Creole Belle

12

That same afternoon, Clete Purcel sat in his swivel chair in his office and through the back window watched the rain dimple the bayou and the fog puff in clouds from under the bridge and the lights of cars crossing the steel grid. His office was housed inside a nineteenth-century two-story building constructed of soft brick, with an iron colonnade over the sidewalk and a patio in back that he had decorated with potted banana plants and a bottlebrush tree and a spool table inset with a beach umbrella under which he often ate his lunch or read his mail in the morning.

The drizzle was unrelenting, and he was confined to his office and the endless flow of squalor and chicanery that went across his desk blotter, not to mention the worm’s-eye view of the world that was the operational raison d’etre of almost every client who came through his door.

With an occasional exception.

Gretchen stepped inside his office and closed the door behind her. “Little Miss Muffet would like to see you. She’s got a guy with her who looks like he has a wig stapled to his scalp,” she said. “Want me to blow them off?”

He shut and opened his eyes. “I’m trying to translate what you just said.”

“The broad at the Dupree place with the broom up her ass. The guy didn’t introduce himself. He’s got a Roman collar on. I can tell them they need to make an appointment.”

“Varina Leboeuf is out there?”

“Who’d you think I was talking about?”

“Send her in.”

Gretchen opened her mouth wide and put her finger in it, as though trying to vomit.

“Lose the attitude,” he said.

A moment later, Varina Leboeuf came into Clete’s office, followed by a man in a black suit and lavender collar whose thick silver hair was bobbed in the style of a nineteenth-century western rancher. He had a high, shiny forehead, and turquoise eyes that were recessed in the sockets, and hands like those of a farmer who might have broken hardpan prairie with a singletree plow. His eyes stayed glued on Clete.

“Hello, Mr. Purcel,” Varina said, extending her hand. “I want to apologize for my abruptness at my father-in-law’s house. I’d had an absolutely terrible day, and I’m afraid I took it out on you and your assistant. This is Reverend Amidee Broussard. He has advised me to hire a private investigator. I understand you’re pretty good at what you do.”

“Depends on what it is,” Clete said. He had risen when she entered the room and was standing awkwardly behind his desk, wishing he had put on his sport coat, his fingertips barely touching his desk blotter, his blue-black. 38 strapped across his chest in its nylon holster. “If this is about divorce work, the expense sometimes outweighs the benefits. What we used to call immorality is so common today that it doesn’t have much bearing on the financial settlement. In other words, the dirt a PI can dig up on a spouse is of little value.”

“See, you’re an honest man,” she said.

Before Clete could reply, the minister said, “Mr. Purcel, may I sit down? I’m afraid I was running to get out of the rain and got a bit winded. Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don’t recognize.”

“Would y’all like some coffee?” Clete said.

“That would be very nice,” the minister said. When he sat down, a tinge of discomfort registered in his face, as though his weight were pressing his bones against the wood of the chair.

“Are you all right?” Clete said.

“Oh, I’m fine,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “What a magnificent view you have. Did you know that during the War Between the States, a Union flotilla came up the bayou and moored right at the spot by the drawbridge? The troops were turned loose on the town, mostly upon Negro women. It was a deliberate act of terrorism, just like Sherman at the burning of Atlanta.”

“I didn’t know that,” Clete said.

“Unfortunately, history books are written by the victors.” The minister’s cheeks were soft and flecked with tiny blue and red capillaries, and his mouth formed a small oval when he pronounced his o ’s. The cadences of his speech seemed to come from another era and were almost hypnotic. “Do you know who wrote those words?”

“Adolf Hitler did,” Clete replied.

“It’s very important that you help Ms. Leboeuf. Her husband is not what he seems. He’s a fraudulent and perhaps dangerous man. I think he may have had dealings with criminals in New Orleans, men who are involved in the sale of stolen paintings. I’m not sure, so I don’t want to treat the man unjustly, but I have no doubt he wants to make Ms. Leboeuf’s life miserable.”

Varina had sat down, smoothing her dress, her gaze fixed on the rain falling on the bayou. Every few seconds, her eyes settled on Clete’s, unembarrassed, taking his measure.

“What do you base that on?” Clete asked.

