“I haven’t had the pleasure,” he replied.
“Boy, that’s a lot for coincidence, isn’t it?” I said.
“What is?”
“You paint a woman who looks like Tee Jolie. You paint a scene that seems to derive from a song she gave me on an iPod. But you’ve never heard of her. The phone call I just received was in regard to Frankie Giacano. You bought your office building from his uncle Didi Gee. Somebody splattered Frankie’s grits in a toilet stall at the Baton Rouge bus station last night.”
Dupree set his shrimp back on his plate. He seemed to gather his thoughts. “I don’t understand your level of aggression, Mr. Robicheaux. No, that’s not quite honest. Let me offer a speculation. The whole time we’ve been talking, your eye has kept drifting to the decanter. If you’d like some brandy, you can pour yourself one. I won’t. No offense; your history is well known. I admire the fact that you’ve rebuilt your life and career, but I don’t like the implications you’ve made here.”
“Dave’s questions were put to you in an honest fashion. Why don’t you answer them?” Alafair said.
“I thought I did,” Dupree said.
“Why not just say where you got the concept for your still life if it wasn’t from a song? Why should that be a problem?” Alafair said.
“I didn’t know you were an art critic,” he said.
Just then Alexis Dupree opened the French doors and came out on the terrace. His mouth was downturned at the corners, his long-sleeve gray shirt buttoned at the wrists and throat, even though the afternoon was warm. His posture was an incongruous mix of stiffness and fragility, the parallel scars on one cheek like half of a cat’s whiskers. “Why are you here?” he said.
“A mistake in judgment,” I said.
“Who is she?” the grandfather said to Pierre, his eyes narrowing in either curiosity or suspicion.
“That’s my daughter, sir. Show her some respect,” I said.
Alexis Dupree raised his finger. “You’ll not correct me in my home.”
“Let’s go, Alfenheimer,” I said.
“What was that? You said Waffen?”
“No, Gran’pere. He was calling his daughter a pet name. It’s all right,” Pierre said.
Alafair and I got up from the table and began walking toward her car. Behind us, I heard footsteps in the leaves. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to speak to a Holocaust survivor like that. My grandfather was in an extermination camp. His brother and sister and his parents were killed there. He survived only because he was chosen for medical experiments. Or did you not know any of that?” Dupree said.
“Your grandfather’s age or background doesn’t excuse his rudeness,” I said. “I don’t think he’s an impaired man, either. In my opinion, the suffering of other people is a sorry flag to operate under.”
“You may not drink anymore, but you’re still a drunkard, Mr. Robicheaux, and white trash as well. Take yourself and Miss Alafair off our property. I think only a special kind of fool-I’m talking about myself-could have invited you here.”
“What did you just call me?” I said.
“What I called you has nothing to do with your birth. The term ‘white trash’ references a state of mind,” he replied. “You hate people who succeed or who have money and who force you to admit you’re a failure. I don’t think that’s a difficult concept to understand.”
“Open your mouth like that again, and you’re going to have the worst experience in your life,” Alafair said.
“I’d listen. She has a black belt. She’ll take your head off,” I said.
Pierre Dupree turned his back on us and returned to the terrace and went into the house with his grandfather, as though they were leaving behind an odious presence that, through chance or accident, had drifted across the moat and gotten inside the castle walls.
As we drove away, I tried to figure out what had happened. Had I reached a point in life when insults no longer bothered me? Years ago, my response to Pierre Dupree would have been quite different, yet I thought it would have been preferable to the passivity I had shown. “I won’t call you those stupid names anymore, Alafair, particularly around other people,” I said.
“What was the word that set off the grandfather?”
“He thought I said Waffen. The Waffen SS were elite Nazi troops. They were known for their fanaticism and lack of mercy. They executed British and American prisoners and worked in some of the death camps. GIs usually shot them whenever they got their hands on them.”
“You think we leaned on them too hard back there?” she said. “The old man’s family was sent to an oven.”
“Pierre Dupree not only enjoyed telling me a story about the hanging of black men and a white abolitionist on his property, he lied in order to tell the story. Then he used his grandfather’s ordeal to instill feelings of guilt in others. Don’t fall for this guy’s rebop.”
We passed a sugarcane field whose stalks were thrashing in the wind, the dust rising out of the rows, a tractor and cane wagon emerging suddenly onto the highway in front of us. Alafair swerved right, blowing her horn, scouring gravel out of the road shoulder. She looked in the rearview mirror, her nostrils dilating, her eyes wide. “Jesus,” she said. “I was talking and didn’t see that guy coming.”
We seldom do, I thought. But who wants to be a prophet in his own country?
7
Clete sat in a metal chair inside the interview room, forty feet from the holding cell where he had spent the last three hours. Dana Magelli was not in a good mood. He was standing across the table from Clete, his right hand on his hip, his coat pushed back. His breath was audible, his groomed appearance and normal composure at odds with the anger he was obviously experiencing. “We have your prints inside the homes of two homicide victims,” he said. “We have witnesses that put you with Frankie Giacano right before his murder. We have a tape you made of a conversation between you and Bix Golightly hours before he was shot in his vehicle in Algiers.”
“Yeah, and you searched my apartment and my office without a warrant,” Clete said.
“Do you deny driving Frankie Gee to the bus depot and buying him a ticket?”
“Getting a safecracker out of New Orleans is a crime?”
“You paid cash for his ticket to L.A. When did you start doing financial favors for sociopaths?”
“I saw Frankie give a quarter to a homeless guy once. So I figured he couldn’t be all bad. Of course, he threw the quarter into the homeless guy’s eye and blinded him.”
“There are people I work with who want to see you hung by your colon from an iron hook.”
“That’s their problem. By the way, do you know Didi Gee actually did that to a guy?”
“I know you didn’t follow the bus to Baton Rouge so you could shoot Frankie in a toilet stall. But some of my colleagues think you’re irrational enough to do anything. When I leave this room, I have to convince these same people you’re the wrong guy. Why did you buy Frankie his ticket out of town?”
“Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes are both dead because they tried to run a scam on me. Frankie was their partner. I figured he was next. Enough is enough. Frankie was a shitbag, but he didn’t deserve getting his brains blown all over a toilet bowl.”
“You were protecting Frankie out of the goodness of your heart?”
“Characterize it any way you want, Dana.”
“Who do you think killed Grimes and Golightly?”
“I chase bail skips and take pictures of husbands porking the maid.”
“I’m going to square with you. The only thing preventing the prosecutor’s office from charging you with murder is the fact that somebody much smaller than you and wearing western clothes was seen leaving the men’s room right after Frankie was left in a pool of blood. You ought to learn who your friends are, Clete.”
“I can go now?”
“No, you can’t. You’re under arrest.”
