Creole Belle

  “Yeah, and a groom and I worked at the concession stand,” she said.

  “You feel like I’ve deceived you?”

  “I don’t know what to call it. I can’t begin to describe what I feel right now,” she said.

  “I saw you smoke Golightly. I called in the shots-fired, but I didn’t dime you. After you brought me my cigarette lighter, I figured you’d run away if I told you I was in Algiers the night Golightly and Grimes got it. If you ran away again, I knew I would never find you. You got a rotten break as a kid, Gretchen. In my view, you’re not responsible for any of the things you did. If anybody is responsible, it’s me. I was a drunk and a pill addict working Vice. I took juice from the Mob, and I took advantage of your mother. Candy was mainlining when she was nineteen, and instead of helping her, I made her pregnant. If you told me you didn’t want a son of a bitch like me for a father, I’d understand.”

  “You’re not a son of a bitch. Don’t say that.”

  He reached down on the floor and picked up his trousers, then stood up from the couch with his back to her and put them on. “Why are you crying?” he said.

  “I’m not. I don’t ever cry.”

  “Our supper is probably burned up. Let’s go to the Patio for some étouffée. A guy couldn’t have a better daughter than you. You have character and you’re not afraid. Anybody who says different is going to have to answer to me.”

  Her hands were propped on her knees, and her head was bent forward so he could no longer see her face. She pushed the wetness out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “There’s a hit on you. You and Dave Robicheaux and Alafair and maybe Mrs. Robicheaux. They’ve got my mother, Clete. I was offered the choice of doing the hit or letting my mother be tortured to death.”

  “Who gave you the contract?” he asked.

  “A guy named Marco. He’s not important. The contract can come from anywhere or anybody. It gets processed through Jersey or Miami or San Diego. The middle guys do business through drop boxes and electronic relays. Right now they’re shooting up my mother with some high-grade smack that could kill her.”

  She waited for him to speak. Instead, he sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. “Where’d they grab Candy?”

  “Probably at her house in Coconut Grove. Are you going to tell Dave Robicheaux and Alafair?” she asked. “I can’t stand the thought of that. Alafair stood up for me. She hit Varina Leboeuf in the face.”

  He lifted his eyes to hers. There was a level of sadness in them that seemed to have no bottom.

  AT THE DEPARTMENT I had started my Internet search into the history of the cycle track in Paris in hopes of discovering a connection with the Nazi SS officer Karl Engels. Some of the search was easy, some of it elusive, some of it a dead end. The name of the racetrack in Paris was Vel’ d’Hiv, a place that had become infamous as the first stop for French Jews on their way to a camp at Drancy and the freight cars that would take them to Auschwitz. Many of the photos were horrific, the eyewitness accounts so gruesome and cruel that you wondered if there was not a demonic agent at work in human beings. There was nothing to link the name of Karl Engels with the cycle track in Paris or the camp at Drancy or the chimneys at Auschwitz.

  When I got home that night, I continued the search on our home computer via a different avenue. I didn’t put in a search for Karl Engels but for the people he might have known or worked under. I brought up photos of Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich and the people in their entourage. I searched the lists of those who had been tried at Nuremberg and those who had escaped justice and fled to South America. I read seemingly endless accounts of their backgrounds. Most of them had come from middle-class homes and been raised by Lutheran or Catholic parents. Their previous lives, before their admission to the SS, had been characterized by mediocrity and failure. That they would pose before cameras in front of the barbed wire holding their victims was mind-numbing. That they would allow themselves to be photographed shooting unarmed people on their knees or a woman with a child in her arms would probably be incomprehensible to a sociopath. The world these men created might exist today only in cyberspace, but to visit it even as a virtual reality makes the stomach crawl.

  By eleven P.M. my eyes were burning, and I was ready to give it up. Then I looked again at a photo I had not lingered on, possibly because of the way the individuals were dressed. The photo showed Heinrich Himmler and three other men talking, all of them wearing business suits. They looked like men who might have gathered at a piece of cleared land in anticipation of a shared business venture. They did not look evil or cunning or remarkable in any fashion. In the cutline, Himmler and two of the other men were named; the fourth man was not. His face was turned at an angle, his posture both confident and regal. There was a dimple in his chin, a pleasant smile on his mouth. The profile was a replica of Alexis Dupree’s.

  I went back to the firsthand accounts given by survivors of Auschwitz. Many of them mentioned a junior SS officer who was singularly cruel and took obvious delight in conducting the selections. Some called him “the light bearer” because of the way his eyes brightened when he let his riding crop hover above an inmate’s head, asking innocuous questions about his place of birth or the work he did, just before touching him on the brow and condemning him to the ovens.

  Other inmates were less poetic in their choice of terms for the light bearer. They simply called him Lucifer.

  “Why don’t you come to bed?” Molly said.

  “I found a guy who might be Alexis Dupree. He was an SS officer by the name of Karl Engels. Look at this photo. That’s Himmler on the left. The guy on the far right looks like Dupree. At least the profile does.”

  She rested her hand on my shoulder as she gazed at the screen. Then she sat down next to me and looked more closely. “He even has the dimple in his chin, doesn’t he?”

  This was the first time Molly had agreed with me about the darker possibilities of Alexis Dupree’s background. “The root of the name Engels means ‘angel.’ The guy who tried to kill me in Lafayette, Chad Patin, said this island where there’s an iron maiden is run by someone named Angel or Angelle.”

  “So Alexis Dupree is the guy running things?”

  “You don’t think that’s possible?”

  “Too big a stretch,” she replied.

