Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  “That’s enough, Mickey,” Pierre said.

  Clete sat up and wiped the blood from his nose on his sleeve. He was slack-jawed and closing and opening his eyes. The back of his neck looked like it had been stung by a jellyfish. From aboveground we heard the sound of a diesel engine cranking to life.

  “That’s the truck your vehicle is being loaded onto, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said. “In five minutes it will be off the property. Before morning your vehicle will be crushed into a ball of tinfoil, and so will you.”

  Pierre walked toward the rear of the basement and rested his hand on a doorknob. “Bring them here,” he said. “I think Mr. Robicheaux deserves a degree of closure. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Talk with her. See what she has to say about her situation.”

  “With who?”

  “The girl of your dreams. Tell me if you think she’s been worth it,” he said.

  He pushed open the door slowly with the flat of his hand, exposing a room whose walls contained floor-to-ceiling plasma screens filled with scenes filmed through the windows of the stucco house on an island southeast of the Chandeleurs. Even the sound of the surf on the beach and the wind in the palm trees was being pumped through a speaker system.

  Tee Jolie Melton was lying on a white brocade couch, wearing a blue evening gown and jewelry around her neck that looked like diamonds and rubies, although I doubted that was what they were. Her head was propped on a tasseled black satin pillow, the twists of gold in her hair still as bright as strings of buttercups. She seemed to smile in recognition. There were scabbed tracks on her forearms. She turned on her hip so she could see me better, but she didn’t try to get up. “That’s you?” she said.

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Tee Jolie,” I said.

  “Yeah, I knowed it was you, Mr. Dave. I knowed you’d be along someday.”

  “What’d they do to you, kiddo?”

  “They ain’t done nothing. It’s just medicine.”

  “It’s heroin.”

  “I couldn’t deliver the baby, see, ’cause I ain’t right inside. Don’t be mad at Pierre. Don’t be mad at me, either. Everyt’ing is gonna be all right, ain’t it?”

  “We’ll be back later, darlin’,” Pierre said. “Mr. Robicheaux and I need to talk over some business.” He closed the door and slipped an iron bolt into a locked position. “She’s a sweet girl.”

  “You turned her into a junkie,” I said.

  “She injected herself. So did her sister,” he replied. “You know your problem, Mr. Robicheaux? You won’t accept people as they are. You’re only interested in them as abstractions. The flesh-and-blood reality isn’t to your liking. It’s you who is the elitist, not I.”

  The door at the bottom of the stairwell that led from aboveground opened, and a man carrying an AK-47 with a banana magazine came inside and closed the door. “This was between the seat and the door of the convertible,” he said.

  “Purcel had an automatic weapon in the front seat?” Pierre said.

  “Yeah, it was covered by a blanket,” the man said.

  “You were riding in the front seat and didn’t see it?” Pierre said to Varina.

  “Oh, I’ve got it. His having a gun is my fault,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I was trying to understand how he got an AK-47 into his car without you seeing it. It’s not an unreasonable question.”

  “I don’t know how it got there. He went to the trunk for a blanket. Maybe the gun was in the trunk.”

  “This is foolish talk,” Alexis said. “The two of you are nattering magpies.”

  “Shut up, you pitiful old fuck,” Varina said.

  I saw Clete looking at me, the light in his eyes intensifying. It wasn’t hard to read the message: Divide and conquer.

  “Lamont Woolsey gave you guys up,” I said.

  Varina and Pierre and Alexis all turned and stared at me.

  “Woolsey thinks he’s going down for the hit on Ozone Eddy Mouton and his girlfriend,” I said.

  “Who is Ozone Eddy?” Pierre said, a laugh starting to break on his face.

  “I guess you’re not up-to-date,” I said. “Your buddy Woolsey had Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend burned to death in the trunk of an automobile after Clete stomped Woolsey’s face in. Woolsey doesn’t like the idea of being a tube of lubricant at Angola. So he told me a few things about your operation. I’ve got it on tape, if you want to hear it.”

  “I spoke with him this afternoon,” Pierre said. “He’s fishing in the Bahamas. He seemed quite relaxed to me.”

