Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  The figure lifted a silenced .22 auto and pointed it with both hands and fired three times into Bix Golightly’s face, hitting him twice in the forehead and once in the mouth, clipping his cigarette in half, the ejected casings tinkling like tiny bells on the asphalt.

  The shooter bent over and picked up the ejected rounds as dispassionately and diligently as someone recovering coins dropped on a beach. From the edge of the alleyway, Clete watched the figure walk down the street through a cone of light under a streetlamp and disappear inside the darkness. The shooter’s windbreaker reminded him of the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then the shooter reversed direction and came back toward the streetlamp and seemed to stare momentarily at the alleyway, uncertain or bemused. Clete edged deeper into the alley. His .38 was clenched in his right hand, the grips biting into his palm, his pulse jumping in his neck. He pressed himself into the brick wall, his own body odor climbing into his nostrils, a vaporlike coldness wrapping itself around his heart. His blood was pounding so loudly in his ears that he couldn’t be sure if the shooter spoke or not. Then he heard the shooter walk away, whistling a tune. Was it “The San Antonio Rose”? Or was he losing his mind?

  CLETE’S CADDY PULLED into my drive at five the next morning, the windows and waxed finish running with moisture. I heard him walking on the gravel through the porte cochere and into the backyard. When I disarmed the alarm system and opened the back door, he was sitting on the steps. The oak and pecan trees and slash pines were barely visible inside the fog rolling off Bayou Teche. He told me everything that had happened in Algiers.

  “You went into Grimes’s apartment after Golightly got it?” I said.

  “I didn’t touch anything.”

  “Grimes died with a .357 in his hand?”

  “Yeah, he probably let the wrong person in and didn’t realize his mistake until it was too late.”

  “Why’d you go into his apartment?”

  “Grimes tortured my secretary. I shouldn’t go into his apartment?”

  “You didn’t call the shooting in?”

  “I called in a shots-fired from a pay phone.”

  “You did that later?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s something not coming together here, Clete. You had your piece out when you were in the alley?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But you didn’t try to stop the shooter?”

  “Would you eat a round for Bix Golightly?”

  Clete was staring into the fog, his big hands cupped on his knees, his porkpie hat low on his forehead, his stomach hanging over his belt. He picked up Snuggs and started wiping the mud off the cat’s paws with his handkerchief, smearing mud and fur on his slacks and sport coat.

  “You’re leaving something out,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “You’re telling me you froze?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just left Golightly to his fate, that’s all. He was born a bad guy, and he went out the same way. The world is better off without him.”

  “You’re a witness to a homicide, Clete.”

  “What else do you want me to say? I told you what happened. You don’t like what I’ve told you, so you put the problem on me. You got anything to eat?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You guess?” he said, putting Snuggs down.

  “Come inside. I’ll get some eggs and bacon started.”

  He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead as though he could smooth the wrinkles out of it. “Just coffee,” he said. “I don’t feel too hot.”

  “You pull something loose inside?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “How can I help you if you won’t be square with me?”

  “I thought this fall we’d be fishing again. Like the old days, when we caught green trout north of Barataria Bay. New Orleans is the only place in the world where people call bass ‘green trout.’ That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?”

  “Who was the shooter, Clete?”

  AT 7:45 A.M. I went to the office, and Clete went to the cottage he rented at a motor court down the bayou. At eleven A.M. I called Dana Magelli at the NOPD. I asked him what he had on a double shooting in Algiers. “How do you know we have anything?” he replied.

  “Word gets around,” I replied.

  “Bix Golightly got it. So did a kid by the name of Waylon Grimes. So far no brass, no prints. It looks like a contract hit. Somebody called in an anonymous shots-fired from a public phone.”

  “Why do you think it was a contract job?”

  “Aside from the fact that the shooter recovered his brass, he probably used a twenty-two or a twenty-five with a suppressor. The pros like small-caliber guns because the round bounces around inside the skull. Who told you about the shooting, Dave?”

  “I got a tip.”

  “From who?”

  “Maybe from the same guy who called in the shots-fired. He said the shooter was wearing a red windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and jeans stuffed in suede boots. He said Golightly called the shooter Caruso.”

  “We’ve already been to Golightly’s condo. A neighbor says a guy who sounds a whole lot like Clete Purcel was hanging around the condo last night. What are you guys up to?”

  “Nothing of consequence. Life is pretty boring on the Teche.”

  “I think you’re lying.”

  “You’re a good man, but don’t ever talk to me like that again,” I said.

  “You’re holding back information in a homicide investigation,” he said.

  “You ever hear of a hitter named Caruso?”

  “No. And if I haven’t, nobody else around here has, either.”

  “Maybe there’s a new player in town.”

  “Sometimes when people have a near-death experience, they think they don’t have to obey the same rules as the rest of us. You tell Purcel what I said.”

  “He’s the best cop NOPD ever had.”

  “Yeah, until he killed a federal informant and fled the country rather than face the music.”

