CLETE CALLED ME at the department after the boy left his office and told me of Robert Weingart’s attempt to buy the date-rape drug known on the street as “roofies.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Talk with the Vietnamese waitress and maybe chat up our celebrity ex-con scribbler.”
“The latter isn’t an option.”
“The First Amendment has been suspended and nobody told me?”
I got up from my desk and closed my office door and picked up the phone again. “Somebody did you a big favor when he helped Stanga into the next world. Don’t blow it.”
“Sounds a little cynical. You’re not lighting candles for Herman?”
“We’ll pick up Weingart and let him know his sexual behavior has come to our attention. In the meantime, you stay out of trouble. You’re the human equivalent of a wrecking ball, Clete. Except you do most of the damage to yourself. You’ve never figured that out.”
“My ex used to say the same thing. She used exactly the same words.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Take an aspirin. Think cool thoughts. Nobody rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”
Did you ever conduct a conversation with a vacant lot?
I HAD MADE an appointment to interview Kermit Abelard at his house. I could have had him come in to the department, but I wanted access once again to the Abelard compound and the bizarre and insular world in which they lived, maybe for reasons I didn’t want to admit to myself. Did I buy into the notion, as Clete had suggested, that the Abelards were players in an Elizabethan tragedy? No, I didn’t. They certainly created the affectation of royalty in exile, but I doubted if even they were convinced by it. Someone once said that had Sir Walter Scott not written his romantic accounts of medieval chivalry, there would have been no War Between the States. I doubted if that was true, either. I believed the legend of the Lost Cause was created after the fact, when the graves of Shiloh and Antietam became vast stone gardens reminding us forever that we imposed this suffering on ourselves.
But if the Abelards and their peers were not created by the pen of an English novelist, what were they? Clete Purcel had said either their house or the old man smelled of death. Was that just his imagination? Except Clete was nobody’s fool and was not given to extravagant metaphors.
I signed out a cruiser and drove down to the watery rim of St. Mary Parish and thumped across the wood bridge onto the Abelard compound. The lagoon that surrounded the property was networked with algae, the moss in the dead cypress lifting in the wind off the Gulf, a solitary ventilated storm shutter slamming incessantly against an upstairs window. Out in the flooded cypress, I could see a man standing in a pirogue, his back to me, casting a lure in a long arc into the water. He was wearing a cap and a sleeveless denim shirt, and he had narrow shoulders and a suntan that had a strange yellow cast.
The black woman who let me in said Mr. Kermit was out in his boat but would be back momentarily; in the meantime, she said Mr. Timothy would like to see me out on the sunporch.
“You’re Miss Jewel?” I said.
“Yes, suh. That’s my name. I’ve taken care of Mr. Timothy for many years.”
“And you know my daughter, Alafair?”
“Yes, suh. She’s very nice.”
I took unfair advantage of my situation and asked a question I should not have asked. “I was trying to remember when Alafair was out here last. Do you recall?”
“I take care of Mr. Timothy. I don’t study on everyone who comes and goes, suh.”
She escorted me to the sunporch. Timothy Abelard was reading in his wheelchair, canted sideways to catch the sunlight on the page, his entire person bathed in the rainbow of color that shone through the stained-glass windows. He looked up at me, smiling, with the expectation one might associate with a tiny bird in the bottom of a nest. “It’s very nice of you to come out and talk with an elderly man,” he said.
I wondered if he was simply being polite or if he was confused about the purpose of my visit. But perhaps a bigger problem for me was that I wanted to like Mr. Abelard. In all ways, he was genteel and seemingly thoughtful. Yes, his eyes were like those of a hawk. But for the elderly, a mistake in judgment about other people can have dire consequences, and it’s hard to begrudge them their cautionary instincts in dealings with others. At least that was what I wanted to believe about this kindly old man.
“I’m here to see your grandson, sir,” I said.
“He didn’t run a traffic light, did he?”
“What are you reading?”
“I was just going to ask your opinion on it. Here, take a look. It’s Kermit’s new book.”
I didn’t want to see it, but he pressed it into my hand. The jacket was a wonderful collage of a plantation house burning against a plum-colored sky, a lovely woman holding the head of a wounded Confederate soldier in her lap, and a gallant officer with a plume in his hat rearing his horse in cannon smoke under the cross of St. Andrew. “Go ahead, read the first paragraph. Tell me what you think,” Mr. Abelard said.
I had read none of Kermit’s work, but I had to admit the opening scene in his new book was written by a very good writer. It described airbursts over Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, and a family of Negroes and one of poor whites trying to take cover in a cave they had dug in the bluffs with barrel staves. Kermit had even described the sound of hot shrapnel raining into the shallows of the Mississippi, a detail I would not expect a man with no war experience to know about.