Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  I prayed that she had not died of drowning or hypothermia. I prayed that the angels had been with her in the moments that led up to her death. I prayed that she heard the echo of a kind and loving voice from her childhood before someone stole her life away. I prayed most of all that one day she would have justice and that a better man than I would find it for her, and perhaps for her sister, because I feared I was no longer up to doing the job that I had done for most of my adult life.

  I RECEIVED A call from the coroner Sunday afternoon. “I’m at Iberia Medical. I’ve just finished the postmortem. I’d like for you to come down here,” he said.

  “What is it you want to tell me?”

  “It’s what I want to show you, not tell you.”

  “I appreciate your deference, but your first obligation is to Sheriff Barbour.”

  “Two weeks ago my wife and I were having supper in Lafayette. Barbour happened to be sitting at the table next to us. He was wearing a Rolex watch. I suspect it cost in excess of a thousand dollars. I was trying to figure how I could afford a fine watch like that on my salary. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with an answer. Are you coming down here or not?”

  Iberia Medical Center was only ten minutes away, located behind oak and palm trees, not far from the turn-bridge where Nelson Canal empties into Bayou Teche. On that same spot in April 1863, Louisiana’s boys in butternut set up a skirmish line in a failed attempt to stop General Banks’s sweep across the southern part of the state. The Episcopalian church on Main was turned into a field hospital for the wounded and the dying, and Union soldiers vandalized and looted the town and were given sanction to rape black women. Up the bayou in St. Martinville, a Catholic priest who tried to shelter women in his church was almost beaten to death by these same soldiers. These events happened, but they are seldom if ever mentioned in history books that deal with the War Between the States.

  The coroner was waiting for me in the room where he performed autopsies, a nonabsorbent apron not unlike a butcher’s looped around his neck and tied about the waist. Blue Melton lay on a stainless steel table, one that had a gutter and a drain and a flushing mechanism. She was covered by a sheet, but the side of her face and one eye and a lock of hair were exposed. Her skin had turned gray or pearly where the tissue was pressed against the bones. “She didn’t die from hypothermia or asphyxiation or blunt trauma. Cause of death was a massive heroin overdose,” the coroner said. “I don’t think she was an intravenous addict. There is only one puncture mark on her body and only one drug in her system. I think she was injected while she was in water, or she was put in water immediately after she was injected. I suspect she was alone when she died.”

  “Why?”

  The coroner picked up a tray from the counter behind him and held it out so I could see its contents. “I removed this red balloon from her mouth,” he said. “There are traces of heroin in it. There was also this slip of paper inside the balloon. The ink has run badly, but I think you can make out the letters.”

  He lifted the strip of paper from the tray with a pair of tweezers and laid it out wetly on the corner of the autopsy table. My eyes filmed when I read the words that Blue Melton had written.

  “Can you give me a time frame?” I asked.

  “I’d say she’s been dead at least three weeks. That’s a guess. This was a brave girl. I don’t know how she pulled off what she did.”

  My eyes were locked on the message Blue had left: My sister is still alive. I couldn’t concentrate on what the coroner was saying. “Would you repeat that?”

  “It’s hard to say what happened, but chances are the heroin she was injected with came from the balloon she tried to swallow. Considering the amount of heroin that went into her heart, it must have taken an enormous effort to write those words on a piece of paper and place it in the balloon and then conceal it in her mouth. When people are dying, particularly under her circumstances, they don’t usually think about the welfare of others. Did you know her?”

  “I used to see her at the convenience store where she worked. I knew her sister, Tee Jolie.”

  “The singer?”

  “She was more than that.”

  “I don’t get your meaning,” he said.

  I started to explain, then decided to keep my thoughts to myself. I drove back home in my pickup and sat for a long time on a folding chair in the shadows down by the bayou. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin curl out of the water into a cypress tree four feet away, its coils slithering and tightening around the branch, its eyes as small as BBs, its tongue flickering. I picked up a pinecone and tossed it at the snake’s head. But the snake ignored me and drew its tail out of the water and secured itself inside the cypress tree’s branches, the leaves already turning from green to yellow in anticipation of winter.

  THERE ARE THREE essential truths about law enforcement: Most crimes are not punished; most crimes are not solved through the use of forensic evidence; and informants produce the lion’s share of information that puts the bad guys in a cage.

  I couldn’t help Blue or Tee Jolie Melton, but perhaps I could do something about the shooting death of Bix Golightly and the fact that Clete Purcel had been a witness to it and would probably be hounded by the NOPD. I was convinced that Clete was concealing the identity of the shooter, although I had no idea why. Where does a person go in New Orleans for the type of information you can’t find in the Yellow Pages?

  The best source I ever had in New Orleans was a former spieler at a strip club on Bourbon Street known as Jimmy the Dime. Jimmy’s nickname came from the fact that with one phone call, he could connect you with any action you were looking for, maybe a card game or access to counterfeit money that sold for twenty cents on the dollar or a brick of Acapulco gold. In terms of underworld activity, he was a minor offender and never a rat. His troubles usually came about from his bizarre and anachronistic frame of reference, which in his case was that of a Depression-era Irish tenement kid for whom dysfunction and living on the rim were as natural as the rising and setting of the sun.

