Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Whose?”

“You asked me what provoked the woman. I clutched her fingers in mine and squeezed until I thought they would break. I made fun of her while I did it. I also enjoyed it. Ask yourself what kind of man would do that to a woman. That’s why I didn’t call the police.”

“Then you had a conversion while you were lying in sick bay?”

“I just told you the dirtiest secrets in the history of my family. You think I do it to extract sympathy? I told all this to Reverend Broussard. My grandfather stole my childhood and destroyed my mother. All these years I’ve defended him. You know why? He’s the only family I had.”

A good liar always threads an element of truth inside his deception. I didn’t know if that was the case with Pierre Dupree. His hands seemed unnaturally large on top of the sheet. They were broad and thick and not the hands of an artist or a musician or a sculptor who worked with clay. They were the hands of a man who had almost broken a woman’s fingers. I did not believe that Pierre Dupree told lies simply to deceive others. I believed he told lies to deceive himself as well. I believed he was a genetic nightmare and a validation of Hitler and Himmler’s belief that pure evil could be passed on through the loins.

I DROVE OUT of the Dupree enclave onto the two-lane and headed back toward New Iberia. To the south, there were clouds that resembled black curds of smoke from an industrial fire, and I wondered if cleanup crews out on the salt were burning off some of the two million gallons of oil from the blowout or if those clouds were just clouds, swollen with rain and electricity and a smell that in summertime is like iodine and seaweed and small baitfish. As I neared New Iberia, the sun went behind the clouds and the wind came up and the cane fields and the corridors of live oaks and the light winking on Bayou Teche turned the world into the Louisiana of my youth. Wilderness enow, the poet wrote. But that’s all it was, a dream, like the lyrics in Jimmy Clanton’s famous song from the year 1958.

TEN MINUTES LATER, I parked the cruiser in front of Clete Purcel’s office on Main and went inside. Behind the reception desk, Gretchen Horowitz was eating take-out Chinese with chopsticks. Three loungers were sitting on the folding chairs, smoking, grinding out their cigarettes on the floor, and picking at their fingernails. “Where’s Clete?” I said.

“Not here,” Gretchen said, poking a tangle of noodles into her mouth, not bothering to look at me.

I reversed the “open” sign on the door so that it read “closed” to the outside world. I dropped the blinds on the door and the big glass window in front. “You three dudes beat it,” I said.

They didn’t move. One of them was hatchet-faced and had the crystalline-clear eyes of either a meth addict or a psychopath. Another had a rattail haircut and rings in his eyebrows and a dark blue tattoo of a penis and testicles on his throat. The third man was dressed in bib overalls and had the gargantuan proportions and body odor of an elephant in rut. His arms were wrapped with one-color ink from the wrist to the armpit, a form of tattooing that is painful and prolonged and inside the system is called “wearing sleeves.” There were no words inside his tats, but the message to the viewer on the yard was clear: “If you want to finish your time, don’t fuck with me.”

I opened my badge holder. “I don’t think y’all are from around here. If you’re Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine’s bail skips, I recommend you get your ass back to New Orleans. Regardless, get out of the office and don’t come back until you see me leave.”

“What if we don’t?” the large man said.

“We’ll make you take a shower,” I said.

After they were gone, I locked the door.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Gretchen said, poking at her noodles.

“Bringing you up-to-date.”

“You got accepted by the Premature Ejaculators Society?”

“Number one, you don’t tell an Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective to fuck himself.”

“Oh, gee, I feel terrible about that.”

I dragged a metal chair over to the desk and sat down. She kept eating, never looking up.

“I’m not sure who you are, Gretchen. Maybe you’re more snap-crackle-and-pop than substance. Maybe you’ve been knocked around a bit. Or maybe you’ve been over on the dark side. It doesn’t matter. The people who live inside Croix du Sud Plantation may look like the rest of us, but they’re not. I cannot tell you what they are, but I can tell you what they are not. The three dudes I just kicked out of here are recidivists who will never figure out they serve the interests of people who want to keep the rest of us distracted. Does any of that make sense to you?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, as though trying to work her way through my question. “I’ve got it. You shut down your friend’s office and run his clients out of town because you have access to knowledge that nobody else does?”

“You’re an intelligent woman. Why don’t you stop acting like a juvenile delinquent? I just finished talking with Alexis Dupree. While he was in another room, I looked in a journal that he’s evidently kept over the years. There were at least two dozen locks of hair between the last pages.”

She had been stirring the noodles in the box, but her hand slowed and stopped, and she blinked once and then looked at nothing. “Did you say anything to him?” she asked.

“No. But I think he knows I saw the locks of hair.”

“What was the name of the place he was in?”

“Ravensbrück,” I said.

“Didn’t they cut the hair off the people they killed?”

“Yes, particularly in the women’s camps,” I replied.

“Maybe he’s just an old man on the make. Maybe he’s a trophy-sex addict.”