Creole Belle (47 page)

“What about the oil guy?”

“I’ve seen him before. He was on the Varina Leboeuf video,” he replied. “After he finished pumping her, he was combing his hair, still in the nude. He looked straight into the camera. The words ‘narcissist’ and ‘real bucket of shit’ come to mind. Think we should dial him up?”

I
CALLED THE
department and had a cruiser placed in front of my house. It would be manned and unmanned at different times of the day. It would be replaced by another cruiser parked in a different spot. Anyone watching our house could not avoid concluding that there was a police presence there twenty-four hours a day.

Then I drove to the Winn-Dixie and found Molly and Alafair and followed them back home. The three of us sat down in the kitchen, and I told them everything Clete had told me. Alafair started opening her mail, seemingly more concerned with it than the discussion. Molly opened a can of cat food and brought Snuggs and Tripod in and fed them on a piece of newspaper and then filled a bowl of water and set it beside the cat food. Snuggs’s tail flipped from side to side on the paper while he and Tripod ate.

“Clete’s sorry for this, and so am I,” I said.

“Clete’s a mess. He’ll never change. The question is what do we do about it,” Molly said. “Have you talked to Helen?”

“Not yet,” I replied.

“When are you going to do that?” she asked.

“First thing in the morning.”

“Don’t blame yourself for this, Dave. You thought you were helping Clete. It’s time he becomes responsible for his choices.”

“I don’t think choice enters into it. He didn’t have a lot of alternatives.”

“Helen is probably going to have something to say about that,” Molly said.

I didn’t want to think about my conversation with Helen Soileau. She had given great latitude to Clete and me, and I was about to repay the favor by telling her that Clete’s daughter had been ordered to kill the department’s senior homicide investigator as well as his family.

“Somebody thinks Clete and I have information that, in reality, we don’t possess,” I said. “I don’t think this contract is about revenge or that it came from the Duprees or Varina Leboeuf. I believe the guys behind it are people we never met.”

“Gretchen was getting off her leash,” Alafair said. Molly and I looked at her. She went on, “This is how the people she works for are getting rid of her. In the meantime, they use her to cause a lot of trouble for Clete and Dave and keep all of us running in circles for a long time.”

“Who?” I said.

“Somebody who’s about to lose a great deal of money,” she replied.

This is what happens when your kid graduates with a degree in forensic psychology.

“Remember what Tee Jolie told you originally?” Alafair said. “She said she knew dangerous men who were talking about centralizers.”

“Yeah, they’re used inside the drill casing on a rig. Everybody knows that,” I said. “That’s part of the suit against two or three companies responsible for the blowout.”

“I think this is about oil, all of it,” she said.

That was my kid.

“They’re underestimating Gretchen Horowitz,” she went on. “I think they’ve made an enemy with the wrong person.”

“Don’t let Gretchen Horowitz anywhere near this house,” Molly said. “If I see her, I’m going to pull her hair out. Please tell her that for me.”

And this is where we ended up, arguing among ourselves, letting the evil of others invade our home and family.

It was dark in the trees, and the electric lights in the park were shining on the surface of the bayou, which was high and muddy and filled with broken tree branches. In the quiet, I could hear geese honking overhead and smell gas pooling in the yard. The wind had shifted out of the north, and inside it was a tannic coldness that only minutes ago had not been there.

I drove to Clete’s motor court. Gretchen’s hot-rod truck was gone, and I was glad I did not have to see her. Her childhood had been terrible, but that was true of many people who had not become contract killers. This kind of conclusion about human behavior is one that almost every man and woman in law enforcement eventually comes to, although the reason behind it is ultimately pragmatic. If a cop begins to think of morality in relative terms, he will quickly find himself in a quandary. Prisons are bad places. We put away eighteen-year-old kids who weigh 120 pounds soaking wet and leave them to their fate. In other words, does a kid like that deserve to be spread-eagled and split apart and forced to his knees in the shower by any swinging dick who wants an easy bar of soap? Did the kid deal his own play? Is he receiving the same treatment a rich kid would? Does the system serve and treat everyone equally? Does anyone in his right mind believe that?