  I took a chance. “You guys made a lot of money off forged artworks. Then y’all invested it in Varina’s electronic security service and offshore well supply. You should have been multimillionaires many times over. Too bad it turned to shit on you.”

  I could see the pause in their eyes, the doubt, the glimmer of uncertainty and calculation that characterizes the thinking of all manipulators.

  “Somebody has to take the fall for the blowout,” I said. “A lot of people thought the issue was the centralizers down in the hole. That was never it at all, was it? The electronic warning system failed. That’s your area, isn’t it?”

  “Show him,” Alexis said.

  “Show me what?” I said.

  “Dave, I didn’t want this to happen,” Varina said.

  “Yeah, you did, Varina. None of these guys had the brains or charm to run an operation like this. You were always a winner. Men loved and admired you, and women were jealous of you. You could have been anything you wanted. Why’d you throw in with a bunch of losers like these guys?”

  “Show him,” Alexis Dupree repeated, his voice sharpening, the blood draining from around his mouth.

  “You’ve made Gran’pere angry,” Pierre said. “That’s not good for you or your friend or Alafair and Gretchen, Mr. Robicheaux. Gran’pere doesn’t have parameters. He has appetites of the most unusual kind.”

  He opened a wood door that gave onto a barred cell. The floor was spread with a rubber tarp. A cast-iron sarcophagus had been set horizontally at the rear of the room, its hinged lid open and resting against the wall. At the bottom of the sarcophagus were slits that I suspected were drains. The inside of the lid was patterned with rows of spikes shaped like stalactites. Alafair and Gretchen were sitting in the corner, wrists and ankles fastened behind them with ligatures, mouths taped. Gretchen was bleeding from a cut at her hairline. I saw Alafair’s mouth working, as though trying to loosen the adhesive on her cheeks.

  “You gutless sack of shit,” I said to Pierre.

  “You might be formally educated, but you’re a coarse man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “As Gran’pere would say, we can scrub everything out of the lower classes except the genes. Gretchen is going to go first. It’s a nasty business. You can watch it or not. If you choose not to watch, believe me, you will hear it. Where’s the tape you made of Lamont’s confession?”

  “In Clete’s office,” I said.

  “Why is it I don’t believe anything you say? What you don’t understand, Mr. Robicheaux, is that we don’t have anything to lose at this point. Do you think we plan to spend years in litigation while every cent we have is taken away from us? Do you think we plan to sell this beautiful historical home to pay years of legal fees because of you and your friend?”

  “There’s no way you can get away with this, Dupree,” Clete said. “You think Helen Soileau won’t figure out where we are?”

  “Would you like to talk to her?” Pierre said.

  “Can you stop talking, Pierre?” Varina said. “Just for once, please stop talking. I would take a vow of celibacy if you would take a vow of silence.”

  “My, my, daddy’s little angel. If you’re an angel, you’re Lucifer in female form,” Pierre said. “Think back, Varina. Who led these men into our lives again and again? You put your lovers on video while you were screwing. That’s like robbing a bank and leaving your driver’s license inside the vault. Oh, I forgot. You didn’t have to compromi
se our security situation. Your idiot of a father did that when he told his minions our operation was run by his petit ange.”

  “Don’t speak of my father like that,” Varina said.

  “You asked if I wanted to talk to Helen Soileau,” I said to Pierre.

  “I insist that you do,” he said. “Maybe you’ll finally understand how self-deluded you are and how minuscule your importance is. However, I don’t know if you’ll be up to the shock. What do you think?”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “You’re uneducable, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

  “This isn’t necessary, Pierre,” Varina said.

  “Stop hectoring the man and let him have a little fun,” Alexis said.

  “Excuse me for saying this, Alexis, but I hate both of you,” she said. “When this is over, I’m going to-”

  “What?” Alexis asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied. “Look at it this way. How much longer do you have to live? Think of me having a glass of champagne at your graveside. Think of me living in this house. Your grandson is incompetent and can’t run a business by himself or paint his way out of a paper bag. How long do you think it will be before I own everything in your possession?”

