Have you ever been told, either by friends or by a therapist, that you’re obsessive? If the answer is yes, I suspect that you, like most people of goodwill, had to accept one of two alternatives. You humbled yourself and ate your feelings and tried to change your emotional outlook, or you realized with a sinking of the heart that you were on your own and the problem you saw was not imaginary and others did not want to hear or talk about it or be reminded of it in any fashion, even though the house was burning down.
My obsession was Tee Jolie Melton. I could no longer be sure she had visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, but I had no doubt her message to me was real, transmitted perhaps in ways that are not quite definable. Many years back I gave up all claim to a rational view of the world and even avoided people who believed that the laws of physics and causality have any application when it comes to understanding the mysteries of creation or the fact that light can enter the eye and form an image in the brain and send a poetic tendril down the arm into a clutch of fingers that could write the Shakespearean sonnets.
There were only three leads in the disappearance of Tee Jolie, and all were tenuous: I had seen a group photo in her scrapbook taken at a zydeco club, with Bix Golightly in the background; at the recovery unit, she had indicated she feared for her life because of knowledge she had about the oil-well blowout in the Gulf; the boat that abducted her sister may have been a Chris-Craft, with a thick-bodied fish painted on the bow.
I had left out one other element in the story: She was unmarried and pregnant, and the undivorced father of her child had asked if she wanted an abortion.
Where do you start?
Answer: Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over others, but ultimately, it will lead you to the issue from which all the other motivations derive-money, piles of it, green and lovely and cascading like leaves out of a beneficent sky, money and money and money, the one item that human beings will go to any lengths to acquire. Let’s face it, it’s hard to sell the virtues of poverty to people who have nothing to eat. In Louisiana, which has the highest rate of illiteracy in the union and the highest percentage of children born to single mothers, few people worry about the downside of casinos, drive-through daiquiri windows, tobacco depots, and environmental degradation washing away the southern rim of the state.
Oil and natural gas, for good or bad, comprise our lifeblood. When I was a boy, my home state, in terms of its environment, was an Edenic paradise. It’s not one any longer, no matter what you are told. When a group of lawyers at Tulane University tried to file a class action suit on behalf of the black residents whose rural slums were used as dumping grounds for petrochemical waste, the governor, on television, threatened to have the lawyers’ tax status investigated. The same governor was an advocate for the construction of a giant industrial waste incinerator in Morgan City. His approval ratings remained at record highs for the entirety of his administration.
In Louisiana, refined or extracted oil is everywhere, sometimes in barrels buried in the 1920s. Working-class people display bumper stickers that read GLOBAL WARMING IS BULLSHIT. Former vice president Al Gore is mocked and denigrated with regularity for his warnings about arctic melt.
Last spring, when the wind was out of the south, I could stand in our front yard and smell oil. It was not buried in the ground, either. It was pouring in thick columns, like curds of smoke, from a blown casing five thousand feet below the Gulf’s surface.
This particular blowout has been referred to again and again as a “spill.” A spill has nothing to do with the events that occurred southeast of my home parish. A spill implies an accident involving a limited amount of oil, one that will seep from a tanker until the leak is repaired or the ship’s hold is drained. The oil leaking from the tanker is not pressurized or on fire and incinerating men on the floor of a drilling rig.
Even when a well is completed under normal circumstances, there is a cautionary tale buried inside the sense of accomplishment and prosperity that everyone on the rig seems to experience. At first you smell the raw odor of natural gas, like the stench of rotten eggs, then the steel in the rig seems to stiffen, as though its molecular texture is transforming itself into something alive; even in hundred-degree heat, the great pipes running out of the hole start to sweat with drops of moisture that are as cold and bright as silver dollars. The entire structure seems to hum with the power and intensity of forces whose magnitude we can only guess at. The driller touches a flaming board to a flare line to burn off excess gas, and a ball of fire rises into the blackness and snaps apart in the clouds and makes us wonder if our pride in technological success isn’t a dangerous presumption.