I’ve seen five people executed, three by electrocution, two by injection. I did not refer to them as inmates or killers. When you watch them die, they become people. Maybe they deserve an even worse fate than the one you are witnessing. But when you see it take place, when you smell the stink in their clothes and see the sheen of fear in their eyes and the jailhouse iridescence on their skin and the nakedness of their scalps where the hair has been shaved away, they become human beings little different from you and me, unless something in us has already died and made us into people we never wanted to be.

I guess what I’m saying is that deep down inside, I believed Clete’s protective feelings for his daughter were justified, that with a different shake of the dice, I could have turned out just like her.

When he opened his door, he was eating a cheese and lettuce and tomato sandwich, his jaw packed like a baseball.

“What was the Brit doing in Lafayette?” I said.

“Telling people that sweet crude tastes like chocolate syrup,” Clete replied.

I went inside the cottage and sat down. I felt as though I’d aged a decade in the last hour. “Where’s Gretchen?”

“Search me.”

“That’s not a good answer.”

“I’ve thought some things over,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to protect her, but maybe it’s too late. Maybe she’s too damaged, and so am I. Same with you, Streak. You’re sober, but you’ve got more of me in you than you want to admit. We don’t fit in, and everybody knows it except us. Maybe we should have bought it in the shootout on the bayou.”

I propped my elbows on his breakfast table and rested my head on the heels of my hands. I felt that something had torn loose behind my eyes and that I couldn’t see Clete or the room correctly. “Who’s playing that song?”

“What song?” he said.

“Jimmy Clanton’s ‘Just a Dream.’ You don’t hear it?”

“No, I don’t hear anything except that workboat deepening the channel in the bayou. You coming down with something?”

V
ARINA
L
EBOEUF WAS
good at whatever she did, whether in love, war, or deception. Her suitors had never been unintelligent men, yet most of them, no matter how bad they got hurt, came back for more, and I never heard one of them say he regretted his choice. When the phone rang on my kitchen counter at eleven-ten that night, she was at her best. “You have to help me,” she said. “I know this is outrageous, but I also know your capacity for forgiveness, and I know you never turn away a person who genuinely needs your help and understanding.”

I tried to think of an adequate response.

“Hello? Are you there?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m here, and it’s really late,” I said.

“My father is drunk and believes you sent the Horowitz woman to our house. He says he saw her parked down the road this afternoon.”

“Why would I send Gretchen Horowitz to your house?”

“He’s getting more and more irrational. He resents you because you’re educated and you were given advancements at the department that he thought should be his. He believes you and the black female deputy conspired to degrade him in front of his peers.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He has a gun. I don’t want him hurt. He called you a nigger-lover before he left. I’m afraid of what he’s going to do.”

“Call 911 and make a report.”

“Dave, if he gets into it with a black deputy, somebody is going to be killed.”

“Frankly, I don’t care what happens to your father, Varina. He’s an ignorant, stupid man, a racist, and a bully who molested black women and jailed and beat their men. His sin lies not in his ignorance and stupidity but in his choice to stay ignorant and stupid. I’m going to hang up now so you can call 911. Take my number out of your Rolodex.”

“He’s a sick old man. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Thanks for asking, though.”

I was lowering the telephone receiver to the cradle when I heard her voice again, as though her intentions, whatever they were, had taken on a new direction and were shifting into overdrive. “Clete Purcel betrayed my trust and stole something from my home and my apartment. I think you know what that is.”

I put the receiver back to my ear. “Clete doesn’t always confide in me.”

“Stop lying. I had some things on video I’m not proud of. But I never used that material against anyone. I’ve had two men try to extort me. One man named me as the third party in a divorce suit. So I decided to get some insurance. That’s
all
.”

