I called her back, but she didn’t answer. I waited fifteen minutes and called home and got the message machine. Molly was at her office at a rural development foundation on the bayou, one that helped poor people build homes and start up small businesses. I dialed her number, then hung up before anyone could answer. Molly had enough worries without my adding to them. I went into Helen’s office and told her what Alafair had discovered.
“An ethanol plant? That’s what all this is about?” Helen said.
“Part of it, at least.”
“The local sugar growers are already trying to build one. This is a separate deal, though?”
“It’s just one more instance of the locals getting screwed by somebody who pretends to be their ally,” I said.
She clicked her nails on her blotter. “So maybe Carolyn Blanchet saw her husband’s fortunes going down the toilet and decided to blow his head off and take over his businesses. Think that’s possible?”
“Yeah, this might explain the motivation for the murder of Bernadette Latiolais, but what about Fern Michot?”
“You don’t know Carolyn Blanchet.”
“She’s not only a dominatrix but homicidal as well?”
“Want me to go into some details I’ve heard?”
“Not really.”
“There’s a world out there you don’t know about, Dave. I think it’s one you don’t want to hear about.”
“I don’t want my daughter to get hurt.”
“How is Alafair going to get hurt?”
“Because none of the lines in this investigation are simple, and both you and she think otherwise.”
“You really know how to win a girl’s heart. Okay, you asked for this.” Helen opened a desk drawer and threw a folder in front of me. “These were taken by a woman I used to be friends with in the Garden District. The woman in the mask with the whip is Carolyn. The leather fetters and chains are the real thing. How do you like the thigh- high boots?”
“I think that stuff is a joke.”
“A joke?”
“It’s the masquerade of self-deluded idiots who never grew out of masturbation. I have the feeling everyone in those photographs is a closet Puritan.”
“You’re too much, bwana.”
“No, I’m just a guy worried about his daughter. I’ll buy Carolyn Blanchet as a greedy, manipulative shrew capable of staging her husband’s suicide. But she’s not Eva Peron in Marquis de Sade drag.”
“How about Carolyn Blanchet and Emma Poche working together? Ever think of that? Or maybe Carolyn has a yen for young girls and Emma got jealous. I don’t have all the answers, Dave, but don’t accuse me of being simplistic or naive.”
“Timothy Abelard is a pterodactyl. To him, people like Carolyn Blanchet and Emma are insects.”
Helen replaced the black-and-white photos in the folder and dropped them in her desk drawer. “You give the Abelards dimensions they don’t have. I’m not fooled by them, but I don’t obsess about them, either.”
This time I made no reply.
“I was about to go down to your office when you came in,” she said. “That guy Gus Fowler?”
“What about him?”
“A body washed up on the shore at East Cote Blanche Bay last night. One hand is missing three fingers. The sheriff says they look like they were recently sutured. The deceased has a white scar cupped around one nostril like a piece of twine. Sound like anyone you know?”
IT HAS BEEN my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced-in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.
This story began with a visit to a penal work gang outside Natchez, Mississippi. Its denouement commenced late in the afternoon with a phone call from one of the players who had sweltered in the heat and humidity next to a brush fire that was so hot, a freshly lopped tree branch would burst instantly alight when it touched the flames. The caller was not a man I cared to hear from again.
Jimmy Darl Thigpin’s voice was like that of a man speaking through a rusty tin can. “I’m retired now and was in the neighborhood,” he said.
“I see,” I replied, actually not seeing anything, not wanting to even exchange a greeting with the gunbull who had shot and killed Elmore Latiolais.
“I’m up at a fish camp at Bayou Bijou. Come out and have a drink.”
“I’ve been off the hooch quite a while, Cap.”
“Got soda pop or whatever you want.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Need to give you a heads-up. I got to get some guilt off my conscience as well.”
“Why don’t you come into the office?”
“I don’t like being around officialdom anymore. The state of Mis’sippi give me a pension wouldn’t pay for the toilet paper in the state capitol building. Guess what color half the legislature is? I got a chicken smoking on my grill. It’s a twenty-minute ride, Mr. Robicheaux. Do an old man a favor, will you?”
After I got off the phone, I called Clete Purcel and told him of my conversation with Thigpin. “I’d blow it off,” he said.
“Why?”
“If he’s got anything to say, let him do it on the phone.”
“Maybe he’s not sure how much he wants to tell me. Maybe he was paid to kill Elmore Latiolais.”
“I say don’t trust him.”
“Check with you later.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Streak. These guys know you’ve got an invisible Roman collar around your neck. They use it against you.”
“Thigpin has chewing tobacco for brains. You give him too much credit.”
“You never listen.”
“Yeah, I do. I just don’t agree with you,” I said.
I called Molly and told her I’d be home for supper a little late. Then I drove down a long two-lane road between oak trees into a chain of freshwater bays that bordered the Atchafalaya Basin. I wasn’t worried about Thigpin. He may have been an anachronism, but I had known many like him. Most of them had become as institutionalized in their mind-set and way of life as the convicts they supervised. Some, when drunk or in a moment of moral clarity, admitted they had gone to work in the prison system before they ended up hoeing soybeans and chopping cotton themselves. Some, upon retirement, looked over their shoulders every day of their lives. Years ago, I knew a guard at Angola who had put men on anthills when they fell out on the work detail. He also shot and killed inmates on the Red Hat gang, sometimes for no other reason than pure meanness. The prison administration allowed him to work at the gate until he was almost eighty because there was not a town in Mississippi or Louisiana he could retire to. The day he was finally forced to leave Angola, he paid one week’s rent at a roominghouse in New Orleans, shut the windows, stuffed newspaper under the doors, and went to sleep with his head in the oven, the gas jets flowing.
I drove up on the levee, my windows down, to my left a wide bay dotted with cypress trees, to my right a string of fish camps on a green bib that sloped down to another bay, this one reddening with the sunset, the fluted trunks of the tupelo gums flaring at the waterline, moss lifting in their limbs. The road atop the levee bent into an arbor of trees where the shadows were thicker, the water along the shore skimmed with a gray film, the tracings of a cottonmouth zigzagging through the algae that had clustered among the storm trash left over from Rita.
I passed a yellow school bus with no wheels, all of its windows pocked by BB guns or.22 rounds, its sides scaled with vine. Then I saw a clapboard shack in the gloom, banana fronds bending over the tin roof, a bright red Coca-Cola machine sweating under the porte cochere, a deck built on pilings over the water, a small barbecue pit smoking greasily in the breeze.
I parked in the yard. Thigpin came out the back of the house and greeted me with a can of beer in his hand.
