it. I didn’t mean to say it. Don’t pay me any mind.”
“Say what?”
“Go back home. Pretend you weren’t here. Keep yourself and your family away from us.”
“Tell me what you said.”
“Don’t make me.”
“You say it, damn you.”
“Somebody is fixing to die at your house.”
She took a deep breath, as though a large, thick-bodied bird had just taken flight from her chest.
I DROVE BACK down the winding two-lane to the Abelard home, on the odd chance I would catch someone
