Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  Though my description of that peculiar moment in my career as a police officer is probably not of much significance now, I must add a caveat. If one loses his life at the hands of another, he would like to believe his sacrifice is in the service of a greater cause. He would like to believe that he has left the world a better place, that because of his death at least one other person, perhaps a member of his family, will be spared, that his grave will reside in a green arbor where others will visit him. He does not want to believe that his life was made forfeit because he offended someone’s vanity and that his passing, like that of almost all who die in wars, means absolutely nothing.

  One day after Clete’s visit, Alafair, my adopted daughter, brought me the mail and fresh flowers for the vase in my window. My wife, Molly, had stopped at the administrative office for reasons I wasn’t aware of. Alafair’s hair was thick and black and cut short on her neck and had a lustrous quality that made people want to touch it. “We’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.

  “You going to take me sac-a-lait fishing?”

  “Dr. Bonin thinks you can go home next week. He’s cutting down your meds today.”

  “Which meds?” I said, trying to hold my smile in place.

  “All of them.”

  She saw me blink. “You think you still need them?” she said.

  “Not really.”

  She held her eyes on mine, not letting me see her thoughts. “Clete called,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “He says you told him Tee Jolie Melton came to see you at two in the morning.”

  “He told you right. She left me this iPod.”

  “Dave, some people think Tee Jolie is dead.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Nobody has seen her in months. She had a way of going off with men who told her they knew movie or recording people. She believed anything anyone told her.”

  I picked up the iPod off the nightstand and handed it to Alafair. “This doesn’t belong to the nurses or the attendant or any of the physicians here. Tee Jolie bought it for me and downloaded music that I like and gave it to me as a present. She put three of her songs on there. Put the headphones on and listen.”

  Alafair turned on the iPod and tapped on its face when it lit up. “What are the names of the songs?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What are they categorized as?”

  “I’m not up on that stuff. The songs are in there. I listened to them,” I said.

  The headphones were askew on her ears so she could listen to the iPod and talk to me at the same time. “I can’t find them, Dave.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Maybe I messed up the iPod.”

  She set it back on the nightstand and placed the headphones carefully on top of it, her hands moving slowly, her eyes veiled. “It’ll be good having you home again.”

  “We’ll go fishing, too. As soon as we get back,” I said.

  “That depends on what Dr. Bonin says.”

  “What do these guys know?”

  I saw Molly smiling in the doorway. “You just got eighty-sixed,” she said.

  “Today?” I asked.

  “I’ll bring the car around to the side entrance,” she said.

  I tried to think before I spoke, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to think about. “My meds are in the top drawer,” I said.

  FIVE DAYS HAD passed since Clete was visited by Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes, and gradually he had pushed the pair of them to the edge of his mind. Golightly had taken too many hits to the head a long time ago, Clete told himself. Besides, he was a basket case even as a criminal; he’d made his living as a smash-and-grab jewelry-store thief, on a par with gang bangers who had shit for brains and zero guts and usually victimized elderly Jews who didn’t keep guns on the premises. Also, Clete had made innocuous calls to his sister and to his niece, who was a student at Tulane, and neither of them mentioned anything of an unusual nature occurring in their lives.

  Forget Golightly and Grimes, Clete thought. By mistake, Golightly once put roach paste on a plateful of Ritz crackers and almost croaked himself. This was the guy he was worrying about?

  On a sunny, cool Thursday morning, Clete opened up the office and read his mail and answered his phone messages, then told his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, he was going down to Café du Monde for beignets and coffee. She took a five-dollar bill from her purse and put it on the corner of her desk. “Bring me a few, will you?” she said.

  Miss Alice was a former nun whose height and body mass and gurgling sounds made Clete think of a broken refrigerator he once owned. Before she was encouraged out of the convent, she had been the terror of the diocese, referred to by the bishop as “the mother of Grendel” or, when he was in a more charitable mood, “our reminder that the Cross is always with us.”

  Clete picked up the bill off the desk and put it in his shirt pocket. “Those two guys I had trouble with have probably disappeared. But if they should come around while I’m not here, you know what to do.”

  She looked at him, her expression impassive.

  “Miss Alice?” he said.

  “No, I do not know what to do. Would you please tell me?” she replied.

  “You don’t do anything. You tell them to come back later. Got it?”

  “I don’t think it wise for a person to make promises about situations that he or she cannot anticipate.”

  “Don’t mess with these guys. Do you want me to say it again?”

  “No, you’ve made yourself perfectly clear. Thank you very much.”

  “You want café au lait?”

  “I’ve made my own. Thank you for asking.”

  “We’ve got a deal?”

  “Mr. Purcel, you are upsetting me spiritually. Would you please stop this incessant questioning? I do not need to be badgered.”

  “I apologize.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Clete walked down the street in the shade of the buildings, the scrolled-iron balconies sagging in the middle with the weight of potted roses and bougainvillea and chrysanthemums and geraniums, the wind smelling of night damp and bruised spearmint, the leaves of the philodendron and caladium in the courtyards threaded with humidity that looked like quicksilver in the shadows. He sat under the colonnade at Café du Monde and ate a dozen beignets that were white with powdered sugar, and drank three cups of coffee with hot milk, and gazed across Decatur at Jackson Square and the Pontalba Apartments that flanked either side of the square and the sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that separated the pedestrian mall from the park area.

