I know what happened out there on the highway when all that traffic got caught by our planes. You know, what the media called the ‘Highway of Death.’ Some of those people were probably civilians. Whole families. I saw it. It’s something you don’t want to remember.”
“You ever go to A.A., Bobby Joe?” I asked.
“I didn’t figure I needed it after I met Amidee.”
“I attend the Solomon House meeting in New Iberia. Why don’t you drive down and see us sometime?”
“My main issue right now is finding a job.”
“I tell you what,” I said. I removed a business card from my billfold and wrote on the back of it. “We have an opening for a 911 dispatcher. You might give it a shot.”
“Why you doing this?”
“You look like a stand-up guy,” I said.
“You’re talking to the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said.
“What the hell is that?”
“Stick around,” Clete said.
“Amidee fooled me real good, didn’t he?” Bobby Joe said.
“I wouldn’t think of it like that,” I said.
“He doesn’t ask people for money,” he replied. “That means somebody else is paying his freight. Any fool would see that, I guess.”
Clete and I looked at each other.
17
Clete called my office at 8:05 the next morning. “Somebody got past my alarm and punched my safe and tore up my office,” he said.
“When?”
“The alarm went off-line at two-seventeen this morning. The safe was done by a pro. The windows were taped over with black vinyl garbage bags. All my file cabinets and desk drawers were dumped, my swivel chair split open, and the top of the toilet tank pulled off and dropped in the bowl. Want to hear some more?”
“Who was on those videos with Varina?”
“I already told you. A few shysters and oil guys who wanted to get laid. They’re not skells.”
“No, you said there were some you didn’t recognize. What do you remember about them?”
“They had bare asses.”
“What else?”
“One guy had a British accent.”
“Why didn’t you mention that before?”
“Who cares about his accent?”
My mind was racing. “You didn’t save any of this on your hard drive? You don’t have an automatic backup system of some kind?”
“No, I told you, I burned the memory cards and opened up the windows in my office to get the smell out. I should have taken your advice and never looked at it.”
“I’m going to send some guys from the crime lab to your office. Leave everything just as it is.”
“I’ll need a copy of the report for my insurance claim, but forget about prints. The guys who did this are good.”
“Did Varina ever mention a Brit to you?”
“News flash, Dave: When you’re with Varina, the only person she talks about is you, all the time staring straight into your eyes. It takes about ten seconds before your flagpole wakes up and decides it’s time to fly the red, white, and blue.”
“You’ve still got the hots for her.”
“Wrong. Since I met her, I feel like I’ve been living inside a snare drum. We’ve got to take these guys down, Dave. This started with Alexis Dupree and Bix Golightly. We need to go back to the source and put some hurt on that old man. You hearing me on this? The guy is probably a war criminal and a mass murderer. Why are we letting him do this kind of stuff to us?”
“I’m sending the guys from the crime lab now,” I said.
“I won’t be here. Gretchen can show them around.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure. Did you run Lamont Woolsey yet?”
“No, I haven’t had time.”
“Don’t bother. I called a guy I know at the NCIC. There’s no Lamont Woolsey in the system. And I mean nowhere. He doesn’t exist. I’ll check back with you later.”
“What are you up to?”
“I’m not even sure myself. How can I tell you? Alexis Dupree has locks of hair in a scrapbook. Maybe we’ve got John Wayne Gacy living in St. Mary Parish. You ever think of that?” he replied.
Clete was right. How does a man like Alexis Dupree end up in our midst? From what I could find out about him through Google, he had been living in the United States since 1957 and was naturalized ten years later. Had he worked for both British and American intelligence? Were there any people alive who could authenticate his claim that he was a member of the French underground? The articles posted on the Internet seemed to replicate one another, and none of them contained any source except Dupree.
That afternoon I called a friend in the FBI and another friend at the INS and a friend whose drinking had cost him his career at the CIA. Of the three, the drunk was the most helpful.
“It’s possible your man is telling the truth,” he said.
“Telling the truth about what?” I said.
“Working with MI6 or one of our intelligence agencies.”
“Maybe he was never an inmate at Ravensbruck,” I said. “Maybe he was a guard there. I don’t know what to believe about him.”
“After the war, we gave citizenship to the scientists who built V-1 and V-2 rockets and helped Hitler kill large numbers of civilians in London. During the 1950s any European who was anti-Communist pretty much got a free pass with the INS. The consequence was we gave safe harbor to a bunch of shitbags. No matter how you cut it, you’ll probably never find out this guy’s real identity.”
“Somebody out there knows who he is,” I said.
“You don’t get it, Dave. This guy is whatever somebody else says he is. Any file you find on Dupree was written by someone who created a work of fiction. You’re a fan of George Orwell. Remember what he said about history? It ended in 1936. Unless you want to get drunk again, leave this crap alone.”
His statement was not one I wanted to hear. I tried to dismiss his words as those of a cynic, a CIA agent who had aided in the installation of a Chilean dictator, armed state-sponsored terrorists in northern Nicaragua, and been the associate of men who operated torture chambers and were responsible for the murder of liberation theologians. Unfortunately, those who give witness to the darker side of our history are usually those who helped precipitate it and, as a result, make it easy for us to discount their stories. Sometimes I wondered if their greatest burden was their eventual realization that they collaborated with others in the theft of their souls.
“We’re going to find out who this guy is. I don’t care how long it takes,” I said.
There was a pause, then my friend who had destroyed his liver and two marriages and the lives of his children hung up the phone. At quitting time, I went home in a funk and sat on a folding chair by the bayou and stared at the current flowing south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Clete had said that our own John Wayne Gacy was perhaps living just down the road, ensconced in an antebellum home that could have been a backdrop for a Tennessee Williams play. Except the comparison was inadequate. Gacy had been a serial killer of young men and boys whose bodies he interred in the walls and crawl spaces of his home. Gacy may not have been psychotic, but there was no question he was mentally ill. Supposedly, his last words to one of the guards who escorted him to his