When a drill bit hits what is called an early pay sand, punching into an oil or natural gas dome unexpectedly, with no blowout preventer in place, the consequences are immediate. An unlimited amount of fossil decay and oceanic levels of natural gas that are hundreds of millions of years old are released in seconds through one aperture, blowing pipe, drilling mud, salt water, and geysers of sand up through the rig floor, creating havoc among the men working there and a cacophony of sound similar to a junkyard falling piece by piece out of the sky. The first spark off the wellhead ignites the gas. The explosion of flame is so intense in velocity and temperature that it will melt the spars of a rig and turn steel cable into bits of flaming string. In minutes the rig can take on the appearance of a model constructed from burned matchsticks.
My father, Big Aldous, was a fur trapper on Marsh Island and a commercial fisherman who, in the off-season, worked the monkey board high up on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He was illiterate and irresponsible and spoke English poorly and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans. He also had no understanding of how or why the Cajun world of his birth was coming to an end. My mother’s infidelities filled him with shame and anger and bewilderment, just as she in turn could not understand his alcoholism and barroom violence and apparent determination to gamble away their meager income at bourre tables and racetracks.
Big Al died in a blowout while I was in Vietnam. His body was never recovered, and I spent a great deal of time wondering whether he suffered greatly before his death. Sometimes I dreamed I saw him standing knee-high in the surf, giving me the thumbs-up sign, his hard hat tilted on his head, the swells around him denting with rain. I didn’t know what kind of death he died, but I knew one thing for sure about my old man: He was never afraid. And I knew in my heart, when the pipe came out of the hole on that windswept night decades ago, Big Al clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and jumped into the black with the courage of a paratrooper going out the door of a plane, and I also knew that as he plummeted toward the water with the tower coming down on top of him, his last thoughts were of me and my half brother, Jimmy, and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory. He died so we could have a better life. And that’s what I will always believe.
It seems to me a “spill” is hardly an adequate term to describe the fate of men who die inside a man-made inferno.
My introspection wasn’t taking me any closer to solving the disappearance of Tee Jolie and the abduction and murder of her sister, Blue. When I came home from work on Thursday, Alafair was reading a glossy magazine at the kitchen table, both Snuggs and Tripod sitting in the open window behind her. Tripod was wearing a diaper. “What’s up, Alfenheimer?” I said.
“Dave, can you get rid of the stupid names?” she said without looking up from her magazine.
“I will. Someday. Probably. What are you reading?”
“There’s a showing of Pierre Dupree’s work in Burke Hall at UL. You want to drive over?”
“Not really.”
“What do you have against him?”
“Nothing. He’s just one of those guys who seems to have someone else living inside him, someone he wants none of us to meet.”
“His paintings aren’t bad. Look,” she said, handing me the magazine.
I glanced indifferently at the images on one page and started to return the magazine to her. Had I followed through, perhaps none of the events that would happen in the next days and weeks and months would have occurred, and maybe we all would have been the better for it. I’ll never know. I stared at the photograph of a painting on the second page of the article. In it a nude woman was reclining on a reddish-brown sofa, a white towel draped across her vagina. She wore a mysterious smile, and her hair was tied behind her head and touched with tiny pools of yellow, like buttercups. Her neck was swanlike, her eyes elongated, her nipples as dark as chocolate; because of her position, her breasts had flattened against her chest, and her body seemed to possess the warm softness of browned bread dough.
“Dave, your face is white,” Alafair said.
“Take a look at the woman on the sofa,” I said, handing back the magazine.
“What about her?”
“It’s Tee Jolie Melton.”
She shook her head and started to speak, then stopped. She rubbed the ball of one finger on her brow, as though a mosquito had bitten it, as though somehow our conversation could be diverted from the direction it was about to take. “The figure looks like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian natives,” she said. “The portrayal is almost generic. Don’t make it into something it’s not.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“I know Tee Jolie. That’s not her.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“I can’t prove it isn’t, but something else is going on in our lives that you won’t acknowledge.”
“Would you like to tell me what?”
