I called in the 911 myself and took Clete by the arm and walked him away from the enclosure of boxes where Julie had probably died. I could find no electric switches on the walls, but there was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and when I twisted the bulb, it lit the room in all its starkness. Clete was breathing deep down in his chest, opening and closing his eyes. “I’m going to take Gretchen’s Star of David,” he said.
“Don’t touch it. There might be prints on it.”
“No, the chain isn’t broken. She dropped it there for me to find,” he said.
I didn’t argue. I had seen few instances in my long relationship with Clete Purcel when the world had gotten the upper hand on him and been able to do him serious injury. In this instance, he looked devastated, not only by the murder of his lover but by the simultaneous abduction of his daughter, both of which I was sure he was blaming on himself.
I looked around and tried to reconstruct what had happened. The loft we were standing in had a second set of steps by the far wall, and it led down to a second side exit. The loft had worked as a kind of bridge for the abductors. They had forced Alafair and Gretchen and Julie into the first-floor hallway, up the steps, down the other side, and out the door and into the park, where Alafair and Gretchen were likely taken away in a vehicle.
I said all these things to Clete, but I wasn’t sure he was hearing me. “Come on, Cletus. We’ve got to get our girls back.”
“Julie fought with them, didn’t she?” he said. “Downstairs in the hallway, she fought back. Julie didn’t take shit off anybody. She told them to fuck off, and they broke her nose and brought her up here and cut her throat.”
“That’s the way I would read it.”
“It’s Pierre Dupree.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“He got to Gretchen. She never had a boyfriend, and he got to her. He wants payback, Dave. Julie was in the way. Dupree has got long-range plans for Gretchen, that son of a bitch.”
“Maybe, but we’re not sure of any of this,” I said.
“He’s got plans for Alafair, too. Don’t lie to yourself.”
“I’m not. What I’m saying is we have to think.”
“They couldn’t nail us at the gig on the bayou, so they’re going to kill our kids,” he said.
“You’re losing it, Clete. The guys who tried to clip us behind my house were cremated. We’re dealing with an entirely separate bunch.”
“The hell we are,” he said. “If there’re two drunks on a ship, they’ll find each other. If there’re two scum-sucking bottom-feeders in the state of Louisiana, they’ll be in the same pond in twenty-four hours.”
“Bobby Joe Guidry said the two gumballs were talking about an amphibian.”
“Forget all the international intrigue and stuff about mysterious islands. These bastards are homegrown.”
“Yeah, but where does that leave us?”
“I’ll let you know,” he said, taking off his coat. He knelt down and placed it over Julie Ardoin’s face. When he stood up, there was a tear in the corner of his eye. He coughed before he spoke again. “We pick up Pierre Dupree, but this time out, it doesn’t make the jail.”
“What if we’re wrong?”
“You want to wait around here for Helen and the coroner? Wake up. Nobody wants to screw with St. Mary Parish. There’s an old man in that plantation house who probably stuck whole families in ovens. Blue Melton floated up on the beach in a block of ice, and nobody could care less. You know how many unsolved female homicides there are in this state? You know what Alafair and Gretchen might be going through while we’re playing pocket pool up here?”
My head felt like a piece of ceramic about to crack. “You’re sure it’s Dupree?”
“Take it to the bank.”
“We’re leaving something out. I just can’t put my hand on it.”
“Like what?” he said.
“I told you, I don’t know. It’s something about a song. I can’t remember.”
“Bad time for a memory blackout,” he said.
I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me. Clete and I turned around. Varina Leboeuf had climbed the steps and was standing halfway inside the loft, as though partially disembodied, her hair sparking with confetti, her face as heartbreakingly beautiful as it was when she was a young girl. “What are you two doing up here?” she said.
“What are you doing here?” Clete replied.
“I was talking to the ice-cream man. He told me y’all were looking for Alafair.”
“Why would you be talking to the ice-cream man about Alafair?” I asked.
“Pierre and his father own part of the frozen-food company. They deliver to offshore rigs. What’s going on?” When we didn’t answer, she glanced at the loft floor. “Where’d this blood come from?”
