By sunrise, the rain had stopped and the sky was filled with white clouds and the trees were dripping on the sidewalks and dimpling the puddles in the gutters, and I decided to walk to work and to think in a calmer and more reasonable way about all the problems that seemed to beset me. At eleven-fifteen I saw Clete’s maroon convertible coming up the long driveway past the city library and the grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother. When I went outside, all his windows were down and he was smiling at me from behind the wheel, his eyes clear, his face pink and unlined. A long-stemmed lavender rose rested on his dashboard. “How about an early lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria?” he said.
“You brought me a rose?”
“No, the gal I was with last night brought me a rose. In fact, her name was Rose.”
I got in on the passenger side and sat back in the deep leather comfort of the seat. “You look good,” I said.
“Maybe if I could go three days without booze, I’d rejoin the human race. I got the gen on that Luger I took off of Frankie Gee. It belonged to a guy in the SS by the name of Karl Engels. He was in Paris in 1943, then he dropped off the screen.” He waited for my response. When I didn’t speak, he said, “Say what you’re thinking.”
“It’s a start.”
“That’s it, a start?”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“No, that’s not it at all. You can’t wait to rain on the parade.”
Once again I was using all my energies to avoid hurting his feelings and doing a poor job of it. There were few times when Clete was genuinely happy. The irreverent and sardonic humor and outrageous behavior that characterized his life were surrogates for happiness, ephemeral ones at that, and I would have given anything in the world if I could have waved a wand over him and cast out the gremlins constantly sawing at the underpinnings of his life. Then I realized I had not only fallen prey to my old arrogance and hubris-namely, that I could fix other human beings-but I had been so concentrated on protecting Clete’s feelings that I had failed to make the connection between the provenance of the Luger and a detail inside the home office of Alexis Dupree.
“Jesus, Clete,” I said.
“What is it?”
I rubbed my forehead like a man who has had a flashbulb popped in his face. “Dupree has a stunning collection of framed photographs on the walls of his den. One shows Italian troops marching through a bombed-out village in Ethiopia. Another one shows a Crusader castle in the desert. There’s one of the Great Wall in China and one of the Venetian canals. But I kept concentrating on a photo of the defenders of Madrid that Robert Capa supposedly inscribed to Dupree. The photo I ignored was of an indoor cycle track in Paris.”
“Like a racetrack for bicycles?”
“Yeah, there was one in Paris that was used as a holding area for Jews rounded up by the SS and the French police. I don’t remember all the details. I think Alexis Dupree’s photographs are a tribute to the Axis attempt to conquer the world.”
Clete opened a packet of turkey jerky and stuck a piece in his mouth and started chewing. This was the first time I could remember his reaching for something other than a drink or a cigarette when he was agitated. “I can’t believe a guy like that has been sitting under our noses all this time. He’s breathing the same air we do. That’s a disgusting thought. We ought to bulldoze that mausoleum of his into the bayou.”
“Why blame the house for the occupant?” I said.
“Places like that are monuments to everything that’s wrong in Louisiana’s history. Slavery, rental convict labor, the White League, corporate plantations, the Knights of the White Camellia, elitist shit-heads figuring out new ways to pay working people as little as they can. Why not put a match to all of it?”
“Then we’d be stuck with ourselves.”
“That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard anyone say. You should get together with Gretchen.”
“What’s the deal with Gretchen?”
“You got me. She woke up looking like she’d been hit by a wrecking ball. I can’t figure her, Dave. One minute she’s a sweet girl, the next she’s the contract hitter who snuffed Bix Golightly’s wick. By the way, Dana Magelli thinks two different shooters capped Waylon Grimes and Frankie Gee.”
“I don’t need to know about this.”
“Out of sight, out of mind? That’s smart.”
“Cut off the head of the snake,” I said.
“Alexis Dupree?”
“You got it.”
“But I shouldn’t be thinking about burning down his house? Streak, if you ever see a psychiatrist, you’re going to end up shooting yourself.”
“You don’t think getting drunk every day is a form of suicide?”
“You talking about me?” he said.
“No, you never hide your feelings or pretend you’re anything other than what you are. I don’t have your candor. That’s what I was saying.”
“Don’t talk like that, big mon. It makes that lead start moving around in my chest. It’s still in there. I don’t care what the docs say. Dave, we’ve got to make things like they used to be. That’s what it’s about. You get to a certain age, and you go back to where you started out. It’s not wrong to do that, is it?”
