Creole Belle (43 page)

I tried to think about Alexis Dupree in terms of what he wasn’t. He claimed to have been a prisoner at Ravensbrück. But if he had been a guard or a junior officer at Ravensbrück and not an inmate, would it make sense for him to draw attention to his association with the camp whose survivors would quickly recognize his photograph? If Alexis Dupree had been a member of the SS, he probably worked at a camp he never made mention of, maybe one that was liberated by the Soviets and whose records were confiscated and not shared with the Americans or the British or the French. When the German army began to collapse on the Eastern Front, the SS fled west and left thousands of bodies in freight cars and in train yards or stacked like cordwood outside crematoriums. They put on the uniforms of the regular German army, hoping to surrender to American or British personnel rather than to the Russians, who summarily shot them.

Alexis Dupree was a smart man. Maybe he had taken the deception one step further and tattooed a prison number on his left forearm and played the role of survivor and veteran of the French
Resistance, composed primarily of Communists. Dupree may have been many things, but leftist was not one of them. Maybe he’d been an informer. He certainly met the standard of a self-serving turncoat. Had he been a friend of the famous combat photographer Robert Capa? Out of all the possibilities and claims about Dupree’s past, I was positive that one was a lie. I also believed the photo of the Republican soldiers taken at the siege of Madrid and inscribed by Capa to Dupree was another fraud perpetrated on the world by the Dupree family. All of Capa’s work had already been published, including a lost satchel of photos discovered in Mexico in the 1990s. Plus, Capa was a socialist who probably would have been repelled by an elitist like Dupree.

Where does that leave us?
I asked myself. The boughs of the cypress trees were as brittle and delicate as gold leaf in the late sun. An alligator gar was swimming along the edge of the lily pads, its needle-nose head and lacquered spine and dorsal fin parting the surface with a fluidity that was more serpent than fish. The great cogged wheels on the drawbridge were lifting its huge weight into the air, silhouetting its black outline against a molten sun. Then the wind gusted and a long shaft of amber sunlight seemed to race down the center of the bayou, like a paean to the close of day and the coming of night and the cooling of the earth, as though vespers and the acceptance of the season were a seamless and inseparable part of life that only the most vain and intransigent among us would deny.

Meditations upon mortality become cheap stuff and offer little succor when it comes to dealing with evil. The latter is not an abstraction, and ignoring it is to become its victim. The earth abides forever, but so does the canker inside the rose, and the canker never sleeps.

I wondered if Clete was right: that at some point you must become willing to put hurt on an old man. Those words had an effect on me that was like a saw cutting through bone. You do not give your enemy power, and you do not let him remake you in his image. I picked up a pinecone and tossed it in a high arc into the middle of the current, as though I had fought my way through a long mental process and was freeing myself of it. But my heart was as heavy as an
anvil in my chest, and I knew I would have no peace until I found the killers of Blue Melton and brought Tee Jolie back to her Cajun home on the banks of Bayou Teche.

A
T THE SUPPER
table, I couldn’t concentrate on what Molly and Alafair were talking about. “It’s going to be a big event, Dave,” Alafair said.

“You mean the Sugar Cane Festival? Yeah, it always is,” I said.

“The Sugar Cane Festival was a month ago. I was talking about the 1940s musical revue,” she said.

“I thought you were talking about next year,” I said.

Molly let her gaze settle on my face and kept it there until I blinked. “What happened today?” she asked.

“Somebody burglarized Clete’s office. Probably friends of Varina Leboeuf,” I said.

“What were they looking for?” she asked.

“Why put yourself in the mind of perps? It’s like submerging your hand in an unflushed toilet,” I said.

“Way to go, Dave,” Alafair said.

“It’s just a metaphor,” I said.

“Next time hand out barf bags in advance,” she said.

“Both of you stop it,” Molly said.

“Varina is part of a cabal of some kind. Clete got ahold of some incriminating video footage that he destroyed, but Varina believes he still has it. The guy I can’t get out of my head is Alexis Dupree. I think he was in the SS, and I think he worked in an extermination camp in Eastern Europe.”

