“That’s the point. Nobody does. Not here, not anywhere. It’s open season on women and girls in this country. You bring that asshole in. If he falls down and leaves blood on the vehicle, all the better. His DNA becomes a voluntary submission.”
“Can you repeat that last part?”
“Call me when you’re at the Abelard place,” she said. “By the way, the ligature Clete found in the Abelards’ Dumpster was clean. Bring me something I can use, Dave. I want to put somebody’s head on a pike.”
BUT RHETORIC IS cheap stuff when you play by the rules and the other side does business with baseball bats. No one came to the Abelards’ door when I knocked. An elderly man whose race was hard to determine was pulling weeds in the flower bed. He said he had seen no one that morning. He also said he had never heard of anyone named Gus Fowler, nor did he remember seeing anyone who fit Fowler’s description. I asked where I might find Miss Jewel.
His eyes were blue-green and scaled with cataracts. They glowed in the indistinct way that light glows inside frosted glass. His skin was a yellowish-brown, leached pink and milk-white in places by a dermatologic disease that often afflicts people of color in the South. The tattered straw hat he wore made me think of pictures of convicts taken at the prison colony in French Guiana. “Jewel Laveau?” he said.
I realized I had never known Jewel’s last name. It was not an ordinary one, either. Anyone who ever read a history of old New Orleans or visited the St. Louis Cemetery on Basin Street would probably recognize it.
“If she ain’t wit’ the family, she’s most probably at her house in the quarters,” the gardener said.
“You know where I could find Robert Weingart?”
He smiled in a kindly fashion. “No, suh.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“No, suh, what I mean is, I ain’t sure who that is. Even if I knew, I ain’t seen nobody.”
I understood that no amount of either coercion or bribery would ever cause this man to give up a teaspoon of information about the Abelards or the people who came and went through the front door. “Can you forget I was here?” I said.
“Suh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I drove east on a winding road between the bay and pastureland that had become a flood zone chained with ponds that were home to clouds of gnats and dragonflies and where, for no apparent reason, cranes or egrets or blue herons did not feed or nest. A gray skein of dead vegetation left by storm surges coated the branches of the persimmon and gum trees and slash pines, and on either side of the road, the rain ditches were strewn with trash, much of it in vinyl bags that had split when they were flung from automobiles. Up ahead, among a few slender palm trees stenciled against the sky like those on a Caribbean isle, I saw the tin roofs of the community where Miss Jewel lived.
The term “quarters,” in the plural, goes back to the plantation era, which did not end with the Civil War but perpetuated itself well into the mid-twentieth century. Harry Truman may or may not have been disliked in the South for integrating the United States Army, but there is no doubt about the enmity he incurred when he made ten-thousand-dollar loans available to southern sharecroppers and farmworkers at 1 percent interest. That one program broke the back of the corporate farm system and created the Dixiecrat Party and the career of Senator Strom Thurmond. But a culture does not transform itself in a few generations. Except for the automobiles and pickup trucks parked in the dirt yards, the quarters owned by the Abelard family had changed little since they were carpentered together in the 1880s.
They were painted yellow or blue and resembled wood boxcars with tin roofs and tiny galleries built onto them. They were often called shotgun houses because theoretically a person could fire a single-barrel twenty-gauge through the front door and send a load of birdshot out the back without bruising a wall. But Jewel’s house was different from the rest, located at the end of a dirt street still slick from an early-morning shower, its walls painted a deep purple, the window frames and gallery posts painted green, the gallery hung with Mardi Gras beads. On the tin mailbox out by the rain ditch was the name Laveau in large black letters. She was sitting on the gallery steps, wearing heavy Levi’s and an unironed men’s shirt she hadn’t bothered to tuck in and a bandanna wrapped tightly around her hair. She was reading a shopper’s guide of some kind, the pages folded back, clutching it with one hand, turning it to catch the light as though the words contained great significance. I walked up the path and stopped three feet from her, but she never raised her eyes from the shopper’s guide.
“Are you related to Marie Laveau, Miss Jewel?” I asked.
“She was my great-great-grandmother.”
“You don’t practice voodoo, do you?”
“She didn’t, either. People used that against her ’cause she was the most powerful woman in New Orleans.”
“I need to find the man with the bandaged hand, the one who calls himself Gus Fowler.”
“I t’ink he left.”
“Do you know where he went?”
She seemed to study the question. “No, he didn’t say. He just drove away.”
“We’re going to find him. We’d like to feel you’re on our side.”
“I don’t have anyt’ing to say about him or any of the t’ings you got on your mind.”
“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”
“Your kind don’t give up easy.”
“No, you were waiting for me. Do you see into the future, Miss Jewel?”