Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“I don’t know how it got there. He went to the trunk for a blanket. Maybe the gun was in the trunk.”

“This is foolish talk,” Alexis said. “The two of you are nattering magpies.”

“Shut up, you pitiful old fuck,” Varina said.

I saw Clete looking at me, the light in his eyes intensifying. It wasn’t hard to read the message: Divide and conquer.

“Lamont Woolsey gave you guys up,” I said.

Varina and Pierre and Alexis all turned and stared at me.

“Woolsey thinks he’s going down for the hit on Ozone Eddy Mouton and his girlfriend,” I said.

“Who is Ozone Eddy?” Pierre said, a laugh starting to break on his face.

“I guess you’re not up-to-date,” I said. “Your buddy Woolsey had Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend burned to death in the trunk of an automobile after Clete stomped Woolsey’s face in. Woolsey doesn’t like the idea of being a tube of lubricant at Angola. So he told me a few things about your operation. I’ve got it on tape, if you want to hear it.”

“I spoke with him this afternoon,” Pierre said. “He’s fishing in the Bahamas. He seemed quite relaxed to me.”

I took a chance. “You guys made a lot of money off forged artworks. Then y’all invested it in Varina’s electronic security service and offshore well supply. You should have been multimillionaires many times over. Too bad it turned to shit on you.”

I could see the pause in their eyes, the doubt, the glimmer of uncertainty and calculation that characterizes the thinking of all manipulators.

“Somebody has to take the fall for the blowout,” I said. “A lot of people thought the issue was the centralizers down in the hole. That was never it at all, was it? The electronic warning system failed. That’s your area, isn’t it?”

“Show him,” Alexis said.

“Show me wh

at?” I said.

“Dave, I didn’t want this to happen,” Varina said.

“Yeah, you did, Varina. None of these guys had the brains or charm to run an operation like this. You were always a winner. Men loved and admired you, and women were jealous of you. You could have been anything you wanted. Why’d you throw in with a bunch of losers like these guys?”

“Show him,” Alexis Dupree repeated, his voice sharpening, the blood draining from around his mouth.

“You’ve made Gran’père angry,” Pierre said. “That’s not good for you or your friend or Alafair and Gretchen, Mr. Robicheaux. Gran’père doesn’t have parameters. He has appetites of the most unusual kind.”

He opened a wood door that gave onto a barred cell. The floor was spread with a rubber tarp. A cast-iron sarcophagus had been set horizontally at the rear of the room, its hinged lid open and resting against the wall. At the bottom of the sarcophagus were slits that I suspected were drains. The inside of the lid was patterned with rows of spikes shaped like stalactites. Alafair and Gretchen were sitting in the corner, wrists and ankles fastened behind them with ligatures, mouths taped. Gretchen was bleeding from a cut at her hairline. I saw Alafair’s mouth working, as though trying to loosen the adhesive on her cheeks.

“You gutless sack of shit,” I said to Pierre.

“You might be formally educated, but you’re a coarse man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “As Gran’père would say, we can scrub everything out of the lower classes except the genes. Gretchen is going to go first. It’s a nasty business. You can watch it or not. If you choose not to watch, believe me, you will hear it. Where’s the tape you made of Lamont’s confession?”

“In Clete’s office,” I said.

“Why is it I don’t believe anything you say? What you don’t understand, Mr. Robicheaux, is that we don’t have anything to lose at this point. Do you think we plan to spend years in litigation while every cent we have is taken away from us? Do you think we plan to sell this beautiful historical home to pay years of legal fees because of you and your friend?”

“There’s no way you can get away with this, Dupree,” Clete said. “You think Helen Soileau won’t figure out where we are?”

“Would you like to talk to her?” Pierre said.

“Can you stop talking, Pierre?” Varina said. “Just for once, please stop talking. I would take a vow of celibacy if you would take a vow of silence.”

“My, my, daddy’s little angel. If you’re an angel, you’re Lucifer in female form,” Pierre said. “Think back, Varina. Who led these men into our lives again and again? You put your lovers on video while you were screwing. That’s like robbing a bank and leaving your driver’s license inside the vault. Oh, I forgot. You didn’t have to compromise our security situation. Your idiot of a father did that when he told his minions our operation was run by his petit ange.”

“Don’t speak of my father like that,” Varina said.