“Why are you here, Mr. Perkins?”
As he gazed around my office, his pale blue eyes shone with the self-satisfied pleasure of a man who knew that he was one of the very few who understood the complexity of the world. “You think I’m trying to fool you about my book. I called a literary agent. Man from the William Morris Agency. Same man your daughter had dinner with when he was visiting here. He said soon as I’m done to fire off my manuscript to him. What do you think about that? Your daughter and me might end up colleagues.”
“That last part isn’t going to happen.”
“Maybe not. But I know a bunch of people that’s going down. And I’m gonna put it all in my book. I’ll give you a little tidbit here, Mr. Robicheaux. About twenty years back, Kermit Abelard’s parents disappeared from their yacht out in the Bermuda Triangle, didn’t they?”
“The story is they were lost in a storm off Bimini.”
“‘Story’ is the word. That nasty old man who don’t want me on his island was doing business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. Their business was running weed and coke into Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Mr. Abelard didn’t pay his tab with the dagos, and the dagos had both his son and his daughter-in-law wrapped with chains and sunk in about sixty feet of water.”
“Was Weingart mixed up with this?”
“Ask him, or read my book when it comes out. Now, tell me a little bit about your education and service record and war experiences, if you’ve had any. Stuff I can kind of soup up the description with.”
“Who killed the Canadian girl and Bernadette Latiolais, Mr. Perkins?”
He gazed earnestly into space. “I’m a blank on that one.”
“I just noticed the time. I’m sorry, I have an appointment. Here’s my business card. Give me a call whenever you want.”
He pointed a finger at me playfully. “You know what, you’re not a bad fella.”
After he was gone, I opened the windows, then went down to Helen’s office and told her what had happened. “You think he’s just nuts?” she said.
“I think he’s a psychopath and typical white trash who hates people like the Abelards. I think he wants to hang Robert Weingart out to dry as well.”
She massaged her upper arm, a tinge of fatigue in her face. “You think Perkins killed the girls?”
“Maybe.”
“For what motive?”
“A guy like that doesn’t need one,” I replied.
“You see the newspaper this morning?”
“No.”
“Layton Blanchet’s death is being called a suicide.”
“Well, it’s bullshit.”
“Cut loose of it, bwana. We have only one homicide to concentrate on in our jurisdiction—the murder of the Canadian girl, Fern Michot.”
“Everything we’ve talked about is part of one package. You know it, and so do I,” I replied.
“Yeah, I do, but our limitations are our limitations. That’s the way it is.”
I started to speak, but she went back to her paperwork and didn’t look up again until I was outside her door.
CHAPTER
14
THE PECULIARITY OF entering one’s eighth decade is that questions regarding theology do not sharpen but instead become less significant. Better said, need for proof of the supernatural becomes less imperative. At a certain point, perhaps we realize that we have been surrounded by the connections between the material and the unseen world all our lives, but for various reasons, we chose not to see them.
Years ago dead members of my platoon used to call me up long-distance during electrical storms. So did my murdered wife, Annie. A psychiatrist told me I was experiencing a psychotic break. But cold sober and free of all the ghosts I had brought back from a land of rice paddies and elephant grass and hills that looked like the summer-browned breasts of Asian women, I had seen my father standing in the surf south of Point Au Fer, the rain tinking on the hard hat he was wearing when he died in an offshore blowout. In the oil field, he had always been called Big Aldous Robicheaux, as though the three words were one. In his barroom fistfights, he took on all comers two and three at a time, exploding his fists on his adversaries’ faces with the dispassionate ease of a baseball player swatting balls in a batting cage. My mother’s infidelities filled him with feelings of sorrow and anger and personal impotence, and in turn his drunkenness and irresponsibility robbed her of any happiness she’d ever had and finally any possibility of belief in herself. My parents ruined their marriage, then their home and their family. But in death, when the wellhead blew out far below the monkey board on the rig where he was racking pipe, Big Aldous clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the blackness, brave to the end, swallowed under a derrick that collapsed like melting licorice on top of him. A survivor said Big Aldous was smiling when he bailed into the stars. And that’s the way I have always remembered my old man, and I have come to learn that memory and presence are inextricably connected and should never be thought of as separate entities.