“Thomas Wolfe already said it. You can’t go home again.”
“I’ve got to have a drink. My liver is flopping. Let’s go to Clementine’s. We can eat at the bar.”
“I can’t do that,” I replied.
“Suit yourself,” he said. He started his engine, the joy gone from his face, his cheeks splotched with color, as though he were coming down with a fever.
I watched him drive through the dappled sunlight, past the grotto and the city library, and turn in to the midday traffic on East Main, the starched white top and waxed surfaces of his Caddy like a tribute to a happier and more innocent time. Then I went into my office and brought up Google on my computer screen and began typing the words “Paris” and “racetrack” and “Jews” into the search window.
Gretchen Horowitz did not contend with the nature of the world. In her opinion, no survivor did. The world was a giant vortex, anchored in both the clouds and the bottom of space, at any given time swirling with a mix of predators and con men and professional victims and members of the herd who couldn’t wait to get in lockstep with everyone around them. She felt little compassion or pity for any of them. But there was a fifth group, the arms and heads and legs of the individuals so tiny they could barely be seen. The children did not make the world. Nor did they have the ability to protect themselves from the cretins who preyed upon them. She did not speculate on the afterlife or the punishment or rewards it might offer. Instead, Gretchen Horowitz wanted to see judgment and massive amounts of physical damage imposed on child abusers in this life, not the next.
Even popping a cap on them seemed too mild a fate. But to do more than summarily blow them out of their socks would give them power. The three child abusers she’d capped had it coming, she told herself. They’d dealt the play when they declared war on the defenseless. Except there had been others, two of them. She didn’t like to think about the others. She told herself they were killers and sadists and contract assassins who were mobbed up all the way to New Jersey. They’d both been armed, and both of them had gotten off a shot before they went down. Gretchen’s argument with herself over the others usually lasted through the night into the dawn. The woman named Caruso may have been feared in the underworld, but for Gretchen Horowitz, Caruso had never existed.
Gretchen did not do well when the center began to come apart. She was not exactly sure what the center was, but she knew it was related to predictability and not letting other people hurt you. You kept it simple, the way people in twelve-step groups did. That meant not getting involved in other people’s problems. You took care of yourself, covered your own back, and drew a line in the sand that other people were told not to cross. When somebody tried to find out if you were blowing smoke, you stepped on his cookie bag. If he had another run at it, you punched his whole ticket. In the meantime, it didn’t hurt to do a good deed or two. You looked out for infants and small kids and girls who fell in with the wrong guys, not just pimps and pushers but guys they had trusted and who threw them away like used Kleenex. Last, when you had a real friend, someone who was stand-up and loyal, you never let him or her down, no matter what price you had to pay.
Gretchen had often wished her mother would nod off on the tar or the mixture of cocaine and whiskey she shot. Candy Horowitz had traded off her daughter’s childhood for her habit and had never felt sorry for anything or anyone except herself. With luck, the dwarf with the satchel would overload her heart and give her the peace she had never found. What more fitting way for Candy to do the Big Exit than to glide into eternity on angel wings trailing streams of China white? That was a cruel thought, Gretchen told herself. Her mother was a child, no different than the defenseless child Gretchen had been when she was molested by at least half a dozen of her mother’s boyfriends. And now Candy Horowitz was in the hands of a man who talked about sticking her inside a wood chipper or a waffle iron.
Gretchen took the four-lane to New Orleans. The Ford pickup she had bought from T. Coon was a dream, the cab chopped down so the windows looked like slits in a machine-gun bunker, the body lowered on the frame, the Merc engine souped up with dual carburetors and a hot cam and milled heads. The dual Hollywood mufflers probably had been deliberately filled with motor oil in order to carbonize the filters and create a deep-throated rumble that echoed off the asphalt like soft thunder. At Morgan City, she got stuck behind two semis on the high bridge over the Atchafalaya River. Finally, when there was a narrow opening between the lanes, she double-clutched into second and floored the accelerator, passing the trucks so suddenly that both of the drivers swerved. In under ten seconds, the semis had shrunk to the size of toys in her rearview mirror.