“I’m Ms. Leboeuf’s spiritual adviser.” The minister hesitated. “She’s confided certain aspects of his behavior to me that normally are difficult to talk about except in a confidential setting.”

“I can speak for myself, Amidee,” Varina said.

“No, no, this was my idea. Mr. Purcel, Pierre Dupree is a dependent and infantile man. In matters of marital congress, he has the appetites of a child. If the implication has unpleasant Freudian overtones, that’s my intention. Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?”

“I don’t think I need an audiovisual, Reverend,” Clete said. “Why is Dupree a threat to Ms. Leboeuf?”

“Because he has the business instincts of a simpleton and is teetering on bankruptcy. He sees Ms. Leboeuf as the source of all his troubles and believes she’s out to cause him financial ruin. He’s a weak and frightened man, and like most frightened men, he wishes to blame his failure on his wife. Last night she went out to the Dupree home to get her dog. Pierre told her he’d had it put down.”

“The dog named Vick?” Clete said to Varina.

“Pierre said Vick had distemper,” she said. “That’s a lie. You saw him. He was fine. Either Pierre or his grandfather did something to him, maybe hurt him in some way, then had him injected. I feel so bad about Vick, I want to cry. I hate Pierre and his hypocrisy and his arrogance and his two-thousand-dollar suits and his greasy smell. I can’t stand the thought that I let him kill my dog.”

“No good comes of blaming ourselves for what other people do,” Clete said. “I understand you’re filing a civil suit against the sheriff’s department over an incident at your father’s place. The incident involved Dave Robicheaux. That creates a conflict of interest for me, Ms. Leboeuf. I’d like to help you, but in this instance, I don’t think I can.”

“I’ve already dropped the suit. It’s not worth the trouble,” she replied.

Don’t do what you’re about to do, a voice in Clete’s head told him.

“My husband is a pervert. I will not discuss the kinds of things he has asked me to participate in,” she said. “He wasn’t drunk when he did it, either. Frankly, I feel sick at the mention of this. The fact that he’s considered a great artist locally is laughable. He has no understanding of intimacy or mutual respect inside a relationship. That’s why he studied commercial art. It has no emotion. If he ever painted what was on his mind, he’d be put in a cage.” Her eyes were moist, her small fists knotted in her lap.

“Maybe I can recommend a couple of PIs in Lafayette,” Clete said.

“I’m going to be staying at my father’s house at Cypremort Point. I’m at the end of my rope, Mr. Purcel. I have to take care of my father, and I can’t be looking over my shoulder in fear of my husband. If you’d rather I go somewhere else, I will. I’ve made my livelihood in electronic security, but that will not protect me from a man who would euthanize a loving pet who was part of our household for five years. I feel such rage right now, I can’t express it. If you want us to leave, please say so. But don’t try to push me off on some seedy private investigator in Lafayette.”

Clete could feel a strand of piano wire tightening along the side of his head. “You dropped the suit against the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department?”

“I already told you that.”

“What if I give you my cell phone number and the number of my answering service? Plus, I can have a talk with your husband about your dog.”

“It’s a bit late for that. Furthermore, I’d like more than talk when it comes to Pierre.”

“Pardon?” Clete said.

“That’s wishful thinking on my part. Don’t pay attention to what I just said.”

“Ms. Leboeuf sometimes speaks sharply, but she’s a religious woman, Mr. Purcel, even though she might get mad at me for saying that,” the minister said.

“My fee is seventy dollars an hour plus expenses,” Clete said.

“You’ve been very kind,” Varina said, her eyes crinkling.

“You’ll probably find you don’t need me, Ms. Leboeuf,” Clete said. “In this kind of situation, a little time passes, and the lawyers agree on division of the assets, and both parties walk away and start new lives. At least the smart ones do.”

“You sound like a man of the world,” she said.

“Dave Robicheaux and I were plainclothes detectives at NOPD. Neither of us is now. That says more than I like to think about,” he replied.

When they had gone and Clete had shut the door behind them, he remained standing in the center of the room, as though he couldn’t remember where he was or what had just transpired in his life. The wind was whipping the rain against his window, obscuring the bayou and the drawbridge and smudging the lights on the cars crossing the steel grid. His stomach was churning, and pinpoints of sweat were breaking on his forehead. He wondered if he was coming down with the flu.

