Gretchen Horowitz had never understood what people called “shades of gray.” In her opinion, there were two kinds of people in the world, doers and takers. The doers did a number on the takers. Maybe there were some people in between, but not many. She liked to think she was among the not many. The not many set their own boundaries, fought under their own flag, gave no quarter and asked for none in return. Until recently, she had never met a man who had not tried to use her. Even the best of them, a high school counselor and a professor at the community college, had turned out to be unhappily married and, in a weak moment, filled with greater need than charity in their attitude toward her, one of them groping her in his office, the other begging her to go with him to a motel in Key Largo, then weeping with remorse on her breast.
That was when she tried women. In each instance she felt mildly curious before the experience and empty and vaguely embarrassed after, as though she had been a spectator rather than a participant in her own tryst. She saw a psychiatrist in Coral Cables who treated her with pharmaceuticals. He also told her that she had never been loved and, as a consequence, was incapable of intimacy. “What can I do about that?” she asked.
“It’s not all bad. Eighty percent of my patients are trying to escape emotional entanglements,” he replied. “You’re already there. What I think you need is an older and wiser man, namely a paternal figure in your life.”
“I have feelings I didn’t tell you about, Doc,” she said. “On a bright, clear day out on the ocean, without a problem in the world, I have this urge to do some payback. On a couple of occasions I acted on my urge, one time with a guy who owned a skin joint and asked me out on his boat. Things got pretty entangled. At least for him. Want to hear about it?”
Later that day the receptionist called Gretchen and told her that the psychiatrist was overloaded and would be referring her to a colleague.
Alafair left her car in town and rode with Gretchen down to Cypremort Point. On the western horizon a thin band of blue light was sealed under clouds as black as a skillet’s lid, and waves were sliding across the darkness of the bay, smacking against the shoals. Gretchen could smell the salt in the air and the rain in the trees and the leaves that had been blown onto the asphalt and run over by other vehicles. But inside the coldness of the smell and the freshness of the evening, she could not take her eyes off the rain rings on the surface of the swells. They reminded her of a dream she’d been having since she was a child. In it, giant hard-bodied fish with the grayish-blue skin of dolphins rose from the depths and burst through the surface, then arched down into the rings they had created with their own bodies, slipping into darkness again, their steel-like skin glistening. The dream had always filled her with dread.
“You have dreams?” she asked.
“What kind?” Alafair said.
“I don’t mean dreams with monsters in them. Maybe just fish jumping around. But you wake up feeling like you had a nightmare, except the images weren’t the kinds of things you see in nightmares.”
“They’re just dreams. Maybe they represent something that hurt you in the past. But it’s in the past, Gretchen. I have dreams about things I probably saw in El Salvador.”
“You ever have violent feelings about people?”
“I was kidnapped when I was little. I bit the guy who did it, and a female FBI agent put a bullet in him. In my opinion, he got what he deserved. I don’t think about it anymore. If I dream about it, I wake up and tell myself it was just a dream. Maybe that’s all any of this is.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like a dream in the mind of God. We shouldn’t worry about it.”
“I wish I could be like you,” Gretchen said.
“There’s an amphibian out there,” Alafair said.
Gretchen looked through the window and saw the plane on the bay, not far offshore, floating low in the water, bobbing in the chop. It was painted white, its wings and pontoons and fuselage glowing in the blue band of light on the western horizon. A fiberglass boat with a deep-V hull and flared bow was anchored close by. The cabin of the boat was lighted, the bow straining against the anchor rope, the fighting chairs on the stern rising and falling against a backdrop of black waves. “Where is Varina Leboeuf’s place?” Gretchen asked.
“Right up there about a hundred yards.”
Gretchen pulled to the shoulder of the road and cut the headlights and the ignition. Through a break in the flooded cypress and gum trees, she had a clear view of the plane and the boat. She took a small pair of binoculars from her tote bag and got out of the truck and adjusted the lenses. She focused first on the amphibian, then on the boat. “It’s a Chris-Craft. The bow has a painting of a sawfish on it,” she said. “That’s the boat Clete and your father have been looking for, the one that Tee Jolie Melton’s sister was abducted on.”