In two hours, she was at Joe amp; Flo’s Candlelight Hostel, not far from the Quarter, where she had rented a security locker. She removed a hatbox from the locker and got back in her pickup and drove onto the I-10. In minutes she was back on the connector to the four-lane, headed toward New Iberia, the chrome-plated Merc engine humming like a sewing machine. Far down the road, where it traversed miles of flooded woods and the swamp water was coated with a milky-green blanket of algae, she popped the top loose from the hatbox and put her right hand inside. She felt the hard, square outline of the. 22 auto and the nine-millimeter Beretta. She also felt the suppressor for the. 22 and the magazines and boxes of cartridges for both weapons. The contents of the hatbox were old friends. They didn’t argue or contend or judge. They did as they were asked and became an extension of the will. As a retired button man in Hialeah once told her, “The objective is not the target, Gretchen. The objective is controlling the environment around you. The proper use of your piece gives you that kind of control. After that point, the personal choices are up to you.”
“What did you do before you were a hitter, Louie?” Gretchen asked.
“You see The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight?”
“Yeah, Jerry Orbach played Joe Gallo.”
“Remember the lion Joe kept in his basement, the one they hooked up to the chain in the car wash? I’m the one who took care of the lion. I participated in history,” he said.
But neither her fingers on the oiled coldness of the guns nor her reveries about the humorous hit man from Brooklyn could relieve her of the sick feeling in her stomach. No, “sick feeling” didn’t approach the systemic debilitation that seemed to be eating its way through her body. Her palms were stiff and hard and dry when she closed them around the steering wheel. Her face looked gray and unfamiliar when she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A sour odor rose from her shirt. If she stopped and ate anything, she knew she would throw up. She had thought nothing worse than her childhood could ever happen to her again. Her choices were like multiple doors that all opened onto a furnace. She could either do as she had been told by the man who called himself Marco or become responsible for her mother’s death, one that was fiendish in design. The guns she had owned and used to control her environment had become the trap that was about to rob her of her soul and the lives of her mother and Dave and Alafair Robicheaux and Clete Purcel, the best man she had ever known, one whose goodness was in every inch of his body, every touch of his hand, every kind expression of concern. His selfless affection for her seemed to have no source. He didn’t want anything from her, and he didn’t get mad when she got mad at him. He made no sense at all. He had an affection for her that only a father had for a daughter, a man to whom she had no known blood relation. Why had this fate been visited upon her?
When she pulled in to the motor court on East Main, a sun shower had just ended, and smoke from Clete’s barbecue pit was hanging in the trees, and red and yellow leaves from a swamp maple were pasted damply on the driveway. The roast on the rotisserie had been burned into a lump of coal. She cut the engine and picked up the hatbox from the passenger seat and went inside Clete’s cottage. The blinds were shut, and the air was gray and dense with an odor that was like moldy towels and dried testosterone and beer that had been sweated through the glands into the bedclothes. A bottle of peppermint schnapps and a half-empty bottle of Carta Blanca were on the breakfast table. Clete was sleeping in his skivvies on the couch, on his side, a pillow over his head. His shirt and trousers lay on the floor.
Gretchen sat down in a straight-back chair close to the couch and removed the. 22 auto and screwed the suppressor on the barrel. Her scalp was tingling, her heart thudding. A tiny pool of perspiration had already formed between her palm and the grips on the. 22. Her breath was so loud and ragged in her throat that she thought it would wake him. She lowered the. 22 behind her calf and touched Clete on the back. “It’s me,” she said.
He didn’t move.
“It’s Gretchen. Wake up,” she said.
When he didn’t move, she felt a surge of anger and impatience toward him that was irrational, as though he were the source of all her problems and deserved whatever happened to him. Her heart was pounding, her nostrils flaring with fear and angst. She clenched his shoulder with her left hand and shook it. His skin was oily and hot, beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He pulled the pillow from his head and looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes bleary. “What’s the haps?” he said.
“Are you in the bag again?”
“Yeah, bad night, bad day. I got to stop drinking,” he replied. He turned over on the couch and supported himself on one elbow. “What time is it?”
“Forget about the time.”
“What’s going on, Gretch? What’s that in your hand?”
She lifted the. 22 above the level of the mattress. “This is the piece I used to clip Bix Golightly. On my sixth birthday, he asked me to come into the kitchen and help him make lemonade. My mother had just left for the grocery to buy a cake. He unzipped his pants and pushed my face against his cock. He squeezed my head so tight, I thought he would crush my skull. He told me if I was a bad girl and told my mother what we’d done, that’s how he put it, what we’d done, he’d come back to Miami and bury me in my backyard. I never knew his full name or where he was from. Earlier this year he was at the track in Hialeah with some other gumballs. They told him I did button work for the Mob. He never made the connection between me and the little girl he sodomized. It took me a long time to catch up with him, but I did. What do you think of that, Clete?”