“How did you arrive at all this?” Molly said.

“Dupree is the opposite of everything he says about himself,” I said.

“That’s convenient.”

“You think he’s a veteran of the French underground, a man of the people? He and his family terrorized the farmworkers you tried to organize,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean he’s an ex-Nazi.”

I set my knife and fork down on the edges of my plate as softly as I
could and left the table, my temples pounding. I went out on the gallery and sat down on the front steps and looked at the fireflies lighting in the trees and the leaves blowing end over end down the sidewalk. I saw a cardboard box wrapped in brown paper next to the bottom step, the wrapping paper folded in tight corners and sealed neatly with shipping tape. There was no writing on the paper. I opened my pocketknife and sliced away the tape and peeled off the paper and pulled back the flaps on the box and peered inside. The packing material was a mixture of straw and wood curlicues that smelled like shaved pine. An envelope with a rose stem Scotch-taped across it rested on top of the straw. Inside the envelope was a thick card with silver scroll on the borders, a message written in the center in bright blue ink. I stared at the words for a long time, then moved some of the straw aside with my knife blade and looked in the box again. I put away my knife and pushed the box with my foot to the edge of the walk just as the door opened behind me. “Dave?” Molly said.

“I’ll be inside in a few minutes,” I said.

“You have to stop internalizing all these things. It’s like drinking poison.”

“You’re saying I bring my problems home instead of leaving them at the department?”

“That wasn’t what I meant at all.”

“I was agreeing with you. Clete and I met a guy named Lamont Woolsey. His eyes are so blue they’re almost purple. You know who else has violet eyes? Gretchen Horowitz.”

She sat down next to me, distraught, like someone watching a car accident about to happen. “What are you saying? Who’s Woolsey?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t think straight anymore. I don’t know who Woolsey is, and I don’t understand my own thoughts. I don’t have any right to drop all this on you and Alafair. That’s what I’m saying.”

She took my hand in hers. “I don’t think you see the real issue. You want Louisiana to be the way it was fifty years ago. Maybe the Duprees
are
evil, or maybe they’re just greedy. Either way, you have to let go of them. You also have to let go of the past.”

“In some of those camps, there were medical experiments done on children. The color of their eyes was changed synthetically.”

She released my hand and stared into the dark. “We have to put an end to this. You and Clete and I need to sit down and talk. But more of the same isn’t going to help.”

“I didn’t make any of it up.”

I could hear her breathing inside the dampness, as though her lungs were working improperly, as though the smell of the sugar refinery and the black lint off the smokestacks were catching in her throat. I didn’t know whether she was crying or not. I picked at my fingernails and stared at the streetlamps and at the leaves gusting in serpentine lines along the asphalt.

“What’s that?” she asked, looking into the shadows below the camellia bushes.

“Somebody left a box on the step.”

“What’s in it?”

“Take a look.”

She leaned over and pulled the box toward her by one of the flaps. She brushed away some of the packing material and tried to tilt the box toward her, but it was too heavy. Then she stood up and set it on the steps so the overhead light shone directly down on it. I could hear the bottles inside tinkling against one another. “Johnnie Walker Black Label?” she said.

“Check out the card.”

She pulled it from the envelope and read it aloud: “‘Charger would want you to have this. Merry Christmas, Loot.’” She looked at me blankly. “Who’s Charger?”

“That was the code name of a colonel I served under. He was a giant of a man and went naked in the bush and drank a case of beer a day and blew bean gas all over his tent. He had huge pieces of scar tissue stapled across his stomach where he’d been wounded by a burst from an AK. He was the best soldier I ever knew. He founded the Delta Force.”

“You never told me about that.”

“It’s yesterday’s bubble gum.”

“Why would somebody do this? Do they think sending you a case of Scotch will get you drunk?”

“Somebody wants me to know he and his buds have access to
every detail in my life, including my military record and the fact that I’m a drunk.”

“Dave, this scares me. Who are these people?”

“The real deal, right out of the furnace,” I replied.

