“Every time I visit a place like this, I always wonder how things would have worked out if the South had won the war,” Clete said.
“How would things have worked out?” Gretchen asked.
“I think all of us, white and black, would be picking these people’s cotton,” he replied.
They stepped out of the Caddy onto the gravel, the trees swelling with wind, a few yellow oak leaves tumbling through the columns of sunlight. In back they heard a dog bark. Clete rang the chimes on the front door, but no one answered. He motioned to Gretchen, and the two of them walked through the side yard to the rear of the house, where a gazebo stood on a long stretch of green lawn that sloped down to the bayou. An elderly man was training a yellow Lab down the slope, a reelless fishing rod clenched in his hand. By the corner of the house, inside a cluster of philodendron, Clete noticed a stack of wire tender traps. “May I help you?” the elderly man said.
“I’m Clete Purcel, and this is my assistant, Miss Gretchen,” Clete said. “I’d like to talk to either Alexis or Pierre Dupree about a man who claimed to have taken a betting marker out of an office safe that used to belong to Didoni Giacano.”
“Did Mr. Robicheaux send you here?”
“I sent myself here,” Clete said. “Frankie Giacano and his friends tried to extort me with that same betting marker. Are you Alexis Dupree?”
“I am. It’s customary to phone people in advance when you plan to visit their home.”
“Sorry about that. Frankie Gee got himself capped, Mr. Dupree. But I don’t think he got capped over this business with the marker. I think it has to do with stolen or forged paintings that a guy named Bix Golightly was fencing. You know anything about that?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Would you like to sit down? Can I get you something to drink?” Alexis Dupree said. His gaze shifted from Clete to Gretchen.
“We’re fine,” Clete said.
Dupree picked up a pie plate from a redwood table and a small sack of dry dog food. He walked down the slope as though Clete and Gretchen were not there and set the pie plate on the grass and sprinkled several pieces of dog food in it. He carried the fishing rod in his left hand. The Labrador retriever was sitting in the sunlight on the opposite side of the lawn but never moved. “Come,” Alexis Dupree said.
The dog started across the grass. “Stop,” Dupree said. The dog immediately sat down. “Come,” Dupree said. The dog took another few steps, then stopped again upon command. “Come,” Dupree said.
When the dog advanced, its attention remained upon Dupree and not the pie plate. “Stop,” Dupree said. He looked up the slope at Clete and Gretchen, then at the white clouds drifting across the sky, then at a flock of robins descending on a tree. His lips were pursed, his regal profile framed against a backdrop of oaks and flowers and Spanish moss and a tidal stream and a gold-and-purple field of sugarcane. “Come,” he said again. This time he let the dog eat.
“Is he telling us something?” Gretchen whispered.
“Yeah, don’t let a guy like that ever get control of your life,” Clete said.
From out front, Clete heard the sound of a car coming up the gravel drive, then a car door slamming.
“Mr. Dupree, somebody tried to kill my friend Dave Robicheaux,” Clete said. “It was right after he left the home of Jesse Leboeuf. Your family and Jesse Leboeuf are mixed up with a group called Redstone Security, Inc. These guys have the reputation of stink on shit. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Your passion and your language are impressive, but no, I know nothing about any of this,” Dupree said. He approached Gretchen with a fond expression, the fishing rod still in his hand, his gaze drifting to her throat. “Are you Jewish?”
“What’s it to you?” she said.
“It’s a compliment. You come from a cerebral race. I also suspect you’re part German.”
“What she is, is one hundred percent American,” Clete said.
“Clete says you were in a death camp,” Gretchen said.
“I was at Ravensbrück.”
“I never heard a Jew call his religion a race,” she said.
“You seem like a very perceptive young woman. What is your name?”
“Gretchen Horowitz.”
“I hope you’ll come by again. And you don’t need to call in advance.”
“Mr. Dupree, we didn’t come out here to talk about religious matters,” Clete said. “People you and your grandson are associated with may be involved in several homicides, including a girl who floated up in a block of ice a little south of here. Are you reading me on this, sir?”
Before Dupree could answer, Clete heard footsteps behind him. He turned around and looked at perhaps one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She did not seem to notice either his or Gretchen’s presence; instead, she was staring at Alexis Dupree with a level of anger Clete would never want directed at him. “Where’s Pierre?” she said.
“In Lafayette at his art exhibit. He’ll be so sorry he missed you,” Dupree said.
“Who are you?” the woman said to Clete.
“A private investigator,” he replied.
“You came to the right place.” She started to speak to Dupree, then she turned again to Clete. “You’re Dave Robicheaux’s buddy, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Varina Leboeuf. You tell Dave if he ever humiliates my father again like he did yesterday, I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”
“If Dave Robicheaux busted your old man, he had it coming,” Clete said.
“What are y’all doing here?” she said.
“You need to butt out, ma’am,” Gretchen said.