Alafair got out and walked around to Gretchen’s side of the truck and stood beside her. Gretchen could see Varina Leboeuf on the stern and, next to her, a man with albino skin and shoulder-length hair that looked like white gold. He was wearing a shirt with blown sleeves and slacks belted high up on his stomach, the way a European might wear them. His forehead and the edges of his face were scrolled with pink scars, as though his face had been transplanted onto the tendons.
Gretchen handed Alafair the binoculars. “I’ll call Clete and tell him about the boat,” she said.
“We don’t have service here,” Alafair said.
“What do you want to do?”
“Confront her.”
Gretchen took back the binoculars and looked again at the boat and at Varina and the man standing on the deck. The man was heavyset and broad-shouldered, thick across the middle and muscular and solid in the way he stood on the deck. He looked in Gretchen’s direction, as though he had noticed either her or her truck. But that was impossible. She forced herself to keep the binoculars directly on his face. He was backlit by the lights in the cabin, his slacks and shirt flattening in the wind. He leaned over and kissed Varina Leboeuf on the cheek, then boarded the amphibian.
The plane’s twin engines coughed, then roared to life, the propellers blowing a fine mist back over the fuselage. Gretchen watched the plane gain speed, the pontoons cutting through the chop, the nose and wings abruptly lifting into the air. Her mouth was dry, her face hot, her breath catching in her throat for no reason.
“Are you okay?” Alafair asked.
“Yeah, sometimes I have kind of a blackout. More like a short circuit in my head. I look at somebody and can’t breathe and get dizzy and have to sit down.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Since I was a child.”
“What do you see through the binoculars that I didn’t?”
“Just that guy with the weird face. He’s like somebody from a dream. When I see a guy like that, maybe on an elevator or in a room with no windows, strange things light up in my head. I’ll go on okay for a few days, then shit starts hitting the fan.”
“What kind of shit?”
“I go out and look for trouble. I’ve got a bad history, Alafair. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to scrub out of my life. That guy with the albino skin and pink scars on his face-”
“What about him? He’s just a guy. He’s made of flesh and blood. Don’t rent space in your head to bad people.”
“He’s like Alexis Dupree. These are people who are made different from the rest of us. You don’t know them. Neither does Clete. But I know everything about them.”
“How?”
“Because part of them is in me.”
“That’s not true,” Alafair said. “Come on, the boat is headed for Varina’s dock. Let’s see who these guys are.”
“I told you I wanted to deal with Varina Leboeuf the way you would. How should I handle it?”
“You don’t ‘handle’ anything, Gretchen. You step back from bad people and let their own energies consume them. It’s the worst thing you can do to them.”
“See? You know stuff I never even thought about.”
They got in the truck and drove down the road to the shell drive that led to Jesse and Varina Leboeuf’s house. Out on the bay, the pilot of the Chris-Craft had throttled back his engine, allowing the boat to drift into the dock. As soon as the hull thumped against the tires that hung from the pilings, Varina stepped off the gunwale onto the planks, and the pilot turned the boat southward and gave it the gas.
The rain had stopped and the clouds had broken up in the west, and there was a tiny glimmer of purple melt at the bottom of the sky. Gretchen got out of the truck before Alafair did, and walked across the lawn toward Varina Leboeuf. The windmill palms were rattling in the breeze, rain dripping out of the tree limbs overhead. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Gretchen said.
“You’re not disturbing me. That’s because I’m going into my house now. That means I will not be talking with you, hence there is no reason for you to think you’re disturbing me.”
“Ms. Leboeuf, that boat you were on was used in a kidnapping, maybe even a homicide,” Gretchen said. “A girl named Blue Melton was forced onto that boat. The next time anybody saw her, she was inside a block of ice.”
“Then please go back to town and report all this to the authorities.”
“That’s not why I came out here. I wanted to ask you to leave Clete Purcel alone. He has nothing you want, and even if he did, he wouldn’t use it to hurt you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No, I don’t know what you’re saying. Are you confirming he burglarized my apartment and my father’s house?”
“I’m saying he doesn’t have anything in his possession that can injure you.”