“There’s a lot more of it behind those boxes,” Clete said. “It belongs to Julie Ardoin. Take a look-see if you like.”
Her face seemed to wrinkle like a flower exposed to heat. “She’s been murdered?”
“Her throat was cut almost to the spine,” Clete said.
Varina pressed her hand to her mouth. I thought she was going to fall backward to the floor below. Clete reached down and helped her the rest of the way up the steps. She looked steadily into his eyes, as though reaching back into an intimate moment they shared. “I wish you’d killed him,” she said.
“Killed who?” Clete asked.
“Lamont Woolsey. I wish you would kill Amidee Broussard, too.”
“What do Broussard and Woolsey have to do with this?” I said.
“They’re evil. They use young girls. They deceive people with religion. It’s white slavery. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? Is Julie behind those boxes?”
“She told me she hardly knew you,” I said.
“That’s not true. I want to see Julie.”
“This is a crime scene. You need to leave, Varina,” I said.
“Why were you down in the hallway?” Clete said.
“I sponsored the western band. I was going to write them a check,” she said.
“Where’s Pierre?” he asked.
“I have no idea. We’ve settled all our business affairs. I hope I never see him again,” she replied. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
She turned and descended the steps, her small hand tightly gripping the rail, the hem of her prairie skirt bouncing on her calves. Clete stared into my face. “Can you read that broad?” he said.
“Not in a thousand years,” I replied.
I told Molly what had happened and asked her to go home and wait by the phone. It was a foolish request. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Where is Pierre Dupree?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find him,” I said.
“Why would they want Alafair?” she said.
“They were after Gretchen. They only took Alafair because the two of them were together.”
“Who is ‘they’?” she said.
“Clete thinks this is all about payback. I don’t agree. I think Gretchen knows too much, and some people in Florida and probably here want her off the board.”
We were standing at the rear of the audience. The swing orchestra had been called back for an encore and was playing “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.”
“Dave, this isn’t happening,” Molly said.
“But it is. They’ve got my little girl.”
“She’s my ‘little girl,’ too. I didn’t believe you before. I wish I had,” she said.
“Believe what?”
“That you were dealing with something that’s diabolic. I wish I had believed every crazy story you told me.”
“Have you seen Varina Leboeuf in the last few minutes?” I asked.
“She was going out the front door. She stopped and put her hand on me and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I didn’t know what she meant. You think she’s involved?”
“I gave up trying to figure Varina out. She reminds me of Tee Jolie in some ways. I’d like to believe in her, but faith has its limits.”
“Forgive me for saying this, but I hate both those women,” Molly said.
Up on the stage, three female singers imitating the Andrews Sisters went into the chorus of a song that, with the passage of time, had somehow made the years between 1941 and 1945 a golden era rather than one that had cost the lives of thirty million people.
Clete and I waited outside in the cold while at least eight emergency vehicles began to turn in to both the north and south entrances of the park and thread their way through the oak trees. Clete wore no coat and was starting to shiver. I used my cell phone to call the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department and ask that a cruiser be sent to the Croix du Sud Plantation.
“What are we supposed to be looking for?” the deputy asked.
“We have a homicide and a double abduction in New Iberia,” I replied. “I want y’all to find out who’s home and who isn’t at the Dupree place.”
“What would the Dupree family know about an abduction?”
“I’m not sure. That’s why we’re requesting your assistance.”
“You’d better talk with the sheriff about this.”
“Where is he?”
“Duck hunting at Pecan Island. Problem is, I’m not supposed to give out his private number.”
“What does it take to get you to do your job?” I said.
I didn’t get to hear his reply. Clete Purcel tore the phone out of my hand. “You listen, you little piece of shit,” he said. “You go out to Croix du Sud and knock on their door and look in their windows and crawl under the house if you have to. Then you call us back and tell us what you find. If you don’t, I’m going to come over there and kick a telephone pole up your ass.”
Clete closed the phone and handed it back to me. He looked at my expression. “What?” he said.
“We need these guys on our side. I thought I was making some progress,” I replied.
