She squeezed her eyes shut, as though trying to work her way through my question. “I’ve got it. You shut down your friend’s office and run his clients out of town because you have access to knowledge that nobody else does?”
“You’re an intelligent woman. Why don’t you stop acting like a juvenile delinquent? I just finished talking with Alexis Dupree. While he was in another room, I looked in a journal that he’s evidently kept over the years. There were at least two dozen locks of hair between the last pages.”
She had been stirring the noodles in the box, but her hand slowed and stopped, and she blinked once and then looked at nothing. “Did you say anything to him?” she asked.
“No. But I think he knows I saw the locks of hair.”
“What was the name of the place he was in?”
“Ravensbruck,” I said.
“Didn’t they cut the hair off the people they killed?”
“Yes, particularly in the women’s camps,” I replied.
“Maybe he’s just an old man on the make. Maybe he’s a trophy-sex addict.”
“It’s possible,” I said. “What are the other possibilities?”
“He’s a pedophile?”
“We would have heard about it.”
“Did the hair look old?”
“Yeah, most of it.”
She wrapped her uneaten food in the plastic bag in which it had been delivered and set it in the bottom of the wastebasket. “I told Clete the old man made me feel funny, like his fingers were crawling all over me.” She was studying the floor. Then she looked me full in the face. “He was one of them?”
“One of what?”
“He’s not a Jew? He was one of the Nazis who worked in those camps? He herded all those children and women and sick people into the gas chambers? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Pierre says Alexis is not only his grandfather but his father as well,” I said. “So tell me who’s lying and who’s evil and who’s telling the truth. This is the wasp’s nest you threw a rock in.”
I heard a key turn in the front-door lock and the blinds rattle against the glass when the door swung open. “What’s going on in here?” Clete said, a double-folded manila envelope in his hand.
“Gretchen was eating some noodles. I kicked three of your clients out. Both of us think Alexis Dupree may have been a Nazi, not a Jewish inmate in a death camp,” I said. “Outside of that, it’s been a pretty dull day.”
15
Clete and I went into his inner office, and I told him about my visit to the Dupree plantation. “So you think the old man is actually a war criminal?” he said.
“It’s possible. He claimed he survived Ravensbruck because of his inner discipline and the fact that he did everything his warders told him to do. Listening to him tell it, I had the feeling that those who died brought their deaths upon themselves. He also said he was a friend of Robert Capa. But he didn’t know if Capa was a Communist. On his wall, he has a photo of Italian troops in what I think was the Ethiopian campaign. They used chemical weapons on people who fought with spears and bows and arrows. Why would a victim of the fascists want a photo like that on his wall?”
I could tell I was losing Clete’s attention. “I know that look. What have you done now?” I said.
“Hang on,” he said. He sent Gretchen on an errand, then closed the door and untaped the double-folded manila envelope he had been holding and removed two memory cards. “I creeped Varina’s apartment in Lafayette and her house on Cypremort Point. You were right about the teddy bear on the couch. It’s a nanny-cam. She had another one on a shelf in Lafayette.”
“You broke into her home and her apartment?”
“Not exactly. I showed my PI badge to the apartment manager in Lafayette.”
“How did you get into the house on Cypremort Point?”
“The key was in a flowerpot.”
“How’d you know it was there?”
“She showed me. In case I wanted to let myself in if her old man wasn’t there.” He saw my look. “So I took advantage of her trust. It doesn’t make me feel good,” he said. “You want to watch this stuff or not?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think you should watch it, either.”
“Maybe I’m on tape. You think I should ignore that?” he said, uploading the first card into his computer.
“Don’t give power to it.”
“To what?”
“Evil.”
“You think Varina is evil?”
“I don’t know what she is. Just stay away from her. Stay away from the shit on that card, too.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Give it back to her. Treat it with contempt. Let her live in her own deceit.”
“Maybe I can have a second career as the model on the covers of bodice-buster novels. Will you lighten up? You make me feel awful, Dave.”
“What can I say?”
“Try nothing,” he replied.
He began clicking the keys on his computer, his huge shoulders stressing the fabric in his sport coat, his porkpie hat pulled down on his eyes, as though, unconsciously, he wanted to shield them. The first image on the monitor was that of Varina in the nude, her back to the camera, as she approached a naked man lying on the couch, one hand tucked behind his head, his chest hair like a black fan spread across his sun-browned skin. The figure was not Clete.
“Adios,” I said.
“Come on, Dave. I went this far with it. I don’t want to look at it by myself. I already feel like a pervert.”
Then I said something I never thought I would say to Clete Purcel: “I can’t help you with this one, partner.”
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at the caller ID. Helen Soileau. “Where are you?” she said.
“In Clete’s office.”
“What are those sounds in the background?”
“Turn the speaker off, Clete,” I said.
“What the hell are you guys doing?” she asked.
“Nothing. I was just leaving.”
“You know anything about hammerhead sharks?” she asked.
“They eat stingrays and their own young. The males bite the females until they mate.”
“I mean where they live or feed or whatever.”
“They go where they want. Why are you asking about hammerhead sharks?”
“The pictures are just coming in on the Internet from Lafourche Parish. We found out what happened to Chad Patin,” she said.
A sport fisherman had been trolling with outriggers southwest of Grand Isle when he foul-hooked what he thought was a sand shark. The drag began to accelerate and sing with such velocity that smoke was rising off the reel. To keep from breaking the line, the mate reversed the vessel in the same direction the shark was running. From the stern, you could see a long torpedo-shaped shadow appear briefly beneath a swell, then a dorsal fin slicing through a wave and dipping below the surface again, bubbles trailing after it. For just a moment the line went slack, as though it had been severed, and the mate throttled back the engine and let the boat drift. The slick spots between the waves were undisturbed, the water glistening with a fine sheen like baby oil, the exhaust pipes of the boat gurgling just below the surface. Overhead, pelicans drifted on the breeze, making a wide turn, the way
