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ON THE WAY BACK to the office, I asked myself why I hadn’t told her I had been friends with her father in Miami. But maybe the memory was just too unpleasant to revisit, I thought. Maybe she had never learned that her father had been enticed into aiding and abetting the robbery of the armored car, if indeed that’s what happened. Why let the past injure the innocent? I told myself.
No, that was not it. She had paused before she acknowledged her father. As any investigative law officer will tell you, when witnesses or suspects or even ordinary citizens hesitate before answering a question, it’s because they are deciding whether they should either conceal information or outright lie about it.
It was almost 5 p.m. when I got back to the department. Wally, our dispatcher, told me there had been a homicide by gunshot wound on the bayou, amid a cluster of houses upstream from the sugar mill. I gave the serial numbers on the bills to a detective in our robbery unit and asked him to run them through our Internet connection to the U.S. Treasury Department. Then I tried to forget the image of Dallas Klein kneeling on a sidewalk, his fingers laced behind his head.
The sheriff of Iberia Parish was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career in law enforcement as a meter maid with NOPD, then had patrolled the Desire district and Gird Town and worked Narcotics in the French Quarter. She wore jeans or slacks, carried herself like a male athlete, and possessed a strange kind of androgynous beauty. Her face could be sensuous and warm, almost seductive, but it could change while you were talking to her, as though not only two genders but two different people lived inside her. People who saw her in one photograph often did not recognize her in another.
I not only admired Helen, I loved her. She was honest and loyal and never afraid. Anyone who showed disrespect regarding her sexuality did so only once.
A couple of years back, a New Iberia lowlife by the name of Jimmy Dean Styles, who ran a dump called the Boom Boom Room and who would eventually rape and murder a sixteen-year-old girl with a shotgun, was drinking from a bottle of chocolate milk behind his bar while he casually told Helen that even though he had overheard her male fellow officers ridiculing her at the McDonald’s on East Main, he personally considered her “a dyke who’s straight-up and don’t take shit from nobody.”
Then he upended his bottle of chocolate milk, his eyes smiling at the barb he had inserted under her skin.
Helen slipped her baton so quickly from the ring on her belt, he didn’t even have time to flinch before glass and chocolate milk and blood exploded all over his face. Then Helen dropped her business card on the bar and said, “Have a nice day. Call me again if I can be of any more assistance.” That was Helen Soileau.
I tapped on her office door, then opened it. “Wally says we have a homicide by the mill?” I said.
“The nine-one-one came in about fifteen minutes ago. The coroner should be there now. Where were you?”
“A couple of bills with dye on them showed up at the new truck stop. Who’s the victim?”
She glanced down at a notepad. “Yvonne Darbonne. She waited tables at Victor’s. You know her?”
“Yeah, I think I do. Her daddy used to cane-farm and run a bar up the bayou?”
“Bring the cruiser around and let’s find out,” she replied.
We drove through downtown and crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at Burke Street, then crossed the bayou again and headed up a broken two-lane road that led past an enormous sugar mill that almost blocked out the sky. At night, during the grinding season, the fires and electric lights and the giant white clouds of steam that rose from the stacks could be seen from miles away, not unlike a medieval painting depicting Dante’s vision of the next world.
Hunkered between the mill and bayou was a community of dull green company-constructed houses left over from an earlier time. In the winter, the stench from the mill and the threadlike pieces of carbon floating off the smokestacks blew with a northern breeze directly onto the houses down below. The yards were dirt, packed as hard as brick, strung with wash lines, the broken windows repaired with tape and plastic bags. Several uniformed cops, two forensic chemists from the lab, the coroner, three cruisers, and an ambulance were already at the scene.
“Who called it in?” I asked Helen as we crossed a rain ditch and pulled into a dirt driveway.
“A neighbor heard the shot. She thought it was a firecracker, then she looked out the window and saw the girl on the ground.”
“She didn’t see anyone else?”
“She thought she heard a car drive away, but she saw no one.”
The girl’s father, whose name was Cesaire Darbonne, had just arrived. Even though he was almost seventy, he was a trim, comely man, with neatly parted steel-colored hair and pale turquoise eyes. His skin was brown, as smooth as tallow, marked on one arm by a chain of white scars that looked like small misshapen hearts. He was also coming apart at the seams.
Two cops had to restrain him from rushing to where his daughter lay in the backyard. They walked him back to a cruiser in the driveway and sat him down in the passenger seat, then stood in front of the open door so he couldn’t get out. “That’s my li’l girl back there. Her birt’day was tomorrow. Who done somet’ing like this to that li’l girl? She ain’t but eighteen years old,” he said.
But the answer was probably not one he wanted to hear. His daughter lay in the Johnson grass by a doorless wood garage, her body in the shape of a question mark. She was wearing a beige skirt and tennis shoes without socks and a T-shirt with a winged horse emblazoned on the front. A blue-black .22 revolver with walnut grips lay by her hand. The entry wound was in the center of her forehead. Her hair, which w
as dark red, had fallen down in a skein across her face.
I squatted down next to her and picked up the revolver by inserting a pencil through the trigger guard. The cylinder looked like one that had been drilled to hold Magnums, and all the chambers other than the one under hammer were loaded and appeared unfired. A cell phone lay in the grass, less than three feet away. Helen handed me a Ziploc evidence bag. “Powder burns?” she said.
“Enough to put out an eye,” I replied.
Helen squatted down next to me, her forearms resting on her knees, her face lowered. “You ever see a woman shoot herself in the face?” she asked.
“Nope, but suicides do weird things,” I replied.
Helen stood up, chewing on a weed stem. The sun went behind a cloud, then the wind came up and we could smell the heaviness of the bayou. “Bag the cell phone and get it to the lab. Find out who she was talking to before she caught the bus. Has the old man got other kids?”
“To my knowledge, Yvonne was the only one,” I replied.
