“You made her have an abortion?” I said.
“I didn’t make her do anything. She’s a nice girl. You’re an incurable romantic when it comes to her kind.”
“Where are Gretchen and Alafair?” Clete said, starting toward Pierre.
A man with tattoos of a kind we had seen before stepped forward and touched the Taser to the back of Clete’s neck. Clete went down as though he had been blackjacked across the temple. I knelt beside him and cradled his head in my hands. His eyes were crossed, and his nose was bleeding.
I looked up at the man with the Taser. He was thin and had black hair and was unshaved and wore jeans with suspenders and a lumberjack shirt. He smelled of the woods and the cold; he smelled like a hunter. There was a long tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating an orange carrot inside his left forearm. “I’m going to square this, buddy,” I said.
“I don’t blame you for being pissed, but if I was you, I’d go with the flow,” he said. “It might work out for you. I carried a badge before I did this.”
“That’s enough, Mickey,” Pierre said.
Clete sat up and wiped the blood from his nose on his sleeve. He was slack-jawed and closing and opening his eyes. The back of his neck looked like it had been stung by a jellyfish. From aboveground we heard the sound of a diesel engine cranking to life.
“That’s the truck your vehicle is being loaded onto, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said. “In five minutes it will be off the property. Before morning your vehicle will be crushed into a ball of tinfoil, and so will you.”
Pierre walked toward the rear of the basement and rested his hand on a doorknob. “Bring them here,” he said. “I think Mr. Robicheaux deserves a degree of closure. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Talk with her. See what she has to say about her situation.”
“With who?”
“The girl of your dreams. Tell me if you think she’s been worth it,” he said.
He pushed open the door slowly with the flat of his hand, exposing a room whose walls contained floor-to- ceiling plasma screens filled with scenes filmed through the windows of the stucco house on an island southeast of the Chandeleurs. Even the sound of the surf on the beach and the wind in the palm trees was being pumped through a speaker system.
Tee Jolie Melton was lying on a white brocade couch, wearing a blue evening gown and jewelry around her neck that looked like diamonds and rubies, although I doubted that was what they were. Her head was propped on a tasseled black satin pillow, the twists of gold in her hair still as bright as strings of buttercups. She seemed to smile in recognition. There were scabbed tracks on her forearms. She turned on her hip so she could see me better, but she didn’t try to get up. “That’s you?” she said.
“It’s Dave Robicheaux, Tee Jolie,” I said.
“Yeah, I knowed it was you, Mr. Dave. I knowed you’d be along someday.”
“What’d they do to you, kiddo?”
“They ain’t done nothing. It’s just medicine.”
“It’s heroin.”
“I couldn’t deliver the baby, see, ’cause I ain’t right inside. Don’t be mad at Pierre. Don’t be mad at me, either. Everyt’ing is gonna be all right, ain’t it?”
“We’ll be back later, darlin’,” Pierre said. “Mr. Robicheaux and I need to talk over some business.” He closed the door and slipped an iron bolt into a locked position. “She’s a sweet girl.”
“You turned her into a junkie,” I said.
“She injected herself. So did her sister,” he replied. “You know your problem, Mr. Robicheaux? You won’t accept people as they are. You’re only interested in them as abstractions. The flesh-and-blood reality isn’t to your liking. It’s you who is the elitist, not I.”
The door at the bottom of the stairwell that led from aboveground opened, and a man carrying an AK-47 with a banana magazine came inside and closed the door. “This was between the seat and the door of the convertible,” he said.
“Purcel had an automatic weapon in the front seat?” Pierre said.
“Yeah, it was covered by a blanket,” the man said.
“You were riding in the front seat and didn’t see it?” Pierre said to Varina.
“Oh, I’ve got it. His having a gun is my fault,” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I was trying to understand how he got an AK-47 into his car without you seeing it. It’s not an unreasonable question.”
“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 what?” 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’pere angry,” Pierre said. “That’s not good for you or your friend or Alafair and Gretchen, Mr. Robicheaux. Gran’pere 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’pere 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.
