I knew Clete wasn’t thinking of our new friends Rick and Sybil. He was thinking of Gretchen and his failure as a father. “I bet you five years from now, those kids will be fine,” I said.
“Yeah, they’ll probably be running Goldman Sachs. Give it a break, Streak. And screw knocking on the door.”
It was made of heavy oak and had three rusted strips of iron bolted across it. Clete used the butt of his rifle to break a pane out of a frosted viewing panel next to the jamb. He reached inside, careful not to cut himself, and twisted the deadbolt free. I pushed the door back on its hinges and walked in ahead of him. The vast tomblike emptiness of the house was stunning. The high ceilings and huge rafters and peaked skylights operated by pulleys and chains had the look of an abandoned cathedral. Our footsteps echoed throughout the entirety of the building.
“What the hell is this place?” Clete said.
“Whatever it is, it was gutted,” I said.
“Listen,” he said.
I could hear wind blowing through a broken door or window, and perhaps the flapping of birds taking flight, but nothing else.
Clete walked ahead of me, his AR-15 slung over his shoulder. Then he froze and made a fist with his right hand, the infantryman’s signal to stop in your tracks. This time I heard it, tinkling sounds mixed with a frenetic flapping of something alive and trapped in an enclosure.
We walked out of the main room and down a corridor into a kitchen. The cabinets and shelves and drawers and refrigerator were empty. I clicked on a light switch, but there was no power. Through the back window, I saw the crumbled brick shell of what probably was a lighthouse. Then I felt a puff of air through a side hallway and heard the tinkling and flapping sounds again. Clete unslung his rifle and moved down the hallway ahead of me, his hat and raincoat dripping, his silhouette massive against the light. He stepped down onto a bare concrete pad inside a room that had a barred window inset in one wall, the glass broken by a pelican that had flown directly into it and lay dead between the glass and the bars. Three concrete steps led down into a room that had been constructed beneath the level of the main floor. There was no mistaking where the sounds had come from.
Clete went down the steps first. At the far end of the lower room was another barred window, this one at ground level and as narrow as a gun slit. Like the room above it, the floor was concrete, but it was covered with gray sand that had seeped through the cracks in the walls.
Clete stared in disbelief. “It’s Didi Gee’s fish tank. Don’t tell me it isn’t. I saw it too many times. Jesus Christ, I told you this place gave me the willies.”
A huge aquarium rested on a stone block. Almost all the water had evaporated from it, and five piranhas were flapping violently in the soup at the bottom, scissoring and skittering across it, smacking their noses into the glass.
An iron bar ran across the top of the ceiling, and at least a dozen oiled and shiny steel chains hung from it, either a hook or a manacle attached to each. Clete touched one of the hooks, then wiped his hand on his handkerchief, swallowing drily. I walked closer to the chains and took my ballpoint from my shirt pocket and speared one of the links and lifted the chain against the light. The end of the hook was encrusted with matter that resembled dried jelly. Higher up on the chain, a strand of auburn hair glowed against the light.
I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it at the bottom of the far wall. “Take a look,” I said.
A rusted outline slightly larger than the size of a coffin was stenciled into the concrete floor. There was a long orange horizontal strip of rust on the wall, as though a heavy iron object had rested against it. The floor was speckled with what looked like dried blood. “I think this is where the iron maiden was,” I said. “I think the lid was pushed back against the wall. The victims were lowered into it, and the lid was shut on top of them. You see those three pools? That’s where the drain holes were.”
“Alexis Dupree?”
“Who else could create something like this?” I said.
“This operation isn’t being run by a bunch of geeks. Didi Gee stuck people’s hands in his fish tank, but the object was money, not payback. The people behind this stuff don’t have a category. You know what our problem is, Dave? We keep playing by the rules. These guys need to be naped off the planet.”
“So we drop a hydrogen bomb on Jeanerette, Louisiana?” I said.
“What do you want to do with the piranhas?”
“We have to put them under,” I said.
“Maybe those kids can dump them in an ice chest full of fresh water and take them somewhere.”
“They’ll get cut to pieces.”
“I got to ask you something,” Clete said.
“Go ahead.”
“Who’s more messed up, my daughter or kids like those two out there?”
“I don’t know, Clete. What does it matter? Young people make mistakes. Some come out of it, some don’t. Stop beating up on yourself.”
“I want your promise on something. You don’t jam Gretchen. She deserves a better life than the one I left her with. You cut her some slack or we go our separate ways. I want your word.”
He had never spoken like that to me in all the years I had known him.
“I was never big on loyalty oaths,” I said.
“I want your word, Dave.”
“I can’t give it to you.”
I saw a great sadness come into his eyes. “All right, let’s get those two down here and see what they have to say. Blow the shit out of those fish first. Yeah, lock and load, Dave, paint the fucking wall.”
When we went back outside, the sky was a bright metallic gray, the wind blowing a dirty chop on the cove where we had set down, the plane rocking in the swells that swirled across the pilings of a submerged jetty. I could see Julie Ardoin in the cabin. I waved at her to indicate we would be along in a few minutes. Sybil and Rick were squatting on the sand, rolling up their tent. Rick had a joint between his lips.
