execution were “Kiss my ass.” Alexis Dupree was totally rational and by no means mentally ill, and if he had been a member of the SS, his crimes were probably far worse and more numerous than Gacy’s. Every time I reached a conclusion about him, I found myself using the word “if.” Why was that? In the age of Google and the Freedom of Information Act, I had been unable to find one incontestable fact about his life.
I tried to think about Alexis Dupree in terms of what he wasn’t. He claimed to have been a prisoner at Ravensbruck. But if he had been a guard or a junior officer at Ravensbruck and not an inmate, would it make sense for him to draw attention to his association with the camp whose survivors would quickly recognize his photograph? If Alexis Dupree had been a member of the SS, he probably worked at a camp he never made mention of, maybe one that was liberated by the Soviets and whose records were confiscated and not shared with the Americans or the British or the French. When the German army began to collapse on the Eastern Front, the SS fled west and left thousands of bodies in freight cars and in train yards or stacked like cordwood outside crematoriums. They put on the uniforms of the regular German army, hoping to surrender to American or British personnel rather than to the Russians, who summarily shot them.
Alexis Dupree was a smart man. Maybe he had taken the deception one step further and tattooed a prison number on his left forearm and played the role of survivor and veteran of the French Resistance, composed primarily of Communists. Dupree may have been many things, but leftist was not one of them. Maybe he’d been an informer. He certainly met the standard of a self-serving turncoat. Had he been a friend of the famous combat photographer Robert Capa? Out of all the possibilities and claims about Dupree’s past, I was positive that one was a lie. I also believed the photo of the Republican soldiers taken at the siege of Madrid and inscribed by Capa to Dupree was another fraud perpetrated on the world by the Dupree family. All of Capa’s work had already been published, including a lost satchel of photos discovered in Mexico in the 1990s. Plus, Capa was a socialist who probably would have been repelled by an elitist like Dupree.
Where does that leave us? I asked myself. The boughs of the cypress trees were as brittle and delicate as gold leaf in the late sun. An alligator gar was swimming along the edge of the lily pads, its needle-nose head and lacquered spine and dorsal fin parting the surface with a fluidity that was more serpent than fish. The great cogged wheels on the drawbridge were lifting its huge weight into the air, silhouetting its black outline against a molten sun. Then the wind gusted and a long shaft of amber sunlight seemed to race down the center of the bayou, like a paean to the close of day and the coming of night and the cooling of the earth, as though vespers and the acceptance of the season were a seamless and inseparable part of life that only the most vain and intransigent among us would deny.
Meditations upon mortality become cheap stuff and offer little succor when it comes to dealing with evil. The latter is not an abstraction, and ignoring it is to become its victim. The earth abides forever, but so does the canker inside the rose, and the canker never sleeps.
I wondered if Clete was right: that at some point you must become willing to put hurt on an old man. Those words had an effect on me that was like a saw cutting through bone. You do not give your enemy power, and you do not let him remake you in his image. I picked up a pinecone and tossed it in a high arc into the middle of the current, as though I had fought my way through a long mental process and was freeing myself of it. But my heart was as heavy as an anvil in my chest, and I knew I would have no peace until I found the killers of Blue Melton and brought Tee Jolie back to her Cajun home on the banks of Bayou Teche.
At the supper table, I couldn’t concentrate on what Molly and Alafair were talking about. “It’s going to be a big event, Dave,” Alafair said.
“You mean the Sugar Cane Festival? Yeah, it always is,” I said.
“The Sugar Cane Festival was a month ago. I was talking about the 1940s musical revue,” she said.
“I thought you were talking about next year,” I said.
Molly let her gaze settle on my face and kept it there until I blinked. “What happened today?” she asked.
“Somebody burglarized Clete’s office. Probably friends of Varina Leboeuf,” I said.
“What were they looking for?” she asked.
“Why put yourself in the mind of perps? It’s like submerging your hand in an unflushed toilet,” I said.
“Way to go, Dave,” Alafair said.
“It’s just a metaphor,” I said.
“Next time hand out barf bags in advance,” she said.
“Both of you stop it,” Molly said.
“Varina is part of a cabal of some kind. Clete got ahold of some incriminating video footage that he destroyed, but Varina believes he still has it. The guy I can’t get out of my head is Alexis Dupree. I think he was in the SS, and I think he worked in an extermination camp in Eastern Europe.”
“How did you arrive at all this?” Molly said.
“Dupree is the opposite of everything he says about himself,” I said.
“That’s convenient.”
“You think he’s a veteran of the French underground, a man of the people? He and his family terrorized the farmworkers you tried to organize,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean he’s an ex-Nazi.”
I set my knife and fork down on the edges of my plate as softly as I could and left the table, my temples pounding. I went out on the gallery and sat down on the front steps and looked at the fireflies lighting in the trees and the leaves blowing end over end down the sidewalk. I saw a cardboard box wrapped in brown paper next to the bottom step, the wrapping paper folded in tight corners and sealed neatly with shipping tape. There was no writing on the paper. I opened my pocketknife and sliced away the tape and peeled off the paper and pulled back the flaps on the box and peered inside. The packing material was a mixture of straw and wood curlicues that smelled like shaved pine. An envelope with a rose stem Scotch-taped across it rested on top of the straw. Inside the envelope was a thick card with silver scroll on the borders, a message written in the center in bright blue ink. I stared at the words for a long time, then moved some of the straw aside with my knife blade and looked in the box again. I put away my knife and pushed the box with my foot to the edge of the walk just as the door opened behind me. “Dave?” Molly said.
“I’ll be inside in a few minutes,” I said.
“You have to stop internalizing all these things. It’s like drinking poison.”
“You’re saying I bring my problems home instead of leaving them at the department?”
“That wasn’t what I meant at all.”
“I was agreeing with you. Clete and I met a guy named Lamont Woolsey. His eyes are so blue they’re almost purple. You know who else has violet eyes? Gretchen Horowitz.”
She sat down next to me, distraught, like someone watching a car accident about to happen. “What are you saying? Who’s Woolsey?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t think straight anymore. I don’t know who Woolsey is, and I don’t understand my own thoughts. I don’t have any right to drop all this on you and Alafair. That’s what I’m saying.”
She took my hand in hers. “I don’t think you see the real issue. You want Louisiana to be the way it was fifty years ago. Maybe the Duprees are evil, or maybe they’re just greedy. Either way, you have to let go of them. You also have to let go of the past.”
“In some of those camps, there were medical experiments done on children. The color of their eyes was changed synthetically.”
She released my hand and stared into the dark. “We have to put an end to this. You and Clete and I need to sit down and talk. But more of the same isn’t going to help.”
“I didn’t make any of it up.”
I could hear her breathing inside the dampness, as though her lungs were working improperly, as though the smell of the sugar refinery and the black lint off the smokestacks were catching in her throat. I didn’t know whether she was crying or not. I picked at my fingernails and stared at the streetlamps and at the leaves gusting in serpentine lines along the asphalt.
“What’s that?” she asked, looking into the shadows below the camellia bushes.
“Somebody left a box on the step.”
“What’s in it?”