Gretchen opened the door without knocking. “Why did you let her do that to you?”

“Do what?”

“She’s a cunt.”

“Don’t use that word.”

“That’s what she is.”

“That word is never used in this office. Not by me, not by the skells, not by you, not by anyone in our acquaintance. That one doesn’t flush. Do you understand that?”

“All right, she’s the C-word from head to toe, from the way she points her boobs at you to the way she crosses her legs to give you a little preview of what might be waiting. You don’t know how mad you make me.”

“I’m your employer, Gretchen, and you’re my employee. I think you’re really a good kid, but while we’re on the job, you need to show some respect.”

“Don’t you call me a kid. You don’t know what I’m capable of.” Her cheeks were wet, her bottom lip trembling. Her down-in-the-ass jeans hung low on her hips, exposing her navel; her broad shoulders were rounded, her eyes filled with sorrow. In that moment, she looked more like a man than a woman. She sat down in the chair the minister had occupied and stared into space.

“I’d never deliberately hurt you,” Clete said.

“If you want to be a dildo, go be a dildo. Don’t let on like you’re a man, though.”

“Gretchen, I’ve been with a lot of women. I liked them all, but there was only one I really loved. What I’m saying is I feel a special kind of affection for you. We’re kindred spirits, know what I mean? Let me take you to dinner.”

“Who was the one you loved?”

“She was a Eurasian girl. She lived on a sampan on the edge of the South China Sea.”

“What happened to her?”

“The VC killed her because she was sleeping with the enemy. Come on, let’s go down to Bojangles.”

Gretchen wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “Call up your new douchebag and ask her. She’s more your style.”

Friday evening Molly and I had people over for a crab boil in the backyard. The sky had turned from gold and purple to green as the sun descended into a bank of thunderheads in the west. The breeze smelled of rain falling from clouds that had drawn water out of the Gulf and fish eggs out of the wetlands; it smelled of newly mowed grass and sprinklers striking warm concrete and charcoal starter flaring on a grill; it smelled of chrysanthemums blooming in gardens dark with shadow, telling us that the season was not yet done, that life was still a party and should not be surrendered prematurely to the coming of night. Molly had strung Japanese lanterns through the live oaks and set the redwood table with bowls of potato salad and dirty rice and chopped-up fruit and corn on the cob, and I had lit the butane burner under the crab boiler, right next to an apple crate crawling with blue crabs. Across the bayou in City Park, the electric lights were blazing above the baseball diamond, where boys who had refused to accept the passing of summer were chasing line drives smacked by a coach at home plate. It was the kind of evening that people of my generation associate with a more predictable era, one that may have been unjust in many ways but possessed a far greater level of civility and trust and shared sense of virtue that, for good or bad, seemed to define who we were. It wasn’t a bad way to be, having drinks in one’s backyard, watching the sunset or a paddle wheeler passing on the bayou, couples dancing to a band on the upper deck. At a certain time in one’s life, the ebb and flow of a tidal stream and the setting of the sun are not insignificant events.

As our guests began arriving, I looked around for Alafair, who I had assumed was joining us.

“Alafair is going to a movie with a new friend she’s made,” Molly said, apparently reading my thoughts.

“She has a date?” I asked.

“Clete has a new assistant. Alafair just met her this morning. They must have hit it off.”

“Where is Alafair?” I said.

“She was looking for her car keys a minute ago. You don’t want her to go?”

I went inside, then saw Alafair getting into her used Honda out front. I went through the front door, waving at her to stop, trying at the same time to be polite to the guests coming up the walk. In the meantime, Alafair pulled away from the curb. I walked down the street, still waving my arms. Her brake lights went on, and she turned out of the traffic and parked by the Shadows. She leaned down so she could see me through the passenger window. “Didn’t Molly tell you where I was going?” she said.

I got in the front seat and closed the door. “You’re seeing a movie with Gretchen Horowitz?”

“Yeah, I kind of had an argument with her this morning at Clete’s office. But she turned out to be a nice person. I asked her to go to a show. Is there something wrong?”

