What she was telling me didn’t coincide with her history. Varina had been an electrical engineering major at LSU and had been involved with high-tech electronic security work since she graduated. “So your lawyer thinks Pierre’s business enterprises might be toxic?” I said.
“At least some of them. He grew up in St. Mary Parish. Back in the 1970s, his mother’s family evicted people from their company homes for even talking to a union representative. The funny thing about them, and this includes Pierre, is they’ve never felt they did anything wrong. They feel no guilt about anything, including infidelity.” She let her eyes shift onto mine.
“You’re talking about Pierre?”
“So you don’t get the wrong idea, I did it back to him. I owned up to it at my church. It was embarrassing, but I’m glad I got it off my chest.”
“Is the grandfather a player in any of this?”
“I don’t know what he is. I always stayed away from him.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Everything. His eyes. The way his teeth show behind his lips when he looks at you. Once he came up behind me and touched the back of my neck. He said, ‘You must be still. There’s a bee in your hair.’ Then he pushed his body against me. It was disgusting. I told Pierre about it, but he said I was imagining things.”
I really didn’t want to hear any more about the grandfather or Varina’s problems with him. “Do the names Tee Jolie and Blue Melton mean anything to you?”
“No, who are they?”
“Girls from St. Martinville. One is missing, and one was found in a block of ice.”
“I read about that.” She shook her head, refocusing her concentration. “What does this have to do with me or Pierre or his grandfather?”
“I think Pierre used Tee Jolie as a model in one of his paintings.”
“I don’t think he uses models. I don’t think he paints anybody. He’s a fraud.”
“Pardon?”
“His talent is like flypaper. Little pieces of other people’s work stick in his head, and he puts them on a canvas and calls the painting his. Every time there’s a real artist in the area, you can see Pierre’s tail disappearing inside his hidey-hole. He’s a sex addict, not an artist. Why would he stay down here if he’s an artist? Wouldn’t he be in New York or Paris or Los Angeles? There’s an art gallery in Krotz Springs, Louisiana?”
“Say that again?”
“Pierre is a freak. I won’t go into detail except to say our bed should have been cruciform in shape. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. None of it seems to register.”
I stared at her blankly, a bit in awe of her ability to control and manipulate a conversation. The first Lafayette PD cruiser to arrive at the crime scene turned in to the parking lot, followed by a sheriff’s cruiser and a second city department vehicle that parked by the curb, on the other side of the hedge. While I still had my thoughts together—which was not easy after a conversation with Varina Leboeuf—I tried to remember everything she had told me. She was intelligent and lovely to look at. Her fine cheekbones and the softness of her mouth and the earnestness in her expression were of a kind that made both the celibate and the happily married question the wisdom of their vows. I also realized that she had managed to deflect the conversation away from specifics about her husband’s criminality to how wretched it was to be married to him. I didn’t know if her depiction of her husband’s sexual habits was true, but I had to hand it to her: Varina could weave a spiderweb and sprinkle it with gold dust and lure you inside and wrap it around both your eyes and your heart, all the while making you enjoy your own entrapment.
“When you get finished with the local cops, hang around and we’ll have some ice cream,” she said.
“Will I learn anything else?”
“There are always possibilities.”
“Would you repeat that?”
Her gaze lingered longer on my face than it should have. “You look picaresque with that cut over your eye.” She touched the side of my face and studied my eyes.
I felt my cheeks coloring. “You always knew how to leave your mark,” I said.
IT WAS RAINING when I walked to work the next morning. Helen Soileau caught me before I could take off my coat. “In my office,” she said.
I was ready for a harangue, but as was often the case in my dealings with Helen, I had misjudged her. “You walked to work in the rain?” she said.
“My pickup is at the glazier’s in Lafayette.”
“The Lafayette PD found the freezer truck burning in a coulee. It was boosted from behind a motel early yesterday,” she said. “You never saw the shooter before?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Give me your coat.”
“What’s going on?”
She took my raincoat from my hand and shook it and hung it on a rack by the door. “Sit down,” she said. “Why did you go to Lafayette without informing me or checking in with Lafayette PD?”
“I was off the clock, and I didn’t think it was a big deal.”
“What are we going to do with you, Pops?”
“How about a pay raise?”
“I don’t know why I put up with you. I really don’t. I have a fantasy: You’re the sheriff and I’m you, and I get to do to you what you do to me.”
“I can’t blame you.”
She was sitting behind her desk now, biting on the corner of her lip. I had always been convinced that several distinct and separate people had taken up residence inside her. I was never sure to which of them I would be speaking. She was a genuinely mysterious woman, probably the most complex I had ever known. Sometimes she would pause in midsentence and stare directly into my eyes in a way that made her features sharpen, her cheeks pool with shadow, as though she were having thoughts that the Helen Soileau who came to work that morning would not allow herself to have. All of us believe we have boundaries we won’t cross. I believed Helen had boundaries, too. But I wasn’t sure that either of us knew what they were. I cleared my throat and focused my attention on the raindrops running down the windows.
