Pierre hurried after him. “Louis! Where are you going?”
“Flic business. Close the front door when you leave, Pierre.”
A tirade of French followed Louis out to the Mustang parked under the gumbo limbo.
On the drive across the causeway, Louis thought about Landeta, wondering again what he was going to do now that the Away So Far case was over —- or at least their part of it. He wondered what he himself was going to do.
Probably skim the friggin’ leaves out of the pool for the rest of my life.
At O’Sullivan’s, Louis paused just inside the door to take off his sunglasses. It was a little after eleven a.m. and the place was near empty. He saw a couple of guys at the end of the bar sipping Bloody Marys, and way in the back, his bald head silhouetted by the jukebox lights, he saw Landeta.
Louis stopped at the bar, got two Diet Cokes and some lemon wedges, and headed back.
“Morning,” Landeta said, looking up.
Louis sat down. “So what’s up?”
Landeta was just finishing a cup of coffee. “The women are being released this afternoon.”
“How do you know?”
“I got a friend at the prosecutor’s office. Since the old lady confessed, Sandusky can’t make a case against the others. The old lady, yeah, but not the other women.”
“What about the men?”
“Charges are still pending, but it doesn’t look good there, either.”
“How can they believe the old lady did all of this? How can they not prosecute the whole family?”
“You’d need a Bugliosi for that.”
“The Manson prosecutor?”
Landeta nodded as he pushed his empty coffee cup away and drew the Diet Coke near. He squeezed the lemon wedge into the Coke. “People said Bugliosi would never be able to convince a jury that Manson was guilty without a motive, that he would never be able to explain why Manson would send those girls off to kill somebody and why they obeyed him. That’s when he came up with the Helter Skelter theory. And suddenly a jury could understand the crimes.”
“I don’t see the parallel,” Louis said.
“Well, not one of the del Bosques is talking. We have no physical evidence. And what did you and I really see on that island? A man holding a rifle and walking away with a pregnant woman so she could have her baby in private. A family argument. And five little graves, with no way anyone can tell how they died.”
Landeta took a drink of his Diet Coke before he went on. “Unless Sandusky can tie all that together with a well- constructed and intelligent theory about families, Roman soldiers, incest, and tradition, and make it believable, he will never get a conviction. It was hard enough in the Manson case, and Sandusky doesn’t have half the brains of Bugliosi.”
“Mel, Those women let their children die.”
Landeta nodded. “Yeah, they did. But did they really have a choice? Emma, Cindy, Paula —- they all had nothing before they got to that island. Then suddenly, they have a man who loves them. And a nice, big family. Such as it was.”
“You’re making excuses for them,” Louis said.
“Not excuses. Reasons.”
Louis was shaking his head.
“It’s over for them, Louis,” Landeta said. “DCF has their hands in it now. Little Louisa’s mother is dead and her aunts, even if they don’t go to trial, are certainly weird enough to call unfit. She won’t have a problem finding someone to adopt her.”
“What about Roberto?”
“DCF will probably charge the family with truancy and other crap like neglect and living in an unsafe environment. Sandusky will make sure he at least saves the souls of the two surviving children. Makes a nice sound bite, don’t you think?”
Louis was quiet.
“I know people over at family services. I can arrange for you to see him, if you want,” Landeta said.
“Roberto?”
Landeta nodded. “Someone needs to let him know things will be all right eventually.”
“I’m the last person who should be telling him anything like that,” Louis said.
Landeta was working on his lemon peel. “We did the right thing, Louis,” he said.
Louis didn’t reply. His fingers picked at the cocktail napkin under his soda.
“They let Woods go,” Landeta said.
“I know. I saw him out at the restaurant. We had a long talk.”
“Oh, yeah? You get anything out of him?”
“Yeah, the ‘why.’”
“He told you why they did it?”
Louis nodded. A part of him didn’t really want to go over it again. A part of him just wanted to forget the whole damn thing. But he knew now that Landeta wanted to know the why as much as he himself ever had. He told Landeta about Ana del Bosque, the incest, and the daughter born with a birth defect.