  I hung up the phone. At noon my half-day shift was over. I walked home under the canopy of live oaks that arched over East Main, the sunlight golden through the leaves, the Spanish moss lifting in the wind, the autumnal Louisiana sky so hard and perfectly blue that it looked like an inverted ceramic bowl. Molly was at her office down the bayou, where she worked for a relief agency that helped fisher-people and small farmers build their own homes and businesses. Alafair was proofreading the galleys of her first novel at our redwood picnic table in the backyard, Tripod and Snuggs sitting like bookends on either side of the table. I fixed ham-and-onion sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea and carried them outside and sat down next to her.

  “Did Pierre Dupree find you?” she said.

  “He called?”

  “No, he was here about an hour ago.”

  “What did he want?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say. He seemed in a hurry.”

  “Dupree owns a building in New Orleans that used to be the headquarters of Didoni Giacano. There was a safe in the building that contained an old IOU from a card game Clete was in. Clete had paid the debt, but a couple of wiseacres got their hands on the marker and tried to take his office and apartment away from him. What do you know about Dupree?”

  “I’ve met him at a couple of parties. He seems nice enough,” she said. She took a bite of her sandwich and avoided my eyes.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “He’s had a lot of commercial success as an artist. I think he’s a marketing man more than a painter. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

  “There isn’t?”

  “He owns an ad agency, Dave. That’s what the man does for a living. Not everybody is Vincent van Gogh.”

  “When was the first time you wrote a dishonest line in your fiction?”

  She drank from her iced tea, her expression neutral, her galley pages fluttering when the wind gusted.

 
“The answer is you never wrote a dishonest line,” I said.

  Her skin was unblemished and dark in the shade, her hair as black as an Indian’s, her features and the luster in her eyes absolutely beautiful. Men had trouble not looking at her, even when they were with their wives. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged airplane that crashed off Southwest Pass. “There’s Pierre Dupree,” she said.

  A canary-yellow Humvee with a big chrome grille had just pulled into the driveway. Through the tinted windshield, I could see the driver talking on a cell phone and fooling with something on the dashboard. I walked through the porte cochere until I was abreast of the driver’s window. Pierre Dupree had thick black hair that was as shiny as a raven’s wing. He also had intense green eyes with a black fleck in them. He was at least six feet seven and had a face that would have been handsome except for the size of his teeth. They were too big for his mouth and, coupled with his size, they gave others the sense that in spite of his tailored suits and good manners, his body contained physical appetites and energies and suppressed urges that he could barely restrain.

  “Sorry I missed you earlier, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said through the window.

  “Get down and come in,” I replied.

  He thumbed a breath mint loose from a roll and put it in his mouth and dropped the roll back on the dashboard. “I’ve got to run. It’s about Mr. Purcel. He’s called my office twice regarding a betting slip of some kind. His message said the betting slip was in a safe I inherited from the previous tenant of a building I own. I got rid of that safe years ago. I just wanted to tell Mr. Purcel that.”

  “Then tell him.”

  “I tried. He doesn’t pick up. I’ve got to get back to New Orleans. Will you relay the message?”

  “Do you know a guy named Bix Golightly?”

  “No, but what a grand name.”

  “How about Waylon Grimes or Frankie Giacano?”

  “Everybody in New Orleans remembers the Giacanos. I never knew any of them personally. I really have to go, Mr. Robicheaux. Stop by the plantation in Jeanerette or my home in the Garden District. Bring Alafair. I’d love to see her again. Is she still writing?”

  While he was speaking the last sentence, he was already starting his engine. Then he backed into the street, smiling as though he were actually listening to my reply. He drove past the Shadows and into the business district.

  I tried to assess what had just occurred. A man who indicated he wanted to deliver a message had gone to my home earlier but had not bothered to go to my office, although he had been told that was where I could be found. Then he had bounced into my driveway and delivered his message, all the while explaining that he didn’t have time to be there. Then he had left, communicating nothing of substance to anyone except the fact that he owned two expensive homes to which we were invited on an unspecified day.

  I decided that Pierre Dupree definitely belonged in advertising.

  HELEN SOILEAU CALLED me at home on Saturday morning. “We’ve got a floater down at the bottom of St. Mary Parish,” she said.

  “A homicide?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what it is. I’m getting too old for this job. Anyway, I’m going to need you there.”

  “Why not let St. Mary handle it?”

  “One of the deputies recognized the victim. It’s Blue Melton, Tee Jolie’s sister.”

  “Blue drowned?”

  “She may have frozen to death.”

  “What?”

  “Blue Melton floated into the marsh inside a block of ice. The water temperature is seventy degrees. The deputy said her eyes are open and she looks like she’s trying to say something. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

  The trip down to the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish didn’t take long. But the geographic distance between St. Mary Parish and other parishes had little to do with the historical distance between St. Mary Parish and the twenty-first century. It had always been known as a fiefdom, owned and run by one family with enormous amounts of wealth and political power. Its sugarcane acreage and processing plants were the most productive in the state. Its supply of black and poor-white labor was of a kind one would associate with an antebellum economy and mind-set. The oil and natural gas wells punched into its swamps and marshlands brought in unexpected revenues that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand, although the recipients did not feel a great Christian urgency to share their good fortune. The have-nots lived in company houses and did and thought as they were told. No court, clergyman, police official, newspaper publisher, or politician ever challenged the family who ran St. Mary Parish. Any historian studying the structure of medieval society would probably consider St. Mary Parish a model teleported from the thirteenth century.

