Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “You run a red light?” I asked.

  He sat down heavily next to me, a gray fog of weed and beer and testosterone puffing out of his clothes. The back of his neck was oily, his face dilated. “Remember a guy name of Waylon Grimes?”

  “He did some button work for the Giacanos?”

  “Button work, torture, extortion, you name it. He came to my place with Bix Golightly. Then he came back with a property appraiser. That’s after he was warned.”

  “What happened?”

  “He said some stuff about Vietnam and killing women and kids. I don’t remember, exactly. I lost it.”

  “What did you do, Clete?”

  “Tried to kill him. Alice Werenhaus saved his life.” He took a breath and lifted one arm and placed his hand on top of his shoulder, his face flinching. “I think I tore something loose inside me.”

  “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “What can a doctor do besides open me up again?”

  “Has Grimes filed charges?”

  “That’s the problem. He told the ambulance attendants that he fell from my balcony. I think he plans to square it on his own. I think Golightly has given him the addresses of my sister and niece.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Golightly told me he was going to do it unless I paid him for the marker. You know the word about Bix. He’s a nutjob, and he’d gut and stuff his own mother and use her for a doorstop, but he’s straight up when it comes to a debt, either collecting or paying it. What do you think I ought to do?”

  “Talk to Dana Magelli at NOPD.”

  “What should I tell him? I tried to beat a guy to death, but I’m the victim, and now I need a couple of cruisers to follow my family around?”

  “Find something else to use against Grimes,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “The death of the child he ran over.”

  “The parents are scared shitless. They’re also both junkies. I think Grimes was delivering their skag when he killed their kid.”

  “I don’t know what else to offer.”

  “I can’t let my sister and niece take the fall for what I did. This is eating my lunch.”

  “You stop having the thoughts you’re having.”

  “What else am I going to do? Grimes should have been cycled through a septic tank a long time ago.”

  I heard the front door open behind me. “I thought I heard your voice, Clete. You’re just in time for dinner,” Molly said. “Is everything okay out here?”

  CLETE TURNED DOWN the invitation, claiming he was meeting someone for supper down the street at Clementine’s, which meant he would close the bar there and probably sleep in the back of his car that night or in his office on Main or perhaps at the motor court down the bayou, where he rented a cottage. Regardless of how the evening ended, it was obvious Clete had returned to his old ways, mortgaging tomorrow for today, holding mortality at bay with vodka and weed and a case of beer he kept iced down in the backseat of the Caddy, and in this instance maybe toying with the idea of premeditated murder.

  After we ate supper, I tried to read the paper and put Clete’s problems with Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly out of my mind. I couldn’t. Clete would always remain the best friend I’d ever had, a man who once carried me down a fire escape with two bullets in his back, a man who would give up his life for me or Molly or Alafair.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” I said to Molly. “You want to go?”

  She was baking a pie in the kitchen, and there was a smear of flour on her cheek. Her hair was red and cut short, her skin powdered with freckles. Sometimes her gestures and expressions would take on a special kind of loveliness, like a visual song, without her being aware of it. “You’re going to talk to Clete?” she said.

  “I guess.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “No reason.”

  “Clete won’t talk openly if I’m there.”

  “I’ll be back soon,” I said. “You look beautiful.”

  I picked up the iPod given to me by Tee Jolie Melton and strolled down East Main under the canopy of live oaks arching over the street. The streetlamps had just come on, and fireflies were lighting in the trees and bamboo along Bayou Teche. I walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street and looked down the long dark tidal stream that eventually dumped into the Gulf. The tide was coming in, and the water was full of mud and sliding high up on the banks when a boat passed, the lily pads in the shallows rolling like a green carpet. For me, Louisiana has always been a haunted place. I believe the specters of slaves and Houma and Atakapa Indians and pirates and Confederate soldiers and Acadian farmers and plantation belles are still out there in the mist. I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is. I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind-numbing, on a level with telling fond tales about one’s rapist.

  But these are dismal thoughts, and I try to put them aside. As I gazed down the Teche, I clicked on the iPod and found one of Tee Jolie’s recordings. She was singing “La Jolie Blon,” the heartbreaking lament that you hear once and never forget for the rest of your life. Then I remembered that Alafair had said she had not been able to find Tee Jolie’s songs in the contents. How was that possible? There on the bridge, in the gloaming of the day, while the last of the sunlight blazed in an amber ribbon down the center of the bayou, while the black-green backs of alligator gars rolled among the lily pads, I listened to Tee Jolie’s beautiful voice rising from the earphones that rested on the sides of my neck, as though she were speaking French to me from a bygone era, one that went all the way back to the time of Evangeline and the flight of the Acadian people from Nova Scotia to the bayou country of South Louisiana. I did not realize that I was about to relearn an old lesson, namely that sometimes it’s better to trust the realm of the dead than the world of the quick, and never to doubt the existence of unseen realities that can hover like a hologram right beyond the edges of our vision.

