“Thanks. I don’t have far to go,” I said.
“Stop acting like an asshole, Dave.”
I stepped off the curb and leaned down on the window jamb. “What do you want, Carolyn?”
“To apologize for the way I acted when you and Helen Soileau came out to the house. I had just gotten finished with those federal auditors and wanted to take it out on somebody.”
I nodded and stepped back on the curb.
“Dave,” she said, turning my name into two syllables.
“Have a great life,” I said.
“You’d better listen to me. Helen Soileau is carrying out a vendetta. Give me two minutes. That’s all I’m asking. Then you can do whatever you please.”
Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it, a voice said.
But there was no question about Helen’s lack of objectivity toward Carolyn Blanchet. Worse, I wasn’t entirely sure that Helen hadn’t been involved in the same circle of female friends in New Orleans as Carolyn. Carolyn pulled around the corner, into the shade of a two-story building, and waited. I followed and got into the car. “Go ahead,” I said.
“I misled you about Emma Poche,” she said. “We had a brief relationship. I didn’t tell you the truth because I didn’t want Emma hurt. Men gave her a bad time at the New Orleans Police Department. She doesn’t need the same kind of trouble in St. Martinville.”
The Lexus’s engine was running, the air-conditioning vents gushing. Carolyn wore sandals and white shorts and a yellow blouse and blue contacts. She sat with her back against the door, her knees slightly spread, a gold cross and thin gold chain lying askew on her chest. Her eyes roamed over my face, her mouth parting, exposing the whiteness of her teeth. “You just going to sit there?” she said.
“Ever read Mein Kampf? Hitler explains how you tell an effective lie. You wrap it in a little bit of truth.”
“Let me tell you this. A friend of mine felt bad about something she had done and called me up and made a confession. My friend had taken pictures of me at a girls-only Mardi Gras celebration. Helen Soileau wanted the pictures. When Helen Soileau wants something, she gets it. I have a feeling you’ve seen those pictures.”
I tried to keep my face neutral, my eyes empty. I looked down the street at a black kid doing wheelies on a bicycle under the colonnade.
“That’s what I thought,” Carolyn said. “Think what you want about those pictures—they’re innocent. Now let me ask you this. What kind of person would use them to blacken another person’s reputation? Also, if these pictures are immoral, how is it that Helen Soileau is friends with the woman who took them?”
“None of this changes the fact that you lied about your relationship with Emma Poche.”
“Have you told Molly everything about your various affairs over the years? Let’s face it, Dave, from what I heard, you were never very big on keeping it in your pants.”
“It’s really been good talking with you, Carolyn. I’ll keep in mind that you were protecting a working-class girl like Emma from public scandal. Tell me, how does that compute with your and Layton’s record of stealing the life savings of thousands of working-class people who trusted y’all?”
“God, you’re a sweetheart to the bitter end.” She paused. “Remember the New Year’s party at the Blue Room in New Orleans about twenty years back?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“I guess you don’t. You’d soaked your head in alcohol for two days.” She was smiling. “Who took you home that night?”
I held my eyes on hers, trying to show no expression.
“You were quite a guy back then,” she said. “Enough to make a girl straighten up and fly right and give up her eccentric ways. Remember that line from Hemingway about feeling the earth move? Wow, you did it, babe.”
I got out of the Lexus. She rolled down the window and looked up at me, laughing openly. “Had you going, didn’t I?” she said.
THAT NIGHT BLACK storm clouds swollen with electricity had sealed the sky from the Gulf to central Louisiana. Waves crashed across the two-lane road at the bottom of St. Mary Parish, and a tornado made a brief touchdown and knocked out a power line. During the night, several emergency vehicles passed the Abelard house and noticed nothing unusual about it other than a few broken tree limbs that had blown into the yard. At around four-fifteen A.M. , a deputy sheriff thought he saw flashes of light inside the windows, both upstairs and downstairs. He slowed his cruiser by the wood bridge that gave onto the compound, but the house had returned to complete darkness. He concluded that he had seen reflections of lightning on the window glass or that someone had been carrying a candelabrum between the rooms.
At 8:43 A.M. Friday, the phone on my desk rang. The caller was someone I had not expected to hear from again. “Mr. Dave?” she said.
“Jewel?”
“I need he’p.”
“What is it?”