Varina wasn’t over ten feet from me now, her hair blowing over her brow, her mouth vulnerable, like that of a child about to be scolded. I looked at the waves cresting and breaking into foam on the chunks of concrete, the petals on the Japanese tulip tree shredding in the wind.
“My father isn’t here. He went fishing,” she said. “He made a ham-and-egg sandwich and was eating it when he drove out at daybreak. I saw him.”
“No, that’s not where he went.”
“He put his poles and tackle box and a shiner bucket in the back of the truck. He wasn’t drinking. He went to bed early last night. Don’t tell me he’s drunk, Dave. I know better. He’s going to be fine.”
“Your father is dead.”
She started to speak, but her eyes filmed and went out of focus.
“Maybe we should go inside,” I said.
“He was in an accident? He’s dead in an accident?” she said, turning her head away as though avoiding her own words.
“He was shot to death in Jeanerette.”
She placed one hand on the rope of a swing suspended from an oak limb. The blood had drained from her face. She was wearing a yellow cowboy shirt with the top snap undone. She began pushing on it with her thumb, knotting the fabric, unable to snap the brad into place, her eyes fastened on mine. “He went to a bar?”
“He was in the home of an Iberia Parish deputy sheriff. I think you know who I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. He was going fishing. He’d been looking forward to it all week.”
“He raped and sodomized Catin Segura. He also beat her severely. A third party came into the house and shot and killed him.”
“My father isn’t a rapist. Why are you saying all this?” Her breath was coming too fast, she was like someone verging on hyperventilation, the color in her face changing.
“Do you have any idea who the shooter was?” I asked.
“I have to sit down. This is a trap of some kind. I know you, Dave. You were out to get my father.”
“You don’t know me at all. I always believed in you. I thought you were stand-up and honorable. I believed you beat the male-chauvinist oil bums around here at their own game. I was always on your side, but you never saw that.”
She was crying now, unashamedly, without anger or heat. There was a red dot on her chest where she had almost cut herself trying to snap her shirt. “Where is he?” she said.
“At Iberia General. Catin is at Iberia General, too. She has two children. I promised to take them to see her. It will probably be years
before Catin overcomes the damage that’s been done to her. Would it hurt if you talked to her?”
“Me?”
“Sometimes the Man Upstairs gives us a chance to turn things around in a way we never see coming. Do Catin and yourself a favor, Varina.”
“You want me to go in there and talk to the woman who claims she was sodomized by my father?”
“I saw her at the crime scene under an hour ago. What happened to that woman is not a claim.”
I was not sure she was hearing me anymore. She looked as though she were drowning, her eye shadow running, her cheeks wet. She started walking toward the kitchen entrance of her house, trying to hold her back straight, almost twisting her ankle when she stepped in a depression. I caught up with her and put my arm around her shoulders. I thought she might resist, but she didn’t.
“Listen to me. Cut loose from that fraudulent preacher, the Duprees, Lamont Woolsey, the rackets they’re involved in, the whole nefarious business. There’s still time to turn it around. Say ‘full throttle and fuck it’ and get this stuff out of your life forever.”
Then she did one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen a bereaved person do. She went up the steps into her kitchen and took a half-gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and sat at the same table where she had gotten Clete Purcel loaded and began eating the ice cream with a spoon, scraping its frozen hardness into curlicues, as though she were the only person in the room.
“Will you be all right if I leave?” I asked.
She looked at me blankly. I repeated my question.
“Look in the garage. You’ll see his spinning rod and ice chest and tackle box are gone. He was going to stop for shiners. He was going after sac-a-lait at Henderson Swamp.”
I put my business card on the table. “I’m sorry for your loss, Varina.”
She rested her forehead on her hand, her face wan. “He was poor and uneducated. Nobody ever helped him. All y’all did was condemn him. You should have helped him, Dave. You grew up poor. Your
parents were illiterate, just like his. You could have been his friend and helped him, but you didn’t.”
“Not everyone who grew up poor took out his grief on people of color. Your father wanted to do payback on me and probably took Catin as a second choice. That doesn’t make me feel too good, Varina,” I said. “Jesse victimized black women for decades. This time he got nailed. That’s the sum total of what happened. If you want to hear the truth, visit Iberia General and talk to Catin and cut the bullshit.”
“How can you talk to me like this? I just lost my father.”
