Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  The biggest downside of incarceration, however, isn’t stacking the time. It’s the realization that you are in the right place and you put yourself there so someone else could feed and take care of you. Titty-babies come in all stripes, many of them with tats from the wrist to the armpit. It isn’t coincidence that mainline recidivists usually have a heavy commitment to topless bars.

  Clete didn’t have all of these thoughts, but he had some of them, and each applied to him. He no longer kept tally of the holding cells and booking rooms he had been in or the times he had been hooked on a chain and transported from jail to morning court, the professional miscreants on the chain eyeing him cautiously. Was it accident that again and again he found himself in their midst, trying to rationalize his behavior, staring at a urine-streaked drainhole in the floor while a night-count man went down the corridor, raking his baton across the bars on the cells? Miscreants broke into the slams, not out of them. They all knew one another, shared needles and women the way ragpickers share clothes, passing their diseases around without remorse or recrimination. The die had been cast for most of them the day they were born. What was Clete’s excuse?

  The light fixture outside his holding cell was defective and kept flickering like a damaged insect, causing him to blink constantly, until his eyelids felt like sandpaper. The paint in the cell was a yellowish-gray and still bore the watermarks and soft decay from five days of submersion during Katrina, when the inmates were left by their warders to slosh about in their own feces until they were rescued by a group of deputies from Iberia Parish. Drawings of genitalia were scratched on the walls, and the names of inmates had been burned onto the ceiling with twists of flaming newspaper, probably during the storm. The toilet bowl had no seat, and the rim was encrusted with dried matter that Clete didn’t want to think about. As he lay on the metal bench against the back wall, his arm across his eyes, he wondered why people always felt compassion toward political prisoners. A political prisoner had the solace of knowing he had done nothing to deserve his fate. The miscreant knew he had ferreted his way into the belly of the beast deliberately, in the same way a tumblebug burrows its way into feces. Could a person have worse knowledge about himself?

  At eight-fifteen A.M. a screw unlocked Clete’s cell door. The screw was a dour lifetime employee of the system, with creases as deep as a prune’s in his face and five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning. “You just got sprung,” he said.

  “Nig Rosewater is out there?” Clete said.

  “Nig Rosewater hasn’t been up this early since World War Two.”

  “Who bailed me out?”

  “A woman.”

  “Who?”

  “How would I know? Why don’t you take your problems somewhere else, Purcel?”

  For some reason, the remark and the flatness of the screw’s tone bothered Clete in a way he couldn’t define. “I do something to set you off?”

  “Yeah, you’re here,” the screw said.

  The girl he had met in the nightclub way down in Terrebonne Parish was standing in the foyer on the other side of the possessions desk, her chestnut hair backlit by the sunlight out on the street. “You went my bail?” Clete said.

  “You’re good for it, aren’t you?”

  “How’d you know my name? How’d you know I was in the can?”

  “A friend of mine at Motor Vehicles ran your tag. I called your office, and your secretary told me where you were.”

  “That doesn’t sound right. Miss Alice doesn’t give out that kind of information.”

  “I kind of lied when I said I was your niece and it was an emergency.” A pale blue cloth purse embroidered with an Indian design hung from her shoulder. She opened it and removed Clete’s Zippo lighter. “You left this on the bar at the club. It has the globe and anchor on it. I thought you’d want it back.”

  “You bet,” he said.

  “Why’d you go charging out of the club? You hurt my feelings.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re pretty easy to jerk around. Maybe you should take some happy pills.”

  “I used to. That’s why I don’t take them anymore.”

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “Are you gonna invite me to breakfast or not?”

  “Let’s go to Cafe du Monde. I love it there in the morning. It’s entirely different from the crowd you see there at night. The whole Quarter is that way. Do you know why I was in the can?”

  “Suspicion of theft or something?”

  They were out on the street now, in the freshness of the morning and the noise of the city. “They were looking at me for a homicide,” he said.

  She was unlocking the passenger door of her rental Honda, her gaze fixed on the traffic, not seeming to listen. “Yeah?” she said.

  “A guy by the name of Frankie Giacano got clipped in the Baton Rouge bus terminal. Somebody came up behind him in a toilet stall and put three rounds in his head,” he said.

  When they got in her Honda, she put the keys in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. “Say that again?”

  “A safecracker, a guy by the name of Frankie Gee, got shot and killed in Baton Rouge. NOPD wanted to put it on me,” Clete said.

  In the silence, he held his eyes on hers, barely breathing, studying every aspect of her face. He could feel his lungs tighten and his heart start to swell, as though no oxygen were reaching his blood, as though a vein might pop in his temple. She moistened her lips and returned his stare. “If we go to breakfast, you won’t run off on me again, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because I really wouldn’t like that.”

  If there was a second meaning in her words, he couldn’t tell. All the way to Cafe du Monde, he watched the side of her face as though seeing part of himself, not necessarily a good one, that he had never recognized.

