Creole Belle

  “Sorry.”

  “She was abducted on your boat.”

  “The boat you’re describing is not mine, and I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “How about that amphibian you were on? I’ve always wanted to take a ride on one of those.”

  “This conversation is over,” he replied.

  The Vietnamese girl set Broussard’s steak by his elbow, the meat so hot it was sizzling in its gravy. “The cook say he sorry and hope you like it,” she said.

  “Later, I want you to take me in the kitchen so I can meet him,” Broussard said. “We don’t want him to leave here with hurt feelings.”

  “That’s white of you,” Clete said.

  “Your mockery is not appreciated, sir,” Broussard said. “I was trying to indicate to this little girl that I was only teasing when I told her to fuss at the cook.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We need to do a lot more good deeds like that, particularly for the Vietnamese,” Clete said, crunching his ice, lifting his index finger for emphasis. “I saw some stuff in Vietnam that takes the cake. Throwing prisoners out of the slick, going into a ville at night and cutting a guy’s throat and painting his face yellow, you know, the kind of heavy shit the home folks don’t want to hear about. I knew this one door gunner who couldn’t wait to get back to a free-fire zone. Someone asked him how he killed all those women and children, and he said, ‘It’s easy. You just don’t lead them as much.’ You ever think about that kind of stuff while you’re tanking up at the pump?”

  The conversation at the table went into slow motion and then died. Amidee raised his hand and gestured at the security personnel as though cupping air with his fingers.

  “Eighty-sixing us, are you?” Clete said. “Tell you what, Rev, I’m going to check up on that Vietnamese girl, and if I find your fingerprints on her, you’re going to get large amounts of publicity that you don’t need.”

  “There’s some misunderstanding. I think we need to talk this out,” Bobby Joe Guidry said.

  “Don’t interfere,” Woolsey said.

  “I thought we were all members of the church here. What’s going on?” Bobby Joe said, trying to smile.

  “Get these two men out of here,” Woolsey said to the three security men who had arrived at the table.

  I stood up and heard Clete getting out of his chair beside me, knocking against the table, shaking the glasses on it. I did not have to look at him to know what he was thinking or planning. The three security men had concentrated their attention entirely on Clete and were not looking at me at all. “We’re leaving,” I said to Woolsey and Broussard. “But you guys are going to see a lot more of us. Both of you have shit on your noses. I saw Blue Melton’s body after it was defrosted and taken apart by the coroner. How do you do something like that to a seventeen-year-old girl and live with yourself?”

  It was an odd moment, one that I didn’t expect. Neither man looked at me, and neither spoke. They seemed to have folded into themselves like accordion cutouts made of cardboard. Clete and I walked toward the Caddy, the wind rustling the tree limbs. I heard feet crunching on the leaves behind me and assumed the security men had decided to score some points with either Broussard or us by escorting us to our vehicle. When I turned around, I was looking into the face of Bobby Joe Guidry. “I don’t like what happened back there,” he said.

  “Oh yeah?” Clete said.

  “Y’all seem like good guys. They shouldn’t have treated y’all like that. I was a radio operator in Desert Storm. I know what happened out there on the highway when all that traffic got caught by our planes. You know, what the media called the ‘Highway of Death.’ Some of those people were probably civilians. Whole families. I saw it. It’s something you don’t want to remember.”

  “You ever go to A.A., Bobby Joe?” I asked.

  “I didn’t figure I needed it after I met Amidee.”

  “I attend the Solomon House meeting in New Iberia. Why don’t you drive down and see us sometime?”

  “My main issue right now is finding a job.”

  “I tell you what,” I said. I removed a business card from my billfold and wrote on the back of it. “We have an opening for a 911 dispatcher. You might give it a shot.”

  “Why you doing this?”

  “You look like a stand-up guy,” I said.

  “You’re talking to the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Stick around,” Clete said.

  “Amidee fooled me real good, didn’t he?” Bobby Joe said.

  “I wouldn’t think of it like that,” I said.

  “He doesn’t ask people for money,” he replied. “That means somebody else is paying his freight. Any fool would see that, I guess.”

  Clete and I looked at each other.

  CLETE CALLED MY office at 8:05 the next morning. “Somebody got past my alarm and punched my safe and tore up my office,” he said.

  “When?”

  “The alarm went off-line at two-seventeen this morning. The safe was done by a pro. The windows were taped over with black vinyl garbage bags. All my file cabinets and desk drawers were dumped, my swivel chair split open, and the top of the toilet tank pulled off and dropped in the bowl. Want to hear some more?”

  “Who was on those videos with Varina?”

  “I already told you. A few shysters and oil guys who wanted to get laid. They’re not skells.”

  “No, you said there were some you didn’t recognize. What do you remember about them?”

  “They had bare asses.”