“You’re supposed to be on the desk and off duty at noon,” she said. “You’re supposed to go home and take naps and throw pinecones in the bayou. Obviously, that’s not what you have in mind. You prefer stirring up the wrong people in New Orleans and going to Lafayette and eating a load of buckshot.”
“I didn’t plan any of this. What do you want me to say?”
“I advise you to say nothing.”
I sighed and raised my hands and dropped them in my lap.
“I think it’s time to put you back on full-time status, bwana,” she said. She narrowed one eye. “It’s the only way I can keep your umbilical cord stapled to the corner of my desk.”
How do you reply to a statement like that? “Thank you,” I said.
“Lafayette PD thinks the shooter was some guy with a personal hard-on,” she said. “They’re looking at a parolee who just got off Camp J, a guy you put away years go. He was staying at the motel where the freezer truck got boosted. You remember a guy by the name of Ronnie Earl Patin?”
“Child molestation, strong-arm robbery, he hurt an elderly man with a hammer about ten years back?” I said.
“That’s the baby.”
“Ronnie Earl was a fat slob. I’m almost certain I’ve never seen either one of the guys in the freezer truck.”
“People can change a lot in ten years, particularly if they’re hoeing out a bean field.”
“The shooter had features like the edge of an ax. The driver was short. Ronnie Earl wasn’t.”
“Could Pierre Dupree be behind this?”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t seem his style. I wouldn’t rule out Jesse Leboeuf.”
“You don’t think that’s a stretch?” she said.
“When I was a pin boy at the bowling alley out on East Main, Jesse was one of the older boys who bullied the rest of us in the pits. He’d made a slingshot with a hand-carved wood frame and elastic medical tubing an
d a leather pouch to fit a marble in. On Saturday nights he and his buds would go nigger-knocking down on Hopkins.”
“That was bad stuff, but it was a long time ago,” she said.
“I knew a number of kids like him. Some of them are still around. Know what’s interesting about them? They’re as mean as they were when they were kids. They just know how to hide it better.”
“How long did it take you to get from Jesse Leboeuf’s place to Varina’s apartment?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“Bring Leboeuf in,” she said.
CLETE PURCEL HAD poured three jiggers of sherry into a glass of milk and gone to sleep before eleven P.M. In his dream, he was standing on a dock under a velvet-black sky on the southernmost tip of Key West, music from a marimba band drifting on the wind behind him, the smoky-green glow of nameless organisms lighting under waves that slid through the pilings without capping. The dream was one he’d had many times and was a safe place to be, but even in his sleep, he knew he had to keep it inviolate and not let it be invaded and destroyed by a milkman who departed for work at four A.M. and often returned home by ten A.M., drunk and unpredictable, sometimes pulling his belt out of his pant loops as soon as he entered the house.
In the dream, the wind was balmy and smelled of salt spray and seaweed and shellfish that had been stranded on the beach by the receding waves. It also smelled of a Eurasian girl who spoke French and English and lived on a sampan in a cove on the edge of the South China Sea, her skin like alabaster traced with the shadows of palm fronds, her nipples as red and inviting as small roses. He could see her walking nude into the water, her hair floating off her shoulders, her teeth white when she smiled at him and extended her hand.
But Clete’s dead father had long ago devised ways of breaking into his inner sanctum, throwing back the bedroom door, his scowl as scalding as an openhanded slap. Sometimes the father poured a sack full of dry rice on the floor and made Clete kneel on the kernels until sunrise; sometimes he sat on the side of the bed and gently touched Clete’s face with a hand that was as callused as a carpenter’s; sometimes he lay down beside Clete and wept as a child would.
Clete could feel himself losing the dream, the marimba music and the salt wind disappearing out an open window, the palm fronds collapsing against their trunks, the Eurasian girl turning her attentions elsewhere. He realized he was hearing the sounds of the street, which he never heard above the hum of his air conditioner. He sat up in bed and reached for the nine-millimeter Beretta he kept between his mattress and box spring. It was gone.
A figure was sitting in a chair by his television set. “Who are you?” he asked.
The figure made no reply.
“You’re about to get the shit kicked out of you,” Clete said. He pulled open the drawer of his nightstand, where he kept a blackjack. The drawer was empty. He put his feet on the floor and adjusted himself inside his skivvies. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you’ve creeped the wrong house.”
In the glow from a streetlamp on the corner, he could see the hands of the figure pick up his Beretta and release the magazine from the frame and pull back the slide and eject the round in the chamber. The figure leaned forward and one by one tossed the Beretta and the magazine and the ejected round on his bed. “I can see why you need some help,” a female voice said. “Your security service has been out of date since Alexander Graham Bell died.”
“Gretchen?”
“That offer you made me, that was on the level?” she said.
“Sure, if you don’t mind working cheap. I work on commission most of the time for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”
“You’re not trying to get in my bread?”
“I would have told you.”
“I get it. You tell girls up front when you’re planning to get it on with them? I bet you get a lot of action that way.”
“You need to stop talking like that.”
“Why were you asking about the scars on my arms?”
“Because you’ve got scars, that’s all. I’ve got lots of them. They mean a person has been around. No, they mean a person has probably paid some dues.”
