Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“I’m truly sorry, Mr. Robicheaux. That’s an unforgivable thing to say to someone.”

“A detective at NOPD called me about the assault on you and your friends in the restaurant. Your grandfather says you don’t have much confidence in the system, so you didn’t report it and apparently wrote it off. That’s an extremely forgiving attitude, don’t you think?”

“Do you know what the media would do with that story? Three grown men beaten into pulp by one young woman? I have a hard time explaining it to myself.”

“What do you think provoked her?”

“She said she was from the Guggenheim in New York. Then she went crazy.”

“She didn’t like your paintings?”

“Did you come here to bait me?”

“A minister just left your home. That was Amidee Broussard, wasn’t it? I’ve seen his television broadcast several times. He knows how to deliver the vote,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“Abortion, gay marriage, that sort of thing, it works every time.”

Pierre removed a pill from a bottle on his nightstand and put it on his tongue. He flinched when he shifted himself in bed, and I realized he had probably been hit in places that would hurt for a long time. “Would you pour me a glass of mineral water, please?”

I filled a glass from a green bottle on the nightstand and handed it to him. His show of dependence and his desire to make me into a caretaker seemed more thespian than real, and I wondered if anything in the Dupree manor went deeper than the cheap facade on a stage set. He turned his head on the pillow and gazed wistfully out the window, like a caricature of royalty in exile. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.

“Why not come clean on this stuff and put it behind you?” I said.

He nodded slightly, as though ending a philosophic debate with himself. “I insulted her. That’s why she attacked me. I called her a kike.”

“Even though your grandfather is a holocaust survivor?”

“That’s why I did it. I get tired of hearing Gran’père’s constant replay of his ordeal. Did you know my mother?”

“No, I did not.”

“She was a suicide. She jumped from a passenger liner off the Canary Islands.”

This time it was I who didn’t speak. I didn’t want to hear about the fortunes or misfortunes of his family. For a lifetime, I had witnessed the damage the Duprees and their relatives and their corporate partners had done to the poor and the powerless. Worse, their arrogance and imperious behavior had always existed in inverse proportion to the defenselessness of the working people they exploited and injured.

“Do you know who my father is?” he asked.

“No, I never knew him.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You know my father. He’s still alive. You were just talking with him downstairs. Alexis Dupree is both my grandfather and my father. My mother was his daughter.”

I searched his face, his eyes, his body language, looking for the blink, the tic in the cheek, the stiffness in the lips, the twitch in the hand that signals a lie. I saw none of those things.

“Maybe you should be telling these things to a clinician,” I said. “I’m here for only one reason. Dana Magelli, my friend at NOPD, called to find out why somebody of your background would allow himself and his friends to be assaulted and not call 911. I don

’t think you’ve provided an adequate answer. What are the names of the two men who were with you at the restaurant?”

“Ask them when you find them. I’m not interested in talking about this anymore.”

“This kind of doodah isn’t working for you, podna,” I said, my anger growing. “I think you were in business with Bix Golightly and Frankie Giacano and Waylon Grimes. It had something to do with stolen or fraudulent paintings. You’re also involved in something far bigger and more important. Bix and Frankie and Waylon are worm food now, but in reality, they were never players. What are you and your wife and your father-in-law and that televangelical huckster up to, Pierre? The bunch of you always give me the feeling you have Vitalis oozing out your pores.”

As I laughed openly at him, I saw his face cloud and his eyes darken, as though the needle of a phonograph he’d been playing had jumped off the record. Then he bit his bottom lip, refocusing. “I hurt her fingers,” he said.