“I want you to take the wax out of your ears and listen carefully, you stupid little twat. If I didn’t have to go inside and care for my father right now, I’d make you cut your own switch. Actually, I feel sorry for you. You look like you were injected with steroids that went to the wrong places. Now get out of here before I kick those two watermelons you call an ass down the road.”
Alafair stepped forward and slapped Varina Leboeuf across the face. “Where do you get off talking to her like that, you lying whore?” she said. “You want another one? Give me an excuse. I would love to rip you apart.”
Varina Leboeuf’s eyes were watering, her cheek flaming. She started to speak, but her mouth was quivering, and her voice clotted in her throat.
“You’re not only a liar, you’re an accessory to murder after the fact,” Alafair said. “By the way, how’s it feel to be a porn star? I wonder if your video will make YouTube.”
Varina’s face looked like a balloon about to burst. The whites of her eyes had turned red as beets. “If you come here again, I’ll kill you.”
“I told you to give me an excuse,” Alafair said. And with that, she hit Varina across the mouth, so hard the other woman’s chin twisted against her shoulder.
“You did what?” I said.
“It was the way she treated Gretchen,” Alafair replied. “She said her ass looked like a pair of watermelons.”
We were sitting in the living room. Outside, the street was wet and glazed with pools of yellow light from the streetlamp. Lightning that made no sound flared and died in the clouds over the Gulf. “It was her fight, not yours. Why mix in it?” I said.
“Because I doubt she ever had a real friend or that anyone cared what happened to her.”
“Varina Leboeuf could have you charged with assault.”
“She won’t.”
“Why not?”
“The boat with the sawfish on the bow. She’s hooked up with the people who kidnapped and murdered Tee Jolie’s little sister.”
“We don’t have any proof of that.”
I thought she was going to argue with me, but she didn’t. “I did something dumb, Dave. Varina has confirmation that Clete took the memory cards out of her nanny-cams.”
“Clete destroyed them.”
“She can never be sure of that. What if there’s somebody on them she doesn’t want anybody to know about?”
“Don’t worry about that. You did the best you could. Don’t make a burden out of tomorrow,” I said.
“I think I set a bad example for Gretchen tonight. She kept telling me she wanted to handle Varina Leboeuf in the way I would. A few minutes later, I slapped Varina’s face into next week.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Really?”
“Of course. I’m always proud of you, Alf.”
“You said you wouldn’t call me that anymore.”
“Sorry.”
“Call me whatever you want,” she said.
I was serious when I said Alafair should have been in law enforcement. At the onset of her last semester at Stanford, her professors released her from class and gave her credit for clerking at the Ninth District Court in Seattle. The judge with whom she worked, an appointee of President Carter, was a distinguished jurist, but Alafair had an opportunity to clerk at the United States Supreme Court and would have done so, except her meddling father didn’t want her living in D.C. Regardless, her career in the Justice Department was almost assured. Instead, she chose to return to New Iberia and become a novelist.
Her first book was a crime novel set in Portland, where she attended undergraduate school. Perhaps because she had an undergraduate degree in forensic psychology, she had extraordinary insight into aberrant behavior. She also knew how to use the Internet in ways that were virtually miraculous.
When she turned on her computer Tuesday morning, her Google news alert had posted four entries in her mailbox. “Better come in here, Dave,” she called from her bedroom.
The news stories originated with a small wire service in the Midwest. A man who owned rows of grain silos along railroad tracks throughout Kansas and Nebraska had died unexpectedly and left behind an eclectic collection of art that ranged from Picasso sketches done during the Blue Period to pretentious junk that the grain-elevator magnate probably bought at avant-garde salons in Paris and Rome. The heirs donated the entire collection to a university. Included in it were three Modigliani paintings. Or at least that was what they seemed to be. The curator at the university art museum said they were not only fakes, they were probably part of a hoax that had been perpetrated on private collectors for several decades.
The operational principle of the scam was the same used in all con games. The scammers would seek out a victim who either wanted something for nothing or was basically dishonest himself. The private collector would be told the Modigliani paintings were stolen and could be purchased for perhaps half of their real worth. The collector would also be told that he was not committing a crime, because the museum or private collection from which the paintings had been stolen had indirectly victimized either Modigliani or his inner circle, all of whom were poor and probably sold the paintings for next to nothing.
