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A half hour later, Mack Bertrand, our chief forensic chemist, called from the Acadiana crime lab. He believed the saucer and teacup and shoes and lipstick tube and handbag and winter coats and the other items retrieved from the burial site on the Delahoussaye property had been placed inside the grave with the girl’s remains and had not been dumped there earlier.
“How do you know?”
“Her body fluids are on every item we ran. Outside the immediate disturbed area, we found no buried garbage or debris of any kind.”
“What do you have in the way of prints?”
“Either rainwater or mud ruined anything that might have been there. If this is any help to you, the winter coats had levels of mold inside them that indicates they were stored a long time, probably in a damp place, before they went into the ground.”
I called the sheriff’s department in Jeff Davis Parish and then went into Helen’s office and told her of the information I had gotten from Koko Hebert and the crime lab. “Has Jeff Davis Parish got a missing girl that fits the description of the vic?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Why did the perp bury her here?”
“Who knows? People dump dead animals out there. No one is going to pay attention to carrion birds circling around.”
“Think we have a serial killer, a guy with a fetish?”
“Guys with a fetish don’t give up their souvenirs. They move their hiding place around, but they don’t give up their trophies.”
She turned her swivel chair toward the window. Across the bayou, the children had gone and the park was empty. A birthday balloon, the air half gone, the painted face on the Mylar surface shriveled into a grimace, floated out of a tree onto the water.
“We need somebody in the box,” Helen said. “This all started with that convict over in Mississippi, what’s-his-name—”
“Elmore Latiolais.”
“Right, the guy who was trying to dime Herman Stanga. Pick up Stanga.”
“For what?”
“His front yard is covered with dog shit. He didn’t brush his teeth this morning. His mother should have had herself sterilized. Any of those will do.”
CLETE PURCEL’S OFFICE was located on Main, in a refurbished nineteenth-century brick building that had a steel colonnade attached to the front wall. He was proud of his office, and on the flagstone patio in back, he had placed a glass-topped table inset with an umbrella, and when life with his clientele was too much, he sat on the patio among the banana fronds and enjoyed a snack and read the newspaper or enjoyed the fine view of Bayou Teche and the drawbridge at Burke Street. When he went onto his patio, he entered his private domain, and his secretary was instructed not to bother him with any of the miscreants, addicts, and marginal hookers who visited and left and returned to his waiting room as though it were a social center.
If a client became disruptive or experienced a psychotic episode or began throwing furniture, the secretary called Clete on his cell phone. Otherwise, he ate his snack and gazed at the flowers and caladiums and oak trees and flooded elephant ears along the banks of the bayou and the passing tugs and workboats that were headed for the Gulf of Mexico. On this day in particular, Clete had resolved he would stop thinking about Herman Stanga and the jail time he might have to do for tearing the man up behind the Gate Mouth club. He had just set aside his copy of The Daily Iberian and nodded off in his chair when his secretary opened the French doors that gave onto the patio. “Mr. Layton Blanchet is outside,” she said.
/> “What does he want?”
“He says he has an appointment. He said he called this morning.”
Clete thought about it. “Yeah, he called, but he didn’t have an appointment.”
“What do you want me to tell him?”
Clete put a mint in his mouth and took his comb out of his pocket. He widened his eyes to wake himself up. “Send him on through,” he said.
The nature of Clete’s vocation did not allow him selectivity. Daily he came in contact with bail skips, pathological liars, bill collectors, loan-company operatives who ran sales scams in slums, wife batterers, runaway girls who had been raped by their fathers and brothers, attorneys who were kept on retainers by pimps and drug dealers, and insurance reps who convinced doped-up accident victims in hospital beds to sign claim waivers. The subculture that provided his livelihood was predatory and Darwinian and often without mercy, but to those who lived inside it, it was as natural a way of life as a zoning board licensing porn theaters and massage parlors in a residential neighborhood comprised primarily of elderly and poor people.
Clete dealt with problematic situations among his clientele in the way a field surgeon would treat a gangrenous wound, or perhaps in the way a nurse in a third-world typhus ward would treat her patients. He clicked off a switch in his head and did not think about what his eyes saw and what his thoughts told him and what his hands were required by necessity to do.
Dealing with people from the mainstream presented a different kind of challenge. Non-felons, people who attended church and ran businesses and belonged to civic clubs, upscale women whose faces wore the ceramic glaze of Botox, came to him in almost secretive fashion, explaining their problems in meticulous detail, keeping the wounds green and festering as they talked about seeking justice. Almost always they attributed the origins of their problems to the misdeeds of others. They considered themselves normal and without blinking lied both to him and to themselves. At the end of their relationship with Clete, no matter how positive the outcome, they had a way of not recognizing him on the street.
What bothered Clete most about Layton Blanchet was his manic level of energy and the power that seemed to flow through his arm when he shook hands, as though control of the other person was supposed to begin as soon as Layton’s fingers crawled up someone’s wrist. The freshness of Layton’s expensive clothes and the intense clarity of his eyes made Clete think of a sailing ship bursting through waves, or in a darker mode, of an avaricious Greek warrior dropping from inside a wooden horse into the silent streets of Troy.
“This is where you work, huh?” Layton said, seating himself in the umbrella’s shade without being asked. “Dave Robicheaux and I were talking about you not long ago. I’m glad you’re making it in New Iberia. It can be a tough town for outsiders, you know, and all that antebellum family crap. Where’d you get that bunch in the waiting room? You bus them in from detox?”
“Jerry Springer does referrals for me.”