“With St. Mary Parish? Progress for those guys is acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation,” he said.
“Bring your car around. You’re going to catch pneumonia.”
“You coming?”
“You’ve got to give me a minute, Clete.”
He looked at his watch. “We need to do this together, Streak. Don’t depend on the locals. We’re the guys with the vested interest. We take Pierre Dupree into Henderson Swamp.”
His skin was prickled, and he was jiggling up and down, but it wasn’t because of the cold. His eyes were wider than they should have been, his breath sour. He rotated his head on his neck and straightened his back, his shoulder rig tightening across his chest. When I touched his back, I could feel his body heat through the fabric.
An ambulance pulled to the rear of the Sugar Cane Festival Building, and two paramedics got out and removed a gurney from the back. Three cruisers pulled in behind the ambulance, the light from their flashers bouncing off the buildings and the oak trees. I looked for Helen Soileau but didn’t see her. A moment later, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I was surprised. It was the deputy Clete had threatened. “Robicheaux?” he said.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“I had a deputy do a check at the Dupree place. Nobody is home. The only light on is the porch light. The deputy walked around back. Nobody is home.”
“You’re sure?”
“What did I just say?”
“One of the abduction victims is my daughter. If I don’t get her back, I’m going to be looking you up,” I said. I broke the connection. I looked at Clete. “That was St. Mary Parish. Nobody is home at Croix du Sud.”
“I don’t buy it,” he said.
“Because you don’t want to,” I said.
“No, I scoped the place out. There was a guard standing in back by the gazebo. I took my eyes off him for two seconds and he was gone, and I mean gone. There was no way he could have entered the house or walked around the side without me seeing him. He never moved ten feet from that gazebo.”
“So what are you saying?”
“There’s got to be a subterranean entrance somewhere close to the gazebo. You ever hear stories about tunnels or basements in that place?”
“No. But the house is over a hundred and fifty years old. There’s no telling what’s under it.”
“I’m going out there. You coming or not?”
I knew what would happen if I stayed at the Sugar Cane Festival Building. I would have to take charge of the crime scene and wait on the coroner and coordinate with Helen and make sure all the evidence was bagged and tagged and the scene secured and the body removed and taken to Iberia General. Then I would have to send someone, if not myself, to notify Julie’s family. In the meantime, word would leak out that a woman had been murdered in the building, and the next problem on my hands would be crowd control. While all this was taking place, my daughter would be in the hands of men who had the mercy of centipedes.
A deputy got out of a cruiser holding a video camera and a Steadicam. “I found these by the entrance to the park, Dave. They’d already been run over. Does this have anything to do with Alafair being kidnapped?”
“Give them to the tech. We need any prints we can lift off them,” I said. Clete was already walking toward his Caddy. “Wait up!” I said.
We headed out of the park and, in some ways, I suspected, out of my career in law enforcement. At a certain age, you accept that nothing is forever, not even the wintry season that seems to define your life. I began dialing Molly’s cell number to tell her where I was.
“Don’t tell anyone where we’re going, Dave,” Clete said.
“That makes no sense.”
“If nobody is at the Dupree place, if I’m all wrong, we come straight back. But if we can get our hands on Pierre or Alexis or any of their hired help, we can get the information we need. We can’t blow this one, partner. Rules are for people who want to feel good about themselves in the morning. They’re not for people who want to save their children’s lives.”
Clete had turned on the heater but was still shivering. I took off my coat and put it over his shoulders.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“I’ve got a corduroy shirt on. I don’t need it,” I replied.
“I’m not cold. My malaria kicks into gear sometimes.”
“You’ve got to go to the VA.”
He coughed deep in his chest and tried to pretend he was clearing his throat. “I’ve got to tell you something, big mon. I haven’t done right by you. Because of me, you protected Gretchen and have probably gotten yourself in a lot of trouble with Helen.”
“I’m always in trouble with Helen.”
“When this is over, we’re all going down to the Keys. I’m going to pay for everything. It’s going to be like it used to be. We’re going to fish for marlin in blue water and fill up the locker with kingfish and dive for lobsters on Seven Mile Reef.”
