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“She wants to find her mother.”
“I’m going to have a talk with Helen about Gretchen this morning.”
I heard him exhale against the receiver. “Is there another way to do this?” he asked.
“No.”
“A PI friend of mine in Lafayette found the British oil guy. His name is Hubert Donnelly. He and Lamont Woolsey are staying at a motel on Pinhook Road in Lafayette.”
“After I talk with Helen, I’ll call you back.”
“Gretchen is still my daughter, no matter what happens.”
“I don’t know how I should take that.”
“Any way you want,” he replied. Then he hung up.
I ate breakfast in the kitchen with Molly while Alafair worked on her new novel in her bedroom. The windows were open, and the morning was cool and fresh and smelled of humus and night damp and the flowers opening in the shadows. I heard Alafair clicking on the old Smith Corona I gave her when she was eight years old. She wrote in a strange fashion, one I never quite understood. She woke in the middle of the night and wrote with a pen in a notebook, typed the words on the Smith Corona in the morning, and then retyped them onto her computer. When I asked her why she did it that way, she replied, “It’s never any good unless you’re sure that not one period or comma is out of place and not one word is used that can be taken out.”
“Who was that on the phone last night?” Molly asked.
“Varina Leboeuf. She said her father was drunk and out to get me. I didn’t take her seriously. That whole bunch at Croix du Sud Plantation are a tangle of vipers. Their schemes are coming apart, whatever they are, and Varina is trying to save herself.”
“Why would her father have it in for you?”
“Years ago someone taught him to hate himself so he’d blame his lot in life on people of color or people who disagree with him. It’s a fine morning. Let’s not talk about these guys.”
“We have to.”
“No, we don’t. It’s like reading the Bible,” I said. “We know how the last chapter ends. The good guys win.”
“You skipped over the part where a lot of the earth gets wiped out.”
“No story is perfect,” I said.
We both laughed, in the way we used to laugh when we didn’t have any cares. We divided a hot cinnamon roll and drank the rest of the coffee and hot milk on the stove. Then we went outside and walked down to the edge of Bayou Teche with Snuggs and Tripod flanking us. The air was cold and wonderful rising off the water, the light as soft as pollen on the tree limbs above us. There was no sound at all on the bayou, not even on the drawbridge at Burke Street. Molly took my hand in hers without speaking, and we watched the bream feeding among the lily pads, which were turning brown and curling stiffly along the edges. I wondered how many weeks we might have before the gray, rainy days of the Louisiana winter set in, laying bare the water oaks and the pecan trees, smudging the windows with fog that could be as cold and wet as seepage in the grave.
WHEN I WENT to the departmen
t, I learned that Helen’s half sister, Ilene, had almost died in an auto accident in Shreveport and that Helen had gone to be by her side. I had been prepared to tell her everything I knew about Gretchen Horowitz and the kidnapping of Candy Horowitz and the contract on me and my family and Clete, and like the guilt-ridden man who finds the church house closed, I found myself with nowhere to take my story.
I called Clete at his office. “What’s the status of the Brit and Lamont Woolsey this morning?” I said.
“Funny you asked. I just called Lafayette. The Brit is addressing a chamber of commerce luncheon on Pinhook Road,” he replied. “Dig this. They’re serving oysters on the half shell that they had flown in from Chesapeake Bay. There’s nothing like being safe.”
THE RESTAURANT WAS located in the older section of Pinhook, where the oak trees had been spared the chain saw and whose gnarled, thick limbs arched over the two-lane and created a leafy, windblown arbor that was truly grand to stand under, particularly when the morning was still fresh and the sunlight cool and filtering through the canopy. It was the kind of moment that made you believe Robert Browning was correct and the naysayers were wrong, that in truth God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.
Unfortunately, all was not right with the world. Giant tentacles of oil that had the color and sheen of feces had spread all the way to Florida, and the argument that biodegradation would take care of the problem would be a hard sell with the locals. The photographs of pelicans and egrets and seagulls encased in sludge, their eyes barely visible, wounded the heart and caused parents to shield their children’s eyes. The testimony before congressional committees by Louisiana fisher-people whose way of life was being destroyed did not help matters, either. The oil company responsible for the blowout had spent an estimated $50 million trying to wipe their fingerprints off of Louisiana’s wetlands. They hired black people and whites with hush-puppy accents to be their spokesmen on television. The company’s CEOs tried their best to look earnest and humanitarian, even though their company’s safety record was the worst of any extractive industry doing business in the United States. They also had a way of chartering their offshore enterprises under the flag of countries like Panama. Their record of geopolitical intrigue went all the way back to the installation of the shah of Iran in the 1950s. Their even bigger problem was an inability to shut their mouths.
They gave misleading information to the media and the government about the volume of oil escaping from the blown well, and made statements on worldwide television about wanting their lives back and the modest impact that millions of gallons of crude would have on the Gulf Coast. For the media, their tone-deafness was a gift from a divine hand. Central casting could not have provided a more inept bunch of villains.
Clete and I had seated ourselves in the middle of the banquet room with a clear view of the podium and the long linen-covered table where the guests of honor were seated. On each table was a silver bowl filled with water and floating camellias. Clete ordered a Bloody Mary and a cup of crawfish gumbo, then leaned toward my ear and pointed at the front of the room. “There’s the albino. You see that cocksucker who just came in? That’s Donnelly. Watch him. He’s going to work the room.”
“How do you know?” I said, trying to ignore the stares we were getting from other tables.
“I saw him on tape with Varina.” I looked at Clete, waiting for him to explain. “You didn’t want to watch the tapes,” he said. “Good for you. But I did watch them. Believe me when I tell you this guy has got one agenda—getting his hammer polished.”
Donnelly was eating strips of lobster with his fingers, dipping them gingerly in oil before he placed them in his mouth. His nails were like pink seashells, his hair freshly clipped and stiff and silver on the tips. He looked youthful and healthy, his skin glowing with tan. His only physical imperfection was in the flesh that sagged under his jaw, as though he couldn’t hide the sybarite that lived inside him.