  When I went into Clementine’s, Clete was standing at the bar, a tumbler of vodka packed with shaved ice and cherries and orange slices and a sprig of mint in front of him. I sat down on a stool and ordered a seltzer on ice with a lime slice inserted on the glass’s rim, a pretense that for me probably disguised thoughts that are better not discussed. “You want me to go back to New Orleans with you?” I said.

  “No, I put my sister on a cruise, and my niece is visiting a friend in Mobile, so they’re okay for now,” he said.

  “How about later on?”

  “I haven’t thought it through. I’ll let you know when I do,” he said.

  “Don’t try to handle this on your own, Clete. There’re lots of ways we can go at these guys,” I said.

  “For instance?”

  “Go after Grimes for vehicular homicide of the child.”

  “Using what for evidence? The testimony of his junkie parents who already flushed the kid down the drain for their next fix?”

  The bar was crowded and noisy. Inside the conversation about football and subjects that were of no consequence, Clete’s face seemed to float like a red balloon, estranged and full of pain. “I grew up around guys like Golightly and Grimes. You know how you deal with them? You take them off at the neck.” He put two aspirins in his mouth and bit down on them. “I’ve got this twisted feeling high up in my chest, like something is still in there and it’s pushing against my lung.” He took a deep drink from his vodka, the ice making a rasping sound against the glass when he set it down on the bar. “You know the biggest joke about all this?” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Getting shot. Almost croaking. I would have bought it righ
t there on the bayou if the bullet hadn’t hit the strap on my shoulder holster. I got saved by my holster rather than by my piece. That’s the story of my fucking life. If anything good happens to me, it’s because of an accident.”

  “Sir, would you hold down your language, please?” the bartender said.

  “Sorry,” Clete said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “No, I like it here. I like the bar and the food and the company, and I have no reason to leave.”

  “Meaning I do?” I said.

  “You know anybody who goes to a whorehouse to play the piano?” He thought about what he had said and smiled self-effacingly. “I’m just off my feed. I’m actually very copacetic about all this. Is that the iPod you had at the recovery unit?”

  “Yeah, I was listening to Tee Jolie Melton’s songs. ‘La Jolie Blon’ is on there.”

  “Let me see.” He picked up the iPod from the bar and began clicking through the contents. “There’re only a few songs on here: Will Bradley and Taj Mahal and Lloyd Price.”

  “Tee Jolie’s songs are on there, too.”

  “They’re not, Dave. Look for yourself.”

  I took the iPod back and disconnected it from the headphones and put it in my pocket. “Let’s take a ride up to St. Martinville,” I said.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “I know where Tee Jolie’s house is.”

  “What are we going to do there?”

  “I don’t know. You want to stay here and talk about football?”

  Clete looked at the bartender. “Wrap me up an oyster po’boy sandwich and a couple of Bud longnecks to go,” he said. “Sorry about the language. I’ve got an incurable speech defect. This is one of the few joints that will allow me on the premises.”

  Everybody at the bar was smiling. Tell me Clete didn’t have the touch.

  IT WAS RAINING when we drove up the two-lane highway through the long tunnel of trees that led into the black district on the south end of St. Martinville. A couple of nightclubs were lit up inside the rain, and flood lamps burned in front of the old French church in the square and shone on the Evangeline Oak in back, but most of the town was dark except the streetlamps at the intersections and the warning lights on the drawbridge, under which the bayou was running high and yellow, the surface dancing with raindrops.

  Tee Jolie had grown up in a community of shacks that once were part of a corporate plantation. The people who lived there called themselves Creoles and did not like to be called black, although the term was originally a designation for second-generation colonials who were of Spanish and continental French ancestry and born in New Orleans or close proximity. During antebellum times, there was another group of mixed ancestry called “free people of color.” During the early civil rights era, the descendants of this group came to be known as Creoles, and some of them joined whites in resisting court-ordered school integration, a fact that always reminds me elitism is with us for the long haul.

  Tee Jolie had lived with her mother and younger sister in a two-bedroom cypress house on the bayou, one that had a rust-stained tin roof and pecan and hackberry trees and water oaks in front and clusters of banana plants that grew above the eaves and a vegetable garden in back and a dock on the bayou. When Clete and I drove into the yard, I didn’t know what I expected to find. Maybe I wanted proof that Tee Jolie was all right and living in the New Orleans area and that she actually visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue. I didn’t think my visit was self-serving. I wanted to know that she was safe, that she was not among dangerous men, that she would have the baby her lover had told her she could abort, that he would turn out to be a decent man who would marry her and take care of their child, and that all good things would come to Tee Jolie Melton and her new family. That was what I sincerely wished, and I didn’t care whether others thought I was delusional or not.

  Clete and I stepped up on the gallery. The wind was blowing in vortexes of rain across the property and on the trees and the great green shiny clusters of flooded elephant ears that grew along the bayou’s banks. When the door opened, we were not prepared for the person silhouetted against a reading lamp in the background. He walked with two canes, his spine so bent that he had to force his chin up to look directly at us. His hands were little more than claws, his skin disfigured by a dermatological disease that sometimes leaches the color from the tissue of black people. It would not be exaggeration to say he had the shape of a gargoyle. But his eyes were the same color as Tee Jolie’s, a blue-green that had the luminosity you might see in a sunlit wave sliding across a coral pool in the Caribbean.