Clete fingered the sheet that covered his loins, his mouth gray, his lips dry-looking. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
“Popping a guy?”
“No, popping a guy who makes a little girl perform oral sex on him on her birthday and threatens to murder her. What are you going to do with that piece?”
“Use it.”
“On who?” he asked.
“The field is wide open.”
He sat up on the side of the couch. He took the. 22 from her hand. The magazine was not in the frame. He pulled back the receiver. The chamber was empty. “Did you take down Frankie Giacano or Waylon Grimes?”
“No, I didn’t. Golightly and Grimes and Giacano were all supposed to catch the bus. I did Golightly, but I didn’t take money for it. I don’t know who clipped the others.”
“Do you know who I am?” Clete asked.
“A guy who smells like he’s been drinking for twenty-four hours?”
He unscrewed the suppressor from the. 22 and handed both the gun and the suppressor back to her. “What else is in that hatbox?”
“A Beretta nine and a gun-cleaning kit and several extra magazines and boxes of ammo.”
“I’m your old man. That’s who I am,” he said.
“Meaning like my boyfriend?”
“I’m your father.”
She felt a sharp pain in her heart that spread through her chest and seemed to squeeze the air out of her lungs. Her brow twitched once, like a rubber band snapping, then something shut down the flow of light into her eyes. “Don’t play around with me.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“My father died in Desert Storm.”
“You went to juvie when you were fifteen, then to foster care. Your mother was in the Miami-Dade stockade. I had a blood test done on you. There was no doubt I was your dad. But you ran away from foster care before I could process the custody application. I tried to find you twice on my own, and later, I hired a PI in Lauderdale, but the trail stopped at the track in Hialeah. You were a hot walker there, right?”
“Yeah, and a groom and I worked at the concession stand,” she said.
“You feel like I’ve deceived you?”
“I don’t know what to call it. I can’t begin to describe what I feel right now,” she said.
“I saw you smoke Golightly. I called in the shots-fired, but I didn’t dime you. After you brought me my cigarette lighter, I figured you’d run away if I told you I was in Algiers the night Golightly and Grimes got it. If you ran away again, I knew I would never find you. You got a rotten break as a kid, Gretchen. In my view, you’re not responsible for any of the things you did. If anybody is responsible, it’s me. I was a drunk and a pill addict working Vice. I took juice from the Mob, and I took advantage of your mother. Candy was mainlining when she was nineteen, and instead of helping her, I made her pregnant. If you told me you didn’t want a son of a bitch like me for a father, I’d understand.”
“You’re not a son of a bitch. Don’t say that.”
He reached down on the floor and picked up his trousers, then stood up from the couch with his back to her and put them on. “Why are you crying?” he said.
“I’m not. I don’t ever cry.”
“Our supper is probably burned up. Let’s go to the Patio for some etouffee. A guy couldn’t have a better daughter than you. You have character and you’re not afraid. Anybody who says different is going to have to answer to me.”
Her hands were propped on her knees, and her head was bent forward so he could no longer see her face. She pushed the wetness out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “There’s a hit on you. You and Dave Robicheaux and Alafair and maybe Mrs. Robicheaux. They’ve got my mother, Clete. I was offered the choice of doing the hit or letting my mother be tortured to death.”
“Who gave you the contract?” he asked.
“A guy named Marco. He’s not important. The contract can come from anywhere or anybody. It gets processed through Jersey or Miami or San Diego. The middle guys do business through drop boxes and electronic relays. Right now they’re shooting up my mother with some high-grade smack that could kill her.”
She waited for him to speak. Instead, he sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. “Where’d they grab Candy?”
“Probably at her house in Coconut Grove. Are you going to tell Dave Robicheaux and Alafair?” she asked. “I can’t stand the thought of that. Alafair stood up for me. She hit Varina Leboeuf in the face.”
He lifted his eyes to hers. There was a level of sadness in them that seemed to have no bottom.