“You’re imagining things about Tee Jolie Melton. Molly knows it and so do I and so does Clete.”
“Why would I imagine things about Tee Jolie?”
“To you, she represents lost innocence. She’s the Cajun girl of your youth.”
“That seems frank enough.”
“You asked me.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“You hear songs on an iPod that no one else can hear.”
“I’m going to fix a ham-and-onion sandwich. Do you want one?”
“I already made some. They’re in the refrigerator. I made some deviled eggs, too.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Are you mad?”
“I’ve never been angry at you, Alf. Not once in your whole life. Is that a fair statement?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You didn’t.”
“You want to talk to Pierre Dupree?” she said.
“If I can find him.”
“I saw him this morning. He’s at his home in Jeanerette. I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“I think I do,” she replied.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“That’s what bothers me about him. I don’t know why I don’t like him,” she replied.
The home of Pierre Dupree outside Jeanerette had been built on the bayou in 1850 by slave labor and named Croix du Sud Plantation by the original owners. Union forces had ransacked it and chopped up the piano in the chicken yard and started cook fires on the hardwood floors, blackening the ceilings and the walls. During Reconstruction, a carpetbagger bought it at a tax sale and later rented it to a man who was called a free person of color before the Emancipation. By the 1890s, Reconstruction and the registration of black voters had been nullified, and power shifted back into the hands of the same oligarchy that had ruled the state before the Civil War. Slavery was replaced by the rental convict system, one established by a man named Samuel James, who turned Angola Plantation-named for the origins of its workforce-into Angola Penitentiary, which became five thousand acres of living hell on the banks of the Mississippi River.
The home of Pierre Dupree was reacquired by the same family who had built it. Unfortunately for the family, one of the descendants was insane and sealed herself inside the home while the grounds turned into a jungle and Formosan termites reduced the walls and support beams to balsa wood.
Then the house was purchased by the Dupree family, who not only restored it and rebuilt the foundation and cleaned up the grounds and terraced the slope but turned the entire environment into artwork, even reconstructing the slave quarters, relying solely on antique wood and brick from historical teardowns, going all the way to France to buy eighteenth-century square nails. I had called ahead and had been surprised by Pierre Dupree’s generosity of spirit when I asked if Alafair and I could visit him at his home that afternoon. “I’d be delighted, Mr. Robicheaux,” he had said. “I’m due at my exhibition at UL this evening, but I’d love to have y’all for an early supper. Something simple out on the terrace. I’ll tell cook to put something together. I’m sure y’all will enjoy it. We’ll see you then.”
He hung up before I could reply.
He was waiting for us on the front porch when we turned off the old two-lane road into his drive. His lawns and gardens were already in shadow, the camellias blooming, the sunlight dancing on the tops of oak trees that were easily two hundred years old. He was dressed in a dark suit with a vest and a luminescent pink tie and a watery blue shirt with a diamond design stamped into the fabric. He opened the car door for Alafair and in all ways was everything a gentleman should be. But something continued to bother me about him besides the physicality that emanated from his tailored clothes; I just couldn’t put my finger on it. “Would you like the grand tour?” he asked.
“We don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said. “I just wanted to ask a question or two of you.”
“Did you know that ghosts live here? Five rebellious slaves and a white instigator were hanged right on that tree by the side of the house. Sometimes people see them in the mist.”
I knew the story well. But the event had taken place outside St. Martinville, not Jeanerette. I wondered why he had appropriated the story, because the details of the execution and the level of inhumanity it involved were sickening.
He looked at me, then at Alafair, and seemed to realize we were not entertained. “I already have food on the terrace. Cook has created a new recipe, shrimp deep-fried in a mushroom batter. Have you ever tried it?”
“No, I haven’t,” I replied.
“I think you might find yourself addicted,” he said.
He was smiling, but I wasn’t sure at what. Had he chosen the word “addicted” deliberately? I heard a sound above me and looked upward into the glaze of sunlight on the tree branches and saw Alexis Dupree peering down at us from the second-story veranda.
