I had left a message on his phone and wondered why he had not simply called me back. But Jesse was not a man whose motivations you openly questioned. “It’s a nice day to take a drive, so I thought I’d stop by,” I said.
He pushed a chair toward me. “You want a drink?” he said.
“I just wanted to ask Miss Varina a couple of questions about her husband.”
“If I was you, I’d leave him alone. Unless you’re planning to shoot him.”
“I have reason to believe he might have ties to the Giacano family.”
He puffed on his cigarette and laughed behind the smoke. “Are you serious?”
“You don’t think Pierre would associate with criminals?”
“The Duprees don’t associate with minorities of any kind, particularly New Orleans dagos. My daughter had all of it she could take.”
“All of what?”
“The fact that the Duprees think their shit don’t stink. The only time they make allowances for other groups of people is when a piece of tail floats by that one of them might be interested in.”
“You’re talking about Pierre?”
“My daughter is getting shut of them, that’s all that counts.” He watched a boat with outriggers cutting across the chop. He took a last hit on his cigarette and flicked it out on the water. “Isn’t this oil spill enough to worry about? Yesterday afternoon my crab traps was loaded to the top of the wire. When I put them in the boiler, every one of them had oil inside the shell. I hear it’s the same with the oyster beds. They say there’s shitloads of sludge plumb to the continental shelf.” He lit another cigarette and puffed on it, the smoke leaking slowly from his mouth.
“I think Pierre Dupree is dirty,” I said.
“Dirty for what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sounds like you got a problem.”
“You ever see a boat around here with the emblem of a fish on the bow? A Chris-Craft with a white hull?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
I was getting nowhere. I asked for his daughter’s phone number.
“Why not just leave her alone?” he said.
“I think Pierre Dupree may know something about the murder of the girl who floated up inside a block of ice in St. Mary Parish.”
“Then go talk to Pierre. He’s a son of a bitch. I don’t like cluttering up my day talking about a son of a bitch. My daughter don’t need to be talking about him, either. Why don’t y’all let us be, Robicheaux?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Dave.”
“You’re on my property, and I’ll call you what I goddamn please.”
“Do you want somebody who respects Miss Varina to interview her or some young guy who just got kicked up to plainclothes?”
“You’re a hardtail. You always were. That’s why you got where you are. That’s not meant as a compliment.” He wrote a telephone number on a scrap of newspaper and handed it to me. “She’s in Lafayette.” Then he raised his index finger at me, the nail as pointy as a piece of horn. “Treat her right. If you don’t, you and I will talk again.”
“Tell you what. I’ve got one more question for you, Mr. Jesse. You said the Duprees are snobs and they don’t associate with minorities of any kind. The grandfather is Jewish and a survivor of a Nazi extermination camp. Does it make sense to say the Duprees don’t associate with minorities? Didn’t Pierre buy his office building from a member of the Giacano family? Or are Italian-Americans not minorities? I have a little trouble tracking your thought processes.”
Jesse’s skin was brown and deeply lined, like the skin on a terrapin’s neck, an ugly purple birthmark buried in his hairline. He got up from his chair, taller than I, unstooped by age, an odor of tobacco and dried sweat emanating from his clothes. He looked me in the face with a glower that made me want to step back from him. He rubbed his jaw, his eyes never leaving mine, and I could hear the sound of his whiskers against the calluses on his palm. I wanted him to speak, to indicate what he was thinking; I wanted him to be more than an emotional condition that was impossible to read or understand. More succinctly, I wanted him to be human so I did not have to fear him. But not another word passed from his lips. He climbed the stairs that led into his screened porch and closed and latched the door behind him, never looking back, his shoulders stiff with hatred of his fellow man.
There was a Japanese tulip tree by the edge of the water. A hard gust of wind blew a shower of pink and lavender petals on top of the waves sliding in with the tide. I thought about Blue Melton’s body inside the block of ice and the fact that Jesse Leboeuf had shown no reaction when I mentioned that his son-in-law might be involved with her death. Was he simply obtuse and insensitive? Or was it no accident that his skin was reminiscent of an early reptilian creature cracking its way out of the egg?
I drove back up the road through a corridor of oak and gum trees strung with Spanish moss and caught the four-lane to Lafayette.
The truth was, I had no idea what kind of investigation I was pursuing. I knew that three low-wattage gangsters had tried to run a scam on Clete Purcel and cheat him out of his apartment and office building. I also knew that Clete had creeped Bix Golightly’s condo in the Carrollton district and found e-mails that indicated Golightly was fencing stolen or forged paintings. Was that all I was looking at, a gumball like Golightly selling hot or copied artwork for twenty cents on the dollar at best?
The sugarcane crop was in full harvest, and the highway was ribbed with dried gumbo strung from the fields by tractors and cane wagons. Traffic was backed up from the Lafayette city limits, and I got stuck behind an empty cane wagon blowing dirt and lint all over my windows. I clamped my emergency flasher on the roof of my pickup, but the driver of the tractor either couldn’t see me or didn’t care. I swung around him and tried to stay in the left lane but got caught in another jam after I crossed the bridge over the Vermilion River and entered the city.
