Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“It’s just a metaphor,” I said.

“Next time hand out barf bags in advance,” she said.

“Both of you stop it,” Molly said.

“Varina is part of a cabal of some kind. Clete got ahold of some incriminating video footage that he destroyed, but Varina believes he still has it. The guy I can’t get out of my head is Alexis Dupree. I think he was in the SS, and I think he worked in an extermination camp in Eastern Europe.”

“How did you arrive at all this?” Molly said.

“Dupree is the opposite of everything he says about himself,” I said.

“That’s convenient.”

“You think he

’s a veteran of the French underground, a man of the people? He and his family terrorized the farmworkers you tried to organize,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean he’s an ex-Nazi.”

I set my knife and fork down on the edges of my plate as softly as I could and left the table, my temples pounding. I went out on the gallery and sat down on the front steps and looked at the fireflies lighting in the trees and the leaves blowing end over end down the sidewalk. I saw a cardboard box wrapped in brown paper next to the bottom step, the wrapping paper folded in tight corners and sealed neatly with shipping tape. There was no writing on the paper. I opened my pocketknife and sliced away the tape and peeled off the paper and pulled back the flaps on the box and peered inside. The packing material was a mixture of straw and wood curlicues that smelled like shaved pine. An envelope with a rose stem Scotch-taped across it rested on top of the straw. Inside the envelope was a thick card with silver scroll on the borders, a message written in the center in bright blue ink. I stared at the words for a long time, then moved some of the straw aside with my knife blade and looked in the box again. I put away my knife and pushed the box with my foot to the edge of the walk just as the door opened behind me. “Dave?” Molly said.

“I’ll be inside in a few minutes,” I said.

“You have to stop internalizing all these things. It’s like drinking poison.”

“You’re saying I bring my problems home instead of leaving them at the department?”

“That wasn’t what I meant at all.”

“I was agreeing with you. Clete and I met a guy named Lamont Woolsey. His eyes are so blue they’re almost purple. You know who else has violet eyes? Gretchen Horowitz.”

She sat down next to me, distraught, like someone watching a car accident about to happen. “What are you saying? Who’s Woolsey?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t think straight anymore. I don’t know who Woolsey is, and I don’t understand my own thoughts. I don’t have any right to drop all this on you and Alafair. That’s what I’m saying.”

She took my hand in hers. “I don’t think you see the real issue. You want Louisiana to be the way it was fifty years ago. Maybe the Duprees are evil, or maybe they’re just greedy. Either way, you have to let go of them. You also have to let go of the past.”

“In some of those camps, there were medical experiments done on children. The color of their eyes was changed synthetically.”

She released my hand and stared into the dark. “We have to put an end to this. You and Clete and I need to sit down and talk. But more of the same isn’t going to help.”

“I didn’t make any of it up.”

I could hear her breathing inside the dampness, as though her lungs were working improperly, as though the smell of the sugar refinery and the black lint off the smokestacks were catching in her throat. I didn’t know whether she was crying or not. I picked at my fingernails and stared at the streetlamps and at the leaves gusting in serpentine lines along the asphalt.

“What’s that?” she asked, looking into the shadows below the camellia bushes.

“Somebody left a box on the step.”

“What’s in it?”

“Take a look.”

She leaned over and pulled the box toward her by one of the flaps. She brushed away some of the packing material and tried to tilt the box toward her, but it was too heavy. Then she stood up and set it on the steps so the overhead light shone directly down on it. I could hear the bottles inside tinkling against one another. “Johnnie Walker Black Label?” she said.

“Check out the card.”

She pulled it from the envelope and read it aloud: “‘Charger would want you to have this. Merry Christmas, Loot.’” She looked at me blankly. “Who’s Charger?”