there before I returned to New Iberia. As I neared the wood bridge that gave access to the Abelards’ island, I saw Robert Weingart in a pair of Speedos on the lawn between the boathouse and a blooming mimosa, performing a martial arts exercise of some kind. Like a flamingo pecking at its feathers, he torqued his body in one direction and then the other, his hands moving delicately in the air, his eyes closed, the breeze caressing his face and the glaze of tan and sweat on his skin.
If I ever saw a man for whom his own body was a holy grail, it was Weingart. His armpits were shaved and powdered like a woman’s. His black Speedos clung wetly to the buttermilk texture of his buttocks, his phallus outlined like a rhinoceros’s horn. His eyelids were lowered as though he was enjoying the sun through the filter of his own skin. He gave no notice of my tires rumbling across the bridge, nor did he look behind him when I parked and got out of the cruiser and stood silently watching him across the top of the roof. I had to admire his concentration and his indifference. Weingart had mastered the ethos of the cynic and, in my opinion, had successfully scrubbed every trace of decency and humanity from his soul. If he had any feelings at all, I suspected they were connected entirely with the satisfaction of his desires, and they had nothing to do with the rest of us.
Was this aging, self-absorbed product of plastic surgery the sole perpetrator behind the death of the two girls? He was the white man’s answer to Herman Stanga, the man we love to hate. He was cruel, pernicious, and predatory. He exploited the faith and trust of uneducated people and forever blighted their lives. But he was also pathetic. He’d had his head shoved in a toilet bowl by Clete Purcel. He’d been humiliated and slapped across the side of the head by one of our deputies at the bank. Later that same day, Emma Poche had brought him to his knees with a baton and then had tormented him on the ground. Weingart reminded me of the high school hood who moves to a small town from a big city and scares the hell out of everybody until someone challenges him and discovers he’s a joke.
But what did I know about him specifically, other than his criminal history and his penchant for getting into it with people who didn’t do things by the rules?
He was pulling his money out of a local bank and transferring it to a bank in British Columbia. He was planning to either blow Dodge or set up another nefarious scheme or both. Timothy Abelard had shown Alafair a photo of himself and a man who resembled Robert Weingart sitting in a cafe on Lake Louise in Alberta, although Abelard had denied to Alafair that his companion was Weingart. What were they doing there? Was it land investment? Were the Abelards taking their long and sorry tradition of environmental abuse and human exploitation to one of the most beautiful places in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world?
What was the box? The term conjured up images I didn’t want to think about.
I walked onto the lawn and stood no more than fifteen feet behind Weingart. He rotated slowly in a circle, opening his eyes, a smirk breaking at the corner of his mouth. “Yes?” he said.
“I’m looking for a guy by the name of Gus Fowler.”
“Let me think. No, can’t place him.”
“Guy with a big wad of bandages wrapped around his hand. He’s probably doped up on painkillers. Has a pal from Taco-Tico Land, a guy who takes offense just because somebody called him a greaseball.”
“Sorry.”
“I blew Mr. Fowler’s fingers off. I thought you might have heard about it. I guess you’re not in the loop.”
“Apparently not.”
“Heading up to Canada? Maybe Trout Lake, someplace like that?”
“No.”
“You’ve been to Trout Lake, though, haven’t you?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Is that where you met Fern Michot?”
“The name doesn’t make bells clang.”
“She was a Canadian girl we dug out of a landfill. She was buried with some broken teacups that Bernadette Latiolais had purchased at a dollar store just before she was abducted. Of course, you remember Bernadette?”
“Many people come to my book signings. Was she one of those?” He never paused in his exercise, his upper body rotating at the hips, his arms gliding through the air as though he were underwater.
“She caught you at the Big Stick club in Lafayette with some of your skanks. Or were they Herman Stanga’s skanks?”
His eyes were roving over my face; a tiny laugh rose like a bubble in his throat. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.
“You don’t hang with skanks?” I said.
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to smile. But I’ve never seen a variation in the script.”
“Which script would that be, Mr. Weingart?”
“The outraged father figure always knocking other people’s sexual behavior. It’s classic. Daddy is always worrying about what other people are doing with their genitalia. Except Daddy’s little girl can’t keep her panties on.”
“Want to spell that out?”
“I’m not one to judge. Talk to Kermit about it. He said Alafair was jumping his stick on their first date. He also said she gives good head.”
He turned at an angle to me, his hands and fingers moving with the fluidity of snakes, the sun-bleached tips of his hair tousling in the wind, a smell like dried salt wafting off his skin.
I winked at him and said nothing. His eyes dropped to my waist. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“This?”
“Yeah.” He had stopped his martial arts routine.
“That’s the strap that holds my holster on my belt. I have to unsnap it to take off my holster.”
“Yeah, I know that. What are you doing with it?”
“You have to ask?”
“This isn’t Tombstone, Arizona, and you’re not Wyatt Earp.”
“You’re right. I don’t trust myself,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t like to carry a weapon when I was alone with Herman Stanga. Want to hold it? I brought it back from Saigon. I got it for twenty-five dollars from a prostitute in Bring Cash Alley. The prostitutes there were all VC. They dosed us with clap and sold us our own guns. Go ahead, get the feel of it. It’s a little heavy, but I bet you can handle it.”
His gaze shifted from me to the house, then to the empty road on the far side of the wood bridge. “You’re an old man. That’s what all this is about.”
“I’m old, but I can lift five hundred pounds across my shoulders. Did you know there’s a twitch in your face?” I stepped closer to him, smiling, touching the holstered grips of the.45 against his breastbone. “Go on. It won’t bite. You’ve been jailing all your life, fading the action inside and outside, taking on all comers. You know how to handle a gun.”
“Your problem is with Kermit, not me.”
“No, I want you to tell me some more about my daughter. You were just getting started.”
“No.”
“I really want you to. It will be a big favor to me. Hold on a second.” I walked to the cruiser and threw the.45 on the seat. “There. Now say whatever you wish. We’re all pals here, aren’t we?”
He shook his head, stepping back from me, his hands useless at his sides, his head turning to look at a motorboat out on the bay, a tiny wad of fear sliding down his windpipe.
“I watched your bud Vidor Perkins die,” I said. “I think he was hit by a toppling round. His brains exploded out of a big exit wound right above his eye. I watched a couple of guys in rain hoods pick him up like a sack of fertilizer and throw him in a van. Think that might happen to you, Mr. Weingart? I suspect you never met any cleaners inside. Know why that is? Cleaners don’t do time. They’re protected by the government or corporate people who use third-world countries to wipe their ass. Guys who are disposable do their time. You ready to go back inside for this bunch? How long has it been since you had your knee pads on?”
When you step on a snake, don’t expect him to run. Even in death, he’ll try to wrap his body around your ankle and sink his fangs in your foot. I had watched Weingart’s face shrink in the wind and become hard and tight, like the skin on an apple. But now he glanced upward at the clumps of pale red mimosa blooming against a blue sky,