  They got a table under the pavilion with a fine view of Jackson Square and the cathedral and the Pontalba Apartments. The sky was blue, the myrtle bushes and windmill palms and banana plants in the square covered with sunshine. It was the kind of crisp green-gold late-fall day in Louisiana that seems so perfect in its dimensions that winter and even mortality are set at bay. “So you’re a private investigator?” she said.

  “I used to be with the NOPD, but I messed up my career. It’s my fault, not theirs. I started over, know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “I worked for some mobbed-up guys in Reno and Montana. But I got clear of them. I have a friend named Dave Robicheaux. He says it’s always the first inning. You get up one morning and say fuck it and start over.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Antiques, collectibles, that kind of stuff. I’ve got a little store in Key West, but most of my sales are on the Internet.”

  “You didn’t know my name, but you ran my tag and traced me to the jail and got me back on the street. You even brought me my cigarette lighter. Not many people could pull that off. Maybe you have a gift.”

  “My mother said my father was a marine who got killed in the first Iraqi war, so that’s why I brought you your lighter. I was never sure if my mother was telling me the truth. She should have had a turnstile on her bedroom door.”

  “What I’m saying is I could use an assistant,” Clete said.

  “Are you having hot flashes or something?” she asked, biting into a beignet.

  “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I have blood pressure issues.”

  “You ought to take better care of yourself,” she said. “This junk we’re eating isn’t helping either your blood pressure or your cholesterol count.”

  “I’ve got two offices, one here and one in New Iberia. That’s on Bayou Teche, about two hours west. How long are you going to be in town?”

  “I’m not big on clocks and calendars.”

  “You think you could work for a guy like m
e?”

  “You married?”

  “Not now. Why do you ask?”

  “You act strange. I don’t think you’re on the make, but I can’t quite figure you.”

  “What’s to figure?”

  “You never asked my name. It’s Gretchen Horowitz.”

  “Glad to meet you, Gretchen. Come work for me.”

  “I never saw you at Little Yankee Stadium. It was somewhere else, wasn’t it?”

  “Who cares?” he said.

  “What did you do in the Crotch?”

  “Tried to stay alive.”

  “You kill any people while you were staying alive?”

  “I did two combat tours in Vietnam. Who told you the Corps was called the Crotch?”

  “I get around. I picked up some of my mother’s habits. Mostly the bad ones.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that now,” he said.

  She gazed at him without replying. He realized her eyes were violet in the daylight as well as in the evening shadows, and they engendered feelings in him that he could not deal with.

  “Thanks for the beignets. You don’t mind walking to your office, do you?” she said. “It’s across the square and about a block down, right? See you around, big boy. Keep it in your pants.”

  She left five dollars under her plate for the waitress. After she was gone, he pressed his fingers against his temples and tried to put together what she had just said. How did she know where his office was, and how did she know the exact distance? Had she followed the Greyhound to Baton Rouge and popped Frankie Gee in the stall? Had his seed produced a psychopath? Even though a breeze was blowing off the river, the scent of her perfume seemed to hang on every surface she had touched.

  That same night in New Iberia, the southern sky was filled with strange lights, flashes of electricity that would ignite inside a solitary black cloud and in seconds ripple across the entirety of the heavens without making a sound. Then a rain front moved across the marshlands and drenched the town and overflowed the gutters on East Main and covered our front yard with a gray and yellow net of dead leaves. At four in the morning, amid the booming of thunder, I thought I heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. I had been dreaming before I woke, and in the dream, large shells fired from an offshore battery were arching out of their trajectory, whistling just before they exploded inside a sodden rain forest.

  I felt light-headed when I picked up the phone, part of me still inside the dream that was so real I could not shake it or think my way out of it. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

  At first I could hear only static. I looked at the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Who is this?” I said.

  “It’s Tee Jolie, Mr. Dave. Can you hear me okay? There’s a bad storm where I’m at.”

  Through the window, I could see fog rolling off the bayou into the trees, pushing against the windows and doors. I sat down in a chair. “Where are you?” I said.

  “A long ways from home. There’s a beautiful beach here. The sea is green. I wanted to tell you everyt’ing is all right. I scared you at the hospital in New Orleans. I wish I ain’t done that.”

  “Nothing is right, Tee Jolie.”

  “Did you like the songs I left on your iPod? I dropped it before I gave it to you. It don’t always work right.”

  “You said everything is all right. Don’t you know about your sister?”

  “What about her? Blue is just Blue. She’s sweet. To tell you the troot’, her voice is better than mine.”

  “Blue is dead.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She was murdered. Her body floated up in St. Mary Parish.”

  “You’re breaking up, Mr. Dave. What’s that you said about Blue? The storm is tearing up the boathouse on the beach. Can you still hear me, Mr. Dave?”

  “Yes.”

  “I cain’t hear you, suh. This storm is terrible. It scares me. I got to go now. Tell Blue and my granddaddy hello. Tell them I couldn’t get t’rew.”

  The line went dead, and the words “blocked call” disappeared from the caller identification window. Molly was awake when I got back into bed and lay back on the pillow. “Were you fixing something in the kitchen?” she said.

  “No, that was Tee Jolie Melton on the phone.”

