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“The road was blocked,” the sheriff said. “What’s inside the house?”
“Go see for yourself,” she replied.
“That’s not helping us a lot,” he said.
“That’s your problem. I won’t talk about it. If you talk about evil, it just makes it grow. Maybe I didn’t see what I t’ought. Maybe it was just the shadows. I tried to call Mr. Kermit in New Orleans. But he wasn’t at the hotel. Neither was Mr. Robert.” Then her gaze shifted on me and stayed there, as though the sheriff were no longer present. “You’re disappearing.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“It’s like you’re being erased—your arms, your legs. They’re thinning away, turning into air.”
“You stay here,” the sheriff said to her. “I’ll talk to you again before we leave.”
“You cain’t tell me what to do. I’m not listening to y’all anymore. I spent my life listening to you. There was evil all around us. But where were you? You were hiding in your offices, doing what you were tole, letting the people in the quarters suffer and work for nothing. Now you’re out here to clean up. ’Cause that’s what y’all been doing all your lives. Cleaning up after the people that kept you scared just like the rest of us.”
“You need to keep a civil tongue, Miss Jewel,” the sheriff said. There was no mistaking the racial resentment that even among the best of us sometimes oozed its way through the mix in our struggle with ourselves.
I walked with the sheriff back up the driveway. Two deputies had already tried the doors and windows and had found all of them locked. The sheriff examined the key slot in the front doorknob without touching it. The slot looked like someone had wedged a blade screwdriver into it. There were also two deep prize marks between the edge of the door and the jamb, as though someone had tried to force back the tongue on the lock. “Get us in,” the sheriff said to his deputy.
We had all put on polyethylene gloves. The deputy used his baton to break a glass pane out of a side panel, then he reached inside and unlocked the door. The power was still off in the house, the windows tightly sealed, the air dense and warm and smelling of moldy wallpaper and curtains and slipcovers that were never free of dust and carpet stretched over dry rot. The light that filtered through the stained glass on the sunporch seemed to burnish the woodwork and antique furniture with a red flush that was garish and unnatural.
“Smell it?” the deputy with the baton said.
“Open some windows,” the sheriff replied. He flicked a wall switch on and off, apparently forgetting that the power grid was down. His eyes traveled up the stairs and along the banister and up the wall to the landing on the second story. “I was really hoping we wouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
The blood evidence told its own story. The smears along the wall were those of a person who was wounded and had probably fallen and struggled to his feet. The linear and horsetail patterns, stippled and attenuated on the edges, as though they had been flung from a brush, were of the kind you associate with the splatter from an exit wound. The sheriff and I started up the stairs, not touching the mahogany banister that was stained in three places by the grip of a bloodied hand.
Down below, one of the deputies said, “Oh, shit.”
“How about it on the language?” the sheriff said.
“Better come look at this, sir. Watch where you step,” the deputy said.
We went back down the stairs and walked past the entrance to the sunporch and entered a dark hallway that led to the kitchen. A man hung from the doorframe, his slippered feet barely touching the floor, a clothesline wrapped around his throat and threaded through a metal eyelet screwed into the top of the jamb. His eyes were open, his tongue sticking out of his mouth like a small, twisted green banana.
But Timothy Abelard’s ordeal had not consisted simply of being hanged like a criminal; he had also been shot, at least twice.
“Who the hell would do this?” the sheriff said.
“About half the parish, if they were honest about it,” the deputy said. The sheriff gave him a look. “Sorry,” the deputy said.
The sheriff looked up the staircase. “I hate to think what’s up there. You ready?” he said to me.
“If it will make this easier for you, I’ll show you the photos of the dead girls who I think suffered much worse than Mr. Abelard did.”
“I’m not making the connection,” the sheriff said, his expression suddenly irritable if not disdainful.
At that moment I didn’t care about the sheriff’s feelings or the conflicts he had probably never resolved regarding his role as a public servant in a fiefdom. I hadn’t liked Timothy Abelard, nor did I like the dictatorial arrogance that I associated with his class. But that did not mean I believed that an elderly, infirm man deserved to die the way he had.
I glanced at the glass case that held the photos of Abelard standing among friends of Batista and members of the Somoza family, people for whom cruelty toward others was as natural as waking in the morning. Was Abelard a monster? Or was he just an extension of the value system that produced him, a blithe spirit who turned a blind eye to the excesses of the third-world dictators we did business with? I started to share my thoughts with the sheriff. But what was the point? He didn’t create the world in which he’d grown up and wasn’t responsible for the sins of others.
Upstairs we began to see the rest of the intruder’s handiwork. An office that I suspected was Kermit’s was torn apart. Books were raked off the shelves, a computer pushed off a desk, drawers pulled out, a gun case shoved facedown on the floor and, behind where the case had stood, a wall safe with its door hanging open, the contents gone.
A trail of blood led from the doorway of the office into a small bathroom. Emiliano lay fully clothed in the bathtub on his back, one leg hooked over the tub’s edge, the shower curtain tangled in his right hand. His face and chest were peppered with bullet wounds that probably had been inflicted by a low-caliber weapon.
It wasn’t hard to find the weapon. It was by the desk, a six-shot .22 piece of junk, the serial number acid-burned, the front sight filed off, the broken grips wrapped with electrician’s tape. The sheriff picked it up and flipped out the cylinder. “The shooter took his brass with him,” he said.
I looked at the wall safe and at the dead man in the bathtub.
