Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  “What’s it to you?” she said.

  “It’s a compliment. You come from a cerebral race. I also suspect you’re part German.”

  “What she is, is one hundred percent American,” Clete said.

  “Clete says you were in a death camp,” Gretchen said.

  “I was at Ravensbruck.”

  “I never heard a Jew call his religion a race,” she said.

  “You seem like a very perceptive young woman. What is your name?”

  “Gretchen Horowitz.”

  “I hope you’ll come by again. And you don’t need to call in advance.”

  “Mr. Dupree, we didn’t come out here to talk about religious matters,” Clete said. “People you and your grandson are associated with may be involved in several homicides, including a girl who floated up in a block of ice a little south of here. Are you reading me on this, sir?”

  Before Dupree could answer, Clete heard footsteps behind him. He turned around and looked at perhaps one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She did not seem to notice either his or Gretchen’s presence; instead, she was staring at Alexis Dupree with a level of anger Clete would never want directed at him. “Where’s Pierre?” she said.

  “In Lafayette at his art exhibit. He’ll be so sorry he missed you,” Dupree said.

  “Who are you?” the woman said to Clete.

  “A private investigator,” he replied.

  “You came to the right place.” She started to speak to Dupree, then she turned again to Clete. “You’re Dave Robicheaux’s buddy, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Varina Leboeuf. You tell Dave if he ever humiliates my father again like he did yesterday, I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”

  “If Dave Robicheaux busted your old man, he had it coming,” Clete said.

  “What are y’all doing here?” she said.

  “You need to butt out, ma’am,” Gretchen said.

  “ What did you say?”

  “We’re having a conversation with Mr. Dupree. You’re not part of it,” Gretchen said.

  “I’ll tell you what, young lady. Why don’t you and this gentleman ask Mr. Dupree about these wire traps stacked in the flower bed? Alexis places them all over the property every two or three weeks. The madwoman who used to own this wretched dump fed every stray cat in the parish. Alexis hates cats. So he baits and traps them and has a black man drop them at night in other people’s neighborhoods. Most of them will starve to death or die of disease.”

  “Did you mention we don’t have a local animal refuge?” Dupree said.

  “I just left the office of Pierre’s lawyer. If your grandson tries to fuck me on the settlement, I’m going to destroy all of you,” Varina said.

  “You’ve certainly arrived here in a charming mood,” Dupree said.

  “What are you doing with my dog? Pierre said he’d run away.”

  “He did. But he came back home. He’s a brand-new dog now,” Dupree said.

  “Come here, Vick,” Varina called.

  The dog rested its jowls on its paws and did not move.

  “Vick, come with Mommy. Come on, fella,” she called.

  The dog seemed to shrink itself into the grass. Alexis Dupree was smiling at her, the fishing rod trembling slightly with the palsy that affected his hand. His gaze moved back to Gretchen and the lights in her hair and the thin gold chain. “Please accept my apologies for the behavior of my grandson’s wife,” he said. “Did your family emigrate from Prussia? Few people know that Yiddish is a German dialect. I suspect you’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

  Gretchen looked at Clete. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Dupree asked, his eyes dropping to Gretchen’s hips and thighs as she walked away.

  “Don’t let that old guy get to you,” Clete said to her in the Caddy.

  “I felt like he wanted to peel off my skin.”

  “Yeah, he’s a little strange.”

  “ He’s a little strange? How about the broad?”

  “She seemed pretty normal to me.”

  “She has a broom up her ass.”

  “So?”

  “You couldn’t keep your eyes off her. That’s the kind of woman you’re attracted to?”

  “You work for me, Gretchen. You’re not my spiritual adviser.”

  “Then act your fucking age.”

  “I can’t believe I’m listening to this,” Clete said.

  She stared at the rusted trailers in the slum by the drawbridge and the children in the dirt yards and the wash flapping on the clotheslines. The Caddy rumbled across the steel grid on the drawbridge. “I don’t know why I said that. I feel confused when I’m with you. I don’t understand my feelings. You really aren’t trying to put moves on me, are you?”

  “I already told you.”

  “You don’t think I’m attractive?”

  “I know my limitations. I’m old and overweight and have hypertension and a few drinking and weed issues. If I was thirty years younger, you’d have to hide.” He accelerated the Caddy toward New Iberia, lowering his window, filling the inside of the car with the sound of wind. “We’re going to get you a badge,” he said.

  “A badge for what?”

  “A private investigator’s badge. At a pawnshop and police-supply store in Lafayette,” he said. “Anybody can buy a PI badge. They’re bigger and shinier and better-looking than an authentic cop’s badge. The trick to being a PI is gaining the client’s confidence. Our big enemy is not the skells but the Internet. With Google, you can look down people’s chimneys without ever leaving your house. Most reference librarians are better at finding people and information than I am.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t just ‘find’ people.”