“You bet,” I said.
He was looking straight ahead, the soft green glow of the dashboard lighting his face, hollowing his eyes. “I got this sick feeling in my stomach,” he said. “Like everything is ending. Like I’ve been full of shit for a lifetime but I never owned up to it.”
“Don’t say that about yourself.”
“Gretchen paid the tab for my mistakes. When you steal a little girl’s childhood, you can never give it back.”
“You’ve tried to square it for years. Don’t blame yourself, Clete.”
“I’ve got an AK in the trunk.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s modified, but it’s untraceable. No matter what else happens, the guys who killed Julie are going down.”
“Can’t let you do that, podna.”
“You know I’m right. Don’t pretend you don’t.”
I kept my eyes straight ahead. We were speeding down the two-lane toward Jeanerette, the bayou chained with fog under the moon, the Angus in the fields clustered under the live oaks. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he clicked on the FM station from the university in Lafayette. The DJ was playing “Faded Love” by Bob Wills. I stared at the radio, then at Clete.
“You said Gretchen was whistling ‘The San Antonio Rose’ the night you saw her clip Bix Golightly?”
“Do you have to put it that way?”
“Does it make sense that a girl from Miami would be whistling a Western tune written seventy years ago?”
“I asked her about that. She said she heard it on a car radio, and it stuck in her head.” He was looking at the road while he spoke.
“She heard it on a car radio in Algiers?”
“Yeah.”
“And she didn’t do the hit on Waylon Grimes?”
“No.”
“Was the car playing the song not far from Grimes’s place?”
He looked at me. “I’m not sure. I didn’t ask.”
“Varina Leboeuf is big on Western art and music and clothes. She collects Indian artifacts from the Southwest.”
“You think she did the hit on Grimes? Maybe on Frankie Gee at the bus depot in Baton Rouge?”
“I don’t know. On this one, I’ve been in the dark since Jump Street, Clete.”
“Join the club,” he said. We came around a bend covered with shadows; he clicked on his brights. “I don’t believe it.”
“Pull over,” I said.
“What’d you think I was going to do? Run her down?”
“It’s a thought,” I replied.
Parked by the side of the road was a Saab convertible, its frame mashed down on a collapsed rear tire. Varina Leboeuf stood next to the Saab, drenched in the glare of Clete’s high beams. Behind her, inside a stand of persimmon trees and water oaks, was a cemetery filled with whitewashed brick and stucco crypts, most of them tilted at odd angles, sinking into the softness of the mold and lichen and wet soil that seldom saw daylight.
I got out on the passenger side. The headlights were in her eyes, and it was obvious she could barely make out who I was. “You sure have bad luck with tires,” I said.
“Yeah, and I told you why. My ex-husband has tried to screw me out of every dime he could,” she said.
“Want a lift?”
“No, I was just about to call AAA,” she replied.
“The AAA service in this area not only sucks, it’s nonexistent,” I said. “You’re headed for Croix du Sud?”
“No, I’m not. If it’s any of your business, I’m supposed to meet friends at the Yellow Bowl for supper. I wanted to cancel, but I couldn’t reach them.”
“Hop in,” I said.
“I don’t like the way you’ve treated me, Dave.”
“Get in front, Varina,” Clete said. “Dave can ride in back. It’s time for a truce, isn’t it?”
While I got in back and Varina got in front, Clete stepped outside the Caddy and removed my coat from his shoulders and tossed it to me.
“You need this,” I said.
“I’ve got a blanket in the trunk,” he replied.
Clete popped the hatch on the trunk, blocking the view of anyone looking through the back window. He strapped his Marine Corps KA-BAR knife high up on his left calf and pulled his trouser leg over it. Then he lifted a blanket out of the trunk and draped it over his shoulders and picked up his pistol-grip AK-47 and held it in his left hand and covered it with the blanket. When he got back in the car, he tightened the blanket around him and looked into Varina’s face and smiled. “We want to talk to Pierre. Want to help us with that?” he said.