“That’s hard to say. I haven’t met her. I have the sense she comes from a pretty rough background. Maybe she knew some bad guys in Miami.”

“Which bad guys?”

“Mobbed-up Cubans, for openers.”

“She works for Clete. He must think she’s okay.”

“Alafair, I’m not sure who this girl is. Clete believes she’s his daughter. What he doesn’t want to believe is that she may be a contract killer, one who’s known in the life as Caruso. She might have capped two or three members of the old Giacano crowd, two in New Orleans, one in the Baton Rouge bus depot.”

“This can’t be the same person.”

“Yeah, it can,” I said.

Alafair stared straight ahead at the deepening shade under the live oaks. The wind was blowing off the Gulf, and the wall of bamboo that grew in front of the Shadows rattled against the piked fence. “Are you certain about any of this?” she said.

“No, I only know what Clete has told me.”

“Does Helen Soileau know?”

“More or less.”

“Why doesn’t she want to do something about it?”

“Because sometimes neither she nor I trust Clete’s perceptions. Because you don’t give up your friends, no matter what they do.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

“You’re still going to the movies with her?”

“Gretchen is waiting for me at the motor court. She’s pretty angry at Clete.”

“What for?”

“Something about Varina Leboeuf. Clete was driving down to Cypremort Point to see her tonight.”

“Do you have any aspirin?” I asked.

“In the glove box. Is Gretchen involved somehow with the Dupree family?”

“It’s possible.”

“You believe Gretchen will give you a lead into the disappearance of Tee Jolie Melton and the death of her sister, don’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“If y’all are still in the backyard later, can I invite Gretchen to join us?”

“I don’t think that’s a real good idea.”

“I don’t believe she’s a killer. I think she has no friends and she’s lived a hard life and she feels betrayed because Clete is seeing Varina Leboeuf. Is that the kind of person our family shuts the door on? Look me in the face and tell me that, Dave. When did we start being afraid of someone who is friendless and alone?”

I felt sorry for the litigators who would have to face Alafair in a courtroom.

In the darkness of the theater, Gretchen Horowitz sat totally still, enraptured by every detail of the film from the opening scene until the fade-out, never taking her eyes off the screen. Alafair had never seen anyone watch a film with such intensity. Even when the credits had finishing rolling, Gretchen waited until the trademark of the studio and the date of production had trailed off the screen before she allowed herself to detach. The film was Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Do you know what John Dillinger’s last words were?” she asked.

“No,” Alafair replied.

“It was in Chicago, at the Biograph Theater. He had just come out of seeing Manhattan Melodrama with the two prostitutes who sold him out to the feds. You’ve heard about the lady in red, right? Actually, she was wearing orange. Anyway, John Dillinger said, ‘Now, that’s what I call a movie.’ Did you see Public Enemies? Johnny Depp played Dillinger. God, he was great. The critics didn’t understand what the film was about, though. That’s because a lot of them are stupid. It’s a really a love story, see. John Dillinger’s girlfriend was an Indian named Billie Frechette. She was beautiful. In the last scene, the fed who shot Dillinger goes to see Billie in jail and tells her that Johnny’s last words were ‘Tell Billie bye-bye blackbird.’ That scene made me cry.”

“Why were you holding your cell phone all during the movie?” Alafair asked. “You expecting a call?”

“A guy I know in Florida is making a nuisance of himself. Did you hear what I said about Dillinger and Billie Frechette?”

“Yeah, sure.”

They were outside the theater now, not far from one of the bridges over the Teche. The air had cooled and smelled of the bayou, and on the horizon giant clouds of smoke were rising from the sugar refinery, which was lit as brightly as a battleship. “You like it here?” Gretchen asked.

“It’s where I grew up,” Alafair said. “I was born in El Salvador. But I don’t remember much of life there, except a massacre I saw in my village.”

Gretchen stopped walking and looked at her. “No shit. You saw something like that?”

“A Maryknoll priest flew my mother and me into the country. We crashed by Southwest Pass. Somebody had put a bomb on board. My mother was killed. Dave dove down without enough air in his tank and pulled me from the wreck.”

“Is that in your book, the one that’s about to come out?”

“Some of it.”

