Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “Why do you care which camp he was in? Dave, I think you’re losing your mind.”

  “Ravensbrück was a women’s camp, most of them Polish Jews,” I said.

  “I’m about to throw a flowerpot at your head,” she said.

  “I don’t think the problem is mine,” I replied.

  I went back to my office. Ten minutes later, Helen buzzed my extension. “I Googled Ravensbrück,” she said. “Yes, it was primarily a women’s extermination camp, but a camp for male prisoners was right next to it. The inmates were liberated by the Russians in 1945. Does this get World War Two off the table?”

  “That old man is hinky, and so is his grandson,” I replied.

  I heard her ease the receiver into the phone cradle, the plastic surfaces clattering against each other.

  IT STARTED RAINING again that night, hard, in big drops that stung like hail. Through the back window, I could see leaves floating under the oaks and, in the distance, the drawbridge at Burke Street glowing inside the rain. I heard Molly’s car pull into the porte cochere. She came through the back door, a damp bag of groceries clutched under one arm, her skin and hair shiny with water. “Did you see my note on the board?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Clete called,” she said, putting down her groceries on the breakfast table.

  “What did he want?”

  She tried to smile. “I could hear music in the background.”

  “He was tanked?”

  “More like his boat left the dock a little early.”

  “Was he in town or phoning from New Orleans?”

  “He didn’t say. I think Clete is trying to destroy himself,” she said.

  When I didn’t reply, she began putting away the groceries. She had the arms and shoulders of a countrywoman, and when she set a heavy can on a shelf, I could see her shirt tighten on her back. She pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and looked at me. “I don’t want to see you lying on a gurney in an emergency room with a bullet hole in your chest again. Is that wrong?” she said.

  “Clete’s in serious trouble, and he doesn’t have many friends.”

  “Don’t get mixed up in it.”

  “All of us would be dead if it wasn’t for Clete.”

  “You can be his friend without making the same kinds of choices he does. You’ve never learned that.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said.

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her and turned the lock.

  I PUT ON my raincoat and hat and drove to Clete’s motor court down the Teche. His cottage was the last one on a driveway that dead-ended in a grove of live oaks by the bayou. His Caddy was parked by the trees, the rain clicking loudly on the starched top. The cottage was dark, and pine needles had clotted in the rain gutters, and water was running down the walls. I knocked, then knocked again harder, with the flat of my fist. A lamp went on inside, and Clete opened the door in his skivvies, the unventilated room sour with the smell of weed and beer sweat and unchanged bed linens. “Hey, Dave, what’s the haps?” he said.

  “You ever hear of opening a window?” I said, going inside.

  “I nodded out. Is it morning?”

  “No. Molly said you called.”

  “Yeah?” he said, rubbing his hand over his face, moving toward the breakfast table, where a manila folder lay open. “I forgot why I called. I was drinking doubles at Clementine’s, and a switch went off in my head. It’s not morning?”

  “It’s not even ten P.M.”

  “I guess I was having some kind of crazy dream,” he said. He closed the folder and moved it aside, as though straightening things so we could have a cup of coffee. His nylon shoulder holster and blue-black snub-nosed .38 were hanging on the back of a chair. A huge old-style blackjack, one teardropped in shape and stitched with a leather cover and mounted on a spring and wood handle, lay by the manila folder. “I dreamed some kids were chasing me through the Irish Channel. They had bricks in their hands. What a funny dream to have.”

  “Why don’t you take a shower, and then we’ll talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Why you called me.”

  “I think it was about Frankie Giacano. He called me up and begged me to help him.”

  “Frankie Gee begged?”

  “He was about to shit his pants. He thinks he’s going to get capped like Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes.”

  “Why?”

  “He won’t say.”

  “Why does he think you can get him off the hook?”

  “He mentioned your name. He said, ‘You and Robicheaux won’t let this thing die.’”

  “What’s he talking about?” I asked.