“No,” she said, staring wanly through the windshield.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I don’t know or care where he is.”
“Think Pierre is capable of kidnapping or hurting our daughters?” Clete said.
“He’s a sick man, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“How about his grandfather? Does he qualify as sick?” Clete said.
“Why ask me?”
“Because you lived with him. Is Alexis Dupree a sadist?” Clete asked.
“I’m really tired, Clete,” she said. “I’m sorry about what’s happened. I wish I never met the Dupree family. I don’t know what else to say.”
Clete dropped the gearshift into drive. “You’re quite a gal,” he said.
She stared uncertainly at the side of his face as the Caddy inched off the road’s shoulder onto the asphalt, gravel clicking under the tires.
We passed Alice Plantation and entered a tunnel of magnificent live oaks that arched over the road, then passed another Greek-columned antebellum home and clanked across the drawbridge and passed a community of trailers leaking rust into the ground and entered the village of Jeanerette, Louisiana, where approximately one-third of the population eked out an existence below the poverty line.
“How’d you like living over here, Varina?” Clete said.
“I hated it,” she replied.
“Where do you want out?”
“Every place is closed,” she said. “At eight o’clock the whole town turns into a mausoleum. A 747 could crash on it and nobody would notice.”
“We don’t have time to take you to the Yellow Bowl,” he said.
“I’ll go with you to Pierre’s and borrow one of his cars.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Tell me something-does Pierre have a basement in that dump?”
“There’s a dank hole down there. It has water in it most of the time. Why?”
“No reason,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. A guy who owned it in the nineteenth century was a business partner of the guy who created Angola pen. Something like two thousand convicts died when this guy rented them out as slave labor. It’s the kind of history that makes you proud to be an American.”
“Yes, I know all about that,” she said. “But I’m a bit tired of feeling guilty about things I didn’t do. Maybe people make their own beds.”
“I wish I had that kind of clarity,” he said. “It must be great.”
I could see the color climbing in the back of Varina’s neck. As though she could read my thoughts, she turned and looked at me. “Are you just going to sit there?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Would you be gentleman enough to tell your fat fuck of a friend to shut up?”
I don’t know if the word “entitlement” would apply to Varina’s behavior, or “arrogance” and “narcissism.” She possessed the same surreal mentality common among higher-class women in southern society of years ago. The self-centeredness and disconnection from reality were so egregious that it often made you wonder if you had the problem, not the spoiled bunch who believed the sun rose and set upon their anointed brows. But Varina did not come from that class of people. Her father had been from the red-clay country of North Louisiana and knew the world of sweat and cotton poison and trysts with black girls taken from the field into a barn. Maybe these contradictions were the source of the mystery that lived in her eyes and hovered around her mouth. Most men wish to be beguiled. And nobody was better at it than Varina. No matter how all this played out, I believed she would remain glamorous and seductive, beautiful and unknowable, to the very end.
When I didn’t answer her question, she looked back at the road, then out the side window. Once again, she seemed wan and distant, and I wondered if her statement about people making their own beds was intended to apply to herself rather than to others.
We drove through the far end of town, the lawns stiff with frost, the houses dark, the moon shining on a backdrop of post-harvest sugarcane fields that were frozen and spiked with stubble and splintered cane. Clete depressed his turn indicator as we approached Croix du Sud. As we turned in to the driveway and passed through the open gates, I could see the blinking red reflection of the left rear light dancing on the stone pillars at the entrance and the deep green waxy leaves of the camellia bushes planted along the driveway, perhaps like a warning of things to come.
The house was dark except for the light on the porch.
“Pull around back,” Varina said.
“Why?” Clete said.
“Pierre leaves a key above the door. I’m going to take one of his cars.”
I felt my cell phone throb against my thigh. I opened it and looked at the caller ID. Clete drove past the carriage house and stopped at the edge of the concrete parking pad, the headlights burrowing through the darkness onto the bayou’s surface, where a single-engine pontoon plane was moored inside the fog. The call was from Catin Segura, the female deputy Jesse Leboeuf had beaten and raped. “I lied to you, Dave,” she said.