“What did you say?”
“We’re having a conversation with Mr. Dupree. You’re not part of it,” Gretchen said.
“I’ll tell you what, young lady. Why don’t you and this gentleman ask Mr. Dupree about these wire traps stacked in the flower bed? Alexis places them all over the property every two or three weeks. The madwoman who used to own this wretched dump fed every stray cat in the parish. Alexis hates cats. So he baits and traps them and has a black man drop them at night in other people’s neighborhoods. Most of them will starve to death or die of disease.”
“Did you mention we don’t have a local animal refuge?” Dupree said.
“I just left the office of Pierre’s lawyer. If your grandson tries to fuck me on the settlement, I’m going to destroy all of you,” Varina said.
“You’ve certainly arrived here in a charming mood,” Dupree said.
“What are you doing with my dog? Pierre said he’d run away.”
“He did. But he came back home. He’s a brand-new dog now,” Dupree said.
“Come here, Vick,” Varina called.
The dog rested its jowls on its paws and did not move.
“Vick, come with Mommy. Come on, fella,” she called.
The dog seemed to shrink itself into the grass. Alexis Dupree was smiling at her, the fishing rod trembling slightly with the palsy that affected his hand. His gaze moved back to Gretchen and the lights in her hair and the thin gold chain. “Please accept my apologies for the behavior of my grandson’s wife,” he said. “Did your family emigrate from Prussia? Few people know that Yiddish is a German dialect. I suspect you’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
Gretchen looked at Clete. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said.
“Did I say something wrong?” Dupree asked, his eyes dropping to Gretchen’s hips and thighs as she walked away.
“DON’T LET THAT old guy get to you,” Clete said to her in the Caddy.
“I felt like he wanted to peel off my skin.”
“Yeah, he’s a little strange.”
“He’s a little strange? How about the broad?”
“She seemed pretty normal to me.”
“She has a broom up her ass.”
“So?”
“You couldn’t keep your eyes off her. That’s the kind of woman you
’re attracted to?”
“You work for me, Gretchen. You’re not my spiritual adviser.”
“Then act your fucking age.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to this,” Clete said.
She stared at the rusted trailers in the slum by the drawbridge and the children in the dirt yards and the wash flapping on the clotheslines. The Caddy rumbled across the steel grid on the drawbridge. “I don’t know why I said that. I feel confused when I’m with you. I don’t understand my feelings. You really aren’t trying to put moves on me, are you?”
“I already told you.”
“You don’t think I’m attractive?”
“I know my limitations. I’m old and overweight and have hypertension and a few drinking and weed issues. If I was thirty years younger, you’d have to hide.” He accelerated the Caddy toward New Iberia, lowering his window, filling the inside of the car with the sound of wind. “We’re going to get you a badge,” he said.
“A badge for what?”
“A private investigator’s badge. At a pawnshop and police-supply store in Lafayette,” he said. “Anybody can buy a PI badge. They’re bigger and shinier and better-looking than an authentic cop’s badge. The trick to being a PI is gaining the client’s confidence. Our big enemy is not the skells but the Internet. With Google, you can look down people’s chimneys without ever leaving your house. Most reference librarians are better at finding people and information than I am.”
“Yeah, but you don’t just ‘find’ people.”
“Here’s the reality of the situation. I’ve got certain powers not because I’m a PI but because I run down bail skips for two bondsmen. I’m not a bondsman, but legally, I’m the agent and representative of people who are, so the powers given them by the state extend to me, which allows me to pursue fugitives across state lines and kick down doors without a warrant. I have legal powers an FBI agent doesn’t have. For example, if a husband and wife are both out on bond and the husband skips, Wee Willie and Nig can have the wife’s bond revoked in order to turn dials on the husband. I don’t do stuff like that, but Wee Willie and Nig do. You starting to get the picture?”
“You don’t like what you do?”
“I want to wear a full-body condom when I go to work. Pimps and pedophiles and dope dealers use my restroom and put their feet on my office furniture. They think I’m their friend. I try not to shake hands with them. Sometimes I have to. Sometimes I want to scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush.”
“It’s a job. Why beat up on yourself?”
“No, it’s what you do after you’ve flushed your legitimate career. The only time you actually help out your clients is in a civil suit. The justice system doesn’t work most of the time, but civil court does. This guy Morris Dees broke the Klan and a bunch of Aryan Nation groups by bankrupting them in civil court. I don’t catch many civil cases. If you work for me, you deal with the skells. That means we’ve got two rules: We’re honest with each other, and we never hurt anybody unless they deal the play. Can you live with that?”
“This is the big test I’m supposed to pass?”