  Jimmy had a house in the Holy Cross section of the Ninth Ward when Hurricane Katrina struck the city. Rather than pay attention to the evacuation order or even listen to the news, Jimmy had watched a porn film on cable the morning the storm made landfall. When a tidal wave blew his house into rubble, Jimmy climbed onto a giant inner tube in polka-dot boxer shorts, with an umbrella and two six-packs of Bud and a Walkman and half a dozen joints in a Ziploc bag, and floated on the waves for thirty-six hours. He was fried to a crisp and almost run down by a Coast Guard boat and ended up in the branches of a tree down in Plaquemines Parish.

  Jimmy’s eccentricities, however, were nothing compared to those of his full-time podjo and part-time business partner, Count Carbona, also known as Baron Belladonna. The Count wore a black cape and a purple slouch hat and had a face like a vertical chunk of train rail. The Count shaved off his eyebrows and was obsessed with the female rock-and-roll singers he believed lived under Lake Pontchartrain. If anyone asked how he knew about the women under the lake, the Count explained that he communicated with them daily through the drain in his lavatory. The Count’s current underwater drainpipe pal was Joan Jett.

  After I finished work at noon on Monday, I drove to New Orleans and visited Jimmy and the Count at their book and voodoo store down by Dauphine and Barracks. In spite of Katrina, the windows looked like they had not been washed since the fall of the city to Union forces in 1862. The shelves and the array of worthless books on them stayed under a patina of dirt that Jimmy moved from place to place in the shop with his feather duster. In back were cartons of hand-painted tortoise shells and mason jars that contained pickled lizards and snakes and birds’ eggs and alligators’ feet. On the back wall was a garish painting of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans.

  “You know anything about Bix Golightly getting capped, Jimmy?” I said.

  “There’s not a lot of mourning going on about that,” he replied. He was drinking a
bottle of soda behind the counter, next to a beautiful antique brass cash register, his face florid, his hair as white as meringue, his stomach draped over his belt. “Remember that Louis Prima song, how’s it go, ‘I’ll be standing on the corner plastered when they bring your body by’?”

  “Any rumors about why he got capped?”

  “He was in the AB. The AB is for life. Maybe he made the wrong guys mad about something.”

  “Waylon Grimes got popped the same night, probably by the same hitter. Grimes wasn’t in the AB.”

  “The word was Bix was into a new racket, something that was more uptown. Also that he was out of his depth, that him and Frankie Giacano and Waylon Grimes decided they were gonna get even with Clete Purcel and make a few bucks at the same time. You talk to Purcel?”

  “Clete didn’t do it, Jimmy.”

  “Who filled up a guy’s convertible with concrete? Or packed a cue ball into a guy’s mouth? Or dragged a guy’s mobile home onto a drawbridge and set it on fire? Let me think.”

  “Have you heard of a new button man in town, somebody named Caruso?”

  “There’s always new talent floating around. You read vampire books? I just bought a shitload of them. Vampire lit is in, muff-diver lit is out. I’m ahead of the curve.”

  “Where’s the new talent from?” I asked.

  “Someplace that begins with M. Miami or Memphis. Maybe Minneapolis. I don’t remember. This is stuff I don’t need to know about.”

  I looked toward the back of the store. The Count was sweeping a cloud of dust through the door into a courtyard that was green and dark with mold and cluttered with junk.

  “He’s on his meds and doing good. Leave him alone, Dave,” Jimmy said.

  “The Count is what is called an autistic savant, Jimmy. Everything he hears and sees goes onto a computer chip.”

  “Yeah, I know all that, and I don’t like people giving him names like ‘autistic savant.’ He did too many drugs, but that don’t mean he’s retarded.”

  “You want to ask him, or do you want me to?” I said.

  Jimmy poured the rest of his soda into a sink and put a matchstick in his mouth. “Hey, Count, you hear anything about a new mechanic in town?” he said.

  The Count stopped sweeping and stared downward at his broom. Rain was swirling inside the courtyard, blowing in a fine mist across his cape and small pale hands. He lifted his eyes to mine, puzzled about either the question or my identity.

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Count,” I said. “I need your help. I’m looking for a hitter by the name of Caruso.”

  “Caruso? Yes. I know that name,” said the Count. He smiled.

  “In New Orleans?”

  “I think so.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  The Count shook his head.

  “Who’s he work for?” I asked.

  He didn’t speak and instead continued to look into my face, his irises tinged with the colors you expect to see only in a hawk’s eyes.

  “How about the name Caruso? Is that an alias?” I said.

  “It means something.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “It means what?” I asked.

  “Like the opera singer.”

  “I know who the opera singer is. But why is this guy called by that name?”

  “When Caruso sings, everybody in the theater gets quiet. When he leaves, they stay in their seats.”

  “Where do you think I might find him? This is real important, Count.”

  “They say he finds you. I heard what you said about me. I’m the way I am because I’m smart. People say things in front of me that they won’t say in front of anyone else. They don’t know I’m smart. That’s why they make fun of me and call me names.”

