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“She doesn’t know you real well. She thinks you don’t like her.”
“I don’t. I think she’s screwing up your life.”
“You remember those fireworks we called devil chasers? They’d ricochet all over the place and go nowhere. We’d stick them up people’s tailpipes on neckers’ row at the drive-in. That’s exactly what you remind me of.”
“Are you going to give me her number or not?”
He was sitting on the side of the bed, the covers pulled across his lap, his face full of sleep. Gretchen’s bedroom door was closed. He threw his cell phone to me. “It’s in my contacts,” he said.
I drove down to the foot of the road to get service, then dialed Felicity Louviere’s number.
“Clete, you shouldn’t call me at home,” she said.
“It’s not Clete. It’s Dave Robicheaux. I’d like to speak with Love Younger, please.”
“About what?”
“About none of your business, Ms. Louviere. Would you mind putting him on?”
“I’ll ask him. You don’t have to get snippy about it.”
“You’ll ask him?” I said it again. “You’ll ask him?”
“My sympathies to your family,” she said.
She must have been gone two minutes. Then I heard her talking and someone else taking the phone from her hand. “Love Younger,” a man’s voice said.
“I need to speak with you, sir, man-to-man, at your home or some other place of your choosing,” I said.
“Regarding what, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Asa Surrette may have been on Albert Hollister’s property last night.”
“What evidence do you have?”
“We can talk about that in person.”
“One of my employees, Tony Zappa, was murdered. Your friend’s daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, is a suspect in his death. Why should I be speaking with you at all on any subject?”
“Number one, the charge against Gretchen Horowitz is not only fraudulent but unprosecutable and will be dropped, and both the sheriff and the district attorney’s office know it. Second, the man you refer to as your employee was a rapist.”
“Tony had a troubled life. But I’ve yet to see any proof that he committed a crime of any kind while he was in my employ.”
“You ever hear of Jack Abbott? He wrote a book titled In the Belly of the Beast. Norman Mailer was deeply moved by it and helped get Abbott out of the Utah state pen. Abbott paid back the favor by shanking a twenty-one-year-old waiter to death.”
“I never read Norman Mailer and have no interest in him. I think I’m going to terminate this call, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Your granddaughter was probably abducted and killed by Surrette. I don’t want my daughter to suffer the same fate. Surrette has a passionate hatred of her and will probably do worse to her than he did to your granddaughter. Frankly, I suspect you’re a genuine son of a bitch, Mr. Younger. That said, you’re obviously a man who cares about his own and understands the nature of loss. If you won’t agree to meet with me, I’ll come out to your house, and we’ll take it from there.”
There was a silence. “I’m hosting a barbecue on my ranch out on Highway 12 at one o’clock,” he said. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes in private. Then you can leave or stay and eat. I don’t care which. You will not make demands of me again. Do you understand me on this?”
“I look forward to our conversation,” I replied.
He broke the connection. I turned off the cell phone and drove back to the house. When Alafair came down for breakfast, I asked if she wanted to go to a barbecue.
“Whose?” she asked.
“Love Younger’s.”