“Your father dealt the play. Unless you accept that fact, you’ll carry his anger the rest of your life.”
“I wouldn’t go in that woman’s hospital room at gunpoint.”
“Good-bye, Varina,” I said.
I went outside and closed the screen door softly behind me and walked to the cruiser. I thought I heard her crying, but I had decided that Varina Leboeuf could not be helped by me or probably anyone else. I was glad that I was alive and that I owned my own soul and that I didn’t have to drink. To others, these might seem like minor victories, but when you are in the presence of the genuinely afflicted, you realize that the smallest gifts can be greater in value than the conquest of nations.
I
WENT TO
an A.A. meeting and to Mass that afternoon. Molly and I and Alafair had supper at home, and later, I drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. I knocked on the door, then realized he was down the slope, standing under the oaks by the bayou’s edge, fishing in an unlikely spot with a cane pole. I knew he had heard the sound of my pickup and that certainly he had heard me walk up behind him. But he continued to study his bobber floating on the edge of the current, the bronze glaze of the late sun flashing on the ripples. A mosquito was drawing blood from the back of his neck. I wiped it off his skin with my hand. “Got a reason for ignoring me?” I asked.
“I saw the news about Leboeuf, and I know what’s coming,” he replied.
“Where is Gretchen?”
“I haven’t seen her today.”
“I need to bring her in.”
“Then do it.”
“She got her mother loose from those guys in Florida?”
“Yeah, I told you.”
“How did she pull it off?”
“How do you think?” he said.
“She popped somebody?”
“Gretchen hasn’t done anything that we haven’t. We’ve probably done worse. Remember those Colombians? How about the time we went after Jimmie Lee Boggs? How about the way we nailed Louis Buchalter? Tell me you didn’t enjoy being under a black flag.”
I didn’t want to think about the years Clete and I had stayed high on booze and racetracks and the smell of cordite and, in my case, rage-induced blackouts that allowed me to do things I would never do in a rational state of mind. I did not want to say any more about his daughter; nonetheless, I did. “I think Gretchen may have been lying to you, Clete.”
He started to turn around but lifted his bobber out of the water and threw it and his sinker and hook farther out in the current. There was only a tiny thread of worm on the hook. “Lying about what?” he said.
“She claims she didn’t clip Waylon Grimes and Frankie Giacano. She told you she only clipped Bix Golightly, a guy who molested her and had it coming.”
“He didn’t just molest her. He forced his dick into her mouth.”
“I know that. But doesn’t it seem too convenient that Grimes and Frankie Gee get capped by somebody else? How about the abduction of her mother? Now the mother is free, and as soon as Gretchen is back in New Iberia, Jesse Leboeuf gets his eggs scrambled. In every situation, Gretchen is the victim.”
“Right or wrong, she’s my daughter. Of all people, you should understand that.”
“Alafair doesn’t do contract hits for the Mob.”
He broke his cane pole across his knee and flung both pieces into
the bayou and watched them drift upstream and disappear inside the band of bronze sunlight still shimmering on the surface. He continued to stare at the sunset on the water, his huge back rising and falling in the shadows.
“You all right?” I said.
“You piss me off sometimes, Dave.”
“Jesse Leboeuf ate two rounds before he fell into Catin Segura’s bathtub. He said something to the shooter before he died. The shooter could have put one in his mouth or through his forehead but evidently decided not to. For whatever reason, the shooter showed mercy. If Gretchen popped him, maybe she had to. His piece was on the dresser. But she didn’t shoot him a third time, which is what a contract hitter would have done.”
“What did Leboeuf say?” Clete asked.
“Catin doesn’t speak French.”
“You think the shooter was Gretchen?”
“Who else?”
“Give her a chance. Let me talk to her before you bring her in.”
“No dice.”
“I don’t know where she is. I’m telling you the truth.”
I believed him. Clete had never lied to me, at least not deliberately. I unfolded the gas receipt I had taken from Jesse Leboeuf’s wallet. “Leboeuf had this receipt for aviation fuel on him when he died. There’re some landing coordinates written on it. The coordinates are southeast of the Chandeleur Islands. I think that’s where Tee Jolie is.”
Clete rubbed the spot where the mosquito had bitten him. “I don’t like the things you said about Gretchen. Alafair had a loving home. Gretchen had guys shoving their cocks down her throat. That was a lousy crack you made.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. You want in or out?”
