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“A meltdown I ran into. Don’t let anybody in the house till I get home.”
“What’s going on, Dave?”
“I wish I knew.”
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING I went to the office and put through a priority request with the National Crime Information Center for everything they had on Robert Weingart and the man who had given his name as Vidor Perkins. The electronic files and photographs that downloaded on my screen contained more information than I wanted or could possibly sort through. Perkins and Weingart had both been at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville at the same time. Whether they knew each other was a matter of conjecture. Perkins had served time in Alabama and Florida as well as Texas. Before Weingart went down for armed robbery in Texas, he had been arrested eleven times in Nevada, California, and Oregon, starting when he was sixteen years old. Unlike the majority of recidivists, neither man seemed to have a penchant for narcotics or alcohol. Most of their arrests involved fraud, robbery, or physical violence. As young men, both had been arrested on charges involving the jackrolling of elderly people and theft of the mails, which usually meant theft of Social Security checks. As a teenager, Weingart had been arrested for cruelty to animals and kept in a psychiatric facility for eight months. When he was nineteen, Vidor Perkins had been a suspect in an apartment-house arson that killed three people, one of them a child.
As with all sociopaths, the factual language used to describe their crimes said little if anything about their backgrounds or the influences that made them permanent members of an underclass that has one agenda—namely, to scratch their names on a wall in a way the rest of us will never forget. Maybe they grew up in shitholes. Maybe their fathers were violent drunks and their mothers wanted them aborted. Maybe they were crack babies, or they were born ugly or poor or stupid or were poorly educated and denied access to a better life. But when you have seen the handiwork of their kind up close and personal, none of the aforementioned seems to offer an adequate explanation for their behavior.
For some repeat offenders, jailing is an end in itself. They don’t break out of jails; they break into them. But I doubted that was the case with either Weingart or Perkins. Actually, the only surprise in the electronic files I downloaded was Weingart’s date of birth. He looked no older than thirty, but he was actually fifty-two. Either he shared much in common with Dorian Gray, or he had undergone a very good face-lift.
Monday morning I went into Helen Soileau’s office with printouts of both men’s rap sheets. I told her about my encounter with Vidor Perkins at Henderson Swamp and the lie he had told me about an emergency at my house. “Where’s Perkins now?” she said.
“He has a rental house on Old Jeanerette Road.”
“How’d you find him?” She was sitting behind her desk, her hands spread on top of the two rap sheets, her expression neutral.
“Called information and asked for new listings.”
“You think he’s delivering a warning on behalf of Robert Weingart?”
“Yeah, I do.”
She stood up and looked at me, thinking thoughts whose nature I could only guess at, her eyes not really seeing me. “The thread on this is going to lead back to the Abelard house in St. Mary Parish, isn’t it?” she said.
“If it does, it’s because the Abelards are up to doing what they do best—screwing their fellow man.”
She blew her breath up into her face. “Bring the cruiser around. Don’t make me regret this, Pops.”
We drove down Old Jeanerette Road through sugarcane acreage and meadowland, the wind riffling Bayou Teche in the sunlight, the rain ditches on either side of us littered with trash of every kind. We passed through a rural slum, then an experimental farm operated by the state, and rounded a bend where an old cemetery stood in a shady grove, the whitewashed crypts sunk at odd angles into the softness of the earth. Up ahead, just before the drawbridge, I could see Alice Plantation, built in 1796, and farther on a second antebellum home, one that is arguably among the most beautiful in the Deep South.
Across the drawbridge stood a trailer slum that looked like it was transported from Bangladesh and reconstructed on the banks of Bayou Teche. The house where Vidor Perkins had taken up residence was located back in a grove of slash pines and cedar trees, and offered a fine view of the economic juxtaposition that has always defined the culture in which I grew up. I doubted that Perkins was a student of history or sociology, or was even cognizant of what went on beyond the dermal wrap that probably constituted the outer layer of his universe. But the fact that he had moved into a comfortable bungalow in the midst of a breezy stand of trees situated between the two extremes of wealth and poverty in our state seemed more than coincidence. Or maybe that was just my fanciful way of looking upon an evil presence that had come into our midst, a phenomenon that was not without precedent.
His speedboat was parked on its trailer under a porte cochere, the trailer hitched to a pale blue paint-skinned pickup truck. In back, I could hear a radio playing and the sound of a rake being scraped across leaves and dirt. Helen and I walked into the backyard and saw a little black girl sitting in a swing that hung from a pecan tree. Vidor Perkins was hefting up great piles of leaves and pine needles and dumping them into an oil barrel that boiled with smoke. He was bare-chested and his skin was networked with rivulets of sweat, even though the morning was still cool. The little girl wore a pinafore and tiny patent-leather shoes powdered with dust. She was eating half of an orange Popsicle, watching us curiously.
Perkins squinted at Helen and me through the smoke, as though he couldn’t recognize me or guess the nature of our visit. Then he pointed at me good-naturedly. “Mr. Robicheaux! Was everything okay at your house?”
“What was your purpose in trying to alarm me, Mr. Perkins?” I said.
“I didn’t do no such thing. No, sir,” he said, shaking his head. But it was obvious that he was less interested in me than he was in Helen. His gaze kept drifting to her, as though he were sneaking a look at a carnival attraction.
“I’m Sheriff Soileau. Filing a false police report is a felony in this state,” she said.
A grin spread across his face. “A false police report? That’s a good one. Y’all trying to play a prank on me?”
“You told a sheriff’s detective about an emergency that didn’t exist,” she said. “Are you saying you didn’t do that?”
“If the emergency didn’t exist, that’s not my fault. I was tole by the man up on the levee to carry a message to Mr. Robicheaux. Tell me the crime in that.”
“Except the man up at the bait shop denies even seeing you,” Helen said.
“Did I say which man give me the message? I most certainly did not. Maybe this fellow was some kind of jokester. Y’all want a cold drink or a Popsicle?”
“What are you doing in our parish?” Helen asked.
“Vacationing, looking for business opportunities and such.” He was beaming as he stared at Helen, his gaze roving over her body in the way that ignorant and stupid people do when they’re amused by a handicapped or minority person.
“You a friend of Robert Weingart?” she asked.
