reloaded at least once, but he left no brass behind. Who always picks up his brass, Dave?”
“If a cop did this, why would he recover his brass and leave his piece?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to have it on his person if he got stopped somewhere. During the storm, emergency vehicles were all over the highways. I’ve heard that you and Clete Purcel have had a couple of confrontations with the Abelards and their associates.”
“You could call it that.”
“Is it true Purcel killed a federal informant years ago?”
“Don’t take the bait.”
“Would you repeat that?”
“Look back at everything we’ve seen. Start with the front door. Who tries to bust a lock by using a screwdriver on the keyhole? If the door was pried, the jamb would be torn up, not just dented. Why would the intruder pull open the drawers in a writer’s desk and knock the computer on the floor and rake books off the shelves? If he knew the combination on the safe, he wouldn’t have to look for it. This place is a stage set.”
“So if a burglar didn’t do this, who did?”
“Somebody who got his education on the yard. Somebody who wanted to shut some people up and make a big score while he was at it. Somebody who’d like to give Clete Purcel as much grief as he can.”
“I’ll bite,” the sheriff said.
Not on my meter, you won’t, I thought.
I walked downstairs and out into the sunlight, my ears ringing. He followed me into the yard. “Where you going?” he said.
“To give Miss Jewel a ride home. If I were you, I’d have a talk with Robert Weingart.”
“Who?”
Hopeless, I thought.
But that’s the way you think when you realize for certain you’re an old man and, as such, like Cassandra, destined to be disbelieved.
CLETE’S SECRETARY TOLD me he had gone home for lunch. I found him by his cottage at the motor court on East Main, reading a book in a lawn chair under the oaks, his wire-frame glasses down low on his nose. Next to him was a card table set with a tray of sandwiches and a sweating pitcher of sangria and cracked ice. The sandwiches were cut in triangles and filled with cream cheese and chives. He lowered his book and smiled.
“
“Yeah, this is great stuff. Did you know Alexander the Great was AC/DC and his sweat smelled like flowers? He also got plastered every night.” Clete picked up a glass of sangria and drank from it, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
“Where’d you get the sandwiches?”
“Somebody dropped them off.”
“Would you answer the question?”
“Emma Poche was in the neighborhood.”
“I think you have brain damage. There’s some kind of tumor loose in your head.”
“Look, she feels bad. She apologized.”
“For what? Killing Herman Stanga?”
“We don’t know she did that. This is what she told me: ‘I’ve done some hateful and bad stuff. I did it because some of the good people took a lick off me. It’s my fault, but they got their lick, and I figured I should get something for it.’”
“That’s the rhetoric of a female recidivist. What’s the matter with you?”
“Want a sandwich?”
“Where’s your throwdown?”
“In the glove compartment.”
“Check.”
“I don’t have to. I just saw it. Why are you worried about my throwdown?” He lifted his glass of sangria to his mouth.
“I came from the Abelard house. Somebody killed the old man and the guy you called a greaseball. The old man was strung up with his feet barely touching the floor. Whoever did it to him wanted him to go out slow and hard.”
Clete lowered his glass without drinking from it. “Somebody left a throwdown?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“Well, it’s not mine. Who do you make for it?”
“Weingart,” I said.
“My vote would be for the Bobster, too. I never met a cell-house bitch yet who wasn’t mean to the core. Where is he now?”
“Supposedly New Orleans.”
“What about the grandson? Kermit Dick Brain or whatever?”
“In New Orleans, too.”
Clete seemed to study my face without seeing me.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“We’re the target, not the old man and the greaseball.” His eyes came back into focus. He continued to stare at me. “Something else happened over there, didn’t it?”
“The black woman, Jewel Laveau, told me I was disappearing.”
“You’re going to be kidnapped?”
“She said I was evaporating.”
I heard his breathing quicken, saw a vein swell in his neck. “You stop listening to superstitious people. You stop believing in stuff like that.”
“I didn’t say I believed her.”
“You’ve got it painted all over you, Dave. It’s a death wish.”
He put his glass of sangria on the table and pinched his thumb and index finger on his temples as though the sun were burning down through the tree overhead, eating into his skull.
“What is it?” I said.
“If you die on me, I’m going to get really mad,” he replied. “You’re not going to do that to me. I’m not going to allow it. You understand me? I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
THE MURDER OF Timothy Abelard and his friend and the heinous nature of the slayings were all over the front pages of state newspapers and provided the lead in every local television broadcast. Because the story had Gothic overtones and involved a wealthy recluse, it was immediately picked up by the national news services. Each account emphasized Abelard’s stature in the community, his contribution as a defense industrialist, the loss of his son and daughter-in-law somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, his convivial personality, and his iconic role as a plantation patriarch who represented a bygone era.
No mention was made of his ties to the Giacano crime family in New Orleans or the Batista regime in Cuba or the Somozas in Nicaragua. The man who died with him, Emiliano Jimenez, was referred to as a “visitor” and “longtime friend” who had been “interested in developing new markets for Louisiana sugar farmers.”
Any serious student of popular media will tell you that the real story lies not in what is written but in what is left out. In this instance the omission was not simply one of airbrushing out the details of Abelard’s dealings with New Orleans gangsters and third-world despots. The bigger omission was ongoing and systemic: Timothy Abelard’s death was the stuff of Elizabethan drama; the murder of the girls in Jefferson Davis Parish didn’t merit the ink it would take to fill a ballpoint pen.
Abelard’s funeral was held on a Tuesday at a mortuary home, not a church. The lawn was green from the spring rains, the flowers in bloom. Most of the mourners were elderly and dressed in clothes that they probably seldom had occasion to wear except at religious services. Their accents and frame of reference were of an earlier generation, one that believed there was virtue in allowing memory to soften and revise the image of the deceased, that appearance was more important than substance, because ultimately appearance was, in its way, a fulfillment