The scam worked because Modigliani’s paintings were in wide circulation, many of them having been used by the artist or his mistress to pay hotel and food bills, and were comparably easy to forge and difficult to authenticate.
“I think this is the connection between Bix Golightly and Pierre Dupree,” Alafair said. “Golightly was probably fencing Pierre’s forgeries as stolen property. If you look at Pierre’s paintings, you can see Modigliani’s influence on him. Remember when you looked at the photo of Pierre’s nude on the sofa? You said the figure in it was Tee Jolie, and I said the painting was generic and was like Gauguin’s work. The painting of Tee Jolie was like a famous nude by Modigliani. Here, look.”
She clicked the image of the Modigliani painting onto the screen. “The swanlike neck and the elongated eyes and the coiffured hair and the prim mouth and the warmth in the skin are all characteristics you see in Pierre’s paintings. Pierre isn’t a bad imitator. But I’d bet he’s both greedy and jealous. Not long ago Modigliani’s painting was auctioned off at Sotheby’s for almost seventy million.”
“I think you’re probably right,” I said. “Clete broke in to Golightly’s apartment the night he was killed and said there was evidence he was fencing stolen or forged artwork. When you think about it, it’s the perfect scam. All you need is a buyer with sorghum for brains and too much money in the bank. Even if the buyer discovers he’s been suckered, he can’t call the cops without admitting he thought he was buying stolen paintings rather than forged paintings.”
“What do you want to do?” she asked.
“I’ll call the FBI in Baton Rouge today, but I usually don’t get very far with them.”
“Why not?”
“Clete and I are not considered reliable sources.”
“Fuck them,” she said.
“How about it on the language, Alafair? At least in the house.”
“Is it okay to use it in the yard? If not, how about on the sidewalk?”
Don’t buy into it, I heard a voice say. “Can you make me a promise about Varina?”
“Stay away from her?”
“No, that’s not it at all. Be aware of what she is. And her father. And Alexis and Pierre Dupree and what they represent.”
“Which is what?”
“They’re working for somebody else. Somebody who is even more powerful and dangerous than they are.”
“Why do you think that?”
“We’re minions down here, not players. Everything that happens here is orchestrated by outsiders or politicians on a pad. It’s a depressing conclusion to come to. But it’s the way things are. We take it on our knees for anybody who brings his checkbook.”
Rhetoric is cheap stuff and about as useful as a thimbleful of water in the desert. When I was a boy and pitching American Legion baseball in the 1950s, a catcher from the old Evangeline League gave me some advice I never forgot, although I don’t necessarily recommend that other people follow it. The Evangeline League was as rough and raw as it got. Cows sometimes grazed in the outfield, and so many of the overhead lights were burned out that sometimes the fielders couldn’t find the ball in the grass. Players smoked in the dugout, threw Vaseline balls and spitters, and slung bats like helicopter blades at the pitcher. They also fist-fought with umpires and one another, came in with their spikes up, and frequented Margaret’s infamous brothel en masse in Opelousas, a practice that on the team bus was called “running up the box score.” My friend the bush-league catcher from New Iberia tried to keep things simple, however. His advice was “Always keep the ball hid in your glove or behind your leg. Don’t never let the batter see your fingers on the stitches. When they crowd the plate, float one so close to the guy’s twanger, he’ll think he was circumcised. Then t’row your slider on the outside of the plate. He’ll swing at it to show he ain’t a coward, but he won’t hit it. Then t’row a changeup, ’cause he’ll be expecting the heater instead. If he gets mean and starts shaking his bat at you, don’t even take your windup. Dust him wit’ a forkball.”
The question was where and when to throw the forkball. At the office that morning, I saw an ad for an evangelical rally at the Cajundome in Lafayette. The centerpiece of the rally was none other than Amidee Broussard, the minister I had seen leaving the Dupree home through the side door.