  “The only woman I’ve ever known like you was Ilse Koch,” Alexis said.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “The Bitch of Buchenwald, you silly girl,” he replied.

  “What did you mean about Helen?” I said to Pierre.

  He removed a remote control from his coat pocket and clicked a button several times. There was a bank of television monitors at the top of the wall by the entrance, most of them showing the grounds and the bayou and the two-lane highway in front of the plantation. The image on one of them changed to a scene inside a kitchen.

  “That place you’re looking at, Mr. Robicheaux, is just beyond Tee Jolie’s bedroom,” Pierre said. “The figure on the floor is Helen Soileau. She’s quite unconscious right now, and I don’t think she can feel very much pain. I also doubt that she’s aware of her surroundings, so don’t be too alarmed by what you’re about to watch.”

  “What did you do to her?” I asked.

  “She was chloroformed, that’s all,” he replied. He took a small walkie-talkie from his pocket and pushed a button and spoke into it. “Put her inside, fellows.” Then he turned to me. “Watch now. You should enjoy this, since I suspect she’s a pain in the ass to work for. It’s oopsy-daisy time for the lady from Lesbos.”

  Helen was bound hand and foot and lying on her side, and I couldn’t see her face. Two men walked in front of the camera and lifted her into the air and opened the top of a deep-freeze chest and set her inside. One of them looked back at the camera, then shut the lid.

  “I give her about fifteen minutes,” Pierre said. “How much did you tell her about us, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “She never believed what I said about you,” I replied. “No one will. You’re killing people for no reason.”

  “It’s getting late,” Alexis said. “Start with the girls, Mickey. Be fast about it, too. I’m tired.”

  “I want to do the one called Gretchen,” the fleshy man said.

  “Oh, that’s right, Harold, she broke out your front teeth, didn’t she?” Alexis said. “By all means.”

  “Look, you guys, it’s obvious you make use of people inside the system,” Clete said. “That’s me and Dave. Maybe we can work something out. Look at our record. I don’t know how many guys we’ve cowboyed. You don’t believe me, check my jacket.”

  “You’re not in a seller’s market, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said.

  “Dave already said it,” Clete replied. “What’s the percentage in snuffing people nobody believes?”

  “And Sheriff Soileau?” Alexis said, an amused gleam in his eye.

  “That’s the breaks, I guess,” Clete said.

  “I knew others like you,” Alexis said. “When we locked them inside the showers, we told them we were creating a special dispensation for those who could prove their mettle. They beat and strangled one another while we watched through a peephole, and after a few minutes we dropped the gas containers through the air vents in the roof.”

  “Shut up and get this over with,” Varina said.

  “Maybe you’ll be part of the entertainment. That would be quite a surprise, wouldn’t it?” Alexis said to her. “Did you know that Caligula did that to his dinner guests?”

  “What?” she said angrily.

  “I wanted to see if you were paying attention,” Alexis said.

  The fat man and the man with greased hair were putting on rubber boots and long rubber gloves. The fat man was looking with anticipation at the cell where Alafair and Gretchen lay bound in the corner.

  “Pierre?” said the man with the greased hair.

  “What is it?”

  “I got a problem. I ate some garlic shrimp for supper. I’m about to download in my pants.”

  “Then go to the bathroom. We’ll wait.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The man with the greased hair lumbered toward a bathroom in the rear of the building, duck-footed, clutching his stomach.

  “Make sure you close the door and turn on the ventilator,” said the man with the Bugs Bunny tattoo.

  “That isn’t funny, Mickey,” Pierre said.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  It was Clete Purcel who seemed to reveal a side that no one had ever seen in him. “I can’t take this, Dave. I’d thought I’d be up to it, but I’m not. I got to sit down.”

  “Act with some dignity, Mr. Purcel,” Pierre said.

  “It’s my chest. I’ve got some lead in there. I think it’s next to my heart. I need a chair. I can’t stand up.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Varina said.

  Clete gagged and spat blood on his hand. “I’m going to hit the deck if I don’t sit down.”

  “Get him a chair,” Alexis said.