He pulled to the side of the road under a shade tree, next to a pasture where black Angus were grazing in the sunlight.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I like you a lot, and I think the world has done a number on you that no kid deserves. I want to be your friend, but I don’t have much to offer. I’m a drunk, and almost everything I touch turns to shit. I don’t care what you did before we met. I just want you to be straight with me now. You want to tell me some things down the track, that’s copacetic. If you don’t want to tell me anything down the track, that’s copacetic, too. You hearing me on all this? I back your play, you back mine. The past is past; now is now.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eye.
“I don’t get you,” she said.
“What’s to get? I love movies and New Orleans and horse tracks and Caddy convertibles with fins and eating large amounts of food. My viscera alone probably weighs two hundred pounds. When I go into a restaurant, I get seated at a trough.”
“You really like movies?”
“I go to twelve-step meetings for movie addiction.”
“You have cable?”
“Sure. I’ve got insomnia. I watch movies in the middle of the night.”
“James Dean’s movies are showing all this week. I think he was the greatest actor who ever lived.”
He restarted the Caddy and turned back onto the road, his brow furrowed, remembering the red windbreaker worn by the person he watched murder Bix Golightly. “What do you know about guns?”
“Enough so I don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”
“We’ll stop at Henderson Swamp. I want to show you a few things about firearms.”
“I found your Beretta and disarmed it on your premises. I don’t need a gun lesson, at least not now. I’m a little tired, okay? The numbers tattooed on that old man’s forearm, they’re from the death camp?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“He made me feel dirty all over. Like when I was a little girl. I don’t know why,” she replied. “I’m not feeling too good. Can we go back to the motor court? I need to take a nap and start the day over.”
THE ONLY LEAD I had on the men who had tried to kill me outside Bengal Gardens was the name of Ronnie Earl Patin, a strong-arm robber I had helped put away a decade ago. Though there are instances when a felon goes down for some serious time and nurses a grudge over the years and eventually gets out and does some payback, it’s very rare that he goes after a cop or judge or prosecutor. Payback is usually done on a fall partner or a family member who snitched him off. Ronnie Earl was a sweaty glutton and a porn addict and a violent alcoholic who knocked around old people for their Social Security checks, but he had been jailing all of his adult life, and most of his crimes grew out of his addictions and were not part of vendettas. That said, would he do a contract job on a cop if the money was right? It was possible.
The driver of the freezer truck was too short to have been Ronnie Earl, and the shooter who had almost taken my head off with the cut-down had an ascetic face similar in design to a collection of saw blades. Could ten years in Angola, most of it on Camp J, have melted down the gelatinous pile that I helped send up there?
I called an old-time gunbull at Angola who had shepherded Ronnie Earl through the system for years. “Yeah, he was one of our Jenny Craig success stories,” the gunbull said. “He stayed out of segregation his last two years and worked in the bean field.”
“He went out max time?”
“He earned two months good time before his discharge. This was on a ten-bit. He could have been out in thirty-seven months.”
“What kept him in segregation?”
“Making pruno and raping fish and being a general shithead. What are you looking at him for?”
“Somebody tried to pop me with a shotgun.”
“It doesn’t sound like Ronnie Earl.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got two interests in life: sex and getting high. The guy’s a walking gland. The only reason he got thin was to get laid when he got out. Cain’t y’all send us a higher grade of criminals?”
“You think he’s capable of a contract hit?”
“You ever know a drunkard who wasn’t capable of anything?” Then he evidently thought about what he had just said. “Sorry. You still off the juice?”
“I go to a lot of meetings. Thanks for your time, Cap,” I said.
I began making phone calls to several bars in North Lafayette. A person might wonder how a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish would be presumptuous enough to believe he could find a suspect in Lafayette, twenty miles away, when the local authorities could not. The answer is simple: Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing dru
nk. CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs, lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.
One bartender told me Ronnie Earl had been in his place two months back, right after his release from Angola. The bartender said Ronnie Earl looked nothing like the fat man the court had sent up the road.
“But he’s the same guy, right?” I said.
“No,” the bartender said. “Not at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s worse. You know how it works,” the bartender said. “A sick guy like that gets even sicker when he doesn’t drink. When he gets back on the train, he’s carrying a furnace with him instead of a stomach.”
The bartender had not seen Ronnie Earl since and did not know where he had gone.
The last bartender I called had picked me up out of an alley behind a B-girl joint in Lafayette’s old Underpass area, a one-block collection of buildings that was so stark and unrelieved, whose inhabitants were so lost and disconnected from the normal world, that if you found yourself drinking there, you could rest assured you had finally achieved the goal you long ago set for yourself: the total destruction of the innocent child who once lived inside you. The bartender’s name was Harvey. For me, Harvey had always been a modern-day Charon who turned me away from the Styx. “Every afternoon there’s a guy who comes in here who goes by Ron,” he said. “He drinks like he’s making up for lost time. One mug of beer, four shots lined up. Same order every time. He likes to flash his money around and invite the working girls over to his table. The whole rainbow, know what I mean?”