Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  After she and I talked, she walked by herself down to the holding cell while I took a seat in a chair around the corner.

  “I have to clear up something between us, Mr. Leboeuf,” she said through the bars. “I don’t like you or what you represent. You’re a racist and a misogynist, and the world would be better off without you. But as a Christian, I have to forgive you. The reason I’m able to do that is I think you’re a victim yourself. It appears you were loyal to people who are now ratting you out. That must be a terrible fate to live with. Anyway, that’s your business, not mine. Good-bye, and I hope I never see you again.”

  It was a masterpiece. I waited five minutes, then unlocked Leboeuf’s cell door. “The sheriff wants to see you,” I said.

  “I’m getting out?” he said, rising from the wood bench where he had been sitting.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. I cuffed his wrists behind him and made sure as many people as possible witnessed his humiliation while I escorted him to Helen’s office.

  “Y’all don’t have the right to do this to me,” he said.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to think, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be the fall guy on this one,” I replied.

  “Fall guy on what?”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. I opened the door to Helen’s office and sat him down in a chair.

  Helen was standing by the window, backlit by the sun’s glare off Bayou Teche. She smiled pleasantly at him. She was holding half a dozen printouts from the phone company. “Did you know that prior to Dave Robicheaux’s visit to your home yesterday, you hadn’t used your landline or your cell phone in two days?”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” he replied, his hands still cuffed behind him, the strain starting to show.

  “Immediately after Detective Robicheaux left your house, you made three calls: one to the home of Pierre Dupree, one to a boat dock south of New Orleans, and one to a company called Redstone Security. Forty-five minutes later, someone tried to kill Detective Robicheaux.”

  “I called Pierre because him and me and my daughter own half of Redstone. I’m retired, but I still consult for them. I wanted Pierre to know that I’ll sell him my shares in the company at the stock option price if he’ll treat my daughter right in their divorce settlement. The phone call to the boat dock was a misdial. What difference does any of this make, anyway?”

  “You dialed the wrong number?” she said.

  “I guess. I didn’t give it any thought.”

  “Your phone records show you called that same boat dock four times in the last month. Were those all misdials?”

  “I’m old. I get confused,” he said. “You’re talking too fast and trying to trip me up. I want my daughter here.”

  “Lafayette PD was on the shooter from the jump,” Helen said. “He’s a guy you know, Mr. Leboeuf. He doesn’t want to go back to Camp J. Are you going to take his weight? At your age, any sentence can mean life.”

  Leboeuf stared into space, his unshaved cheeks threaded with tiny purple veins. I realized we had been foolish in thinking we could take him over the hurdles. He belonged to that group of people who, of their own volition, eradicate all light from the soul and thereby inure themselves against problems of conscience and any thoughts of restraint in dealing with the wiles of their enemies. I cannot say with certainty what constitutes a sociopath. My guess is they love evil for its own sake, that they chose roles and vocations endowing them with sufficient authority and power to impose their agenda on their fellow man. Was Jesse Leboeuf a sociopath? Or was he something worse?

  “I don’t like you staring at me like that,” he said to me.

  “Did you ever think about the emotional damage you did to the people you tormented with your slingshot years ago?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When you and your friends went nigger-knocking in the black district.”

  He shook his head. “I have no memory of that,” he replied.

  “Get him out of here,” Helen said.

  I unlocked Leboeuf’s cuffs. He stood up, rubbing his wrists. “You charging me on the beef with the black woman?”

  “You’re free to go, sir,” I replied.

  Leboeuf huffed air out his nose and left Helen’s office, trailing his cigarette odor like a soiled flag. But it wasn’t over. Five minutes later, I was standing by the possessions desk when a deputy handed Leboeuf the manila envelope that contained his wallet and keys and pocket change and cigarette lighter. I watched him put each item back in his pockets, gazing indolently out the window at the oak-shaded grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother.

  “Mind if I have a look at your key chain?” I said.

  “What’s so interesting about it?” he asked.

  “The fob. It’s a sawfish. It’s like the one I think was painted on the bow of the boat that abducted Blue Melton.”

  “It’s a goddamn fish. What kind of craziness are you trying to put on me now?”

  “I remember where I saw that emblem painted on another boat many years ago. It was in sixty feet of water, south of Cocodrie. The sawfish was on the conning tower of a Nazi submarine. It was sunk by a Coast Guard dive-bomber in 1943. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Give your guff to the devil,” he replied.

  Later, I made two calls to the boat dock whose number Helen had pulled from Leboeuf’s phone records. In each instance the man I spoke with said he knew nothing of a white boat with a sawfish painted on the bow.

  9

  That evening, Clete Purcel pulled his Caddy to the curb one house down from ours and walked back across our yard to the front door, tapping softly, as though preoccupied about something. When I answered the door, I could see the Caddy in the shadows, a solitary spark of red sunlight showing through the live oaks that towered over it. The air was humid and warm, the trees along the bayou pulsing with birds. Clete untwisted the cellophane on a thin green-striped stick of peppermint candy and put it in his mouth. “Where’d you get the cuts on your face?” he asked.

