“So what’s your opinion?” I said.
“I’ve already told you. You just weren’t paying attention.” He punched me in the arm with one finger.
His eyes were merry, a liquid green under his thick, half-moon, Curious George eyebrows and jutting forehead. “Is it true your sheriff is a hermaphrodite?”
We went through the back door of the courthouse and I took him directly to the interview room. Several uniformed cops turned around and looked at us as we passed them in the hallway.
“I’ll tell Sheriff Soileau you’re here. How about some coffee and doughnuts?”
“I like doughnuts.”
“Coming up,” I said.
I left him in the interview room and asked Wally to take him some doughnuts and a cup of Community coffee, then I told Helen that he was here.
“How did he behave coming over?” she said.
“He asked me if I was familiar with solipsism.”
“With what?”
“It’s a philosophical view that the only reality is one our minds generate. Then he asked me the riddle about a tree falling in the forest.”
“If no one hears it, does it really fall?” she said.
“I told him it falls, whether anyone hears it or not. He laughed.”
“What do you think he was trying to say?”
“Earlier he had said something about the definition of a criminal being the physical record of the criminal. I think he was ridiculing us because we can’t find evidence of any criminal activity in his life. I think he just gave us his whole MO. He’s a sociopath who doesn’t get caught. Like Bundy or BTK and probably thousands of others, they burrow into the woodwork and nobody knows they’re there until the house falls down.”
“How do you want to play it?” she asked.
“This guy is a sexual nightmare. I suspect he hates women, particularly female authority figures.”
“Can you imagine that?” she replied.
We walked down to the interview room, a relatively small enclosure, with two oblong glassed slits in the wall that allowed someone in the hallway to look at the subject with a degree of invisibility.
“Check him out,” I said.
Helen peered through the glass. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
“Ready?”
“When you are,” she replied.
I opened the door and we went inside. Wally had brought Bledsoe at least four custard-filled doughnuts and a king-size paper cup of community coffee. He ate them as you would a hamburger, feeding the whole doughnut into his mouth, the yellow cream glistening on top of his nails.
“My name’s Ronald. What’s yours?” Bledsoe said to Helen. He partially rose from his chair and sat back down again.
“I’m Sheriff Soileau, Mr. Bledsoe. Appreciate you coming down.” She closed the door behind us and glanced up at the video camera on the wall. “Since this is just an informal conversation, I had that camera turned off.”
“I never noticed it.”
There were two empty chairs at the table, but Helen and I remained standing.
“Let’s get right to it,” she said. “Somebody broke into Detective Robicheaux’s home and vandalized his daughter’s computer and pissed in the wastebasket. You gave us your DNA voluntarily and we appreciate that. But we have a larger concern. What the hell are you doing here in New Iberia?”