  “Here’s the reality of the situation. I’ve got certain powers not because I’m a PI but because I run down bail skips for two bondsmen. I’m not a bondsman, but legally, I’m the agent and representative of people who are, so the powers given them by the state extend to me, which allows me to pursue fugitives across state lines and kick down doors without a warrant. I have legal powers an FBI agent doesn’t have. For example, if a husband and wife are both out on bond and the husband skips, Wee Willie and Nig can have the wife’s bond revoked in order to turn dials on the husband. I don’t do stuff like that, but Wee Willie and Nig do. You starting to get the picture?”

  “You don’t like what you do?”

  “I want to wear a full-body condom when I go to work. Pimps and pedophiles and dope dealers use my restroom and put their feet on my office furniture. They think I’m their friend. I try not to shake hands with them. Sometimes I have to. Sometimes I want to scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush.”

  “It’s a job. Why beat up on yourself?”

  “No, it’s what you do after you’ve flushed your legitimate career. The only time you actually help out your clients is in a civil suit. The justice system doesn’t work most of the time, but civil court does. This guy Morris Dees broke the Klan and a bunch of Aryan Nation groups by bankrupting them in civil court. I don’t catch many civil cases. If you work for me, you deal with the skells. That means we’ve got two rules: We’re honest with each other, and we never hurt anybody unless they deal the play. Can you live with that?”

  “This is the big test I’m supposed to pass?”

  He pulled to the side of the road under a shade tree, next to a pasture where black Angus were grazing in the sunlight.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I like you a lot, and I think the world has done a number on you that no kid deserves. I want to be your friend, but I don’t have much to offer. I’m a drunk, and almost everything I touch turns to shit. I don’t care what you did before we met. I just want you to be straight with me now. You want to tell me some things down the track, that’s copacetic. If you don’t want to tell me anything down the track, that’s copacetic, too. You hearing me on
all this? I back your play, you back mine. The past is past; now is now.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eye.

  “I don’t get you,” she said.

  “What’s to get? I love movies and New Orleans and horse tracks and Caddy convertibles with fins and eating large amounts of food. My viscera alone probably weighs two hundred pounds. When I go into a restaurant, I get seated at a trough.”

  “You really like movies?”

  “I go to twelve-step meetings for movie addiction.”

  “You have cable?”

  “Sure. I’ve got insomnia. I watch movies in the middle of the night.”

  “James Dean’s movies are showing all this week. I think he was the greatest actor who ever lived.”

  He restarted the Caddy and turned back onto the road, his brow furrowed, remembering the red windbreaker worn by the person he watched murder Bix Golightly. “What do you know about guns?”

  “Enough so I don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”

  “We’ll stop at Henderson Swamp. I want to show you a few things about firearms.”

  “I found your Beretta and disarmed it on your premises. I don’t need a gun lesson, at least not now. I’m a little tired, okay? The numbers tattooed on that old man’s forearm, they’re from the death camp?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “He made me feel dirty all over. Like when I was a little girl. I don’t know why,” she replied. “I’m not feeling too good. Can we go back to the motor court? I need to take a nap and start the day over.”

  The only lead I had on the men who had tried to kill me outside Bengal Gardens was the name of Ronnie Earl Patin, a strong-arm robber I had helped put away a decade ago. Though there are instances when a felon goes down for some serious time and nurses a grudge over the years and eventually gets out and does some payback, it’s very rare that he goes after a cop or judge or prosecutor. Payback is usually done on a fall partner or a family member who snitched him off. Ronnie Earl was a sweaty glutton and a porn addict and a violent alcoholic who knocked around old people for their Social Security checks, but he had been jailing all of his adult life, and most of his crimes grew out of his addictions and were not part of vendettas. That said, would he do a contract job on a cop if the money was right? It was possible.

  The driver of the freezer truck was too short to have been Ronnie Earl, and the shooter who had almost taken my head off with the cut-down had an ascetic face similar in design to a collection of saw blades. Could ten years in Angola, most of it on Camp J, have melted down the gelatinous pile that I helped send up there?

  I called an old-time gunbull at Angola who had shepherded Ronnie Earl through the system for years. “Yeah, he was one of our Jenny Craig success stories,” the gunbull said. “He stayed out of segregation his last two years and worked in the bean field.”

  “He went out max time?”

  “He earned two months good time before his discharge. This was on a ten-bit. He could have been out in thirty-seven months.”

  “What kept him in segregation?”

  “Making pruno and raping fish and being a general shithead. What are you looking at him for?”

  “Somebody tried to pop me with a shotgun.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Ronnie Earl.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s got two interests in life: sex and getting high. The guy’s a walking gland. The only reason he got thin was to get laid when he got out. Cain’t y’all send us a higher grade of criminals?”

  “You think he’s capable of a contract hit?”

  “You ever know a drunkard who wasn’t capable of anything?” Then he evidently thought about what he had just said. “Sorry. You still off the juice?”

  “I go to a lot of meetings. Thanks for your time, Cap,” I said.

  I began making phone calls to several bars in North Lafayette. A person might wonder how a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish would be presumptuous enough to believe he could find a suspect in Lafayette, twenty miles away, when the local authorities could not. The answer is simple: Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing drunk. CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs, lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.

  One bartender told me Ronnie Earl had been in his place two months back, right after his release from Angola. The bartender said Ronnie Earl looked nothing like the fat man the court had sent up the road.

  “But he’s the same guy, right?” I said.

  “No,” the bartender said. “Not at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s worse. You know how it works,” the bartender said. “A sick guy like that gets even sicker when he doesn’t drink. When he gets back on the train, he’s carrying a furnace with him instead of a stomach.”

  The bartender had not seen Ronnie Earl since and did not know where he had gone.

  The last bartender I called had picked me up out of an alley behind a B-girl joint in Lafayette’s old Underpass area, a one-block collection of buildings that was so stark and unrelieved, whose inhabitants were so lost and disconnected from the normal world, that if you found yourself drinking there, you could rest assured you had finally achieved the goal you long ago set for yourself: the total destruction of the innocent child who once lived inside you. The bartender’s name was Harvey. For me, Harvey had always been a modern-day Charon who turned me away from the Styx. “Every afternoon there’s a guy who comes in here who goes by Ron,” he said. “He drinks like he’s making up for lost time. One mug of beer, four shots lined up. Same order every time. He likes to flash his money around and invite the working girls over to his table. The whole rainbow, know what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “He’s definitely multicultural.”

  “What does Ron look like?”

  “Neat dresser, good haircut. Maybe he’s been working outdoors. I remember him telling a joke. It was about Camp J or something. Does that mean anything?”

  “A lot.”

  “He just walked in. He’s got three broads with him. What do you want me to do?”

  I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to five. “Keep him there. I’m on my way. If he leaves, get his tag and call the locals.”

  “I don’t need a bunch of cops in here, Dave.”

  “Everything is going to be fine. If you have to, give Ron and his friends an extra round or two. It’s on me.”

  My truck was still at the glazier’s. I checked out an unmarked car and tore down the two-lane past Spanish Lake toward Lafayette, a battery-powered emergency light clamped on the roof.

  The club was a windowless box with a small dance floor and vinyl booths set against two walls. The light from the bathrooms glowed through a red-bead curtain that hung from a rear doorway. Outside, the sky was still bright, but when I entered the bar, I could barely make out the people sitting in the booths. I saw Harvey look up from the sink where he was rinsing glasses. I didn’t acknowledge him but went to the corner of the bar, in the shadows, and sat down on a stool. I was wearing my sport coat and a tie, and the flap of my coat covered the holstered. 45 clipped onto my belt. The duckboards bent under Harvey’s weight as he walked toward me. His face was round and flat, his Irish mouth so small it looked like it belonged to a goldfish. “What are you having?” he asked.

  “A Dr Pepper on ice with a lime slice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black woman in a short skirt and a low-cut white blouse sitting on a barstool. I looked back at Harvey. “You still serve gumbo?”

  “Coming up,” he said. He began
fixing my drink, letting his gaze rest on a booth by the entrance. I glanced over and saw a blade-faced man and three females. Harvey placed my drink in front of me and picked up a stainless steel dipper and lowered it into a cauldron of chicken gumbo and filled a white bowl and set it and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. He picked up the twenty I had placed on the bar. “I’ll bring your change back in a minute. I got an order waiting over here.”

  He took a frosted mug from the cooler and filled it until foam ran over the lip, then poured four shot glasses to the brim and placed the mug and all the glasses on a round tray. The work Harvey did behind a bar was not part of a mystique or of a kind most normal people would notice. But I could not take my eyes off his hands and the methodical way he went about filling the glasses and placing them on the cork-lined tray; nor could I ignore the smell of freshly drawn beer and whiskey that had not been cut with ice or fruit or cocktail mix. I could see the brassy bead in the beer, the strings of foam running down through the frost on the mug. The whiskey had the amber glow of sunlight that might have been aged inside yellow oak, its wetness and density and latent power greater than the sum of its parts, welling over the brim of the shot glasses as though growing in size. I felt a longing inside me that was no different from the desire of a heroin or sex addict or a candle moth that seeks the flame the way an infant seeks its mother’s breast.

  I drank from my Dr Pepper and swallowed a piece of shaved ice and tried to look away from the tray Harvey was carrying to the booth by the front door.

  “You ever see a li’l boy looking t’rew the window at what he cain’t have?” the black woman in the short skirt said.

  “Who you talking about?” I said.

  “Who you t’ink?”

  “This is my job,” I said. “I check out dead-end dumps that serve people like me.”

  “Ain’t nothing that bad if you got a li’l company.”

  “You’re too pretty for me.”