“My grandfather told me about your visit to our office in New Orleans,” Pierre Dupree said. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Robicheaux. Gran’pere gets things confused sometimes. Rather than admit it, he becomes defensive. Please, let’s sit down.”
I did not want to sit down, and I was becoming less and less inclined to be polite. Alafair intervened. “I’d love some shrimp, Pierre,” she said.
I gave her a look, but she refused to acknowledge it. So the three of us sat down at his table on the terrace in the cooling of the day and the glimmer of the late sun on Bayou Teche. The four-o’clocks were opening in the shade, and I could smell the horse stables and see the wind blowing plumes of cinnamon-colored dust out of the cane fields. In the middle of our table was a silver tray set with a decanter of brandy and several crystal glasses. Close by the French doors was an artist’s easel with a partially completed painting propped on it. I asked permission to look at it.
“Why, certainly,” Dupree said.
On the canvas was a peculiar scene, one that seemed to draw its meaning from outside itself: a weathered wood home with cornices and gables, a vegetable garden by a stream, oak trees pooled with shadow, a Victrola in the yard, a guitar leaning against the steps that led up to the gallery. There were no people or animals in the painting.
I sat back down. Alafair had accused me earlier of obsession. I wondered if she was right.
“Does something bother you about my painting?” Dupree said, his eyes bursting with so much goodwill that they were impenetrable.
“Yes, it does bother me,” I replied. Before I could continue, my cell phone chimed. I started to silence it, then saw who the call was from. “I’m sorry, I have to take this call.”
I got up from the table and walked through the trees and down the slope toward the bayou. “Where are you?” Helen asked.
“At Pierre Dupree’s home in Jeanerette.”
“Is Clete Purcel with you?”
“No, I haven’t seen him.”
“Dana Magelli just called from NOPD. Frankie Giacano got popped last night in the men’s room of the Baton Rouge bus depot. Three rounds in the head inside a toilet stall. Giacano’s neighbors say he left his garage apartment with a man in an antique Cadillac convertible. The ticket seller at the New Orleans depot identified Giacano’s photo and said a man fitting Clete’s description bought a ticket for him to Los Angeles.”
“Did Clete get on the bus with him?”
“No, he just paid for the ticket.”
“So why should Clete be a suspect for a homicide committed in Baton Rouge?”
“Ask Dana Magelli. Listen, Dave, if you see Clete Purcel, you tell him to get his big fat ass into my office.”
“Copy that,” I said.
“Don’t be clever. I’m really pissed off.”
“About what?”
“What are you doing at the Dupree house?”
“I’m not sure.”
She made a sound that wasn’t quite a word and hung up. When I got back to the table, Alafair and Pierre Dupree were eating jumbo shrimp that had been fried in a thick golden batter. “Dig in, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “What were you about to say about my painting?”
“It reminds me of a song by Taj Mahal. It’s called ‘My Creole Belle.’ Mississippi John Hurt wrote it, but Taj sings it. There’s mention of a house in the country and a garden out back and blues on a Victrola.”
“Really?” he said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alafair watching me.
“A Cajun singer named Tee Jolie Melton gave me a recording of it when I was in a hospital in New Orleans.”
He nodded pleasantly, his gaze as radiant as the sunlight filtering through the trees. Then I realized what it was that had bothered me most about him. His eyes performed a constant deceit. I believed he could look endlessly into the face of another human being with a lidless, almost ethereal curiosity, giving no hint about his inner thoughts while he simultaneously dissected the other party’s soul.
“Today I saw a photo of one of your paintings at the UL exhibition. The nude woman on the sofa is Tee Jolie, isn’t she?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know this person,” he said, biting into a shrimp and chewing, leaning over his plate, his gaze never leaving mine.
“Her sister was the girl who floated up on a sand spit in a block of ice south of here.”
He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Yes, I heard about that. How does someone end up in a block of ice in the Gulf of Mexico?”
“That beats all, doesn’t it?” I said. “Tee Jolie used to sing in a couple of clubs by Bayou Bijoux. You ever go to clubs on Bayou Bijoux?”
“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?