At the department I had started my Internet search into the history of the cycle track in Paris in hopes of discovering a connection with the Nazi SS officer Karl Engels. Some of the search was easy, some of it elusive, some of it a dead end. The name of the racetrack in Paris was Vel’ d’Hiv, a place that had become infamous as the first stop for French Jews on their way to a camp at Drancy and the freight cars that would take them to Auschwitz. Many of the photos were horrific, the eyewitness accounts so gruesome and cruel that you wondered if there was not a demonic agent at work in human beings. There was nothing to link the name of Karl Engels with the cycle track in Paris or the camp at Drancy or the chimneys at Auschwitz.
When I got home that night, I continued the search on our home computer via a different avenue. I didn’t put in a search for Karl Engels but for the people he might have known or worked under. I brought up photos of Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich and the people in their entourage. I searched the lists of those who had been tried at Nuremberg and those who had escaped justice and fled to South America. I read seemingly endless accounts of their backgrounds. Most of them had come from middle-class homes and been raised by Lutheran or Catholic parents. Their previous lives, before their admission to the SS, had been characterized by mediocrity and failure. That they would pose before cameras in front of the barbed wire holding their victims was mind-numbing. That they would allow themselves to be photographed shooting unarmed people on their knees or a woman with a child in her arms would probably be incomprehensible to a sociopath. The world these men created might exist today only in cyberspace, but to visit it even as a virtual reality makes the stomach crawl.
By eleven P.M. my eyes were burning, and I was ready to give it up. Then I looked again at a photo I had not lingered on, possibly because of the way the individuals were dressed. The photo showed Heinrich Himmler and three other men talking, all of them wearing business suits. They looked like men who might have gathered at a piece of cleared land in anticipation of a shared business venture. They did not look evil or cunning or remarkable in any fashion. In the cutline, Himmler and two of the other men were named; the fourth man was not. His face was turned at an angle, his posture both confident and regal. There was a dimple in his chin, a pleasant smile on his mouth. The profile was a replica of Alexis Dupree’s.
I went back to the firsthand accounts given by survivors of Auschwitz. Many of them mentioned a junior SS officer who was singularly cruel and took obvious delight in conducting the selections. Some called him “the light bearer” because of the way his eyes brightened when he let his riding crop hover above an inmate’s head, asking innocuous questions about his place of birth or the work he did, just before touching him on the brow and condemning him to the ovens.
Other inmates were less poetic in their choice of terms for the light bearer. They simply called him Lucifer.
“Why don’t you come to bed?” Molly said.
“I found a guy who might be Alexis Dupree. He was an SS officer by the name of Karl Engels. Look at this photo. That’s Himmler on the left. The guy on the far right looks like Dupree. At least the profile does.”
She rested her hand on my shoulder as she gazed at the screen. Then she sat down next to me and looked more closely. “He even has the dimple in his chin, doesn’t he?”
This was the first time Molly had agreed with me about the darker possibilities of Alexis Dupree’s background. “The root of the name Engels means ‘angel.’ The guy who tried to kill me in Lafayette, Chad Patin, said this island where there’s an iron maiden is run by someone named Angel or Angelle.”
“So Alexis Dupree is the guy running things?”
“You don’t think that’s possible?”
“Too big a stretch,” she replied.
I couldn’t argue with her. Dupree was close to ninety and did not have the emotional stability it would take to run a well-organized criminal enterprise. And even if he were Karl Engels, there was no way to confirm that Karl Engels was the man known as the light bearer at Auschwitz.
“Look at it this way,” Molly said. “You were right about Alexis Dupree, and I was wrong. He’s probably a war criminal. He’s also at the end of his days. The fate that’s waiting for him is one we can only imagine. I think he’ll find that hell is just like Auschwitz, except this time he’ll be wearing a striped uniform.”
I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. That night I opened the bedroom window and turned on the attic fan and let the breeze blow across the bed. As I fell asleep, I could hear the wind in the trees and the squirrels running on the roof and a dredge boat deepening the main channel in the bayou. I slept all the way to morning without dreaming.
It was late the next afternoon when Clete showed up at the house, just after a sun shower and the return of Gretchen Horowitz from New Orleans. He was chewing breath mints and had shaved and combed his hair and put on shades and a crisp Hawaiian shirt to hide his dissipation and the increasing pain his hangovers caused him. But when he came into the house and removed his shades, the skin around his eyes was a whitish-green, the lids constantly blinking, as though someone had shone a flashlight directly into the pupils. “Where are Molly and Alafair?” he asked.
“At Winn-Dixie,” I said.
“I’ve got to tell you something.”
“It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“You got anything to drink? I feel like I’m passing a gallstone.”
