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“I don’t know. That’s what I was going to find out. Miss Lucinda was tight with all those people. You ever see The Thin Blue Line? It saved an innocent man’s life. That could be my story.”
“I’m going to give you five minutes to get dressed and get out of here,” Clete said. “Then your ass is grass.”
Tillinger got to his feet cautiously, wobbling, pressing one hand against the wall. “You know what I was down for?”
“Killing your family.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My guess is you’re innocent. But you’re still an asshole,” Clete said. “You’ve used up one minute.”
Chapter Fifteen
CLETE WAS AT my back screen early on Saturday, freshly showered, his hair wet-combed, his clothes pressed. But his ebullience and his attempt to blend with the coolness of the morning and the dew-drenched fragrance of the flower beds were a poor disguise for the guilt he always wore like a child would, at least when he thought he had wronged me, which he had never intentionally done.
Alafair was still asleep. I fixed biscuits and coffee and waited for Clete to get to whatever was bothering him. It took a while. Clete had a way of talking about every subject in the world until he casually mentioned a minor incident such as smashing an earth grader through the home of a mafioso on Lake Pontchartrain, blowing a greaseball with a fire hose into a urinal at the casino, or pouring sand into the fuel tank of a plane loaded with more greaseballs, all of whom ended up petroglyphs on a mountainside in western Montana.
“You let Hugo Tillinger slide because he saved the little girl?” I said.
“He’s not a killer.”
We were seated at the breakfast table. The window was open, the wind sweet through the screen, Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon sitting on Tripod’s hutch.
“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked.
“This conversation didn’t happen. We bury it right here. Got it?”
“You’re not upset?”
“I probably would have done the same thing. The guy got a bad deal in Texas.”
“You don’t think he could have done the baton job on Devereaux?”
“These murders are about money, Clete.”
“You lost me, big mon.”
“The tarot and the floating cross have private meaning to the killer, but the motivation is much larger. It’s not sex, it’s not power or control. That leaves money.”
“I think you’re taking too much for granted,” Clete said.
“The killer injected Arceneaux with a fatal dose of heroin. The others went out hard. Why would he make distinctions in the way he killed his victims? It’s because he’s created a grand scheme. Think about it. A serial killer wants to paint the walls and enjoy every minute of it. He’s driven by compulsion. Unless his motivation is misogynistic, his targets are random. Our guy has a plan. Tillinger is a simpleton who wants to be a celebrity. He’s not our guy.”
Clete had a biscuit in his jaw. He looked at me for a long moment, then drank from his cup, his eyes not leaving mine. “Why only in our area?”
“That’s the big one,” I said. “He’s sending us a message.”
“Lucky us,” Clete said.
• • •
MY SPECULATIONS PROBABLY seemed grandiose. In reality, I wasn’t talking about our local homicides. I believed then, and I believe now, that our poor suffering state is part of a historical ebb tide that few recognize as such. Southern Louisiana, as late as the Great Depression, retained many of the characteristics of the antediluvian world, untouched by the Industrial Age. Our coast was defined by its pristine wetlands. They were emerald green and dotted with hummocks and flooded tupelo gums and cypress trees and serpentine rivers and bayous that turned yellow after the spring rains and lakes that were both clear and black because of the fine silt at the bottom, all of it blanketed with snowy egrets and blue herons and seagulls and brown pelicans.
We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year.