  “A situation in Lafayette. Why’d you park up the street?”

  “I’ve got an oil leak.”

  “I thought you were in New Orleans. Come inside.”

  “I think NOPD still wants to hang Frankie Giacano’s murder on me. I’ll be at the motor court. I’ll see you later. I just wanted to tell you I was back in town.”

  Through the gloom, I could see someone sitting in the passenger seat, even though the top was up. “Who’s with you?”

  “A temp I put on.”

  “What kind of temp?”

  “The kind that does temporary jobs.”

  “A guy tried to take my head off with a cut-down yesterday. He was using double-aught bucks. Lafayette PD thinks it was a guy I helped send away about ten years ago. A retired plainclothes named Jesse Leboeuf may have sicced him on me.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”

  “None of your business. Is this guy Leboeuf connected to Pierre Dupree or any of this stuff with Golightly and Grimes and Frankie Gee?”

  “Leboeuf is Pierre Dupree’s father-in-law.”

  “This guy is like a stopped-up toilet that keeps backing up on the floor. I think maybe we should do a home call.”

  “Better listen to the rest of it,” I said.

  We sat down on the gallery steps, and I told him about the shooting by Varina Leboeuf’s apartment in Bengal Gardens, the heisted freezer truck that the shooter and his driver had used, the connection between the Leboeufs and Pierre Dupree and a group called Redstone Security, and the key-chain fob cast in the miniature shape of a sawfish carried by Jesse Leboeuf.

  “And there was a sawfish on that old wreck that used to drift up and down the continental shelf?” Clete said.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Leboeuf is a crypto-Nazi or something?”

  “I doubt if he could spell the word,” I said.
>
  “This isn’t connecting for me, Dave. We’re talking about the emblem on a Chris-Craft that kidnapped the Melton girl and now about a sawfish on a submarine and a key chain? And the guy with the key chain is the father-in-law of a guy who’s part Jewish?”

  “That pretty much sums it up.”

  “The shooter suspect, this guy Ronnie Earl Patin, is not in custody, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You make him for the shooter?”

  “I saw him for maybe two seconds before he fired into my windshield. The Ronnie Earl Patin I sent up the road was a blimp. The guy in the freezer truck wasn’t. Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”

  “My latest squeeze. She works for the Humane Society and adopts pathetic losers like me.”

  I laid my arm across his shoulders. They felt as hard and solid as boulders in a streambed. “Are you getting in over your head, partner?”

  “Will you stop that? I’m not the problem here. It’s you that almost caught a faceful of buckshot. Listen to me. This deal has something to do with stolen or forged paintings. They go into private collections owned by guys who want power over the art world. They not only want to own a rare painting, they want to make sure nobody ever sees it except them. They’re like trophy killers who hide the cadavers.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “It’s no secret. There’s a criminal subculture that operates in the art world. The clientele are greedy, possessive assholes and are easy to take over the hurdles. Golightly had e-mails from well-known art fences in Los Angeles and New York. I confirmed the names with NYPD and a couple of PIs in L.A.”

  “It’s not just stolen artwork. It’s bigger than that,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “What do you know about this Redstone Security group?”

  “They’re out of Galveston and Fort Worth, I think. They did a lot of government contract work in Iraq. I’ve heard stories about their people indiscriminately killing civilians.”

  “Can I meet your temp?”

  “No, she’s tired. What’s this obsession over my temp?”

  “Jimmy the Dime called me. He told me Count Carbona gave you a lead on your daughter.”

  “Jimmy the Dime should keep his mouth shut.”

  “What are you up to, Clete? You think you can change the past?”

  “You got to ease up on the batter, Streak. In this case, the batter is me.”

  “If that’s the way you want it,” I said.

  He crunched down on the peppermint stick and chewed a broken piece in his jaw, making sounds like a horse eating a carrot, his eyes never leaving mine. “We almost died out there on the bank of the bayou, where we used to have dinners on your picnic table. Know why? Because we trusted people we shouldn’t. That’s the way it’s always been. We turned the key on the skells while the white-collar crowd kicked a railroad tie up our ass. That’s not the way this one is going down. Got it, big mon?”

  Early the next morning Clete and Gretchen ate a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and fried pork chops and scrambled eggs at Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and then drove to Jeanerette down the old two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche through an idyllic stretch of sugarcane and cattle acreage. Her window was down, and the wind was blowing her hair over her forehead. There was a thin gold chain around her neck, and she was fiddling with the icon attached to it. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.

  “The fishing is good, too. So is the food, maybe even better than New Orleans.”

  “You sure you want to ’front this guy at his house?”

  “Stonewall Jackson used to say ‘Mislead, mystify, and surprise the enemy.’”

  “That’s great stuff as long as you have fifty thousand rednecks stomping ass for you.”

  “Is that the Star of David?” he asked.

  “This?” she said, fingering the gold chain. “My mother is Jewish, so I’m at least half. I don’t know what my father was. He could have been a Mick or a Swede, because neither my mother nor anybody in her family has reddish-blond hair.”

  “You go to temple?”

  “Why are you asking about the Star of David?”