I had already called Varina on my cell phone and told her I was on my way. I hit the redial. “I’m delayed, but I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it, Dave. I’ll be by the pool,” she replied. “You said this is about Pierre?”
“You could say that.”
“Y’all must not have much to do in New Iberia,” she said, and hung up. Two minutes later, she called back. “I’m having some ice cream and strawberries. You want some?” Then she hung up again.
I wondered how many young men had wakened in the middle of the night, trying to sort out Varina’s mood swings and the conscious or unconscious signals she sent regarding her affections. I also wondered how many of them woke in the morning throbbing with desire and went to their jobs resenting themselves for emotions they couldn’t control. I thought Varina caused her lovers heartbreak because they believed there was nothing false or manipulative in her nature. They saw a loveliness and innocence in her that reminded them of dreams they’d had in adolescence about an imaginary girl, one who was so pretty and decent and good that they never told others about her or allowed themselves to think inappropriately of her. At least those were the perceptions of an aging man whose retrospective vision was probably no more accurate today than it was when he was young.
I had just turned in to Bengal Gardens, an old upscale apartment neighborhood shaded by live oaks and filled with tropical plants and flowers, when a freezer truck pulled alongside me in the left lane, trapping me behind an elderly driver in a gas-guzzler. I realized the battery had gone out on my flasher when I started to pull around. The freezer truck, the kind with big lockers that delivers frozen steaks and vegetables and pizzas to residential subscribers, inched forward, blocking me in. There were two men in the cab, both smoking and talking, their windows up. “How about it?” I said out my window.
They didn’t hear me. I opened my badge and held it out the window. “Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
The freezer truck dropped slightly behind me, and I though
t I could swing out to pass. Except now I was only half a block to the entrance of the two-story white stucco apartments where Varina Leboeuf lived. Time to dial it down, I told myself.
The freezer truck pulled abreast of me again, the side panels closer than they should have been. Above me, the sun was shining through the oak limbs that arched over the street, creating a blinding effect on my windshield. I saw the two men in the truck talking to each other, their hands moving in the air, as though they were reaching a humorous conclusion to a joke or a story. Then the passenger turned toward me, rolling down the window, his profile as sharp as razored tin against a shaft of sunlight, his mouth breaking into a grin. “Eat this, shit-for-brains,” he said.
I stomped on the brake. The cut-down shotgun was wrapped in a paper bag. The passenger pulled the trigger, and a load of buckshot blew out my windshield and patterned across the hood and the top of the dashboard and covered me with splinters of glass. My right wheel slammed into the curb, throwing me against the safety belt. I saw the freezer truck stop by the corner while other vehicles veered around it. The passenger got out on the swale and walked toward my pickup, evidently oblivious to the terror he was instilling in others, the bottom of the paper bag curling with flame. I got my. 45 loose from the holster clipped to my belt and opened the passenger door on my pickup and rolled off the seat onto the swale.
My choices were simple. I could shoot from behind the truck at my assailant and, with luck, drop him with the first shot. In all likelihood, that would not happen, and I would end up firing into the traffic and hitting an innocent person. So I crashed through the hedge into the parking lot below Varina Leboeuf’s apartment. In seconds, my assailant was gone, the freezer truck grinding down the speedway that led into Lafayette’s commercial district.
I put away my. 45 and realized my face and arms were bleeding. Cars and SUVs were trying to work their way around my pickup, in the way that people work their way around a fender-bender. The sun was bright through the tree limbs overhead, the wind ruffling the hydrangeas and caladiums in the gardens around me, the ebb and flow and normalcy of the day somehow undisturbed for those who had someplace to be. I sat down on a stone bench by a gate that gave onto the apartment swimming pool and I got out my cell phone, my hands shaking so badly that I had to use my thumb to punch in a 911 call.
In the background, I heard the voice of Jimmy Clanton singing “Just a Dream.” I saw Varina Leboeuf walk toward me in a swimsuit, her elevated sandals clacking on the flagstones. She went to one knee and brushed the broken glass off my face and arms. Then she looked up at me in the same way that I was sure she had melted the defense mechanisms in many a suitor. Her eyes were brown and warm and lustrous and charged with energy all at the same time, her expression so sincere, showing such concern for your welfare, that you would do anything for her. “Oh, Dave, they’ll kill their own mothers. They have no boundaries. I think it involves millions. Don’t be such a foolish man,” she said.
A stereo was playing by the pool, the wind ruffling the water and the palm and banana fronds and the bloom on a potted orchid tree. Jimmy Clanton’s voice had risen out of the year 1958, and for just a moment I believed I was back there with him, in an era of sock hops and roadhouse jukeboxes when the season seemed eternal and none of us thought we would ever die. I removed a sliver of glass from my eyebrow and felt a rivulet of blood on the side of my face. Varina caught my blood on a paper napkin and pushed my hair out of my eyes. “One day your luck is going to run out, Dave,” she said.