  “What else?”

  “One guy had a British accent.”

  “Why didn’t you mention that before?”

  “Who cares about his accent?”

  My mind was racing. “You didn’t save any of this on your hard drive? You don’t have an automatic backup system of some kind?”

  “No, I told you, I burned the memory cards and opened up the windows in my office to get the smell out. I should have taken your advice and never looked at it.”

  “I’m going to send some guys from the crime lab to your office. Leave everything just as it is.”

  “I’ll need a copy of the report for my insurance claim, but forget about prints. The guys who did this are good.”

  “Did Varina ever mention a Brit to you?”

  “News flash, Dave: When you’re with Varina, the only person she talks about is you, all the time staring straight into your eyes. It takes about ten seconds before your flagpole wakes up and decides it’s time to fly the red, white, and blue.”

  “You’ve still got the hots for her.”

  “Wrong. Since I met her, I feel like I’ve been living inside a snare drum. We’ve got to take these guys down, Dave. This started with Alexis Dupree and Bix Golightly. We need to go back to the source and put some hurt on that old man. You hearing me on this? The guy is probably a war criminal and a mass murderer. Why are we letting him do this kind of stuff to us?”

  “I’m sending the guys from the crime lab now,” I said.

  “I won’t be here. Gretchen can show them around.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m not sure. Did you run Lamont Woolsey yet?”

  “No, I haven’t had time.”

  “Don’t bother. I called a guy I know at the NCIC. There’s no Lamont Woolsey in the system. And I mean nowhere. He doesn’t exist. I’ll check back with you later.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “I’m not even sure myself. How can I tell you? Alexis Dupree has locks of hair in a scrapbook. Maybe we’ve got John Wayne Gacy living in St. Mary Parish. You ever think of that?” he replied.

  CLETE WAS RIGHT. How does a man like Alexis Dupree end up in our midst? From what I could find out about him through Google, he had been living in the United States since 1957 and was naturalized ten years later. Had he worked for both British and American intelligence?
Were there any people alive who could authenticate his claim that he was a member of the French underground? The articles posted on the Internet seemed to replicate one another, and none of them contained any source except Dupree.

  That afternoon I called a friend in the FBI and another friend at the INS and a friend whose drinking had cost him his career at the CIA. Of the three, the drunk was the most helpful.

  “It’s possible your man is telling the truth,” he said.

  “Telling the truth about what?” I said.

  “Working with MI6 or one of our intelligence agencies.”

  “Maybe he was never an inmate at Ravensbrück,” I said. “Maybe he was a guard there. I don’t know what to believe about him.”

  “After the war, we gave citizenship to the scientists who built V-1 and V-2 rockets and helped Hitler kill large numbers of civilians in London. During the 1950s any European who was anti-Communist pretty much got a free pass with the INS. The consequence was we gave safe harbor to a bunch of shitbags. No matter how you cut it, you’ll probably never find out this guy’s real identity.”

  “Somebody out there knows who he is,” I said.

  “You don’t get it, Dave. This guy is whatever somebody else says he is. Any file you find on Dupree was written by someone who created a work of fiction. You’re a fan of George Orwell. Remember what he said about history? It ended in 1936. Unless you want to get drunk again, leave this crap alone.”

  His statement was not one I wanted to hear. I tried to dismiss his words as those of a cynic, a CIA agent who had aided in the installation of a Chilean dictator, armed state-sponsored terrorists in northern Nicaragua, and been the associate of men who operated torture chambers and were responsible for the murder of liberation theologians. Unfortunately, those who give witness to the darker side of our history are usually those who helped precipitate it and, as a result, make it easy for us to discount their stories. Sometimes I wondered if their greatest burden was their eventual realization that they collaborated with others in the theft of their souls.

  “We’re going to find out who this guy is. I don’t care how long it takes,” I said.

  There was a pause, then my friend who had destroyed his liver and two marriages and the lives of his children hung up the phone. At quitting time, I went home in a funk and sat on a folding chair by the bayou and stared at the current flowing south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Clete had said that our own John Wayne Gacy was perhaps living just down the road, ensconced in an antebellum home that could have been a backdrop for a Tennessee Williams play. Except the comparison was inadequate. Gacy had been a serial killer of young men and boys whose bodies he interred in the walls and crawl spaces of his home. Gacy may not have been psychotic, but there was no question he was mentally ill. Supposedly, his last words to one of the guards who escorted him to his execution were “Kiss my ass.” Alexis Dupree was totally rational and by no means mentally ill, and if he had been a member of the SS, his crimes were probably far worse and more numerous than Gacy’s. Every time I reached a conclusion about him, I found myself using the word “if.” Why was that? In the age of Google and the Freedom of Information Act, I had been unable to find one incontestable fact about his life.

  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.

  AT 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.”