  The square was a place that seemed more like a depiction of life in the Middle Ages than twenty-first-century America. Street bands and mimes and jugglers and unicyclists performed in front of the cathedral, as they might have done in front of Notre Dame while Quasimodo swung on the bells. The French doors to the big restaurant on the corner were open, and Clete could smell the crawfish already boiling in the kitchen. New Orleans would always be New Orleans, he told himself, no matter if it had gone under the waves, no matter if cynical and self-serving politicians had left the people of the lower Ninth Ward to drown. New Orleans was a song and a state of mind and a party that never ended, and those who did not understand that simple fact should have to get passports to enter the city.

  It was a bluebird day, the flags on the Cabildo straightening in the breeze. Clete had gone to bed early the previous night and his body was free of alcohol and the residue of dreams that he sometimes carried through the morning like cobweb on his skin. It seemed only yesterday that Louis Prima and Sam Butera had jammed all night and blown out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, or that Clete and his partner from New Iberia had walked a beat with nightsticks on Canal and Basin and Esplanade, both of them recently back from Vietnam, both of them still believers in the promise that each sunrise brought.

  He bought a big bag of ho
t beignets for Miss Alice that cost him twice the amount she had given him. He listened to one song played by a string-and-rub-board band at the entrance to Pirates Alley, then walked back to St. Ann, his mind free of worry.

  As soon as he turned the corner on St. Ann, he saw a large black Buick with charcoal-tinted windows parked illegally in front of his building. By the time he reached the foyer that gave onto his office, he had little doubt who had parked it there. He could hear the voice of Alice Werenhaus in the courtyard: “I told the pair of you, Mr. Purcel is not here. I also told you not to go inside the premises without his permission. If you do not leave right now, I will have you arrested and placed in the city prison. I will also have your automobile towed to the pound. Excuse me. Are you smirking at me?”

  “We didn’t know we were gonna get a show,” the voice of Waylon Grimes replied.

  “How would you like your face slapped all over this courtyard?” Miss Alice said.

  “How’d you know I’m a guy who likes it rough? You charge extra for that?” Grimes said.

  “What did you say? You repeat that! Right now! Say it again!”

  “You promise to hit me?” Grimes said.

  Clete walked through the shade of the foyer and into the courtyard, squinting in the glare at Grimes and a bald man who wore a suit and carried a clipboard in his hand.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Waylon?” Clete said.

  “Mr. Benoit here is our appraiser. Bix is thinking of buying you out, less the principal and the vig on your marker,” Grimes replied. “But this place looks like it has some serious problems. Right, Mr. Benoit?”

  “You have some settling, Mr. Purcel,” the appraiser said. “You see those stress cracks in the arch over your foyer? I notice the same tension in the upper corners of your windows. I suspect you have trouble opening them, don’t you? That’s because your foundation may be sinking, or you may have Formosan termites eating through the concrete. There’s a possibility here of structural collapse.”

  “The roof is caving in? People will be plunging through the floors?” Clete said.

  “I don’t know if it would be that bad, but who knows?” Benoit said. He was smiling, his pate shiny in the sunlight. He seemed to be clenching his back teeth to prevent himself from swallowing. “Have you seen any buckling in the floors?”

  “This building has been here for over a hundred and fifty years,” Clete said. “I renovated it after Katrina, too.”

  “Yeah, it’s old and storm-damaged. That’s why it’s falling apart,” Grimes said.

  “Get out of here,” Clete said.

  “It don’t work that way, Purcel,” Grimes said. “Under Louisiana law, that marker is the same as a loan agreement signed at a bank. You fucked yourself. Don’t blame other people.”

  “Watch your language,” Clete said.

  “You worried about the bride of Frankenstein, here? She’s heard it before. You killed a woman. Who are you to go around lecturing other people about respect? I heard you blew her head off in that shootout on the bayou.”

  Clete never blinked, but his face felt tight and small and cold in the wind. There was a tremolo in his chest, like a tuning fork that was out of control. He thought he heard the downdraft of helicopters and a sound like tank treads clanking to life and grinding over banyan trees and bamboo and a railed pen inside which hogs were screaming in panic. He smelled an odor that was like flaming kerosene arching out of a gun turret. His arms hung limply at his sides, and his palms felt as stiff and dry as cardboard when he opened and closed his hands. His shirt and tie and sport coat were too tight on his neck and shoulders and chest; he took a deep breath, as though he had swallowed a chunk of angle iron. “I killed two,” he said.

  “Say again?” Grimes asked.

  “I killed two women, not just one.”

  Waylon Grimes glanced at his wristwatch. “That’s impressive. But we’re on a schedule, here.”

  “Yes, we should be going,” the appraiser added.

  “The other woman was a mamasan,” Clete said. “She was trying to hide in a spider hole while we were trashing her ville. I rolled a frag down the hole. There were kids in there, too. What do you think about that, Waylon?”

