Chapter 27

27

“I always liked Robbie,” Eli McVay said, stirring his sweet tea. He was a slightly taller version of his little brother, Caleb, with the McVay trademark flame-red hair and pointy chin.

They sat at an outdoor table on the deck of a little café not far from the Lafayette Public Works department. The sun had grown warm enough to be pleasant. Down along a rambling little bayou a mob of white ibis were prancing around on their sticklike legs, grazing for bugs with their long, curved yellow beaks. It was a soothing view after the morning Annie had had.

They had already had their lunch, caught up on family news, talked about the upcoming annual Doucet family Thanksgiving weekend get-together—all the conversation essentials before Annie had asked a single question.

“He was a different breed of cat, for sure,” Eli qualified, “but I liked him.”

“Different how?”

“Robbie always marched to his own drummer. He wasn’t just a jock. He had other interests. He was a reader. He followed the news. He wanted to know about the world. He wanted to be some kind of documentary filmmaker or investigative journalist. I mean, the dude could have ended up in the NFL, for sure, but there was a lot more to him than football.

“He used to make all these videos on his phone and then post them on social media. Little news stories about stuff going on around school. Interviews with people—coaches, janitors, lunch ladies, teachers. He’d ask them all kinds of things. It was so odd because he was a quiet guy, himself. You didn’t always know what he was thinking, and it was usually something deeper than the average teenager.

“Such a shame, what happened,” he said. “He had a lot of promise. Drugs took that all away.”

“So you were all good friends—you and Robbie and Marc Mercier?” Annie asked.

“Yeah, we were pretty tight up until Robbie got hurt.”

“And Dozer Cormier?”

“Dozer was more Marc’s friend. He didn’t really fit our group. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, you know? Or the most ambitious. But Marc would hang with him. I think they knew each other through their families somehow or family businesses or something. Me, I was interested in hot cheerleaders—I’m not gonna lie—and hot cheerleaders were not interested in having Dozer Cormier hanging around. Fair or not, he’s got that kind of creepy giant vibe about him. A handy guy to have around if you wanted to intimidate somebody, that’s for sure. Can’t say we didn’t make use of that talent more than once.”

“And Robbie wasn’t part of the group anymore after his accident?”

“Well, first of all, he was out of school a long time. He almost lost that leg, the injury was so bad. And then he didn’t really want people around him. I’m sure he was in a major depression, but kids don’t think about that kind of thing. He was out of sight, out of mind. And that senior year is busy, you know? And by spring that year he’d already gone down the rabbit hole with the drugs…”

“I understand that was a particular problem for Marc—the drug thing?”

“Yeah, well, me and Marc were the DARE leaders, so we couldn’t really be hanging around with a guy doing drugs and stealing and whatnot. And of course our parents didn’t want us being around him.”

“So that was the end of the friendship?”

He sighed. “Looking back, I wish I’d done some things differently, because I liked Robbie. I don’t think I was a very good friend. But you know kids that age. We were self-involved and not really equipped mentally to navigate something like addiction. It was easier just to walk away, but that’s not what friends should do.”

“Do you think Marc might feel the same way?”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. Marc cut him off. Boom. Done. Of course, it was an awkward situation for Marc because when Robbie went down, Marc had to step in and take his place on the team, and the team went on and won the state championship. Marc ended up getting a scholarship to Tulane. That didn’t really work out for him as far as football, but nevertheless there he was, and where was Robbie? In rehab or in jail. How do you get a relationship back from that? I don’t know…”

He trailed off, looking down toward the bayou. The memories clearly bothered him. “Nothing was the same after Robbie got hurt. Not for any of us.”

“Did you and Marc stay in touch after graduation?”

“Oh, not really,” he said. “We went in different directions. Literally. He was in school in New Orleans. I was here in Lafayette. I’d see him time to time in Bayou Breaux, but not very often. Say hey. Have a beer. We didn’t have much in common anymore. When we’d see each other all he wanted to do was play Remember When. And not to say we didn’t have some good times, but that was high school. Grow up, dude, move on. Then he got married and moved up north somewhere. I was in Houston…”

Annie watched his body language. He seemed a little agitated, uncomfortable. Under the table, he was tapping his toe like he was keeping time to some music only he could hear.

“Marc’s been back in Bayou Breaux about a year now, helping with his family’s business,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s been hard to escape the Saint Marc stories from home,” he said with a forced smile. “Marc always did like to be a hero. Good for him.”

“What?” Annie asked. “Do you think it’s not genuine?”

“No, no, I’m sure it is.”

“But…?”

He shrugged. “After a while, it just starts looking like a politician kissing babies, you know? My dad once said, Marc’s the kind of guy who would knock a bird’s nest out of a tree so he could save the baby birds and get his picture in the paper.” As soon as the words were out, he clearly regretted them. He made a face and said, “That’s not fair. Forget I said it.”

But he had said it, Annie thought. And not for no reason.

“And now he’s missing or maybe dead, and here I am saying something like that. Jesus. Annie, you have permission to pistol-whip me for being an asshole,” he said, his bright smile splitting his wide face.

“Being honest isn’t a crime,” Annie said. “I’d rather have you be honest than tell me some pleasant lie that doesn’t help anyone.”

“Most people think the opposite,” he said. “Better a good lie than a hard truth.”

“That philosophy might keep the peace at family gatherings, but it never solved a crime,” Annie said.

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Caleb told me you ran into Robbie recently.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I did, a month or so ago.”

“How was that?”

“Awkward. I hadn’t seen him in years. He looked good, though. He looked healthy. I was surprised. I didn’t think he’d ever get clean. Frankly, I thought he’d be dead by now.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing. The standard pleasantries—how you doing, what you doing, where you living. I’m standing there feeling like a shit because what did I ever do to help him, and he’s standing there feeling whatever because what’s he ever done with his life but fuck it up? What’s he supposed to tell me? That he just got out of rehab and he’s working at the lamp factory? I made some stupid joke about him being an investigative reporter, and he said yeah, that he was deep undercover investigating police corruption in Bayou Breaux.”

Annie’s heart skipped a beat, and she sat up a little straighter. “Why would he say that?”

Eli shook his head and shrugged. “It was just a dumb joke. I said, what’s that amount to? Them taking free day-old beignets at the back door of Melancon’s Bakery? He laughed. I wanted to crawl in a hole. Next time I saw him, I just ducked around a corner.”

“When was that?”

“At Monster Bash. I saw him talking to Dozer, and I thought, I don’t want any part of that, another drunken trip down bad memory lane. No, thanks.”

“What time was that?” Annie asked, her heart beating a little faster. Dozer Cormier had flatly denied seeing Robbie. Why would he lie about that?

“Must have been eleven fifteen, eleven thirty.”

“Where?”

“Around Fifth and Dumas. I was leaving. I was parked in that lot down past Canray’s Garage. I walked an extra block just to avoid them. I’m coming off here like a real asshole, aren’t I?” he asked.

“You’re not,” Annie assured him. “We’ve all done it. Why make life hard if we don’t have to?”

“Yeah, well, I looked at the two of them and thought, what the hell is that conversation gonna be anyway? ‘Hey, Robbie, great to see you. Sorry I ruined your entire life’? I mean, Dozer became an alcoholic after that. He couldn’t cope with what he’d done.”

“Poor kid,” Annie said. “It was an accident.”

Eli said nothing. He looked down to the bayou again with a thousand-yard stare into the past. Annie could feel the tension in him, the need to say something pushing against the need to say nothing.

“I get the feeling you’re holding something back here, Eli,” she said.

He shifted on his chair and rubbed a hand across his lower face, as if he might just push any errant words back into his mouth.

“Just say it,” Annie said. “I’m not gonna judge you.”

He took a sip of his tea to buy time as he turned his options over in his mind.

“It’s ten years ago,” Annie said. “How much longer do you want to hang on to it?”

He took a breath as if to speak, then checked himself again, made a little face of frustration, and shook his head. Finally, he just said it.

“I don’t know that it was an accident.”

He blew out a breath that might have been relief.

“I know, it happened in front of fifty people,” he said. “And no one ever said anything like that, but now I’m saying it. I was right there.”

Annie sat still, waiting, feeling a little sick in her stomach. Around them, the few other diners who had chosen to sit on the patio went on with their lunches and their polite conversations, accented by the sounds of silverware clinking and the waitress topping off glasses of iced tea.

“There was absolutely no reason for what happened to have happened that day,” Eli said soberly. “None. It was a routine practice. Robbie was in the red jersey. No one should have been anywhere near him. But there was Dozer, stumbling backward into him. And when he hit him, he twisted around and looked right at him as they went down. I’ll never forget that for as long as I live. And the sound of Robbie screaming.” He blinked back tears at the memory. “I was the tight end on the play. I was lined up maybe ten feet to Robbie’s left. It still makes me sick to remember.”

“Oh, Eli,” Annie murmured. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

She’d known him all his life. He was a sweet boy. Fun, funny, smart, popular. She would have thought at the time that life was a breeze for young Eli McVay, if she had thought much about him at all. She’d been a patrol deputy at the time, fighting to gain respect in a department that thought women belonged elsewhere, not wearing a badge. To think at that same time Eli had been going through an experience so heavy, so sad, made her heart hurt for him.

“Robbie was so good,” he said softly, emotion thickening his voice. “He was like watching a unicorn, the things he could do! The gods reached down and turned his arm into a thunderbolt, and he had wings on his feet. Everything was instinctual for him. It was like he could bend time, stretch it like a rubber band. Effortless. Easy.

“And there was Marc, sitting on the bench. And he was good. He was very, very good. But he was never gonna be Robbie. The college scouts would come around, and all they wanted to see was Robbie Fontenot. He was a legit five-star recruit. And of course, Robbie didn’t need a scholarship—his family was loaded—but he was going anywhere he wanted on a magic carpet, a full ride.

“Marc needed that opportunity. He needed a scholarship. He wasn’t going to any Division I school sitting on the bench. And his family were junk dealers. They couldn’t afford to send him to Tulane or anyplace like it. But then Robbie went down, and all those doors opened right up for Marc.

“God help me for thinking it,” he said. “But I always have, and I always will. I saw what I saw, and I know what I know.”

“You think Dozer would do that for Marc?”

“I think Dozer did do it for him. And Dozer was no freethinker. He didn’t come up with that on his own.”

“Did he not like Robbie?”

“He liked Robbie fine, but he was loyal to Marc. He might have thought he owed him.”

“Did you ever say anything to Marc about it?”

He shook his head. “No, but nothing was ever the same between us after that day. Maybe he sensed that was what I was thinking. I don’t know.”

“Did Robbie ever say he thought it was anything other than an accident?”

“Not to me. I can’t imagine he didn’t wonder, though. He was always the one had to get to the bottom of a story.”

“Did you ever say anything to anybody about your suspicion?”

“I started to once. A few weeks after it happened. I was having a hard time dealing with it, and Coach Latrelle pulled me into his office. He was a good man. Still is. He asked me what was wrong, and I started to say what if …He didn’t want to hear it. Nobody would have. By then Marc was already our team hero, and we were going into the playoffs. That’s all anybody cared about, so…”

So…Robbie Fontenot had nearly lost his leg, an injury that set him on a path of self-destruction…and Dozer Cormier had become an alcoholic…and Marc Mercier had gone on with his life, gotten an education, met and married his wife…and Eli McVay had carried this terrible suspicion like a sliver in his soul all this time, festering, aching so that it could still bring him to the point of tears ten years later…all because a good lie was so much more palatable than an ugly truth.

People had wanted to believe Marc Mercier was a hero, just as they were happy to assume Robbie Fontenot was good for nothing once he’d fallen from his pedestal. The average human wanted life to be simple, cut-and-dried, black-and-white, but it almost never was.

