Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

I took her by the arm and pulled her down to Julie Ardoin’s empty chair. “Are you telling us Alafair and Gretchen are in harm’s way?” I said.

“God, you’re an idiot. Do I have to write it on the wall?” she said. She walked away from us, her southwestern prairie skirt swishing on the backs of her legs.

“She’s wearing a gold belt,” Clete said.

“So what?”

“So was the woman I saw with Pierre Dupree at Dupree’s house.”

My head was splitting.

I WENT BACK to my seat. Molly was still sitting by herself. “You didn’t see Alf?” I said.

“No. She wasn’t with Clete?” she said.

“She and Gretchen went to the restroom with Julie Ardoin. I thought maybe she came back here.”

“She’s fine. Stop worrying. Come on, Dave, enjoy yourself.”

“Vari

na Leboeuf said some gumballs who want to hurt Gretchen were outside, and so were Alafair and Gretchen.”

“Varina likes to stir things up. She’s a manipulator. She wants to stick pins in Clete for dumping her. Now sit down.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Where’s Clete?”

“Looking for Gretchen.”

“I’m coming, too.”

“No, stay here. Alafair won’t know where we are if she comes back and you’re gone.”

Maybe I was losing it, as Clete had said. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Would a couple of goons try to do payback on Gretchen Horowitz at a music festival attended by hundreds of people? Was Varina Leboeuf telling the truth? Was she a mixture of good and evil rather than the morally bankrupt person I had come to regard her as? Did she have parameters I hadn’t given her credit for?

Clete and I had thrown away the rule book and were paying the price. We had protected Gretchen Horowitz and, in the meantime, had accomplished nothing in solving the abduction of Tee Jolie Melton and the murder of her sister, Blue. The greatest irony of all was the fact that our adversaries, whoever they were, thought we had information about them that we didn’t. Ultimately, what was it all about? The answer was oil: millions of barrels of it that had settled on the bottom of the Gulf or that were floating northward, like brownish-red fingers, into Louisiana’s wetlands. But dwelling on an environmental catastrophe in the industrial era did little or no good. It was like watching the casket of one’s slain son or daughter being lowered into the ground and trying to analyze the causes of war at the same time. The real villains always skated. The soldier paid the dues; a light went out forever in someone’s home; and the rest of us went on with our lives. The scenario has never changed. The faces of the players might change, but the original script was probably written in charcoal on the wall of a cave long ago, and I believe we’ve conceded to its demands ever since.

At the moment I didn’t care about the oil in the Gulf or Gretchen Horowitz or even Tee Jolie Melton. I didn’t care about my state or my job or honor or right and wrong. I wanted my daughter, Alafair, at my side, and I wanted to go home with her and my wife, Molly, and be with our pets, Tripod and Snuggs, in our kitchen, the doors locked and the windows fastened, all of us gathered around a table where we would break and share bread and give no heed to winter storms or the leaves shedding with the season and the tidal ebb that drained the Teche of its water.

The acceptance of mortality in one’s life is no easy matter. But anyone who says he has accepted the premature mortality of his child is lying. There is an enormous difference between living with a child’s death and accepting it. The former takes a type of courage that few people understand. Why was I having these thoughts? Because I felt sick inside. I felt sick because I knew that Clete and I had provoked a group of people who were genuinely iniquitous and who planned to hurt us as badly as they could, no matter what the cost. This may seem like a problematic raison d’être for the behavior of villainous individuals, unless you consider that there are groups of people in our midst who steal elections, commit war crimes, pollute the water we drink and the air we breathe, and get away with all of it.

I went outside through the front door and circled around the side of the building. The air was cold, the wind biting, and in the north the sky piled with clouds that looked as though they contained both snow and electricity. Bobby Joe Guidry was latching the doors on the freezer compartments of his truck.

“Did you see Miss Julie with a couple of young women?” I asked.

“I didn’t see Miss Julie,” he replied. “There were a couple of young women here, though.”

“What did they look like?”

“One had long black hair. The other one looked kind of AC/DC, know what I mean? Her eyes were purple.”

“That’s my daughter, Alafair, and her friend.”

“Sorry.”

“Where did they go?”