  “Don’t get near him! Don’t trust this man!” Varina said.

  Clete swayed from side to side, then fell against the wall. Mickey held him up and slapped his cheek. “Hang on, big man,” he said. “You were in the Crotch, right? Time to man up.”

  Clete bent over, his hands on his thighs, as though about to be sick. “I’m going down, Dave. You’ll be on your own. I’m sorry,” he said.

  He crumpled to one knee, his shirt splitting down his spine, his love-handles hanging over his belt, his giant buttocks spreading like an elephant’s.

  “This man is pitiful,” Alexis said.

  “I didn’t sign on for this,” Clete replied, shaking his head.

  “This is the legendary New Orleans badass who capped our guys in the shootout on the bayou?” Mickey said. “What a joke.”

  With his left hand, Clete pulled his trouser leg up and unsnapped the KA-BAR strapped on his calf. He pulled the blade from its scabbard. “Chug on this, bubba,” he said.

  31

  Clete clenched one arm around the throat of the man who had Bugs Bunny on his forearm, and drove the knife into his chest not once but twice, holding him up, using him as a shield. “Dave! The AK!”

  He didn’t have to tell me. I was already running for it. It was propped against the wall by the stairwell, painted with green and black tiger stripes, the banana-shaped magazine dull gray, nicked silver on the edges with wear. As I ran toward the stairwell, I was trying to count inside my head the number of men in the room. How many were there?

  There was a fat man who wanted to personally crush Gretchen Horowitz inside the iron maiden because she had broken his teeth. There was the man whose hair was scalped around the ears and layered with grease on top, and another man who had found the AK-47 in Clete’s convertible and brought it inside. There was the man who had Tasered Clete, although he was already a casualty, his feet kicking uselessly, his mouth trying to suck oxygen into his lungs after both of them had already been punctured by Clete’s knife.

  In the kitchen were
two men who had lowered Helen Soileau into the deep freezer.

  How many others were on the property, either inside or above-ground? I couldn’t remember the number I had seen. Was Pierre Dupree armed? Or Alexis? Or Varina?

  I had no way of knowing.

  I would like to describe the next few minutes in a precise fashion, but I cannot. There are experiences in your life that you never quite sort out. You relive them many times in your dreams but always through a broken lens. Think of the syndrome in this way, and tell me if any of it sounds familiar. You are a man or woman who never uses profanity, but you remember yourself screaming obscenities, none of it with any syntax and none of it making any sense. You remember the buck of a weapon in your hands, but you do not remember aiming it; instead, you remember with a sinking of the heart that you did not care who was in front of it, that you would have shot your father or your brother or your son if he had been in your line of fire. You gloried in the fact that you were alive while others died and that your enemy seemed to deconstruct in a bloody mist before your eyes.

  I know I pulled back and released the bolt on the AK-47 and prayed that the magazine was loaded. I know I pulled the trigger as soon as the round chambered, and I saw a man in overalls-I think the man who found the AK-grab his stomach and bend over as though someone had punched him in the solar plexus inside a crowded elevator. I saw Clete drop the man he had stabbed and pick up the Taser and use it on Pierre Dupree, or try to use it, I couldn’t be sure. I saw the kitchen door open and a man’s face appear briefly against a backdrop of pots and pans hanging from a wall, and I know I started firing at him and saw the door close again and the rounds pock through a metal surface that had been oversprayed with black paint.

  I saw the fat man whose name was Harold unlock the door to Gretchen and Alafair’s cell and go inside. I saw the man with the intestinal problem emerge from the bathroom, his fly unzipped, his belt unbuckled, a nickel-plated. 357 in his hand. I lifted the AK-47 and fired two or perhaps three rounds at him and saw a spurt of blood fly from his shoulder and whip across the doorjamb. He righted himself with one hand propped behind him and began firing at me as fast as he could pull the trigger of his revolver. I saw Clete fall back against the wall and couldn’t tell if he was hit. Pierre Dupree was crouched in a ball, trembling from either fear or the shock of the Taser or both. I had no idea where Alexis Dupree or Varina had gone.