  “Barney Ross and Max Baer both wore it on their trunks. I don’t know if they went to temple or not. Maybe they wore it for good luck. Is that why you wear it? That’s all I was asking.”

  “Who are Max Baer and Barney Ross?” she said.

  “Never mind. Look, we’re going into St. Mary Parish. Pierre Dupree owns another home in the Garden District in New Orleans. I suspect he’s here. This place looks like the United States, but it’s not. This is Dupree turf. The rest of us are tourists. You don’t want to get pinched here. I have to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You know what ‘wet work’ is?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “I’ve had people ask me to do it.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I run an honest business. I don’t work for dirtbags, and I don’t jam the family of a skip in order to bring him in. What I’m asking you is did you know some bad guys in Little Havana, maybe some guys who got you into the life? Did you maybe do some stuff you don’t feel good about?”

  “I didn’t know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street,” she said. “Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “The only time I felt bad about anything was when I didn’t get even for what people did to me,” she said. “By the way, I don’t like that term ‘in the life.’ I was never ‘in the life.’”

  Clete passed a plantation on the Teche that had been built miles downstream in 1796 and brought brick by brick up the bayou in the early 1800s and reassembled on its present site. Then he entered the spangled shade of live oaks that had been on the roadside for over two hundred years, and passed a second antebellum plantation, one with enormous white columns. He crossed the drawbridge and drove by a trailer slum and entered the small town of Jeanerette, where time seemed to have stopped a century ago and the yards of the Victorian homes along the main street were bursting with flowers, the lawns so blue and green and cool in appearance that you felt you could dive into them as you would into a swimming pool. Clete approached the home of Pierre Dupree and turned in to the gravel lane that led to the wide-galleried entrance of the main house, the gigantic oak limbs creaking above.

  “Every time I visit a place like this, I always wonder how things would have worked out if the South had won the war,” Clete said.

  “How would things have worked out?” Gretchen asked.

  “I think all of us, white and black, would be picking these people’s cotton,” he replied.

  They stepped out of the Caddy onto the gravel, the trees swelling with wind, a few yellow oak leaves tumbling through the columns of sunlight. In back they heard a dog bark. Clete rang the chimes on the front door, but no one answered. He motioned to Gretchen, and the two of them walked through the side yard to the rear of the house, where a gazebo stood on a long stretch of green lawn that sloped down to the bayou. An elderly man was training a yellow Lab down the slope, a reelless fishing rod clenched in his hand. By the corner of the house, inside a cluster of philodendron, Clete noticed a stack of wire tender traps. “May I help you?” the elderly man said.

  “I’m Clete Purcel, and this is my assistant, Miss Gretchen,” Clete said. “I’d like to talk to either Alexis or Pierre Dupree about a man who claimed to have taken a betting marker out of an office safe that used to belong to Didoni Giacano.”

  “Did Mr. Robicheaux send you here?”

  “I sent myself here,” Clete said. “Frankie Giacano and his friends tried to extort me with that same betting marker. Are you Alexis Dupree?”

  “I am. It’s customary to phone people in advance when yo
u plan to visit their home.”

  “Sorry about that. Frankie Gee got himself capped, Mr. Dupree. But I don’t think he got capped over this business with the marker. I think it has to do with stolen or forged paintings that a guy named Bix Golightly was fencing. You know anything about that?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. Would you like to sit down? Can I get you something to drink?” Alexis Dupree said. His gaze shifted from Clete to Gretchen.

  “We’re fine,” Clete said.

  Dupree picked up a pie plate from a redwood table and a small sack of dry dog food. He walked down the slope as though Clete and Gretchen were not there and set the pie plate on the grass and sprinkled several pieces of dog food in it. He carried the fishing rod in his left hand. The Labrador retriever was sitting in the sunlight on the opposite side of the lawn but never moved. “Come,” Alexis Dupree said.

  The dog started across the grass. “Stop,” Dupree said. The dog immediately sat down. “Come,” Dupree said. The dog took another few steps, then stopped again upon command. “Come,” Dupree said.

  When the dog advanced, its attention remained upon Dupree and not the pie plate. “Stop,” Dupree said. He looked up the slope at Clete and Gretchen, then at the white clouds drifting across the sky, then at a flock of robins descending on a tree. His lips were pursed, his regal profile framed against a backdrop of oaks and flowers and Spanish moss and a tidal stream and a gold-and-purple field of sugarcane. “Come,” he said again. This time he let the dog eat.

  “Is he telling us something?” Gretchen whispered.

  “Yeah, don’t let a guy like that ever get control of your life,” Clete said.

  From out front, Clete heard the sound of a car coming up the gravel drive, then a car door slamming.

  “Mr. Dupree, somebody tried to kill my friend Dave Robicheaux,” Clete said. “It was right after he left the home of Jesse Leboeuf. Your family and Jesse Leboeuf are mixed up with a group called Redstone Security, Inc. These guys have the reputation of stink on shit. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “Your passion and your language are impressive, but no, I know nothing about any of this,” Dupree said. He approached Gretchen with a fond expression, the fishing rod still in his hand, his gaze drifting to her throat. “Are you Jewish?”