“You had someone burglarize Clete’s office.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Your father carries a key chain with a fob on it that resembles
a sawfish. I think Alexis Dupree gave the fob to him. I also think Alexis Dupree is a Nazi war criminal and your father admired him as a kindred spirit. Except your father finally realized that in Dupree’s eyes, he was a throwback walking around with a Styrofoam spit cup in his hand. Where is Tee Jolie Melton, Varina? Why did y’all have to murder Blue?”

“I’d get mad at you, Dave, but objectively speaking, you’re not worth the effort. Good God, what did I ever see in you?”

I
CALLED
C
LETE
at six
A.M.
and woke him up. “Where’s Gretchen?” I said.

“I think she flew to Miami,” he replied.

“Varina Leboeuf claims her father saw her at Cypremort Point yesterday.”

“That’s possible.”

“What’s she up to, Clete?”

“She wants to find her mother.”

“I’m going to have a talk with Helen about Gretchen this morning.”

I heard him exhale against the receiver. “Is there another way to do this?” he asked.

“No.”

“A PI friend of mine in Lafayette found the British oil guy. His name is Hubert Donnelly. He and Lamont Woolsey are staying at a motel on Pinhook Road in Lafayette.”

“After I talk with Helen, I’ll call you back.”

“Gretchen is still my daughter, no matter what happens.”

“I don’t know how I should take that.”

“Any way you want,” he replied. Then he hung up.

I ate breakfast in the kitchen with Molly while Alafair worked on her new novel in her bedroom. The windows were open, and the morning was cool and fresh and smelled of humus and night damp and the flowers opening in the shadows. I heard Alafair clicking on the old Smith Corona I gave her when she was eight years old. She wrote in a strange fashion, one I never quite understood. She woke in the middle of the night and wrote with a pen in a notebook, typed
the words on the Smith Corona in the morning, and then retyped them onto her computer. When I asked her why she did it that way, she replied, “It’s never any good unless you’re sure that not one period or comma is out of place and not one word is used that can be taken out.”

“Who was that on the phone last night?” Molly asked.

“Varina Leboeuf. She said her father was drunk and out to get me. I didn’t take her seriously. That whole bunch at Croix du Sud Plantation are a tangle of vipers. Their schemes are coming apart, whatever they are, and Varina is trying to save herself.”

“Why would her father have it in for you?”

“Years ago someone taught him to hate himself so he’d blame his lot in life on people of color or people who disagree with him. It’s a fine morning. Let’s not talk about these guys.”

“We have to.”

“No, we don’t. It’s like reading the Bible,” I said. “We know how the last chapter ends. The good guys win.”

“You skipped over the part where a lot of the earth gets wiped out.”

“No story is perfect,” I said.

We both laughed, in the way we used to laugh when we didn’t have any cares. We divided a hot cinnamon roll and drank the rest of the coffee and hot milk on the stove. Then we went outside and walked down to the edge of Bayou Teche with Snuggs and Tripod flanking us. The air was cold and wonderful rising off the water, the light as soft as pollen on the tree limbs above us. There was no sound at all on the bayou, not even on the drawbridge at Burke Street. Molly took my hand in hers without speaking, and we watched the bream feeding among the lily pads, which were turning brown and curling stiffly along the edges. I wondered how many weeks we might have before the gray, rainy days of the Louisiana winter set in, laying bare the water oaks and the pecan trees, smudging the windows with fog that could be as cold and wet as seepage in the grave.

W
HEN
I
WENT
to the department, I learned that Helen’s half sister, Ilene, had almost died in an auto accident in Shreveport and that
Helen had gone to be by her side. I had been prepared to tell her everything I knew about Gretchen Horowitz and the kidnapping of Candy Horowitz and the contract on me and my family and Clete, and like the guilt-ridden man who finds the church house closed, I found myself with nowhere to take my story.