Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  He took another drink from the bottle and another deep puff off his cigarette, letting the exhaled smoke drift through his fingers. He saw himself squeezing the trigger of his. 38 snub, the flash leaping from the muzzle and either side of the chamber, the bullet catching the target unaware, pocking a single hole in the middle of the forehead, the facial muscles collapsing as the brain turned to mush. Then he would wrap the drop in his victim’s hand and fire a round into a wall. It was that easy. In his lifetime, he had never seen a cop go down for an execution if there were no witnesses and it was done right.

  The street was completely silent, the lawns empty, the Victorian and antebellum homes overhung by trees dripping with Spanish moss. The setting was like a replication of everything that he secretly hated. Was he being silently mocked for the fact and circumstances of his birth? He had picked cotton and broken corn and mucked out cow stalls before ever seeing the inside of a school. He wondered if anyone in those houses had seen the tips of a child’s fingers bleed on a cotton boll.

  He looked at the shotgun house again. Wrong time, wrong place, he thought. Down the bayou in Jeanerette, there was another person he might visit, someone who deserved an experience he hadn’t given a woman in a long time. He wet his lips at the prospect. As he pulled away from the curb, he thought he heard the deep-throated rumble of dual exhausts echoing off a row of buildings, the kind of sound he associated with hot rods and Hollywood mufflers. Then the sound thinned and disappeared over on St. Peter Street, and he gave it no more thought.

  Jesse took the back road into Jeanerette and crossed the drawbridge by a massive white-pillared home surrounded by live oaks whose leaves trembled simultaneously when the wind gusted. The eastern sky was black with rain clouds, the moon still up, the surface of the bayou coated with fog as white and thick as cotton. Catin Segura’s home was not hard to find. It was the last one on the block, down by the water, in a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses. Her cruiser was parked in the gravel driveway, and she had put new screens on her gallery and planted flowers in all the beds and window boxes and nailed a big birdhouse painted like the American flag in a pecan tree. A tricycle rested on its side in the yard. A plastic-bladed whirligig fastened to a rain gutter was spinning and clicking in the breeze. Other than the whirligig, there was no movement or sound anywhere on the short block where Catin lived with her two children.

  Jesse had one more drink and capped his bottle and rolled down his windows. He lit another cigarette and draped one arm over the steering wheel and thought about his alternatives. There were two or three ways to go. He could get rough with her in a major way and teach her a lesson in the bedroom that she would never forget and probably would be afraid to report. Or he could park one in her ear with his. 38 snub and put the drop in her hand and tack a small holster for it under the breakfast table. He could take a flesh wound if he had to. He drew in on his cigarette and heard the paper crisp and burn. He took the cigarette from his mouth, holding it with his thumb and three fingers, exhaling through his nostrils, his thoughts coming together, an image forming before his eyes. He dropped the cigarette out the window and heard it hiss in a puddle of water. He reached into his glove box and removed a pair of handcuffs and the clip-on holster that contained his. 38 snub. Then he got out of the truck and put on his coat and took his old fedora from behind the seat and put it on his head and threaded the handcuffs through the back of his belt. He worked a crick out of his neck and flexed his shoulders and opened and closed his hands. “Tell me how your life is going one hour from now, you black bitch,” he said under his breath.

  The screen door on the gallery was latched. He slipped a match cover between the jamb and the door and lifted the latch hook free of the eyelet and stepped inside. As he tapped on the inside door, he heard the same rumble of twin exhausts that he had heard in New Iberia. He looked down the street and caught a glimpse of a pickup painted with gray primer, its windows no more than one foot high. The vehicle went through the intersection, the driver easing off the accelerator and depressing the clutch to prevent the dual exhausts from waking up the neighborhood.

  Catin opened the door on the night chain. Through the crack, he could see her slip showing where she had belted her bathrobe. He could also see the black sheen and the thickness of her hair and the way it curled on her cheeks, like a young girl might wear it. Her skin had the color and tone of melted chocolate; it didn’t have the pink scars that black women often got from shucking oysters or fighting over their men in the juke. “What are you doing on my gallery?” she said.