  Grimes massaged the back of his neck with one hand, his expression benign. Then a short burst of air escaped his mouth, as though he were genuinely bemused. “Sounds like you got issues, huh?” he said.

  “Is that a question?”

  “No. I wasn’t in the service. I don’t know about those kinds of issues. What I was saying is we’re done here.”

  “Then why did you make it sound like a question?”

  “I was trying to be polite.”

  “The mamasan lives on my fire escape now. Sometimes I leave a cup of tea on the windowsill for her. Look right over your head. There’s her teacup. Are you laughing at me, Waylon?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re not laughing at me, who are you laughing at?”

  “I’m laughing because I get tired of hearing you guys talk about the war. If it was so fucking bad, why did you go over there? Give it a rest, man. I read about a guy at the My Lai massacre who told a Vietnamese woman he was gonna kill her baby unless she gave him a blow job. Maybe that was you, and that’s why your head is fucked up. The truth is, I don’t care. Pay your marker or lose your building. Can you fit that into your head? You killed a mamasan? Good for you. You killed her kids, too? Get over it.”

  Clete could feel a constriction in one side of his face that was not unlike an electric shock, one that robbed his left eye of sight and replaced it with a white flash of light that seemed to explode like crystal breaking. He knew he had hit Waylon Grimes, but he wasn’t sure where or exactly how many times. He saw Grimes crash through the fronds of a windmill palm and try to crawl away from him, and he saw the appraiser run for the foyer, and he felt Alice Werenhaus trying to grab his arms and wrists and prevent him from doing what he was doing. All of them were trying to tell him something, but their voices were lost in the squealing of the hogs and the Zippo-track rolling through the hooches and the downdraft of a helicopter blowing a rice paddy dry while a door gunner was firing an M60 at a column of tiny men in black pajamas and conical straw hats who were running for the tree line.

  Clete picked up Waylon Grimes by the front of his shirt and shoved him through a cluster of banana plants into the side of the building, pinning him by his throat against the wall, driving his fist again and again into the man’s face, saliva and blood stringing across the plaster.

  He dropped Grimes to the ground and kicked at him once and missed, then steadied himself with one hand against the wall and brought his foot down with all his weight on Grimes’s rib cage. It was then that Clete knew, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he was not only capable of killing a man with his bare hands but he could literally tear him into pieces with no reservation or feeling whatsoever. That was what he commenced doing.

  Out of nowhere, Alice Werenhaus pushed past him, her feet sinking to the ankles in the mixture of black dirt and coffee grinds and guano that Clete used in his gardens, dropping onto all fours and forming a protective arch over Grimes’s body, her homely face terrified. “Please don’t hit him anymore. Oh, Mr. Purcel, you frighten me so,” she said. “The world has hurt you so much.”

  OUR HOME WAS located on a one-acre lot shaded by live oak and pecan trees and slash pines on East Main in New Iberia, right up the street from the Shadows, a famous antebellum home built in the year 1831. Even though our house was also constructed in the nineteenth century, it was of much more modest design, one that was called “shotgun” because of its oblong structure, like a boxcar’s, and the folk legend that one could fire a bird gun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back entrance without ever striking a wall.

  Humble abode or not, it was a fine place to live. The windows reached all the way to the ceiling and had ventilated storm shutters, and in hurricane season, oak limbs bounced off
our roof without ever shattering glass. I had extended and screened the gallery across the front, and hung it with a glider, and sometimes on hot afternoons I would set up the ice-cream freezer on the gallery and we would mash up blackberries in the cream and sit on the glider and eat blackberry ice cream.

  I lived in the house with my daughter, Alafair, who had finished law school at Stanford but was determined to be a novelist, and with my wife, Molly, a former nun and missionary in Central America who had come to Louisiana to organize the sugarcane workers in St. Mary Parish. In back, there was a hutch for our elderly raccoon, Tripod, and a big tree above the hutch where our warrior cat, Snuggs, kept guard over the house and the yard. I had been either a police officer in New Orleans or a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish since I returned from Vietnam. My history is one of alcoholism, depression, violence, and bloodshed. For much of it I have enormous regret. For some of it I have no regret at all, and given the chance, I would commit the same deeds again without pause, particularly when it comes to protection of my own.

  Maybe that’s not a good way to be. But at some point in your life, you stop keeping score. It has been my experience that until that moment comes in your odyssey through the highways and byways and back alleys of your life, you will never have peace.

  I had been home from the recovery unit nine days and was sitting on the front step, cleaning my spinning reel, when Clete Purcel’s restored Cadillac convertible with the starch-white top and freshly waxed maroon paint job pulled into our driveway, the tires clicking on the gravel, a solitary yellow-spotted leaf from a water oak drifting down on the hood. When he got out of the car, he removed the keys from the ignition and dropped them in the pocket of his slacks, something he never did when he parked his beloved Caddy on our property. He also looked back over his shoulder at the one-way traffic coming up East Main, fingering the pink scar that ran through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose.