“You’re going to be kidnapped?”
“She said I was evaporating.”
I heard his breathing quicken, saw a vein swell in his neck. “You stop listening to superstitious people. You stop believing in stuff like that.”
“I didn’t say I believed her.”
“You’ve got it painted all over you, Dave. It’s a death wish.”
He put his glass of sangria on the table and pinched his thumb and index finger on his temples as though the sun were burning down through the tree overhead, eating into his skull.
“What is it?” I said.
“If you die on me, I’m going to get really mad,” he replied. “You’re not going to do that to me. I’m not going to allow it. You understand me? I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
THE MURDER OF Timothy Abelard and his friend and the heinous nature of the slayings were all over the front pages of state newspapers and provided the lead in every local television broadcast. Because the story had Gothic overtones and involved a wealthy recluse, it was immediately picked up by the national news services. Each account emphasized Abelard’s stature in the community, his contribution as a defense industrialist, the loss of his son and daughter-in-law somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, his convivial personality, and his iconic role as a plantation patriarch who represented a bygone era.
No mention was made of his ties to the Giacano crime family in New Orleans or the Batista regime in Cuba or the Somozas in Nicaragua. The man who died with him, Emiliano Jimenez, was referred to as a “visitor” and “longtime friend” who had been “interested in developing new markets for Louisiana sugar farmers.”
Any serious student of popular media will tell you that the real story lies not in what is written but in what is left out. In this instance the omission was not simply one of airbrushing out the details of Abelard’s dealings with New Orleans gangsters and third-world despots. The bigger omission was ongoing and systemic: Timothy Abelard’s death was the stuff of Elizabethan drama; the murder of the girls in Jefferson Davis Parish didn’t merit the ink it would take to fill a ballpoint pen.
Abelard’s funeral was held on a Tuesday at a mortuary home, not a church. The lawn was green from the spring rains, the flowers in bloom. Most of the mourners were elderly and dressed in clothes that they probably seldom had occasion to wear except at religious services. Their accents and frame of reference were of an earlier generation, one that believed there was virtue in allowing memory to soften and revise the image of the deceased, that appearance was more important than substance, because ultimately appearance was, in its way, a fulfillment of aspiration.
They remembered Timothy Abelard for his acts of charity, his intercession on behalf of a Negro servant locked in jail, his kindness to a deranged woman who begged food at people’s doors, his rehabilitation of a drunkard driven from his ministry by his own congregation. Abelard’s eviction of his tenants from their homes when they tried to join a farmworkers’ union was forgotten.
From across the street, I watched Robert Weingart and Kermit Abelard and four other pallbearers carry the casket down the steps to a hearse. Kermit’s face seemed to glow with the self-induced resilience of a person who is either heavily medicated or teetering on the edge of nervous collaps
e. In spite of the heat, he wore a heavy navy blue suit and white dress shirt and dark tie with a white boutonniere. After the casket was rolled into the back of the hearse, he seemed at a loss as to what he should do next. His truncated workingman’s physique seemed wrapped too tight, the heat in his suit visibly climbing up his neck.
Almost as though he had heard my thoughts, his gaze traveled across the street and met mine. He disengaged from the mourners and walked through the traffic to my truck, barely acknowledging the two vehicles forced to stop in order to let him pass. “I didn’t recognize your pickup,” he said.
“State Farm bought me a new one. After my old one got shot up and hauled off by some guys I’d like to have a talk with,” I said.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Please accept my sympathies,” I said.
“Do I have to restate the question?”
“Sometimes a killer shows up at the funeral service of his victim.”
“I don’t see your friend Mr. Purcel here.”
I let my eyes drift off his face, then return again. “I’m not sure how I should take that.”
“Take it any way you wish. I resent your presence.”
“Sorry to hear you say that.”
He placed his hand on the window jamb. “I cared for your daughter. You treated me with repugnance and disrespect every time we met.”
“You ‘cared’ for her?”
“I’m going to the cemetery now. I’m going to ask that you not follow us.”
“Maybe you should do a reality check, Kermit. Your father and mother may have been killed because of your grandfather’s iniquitous deeds. Number two, you’re not going to tell a police officer what he’s going and not going to do in a homicide investigation. Do you understand that?”
“You may have gone to college, Mr. Robicheaux, but you wear your lack of breeding like a rented suit,” he said.