  “I came to apologize,” he replied.

  Her eyes went away from his face and focused on the latch hook that he had worked loose with his match cover. “I already forgave you. There’s no reason for you to be here.”

  “I want to make it right, maybe do something for your kids.”

  “Don’t you talk about my children.”

  “I can get them into a private school. My daughter’s church has got a scholarship fund for minority children.”

  “I think you’ve been drinking.”

  “Getting to the end of the road isn’t much fun. People deal with it in different ways.”

  “Go home, Mr. Jesse.”

  “I’m talking about death, Miss Catin.”

  “It’s Deputy Segura.”

  “You know why each morning is a victory for an old person? It’s ’cause most old people die at night. Can I have a cup of coffee? It’s not a lot to ask.”

  He noticed the pause in her eyes and knew he’d found the weak spot. He could see into the house’s interior now, a bedroom door that opened on two small beds, the covers tucked tightly in, the pillows fat and unmarked by the weight of anyone’s head. The children were not home. He could feel a tingling in his hands and a stiffening in his loins.

  “I can call a cab for you or have a cruiser drive you home,” she said.

  “You said you was a Christian woman.”

  “I am.”

  “But you’ll turn me from your door?”

  Her eyes were lidless, her face absolutely still.

  “What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m an old man with congestive heart failure,” he said.

  She slid the night chain off the door and pulled it wide. “Sit at the dining room table. I’ll start the coffee. There’s a sweet roll on the plate.”

  He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the table and sat in a straight-back chair. “You have two, don’t you?”

  “Two what?”

  “Children. That’s what I always heard. You’re a single mother. That’s what they’re calling it, aren’t they?”

  She was at the stove. She looked sideways at him. “What was that?”

  “They use the term ‘single mother’ these days. That’s not how we used to put it.”

  “I changed my mind. I want you to leave.”

  “Your robe isn’t tied tight. You got a piece of string wrapped around your waist so it hikes up your slip and don’t let it show below your hem. My mother learned that trick from a nigra woman we picked cotton with. Where’s your children at?”

  “I told you to leave.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Don’t smoke in here,” she said.

  He blew out the paper match he had used to light his cigarette and dropped it in the flower vase on the table. “You came out to my house with Dave Robicheaux and treated me like I was dirt. Now I’m in your house.”

  “You stay back.”

  “You ever have a white man in your house?”

  “Don’t you dare put your hand on me.”

  “’Fraid my color is gonna rub off on you?”

  “You’re a sick man. And I pity you.”

  “Not as sick as you’re fixing to be.”

  He hit her across the face with the flat of his hand. His hand was large and square and as rough-edged as an asbestos shingle, and the blow knocked the light out of her eyes and the shape out of her face. He grabbed her around the
neck with his left arm and turned off the burner on the stove with his right hand. Then he pinched her chin and forced her to look into his face. “Where’s your piece?”

  Her left eye was red and watering where he had struck her. “You’re going to prison.”

  “I doubt it. When I get finished with you, you’ll think twice about the story you tell.”

  She spat in his face. He picked her up in the air, locking his hands behind her back, crushing her ribs, and slung her across the table. Then he wiped her saliva off his skin with a paper towel and lifted her to her feet and slammed her down in the chair where he had been sitting. “Want to answer my question? Where’s your piece?”

  She was bleeding from one nostril, her face trembling with shock. “You’re a man and twice my size. But you’re afraid of me.”

  He wrapped his fingers in the back of her hair and slowly raised her up from the chair, twisting her hair to get better purchase, making tears run from her eyes. He pulled his handcuffs from the back of his belt and bent one arm behind her and fitted a cuff on her wrist and pushed the steel tongue into the lock, then crimped the second cuff on her other wrist and squeezed the mechanisms so tight that the veins on the undersides of both wrists were bunched like blue string.

  “You gonna yell?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s what you say now.” He wadded up three paper towels and pushed them into her mouth. “See, that takes away all temptation.”

  He walked her into her bedroom and opened a pocketknife and cut her robe down the back and her slip down the front and peeled both of them off her. Her eyes were bulging, sweat beading on her forehead, her breath starting to strangle on the paper towels that had become so soaked with saliva, they were slipping down her throat. He fitted his hand on her face and shoved her on the bed.

  “Think this is tough?” he said. “Wait till we get to the main event.”

  Then he began to hurt her in ways she probably did not know existed. But Jesse Leboeuf had a problem he was not aware of. He’d always considered himself a cautious man. As a lawman, he had taken risks only when necessary and had never felt the need to prove himself to his colleagues. In fact, he looked upon most displays of bravery as theatrical, as confessions of fear. When the Loup went after a barricaded suspect with a cut-down Remington pump, he had no doubt about the outcome: Only one man would walk out of the building. Most perps, particularly the black ones, would drop their weapons and beg right before he pulled the trigger. The equation had always been simple: He was better than they were and they knew it, and as a result, he lived and they died. People could call it bravery if they wished; Jesse called it a fact of life.

  He had shut the bedroom door and made sure the windows were down and the shades pulled all the way to the sills. He had turned on a floor fan to keep the room cool. He was environmentally safe and comfortable and sealed off from the outside world and could do whatever he wanted and take all the time in the world doing it. All these were unconscious conclusions that he considered a done deal.

  Until he heard the doorknob twist behind him and the door scrape across the throw rug that had knotted under his boot when he shoved Catin Segura into the room. He rose naked from the bed, his body hair glistening with sweat, his mouth and throat choked with phlegm. “Who are you?” he said.

  The figure was wearing a hooded jacket and a face mask made of digital camouflage and was pointing a Sig Sauer P226 at him, a sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. His eyes drifted to Catin’s dresser, where he had placed his. 38 snub in its clip-on holster. The. 38 was under five feet from where he stood, but the distance could have been five miles. There was salt in his eyes, and he tried to wipe them clean with his fingers. His erection had died, and a vinegary stench was rising from his armpits. He heard the roof creak in the wind.

  “The woman invited me here. Ask her,” he said. “Me and her go back. We got us an arrangement.”

  He realized he had started to raise his hands without being told and that a kettledrum was pounding in his head. What were the right words to say? What argument could he make to save his life? What verbal deceit could he perpetrate on the person aiming the silenced P226 at his sternum? “That’s military-issue. I was a serviceman myself. United States Air Force,” he said.

  The figure moved toward the bed and, with a gloved hand, removed the wadded-up paper towels from Catin Segura’s mouth.

  “I know who you are,” Jesse Leboeuf said. “You’re the one that was out at the Point. You got no reason to kill me, girl.”

  He tried to hold his eyes on the masked figure, but they were burning so badly that he had to press his palms into the sockets. Red rings receded into his brain, and sweat ran down his chest and stomach and pubic hair and phallus onto the floor. Reach out and take death into your arms and pull it inside your chest, he heard a voice say. It cain’t be as bad as they say. A flash, a moment of pain, and then blackness. Don’t be afraid.

  “Kill him,” Catin Segura said.

  “She tole me to do all this. The handcuffs, all of it,” he said. “We need to talk this out. I’m gonna put on my pants, and we’ll sit down and talk. You got to let me give my side of it.”

  “He’s lying,” the woman said from the bed.

  “It’s her that’s lying. It’s their nature. It’s the way they was raised. I’m not being unfair. I’m not afraid. I know you’re probably a good person. I just want to talk.”

  But he was terrified and acted it. He ran for the bathroom, where he had not locked the window, slipping on the rug, slamming into the doorframe, trying to right himself with one hand and reach a spot that was beyond the shooter’s angle of fire. His flab and his genitalia jiggled on his frame; his breath heaved in his chest; his heart felt like it was wrapped with wire. He heard a sound that was like a sudden puncture and the brief escape of air from a tire, just as a round cored through his left buttock and exited his thigh, slinging a horsetail of blood across the wall. He tried to grab the windowsill with one hand and mount the toilet seat so he could knock the screen out of the window with his head and leap to the ground. Then he heard the phitt of the suppressor again. The round hit him with the bone-deep dullness of a ball-peen hammer thudding between his shoulder blades, the bullet punching an exit hole above his right nipple. He fell sideways and tumbled over the edge of the bathtub, bringing the shower curtain down on top of him, his legs spread over the tub’s rim as though they had been fitted into stirrups.

  The figure stood above him, aiming with both hands, arms outstretched. The suppressor was pointed directly at his mouth. Jesse tried to look through the slits in the mask at the shooter’s eyes. Were they lavender? If he could only explain, he thought. If someone could reach back in time and find the moment when everything went wrong, if someone could understand that he didn’t plan this, that this was the hand he was dealt and it was not of his choosing. If others could understand that, they could all agree to go away and let the past be the past and forget about the injuries he had done to his fellow man and let him start all over. If he could just find the right words.

  “None of y’all know what it was like,” he said. “I broke corn when I was five. My daddy worked nights eleven years to buy ten acres.”

  He tried to make himself stare into the suppressor, but he couldn’t do it. He saw a soapy pink bubble rise from the hole in his chest. The tears in his eyes distorted the room as though he were looking at the world from the bottom of a goldfish bowl. “Tell Varina-”

  His lung was collapsing, and he couldn’t force the words out of his mouth. The figure stepped closer, then squatted next to the tub, gripping the rim with one hand, holding the P226 with the other.

  Jesse waited for the round that would rip through his brain and end the bubbling sound in his throat, but it didn’t happen. He shut his eyes and whispered hoarsely at the masked face. It was a phrase he had learned from his French-speaking father when the father talked about Jesse’s baby sister. Then the words seemed to
die on his lips. For just a moment, Jesse Leboeuf thought he heard black people laughing. Oddly, they were not black people in a juke joint, nor were they laughing at him behind his back, as they did when he first wore a policeman’s uniform. They were in a cotton field in North Louisiana at sunset, and the sky and the earth were red and the plants were a deep green and he could smell rain and see it blowing like spun glass in the distance. It was Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, and all the darkies in the parish would be headed into town soon, and he wondered why he hadn’t chosen to celebrate the occasion with them. They had always been kind to him and let him ride on the back of the flatbed when they drove to town, all of them rocking back and forth with the sway of the truck, their bodies warm with the heat of the day, smelling slightly in a good way of the sweat from their work, their legs hanging down in the dust, the children breaking up a watermelon in big meaty chunks. Why hadn’t he gone with them? It would have been fun. He opened his eyes one more time and realized a terrible transformation was taking place in him. He was no longer Jesse Leboeuf. He was dissolving into seawater, his tissue and veins melting and running down his fingertips and pooling around his buttocks. He heard a loud sucking sound and felt himself swirling through the chrome-ringed drain hole at the bottom of the tub. Then he was gone, just like that, twisting in a silvery coil down a pipe to a place where no one would ever celebrate Juneteenth.

  21

  Catin Segura called in the 911 herself. The first emergency personnel to arrive were the Acadian Ambulance Service, followed by deputies from Iberia and St. Mary Parish. Because it was Saturday, many of the neighbors had slept in and seen nothing unusual. When I arrived, the paramedics were already in the bedroom with Catin. There was blood on the sheets and the pillowcase. Her face was dilated with bruises, both wrists scraped raw by Leboeuf’s handcuffs. Through the bathroom door, I could see his bare feet and legs extending over the edge of the tub. No brass had been found in the bedroom or the bathroom.