  Molly raised herself up on one elbow. Each time lightning flashed in the clouds, I could see the freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.

  “It woke me up.”

  “No, I was awake, Dave. You were talking in your sleep.”

  “She said she was sorry for making me worry about her. She doesn’t know her sister is dead.”

  “Oh, Dave,” Molly said, her eyes filming.

  “These are the things she said. It was Tee Jolie. You think I could forget what her voice sounds like?”

  “No, it was not Tee Jolie.”

  “She told me she dropped the iPod. That’s why other people can’t hear the songs she put on there.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m telling you what she said. I didn’t imagine it.”

  “You’re going to drive us all crazy.”

  “You want me to lie to you instead?”

  “I almost wish you were drinking again. We could deal with that. But I can’t deal with this.”

  “Then don’t,” I said.

  I returned to the kitchen and sat in the darkness and looked through the window at the Teche rising over its banks. A pirogue was spinning in the current-empty, with no paddle, rotating over and over as it drifted downstream toward a bend, filling with rainwater that would eventually sink it in the deepest part of the channel. I could not get the image of the sinking pirogue out of my head. I wished I had asked Tee Jolie about the baby she was carrying. I wished I had asked her many things. I felt Molly’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Come back to bed,” she said.

  “I’ll be along directly.”

  “I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “Your feelings are justified.”

  “I thought you were dreaming about Vietnam. I heard you say ‘incoming.’”

  “I don’t remember what I was dreaming about,” I lied, my gaze fixed on the pirogue settling in a frothy whirlpool beneath the current.

  Unless a felon walks into a police station and confesses his crime, or unless he is caught in the commission of the crime, there are only two ways, from an evidentiary point of view, that the crime is solved and given prosecutable status. A detective either follows a chain of evidence to the suspect, or the detective begins with the suspect and, in retrograde fashion, follows the evidence back to the crime. So far I had no demonstrable evidence to link Pierre Dupree to Tee Jolie Melton or her sister, Blue. But there was one thing I knew about him for certain: He was a liar. He had denied knowing Tee Jolie, even though his painting of the reclining nude looked very much like her; second, he had claimed that years ago he had gotten rid of the safe from which Frankie Giacano had taken Clete Purcel’s IOU.

  So where do you start when you want to find out everything you can about a man whose physical dimensions and latent anger give most men serious pause?

  His ex-to-be might be a good beginning.

  Varina Leboeuf Dupree had once been known as the wet dream of every fraternity boy on the LSU campus. By the time she was twenty-five, she had proved she could break hearts and bank accounts and succeed at business in a male-oriented culture in which women might be admired but were usually thought of as acquisitions. She was certainly nothing like her father, a retired Iberia sheriff’s detective, the mention of whose name would cause black people to lower their eyes lest they reveal the fear and loathing he instilled in them. Jesse Leboeuf had named his daughter for Jefferson Davis’s wife, I suspect in hopes that it would allow her to occupy the social station that would never be his or his wife’s. Unfortunately for him, Varina Leboeuf did things her own way, couldn’t have cared less about her social station, and made sure everyone
knew it. In college she wore her dark brown hair in braids wrapped around her head, sometimes with Mardi Gras beads woven in. She wore peasant dresses to dances, jeans and pink tennis shoes without socks to church, and once, when her pastor asked her to greet a famous televangelical leader at the airport, she arrived barefoot and braless at the Lafayette concourse in an evening gown that looked like sherbet running down her skin.

  She was scandalous and beautiful and often had a pout that begged to be kissed. Some condemned her as profligate, but she always seemed to enter into her affairs without anger or need and depart from them in the same fashion. Even though she broke hearts, I had never heard one of her former lovers speak ill of her. In the American South, there is a crude expression often used to define the plantation-bred protocol of both conjugal and extramarital relationships. The statement is offensive and coarse and is of the kind that is whispered with a hand to the mouth, but there is no question about its accuracy inside the world in which I grew up: “You marry up and you screw down.” I heard some women say Varina married up. I didn’t agree. By the same token, I didn’t understand why she had married into the Dupree family or why she had taken up residence in St. Mary Parish, a place where convention and sycophancy and Shintoism were institutions.

  On Monday morning I signed out of the office and drove in my pickup down to Cypremort Point, a narrow strip of land extending into West Cote Blanche Bay, where Varina’s father lived among cypress and oak trees in a beachfront house elevated on pilings. Jesse Leboeuf was a Cajun but originally from North Louisiana and the kind of lawman other cops treat with caution rather than respect, in the same way you walk around an unpredictable guard dog, or a gunbull whose presence in the tower can make a convict’s face twitch with anxiety, or a door gunner who volunteers for as much trigger time as possible in free-fire zones. Jesse had abused himself with whiskey and cigarettes for a lifetime but showed no signs of physical decay. When I found him on his back porch, he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette, gazing at the bay, his outboard boat rocking against his small dock. He rose to greet me, his hand enveloping mine, his face as stolid as boilerplate, his hair flat-topped and boxed and shiny with butch wax. “You want to know where my little girl is at?” he said.