“Streak?”
I hated what I knew was coming next.
“Did you talk to Clete?” she said.
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“He was drunk last night. All he remembers is waking up in the backseat of his rental car in Morgan City.”
“He has a blackout the same night Stanga is killed? What are the odds of that happening?”
“Clete is going through a bad time in his life. Why don’t you cut him some slack?”
“All right, let’s talk about you. You think I was too hard on you this morning, asking you where you were last night?”
“I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”
“Everyone knows you carry a forty-five auto, Dave. Everybody knows your feelings about Herman Stanga. Your best friend was about to be financially ruined and sent to Angola by a pimp you despised. You and Clete have been trashing legal procedure and stringing feces through courtrooms for decades. Both of you act like the world is a huge O.K. Corral. But I’m supposed to ignore all that to protect your sensibilities?”
“Why is it people remember Wyatt Earp’s and Doc Holliday’s names but not the names of the guys they shot?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she replied.
“My vote is still for Doc and the Earps.”
“That’s because you’re unteachable,” she said. “God!”
CHAPTER
8
HELEN HAD TOLD me to find out why the murdered Canadian girl, Fern Michot, had come all the way from British Columbia to southwestern Louisiana. But where was I to start? For openers, we sent out her photo to every newspaper and television channel in the state. I also called up a local printer and had circulars made that contained her picture and the words underneath: have YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? CALL THE IBERIA PARISH SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. A twenty-four-hour number was printed at the bottom.
I spread all the material I had on Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais on top of my desk. I also opened up the file folders I had on the other women and girls who had died under suspicious circumstances in Jeff Davis Parish. But in actuality, what did I have? In general, the forensic connections were tenuous and perhaps even nonexistent. Some of the deaths may have been accidental, the kind of fate that often happens to marginalized girls and young women who find the wrong males and end up with an air bubble in a vein or who try to walk home dead drunk from a bar and never see the headlights they step in front of.
But there was one detail that was incontestable and would not go away. Bernadette Latiolais had bought two plastic teacups and saucers at the dollar store on the day of her disappearance. We had confirmed that the saucer and broken teacup buried with the body of the Canadian girl were of the same manufacture as the ones sold at the dollar store. There was little doubt that the two girls had been abducted and murdered or held in the same place by the same killer or killers.
But Bernadette did not fit the pattern of the other girls or women. She was not a runaway or a school dropout or a teenage addict or alcoholic. She had been an honor student who had won a scholarship to attend the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She had been happy and confident about her future and was known for the sweetness of her personality. Perhaps more important from an investigative perspective, she was the only person among the eight women or girls who evidently had contact outside the small world in which they all lived. Her brother, the convict Elmore Latiolais, had recognized the newspaper photo of Kermit Abelard as the man who had promised to make her rich. Bernadette’s grandmother had recognized the author’s jacket photo of Robert Weingart as the man she had seen buying boudin in a store with someone whose description fit Herman Stanga’s, which suggested at least the possibility that Bernadette had seen or known them.
But on what basis would Kermit Abelard or anyone else promise to make her rich? The grandmother had said Bernadette had inherited seven arpents of farmland that were part of an undivided estate. The arpent is the old French measure that is approximately one acre in size. Its value in that part of rural Louisiana was not great. In fact, Hurricane Rita, which struck the Louisiana coast three and a half weeks after Katrina, devastated the area.
Unfortunately, the story about Kermit Abelard’s promise to Bernadette had its origins with Elmore Latiolais, a thief and a liar who probably bore a lifetime’s enmity toward white people in general and cops in particular.
I twirled a ballpoint pen on my desk pad. Through my office window, I could see rain tumbling out of the sunlight onto the surface of Bayou Teche. In City Park, the old brick firehouse, now painted battleship gray, was deep inside the shadows of the oak trees. When I was a little boy, a French band used to play in the park on Saturday evenings, and the firemen, all friends of my father, boiled crabs behind the firehouse, and my mother and father would take me and my half brother, Jimmy, to eat with them. That was where I first listened to the song “La Jolie Blon,” sung with the same French lyrics that had been sung in France in the eighteenth century. It remains today the saddest lament I have ever heard, one that you hear once and never forget for the rest of your life.
Where did it all go? I asked myself.
But I had to remind myself that neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is. If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin. Bernadette Latiolais had been robbed of her young life, and all her joys and choices stolen from her. Her mouth had been stopped with dust, and her advocates were few. Regardless of my promise to Alafair, it was time to make Kermit Abelard accountable.
CLETE PURCEL HAD gotten up early and showered, shaved, and brushed his teeth, then fixed a bowl of cereal and strawberries and taken it and a pot of coffee out on a table under the oak trees at the end of the driveway that divided the stucco cottages in the 1940s motor court where he lived. He had not taken a drink since lunch the previous day and had slept soundly through the night and awakened with his mind clear and his metabolism free of booze. It was a fine morning to be alive and to feel like a player again. A blue heron was standing in the shallows of Bayou Teche, pecking at its feathers, its legs as thin and delicate as strokes from a bamboo brush. An elderly black man sitting on an inverted bucket was bobber-fishing with a cane pole among the lily pads, raising his baited hook up and down as though the movement would make it more attractive to the fish hiding there. And sitting proudly in the shade, its maroon finish gleaming, its starched white top as immaculate as ever, was Clete’s vintage Cadillac, just out of the repair shop.
He finished eating and washed his dishes, put on his porkpie hat, and went to the office with a song in his heart. Fifteen minutes after his arrival, he was reading a magazine article on Layton Blanchet and biofuels when his rosy-complected, top-heavy secretary, Hulga Volkmann, opened his door and leaned inside, her perfume drenching the room. “There’s somebody out here who says his name is Kiss-My-Ass-Fat-Man,” she said.
“What’s he want?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Tell him the reparation issue for pygmies is off the table.”