  We drove in Helen’s cruiser down a long two-lane road through flooded gum and willow and cypress trees, the sunlight spangling through the canopy on water that was black in the shade or filmed with a skim of algae that resembled green lace. The road dead-ended on a cusp of oil-streaked beach and a shallow saltwater bay that bled into the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Mary Parish sheriff, two deputies, a crime scene investigator, the coroner, and two paramedics were already at the scene. They were standing in a circle with the blank expressions of people who had just discovered that their vocational training and experience were perhaps of no value. When they glanced up at us in unison, they reminded me of late-night drinkers in a bar who stare at the front door each time it opens, as though the person coming through it possesses an answer to the hopelessness that governs their lives.

  The sheriff of St. Mary Parish was not a bad man, but I would not call him a good one. He was trim and tall and wore cowboy boots and western-cut clothes and a short-brim Stetson. He gave the impression of a law officer from a simpler time. However, there was always a cautious gleam in his eyes, particularly when someone was making a request of him, one that might involve the names of people he both served and feared. One person he obviously did not like was Helen Soileau, either because she was a lesbian or because she was a female administrator. There were razor nicks on his jaw, and I suspected the discovery of Blue Melton’s body had robbed him of his day off. The sheriff’s name was Cecil Barbour.

  “Thanks for contacting us,” Helen said.

  “No thanks are necessary. I didn’t contact you. My deputy did that without my permission,” Barbour replied. The deputy was looking out at the bay, his arms folded across his chest.

  “I didn’t know that,” Helen said.

  “My deputy is a relative of the girl’s grandfather and says Detective Robicheaux was asking about her. That’s how come he contacted you,” Barbour said. “Look down in the ice. Is that Blue Melton, Detective Robicheaux?”

  “Yes, sir, it is,” I replied. “How about putting a tarp over her body?”

  “Why should we do that?” Barbour asked.

  “Because she’s naked and exposed in death in a way no human being should be,” I replied.

  “We have to defrost her before we take her in. Do you object to that?” he said.

  “It’s your parish,” I said.

  I walked down to the water’s edge, my eyes on the southern horizon, my back to the sheriff. I did not want him to see my expression or the thoughts that probably showed in my eyes. The tide was out, and a dead brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, was rolling in the frothy skim along the shoals, its feathers iridescent with oil. I could feel my right hand opening and closing at my side. I picked up a pebble and threw it underhanded into a swell. My mouth was dry in the way your mouth is dry when you come off a bender, my heart was beating, and the wind was louder than it should have been, like the sound a conch shell makes at your ear. I turned around and looked at Barbour. His attention had shifted back to the body of Blue Melton. She had been frozen nude inside a block of ice that must have been the size of a bathtub. The salt water and the sun and stored heat in the sand had reduced the block to the size and rough shape of a foo
tlocker. Her blond hair and her blue eyes and her small breasts and nipples seemed protected by only an inch or so of frosted glass. The sheriff was smoking a cigarette, the ash dripping off the end onto the ice.

  “Dave’s right,” the coroner said. He was a taciturn man who wore straw gardener’s hats and firehouse suspenders and long-sleeve blue shirts buttoned at the wrists. “This poor girl has been exposed to enough abuse. Bust off some of that ice and get her on the gurney and cover her up, for God’s sake.”

  A few moments later, I was alone with the coroner. “You ever see anything like this?”

  “Never,” he replied.

  “What do you think we’re looking at?” I asked.

  “She was in a big subzero locker of some kind. Maybe on a freighter. There’s no way to know how long she was in the water. Ice creates its own environment and temperature zones. Maybe I can come up with an estimate of when she died, but I don’t know how dependable it will be.”

  “Y’all better look at this,” a female paramedic said. She wiped her gloved hand across the ice barely covering Blue’s face, cleaning the melt and ice crystals away like someone brushing powdered snow off a windshield. The sun’s rays had probably magnified inside the ice block and created an air bubble and a pool of water that wobbled around Blue Melton’s head, like Jell-O. “There’s something in her throat. It looks like a piece of red rubber.”

  SECRETLY, I WAS glad Blue Melton’s body had washed ashore in St. Mary Parish and not in Iberia Parish, because I would not have to notify the grandfather of her death. The rest of the day I tried to forget the images of Blue’s face and hair and embryonic-like arms and tiny feet locked inside a block of ice that could have been sawed out of a glacier. She could not have been over seventeen. What kind of human could do something like that to a young woman? Unfortunately, I knew the answer. There were misogynistic sadists in our midst, in greater numbers than most people could guess at. And how did they get there? Answer: Our system often gives them a free pass.