Beginning perhaps in the 1970s, Pentecostal and fundamentalist religion took on a new life and began to grow exponentially in southern Louisiana. There are probably numerous explanations for the phenomenon, but the basic causes are rather simple: the influence of televised religion that was as much entertainment as it was theology; and the deterioration of the Acadian culture in which my generation grew up. In the 1950s courthouse records were still handwritten in formal French, and Cajun French was spoken almost entirely in the rural areas of the parish; in cities like Lafayette or New Iberia, perhaps half of the population spoke French as their first language. But during the 1960s, Cajun children were not allowed to speak French on school property, and the language that Evangeline and her people brought with them from Nova Scotia in 1755 fell into decline and became associated with ignorance and failure and poverty. The fisher-people of southern Louisiana became ashamed of who they were.
My experience has been that when people are frightened and do not understand the historical changes taking place around them, they seek magic and power to solve their problems. They want shamans who can speak in tongues, even Aramaic, the language of Jesus. They want to see the lame and the blind and the incurably diseased healed onstage. They want the Holy Spirit to descend through the roof of the auditorium and set their souls on fire. And they want a preacher who can pound a piano like Jerry Lee Lewis but sing gospel lyrics written by angels. The blood of Christ and the waters of baptism and the hypnotic rant of a clairvoyant all become one entity, a religion that has no name and no walls, a faith you carry like a burning sword, one that will cause your enemies to cower.
There’s an admission price in this church, but contrary to popular belief, it’s not always monetary. That night Clete Purcel and I drove to the Cajundome and entered the throng working its way through the front doors. Almost all the seats had been taken. The overhead lights created an iridescent sheen above the crowd, which was buzzing like a giant beehive. When Amidee Broussard took the stage, the reaction was electric. The crowd clapped and stomped their feet and laughed as though an old friend had returned to their midst with glad tidings.
I had to hand it to him. As a speaker, Amidee was stunning. There was an iambic cadence in all his sentences. His diction and voice were as melodic as Walker Percy’s or Robert Penn Warren’s. He made people laugh. Then, without seeming to shift gears, he began to speak of Satan and the apocalyptic warnings in the book of John. He spoke of lakes of fire and halls of torment and sinners impaled like snakes on wooden stakes. He spoke of the sacrifice of Jesus and the scourging and the crown of thorns and the nails in his hands and feet. You could feel the discomfit growing in the crowd, like a tremolo effect across calm water. Broussard was a master at inculcating fear, anxiety, and self-doubt in his constituency. When the tension in the crowd was such that people were clenching their arms tightly across their chests, and breathing through their mouths as though their oxygen supply were being cut off, he raised his hands high in the air and said, “But his ordeal has set us free. Our sins are paid for, just like you pay off a friend’s life insurance policy, just like you pay for his legal fees and hospital bills. Your friend can announce to the whole world, ‘I owe no debt anywhere, because it has already been paid.’ That’s what Jesus has done for you.”
The change in the audience was instantaneous, as if someone had turned on a huge electric fan and a cool breeze had begun to blow into their faces. At that point I thought he would begin curing the crippled and the terminally ill, hoaxes that are easily perpetrated in a controlled situation. But Amidee was much more sophisticated than his peers. Instead of claiming he possessed the power to heal, or that God healed through him, he told his audience the power was theirs to seize, and all they had to do was reach out and grab it.
“You heard me right,” he said into the microphone, his silver hair and high forehead gleaming under the lights, his recessed turquoise eyes radiant in his weathered face. “It doesn’t cost you money. You don’t have to pledge or tithe or sign up as a church member. You’ve already given witness by being here. The power of the Holy Spirit is within you. You take it with you wherever you go, and every day it grows stronger. You’re part of a special group now. It’s that easy. If your life doesn’t change after tonight, I want you to come back and tell me that. Know what? I’ve said that ten thousand times, and it’s never happened. And why is that? Because once you’re saved, your salvation can never be taken away from you.”
I never saw a local audience give anyone a longer and more enthusiastic ovation than Amidee Broussard received that night.
Clete went to the restroom and rejoined me in the concourse. He was wearing his shades and seersucker suit and a Panama hat and a tropical shirt with the collar outside the jacket, and he looked like a neocolonial on the streets of Saigon. “A guy in the head said there’s a big lawn party for Broussard at a place on the Vermilion River. What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go.”
“How do you read this dude?” he asked.
“I think he could probably sell central heating to the devil,” I replied.
