“Helen is not a big fan of my investigating a homicide outside our jurisdiction.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“If you want,” I said, my gaze not meeting hers. “Look, I ran into Vidor Perkins on the street. I don’t think he intends us any harm. Evidently he’s convinced himself he’s an author. But I had Wally put a cruiser in front of the house until I get back.”
“What was he doing on East Main?” Alafair said.
“Following me.”
“Early Sunday morning?” she said.
“He’s a wack job. He says he was surveilling the Abelards’ compound yesterday and saw you there. But his agenda is with them and not us.”
“How do you know?” Molly asked.
“We don’t have anything he wants. I’ll be back in three hours.”
“Dave?” Molly said.
But I didn’t answer, in part because no matter how helpful Molly or Alafair wanted to be, I had to find an empty place in my head where I could see the detail I had missed, the image that had not recorded itself on my memory, the line of dialogue that had seemed inconsequential at the time, the finitely small symbol for the larger story that would explain the brutal murders of two innocent girls. Or maybe I would end up concluding that all my speculations were a vanity. Sometimes the clue is not there, or the case information is wrong, or somebody screwed up in the lab. But if Fern Michot and Bernadette Latiolais’s killer or killers went not caught or taken off the board in a more primitive fashion, it wouldn’t be because no one tried.
I took the old two-lane highway past Spanish Lake and turned onto I-10 in Lafayette and drove to Jennings, then down into the southern tip of the parish where the coastline dissolved into a marshy green haze and eventually became part of a saltwater bay. Just as I had placed Vidor Perkins into a much simpler category, one in which most miscreants have the wingspans of moths rather than pterodactyls, I tried to imagine the makeup of the person or persons who had murdered the two girls. I was sure that sex and misogyny were involved. But I was also sure that finance was as well. And when it came to the big score in Louisiana, from World War II to the present, what was the issue? Always? Without exception? I mean take-it-to-the-bank, lead-pipe cinch, what extractive opportunity in an instant created the sounds of little piggy feet stampeding for the trough?
How about oil? Its extraction and production in Louisiana had set us free from economic bondage to the agricultural oligarchy that had ruled the state from antebellum days well into the mid-twentieth century. But we discovered that our new corporate liege lord had a few warts on his face, too. Like the Great Whore of Babylon, Louisiana was always desirable for her beauty and not her virtue, and when her new corporate suitor plunged into things, he left his mark.
I didn’t revisit Bernadette’s grandmother; instead, I talked to people at a crossroads store, a bait shop, and a trailer settlement. Some of the damage done by Hurricane Rita was still visible: concrete foundations in empty fields, an automobile wedged upside down in a coulee, the wreckage of homes bulldozed in piles as high as small pyramids, and the tangled bones of livestock that had drowned by the tens of thousands, sometimes on rooftops or inside the second stories of farmhouses. But I was struck most by the riparian resilience of the land, the sawgrass that extended as far as the eye could see, the hummocks of gum and persimmon and hackberry and oak trees, the seagulls and brown pelicans that sailed over the mouth of a freshwater river flowing into the Gulf. In moments like these, I knew that Louisiana was still a magical place, not terribly different than it was when Jim Bowie and his business partner the pirate Jean Lafitte smuggled slaves illegally into the United States and kept them in a barracoon, somewhere close to the very spot I was standing on. If anyone doubts the history I’ve described, he can visit an island at the south end of this particular parish and perhaps find some of the skeletal remains for which it is known. The skulls and vertebrae and rib cages and femurs that have washed out of the sand belonged to a shipload of slaves abandoned by a blackbirder sea captain who left them to starve when he feared arrest. Louisiana is a poem, but as with the Homeric epic, it’s not good to examine its heroes too closely.
I parked my pickup at the end of the road and got out on the asphalt and looked southward. In the alluvial sweep of the land, I thought I could see the past and the present and the future all at once, as though time were not sequential in nature but took place without a beginning or an end, like a flash of green light rippling outward from the center of creation, not unlike a dream inside the mind of God.
I could smell the salt out on the Gulf, the baitfish and shrimp in the waves, the warm and stagnant smell of wet sand and dead vegetation and ponded water in the marsh, and the distant hint of rain and electricity in the clouds. It was a grand place to be. Did the seven arpents of land that Bernadette had inherited from her father have anything to do with her death? Her grandmother had said Bernadette wanted to save the bears. The people I spoke to on the south end of the parish said they knew nothing of any attempt to save bears, nor were they sure where Bernadette’s seven arpents might have been located, although they said that many years ago some of the Latiolais family had farmed some rice acreage that had been turned into commercial crawfish ponds. But the ponds had been abandoned because of the importation of Chinese crawfish, and the land was now little more than a soggy swamp.
Plus, Louisiana’s land areas had been drilled and redrilled and offered little in the way of further exploration. The money was in offshore drilling, and to my knowledge, no new refineries were being built in Louisiana. What possible value could Bernadette’s seven arpents have possessed?
At lunchtime I gave up my odyssey and went back to a crossroads service station where I had stopped earlier. I sat on a chair outside facing the Gulf and ate two microwaved lengths of white boudin and a pile of dirty rice and potato salad off a paper plate. Then I went back inside and bought a fried pie and a cup of Community coffee and ate the pie and drank the coffee while I looked out the window at a shrimp boat moving down a canal through the sawgrass, seagulls whirling and dipping over its wake.
“Find out any more about that property you were looking for, Mr. Robicheaux?” the clerk said. He was in his mid-twenties and wore a crew cut and striped strap overalls and a brown T-shirt.
“Not much,” I said. “I’ll probably go to the courthouse and check the records tomorrow.”
“After you left, another man came in and asked me about that property. No, not exactly about the property, but about the girl, the one who was killed?”
“Bernadette Latiolais.”
“Yeah, a man came in and said didn’t that girl come from a family that had a rice or crawfish farm here’bouts.”
“What did this fellow look like?” I asked.
“‘Strange’ is the word I’d use.”
“Strange in what way?”
“His eyes, they didn’t have any pupils.”
“What color were they?”
“Blue. And he had black hair combed up on his head.”
“What else do you remember about him?”