“No one could argue with that,” she said. She punched me on the arm.
The next day was Friday. At 9:17 a.m. my desk phone rang. I don’t know how, but I knew who it was, in the same way you know when you’ve stepped on chewing gum or when it’s the knock of a paranoid neighbor who believes your cat is deliberately spraying his vegetable garden.
“Robicheaux,” I answered.
“Guess who,” the voice said.
“You need to go somewhere else, Mr. Tillinger,” I said.
“Thought you’d be glad to hear from me.”
“Those two killers in Cameron Parish almost put you out of business. Maybe it’s a good time for you to visit Nebraska or Antarctica.”
“If I read the newspaper right, they might be the two guys that got fried by a flamethrower. What’s that tell you?”
“It doesn’t tell me anything,” I replied.
“I got the Man Upstairs on my side.”
“You know the will and mind of God?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Why are you calling me?” I said.
“Bet you’ve already forgotten Travis Lebeau.”
“He was dragged to death on asphalt. That’s a hard image to forget.”
“Lebeau was in the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Aryan Brotherhood was providing the skanks that dirty cop was pimping for. Those AB boys thought they were going to be players. Didn’t work out too good, did it? For the dirty cop, either.”
“Axel Devereaux?”
“The one who got a baton shoved down his windpipe.”
“I’ve got a theory about you, Mr. Tillinger. You want to be in the movies, even if it costs you your life.”
“Miss Lucinda knew something that got her killed, Mr. Robicheaux.” His voice had changed, like that of a man who had spent a lifetime hiding who he really was. “I talked with Desmond Cormier’s father.”
“You did what?”
“I followed you and the woman to Ennis Patout’s wrecker service in Opelousas.”
“You’ve been following Detective Ribbons and me?”
“Free country.”
“Not for you it isn’t,” I said.
“You want to hear what Patout told me?”
I could hear my breath against the phone receiver. I wanted to hang up on him but knew I couldn’t. “Yes.”
“He didn’t say anything except to threaten me.”
“I think you have some kind of cerebral damage, partner.”
“Try this. I checked birth records in the courthouses hereabouts. Patout had a daughter twenty-five years ago.”
“You said ‘had.’ ”
“That old boy didn’t let race get in his way, either,” Tillinger said. “Starting to put it together? See you around.”
The blood veins in my head were dilating. I went down to Bailey’s office. She was out of the building. I checked out a cruiser and headed for Opelousas. I tried to piece together all the random bits of information that showed a possible motive or pattern in the murders of Lucinda Arceneaux, Joe Molinari, Travis Lebeau, Axel Devereaux, and Hilary Bienville. Each was, in some fashion, ritualistic. Perhaps the tarot and the Maltese cross were involved. So were cruelty and rage. But as soon as I linked one homicide to a second or third, my logic would fall apart.
Lucinda Arceneaux had been injected and perhaps died without knowing she was being murdered. Yet the killer, if he was the same man, had beaten Hilary Bienville without mercy. Why her? She was a harmless uneducated woman trying to raise a child by herself and each night allowing her body to be penetrated and degraded and smeared with the fluids of unshaved men who stank of alcohol and dried sweat and filling station grease. Don’t let anyone tell you prostitution is a victimless crime. The men who strike women are moral and physical cowards. Every street cop, every detective, sees violence against women with regularity, more today than in past decades. For the misogynist, women like Hilary Bienville are plump fruit waiting to be picked. My mother was the victim of men like the killer of Hilary Bienville. They appear in my dreams, their bodies naked and sweaty, their hands like the claws on crabs.
What’s the point? Hilary Bienville had gone to Clete for help. She told him she was involved with a white man who had gotten inside her head and seemed to have total power over her. But she had also said something that didn’t fit with the details of the homicide. Just outside Opelousas, I hit the speed dial on my cell phone.
Clete answered on the first ring. “Talk to me, big mon.”
“Remember when you told me about Hilary Bienville visiting you at the motor court?”
“Yeah, she said she had a john who liked her to massage his back while he messed with her head. A white guy.”
“But he told her something about herself. Something that got her even more confused.”
Up ahead I saw the city limits sign and a deep-green grove of slash pines on the swale.
“He called her the Queen of Cups,” Clete said. “He also called her a chalice. He said she was chosen.”
“But the guy who killed her stuck a Christmas-tree star on her forehead.”
“I’m not getting the connection.”
“The Suit of Cups in the tarot represents love,” I said. “The chalice can also mean fertility and rebirth. Bailey thinks the star represents the Suit of Pentacles.”
“I still don’t get it,” he said.
“Pentacles has to do with prosperity. The killer was showing contempt. Hilary was a prostitute. She didn’t measure up.”
“I think you’re getting too deep into this guy’s head. You did that with the BTK guy. Bad mistake.”
“How else do you explain the symbols our guy is obviously using?”
“The day you figure out these guys is the day you eat your gun.”
“Quit it.”
“I have a funny feeling sometimes,” he said.
“About what?”
“That we’re all dead and don’t know it.”
I took the cell phone from my ear and looked at it and then put it back.
“My exit is just ahead,” I said. “Catch you down the track.”
I folded the phone and dropped it on the seat before he could say anything else.
As I got out of the cruiser at Ennis Patout’s wrecker service, I could see him playing checkers with his mechanic on top of an oil can inside the bay. He was eating a sandwich with one hand, his gaze fixed on the game, dirty fingers pressed deep into the bread. The black man looked directly at me and shook his head in a cautionary fashion.
“Hello, Mr. Patout,” I said. “I’ll make it quick.”
Patout moved a checker with one finger. “Not quick enough.”
“Hugo Tillinger came to see you?”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“What’d he have to say?”
“Nothing. I run him off.”
“Did you have a daughter, Mr. Patout?”
He put down his sandwich, his eyes still on the checkerboard. His neck was as corded as a cypress stump. “You stay out of my life.”
“The mother of your daughter was not the mother of Desmond Cormier?” I said.
“Louis, call up the chief of police and tell him to send an officer out here.”
“Yes, suh,” the black man said. He rose from his chair and went inside the office.
“You fathered a daughter with a woman of color?” I said.
Patout’s eyes had the lopsided look of two egg yolks in a skillet. “What if I did?”
“I’m not judging you, sir. I need your help.”
He propped his big hands on his knees and stared at a wall hung with old tires and fan belts and drop cloths and a child’s bicycle that was rusted and missing one wheel. “It was twenty-five years back. The colored girl didn’t want a white man’s baby. At least she sure as hell didn’t want mine. I went to Corina.”