“I fixed y’all sandwiches from our wieners,” Sybil said. “They’re a little bit sandy, though.”
“That’s nice of you, but I want y’all to come into the house and check out a room we found,” I said.
“Is someone home there?” she replied. “I don’t know if we should go in there if nobody’s home.”
“Have you been in that house before, Miss Sybil?” I asked.
“No, sir,” she replied.
I continued to look directly into her face.
“Maybe once,” she said.
“Who’d you see in there?” I asked.
“Just that old man. He was nice. He said I looked like a model, somebody named Twiggy.”
“Did y’all meet somebody named Angel or Angelle?” I said.
“That last one, I heard that name.”
“You heard the name Angelle?” I said.
“Yeah, I think I did, but with all kinds of shit happening, I mean, you can’t always be sure.”
“I’m not reading you, Miss Sybil. What kind of shit?”
“We were inside the house once, talking to the old dude,” Rick said, his pupils dilated into big drops of black ink. “Then somebody started screaming. The old guy said it was a crazy person he was taking care of. We hauled ass. I mean, fuck, man, who wants to have lunch with crazy people screaming and probably throwing food and shit at the table? We didn’t come all the way out here for that.”
“So why’d y’all come back?” I said.
“He gave us some crystal,” Sybil said.
“That’s why you had a swastika tattooed on your arm?” I said. “You wanted to score meth from the old man?”
“No, I told you. It was for my boyfriend’s birthday, except that’s not what he wanted. What does my tattoo have to do with the old guy?” She squeezed her eyes shut in consternation and exhaled loudly, letting her mouth remain open, as though silently laughing.
“You made these sandwiches for us?” I said.
“I got to make a confessi
on. I think a crab was eating on one of the wieners,” she said. She scratched at a scab on her tattoo. “I’m sorry for probably telling you some lies today. I say things I kind of make up and they seem real, but later, they don’t.”
What can you say to kids like these? You might as well fill reams of paper with all the wisdom of the ancient and the modern world and pack them down a ship’s cannon with a plunger and stand back and ignite the fuse and blow six thousand years of knowledge into confetti and watch it float away on the next wave.
“There’s a torture chamber in that house. You could have been hung up in it. Don’t come back here,” I said.
“Wow, that’s seriously fucked up, man,” Rick said.
Clete and I walked past the dead birds in the compound, not speaking, our weapons across our shoulders, our raincoats flapping in the wind, the sun cold and gaseous in the pewter-colored sky.
Clete stopped. “We didn’t take the sandwiches she fixed,” he said.
“Forget it.”
“It’ll hurt her feelings. What’s the harm? I’ll see you at the plane.”
I waded out into the water and climbed into the cabin of the Cessna. I could think of only a few instances in my life when I had felt as depressed as I did then.
“What’s in that house?” Julie said.
“Pure evil.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing anyone will believe.”
“What’s your podjo doing?”
“He was worried we hurt a young woman’s feelings.”
“That’s why he went back?”
“Clete is a cross between Saint Francis of Assisi and Captain Bly. But you never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box.”
I saw her watching him through the windshield as though seeing him for the first time, her thoughts hidden.
“I’m going to tell you something that maybe I have no right to say, but I’ll say it anyway,” I said. “When people kill themselves, particularly when they bail off buildings or leave blood splatter on the ceiling, it’s usually because of a chemical assault on the brain. They can free themselves of their rage only by creating a legacy of guilt and shame and depression that is equal to their own suffering and that other people will buy into. In their fantasy, they survive their death and witness the discovery of their remains by the people they want to injure. Don’t let that be your fate, Julie. The world belongs to the living. Let the dead stay under their headstones.”
“Boy, you know how to say it, don’t you?”
“I think you’re a nice lady, too good to carry the weight of a guy who decided to mess you up as bad as he could,” I said.
“You’re the only person who ever had the guts to talk to me like that.” She looked in Clete’s direction again. “Something happen between you and your friend?”
“I let him down. Or at least he thinks I did.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s my friend. You don’t let your pals down. Right or wrong, you brass it out. Right?”
“You’re a funny guy, Dave. Here he comes now. He’s smiling. I bet he’s forgotten all about it.”
Clete climbed into the cabin and sat down heavily in the backseat, a smear of mustard on his cheek. His face was flat, his eyes empty when he looked at me. “Let’s blow this dump,” he said.
I CALLED IN sick Monday and spent the early-morning hours raking leaves in the backyard. I piled them in stacks by the water’s edge and soaked them with kerosene and set them ablaze and watched the curds of smoke rise through the trees and break apart in the wind. I felt like a man coming off a bender, wanting to invest the rest of his life in garden chores and fixing his roof and oiling his fishing tackle and sanding the barnacles off a boat he left half filled with rainwater for the last year. I wanted to take every misadventure and wrong choice in my life and set it on fire with the leaves and watch it burn into a pile of harmless ash.