“He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. I’ve heard worse.”
“He’s a snake-oil salesman. He’s smarter and more cunning than most, but he’s a fraud, just like Varina Leboeuf and the Duprees.”
Clete now knew about Varina’s connection to the Chris-Craft boat with the sawfish on the bow, and I saw his expression change at the mention of her name. I rested my hand on his shoulder as we walked toward the exit. “Let her go,” I said.
“I already have.”
“I don’t think that’s true. When you sleep with a woman, you always believe you’ve married her. You’re not a one-night-stand man, Cletus.”
“Why don’t you tell the whole fucking auditorium?”
“Cool it back there,” a man in front of us said.
Clete looked around uncertainly. “Oh, excuse me, you’re talking to me? The rest of us don’t have First Amendment rights because you say so? Is that what you were saying?”
The man was as big as Clete and younger, jug-eared, his face like a boiled ham, the kind of tightly wrapped man who sweats inside his clothes and never takes his coat off. “Who are you guys?” he asked.
“We’re cops. That means beat it, asshole,” Clete said.
I held Clete by his upper arm until the momentum of the crowd separated us from the man. His arm felt as hard as a pressurized fire hose and was humming with the same level of energy. “What’s the matter with you?” I said.
“Remember when we walked a beat in the First District? That was the happiest time of my life.”
“We’re in the bottom of the sixth. It’s not even the seventh-inning stretch yet,” I said.
“Right, keep telling yourself that,” he replied. “I need a drink.” He took a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and drank it half empty before we reached the Caddy.
The party was being held inside a magnificent grove of oak trees wrapped with strings of white lights, backdropped by a brightly lit mansion on the Vermilion River that was owned by an oilman from Mississippi. Though the house had a swimming pool in back and probably cost a fortune to build, the final result was a cross between an architectural nightmare and a deliberate celebration of vulgarity and bad taste. The pillars were made of concrete and swollen in the middle like Disney dwarfs; the brickwork had the shiny uniformity of laminated siding, the kind that is rolled and glued onto cinder block. The ceiling-high windows, the most outstanding feature of Louisiana houses, were bracketed with nonoperational shutters painted mint green and bolted flatly on the brick like postage stamps. The patio was a bare concrete pad that had settled and cracked through the center and was infested with fire ants. Through the windows, a visitor could look into a series of rooms carpeted in different colors and filled with furniture that could have been painted with shellac that morning.
The five acres of front lawn were filled with vehicles, row after row of them, extended-cab pickups and the biggest SUVs on the market. The guests were the glad of heart and the curious and the voyeuristic or those who had recently discovered that salvation and prosperity and the exploitation of the earth’s resources were all part of the same journey.
The serving tables groaned with bowls of white and dirty rice and etouffee and deep-fried crawfish and boiled shrimp. White-jacketed black waiters sliced pork off a hog on the spit and carved up turkeys and sirloin roasts and smoked hams swimming in pineapple rings and redeye gravy. There were beer kegs in tubs of ice and a three-table bar for those who wanted champagne or highballs. With the breeze off the river and the rustle of the moss in the trees and the smell of meat dripping into an open fire, the night could not have been more perfect. What imperfection could anyone see in the scene taking place before us? Even the Vietnamese serving girls seemed like a testimony to the richness of the New American Empire, one that indeed offered sanctuary to the huddled and downtrodden.
We found a place on a bench under a spreading oak, and Clete went straight to the drinks table and came back with a Jack on the rocks and a draft Budweiser foaming over the edges of a red plastic cup. “Guess who I just talked to in the line. The guy who was giving us trouble in the concourse. He said he didn’t know we were cops and he was sorry for getting in our face. Can you figure it?”
“Figure what?”
“As soon as these guys think you’re in the club, they want to kiss your ass.”
We were a few feet away from a plank table where people were eating off paper plates. They glanced at us from the corners of their eyes. “Sorry,” Clete said. “I’ve got a genetic case of logorrhea.”
A couple of them smiled good-naturedly and went on eating. Clete drank from his cup and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin. “I know you worry about me, big mon, but everything is copacetic,” he said.
“The only person who doesn’t worry about you is you.”