“I wish I could write. I’d like to be a screenwriter. I have an associate’s degree and fifteen hours at Florida Atlantic. You think I could get into film school at the University of Texas?”

“Why would you not be able to?”

“I wasn’t the best student in the world. I think half the time my male professors were grading my jugs. I kind of had a way of choosing almost all male professors for my classes. Oops, there goes my phone. I’ll be just a minute.”

Gretchen walked across the parking lot and began speaking into the phone as she rounded the corner of the theater. Some middle-school kids cutting through from the street to the parking lot passed her, then looked back and started laughing. “What’s so funny, you guys?” Alafair asked.

“That lady over there dropped her phone in the mud puddle. She knows some cuss words, yeah,” one boy said.

Alafair looked at her watch, then walked to the corner of the building. She could hear Gretchen’s voice in the darkness. Perhaps secretly, she hoped to hear a profane tirade at a lover or a family member. Or a confession of need or an attempt at reconciliation or an argument over money. But the voice she heard was not one dependent on profanity to intimidate the listener. Nor was it the voice of the Gretchen Horowitz enamored by the love story of Billie Frechette and John Dillinger.

“Here’s what it is, and you’d better get it right the first time,” Gretchen said. “I’m out. Don’t leave anything in the drop box. The last deal was on the house. No, you don’t talk, Raymond. You listen. You take my number out of your directory, and do not make the mistake of contacting me again.” There was a pause. “That’s the breaks. Go back to Cuba. Open a beans-and-rice stand on the beach. I think you’re worrying about nothing. The people who pay us pay us for one reason: They’re not up to the job themselves. So adios and hasta la cucaracha and have a good life and stay away from me.”

Gretchen closed her phone and turned around and looked into Alafair’s face. “Didn’t see you there,” she said.

“Who was that?” Alafair asked.

“A guy I was in the antique business with in Key West. He’s a gusano and always spotting his drawers about something.”

“A worm?”

“A Batistiano, an antirevolutionary. Miami is full of them. They love democracy as long as it’s run by brownshirts.” She smiled awkwardly and shrugged. “We brought in some antiquities from Guatemala that were a little warm, like freshly dug up next to some Mayan pyramids, the kind of stuff that private collectors pay a lot of money for. I’m out of it now. You said something about going to your house for boiled crabs?”

“It’s kind of late.”

“Not for me.”

“How about a drink at Clementine’s?” Alafair said.

“You were looking at me a little funny. What did you think I was talking about?”

“I wasn’t sure. It’s not my business.”

“You had a real funny look on your face.”

“You have mud in your hair. You must have dropped your phone.”

Gretchen touched her ear and looked at her fingers. “You think I could fit in at a place like the University of Texas? I hear a lot of rich kids go there. I’m not exactly a sorority girl. Tell me the truth. I’m not sensitive.”

Clete Purcel turned the Caddy south on the two-lane and headed down the green tree-lined strip of elevated land that led to Cypremort Point. The surface of the bay was the color of tarnished brass, the waves capping close to the banks, the late sun as red and angry and unrelenting as a stoplight at a railroad crossing. He pulled down the visor but could not keep the brilliance out of his eyes. He had to drive with one hand and shield himself from the glare, as though the sun had conspired with the voices in his head that told him to desist, to cut a U-turn and scour grass and mud out of the swale, to floor the Caddy back to New Iberia and find a bar with a breezy deck by Bayou Teche and quietly sedate his head for the next five hours.

But omens and cautionary tales had never been an influence in the life of Clete Purcel. The sunset was splendid, the oil that lurked in the Gulf quiescent or even biodegrading, as the oil companies and government scientists had claimed. He and his best friend had eluded death on the bayou and left their enemies blown into bloody rags among the camellias and live oaks and pecan trees and elephant ears. How many times in his life had he been spared a DOA tag on his toe? Maybe it was for a reason. Maybe his attendance at the big dance was meant to be much longer than he had thought. Perhaps the world was not only a fine place and well worth the fighting for; perhaps it was also a neon-lit playground, not unlike the old Pontchartrain Beach, where the admission was free and the Ferris wheel and the aerial fireworks on the Fourth of July stayed printed against the evening sky forever.