“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on a fellow, would you?” I replied.
8
I went back through the hedge and started my truck and got it out of the traffic and into the parking lot. I knew I had no more than five minutes before the Lafayette Police Department would be at the apartment and all my opportunities to interview Varina would be lost. She had put on a robe and was sitting at a table by the pool, a carton of ice cream melting on the glass tabletop.
“Who shot at me?” I said.
“I have no idea,” she replied.
“Don’t tell me that.”
“You scared my father. You had no right to do that.”
“Nobody scares your father. It’s the other way around. His whole career was invested in terrifying people who have no power.”
“I don’t mean you. I mean what you’re doing. Pierre got mixed up with the Giacano family. On what level, I don’t know. But I know he’s afraid, just like my father is.”
“The Giacanos slid down the pipe when Didi Gee died. The rest of the family are nickel-and-dime lamebrains who couldn’t operate a pizza oven without a diagram. Your father has his vices, but I don’t think fear of the Giacanos is one of them.”
“My lawyer is in the middle of working out a divorce settlement with Pierre. I’m not sure of all the things he’s involved in. My lawyer says maybe I should be careful about what I pray for, meaning what I end up with.”
“Don’t you and Pierre already own an electronic security service of some kind?”
“Not exactly. Pierre and I and my father own half of it together. An international conglomerate bought the rest of the stock a few years ago. I actually got into the business to create a job for my father.”
What she was telling me didn’t coincide with her history. Varina had been an electrical engineering major at LSU and had been involved with high-tech electronic security work since she graduated. “So your lawyer thinks Pierre’s business enterprises might be toxic?” I said.
“At least some of them. He grew up in St. Mary Parish. Back in the 1970s, his mother’s family evicted people from their company homes for even talking to a union representative. The funny thing about them, and this includes Pierre, is they’ve never felt they did anything wrong. They feel no guilt about anything, including infidelity.” She let her eyes shift onto mine.
“You’re talking about Pierre?”
“So you don’t get the wrong idea, I did it back to him. I owned up to it at my church. It was embarrassing, but I’m glad I got it off my chest.”
“Is the grandfather a player in any of this?”
“I don’t know what he is. I always stayed away from him.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Everything. His eyes. The way his teeth show behind his lips when he looks at you. Once he came up behind me and touched the back of my neck. He said, ‘You must be still. There’s a bee in your hair.’ Then he pushed his body against me. It was disgusting. I told Pierre about it, but he said I was imagining things.”
I really didn’t want to hear any more about the grandfather or Varina’s problems with him. “Do the names Tee Jolie and Blue Melton mean anything to you?”
“No, who are they?”
“Girls from St. Martinville. One is missing, and one was found in a block of ice.”
“I read about that.” She shook her head, refocusing her concentration. “What does this have to do with me or Pierre or his grandfather?”
“I think Pierre used Tee Jolie as a model in one of his paintings.”
“I don’t think he uses models. I don’t think he paints anybody. He’s a fraud.”
“Pardon?”
“His talent is like flypaper. Little pieces of other people’s work stick in his head, and he puts them on a canvas and calls the painting his. Every time there’s a real artist in the area, you can see Pierre’s tail disappearing inside his hidey-hole. He’s a sex addict, not an artist. Why would he stay down here if he’s an artist? Wouldn’t he be in New York or Paris or Los Angeles? There’s an art gallery in Krotz Springs, Louisiana?”
“Say that again?”
“Pierre is a freak. I won’t go into detail except to say our bed should have been cruciform in shape. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. None of it seems to register.”
I stared at her blankly, a bit in awe of her ability to control and manipulate a conversation. The first Lafayette PD cruiser to arrive at the crime scene turn
ed in to the parking lot, followed by a sheriff’s cruiser and a second city department vehicle that parked by the curb, on the other side of the hedge. While I still had my thoughts together-which was not easy after a conversation with Varina Leboeuf-I tried to remember everything she had told me. She was intelligent and lovely to look at. Her fine cheekbones and the softness of her mouth and the earnestness in her expression were of a kind that made both the celibate and the happily married question the wisdom of their vows. I also realized that she had managed to deflect the conversation away from specifics about her husband’s criminality to how wretched it was to be married to him. I didn’t know if her depiction of her husband’s sexual habits was true, but I had to hand it to her: Varina could weave a spiderweb and sprinkle it with gold dust and lure you inside and wrap it around both your eyes and your heart, all the while making you enjoy your own entrapment.
“When you get finished with the local cops, hang around and we’ll have some ice cream,” she said.
“Will I learn anything else?”
“There are always possibilities.”
“Would you repeat that?”
Her gaze lingered longer on my face than it should have. “You look picaresque with that cut over your eye.” She touched the side of my face and studied my eyes.
I felt my cheeks coloring. “You always knew how to leave your mark,” I said.
It was raining when I walked to work the next morning. Helen Soileau caught me before I could take off my coat. “In my office,” she said.
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