Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  As I looked out at the reflection of moonlight on the bayou, I thought of Tee Jolie Melton and the music that no one heard except me. Had I become delusional? Maybe. But here’s the rub. I didn’t care. Long ago I had come to believe that the world is not a rational place and that only the most self-destructive of individuals convince themselves that it is. Those who change history are always rejected in their own era. As a revolutionary people, we Americans won an improbable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don’t put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoliers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of howitzers loaded with chain and chopped-up horseshoes.

  Somehow I knew with absolute certainty that not only had Tee Jolie visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue but that now, right at this moment, she was out there in the darkness beckoning, her mouth slightly parted, her mahogany tresses flecked with the golden glow of the buttercups that grew along the levees in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Our wetlands were cut by over eight thousand miles of channels that allowed a constant infusion of saline into freshwater marsh; our poorest communities were dumping grounds for chemical sludge trucked in from other states; and the Gulf Stream waters of Woody Guthrie’s famous song were strung with columns of oil that were several miles long. But I believed I could hear Tee Jolie’s voice rising out of the mists, her Acadian French lyrics as mournful as a dirge. Maybe all my perceptions and convictions were the stuff one expects of a dry drunk or, in this instance, a drunkard who had to wet his lips each time he thought about the slow seep of a translucent tube into his veins. No matter how it played out, my vote would always remain with those who’d had their souls shot out of a cannon and who no longer paid much heed to the judgment of the world.

  I would like to say that all my cerebral processes gave me a solution to my problems. The opposite was true. At sunrise, when steam rose off the bayou and the tidal current reversed itself and I heard the drawbridge at Burke Street clanking into the air, I still had no answer to two essential questions: What had happened to Tee Jolie Melton, and how had a collection of low-rent gumballs gotten their hands on a bourre marker that Clete Purcel paid off two decades ago?

  At 7:45 A.M. I walked down East Main and up the long driveway past the city library and the shady grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother and entered the side door of the sheriff’s department and knocked on Helen Soileau’s door. Helen had started her career as a meter maid with NOPD and had worked herself up to the level of patrol-woman in a neighborhood that included the Desire Projects. Later, she became a detective with the department in New Iberia, the town where she had grown up. For several years she had been my partner in our homicide unit, overcoming all the prejudices and suspicions that people have toward women in general and lesbians in particular. She had been the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation and brought to task because of her romantic involvement with a female confidential informant. She had received three citations for bravery and meritorious service. She had been Clete Purcel’s lover. Last, there had been occasions when Helen looked at me with an androgynous light in her eyes and I found it necessary to leave the room and devote myself to other duties in the building.

  I told her about Clete’s problems with Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly and about Grimes’s invasion of Alice Werenhaus’s home. I also told her about the disappearance of Tee Jolie and her sister, Blue Melton, in St. Martin Parish.

  “Dave, no matter what Clete does or does not do, Ms. Werenhaus is going to file charges with NOPD against Grimes,” she said. “Let them do their job.”

  “There’s no evidence it was Grimes,” I replied.

  “Maybe they’ll create some.”

  “Things have changed since you and I worked there.”

  She picked up a ballpoint pen and stuck the end between her teeth while she stared flatly into my face. “What Clete does in New Orleans is his business. I don’t want to hear about it again. Got it?”

  “No. What do you think happened to Tee Jolie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her exasperation barely constrained. “You say you saw her at your recovery unit. Why do you think anything happened to her?”

  I didn’t have an adequate answer for that one.

  “Hello? Are there two of us in the room, or did you just take flight?” she asked.

  “Tee Jolie was afraid. She was talking about centralizers.”

  “About what?”

  “She said she was scared. She said she was around dangerous people.”

  “If we’re talking about the same person, she has a promiscuous reputation, Dave. Bad things happen to girls who drop their panties for bad guys.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to say.”

  “Too bad. It’s the truth. Didn’t she sing in that zydeco dump by Bayou Bijoux?”

  “So what?”

  “It’s a place where guys in suits and ties hunt on the game farm.”

  “What you’re suggesting is that she deserved her fate.”

  “It’s a real pleasure to have you back on the job.”

  “You’re dead wrong about Tee Jolie.”

  She tapped her ballpoint on the desk blotter, her eyelids fluttering, her gaze focused on neutral space. “How should I say this? Tell you what, I won’t even try. Thank you for all this information that has nothing to do with crimes committed in Iberia Parish. In the future, bwana put it in writing so I can look at it and then file it in the trash basket. That way bwana and I can both save loads of time.”

  Before I could speak, she jiggled her fingers at me and widened her eyes and silently mouthed, Get out of here.

  Bix Golightly didn’t like the way things were going. Not with the squeeze on Purcel, not with this nutcase kid Grimes attacking an ex-nun, not with the general state of cultural collapse in New Orleans. If you asked him, Katrina was a blessing in disguise, hosing out the projects when nothing else worked. This artsy-fartsy renaissance stuff needed to get washed off the streets, too. What did poets and sidewalk painters and guys blowing horns on the corners for pocket change have to do with rebuilding a city? “It’s a publicity scam run by these Hollywood actors whose careers are washed up,” he told his friends. “We shipped out the boons and got hit with half the panhandlers in San Francisco. You ever been to San Fran? I went into a steam room in a part of town named after Fidel Castro, which shows you what kind of neighborhood it is, and there were two dozen guys having a Crisco party. The door was jammed or something, and it took me almost half an hour to fight my way out of there.”