  I couldn’t argue with her. Dupree was close to ninety and did not have the emotional stability it would take to run a well-organized criminal enterprise. And even if he were Karl Engels, there was no way to confirm that Karl Engels was the man known as the light bearer at Auschwitz.

  “Look at it this way,” Molly said. “You were right about Alexis Dupree, and I was wrong. He’s probably a war criminal. He’s also at the end of his days. The fate that’s waiting for him is one we can only imagine. I think he’ll find that hell is just like Auschwitz, except this time he’ll be wearing a striped uniform.”

  I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. That night I opened the bedroom window and turned on the attic fan and let the breeze blow across the bed. As I fell asleep, I could hear the wind in the trees and the squirrels running on the roof and a dredge boat deepening the main channel in the bayou. I slept all the way to morning without dreaming.

  IT WAS LATE the next afternoon when Clete showed up at the house, just after a sun shower and the return of Gretchen Horowitz from New Orleans. He was chewing breath mints and had shaved and combed his hair and put on shades and a crisp Hawaiian shirt to hide his dissipation and the increasing pain his hangovers caused him. But when he came into the house and removed his shades, the skin around his eyes was a whitish-green, the lids constantly blinking, as though someone had shone a flashlight directly into the pupils. “Where are Molly and Alafair?” he asked.

  “At Winn-Dixie,” I said.

  “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “It can’t be that bad, can it?”

  “You got anything to drink? I feel like I’m passing a gallstone.”

  I pour
ed him a glass of milk in the kitchen and put a raw egg and some vanilla extract in it. He sat at the breakfast table and drank it. The windows were open to let in the coolness of the evening, and fireflies were starting to spark in the trees. None of that did anything to relieve the turmoil that was obviously roiling inside Clete Purcel.

  He told me everything about Gretchen Horowitz’s confession to him—the hit on Bix Golightly, her career as an assassin, the kidnapping of her mother, and the contract Gretchen was supposed to carry out on me and my family.

  At first I felt only anger. I felt it toward Gretchen and toward Clete and toward myself. Then I felt incurably stupid and used. I also felt a nameless and abiding fear, the kind that is hard to describe because it’s irrational and goes deep into the psyche. It’s the sort of fear you experience when someone unexpectedly turns off a light in a room, plunging it into darkness, or when the airplane you are riding on hits an air pocket and drops so fast that you cannot hear the sound of the engines. It’s the kind of fear you experience when an atavistic voice inside you whispers that evil is not only real but it has become omnipresent in your life, and nothing on God’s green earth can save you from it.

  After he finished telling me things he probably never guessed he would say to his best friend, he got up from the breakfast table without looking at me and went to the cabinet and poured more milk in his glass and added more vanilla extract, shaking the last few drops out of the tiny bottle. “Have you got anything stronger?” he asked.

  “No, and I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.”

  “If you slugged me, I’d consider it a gift,” he said.

  “You think Gretchen’s mother is being held in Miami?” I asked.

  “I doubt it.” He tried to meet my stare, but his gaze broke. “You want to go to the FBI?”

  I looked at him for a long time, and I didn’t do it to make him feel uncomfortable. I knew there had to be an answer to the problem, but I didn’t know what it was. The moment we brought in the FBI, they would pick up Gretchen Horowitz, and the contract for our death would go to someone else. In the meantime, there was a strong chance that Clete Purcel would go down for aiding and abetting. When all that was done, we would still be on our own. Sound like exaggeration? Ask any victim of a violent crime or any witness for the prosecution in a trial involving the Mob what his experience with the system was like. Ask him how safe he ever felt again or how often he slept soundly through the night. Ask him what it was like to be afraid twenty-four hours a day.

  “I need to tell Molly and Alafair and see what they think,” I said.

  I saw him trying to control his emotions. His throat was prickled with color, the whites of his eyes full of tiny pink vessels, the skin around his mouth as sickly-looking as a fish’s belly. My guess was he couldn’t begin to sort through the shame and embarrassment and guilt he was experiencing. Nor could he help wondering if he would ever stop paying dues for the mistakes he had made years ago.

  “Whatever y’all want to do is jake with me,” he said.

  “Gretchen has no idea where the contract came from?”

  “You know how it works. They use people who are morally insane to carry out the job, then half the time they dispose of them.” He paused as though he couldn’t deal with the content of his own statement. “Gretchen didn’t choose the world she was born into. She was tortured with cigarettes when she was an infant, all because her father wasn’t there to protect her. On her sixth birthday, she had to perform oral sex on Bix Golightly. Does anyone in his right mind believe a kid like that will grow into a normal adult? I think it’s amazing she’s the decent person she is.”

  His eyes were shiny, his voice so wired that some of his words were almost inaudible.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “To get some ice cream.”

  “Dave, I’m truly sorry for this. Gretchen is, too.”

  “Don’t tell me about Gretchen’s problems, Clete. I’m not up to it.”

  “I’m just telling you, that’s all. She’s human, too. Give her a break.”

  “That might be hard to do,” I said.

  He looked at me, surprised and hurt.

  I could see the light failing in the trees and hear the frogs croaking on the bayou, and I wanted to walk into the yard and wrap myself and Molly and Alafair and Clete inside the gloaming of the day and forget everything taking place around us. Instead, I said, “We’ll get through it. We always do.”

  “I forgot to tell you something. While I was getting dressed to come over, I had the television on. There was a clip about a British oil guy who’s giving a talk in Lafayette. There was a shot of him with Lamont Woolsey, that albino who hangs out with the televangelist.”

  “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 th
ink 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.