I wanted to be rid forever of martial thoughts and the faces of the men I had killed and the images of dead children and animals in third-world villages. I wanted to slip through the dimension into a place where moth and rust did not have their way, where thieves did not break in and steal. I felt sickened by my own life and the evil that seemed to pervade the earth. I wanted to find a gray-green tree-dotted tropical stretch of land on the watery rim of creation that had not been stained by war and the poisons of the Industrial Age. I was convinced that Eden was not a metaphor or a legend and that somehow it still lay within our grasp if only we could find the path that led back into it. If it had existed once, it could exist again, I told myself. I wondered if the dead who seemed to wander the earth were not seeking it, too, over and over, feeling their way through the darkness, searching for the place that lay somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
I guess these were strange thoughts to have on the cusp of winter, inside the smoke of a leaf fire that contained both the fecund smell of the earth and a petrochemical accelerant, but could there be a more appropriate season and moment?
I did not hear the footsteps of the person standing behind me while I heaped layer upon layer of blackened leaves onto the flames, my face hot, my eyes stinging with humidity.
“I hear you’re looking for me,” Gretchen said.
I stepped back from the fire and turned around and propped the bottom of the rake on the ground. “That’s one way to put it.”
“I’m not staying with Clete. I’ve got my own place. What do you want?”
“Did you have to pop somebody when you rescued your mother?”
“I scared a couple of guys, but no, I didn’t hurt them. You can check out my mother. She’s holed up in Key Largo, coked to the eyes. Something else you want to know?”
“Yeah, after you put two rounds into Jesse Leboeuf, he said something to you in French. Remember what it was?”
“I’m here about Clete, Mr. Robicheaux. He has to choose between me and you, and it’s tearing him up. I don’t want him taking my weight.”
“Then tell me what Leboeuf said before he died.”
Her eyes followed a speedboat that had just roared past us, splitting the bayou with a frothy yellow trough, the wake sliding through the cypress roots.
“They’re going to send people after you,” she said.
“Answer the question. Why not get your old man off the hook? The Leboeuf shooting was probably justified. You stopped a rape in progress. Leboeuf was armed and a threat to both you and Catin Segura. You can skate.”
She was breathing through her nose, her nostrils white around the edges. “You want me to confess to snuffing a cop in a place like this?”
“You probably saved Catin’s life. If you’d wanted to summarily execute Leboeuf, you would have parked a third round in him while he was lying in the bathtub. That means you have a conscience.”
“Roust me if you want. Tell my landlord I have AIDS. Do all the dog shit you guys do when you can’t make your case, but lay off Clete.”
“You’ve got it turned around, Miss Gretchen. Clete saw you put three rounds in Bix Golightly’s face. You made him a witness to a homicide and an accessory after the fact. You’ve done a major clusterfuck on your father. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”
Her breathing had grown louder, the blood draining from around her mouth. “The guys who kidnapped my mother are pretty dumb, but they were smart enough to know the difference between cooperation and going over a gunwale with cinder blocks wired around their necks. The contract came down from a guy who talks like he has a speech defect, like he can’t pronounce an R. Did you see Lawrence of Arabia? Remember how Peter O’Toole dressed? The guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd wraps himself up like Peter O’Toole because he’s afraid of the sunlight. Know anybody like that?”
“The albino, Lamont Woolsey?”
“God, you’re smart,” she said.
CLETE PURCEL WAS not a fan of complexities. Or rules. Or concerns about moral restraint when it came to dealing with c
hild molesters, misogynists, rapists, and strong-arm robbers who jackrolled old people. Clete wasn’t sure which category Lamont Woolsey fit into, but he didn’t care. The chains and hooks and manacles and piranha tank and dried blood in the room we found on the island southeast of the Chandeleurs gave Lamont Woolsey the status of crab bait.
Woolsey had used a credit card to pay for his stay in a hotel on Pinhook Road in Lafayette. It took Clete’s secretary, Alice Werenhaus, ten minutes to get the billing address. It was uptown in New Orleans, right off Camp Street, one block from the old home of the Confederate general John Bell Hood. Clete called me from his cottage. “I’m going to dial him up, Dave. He’s going to know it’s our ring, too,” he said.
“Be careful. Dana Magelli doesn’t want us wiping our feet on his turf anymore,” I said.
“Dana’s okay. People give him a bad time because he’s Italian. That’s the advantage of being Irish. Nobody expects much from a pagan race.”
“Who told you that?”
“I did. You don’t think I read? You don’t think I have a brain? Listen, I wasn’t fair to you on the island. I didn’t mean what I said about going our separate ways. That’s never going to happen. Diggez-vous, big mon? The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever. You copy that?”
“You got it, bud.”
“We wrote our names on the wall, didn’t we?”
“Five feet high.”
“You ever miss the greaseballs?”
“That’s like missing bubonic plague.”
“Be honest. It was like being in the middle of a Dick Tracy comic strip. Who could invent guys like Didi Gee and No Duh Dolowitz? How about the broads? I used to think getting laid on the ceiling was a physical impossibility. After every Mardi Gras, I’d have to send my flopper to rehab.”
“Watch out for Woolsey, Clete. Most of the greaseballs were family men and had parameters. These guys don’t.”
“That’s the point. These cocksuckers ran up the black flag. Not us,” he said.