He folded his arms and cleared his throat and spat. “You know anybody with a seaplane?” he asked.
“Yeah, Julie Ardoin.”
“The one whose husband killed himself? She’s kind of a pill, isn’t she?”
“How many normal people does either of us know?” I replied.
J
ULIE’S HUSBAND HAD
been an offshore pilot and an untreated drug addict and, finally, a Saran-wrapped fundamentalist fanatic who tried to cure his addiction with exorcism and tent revivals. The night he did the Big Exit, he parked his car in the yard and came in the house and told his wife he had a surprise for her, namely that he was clean and had found a cure. He retrieved a double-barrel shotgun from his car trunk and reentered the house and sat down in his favorite chair and told his wife to open her eyes. The butt of the shotgun was propped on the floor between his legs and the twin muzzles under his chin. He was grinning from ear to ear, as though he had found the secret to eternal wisdom. “Keep it between the ditches, baby cakes,” he said. Then he depressed both triggers.
He left her with a Cessna 182 four-seat amphibian that she learned to pilot and used to pay off his debts. It was bright red and sleek and ideal for landing on freshwater lakes in the wetlands and even out on the salt if the wind wasn’t too bad. Julie kept to herself and never discussed her husband’s suicide, but sometimes I would see her blank out in the middle of a conversation, as though a movie projector had clicked on behind her eyelids and she was no longer with us.
Clete and I met her at New Iberia’s small airport early Sunday morning. I had convinced Molly and Alafair to visit Molly’s family in Beaumont for the day. I told Julie I would pay for her fuel and flight time if I couldn’t put it on the department. I watched Clete load his duffel bag into the baggage compartment behind the cabin area. The muzzle of his AR-15 and my cut-down Remington pump were sticking out of the bag. “How hot is this going to be, Dave?” she asked.
“It’s a flip of the coin,” I said.
“I think I know that island,” she said.
“You’ve been there?”
“I think Bob may have flown there.” The wind was blowing hard out of a gray sky, flattening her khakis and blue cotton shirt against her body. “He got mixed up with a televangelist here’bouts. His
name is Amidee Broussard. Bob took him on a couple of charters. You know who I’m talking about?”
“I sure do.”
“What are we into, Streak?”
“I haven’t figured it out. It involves the Dupree family in St. Mary Parish and maybe Varina Leboeuf. It may involve some oil guys, too. Maybe Tee Jolie Melton is on that island. Maybe these are the guys who killed her sister.”
“Does Helen know about this trip?”
“She’s got enough to worry about as it is.”
“Tee Jolie Melton is a singer, right? Why would she be with the Duprees? They wouldn’t take time to spit on most of us.”
“What the Duprees can’t have, they take.”
“Tell your friend to ride in back.”
Clete was on the edge of the tarmac, locking up his Cadillac. “You have a problem with Clete?” I asked.
“I need to balance the weight. I don’t need a freight car in the front seat,” she replied.
Clete opened the cabin door of the plane and threw a canvas rucksack of food inside. “Let’s kick some butt,” he said.
We took off buffeting in the wind and flew through a long stretch of low clouds full of rain and popped out on the other side into a patch of blue with a wonderful overview of Louisiana’s wetlands, miles and miles of marsh grass and gum trees and rivers and bayous and flooded woods and sandspits covered with white birds. Through the side window, I could see the plane’s shadow racing across an inaccessible lake that was lime green with algae; then the shadow seemed to leap from the water’s surface and continue across a dense canopy of willows and cypresses that had turned gold with the season. From the air, the wetlands looked as virginal as they had been when John James Audubon first saw them, untouched by the ax and the dredge boat, thousands of square miles that are the greatest argument for the existence of God that I know of.
At the edge of the freshwater marsh, the canals that had been dug in grid fashion from the Gulf were now bulbous in shape, like giant worms that had been stepped on. I didn’t want to look at it, in the
same way that you don’t want to look at people throwing litter out of a car window, or at pornography, or at an adult mistreating a child. This was even worse, because the injury to the wetlands was not the result of an individual act committed by a primitive and stupid person; it had been done collectively and with consent, and the damage it had caused was ongoing, with no end in sight. Eventually, most of the green-gray landmass below me would probably turn to silt and be washed away, and there would be no Ionian poet to witness and record its passing, as there had been for the ancient world.