“I didn’t mean what I said.”
“Your feelings are justified.”
“I thought you were dreaming about Vietnam. I heard you say ‘incoming.’”
“I don’t remember what I was dreaming about,” I lied, my gaze fixed on the pirogue settling in a frothy whirlpool beneath the current.
UNLESS A FELON walks into a police station and confesses his crime, or unless he is caught in the commission of the crime, there are only two ways, from an evidentiary point of view, that the crime is solved and given prosecutable status. A detective either follows a chain of evidence to the suspect, or the detective begins with the suspect and, in retrograde fashion, follows the evidence back to the crime. So far I had no demonstrable evidence to link Pierre Dupree to Tee Jolie Melton or her sister, Blue. But there was one thing I knew about him for certain: He was a liar. He had denied knowing Tee Jolie, even though his painting of the reclining nude looked very much like her; second, he had claimed that years ago he had gotten rid of the safe from which Frankie Giacano had taken Clete Purcel’s IOU.
So where do you start when you want to find out everything you can about a man whose physical dimensions and latent anger give most men serious pause?
His ex-to-be might be a good beginning.
Varina Leboeuf Dupree had once been known as the wet dream of every fraternity boy on the LSU campus. By the time she was twenty-five, she had proved she could break hearts and bank accounts and succeed at business in a male-oriented culture in which women might be admired but were usually thought of as acquisitions. She was certainly nothing like her father, a retired Iberia sheriff’s detective, the mention of whose name would cause black people to lower their eyes lest they reveal the fear and loathing he instilled in them. Jesse Leboeuf had named his daughter for Jefferson Davis’s wife, I suspect in hopes that it would allow her to occupy the social station that would never be his or his wife’s. Unfortunately for him, Varina Leboeuf did things her own way, couldn’t have cared less about her social station, and made sure everyone knew it. In college she wore her dark brown hair in braids wrapped around her head, sometimes with Mardi Gras beads woven in. She wore peasant dresses to dances, jeans and pink tennis shoes without socks to church, and once, when her pastor asked her to greet a famous televangelical leader at the airport, she arrived barefoot and braless at the Lafayette concourse in an evening gown that looked like sherbet running down her skin.
She was scandalous and beautiful and often had a pout that begged to be kissed. Some condemned her as profligate, but she always seemed to enter into her affairs without anger or need and depart from them in the same fashion. Even though she broke hearts, I had never heard one of her former lovers speak ill of her. In the American South, there is a crude expression often used to define the plantation-bred protocol of both conjugal and extramarital relationships. The statement is offensive and coarse and is of the kind that is whispered with a hand to the mouth, but there is no question about its accuracy inside the world in which I grew up: “You marry up and you screw down.” I heard some women say Varina married up. I didn’t agree. By the same token, I didn’t understand why she had married into the Dupree family or why she had taken up residence in St. Mary Parish, a place where convention and sycophancy and Shintoism were institutions.
On Monday morning I signed out of the office and drove in my pickup down to Cypremort Point, a narrow strip of land extending into West Cote Blanche Bay, where Varina’s father lived among cypress and oak trees in a beachfront house elevated on pilings. Jesse Leboeuf was a Cajun but originally from North Louisiana and the kind of lawman other cops treat with caution rather than respect, in the same way you walk around an unpredictable guard dog, or a gunbull whose presence in the tower can make a convict’s face twitch with anxiety, or a door gunner who volunteers for as much trigger time as possible in free-fire zones. Jesse had abused himself with whiskey and cigarettes for a lifetime but showed no signs of physical decay. When I found him on his back porch, he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette, gazing at the bay, his outboard boat rocking against his small dock. He rose to greet me, his hand enveloping mine, his face as stolid as boilerplate, his hair flat-topped and boxed and shiny with butch wax. “You want to know where my little girl is at?” he said.
I had left a message on his phone and wondered why he had not simply called me back. But Jesse was not a man whose motivations you openly questioned. “It’s a nice day to take a drive, so I thought I’d stop by,” I said.
He pushed a chair toward me. “You want a drink?” he said.
“I just wanted to ask Miss Varina a couple of questions about her husband.”
“If I was you, I’d leave him alone. Unless you’re planning to shoot him.”
“I have reason to believe he might have ties to the Giacano family.”
He puffed on his cigarette and laughed behind the smoke. “Are you serious?”
“You don’t think Pierre would associate with criminals?”
“The Duprees don’t associate with minorities of any kind, particularly New Orleans dagos. My daughter had all of it she could take.”
“All of what?”
“The fact that the Duprees think their shit don’t stink. The only time they make allowances for other groups of people is when a piece of tail floats by that one of them might be interested in.”
“You’re talking about Pierre?”
“My daughter is getting shut of them, that’s all that counts.” He watched a boat with outriggers cutting across the chop. He took a last hit on his cigarette and flicked it out on the water. “Isn’t this oil spill enough to worry about? Yesterday afternoon my crab traps was loaded to the top of the wire. When I put them in the boiler, every one of them had oil inside the shell. I hear it’s the same with the oyster beds. They say there’s shitloads of sludge plumb to the continental shelf.” He lit another cigarette and puffed on it, the smoke leaking slowly from his mouth.
“I think Pierre Dupree is dirty,” I said.
“Dirty for what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sounds like you got a problem.”
“You ever see a boat around here with the emblem of a fish on the bow? A Chris-Craft with a white hull?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
I was getting nowhere. I asked for his daughter’s phone number.
“Why not just leave her alone?” he said.