“Because none of the lines in this investigation are simple, and both you and she think otherwise.”
“You really know h
ow to win a girl’s heart. Okay, you asked for this.” Helen opened a desk drawer and threw a folder in front of me. “These were taken by a woman I used to be friends with in the Garden District. The woman in the mask with the whip is Carolyn. The leather fetters and chains are the real thing. How do you like the thigh-high boots?”
“I think that stuff is a joke.”
“A joke?”
“It’s the masquerade of self-deluded idiots who never grew out of masturbation. I have the feeling everyone in those photographs is a closet Puritan.”
“You’re too much, bwana.”
“No, I’m just a guy worried about his daughter. I’ll buy Carolyn Blanchet as a greedy, manipulative shrew capable of staging her husband’s suicide. But she’s not Eva Perón in Marquis de Sade drag.”
“How about Carolyn Blanchet and Emma Poche working together? Ever think of that? Or maybe Carolyn has a yen for young girls and Emma got jealous. I don’t have all the answers, Dave, but don’t accuse me of being simplistic or naive.”
“Timothy Abelard is a pterodactyl. To him, people like Carolyn Blanchet and Emma are insects.”
Helen replaced the black-and-white photos in the folder and dropped them in her desk drawer. “You give the Abelards dimensions they don’t have. I’m not fooled by them, but I don’t obsess about them, either.”
This time I made no reply.
“I was about to go down to your office when you came in,” she said. “That guy Gus Fowler?”
“What about him?”
“A body washed up on the shore at East Cote Blanche Bay last night. One hand is missing three fingers. The sheriff says they look like they were recently sutured. The deceased has a white scar cupped around one nostril like a piece of twine. Sound like anyone you know?”
IT HAS BEEN my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced—in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.
This story began with a visit to a penal work gang outside Natchez, Mississippi. Its denouement commenced late in the afternoon with a phone call from one of the players who had sweltered in the heat and humidity next to a brush fire that was so hot, a freshly lopped tree branch would burst instantly alight when it touched the flames. The caller was not a man I cared to hear from again.
Jimmy Darl Thigpin’s voice was like that of a man speaking through a rusty tin can. “I’m retired now and was in the neighborhood,” he said.
“I see,” I replied, actually not seeing anything, not wanting to even exchange a greeting with the gunbull who had shot and killed Elmore Latiolais.
“I’m up at a fish camp at Bayou Bijou. Come out and have a drink.”
“I’ve been off the hooch quite a while, Cap.”
“Got soda pop or whatever you want.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Need to give you a heads-up. I got to get some guilt off my conscience as well.”
“Why don’t you come into the office?”
“I don’t like being around officialdom anymore. The state of Mis’sippi give me a pension wouldn’t pay for the toilet paper in the state capitol building. Guess what color half the legislature is? I got a chicken smoking on my grill. It’s a twenty-minute ride, Mr. Robicheaux. Do an old man a favor, will you?”
After I got off the phone, I called Clete Purcel and told him of my conversation with Thigpin. “I’d blow it off,” he said.
“Why?”
“If he’s got anything to say, let him do it on the phone.”
“Maybe he’s not sure how much he wants to tell me. Maybe he was paid to kill Elmore Latiolais.”