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“You didn’t sleep?”
“I think both of us kind of passed out.”
“So you don’t know what she did?”
“She’s not that kind of person, Dave.”
“Yeah, I know. You told me she’s cute because she has a tattoo on her butt.”
“You ought to see it.”
“When are you going to grow up? Don’t you realize how serious this is?”
“What am I supposed to do, go into mourning for myself? I don’t care if I was blacked out or not. I didn’t pop Stanga. If other people don’t believe me, that’s their problem. How about I treat you and Molly and Alafair to dinner at the casino tonight? You’re giving me a headache here.”
I LEFT THE health club and called Molly and said I was working late and that I was not sure when I would be home.
“Alafair told me about her encounter with that creep Perkins,” she said. “Is this related?”
“I’m not sure where he is right now.”
“Is Clete with you?”
“No, I just left him at the health club.”
“Let Helen and the department handle this.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“If you’re going after this guy, I want to be with you.”
“I’ll call you back later. Everything is fine. I just got a little behind in my schedule today.”
“Don’t you hang up on me.”
“I’m losing the signal,” I said.
My statement to Molly had not been a total lie. In truth, I had no plan about Vidor Perkins. He was obviously a psychopath, inured to threats and pain and deprivation by a lifetime of institutionalization. Worse, he delighted in attention, particularly when he had an audience. Any con who turns down parole from a joint like Huntsville and of his own volition does twenty-seven months in a cotton field under the tender and loving supervision of mounted Texas gunbulls has demonstrated a degree of toughness that cannot be dismissed easily. Also, I still believed that Perkins had an agenda that may have involved betrayal of either the Abelards or Layton Blanchet or Robert Weingart. But I couldn’t be sure. In fact, I could not be sure about anything in this case, except that Perkins had to leave my daughter alone.
I drove down Old Jeanerette Road through fields of waving sugarcane and past the whitewashed crypts that stood in a shady copse, the ground green with lichen that looked as soft as felt, all of it five feet from a bend in the road, like an abiding visual reminder, at least for me, of the earth’s gravitational claim upon the quick.
I pulled into Perkins’s gravel driveway. His stucco bungalow was already deep in shadow inside the pecan trees and slash pines that surrounded it, his pickup truck parked under the porte cochere. His flower beds were mulched and blooming with azaleas and impatiens and rosebushes. A water bird jittered a rainbowlike haze across the front lawn. On the far side of the two-lane, the property extended all the way down to the Teche, a long grassy slope pooled with the shade of giant live oaks that were silhouetted against a red sun. It was an idyllic scene except for the little black girl who sat on the front steps, her knees pinched close together, her hands knotted in her lap.
I got out of my pickup and walked toward her. From the backyard, I could hear a thick, whapping sound, like a hard object striking a canvas or plastic cover. The little girl was the same one Helen and I had told not to visit Vidor Perkins’s home by herself again.
“Remember me?” I said.
“Yes, suh. You and the lady drove me home,” she replied.
“You promised us you wouldn’t come back here without your mommy.”
“She dropped me off. She takes care of a sick lady. My auntie couldn’t keep me.” She spoke in a monotone, her face empty.
I sat down on the steps, one step lower than she was. I gazed at the bayou. “Your name is Clara?”
