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“Who?” I asked.
Wally, our three-hundred-pound hypertensive dispatcher, was known as the department’s comedian and professional cynic. Essentially he was a good soul, but he invested most of his energy in trying to convince people otherwise. “He won’t give his name. He says he’ll only talk to you.”
“What’s he look like?”
He thought about it. “I’d say he looks like the bore brush you run through a gun barrel. He’s also got a birthmark running out of his hair down the back of his neck, like maybe a bird with the red shits sat on his head.”
“What’s this fellow doing now?”
“Eating a Big Mac and drinking a soda and wiping his mout’ on the paper towels he got out of our can.”
“Get a deputy to escort him up here. Also tell Helen that Mr. Vidor Perkins is in the building.”
Then Wally said something that was unusual even for him. “Dave, who is this guy?”
“The real deal, Wally.”
When Vidor Perkins sat down in front of my desk, he was holding a clipboard in one hand and a ballpoint in the other, his idiot’s grin firmly in place. “Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “Let me explain the purpose of my visit.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“I’m writing my own book. Folks have always tole me I have a flair for it.”
“That’s interesting. How can I help you with that?”
Aside from their moral vacuity, Perkins’s eyes had another abiding and singular characteristic: The pupils seem to remain the size of pinheads, regardless of where he was. I remembered something Elmore Latiolais had said when I interviewed him on the prison work gang in Mississippi: “There’s no money in selling cooze no more. Herman Stanga is into meth.”
“Where were you educated, Mr. Robicheaux?” Perkins asked, crossing his legs at the knee, his expression anticipatory, respectful, his pen poised over his clipboard.
“I don’t think my background will be of great interest to your readership.”
“Don’t underestimate either yourself or my book. This is gonna be a humdinger of a story. I’ll let you in on a secret. Rob Weingart’s book got wrote mostly by his female attorney. Mine is gonna be written by my own hand, without no he’p from people who have no idea how things really work.”
I looked at his eyes and the manic way he smiled and the twitches under his facial skin, and I had little doubt that Vidor Perkins not only had an addiction but that it had moved into overdrive. “Something happen between you and Weingart?” I said.
“I wouldn’t say exactly between me and him. More like between me and that nasty old man.”
“Mr. Abelard?”
“He tole Rob he don’t need the likes of me hanging around his island. I bet you think that’s ’cause of my prior troubles with the law.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Over his shoulder, I saw Helen look through the glass in my office door. Then her face went away.
“It don’t have anything to do with my history. It’s because of the class of people I come from. In Mr. Abelard’s mind, I’m po’ white trash from a tenant farm in north Alabama. It’s in my diction and my frame of reference. For a man like Mr. Abelard, those things are worse than the mark of Cain. It ain’t much different here’bouts, is it?”
“I have no idea what goes on in Mr. Abelard’s mind.”
“Let me set y’all straight on a couple of things. I never intentionally harmed a person in my whole life.”
“Your sheet seems to indicate otherwise.”
He nodded as though agreeing with me. “When we lived in the projects, I took Social Security checks from some old people’s mailboxes. But it was two other boys done the beating up on them, not me. And I got a lot of gone between me and them boys later on.”
“You were also arrested in an arson that killed three people. One of them was a child.”
“No, sir, I had nothing to do with t
hat fire. I knew who did, but I kept my mouth shut. That wasn’t easy for a boy who was fifteen years old and getting hit upside the head with the Birmingham telephone directory.”