  I introduced myself and showed him my badge. I told him I was a friend of Tee Jolie and had recently seen her in New Orleans, and I wondered if she was all right. He had not invited us inside. “You seen her, suh?” he said.

  “Yes, she visited me when I was recovering from an injury. Are you her relative?”

  “I’m her grandfather. After her mama died, she went away. That was maybe t’ree months ago. Right there on the dock, a man picked her up in a boat, and we ain’t seen or heard from her since. Then her little sister, Blue, went away, too. You ain’t seen Blue, have you?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid not. May we come in?”

  “Please do. My name is Avery DeBlanc. You’ll have to excuse the place. It ain’t very neat. Y’all want coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. Clete and I sat down on a cloth-covered couch while Mr. DeBlanc continued to stand. “Did you report Tee Jolie’s disappearance?”

  “Yes, suh. I talked to a deputy sheriff. But wasn’t nobody interested.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “’Cause the deputy tole me Tee Jolie’s got a reputation. This is the way he said it: ‘She got a reputation, and let’s face it, ain’t none of it is good.’ He said she run off in high school and she hung out wit’ young people that sells dope. I axed him which one of them don’t sell dope. I called him twice more, and each time he said there ain’t any evidence a crime was committed. I got to sit down, me. I cain’t stand up long. Y’all sure you don’t want coffee?”

  “Sir, do you have someone here to help you?” I asked.

  “There ain’t no he’p for what I got. I was at Carville eighteen years. I t’ink I scared that deputy. He wouldn’t shake hands wit’ me.”

  “You have Hansen’s disease?” I said.

  “That and everyt’ing else.” For the first time he smiled, his eyes full of light.

  “Tee Jolie told me she was living with a man I know,” I said. “She mentioned centralizers. I think this man might be in the oil business. Does any of this sound familiar?”

  “No, suh, it don’t.” He had sat down in a straight chair, a photograph of a World War I doughboy hanging behind him. A framed color picture of Jesus, probably cut from a magazine, hung from the opposite wall. The rug was frayed into string along the edges; a moth swam in the glow of the reading lamp. Outside, in the rain, I could see the green and red running lights on a passing barge, the waves from the bow slapping into the elephant ears. He added, “She had a scrapbook, though.”

  “Sir?” I said.

  “In her room. You want me to get it? It’s got a mess of pictures in there.”

  “Don’t get up, sir. With your permission, I’ll go into her room and get it.”

  “It’s there on her li’l dresser. She was always proud of it. She called it her ‘celebrity book.’ I tole her, ‘There ain’t no celebrities down here, Tee Jolie, except you.’ She’d say, ‘I ain’t no celebrity, Granddaddy, but one day that’s what I’m gonna be. You gonna see.’”

  He looked wistfully into space, as though he’d said more than he should have and had empowered his own words to hurt him. I went into Tee Jolie’s bedroom and found a scrapbook bound in a thick pink plastic cover with hearts embossed on it. I sat back down on the couch and began turning the pages. She had cut out several newspaper articles and pasted them stiffly on the pages:
a story about her high school graduation, a photograph taken of her when she was queen of the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, another photo that showed her with the all-girl Cajun band called BonSoir, Catin, a picture of her with the famous Cajun fiddler Hadley Castille.

  Among the back pages of the scrapbook was a collection of glossy photographs that she had not mounted. Nor were they the kind that one finds in a small-town newspaper. All of them appeared to have been taken in nightclubs; most of them showed her with older men who wore suits and expensive jewelry. Some of the men I recognized. Two of them were casino people who flew in and out of New Jersey. One man ran a collection agency and sold worthless insurance policies to the poor and uneducated. Another man operated a finance company that specialized in title loans. All of them were smiling the way hunters smiled while displaying a trophy. In every photo, Tee Jolie was dressed in sequined shirts and cowboy boots or a charcoal-black evening gown with purple and red roses stitched on it. She made me think of a solitary flower placed by mistake among a collection of gaudy chalk figures one takes home from an amusement park.

  In one photograph there was a figure I did not expect to see in Tee Jolie’s scrapbook. He was standing at the bar behind the main group, wearing a dark suit with no tie, the collar of his dress shirt unbuttoned, a gold chain and gold holy medal lying loosely around his neck, his scalp shining through his tight haircut, his eyebrows disfigured by scar tissue, his mouth cupped like a fish’s when it tries to breathe oxygen at the top of a tank. I handed the photo to Clete for him to look at. “Do you know who Bix Golightly is?” I asked Mr. DeBlanc.

  “I don’t know nobody by that name.”

  “He’s in this photo with Tee Jolie and some of her friends.”

  “I don’t know none of them people, me. What’s this man do?”

  “He’s a criminal.”