Varina Leboeuf had called and said she’d found a photo she thought he should see. Should he have ignored her call and not driven out to Cypremort Point? Was there something inherently bad in his level of desire or the fact that he admired the way a woman walked and glanced back over her shoulder at a man? Was it wrong that he was fascinated by the mystery that hid in women’s eyes and the way they kept their secrets to themselves and dressed for one another rather than for men? Why should age stop him from being who he was? The seventh-inning stretch was just the seventh-inning stretch. The game wasn’t over until the last pitch in the bottom of the ninth. And sometimes the game went into extra innings.

He was almost home free in his thought processes, ready to get back on that old-time boogie-woogie, when he looked out at the bay and the flooded cypress trees strung with moss and a green rain cloud that had moved across the sun. Where had he seen all this before? Why did this seascape make his heart twist? Why couldn’t he accept loss and life on life’s terms? Why did he always have to seek surrogates for a girl who had not only been taken irrevocably from him but who was irreplaceable? Unfortunately, he knew the answer to his own question. When death stole the love of your life, no amount of revenge ever healed the hole in your heart. You lived with anger and physical yearnings that were insatiable, and you went about dismantling yourself on a daily basis, tendon and joint, for the rest of your days, all the time wearing the mask of a court jester.

He clicked on his radio and turned up the volume full-blast and kept it there until he saw the house on stilts that Varina Leboeuf had described to him. The house was constructed of weathered, unpainted cypress and had a peaked, synthetically coated fireproof roof that blended with the surroundings. She had set up a badminton net in the yard and was batting a shuttlecock back and forth with two little black girls dressed in pinafores that were threaded with ribbons.

He pulled onto the grass and got out of the Caddy. Varina was wearing shorts rolled high up on the thigh and a sleeveless blouse that exposed her bra straps. Her face was flushed and happy, her brown eyes electric, like light trapped inside a barrel of dark water. “Get a racket,” she said.

He removed his porkpie hat and seersucker coat and put them in the Caddy, conscious of his shirt pulling loose from his slacks and the way his love handles hung over his belt. “Is your father back from the hospital?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“He’ll be at Iberia Medical Center for at least two more days. The twins here have been keeping me company. Their grandmother used to work for my father. He’s their godfather.”

“Really?” Clete said.

“Yeah, really. Did you hear some bad stories about him?”

“If I did, I don’t remember them.”

She hit the shuttlecock at him, whizzing it past his head. “Come on, I bet you can really sock it,” she said.

But Clete was a hog on ice, slashing the racket into the net, tumbling over a lawn chair, batting the shuttlecock into a tree, almost stepping on one of the little girls. “I better quit,” he said.

“You did great,” Varina said. “Girls, let’s have our ice cream and cake, then y’all had better run along home. Mr. Clete and I have some business to take care of.”

“It’s somebody’s birthday?” Clete said.

“Tomorrow is. I’m going to take them to the zoo in the morning.”

“I didn’t mean to disturb y’all,” he said.

“No, you’re not disturbing anything. Come inside. Go wash your hands, girls. Let’s hurry up now.”

“I need to make a couple of calls,” he lied. “I’ll wait out here and have a cigarette.”

He watched Varina escort the two girls into the back of the house. Through the window, he could see them gathered around a cake and a carton of ice cream at the kitchen table. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in the wind, unable to dispel his sense of discomfort. Why did the children have to leave? They obviously dressed for the occasion. They could have played in the yard while Clete looked at a photograph Varina had said would be of interest to him.

The twins came out the back door and walked up the road holding hands. Varina waved him inside.

“Think it’s all right for those kids to walk home by themselves?” he asked.

“They don’t have far to go.” There was a smear of ice cream on her mouth. She wiped it away with her wrist. “I was watching you through the window. You looked wistful.”

“South Louisiana makes me think of Southeast Asia sometimes. I’m an odd guy, probably one of the few who dug it over there.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“Two tours. I was in Thailand and the Philippines. Cambodia, too. But we weren’t supposed to talk about that. I’d go back to Vietnam if I had the chance.”

“What for?”

