Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“I have no idea. We’ve settled all our business affairs. I hope I never see him again,” she replied. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

She turned and descended the steps, her small hand tightly gripping the rail, the hem of her prairie skirt bouncing on her calves. Clete stared into my face. “Can you read that broad?” he said.

“Not in a thousand years,” I replied.

I TOLD MOLLY what had happened and asked her to go home and wait by the phone. It was a foolish request. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Where is Pierre Dupree?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find him,” I said.

“Why would they want Alafair?” she said.

“They were after Gretchen. They only took Alafair because the two of them were together.”

“Who is ‘they’?” she said.

“Clete thinks this is all about payback. I don’t agree. I think Gretchen knows too much, and some people in Florida and probably here want her off the board.”

We were standing at the rear of the audience. The swing orchestra had been called back for an encore and was playing “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.”

“Dave, this isn’t happening,” Molly said.

“But it is. They’ve got my little girl.”

“She’s my ‘little girl,’ too. I didn’t believe you before. I wish I had,” she said.

“Believe what?”

“That you were dealing with something that’s diabolic. I wish I had believed every crazy story you told me.”

“Have you seen Varina Leboeuf in the last few minutes?” I asked.

“She was going out the front door. She stopped and put her hand on me and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I didn’t know what she meant. You think she’s involved?”

“I gave up trying to figure Varina out. She reminds me of Tee Jolie in some ways. I’d like to believe in her, but faith has its limits.”

“Forgive me for saying this, but I hate both those women,” Molly said.

Up on the stage, three female singers imitating the Andrews Sisters went into the chorus of a song that, with the passage of time, had somehow made the years between 1941 and 1945 a golden era rather than one that had cost the lives of thirty million people.

Clete and I waited outside in the cold while at least eight emergency vehicles began to turn in to both the north and south entrances of the park and thread their way through the oak trees. Clete wore no coat and was starting to shiver. I used my cell phone to call the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department and ask that a cruiser be sent to the Croix du Sud Plantation.

“What are we supposed to be looking for?” the deputy asked.

“We have a homicide and a double abduction in New Iberia,” I replied. “I want y’all to find out who’s home and who isn’t at the Dupree place.”

“What would the Dupree family know about an abduction?”

“I’m not sure. That’s why we’re requesting your assistance.”

“You’d better talk with the sheriff about this.”

“Where is he?”

“Duck hunting at Pecan Island. Problem is, I’m not supposed to give out his private number.”

“What does it take to get you to do your job?” I said.

I didn’t get to hear his reply. Clete Purcel tore the phone out of my hand. “You listen, you little piece of shit,” he said. “You go out to Croix du Sud and knock on their door and look in their windows and crawl under the house if you have to. Then you call us back and tell us what you find. If you don’t, I’m going to come over there and kick a telephone pole up your ass.”