“You want to know how I got them? It happened before I was supposed to be able to remember anything. But I still have dreams about a man who comes into my room with fingertips that glow with light. You know what the light is?”
“You don’t need to talk about this, Gretchen.”
“You figured it out?”
“Maybe.”
“What kind of man would do that to a baby?”
“A sadist and a coward. A guy who doesn’t deserve to live. Maybe a guy who already got what he deserved.”
“What was that last part?”
“They all go down. It’s just a matter of time. That’s all I was saying. It takes a while, but they go down.”
“I can’t figure you out.”
“You want to work for me or not?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I like you. I need the help, too.”
“I know where I saw you before.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, his heart seizing up.
“Remember Boog Powell? He played first base for Baltimore. He used to own a boatyard in the Keys. I used to take a charter out of there to Seven Mile Reef. Boog always said mermaids lived under the reef. He was a big kidder.”
“That was probably it.”
“You’re a piece of work,” she said.
“I’m not sure how to take that.”
“It’s a compliment,” she said. “Sometimes I have to travel. Are you cool with that?”
“No, if you work for me, you work for me.”
She shrugged. “And eBay is killing my antique business, anyway. You got anything to eat? I’m starving.”
BEFORE I LEFT the office to bring in Jesse Leboeuf, Helen told me to bring along a black female deputy named Catin Segura. “What for?” I asked.
“Because she’s about to be promoted to detective, and I want her around a good influence.”
“What’s the real reason?”
“What I said.” When I continued to look at her, she added, “If Jesse Leboeuf gives you trouble, I want a witness.”
Catin Segura was a single mother and had a two-year degree in criminal justice from a community college in New Orleans. Like Helen, she had started her career in law enforcement at the NOPD as a meter maid, then had gone to work for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department as a 911 dispatcher. She owned a modest home in Jeanerette and lived there with her two children and was a pleasant and decent and humble woman who was conscientious about her job and the care of her family. In the five years she had been a patrolwoman, no complaint of any kind had ever been filed against her. As we headed down to Cypremort Point in her cruiser, I knew that Helen had made a mistake in assigning Catin to accompany me. There is an old lesson a police officer learns soon or learns late: Evil does not rinse itself out of the human soul. Catin Segura had no business around the likes of Jesse Leboeuf.
The rain had stopped, and through the cruiser’s windshield, I could see a waterspout on the bay, its funnel as bright as spun glass, bending and warping in the sunlight. The cypress trees that stood in freshwater ponds on either side of us were turning gold with the season, and there was a smell in the wind like shrimp or trout schooling up in the coves.
“What’s the story on this guy?” Catin asked.
“He’s just an old man. Don’t pay too much attention to what he says or does.”
She took her eyes off the road. “He’s got some racial issues?”
“He’s one of those guys whose head is like a bad neighborhood. It’s better not to go into it.”
She didn’t speak the rest of the way to Jesse’s house. When we pulled into his yard, he was standing by a barbecue pit under a pecan tree, wrapping a sheet of aluminum foil around a large redfish. He had filled the aluminum foil with sauce piquante and sliced onions and lemons and had perforated it with a
fork so the fish could absorb the smoke from the coals. He glanced at us and then picked up a can of beer from a wood table and drank from it, his attention focused on the waterspout on the bay. His shoulders looked as wide as an ax handle. The wind was blowing steadily out of the south, rustling the leaves on the tree limbs above us.
“Sheriff Soileau wants you to help her out with something, Mr. Jesse,” I said. “If you have a few minutes to spare, we can drive you into town.”
“You’re talking about the hermaphrodite?” he said.
“Bad choice of words,” I replied.
“He’p with what?” he asked.
“Better take it up with her. She doesn’t always share everything with me,” I said.
“You’re a goddamn liar.”
“That’s not a good way to talk to a fellow officer,” I said.
“Who’s this?” he asked, looking at Catin.
“Deputy Sheriff Segura, sir,” she said.
Jesse’s eyes traveled up and down her person as though he were examining a side of beef. “I’m fixing to eat,” he said to me. “Tell the hermaphrodite I’ll come in when I’ve got a mind to.”
“No, sir, you need to come in now,” Catin said.
“Did I address you?” Jesse asked.
“Jesse, you know the drill. It’s not up for grabs,” I said.
“I asked this girl a question,” Jesse said.
“Sir, you can go in as a friend of the process or in cuffs,” Catin said.
“You need to do something about this, Robicheaux.”
“Here’s the way I see it, Mr. Jesse,” I said. “There are ponds on both sides of your road that are full of sunfish and goggle-eye perch. You’re surrounded by palm and oak trees and a saltwater bay with schools of both white and speckled trout. You can sail a boat from your yard to Key West, Florida. How many men get to live in a place like that? Sheriff Soileau probably needs about twenty minutes of your time. Is that too much to ask of you, sir?”
“After I’m done with my dinner and washing my dishes and cleaning out my fire pit, I’ll give it some thought,” he replied. “Then I’ll call Sheriff Soileau and take care of the matter. In the meantime, I want y’all out of here.”