  For Bix, the city was a safe and predictable place when it was under the supervision of the Giacanos. Everybody knew the rules: Tourists got what they wanted; any vice was acceptable in the Quarter except narcotics; jackrollers had their sticks broken, by either the Giacanos or NOPD; no bar operator double-billed a drunk’s credit card; the hookers were clean and never rolled a john; pimps didn’t run Murphy scams; street dips or anybody washing Jersey money at a cardhouse or the horse track got their thumbs cut off; no puke from the Iberville Projects would strong-arm a tourist in the St. Louis cemeteries unless he wanted to see the world through one eye; and child molesters became fish chum.

  What was wrong with any of that?

  Before Katrina, Bix owned a corner grocery store on the edge of the Quarter, a seafood business across the river in Algiers, and a car wash in Gentilly. The grocery was looted and vandalized and the car wash buried in mud when the levees burst, but to Bix these were not significant losses. His seafood business was another matter. The gigantic plumes of oil from the blowout in the bottom of the Gulf had fanned through the oyster beds and shrimping grounds all along the Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama coastline. Not only had Bix seen his most lucrative business slide down the bowl, he’d lost his one means to declare his illegal income, such as the two big scores
he’d pulled off in Fort Lauderdale and Houston, one jewelry heist alone amounting to eighty grand, less the 40 percent to the fence.

  How do you end up with that much money and nowhere to put it besides a hole in your backyard? Now Waylon Grimes had busted into the house of an ex-nun and poured scalding water on her, and the Times-Picayune had put the story on the front page. The more Bix thought about Grimes, the angrier he got. He picked up his cell phone from the coffee table and went out on the balcony of his apartment, dialing Grimes’s number. The evening sky was pink, the wind warm and cool at the same time, the palm trees on the apartment grounds rattling drily. He should be out on the town, dialing up a lady or two, having a dinner in a cafe on St. Charles, not dealing with all this grief. What had he done to deserve it? Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a maroon Caddy with a starch-white top pass through the intersection.

  Grimes picked up. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Guess.”

  “Who is this?”

  “ Who is this? Who do you think, asshole?” Bix said.

  “In case it’s escaped your attention, I’m not feeling too good, and I’ve already told you what happened, and I don’t need any more of your bullshit, Bix.”

  “Did I hear right? You don’t need my bullshit. If an elephant is sleeping, you don’t take a dump on its head and wipe your ass with its trunk and stroll off down the street.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think I just saw Purcel’s car go through the intersection.”

  “It was you who threatened Purcel’s family, not me.”

  “The point is, I wasn’t gonna do anything.”

  “How is Purcel supposed to know that? Most people around here think you got brain damage.”

  “Where are you?” Bix asked.

  “What do you care?”

  “I want to give you your cut on the Houston job. Are you at that fuck pad you got?”

  “You said the fence hadn’t paid you.”

  “He just did.”

  “It’s true you bit off the nose of the psychiatrist at Angola?”

  “No, it’s not true, you little bitch. My cellmate did. You want to know what I’m gonna do if you don’t clean up this mess?”

  “Speak slower, will you? I’m taking notes on this so I can send Purcel a kite and tell him what you got planned for his family.”

  Bix’s hand was opening and closing on the cell phone, his fingers sticking to the surface. “You got twenty large coming. You want it or not?”

  “Change your twenty large into nickels and shove them up your nose. While you’re at it, go fuck yourself, because no broad is gonna do it. I heard some guys in the AB say you were queer bait and on the stroll at Angola. Is that why you never get laid?”

  Before Bix could reply, the connection went dead, and he found himself squeezing the cell phone so tightly he almost cracked the screen. There was a pain behind his eyes as if someone had hammered a nail into his temple. He tried to concentrate and rid his head of all the energies that seemed to devour him from dawn to dusk. What was that word people were always using? Focus? Yeah, that was it. Focus. He heard the wind in the palm trees and the sound of the streetcar reversing itself for the return trip up St. Charles Avenue. Music was playing in a cafe over on Carrollton. Then a Hispanic guy who looked like a pile of frijoles came roaring around the side of the building on a mower that didn’t have a bag or muffler on it, the discharge chute firing a steady stream of grass clippings and ground-up palm fronds and dog turds against the walls. Screw focus, Bix thought.

  “Hey, you! The greaseball down there! Yeah, you!” Bix shouted. “Hey, I’m talking here!”

  The driver, who was wearing ear protectors, smiled stupidly at the balcony and kept going.

  “Think that’s funny?” Bix said. He waited until the mower had made a turn and was passing under the balcony again. The flowerpot he picked up was packed with dirt and a root-bound palm and felt as heavy as a cannonball. Bix gripped the pot solidly with both hands, judging distance and trajectory like a bombardier, and lobbed it into space.