“Where’d all these Vietnamese girls come from?”
“A lot of them got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina.”
“You ever think about going back to ’Nam?”
“Almost every night.”
“John McCain went back. A lot of guys have. You know, to make peace with yourself and maybe some of the people we hurt or who were shooting at us? I hear they treat Americans pretty good today.”
I knew Clete was not thinking about making peace. He was thinking about the irrevocable nature of loss and about a Eurasian girl who had lived in a sampan on the edges of the South China Sea and whose hair floated off her shoulders like black ink when she walked into the water and reached back for him to take her hand.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” I said.
“Would you go with me?”
“If you want me to.”
“You believe spirits hang around for a while? They don’t take off right away to wherever they’re supposed to go?”
I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t sure he was talking to me any longer.
“The girl I had over there was named Maelee. I told you that already, huh?” he said.
“She must have been a great woman, Clete.”
“If I’d stayed away from her, she’d still be alive. Sometimes I want to find the guys who did it and blow up their shit. Sometimes I want to sit down and explain to them what they did, how they punished an innocent, sweet girl because of a guy from New Orleans who wasn’t much different from them. We thought we were fighting for our country just like they thought they were fighting for theirs. That’s what I’d tell them. I’d meet their families and tell them the same thing. I’d want them all to know we didn’t get over the war, either. We’re dragging the chain forty years down the road.”
He swirled the whiskey and ice in his cup, then drained it and crunched the ice between his molars. His cheeks had the red blush of ripe peaches, his eyes aglow with an alcoholic benevolence, one that always signaled an unpredictable metabolic change taking place in his system. “There’s Amidee Broussard. Check out the dude sitting with him,” he said.
I tried to see through the crowd, but my angle was wrong, and I couldn’t get a clear view of Broussard’s table.
“Gretchen said she saw Varina on board that Chris-Craft with an albino. I don’t know if I’d call this guy an albino or not,” Clete said. “His face looks like a piece of white rubber somebody sewed onto his skull. You think that’s the guy?”
I took a barbecue sandwich off a tray a waiter was passing around, then stood up so I could see Broussard’s table. I cradled the sandwich in a napkin and ate it and tried to hide my interest in Broussard while I watched him and his friend. As a police officer, I had learned many years ago that you learn more by seeing than listening. Why? All perps lie. That’s a given. All sociopaths lie all the time. That’s also a given. Any truth you learn from them comes in the form of either what they don’t say or what their eyes and hands tell you. A refusal to blink usually indicates deception. A drop in the register of the voice and a blink right after a denial means you tighten the screw. Evasion and begging the question and telling half a truth are indicators of a habitual liar whose methodology is to wear you down. It’s not unlike playing baseball. Have you ever gone up against a left-handed pitcher who hasn’t shaved in three days and looks like his wife just kicked him out of the house? You either read his sign language or you get your head torn off.
When you watch a man like Amidee Broussard, if he’s deprived by distance of his ability to deceive with words, what things do you look for? You ignore the ceramic smile, the work-worn, sun-freckled hands of the farm boy and the bobbed white hair of a frontier patriarch. You look at the eyes and where they go. He was being served dinner from the kitchen rather than from the buffet tables. The black waiter who put Broussard’s steak before him wore sanitary plastic mittens, although none of the other serving personnel did. After the waiter set the plate down, Broussard offered no word of appreciation, no show of recognition; he never paused in his conversation with the man who had the surreal face of someone you thought lived only in the imagination.
I dropped the rest of my sandwich in a trash barrel and began walking toward the Broussard table. A Vietnamese girl was refilling his water glass and picking up the dirty dishes from the tablecloth. There was no mistaking the direction of Broussard’s eyes. They darted to her cleavage when she bent over, and they followed her hips as she walked away. His dentures looked as stiff as bone. “You think our man might be having impure thoughts?” Clete said.
Before we reached the table, we were joined by the man who had given us trouble at the Cajundome. “Hey, y’all fixing to talk to Reverend Amidee?” he said.
“Yeah, that’s our plan,” Clete said.
“Come on, I know him. I went fishing with him and Lamont Woolsey. Lamont had so much protective clothing on, he looked like he was wearing a hazmat suit.”