  He swept a cloud of dust out into the rain, then followed it into the courtyard and shut the door behind him.

  I deserved his rebuke.

  THE HOUR WAS three P.M., and I had time to make another stop before returning to New Iberia, which was only a two-hour drive if you went through Morgan City. The old office of Didi Giacano, the one where he kept an aquarium full of piranha, was on South Rampart, outside the Quarter, just across Canal. The building was two stories and constructed of soft, variegated brick and had an iron balcony and a colonnade, but one of the side walls had been scorched by fire and the building had a singed, used look that the potted bougainvillea and caladium and philodendron on the balcony did little to dispel.

  The inside of the office had been completely redone. The beige carpet was two inches thick, the off-white plastered walls hung with paintings of Mediterranean villages and steel-framed aerial color photos of offshore oil platforms, one of them flaring against a night sky. The receptionist told me that Pierre Dupree was at his home in Jeanerette but that his grandfather was in his office and perhaps could help me.

  “Actually, I was interested in a safe that used to be here,” I said. “I collect all kinds of historical memorabilia. It was a huge box of a thing right over there in the corner.”

  “I know the one you mean. It’s not here anymore. Mr. Pierre took it out when we installed the new carpets.”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  She was an attractive blond woman in her early twenties, with an earnest face and eyes that seemed full of goodwill. Her forehead wrinkled. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. I think some movers took it out.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “About five or six months ago, I think. Did you want to buy it?”

  “I doubt that I could afford it. I just wanted to look at it.”

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department.”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Alexis you’re here. That’s Mr. Pierre’s grandfather. I’ll bet he can tell you all about the safe.”

  Before I could stop her, she went into the back of the building and returned with a man I had seen once or twice in New Iberia or Jeanerette. For his age, he was remarkable in his posture and his bearing. He was even more remarkable for the story associated with his name. I couldn’t remember the specific details, but people who knew him said he had been a member of the French Resistance during World War II and had been sent to an extermination camp in Germany. I couldn’t recall the name of the camp or the circumstances that had spared his life. Was it Ravensbrück? He was dressed in slacks and a long-sleeve white shirt rolled to the elbows. When he shook my hand, the bones in his fingers felt hollow, like a bird’s. A chain of numbers was tattooed in faded blue ink on the underside of his left forearm. “You were asking about an old safe?” he said.

  “I collect old things. Antiques and Civil War artifacts and that sort of thing,” I replied.

  “There was a safe here that came with the building, but it was taken out a long time ago, I think.”

  His face was narrow, his eyes as gray as lead, his hair still black, with a few strands of white. There was a pronounced dimple in his chin. On his left cheek were two welted scars. “Would you like coffee or perhaps a drink?”

  “No, thank you. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Do you know a fellow by the name of Frankie Giacano or his friend Bix Golightly?”

  “Those names aren’t familiar. Are they antique dealers?” He was smiling when he spoke, the way an older man might when he’s showing tolerance of his listener.

  “No, they’re bad guys, Mr. Dupree. Pardon me, the use of the present tense isn’t quite accurate. Frankie Giacano is still around, but somebody over in Algiers parked three rounds from a semi-auto in Bix Golightly’s face.”

  “That’s a graphic image, Mr. Robicheaux. Why are you telling me this?”

  “It’s probably just the ambience. I remember when Didi Gee used to hold a person’s hand in an aquarium over by that wall. I came in here once when the water was full of blood.”

  “I’m not one who needs convincing of man’s inhumanity to man.”

  “I meant you no offense.”

 
; “Of course you did,” he said. “Good day to you, sir.”

  I started to leave. He was an elderly man. The tattoo on his left arm was of a kind that only a visitor to hell could have acquired. Sometimes there are occasions when charity requires that we accept arrogance and rudeness and deception in others. I didn’t feel this was one of them. “You lied to me, sir.”

  “How dare you?” he replied, his eyes coming to life.

  THE NEXT MORNING at work, Helen Soileau called me into her office. She was watering the plants on her windowsill with a tin sprinkler painted with flowers. “I just got off the phone with Alexis Dupree. You called an eighty-nine-year-old man a liar?” she said.

  “I said he lied to me. There’s a difference.”

  “Not to him. My ear is still numb. What were you doing in his office?”

  I explained to her about Didoni Giacano’s old safe and the marker that supposedly was found inside it. “The receptionist said the safe was taken out five or six months ago. The old man said otherwise. In front of her. Her face turned red.”

  “Maybe Dupree was confused. Or maybe the receptionist was.”

  “I think he was lying. I also think he was mocking me.”

  “What happens in New Orleans is not our business.”

  “I went there on my own time.”

  “You identified yourself at Dupree’s office as a member of this department. That’s why he called here and yelled in the phone for five minutes. I don’t need this kind of crap, Pops.”

  “That old man is corrupt.”

  “Half the state is underwater, and the other half is under indictment. Our own congressional representative said that.”

  “What was the name of the death camp Dupree was in?” I asked.

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Was it Ravensbrück?”

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “I’m almost sure it was Ravensbrück. I read a feature on Mr. Dupree in the Advocate about two years ago.”