I poured him a glass of milk in the kitchen and put a raw egg and some vanilla extract in it. He sat at the breakfast table and drank it. The windows were open to let in the coolness of the evening, and fireflies were starting to spark in the trees. None of that did anything to relieve the turmoil that was obviously roiling inside Clete Purcel.
He told me everything about Gretchen Horowitz’s confession to him-the hit on Bix Golightly, her career as an assassin, the kidnapping of her mother, and the contract Gretchen was supposed to carry out on me and my family.
At first I felt only anger. I felt it toward Gretchen and toward Clete and toward myself. Then I felt incurably stupid and used. I also felt a nameless and abiding fear, the kind that is hard to describe because it’s irrational and goes deep into the psyche. It’s the sort of fear you experience when someone unexpectedly turns off a light in a room, plunging it into darkness, or when the airplane you are riding on hits an air pocket and drops so fast that you cannot hear the sound of the engines. It’s the kind of fear you experience when an atavistic voice inside you whispers that evil is not only real but it has become omnipresent in your life, and nothing on God’s green earth can save you from it.
After he finished telling me things he probably never guessed he would say to his best friend, he got up from the breakfast table without looking at me and went to the cabinet and poured more milk in his glass and added more vanilla extract, shaking the last few drops out of the tiny bottle. “Have you got anything stronger?” he asked.
“No, and I wouldn’t give it to you if I did.”
“If you slugged me, I’d consider it a gift,” he said.
“You think Gretchen’s mother is being held in Miami?” I asked.
“I doubt it.” He tried to meet my stare, but his gaze broke. “You want to go to the FBI?”
I looked at him for a long time, and I didn’t do it to make him feel uncomfortable. I knew there had to be an answer to the problem, but I didn’t know what it was. The moment we brought in the FBI, they would pick up Gretchen Horowitz, and the contract for our death would go to someone else. In the meantime, there was a strong chance that Clete Purcel would go down for aiding and abetting. When all that was done, we would still be on our own. Sound like exaggeration? Ask any victim of a violent crime or any witness for the prosecution in a trial involving the Mob what his experience with the system was like. Ask him how safe he ever felt again or how often he slept soundly through the night. Ask him what it was like to be afraid twenty-four hours a day.
“I need to tell Molly and Alafair and see what they think,” I said.
I saw him trying to control his emotions. His throat was prickled with color, the whites of his eyes full of tiny pink vessels, the skin around his mouth as sickly-looking as a fish’s belly. My guess was he couldn’t begin to sort through the shame and embarrassment and guilt he was experiencing. Nor could he help wondering if he would ever stop paying dues for the mistakes he had made years ago.
“Whatever y’all want to do is jake with me,” he said.
“Gretchen has no idea where the contract came from?”
“You know how it works. They use people who are morally insane to carry out the job, then half the time they dispose of them.” He paused as though he couldn’t deal with the content of his own statement. “Gretchen didn’t choose the world she was born into. She was tortured with cigarettes when she was an infant, all because her father wasn’t there to protect her. On her sixth birthday, she had to perform oral sex on Bix Golightly. Does anyone in his right mind believe a kid like that will grow into a normal adult? I think it’s amazing she’s the decent person she is.”
His eyes were shiny, his voice so wired that some of his words were almost inaudible.
“Let’s take a walk,” I said.
“Where?”
“To get some ice cream.”
“Dave, I’m truly sorry for this. Gretchen is, too.”
“Don’t tell me about Gretchen’s problems, Clete. I’m not up to it.”
“I’m just telling you, that’s all. She’s human, too. Give her a break.”
“That might be hard to do,” I said.
He looked at me, surprised and hurt.
I could see the light failing in the trees and hear the frogs croaking on the bayou, and I wanted to walk into the yard and wrap myself and Molly and Alafair and Clete inside the gloaming of the day and forget everything taking place around us. Instead, I said, “We’ll get through it. We always do.”
“I forgot to tell you something. While I was getting dressed to come over, I had the television on. There was a clip about a British oil guy who’s giving a talk in Lafayette. There was a shot of him with Lamont Woolsey, that albino who hangs out with the televangelist.”
“What about the oil guy?”
“I’ve seen him before. He was on the Varina Leboeuf video,” he replied. “After he finished pumping her, he was combing his hair, still in the nude. He looked straight into the camera. The words ‘narcissist’ and ‘real bucket of shit’ come to mind. Think we should dial him up?”