“I had a girl there. Her name was Maelee. I always wanted to find her family. I think they got sent to a reeducation camp by the VC. But I’m not sure.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was killed.”

“By who?”

“What difference does it make? We used snake and nape on their villes. The NVA buried people alive on the banks of the Perfume River. I helped dig up some of the bodies. When I was in Saigon, there was a place called the Stake where the public executions took place. The French could be nasty, too. The tiger cages and stuff like that. A lot of the Legionnaires were German war criminals. The whole country, north and south, was a moral insane asylum. The people got fucked by the Communists, then by us.”

There was no expression on her face. She opened the icebox door and took out a bottle of tequila and a Carta Blanca and a white bowl of lime wedges. She set the tequila and the Mexican beer and the bowl of limes on the table and took two shot glasses from a cabinet and set them next to the tequila. “I’m sorry to hear about the girl you lost,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute. Pour yourself a drink.”

“I’m not sure I want one.”

“ I’d like one. I’d like for you to join me. Did I say something wrong?”

“No.”

“Because you give me that impression.”

“Why’d you send the little girls home?”

“I told their mother they’d be home before dark. They only have to walk two hundred yards, but if I had thought they were in danger, I would have driven them to their house. I’ve known their family since I was a small child.”

Clete unscrewed the cap on the tequila and poured the two shot glasses full. The bottle felt cold and hard and full in his palm. “Can you show me that photo now?” he asked.

“I’ll be right back,” she replied.

He sat down at the table and salted a lime and took a hit off the tequila, then knocked back the whole shot and chased it with the Carta Blanca. The rush made him close his eyes and open his mouth, as though his body had just been lowered into warm water. Wow, he said to himself, and sucked on a salted lime. He heard the shower running in the back of the house.

He filled his shot glass again, until it brimmed, then sipped from the rim and gazed out the window at the long expanse of the bay, the brasslike color in the water fading to pewter, the sun no more than a spark on the horizon. Varina appeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her neck with a towel. She had changed into blue jeans and beaded moccasins and a cowboy shirt that glittered like a freshly sliced pomegranate. “Come in here,” she said.

“I poured you a shot,” he said. “Do you have another beer?”

“No, that one is for you. Here’s the photo I wanted to show you.”

The next room had no windows and was furnished with only a couch and a rollaway bed covered by a beige blanket with an Indian design. On the couch was a big brown teddy bear that she had propped up against the cushions, as though to surveil the room. Above the couch were two shelves filled with antique Indian dolls, stone grinding bowls, a tomahawk, a trade ax strung with dyed turkey feathers, and pottery whose discernible markings looked hundreds of years old. She pulled a scrapbook from under the rollaway and sat down on the mattress and began turning the stiffened pages in the book, never glancing up at him.

He sat down next to her. It was only then that she turned to the back pages of the scrapbook and removed an envelope filled with photos. “These pictures were taken with a camera Pierre and I both used,” she said. “I think he forgot about a couple of photos he took in a nightclub. I had them developed a couple of years back but never paid particular attention to them. I went to the house in Jeanerette yesterday and picked up a few things, including this scrapbook.”

She removed a photo from the envelope and handed it to him. In it, Pierre Dupree was standing in front of a bandstand festooned with strings of Christmas wreath and tinsel. A young Creole woman with cups of gold in her hair stood next to him. She wore a magenta evening gown, an orchid pinned to one strap. Neither person was touching the other.

“Is that the girl you and Dave Robicheaux were looking for?” Varina asked.

“That’s Tee Jolie Melton.”

“And Pierre denies knowing her?”

“According to Dave. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your husband.”

“I no longer think of him as my husband.”

“You think Mr. Dupree and Tee Jolie were an item?”

“I’m afraid you didn’t hear me the first time. In my mind, Pierre is not my husband. That means I quit tracking his extracurricular activities years ago. He inherited the worst traits on both sides of his family. His grandfather is an imperious aristocrat who thinks he’s genetically superior to others. His mother’s family made most of their money on the backs of rental convicts. They literally worked those poor devils to death. I hated going out in public with any of them.”

“Why?” Clete asked.