“Woolsey is the guy with the latex skin?” Clete said.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” the man said. He looked at me and extended his hand. It was as hard and rough as brick. “I’m Bobby Joe Guidry.”
“How you doing, Bobby Joe?” I said.
“I was a drunkard for fifteen years. Up until I met Amidee six months ago. Not one drink since.”
“That’s great. My friend has met the reverend, but I haven’t. Can you introduce me?” I said.
Clete and I both shook hands with Broussard, but I don’t think he saw or heard either of us. He never stopped chewing his salad and never quite took his eyes off the Vietnamese waitress. Clete and I and Bobby Joe Guidry pulled up folding chairs to his table and sat down among a group of people who seemed to share no commonalities except their faith in Amidee Broussard, a man who knew the will of God and also what was best for their country.
“You’ve got a collection of the biggest SUVs I’ve ever seen,” Clete said. He’d already snagged another whiskey on the rocks, at least four fingers of it, drinking it in sips while he talked. “What kind of vehicle do you drive?”
“It’s a dandy, a Chevrolet Suburban. I can fit nine people in it,” Broussard said.
The Vietnamese waitress set a ketchup bottle and a bottle of steak sauce by Broussard’s plate. He patted her kindly on the forearm, looking up brightly at her. “Would you take this steak back? It’s still red in the middle.”
“Yes, sir. I sorry. I bring it back to you all cooked, Reverend Amidee,” she replied.
“That’s a good girl. You give that cook a good fussing-out while you’re at it,” he said. He continued to look at her as she walked away, but this time he did not let his eyes drop below her waist. “A beautiful girl.”
“You think we kicked enough raghead butt over there to keep the oil flowing?” Clete said.
Please don’t blow it, Clete, I thought.
“What was that about ragheads?” Broussard said.
“I was talking about the price of gas. That Suburban must get the mileage of a motor home packed with concrete,” Clete said.
I tried to interject myself into the conversation and stop Clete from wrecking our situation. “I think I know you,” I said to Lamont Woolsey. “You’re a friend of Varina Leboeuf.”
His eyes made me think of dark blue marbles floating in milk, his mouth duck-billed, his nose shiny with moisture, even though the night air was cool and getting cooler. I had never seen anyone with such strange coloration or with such a combination of peculiar features, nor had I ever seen anyone whose eyes were so deeply blue and yet devoid of moral light.
“Yes, I’m familiar with Ms. Leboeuf. I don’t recall seeing you while I was in her company,” he said. The accent was Carolinian or Tidewater, the vowels rounded, the R’s slightly bruised. That he’d chosen the word “familiar” to describe his relationship with a woman didn’t seem to bother him.
“I think she was on your boat, the one that has a sawfish painted on the bow,” I said.
His eyes fixed on mine, hard and so blue they were almost purple. “I don’t remember that.”
Take a chance, I heard a voice say. “Don’t you live on an island somewhere?”
“I did. I grew up in the Georgia Sea Islands.”
“You ever hear of a guy named Chad Patin? He took a shot at me.”
“Why would I know someone like that?” Woolsey said.
“This guy Patin was a couple of quarts down. He told me this crazy story about a medieval instrument called the iron maiden. He said it was on an island someplace. It works like a grape press. Except people are put inside it and not grapes.”
Woolsey’s head swiveled on his shoulders, as though he were surveying the crowd. His hands rested on the tablecloth, as round and pale as dough balls, his chest as puffed as a peacock’s. “Who are you?”
“Dave Robicheaux is the name. I’m a homicide detective in Iberia Parish.”
He fingered a gold cross that hung from his neck. His eyes came back to mine. “I think you and your friend have had too much to drink.”
“I don’t drink,” I replied.
He stretched his legs out before him, popping his knees, and smiled at me. “Maybe you should start. A snootful gives a fellow a wonderful excuse to say whatever is on his mind. He can apologize later and have it both ways.”
“I never thought of it like that. You’re not up to speed on iron maidens, huh?”
He scratched the back of his neck, then put on a pair of sunglasses that were tinted almost black. “No, I’ve met no maidens recently, iron or otherwise.”
“How about a kid named Blue Melton?”
“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.