If Eli’s suspicion was correct, that Robbie’s injury had been no accident, what did that mean in the here and now? What would ten years of rage built in jail and rehab and bitter disappointment do? Annie could only imagine the resentment. B’Lynn had suggested it, just based on the outcome of what had happened. How could Robbie not resent Marc? If he had somehow come to the conclusion that his injury had been intentional, how could that resentment not boil over? What if that resentment had become motive? Annie wondered as she drove back toward Bayou Breaux.

Nick had texted her to come back to the Pizza Hut as soon as she was done in Lafayette. He hadn’t said why, nor had he answered when she’d tried to call him. She texted him back, including the piece of information she’d gleaned from Eli regarding Robbie being seen with Dozer Cormier at Monster Bash. He didn’t respond.

She didn’t want to try to imagine why he wanted her back at the PH. Her head was spinning just from that morning’s revelations.

Danny Perry had tried to run Robbie Fontenot’s car off the road into the swamp. Robbie had told Eli he was investigating police corruption. Just a joke, Eli said. Robbie wasn’t a reporter. He didn’t have a job at all. But he had a box full of money no one could explain. How much of that money might have Danny Perry’s fingerprints all over it?

She kept going back to Halloween night.

Robbie had been seen talking to a town cop…or a party reveler dressed as one…

He had also been seen talking to Dozer Cormier.

And he hadn’t been seen since—until Danny Perry had chased after his car leaving the Merciers’ neighborhood.

If Robbie was driving that car, what was he doing there? And why had Danny Perry been there to intercept him? Danny had been working days—had worked that very day. How had he come to be there in the middle of the night? It wasn’t like the PD didn’t have a dog shift. The only way Danny got that assignment had to have been to volunteer for it, and why in the world would he do that when he had worked all day? Unless he thought there was something in it for him.

If Annie gave any credence to the possibility of Melissa paying Robbie to get rid of her husband, why this cloak-and-dagger bullshit in the middle of the night—calling her cell phone, creeping around the Merciers’ neighborhood? Maybe if the wife wasn’t paying what she owed him…But Melissa Mercier had no known connection to Robbie. Will Faulkner might have been the linchpin there, but they certainly didn’t have enough cause at this point to ask a judge for a look at Faulkner’s phone records or his finances for any unusual withdrawals of cash.

There were too many loose puzzle pieces, most of which would likely turn out to mean nothing. Murder almost always turned out to be depressingly, stupidly simple. A killed B because of money or jealousy or for revenge or in a fit of rage. The trick was sifting through the thousand pieces to find just the five or six that fit together to make the true picture of what had happened.

She turned into the law enforcement center parking lot, thinking she would begin again with the security video from downtown on Halloween night.

“Broussard!” Stokes called out as she walked in the door of the Pizza Hut. “How come you’re never around when I need you?”

“Because I don’t live my life for you?” Annie said. “Where’s Nick?”

“I don’t know. He got a text and left a little while ago.”

“And since when have you ever needed me?”

“Since I found this video,” he said. “Come have a look.”

She rounded the counter and went to stand behind him at his desk. “If this is porn, I’m gonna kick your ass. I’m in no mood for your nonsense, Chaz.”

“Well, this isn’t gonna improve your mood any,” he said. “We found out this morning there were two trucks at the dump site of our murdered guy. One dark and one light. This is a security video from a garage near the turnoff for that road. We lucked out. They’ve got a nice big yard light on that property.”

He clicked his mouse and started the footage. “We know Cody Parcelle drives a black Dodge Ram, and there’s a dark truck going by, could be a Ram. Can’t see the plates, can’t see the driver. And here comes our light truck right behind. Does that look familiar to you?”

An older white pickup with what looked like rust damage around the rear wheel wells.

The truck that had been parked in front of the Parcelles’ barn.

Annie felt her heart sink. “Oh, man…”

Stokes pushed his chair back and stood. “We need to go pick up Tulsie Parcelle.”

“And here I thought this day couldn’t get any worse.”