W
HEN IT CAME
to courage and grace under fire, Clete Purcel was not an ordinary man. He grew up in the old Irish Channel in an era when the welfare projects of New Orleans were segregated and the street gangs were made up primarily of kids from blue-collar Italian and Irish homes who fought with chains and knives and broken bottles for control of neighborhoods that most people wouldn’t spit on. The pink scar that resembled a strip of rubber running through his eyebrow to the bridge of his nose had been given to him by a kid from the Iberville Projects. The scars on his back had come from the .22 rounds he took while he carried me unconscious down a fire escape. The scars across his buttocks had come from his father’s razor strop.

He seldom mentioned the specifics of his two combat tours in Vietnam. He went there and came back and never made an issue of the psychological damage that had obviously been done to him. He still served tea to the mamasan he killed and who had traveled with him from Vietnam to Japan and New Orleans and Vegas and Reno and Polson, Montana, and back to New Orleans and his apartment on St. Ann Street. In terms of physical courage, he had no peer; he ate his pain and swallowed his blood and never let his enemies know he was hurt. I had never known a braver human being.

But the sense of shame and rejection that was inculcated in Clete by his father was the succubus he could never exorcise, and it was never more apparent than when he was confronted by the odium his name carried with the New Orleans Police Department. The irony was that the department was notorious for its corruption and vigilantism and its targeting of Black Panthers during the 1970s. I knew cops who investigated their own burglaries. I knew a Vice detective who put a hit on his own confidential informant. I knew a patrolwoman who murdered the owners of the restaurant she held up.
Sound like exaggeration? The hiring procedures at NOPD were so shabby, the department hired known ex-felons.

Dwelling on the moral failure of others brought no respite for Clete Purcel. No matter how elegantly he dressed, the man he saw in the mirror not only wore sackcloth and ashes but deserved them.

He had driven to New Orleans and checked in with his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, and the PI who handled some of his cases when he was out of town. Then he went upstairs to his apartment and picked up the phone and called Dana Magelli, not allowing himself to stop at the refrigerator, where almost every shelf was stocked with Mexican and German beer and chilled bottles of gin and vodka. While he waited for the call to be transferred, he could hear his breath echoing off the receiver.

“Magelli,” a voice said.

“It’s Clete Purcel, Dana. I need some help with that Luger you took off me.”

“Bix Golightly’s piece?”

“Right. Did you run the serial number?”

“Why should that be of interest to you?”

“I think Bix stole the Luger from Alexis Dupree. I think Dupree may be a Nazi war criminal.”

“I should have known,” Magelli said.

“Known what?”

“It’s not enough that you leave shit prints all over New Orleans. Now you’re branching into international affairs.”

“This isn’t funny, Dana. That old man has a scrapbook full of human hair in his house. Does that sound normal to you?”

There was a beat. “Where’d you get that information?”

“Dave Robicheaux saw it. Why do you ask?”

“Maybe we should talk. Where are you?”

“At my apartment.”

“Stay there.”

“No, I want to come down to the district.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Yeah, it is,” Clete replied.

He shaved and showered and wet-combed his hair, trying to keep
his mind empty, trying not to think about the people he was about to see and the situation he was about to place himself in. He put on a flaming-red long-sleeve silk shirt and his gray suit and a pair of black dress shoes he kept stored in velvet bags with drawstrings. Then he took his Panama hat off his closet shelf and fitted it low on his brow and walked down the stairs into the breezeway and told Alice Werenhaus she could go home early.

“You’re bringing a guest here?” she asked. “Because if you are, you don’t have to hide your behavior from me.”

“No, it’s just a fine afternoon, and you deserve some time off, Miss Alice.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m raising your salary by one hundred a week.”

“You pay me adequately. You don’t have to do that.”

“I just sold a waterfront lot I’ve been hiding from my ex-wife’s lawyers. I’d rather give the capital gains to you than the IRS.”

“Is that legal?”

“Miss Alice, tax laws are written by rich guys for rich guys. But in answer to your question, yeah, it’s legal. I’m just cleaning house a little bit, know what I mean?”