Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

He shaved and showered and wet-combed his hair, trying to keep his mind empty, trying not to think about the people he was about to see and the situation he was about to place himself in. He put on a flaming-red long-sleeve silk shirt and his gray suit and a pair of black dress shoes he kept stored in velvet bags with drawstrings. Then he took his Panama hat off his closet shelf and fitted it low on his brow and walked down the stairs into the breezeway and told Alice Werenhaus she could go home early.

“You’re bringing a guest here?” she asked. “Because if you are, you don’t have to hide your behavior from me.”

“No, it’s just a fine afternoon, and you deserve some time off, Miss Alice.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m raising your salary by one hundred a week.”

“You pay me adequately. You don’t have to do that.”

“I just sold a waterfront lot I’ve been hiding from my ex-wife’s lawyers. I’d rather give the capital gains to you than the IRS.”

“Is that legal?”

“Miss Alice, tax laws are written by rich guys for rich guys. But in answer to your question, yeah, it’s legal. I’m just cleaning house a little bit, know what I mean?”

“Thank you very much,” she said. “You’re a very good man, Mr. Purcel.”

“Not really,” he replied.

“Don’t you dare say that of yourself again,” she said.

He lifted his hat to her and walked down to the old district headquarters on Royal and Conti and entered the lions’ den.

DANA MAGELLI CAME out to the reception desk and walked with Clete to his office. Clete knew almost all the personnel in the room, but they looked right through him or found other ways not to see him. Magelli shut the door. Clete gazed through the glass at the cops working at their desks or getting coffee or talking on the telephone. Then he looked out the office window at the palm trees and the motorcycles and cruisers parked at the curb. He also looked at the Crescent City logo painted on their immaculate white paint jobs. He wondered at what exact point he had taken a wrong turn into the cul-de-

sac that had become his life. “You look sharp,” Dana said.

“What were you going to tell me about the Luger?” Clete asked.

“It was issued in 1942 to a junior German submarine officer by the name of Karl Engels. But this guy Engels didn’t stay in the navy. He transferred into the SS.”

“You can run numbers on German ordnance issued in 1942?”

“How about that?”

“You went through the CIA or the National Security Agency or something?”

“No, a reference librarian up St. Charles. She could find the street address of the caveman who invented the wheel.”

Clete was sitting in a chair by the window, his hat crown-down on Dana’s desk. He put his hand inside his shirt and scratched a place on his shoulder. “What happened to Karl Engels?”

“My reference friend went through a bunch of German veterans’ organizations and found some records on a Karl Engels who was stationed in Paris until late 1943. And that’s it.”

“Why’d you have all this interest in the Luger?”

“It started out as routine. We found information in Golightly’s computer that indicated he was mixed up with Dupree in a stolen-painting scam of some kind. The more I thought about the possible connection between the Luger and Alexis Dupree, the more I thought about something my wife had told me.”

“Told you what?”

“We’d met Alexis Dupree two or three times at social functions. Everybody had heard about his work in the French underground. My wife is from Wiesbaden. She speaks both German and French and teaches in the language department at Tulane. She heard Dupree speaking German to someone. She said his German was perfect. She went up to him and spoke to him in French. She said he had an accent, a bad one, and it was obvious that French was not his first language.”

“You think Karl Engels is Dupree?”

“That’s anybody’s guess.”

Clete picked up his hat and smoothed the brim. He looked through the glass at the squad room and all the cops at their desks. “I need to get something off my chest,” he said. “Out there, I’m the Invisible Man or the spit on the sidewalk, take your choice. I’ve got no beef about y’all’s attitude toward me. I took money from the Giacanos. I also did security for a mobbed-up guy out west. I haven’t helped matters by knocking around a couple of your detectives. But I never braced a cop who was on the square, not in New Orleans or anywhere else.”