“They think the rest of the world is like St. Mary Parish. They expect waiters to grovel wherever they eat. They’re boorish and loud and never read a book or see a film or talk about anything except themselves. They never once invited my father to dinner. I’m sorry, I can’t stand them. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Was your marriage a great success? Is that why you’re single? You are single, right?”

Trying to follow her train of thought was exhausting. “My wife dumped me for a Buddhist guru in Boulder, Colorado. This was a guy who made people take off their clothes in front of the commune he ran. She also gave him most of our savings account. It took three years for the divorce to go through. By that time I was hiding out in El Salvador on a murder beef. You want to go for a walk?”

“You committed a murder?”

“Not exactly. I thought the guy had a piece in his hand. Anyway, he was a sorry sack of shit and had it coming. I need a drink.”

“Go ahead.”

“You want to go in the kitchen?” he asked.

“No, I want to stay here. This was my room when I was a child. It was always my room, even after I left home. What should I do with the photo?”

“Give it to Dave. If I take it, I might create a problem with the chain of evidence.”

“There’s a tray on the drainboard. Will you bring the drinks and the limes in? I’ll put the photo in my desk.”

“It’s pretty nice out. We can have our drinks outside, if you want.”

“No, I don’t want to go outside. The mosquitoes are terrible tonight. Would you rather not be here?”

Clete propped his hands on his knees and studied the far wall and the Indian artifacts on the shelves and the teddy bear staring back at him from the couch. “I shouldn’t be calling somebody else a sorry sack of shit, even the guy I popped in the hogpen. His name was Starkweather, like the kid who killed all those people in Nebraska. What I’m saying is I have a history. For a while I was mobbed up with some guys in Reno and on Flathead Lake in western Montana. These guys happened to be on a plane that crashed into the side of a mountain. I heard they looked like fricasseed pork when they were raked out of the fir trees. The shorter version is I’ve got a jacket that’s probably three inches thick.”

“Are you trying to scare me off?”

He pressed his fingers against his temples. “Hang on a minute. There are some things I can’t talk about without a drink in my hand, otherwise my gyroscope spins out of control and I fall down.” He went into the kitchen and put the shot glasses and the Carta Blanca and the bottle of tequila and the bowl of limes and a salt shaker on the tray and brought them back to the rollaway. He drank his shot glass empty and sipped on the beer and felt it go down cold and bright and hard in his throat. He sucked on a lime and poured another shot, blowing out his breath, gin roses blooming in his cheeks. “I guess I’m going through some kind of physiological change. Hooch seems to go straight into my bloodstream these days, kind of like I’m mainlining. Or throwing kerosene on a fire. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got a dragon walking around in my chest. My nether regions get out of control, too.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink.”

“That’s like telling the pope he shouldn’t work on Sundays.”

“You shouldn’t belittle yourself.”

“Yeah?”

“The world beats up on everybody and breaks most of us,” she said. “Why should we do it to ourselves when it’s going to happen anyway? The only things we take with us are the memories of the good times we had and the good people we knew along the way.”

“I never figured any of that stuff out.”

“You’re a lot more complicated than you pretend.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “It’s almost dark. I’m going to turn on the floor lamp. I don’t like the dark.”

“Why tell me about it?”

“Because I don’t hide anything I do.” She walked to the lamp and clicked it on, then faced him. “Do you like me?”

“I get in trouble, Miss Varina. Lots of it, on a regular basis. I think you’ve had enough trouble in your life already.”

She unbuttoned her shirt and the top of her jeans. “Tell me if you like me.”

“Sure I do.”

“You like the way I look now? Am I too forward? Tell me if I am.”

“I don’t have any illusions about my age and the way I look and the reasons I wrecked my career. I’d better hit the road. I showed bad judgment in coming here. You’re a nice lady, Miss V. It would be an honor to get involved with a lady like yourself, but you’re still married, and this won’t be good for either one of us.”

“If you call me ‘Miss’ again, I’m going to hit you. No, don’t get up. Let me do this for you. Please. You don’t know how important the love of a good man can be. No, not just a good man but a strong man. You are a good man, aren’t you? Oh, Clete, you sweet man. Clete, Clete, Clete, that’s so good. Oh, oh, oh.”

He felt as though a great wave had just curled out of the ocean and knocked him backward into the sand.