Axel Devereaux didn’t show up for the 0800 roll call. Instead, he called Helen from his home. She walked down to my office and opened the door without knocking. “Get Bailey and go over to Devereaux’s place. Somebody creeped his house.”
“You want us to investigate a B and E?”
“It sounds like it’s more than a B and E,” she said. “Maybe justice is finally catching up with this asshole.”
Bailey checked out a cruiser, and the two of us rode up the bayou to the drawbridge south of Loreauville where Axel lived by himself in a smudged stucco house with Styrofoam litter and car parts and two boats and stacks of crab traps in the yard. He met us at the door in a rage.
“Calm down,” I said.
“Look at my place. He did it in my sleep,” he said.
“Who did?” I said, stepping inside.
“The exterminator,” he said.
“Which exterminator?” I asked.
“A freelancer,” Axel said. “He was going from door to door yesterday.”
“You don’t use a regular service?” Bailey said.
So far he had not acknowledged her presence. “I take care of the termites myself. The guy gave me a deal.”
“How do you know the exterminator is the vandal?” she said.
“I keep a spare set of keys on the dresser,” Axel said. “I didn’t notice they were missing until this morning. Nobody else has been in here except me.”
The living room was a masterpiece of destruction, one that had obviously been accomplished with silent perfection. The couch and chairs had been sliced, perhaps with an X-Acto knife or a barber’s razor, the stuffing pulled out, the cheap decorative prints on the walls and the photos on the mantel slashed and pulled from the frames, the carpets and wood floor layered with paint. In the kitchen and bathroom, the intruder or intruders had poured concrete mix down the drains and oil sludge and glue in the appliances. A deer rifle and a shotgun and a German Luger had been taken from a closet, five hundred dollars from a desk drawer, a gold watch and a derringer from a jewelry box.
Bailey peered out the window at the backyard. A new electric-blue Ford pickup was parked by a tin boat shed. She went out the screen door.
“Where’s she going?” Axel said.
“Obviously to look around. You want us here or not?”
“What’s with you, Robicheaux? I never had a beef with you.”
“You’ve got a beef with the world, Axel. What was the exterminator’s name?”
“I didn’t get it. He’s an exterminator.”
“You didn’t look at his license or proof of insurance?”
“Crawling under the house and spraying poison on Formosan termites doesn’t take a college degree.”
“You didn’t hear anything during the night? While he was demolishing your house?”
“I had a couple of drinks. Somebody left a bottle of Dewar’s on the gallery.”
“That didn’t seem odd to you?” I asked.
“People leave me gifts.”
“For doing what?”
“For helping them,” he replied. “For doing my job.”
“What did the exterminator look like?”
“White, medium height, stocky, black curly hair, unshaved.”
“From around here?”
“Texas or Mississippi.”
“What kind of vehicle did he drive?”
“An SUV, lot of mud on it, Louisiana tag.”
“Remember the number?”
“I didn’t pay it any mind. I didn’t have any reason to.”
“Quit dancing around the problem, Axel. You hired an illegal sprayer.”
“Oh, I’ll live in remorse over that.” He bent down to see under the window shade. “What’s that bitch doing?”
“You call her that again and I’ll take your head off.”
“Try it. Either here or anywhere else.” He pointed at his cheek. “I haven’t forgotten what you did in the restroom. That one isn’t going away.”
I closed my notebook and clicked on a photo in my iPhone. “You recognize this guy?”
“That’s him, the exterminator.”
“That’s Hugo Tillinger.”
“The escapee? Why’s he after me?”
“Did you know Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“I saw her around, maybe. She was a do-gooder or something.”
“Yeah, or something. Why would Tillinger come after you, Axel?”
“Why does somebody get hit by lightning?”
Bailey came back through the door. “You didn’t check your truck?”
“I looked out the window. It was all right. It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Sorry I have to tell you this,” she said. “You have four slashed tires. Your seats and headliner and door panels are slashed. There’s an empty sugar sack by your gas cap. The ignition was on, but the engine had died. The hood is still warm. The engine must have run quite a while.”
“The fuck?” Axel said.
She dropped the keys in his palm, releasing them high enough so her hand didn’t touch his. She gazed at him silently, in a benign way, as if staring at a stranger in a casket.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Why is this happening? Why am I getting treated like I’m the stink on shit?”
“Tillinger had a reason for doing this,” I said. “You know what it is. Want to tell us?”
“Get out of here,” he said.
“Gladly,” I said.
“What are you looking at?” he said to Bailey.
“A sad man,” she said. “Get some help.”
Alafair called me from Arizona late that afternoon. “You should see it here,” she said.
“Beautiful, huh?” I replied, a strange longing in my heart at the sound of my daughter’s voice.
“I didn’t mean to be hard on you this morning.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have a way of saying all the wrong things at the wrong time.”
“I have a single room. Lou is just a friend.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Yes, I do. You want to protect me. But I’m fine. Give me some credit.”
“Is Desmond out there?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“He’s decent to women.”
“But the people he works with are not?”
“I don’t trust Butterworth, that’s for sure.”
“He’s still at Cypremort Point.”
“When will you be back?”
“In a few days, probably. Dave, are you sure about Desmond?”
“How do you mean?”
“Sometimes he goes inside himself and doesn’t come back for a while.”
“He’s probably a depressive. Most artists are.”
“I asked him about it,” she said. “Know what he said? ‘Dead poets are always speaking to us. You better listen to them. If you don’t, they get mad.’ ”
I felt like someone had poured ice water on my back.
“Are you there?” she said.
“The last person who said something like that to me was a prostitute who lives in that trailer slum by the Jeanerette drawbridge.”
“That’s not unusual in Acadiana.”
“Her baby had a charm tied on her ankle. It was a Maltese cross. The mother wouldn’t tell me where she got it. There was a tiny ankle chain on Lucinda Arceneaux’s body, with a piece of silver wire attached.”
“You’re scaring me, Dave.”
“Come on back home.”
“I can’t do that. I made a commitment. Why don’t you come out? You’d love it here. It’s like stepping into eternity.”
“You were born to be a writer, Alfenheimer.”
I was on my cell phone in the backyard. I saw a gator slip under the hyacinths, its serrated tail slicing through the flowers and tendrils.
“I love you, Dave.”
“You, too, kid,” I replied.
“I have to go now. I’ll call in the morning.”
I said goodbye and closed my cell. I heard a sound in the oak limbs above me and felt a shower of leaves come down on my head, and I thought perhaps Mon Tee Coon had returned. A hoot owl with an injured wing was caught in the branches. I got a ladder from my toolshed and climbed into the tree and brought him down and placed him in a cardboard box and called a friend in Loreauville who ran an animal sanctuary and would pick up the bird. Then I drove to the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, from which I had graduated in 1960 with a teacher’s certificate and a degree in English.