  He couldn’t believe what happened next. He not only missed the gardener and the mower; just as he let fly, the neighbor’s poodle, whom Bix called the Barking Roach, ran out from the patio below and got knocked senseless by the pot. Then the driver swung the mower in a circle to cut another swath in the opposite direction and crunched over the broken pot and the compacted dirt and the palm plant and its exposed roots and shredded all of them without ever noticing that Bix had just tried to brain him. The only break Bix got was the fact that the Barking Roach ran back into its apartment and, unless it knew Morse code, wouldn’t be able to report him.

  Before Bix could reload for a second shot, he saw the maroon Caddy come around the corner and park in front of a refurbished double-shotgun house called the Maple Street Bookstore. Maybe it wasn’t Purcel, Bix thought. What would an albino ape be doing in a bookstore, particularly one named Purcel, unless it sold porn or bananas? Time to stop messing around and get to the bottom of things. He Velcro-strapped a. 25 auto on his ankle, pulled his trouser cuff over the grips, and headed downstairs.

  He crossed the street and took up a position in front of the bookstore, leaning back on the Caddy’s fender, his arms folded comfortably on his chest. Five minutes later, Purcel came out with a couple of books in a plastic sack, wearing cream-colored pleated slacks and oxblood loafers and a pale blue long-sleeve shirt and a straw hat that had a black band around the crown, like he was some kind of planter in the islands instead of an alcoholic bail-skip chaser for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. “You dogging me?” Bix said.

  “Get off my car.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “If I was following you around, would I park my car next to your crib?”

  “It ain’t a crib. It’s a condo. You want Waylon Grimes, or do you just want to look through people’s windows?”

  “What I want is your germs off my fender.”

  “Relax. We go back, right? Old school. I didn’t sic Grimes on your secretary.”

  “Who said it was Grimes?” Clete asked.

  “Maybe it wasn’t. What I’m saying is I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Clete unlocked the driver’s door and threw his books on the seat. “You threatened to harm my sister and niece. You think you’re going to walk off from that?”

  Bix stepped up on the curb, away from the car, flexing his neck the way he used to before he came out of his corner in the first round, both gloves flying into his opponent’s face. “You’re a bum and your word don’t mean anything, Purcel. Sorry your secretary got hurt, but it’s on you, not me.” He squeezed his penis and pulled it taut against his slacks. “You don’t like that, bite my stick.”

  “Here’s what doesn’t make sense, Bix. Why is it that after all these years you guys end up with an old marker you think you can use to steal my home and my office? Who could think up a harebrained scheme like that?”

  “I told you. Frankie Giacano opened up Didi Gee’s safe as a favor for somebody.”

  “For who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where was the safe?”

  “At the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. How would I know? Ask Frankie Gee.”

  “I think you’re lying. Didi Gee kept a two-thousand-pound safe right by his aquarium, the one that was full of piranhas. I don’t think that safe went anywhere. I did some checking on the ownership of Didi’s old building. It’s owned by a guy named Pierre Dupree. Is that the guy y’all got the marker from?”

  “This is all over my head.”

  “You look a little uncomfortable, Bix. You don’t have a meth problem, do you?”

  “I don’t have any kind of problem,” Bix said, leaning forward, pointing his stiffened fingers into his own chest. “It’s you who’s got the problem, Purcel. You were a dirty cop. Everybody laughed at you behind your back. Why do you think our whor
es slept with you? It’s because Didi Gee told them to. I put you in a cab once outside the Dos Marinos. You had puke on your clothes and cooze on your face. Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “I think you’re scared.”

  “Of you?”

  “No, of somebody else. I think you and your lamebrain friends went out on your own and ended up stepping in your own shit. Now you’ve gotten somebody else jammed up, and they’re about to clamp jumper cables on your ears. That’s it, isn’t it, or something close to it?”

  “What gave you this brilliant idea?”

  “All this time you haven’t said anything about money. Every one of you guys has got only one thing on the brain, and it’s money. Y’all never talk about anything else. Not sex, not sports, not politics, not your families. You talk about money from morning to night. You never get enough of it, you don’t give five cents of it away, and you don’t tip in restaurants unless you can make a production out of it. For you guys, greed is a virtue. But there hasn’t been one peep out of you about the money you say I owe you. Are you hooked up with some kind of new action in the city? Something besides smash-and-grab scores on old people?”

  “Maybe I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. You want Grimes, I’ll give you Grimes.”

  “I didn’t think AB guys did that.”

  “So I’m making an exception. Grimes deserves anything that happens to him. Also, I’m tearing up your marker.”

  “You already missed your opportunity. I’ll find Grimes on my own. If I discover you told him to hurt Miss Alice, I’m going to cancel your whole ticket. In the meantime, you might start thinking about giving back your ink.”

  “Say again?”

  Clete Purcel pulled a small recorder from his pants pocket and rewound it until he isolated the moment when Bix had said he was making an exception to the code of the Aryan Brotherhood and was willing to rat out Waylon Grimes. “By tomorrow this will be on several Aryan-supremacist message boards.”