“No, I’m not. If it’s any of your business, I’m supposed to meet friends at the Yellow Bowl for supper. I wanted to cancel, but I couldn’t reach them.”
“Hop in,” I said.
“I don’t like the way you’ve treated me, Dave.”
“Get in front, Varina,” Clete said. “Dave can ride in back. It’s time for a truce, isn’t it?”
While I got in back and Varina got in front, Clete stepped outside the Caddy and removed my coat from his shoulders and tossed it to me.
“You need this,” I said.
“I’ve got a blanket in the trunk,” he replied.
Clete popped the hatch on the trunk, blocking the view of anyone looking through the back window. He strapped his Marine Corps KA-BAR knife high up on his left calf and pulled his trouser leg over it. Then he lifted a blanket out of the trunk and draped it over his shoulders and picked up his pistol-grip AK-47 and held it in his left hand and covered it with the blanket. When he got back in the car, he tightened the blanket around him and looked into Varina’s face and smiled. “We want to talk to Pierre. Want to help us with that?” he said.
“No,” she said, staring wanly through the windshield.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I don’t know or care where he is.”
“Think Pierre is capable of kidnapping or hurting our daughters?” Clete said.
“He’s a sick man, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“How about his grandfather? Does he qualify as sick?” Clete said.
“Why ask me?”
“Because you lived with him. Is Alexis Dupree a sadist?” Clete asked.
“I’m really tired, Clete,” she said. “I’m sorry about what’s happened. I wish I never met the Dupree family. I don’t know what else to say.”
Clete dropped the gearshift into drive. “You’re quite a gal,” he said.
She stared uncertainly at the side of his face as the Caddy inched off the road’s shoulder onto the asphalt, gravel clicking under the tires.
We passed Alice Plantation and entered a tunnel of magnificent live oaks that arched over the road, then passed another Greek-columned antebellum home and clanked across the drawbridge and passed a community of trailers leaking rust into the ground and entered the village of Jeanerette, Louisiana, where approximately one-third of the population eked out an existence below the poverty line.
“How’d you like living over here, Varina?” Clete said.
“I hated it,” she replied.
“Where do you want out?”
“Every place is closed,” she said. “At eight o’clock the whole town turns into a mausoleum. A 747 could crash on it and nobody would notice.”
“We don’t have time to take you to the Yellow Bowl,” he said.
“I’ll go with you to Pierre’s and borrow one of his cars.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “Tell me something-does Pierre have a basement in that dump?”
“There’s a dank hole down there. It has water in it most of the time. Why?”
“No reason,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. A guy who owned it in the nineteenth century was a business partner of the guy who created Angola pen. Something like two thousand convicts died when this guy rented them out as slave labor. It’s the kind of history that makes you proud to be an American.”
“Yes, I know all about that,” she said. “But I’m a bit tired of feeling guilty about things I didn’t do. Maybe people make their own beds.”
“I wish I had that kind of clarity,” he said. “It must be great.”
I could see the color climbing in the back of Varina’s neck. As though she could read my thoughts, she turned and looked at me. “Are you just going to sit there?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Would you be gentleman enough to tell your fat fuck of a friend to shut up?”
I don’t know if the word “entitlement” would apply to Varina’s behavior, or “arrogance” and “narcissism.” She possessed the same surreal mentality common among higher-class women in southern society of years ago. The self-centeredness and disconnection from reality were so egregious that it often made you wonder if you had the problem, not the spoiled bunch who believed the sun rose and set upon their anointed brows. But Varina did not come from that class of people. Her father had been from the red-clay country of North Louisiana and knew the world of sweat and cotton poison and trysts with black girls taken from the field into a barn. Maybe these contradictions were the source of the mystery that lived in her eyes and hovered around her mouth. Most men wish to be beguiled. And nobody was better at it than Varina. No matter how all this played out, I believed she would remain glamorous and seductive, beautiful and unknowable, to the very end.
When I didn’t answer her question, she looked back at the road, then out the side window. Once again, she seemed wan and distant, and I wondered if her statement about people making their own beds was intended to apply to herself rather than to others.
We drove through the far end of town, the lawns stiff with frost, the houses dark, the moon shining on a backdrop of post-harvest sugarcane fields that were frozen and spiked with stubble and splintered cane. Clete depressed his turn indicator as we approached Croix du Sud. As we turned in to the driveway and passed through the open gates, I could see the blinking red reflection of the left rear light dancing on the stone pillars at the entrance and the deep green waxy leaves of the camellia bushes planted along the driveway, perhaps like a warning of things to come.
The house was dark except for the light on the porch.
“Pull around back,” Varina said.
“Why?” Clete said.
“Pierre leaves a key above the door. I’m going to take one of his cars.”
I felt my cell phone throb against my thigh. I opened it and looked at the caller ID. Clete drove past the carriage house and stopped at the edge of the concrete parking pad, the headlights burrowing through the darkness onto the bayou’s surface, where a single-engine pontoon plane was moored inside the fog. The call was from Catin Segura, the female deputy Jesse Leboeuf had beaten and raped. “I lied to you, Dave,” she said.
30
Clete got out of the Caddy, letting the blanket slip off his shoulders onto the edge of the seat.
“Lied about what?” I said into the phone.
“I told you Jesse Leboeuf said something when he was dying in my bathtub,” Catin replied. “I told you I didn’t know what he said because I don’t talk French.”
“You mean you do speak French?”
“No, not at all. But I wrote down what the words sounded like.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
Varina had also gotten out of the car and was walking around to the other side, where Clete was standing with one hand on the half-closed driver’s door, his face as cold-looking in the wind as a bluish-white balloon.
“Are you there?” Catin said.
“Yeah, go ahead,” I said, getting out of the car.
“I thought what Leboeuf said might give away who the shooter was. I didn’t want to give up the person who saved my life.”
“Don’t worry about it. What are the words?”
“Jam, mon, tea, orange.”
