Jacques Renault

Jacques Renault sources cocaine with his brother Bernard. Leo Johnson moves it on his truck route, and the destination includes the high school. Jacques works at One Eyed Jacks, Ben Horne's cross-border brothel, and he brokers rooms — the tricks Laura Palmer turns are arranged through him.

He keeps a cabin in the woods. On the night of 23 February 1989 the party there is Laura Palmer, Ronette Pulaski, Leo Johnson and Jacques. Leland Palmer breaks it up, knocks Jacques unconscious, and takes the two girls to an abandoned train car. Laura is murdered there.

Jacques is shot in the shoulder by Deputy Andy Brennan, taken to Twin Peaks General Hospital, and smothered in his bed by Leland Palmer.

The cocaine is sourced by Jacques and Bernard Renault, moved by Leo Johnson, and sold onward — among other places, into Twin Peaks High School. Bobby Briggs and Mike Nelson owe Leo ten thousand dollars and cannot pay. Laura Palmer is inside the same economy. When the arrangement threatens him, Leo kills Bernard.

Jacques works at One Eyed Jacks and is part of the network — with Blackie, Leo Johnson, the recruiters and the clients — through which young women are exploited. When he tells Cooper that Laura was dismissed for drug use, the detail does not make the establishment protective. It reveals a business regulating the condition in which exploitation stays profitable.

The party at Jacques's cabin is Laura, Ronette, Leo and Jacques. Fire Walk With Me stages what the broadcast series only reconstructed: Leland breaks it up, knocks Jacques unconscious, and takes Laura and Ronette to the train car in the woods.

Waldo is Jacques Renault's myna bird, recovered from the cabin and held at the sheriff's station. It has been repeating fragments of speech from the night Laura Palmer died. Cooper sets a tape recorder running beside the cage. Leo Johnson shoots the bird through the window with a rifle. The tape survives, and Waldo's voice on it is one of the investigation's most disturbing recoveries.

Bobby Briggs takes Leo Johnson's bloodied shirt and puts it in Jacques Renault's apartment, to frame Leo.

Andy Brennan shoots Jacques in the shoulder. He is taken to Twin Peaks General Hospital. In "The Last Evening," Leland Palmer smothers him in his bed.

In "May the Giant Be with You," the Giant stands over Cooper on the floor of his room with three bullet wounds in him and offers to tell him three things. The first: "There's a man in a smiling bag." It is the body bag containing Jacques Renault.

Jacques Renault is not a mystery and does not have an interior. He supplies drugs, he arranges rooms, and he is present at the last ordinary hours of Laura Palmer's life because both of those services were things she used.

His function in the work is to be the answer the town wants. He is an outsider by name, he keeps a cabin off the road, he is coarse, he is guilty of real things, and he was with her that night. Every instinct in Twin Peaks — and a good deal of the physical evidence — points at him. The investigation is not stupid to pursue him.

What the case cannot absorb is that Laura Palmer's exploitation and Laura Palmer's murder are two different crimes with two different perpetrators, and that the second one lives in her house. Jacques is the whole of the first crime that the town is prepared to see. He brokered the rooms; he did not build the demand, and he is not what was in her bedroom.

He is also, on the record, the point where the two halves of the case touch. The last man to see Laura alive apart from her killer is a pimp with a myna bird, and the killer's first act after the murder is to come to his hospital bed and finish him. The trade and the Lodge use the same address for one night, and the man whose name is on the door is unconscious for it.

Laura Palmer · Ronette Pulaski · Leo Johnson · Leland Palmer · Bobby Briggs · Benjamin Horne · The Giant / Fireman · Andy Brennan · Fire Walk With Me · Jean Renault