  “Who knows? Did you roust him or something?”

  “I went to Pierre Dupree’s office on South Rampart yesterday. I talked with the grandfather. He lied to me about the safe. What’s in the manila folder?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You want to level with me, or should I leave?”

  “It’s a file on a kid in Fort Lauderdale. I got it from a friend in the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee.”

  “Who’s the kid?”

  “Just a kid. One who was abused.”

  “Abused how?”

  “As bad as it gets. So bad you don’t want to know. Dave, don’t look at that.”

  I took my hand away from the folder. Clete pulled out a drawer under the table and removed a clear plastic bag of weed and a sheaf of cigarette papers.

  “Lay off that stuff,” I said.

  “I’ll do what I please.”

  “No, you won’t.” I pulled the bag from his hand and opened the front door and shook the weed into the rain. I threw the bag and the papers into a waste can.

  “Even my ex didn’t do that.”

  “Too bad. What’s in the folder?”

  “Let it slide, big mon.”

  I picked up the folder regardless and looked at the black-and-white photographs of a small child. I read the medical report written by an emergency room physician. I read the statements of a social worker who threatened to quit her agency if the state didn’t remove the child from the home. I read the report of a Broward County sheriff’s detective detailing the arrest of the mother’s live-in boyfriend and the condition in which he found the child upon his last visit to the mother’s apartment. Most of the photos and the paperwork were almost twenty-five years old. The photos of the child were of a kind you never want to see or remember or discuss with anyone. “Who’s the mother?” I asked.

  “A junkie.”

  “You knew her?”

  “She used to strip and hook out of a joint on Bourbon. She was from Brooklyn originally, but she’d moved to New Orleans, and she and her pimp were running a Murphy game on conventioneers. They blew town on an assault warrant. The john got wise to the scam when the pimp showed up as the outraged husband, because the same pimp had shown up on the same john six months earlier. So the pimp busted up the john with a pair of brass knuckles. How about that for a bunch of geniuses?”

  “The pimp is the one who did this?” I was holding one of the photos, the paper shaking slightly in my fingers.

  “No, Candy would screw anybody who’d give her heroin. There were always different guys living with her.”

  “That’s when you were in Vice?”

  “Yeah, and on the grog and pills and anything else I could cook my head with.”

  “You got it on with her?”

  “Big-time.”

  “What’s going on, Cletus?”

  He got a beer out of the icebox and ripped the tab and sat down at the table. The scar that ran through his eyebrow and touched the bridge of his nose had flushed a dark pink. He drank from the can and set it down and took his hand away from it and looked at the prints his fingers had left on the coldness of the can. “The kid in those photos had a miserable life.”

  “Who is she?”

  “You already know
.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Let it go, Dave.”

  “Say it, Cletus.”

  “It won’t change anything.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “You’d better believe it.” He was breathing harder, through his nose, his face shiny under the overhead light.

  “Come on, partner.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Her name is Gretchen.” His hands were propped on his knees, his big shoulders bent forward. He looked like a man experiencing vertigo aboard a pitching ship. “I made some calls to people around Miami and Lauderdale. In Little Havana people talk about a hitter they call Caruso. The old Batistiano and Alpha 66 crowd don’t mess with her. The greaseballs in Miami Beach say she’s like the Irish button men on the west side of New York: all business, no passion, a stone killer. They say maybe she’s the best on the East Coast. I think Caruso might be my daughter, Dave. I feel like somebody drove a nail in my skull.”

  CLETE TOOK A shower and dressed and sat down again at the table, his hair wet-combed, his eyes clear. “I didn’t know I had a daughter until Gretchen was fifteen,” he said. “Her mother called collect from the Dade County stockade and said Gretchen was in juvie and I was her father. I don’t think Candy could have cared less about her daughter; she wanted me to bail her out of the can. I got a blood test done on Gretchen. There was no doubt she was mine. In the meantime she’d been transferred from juvie to foster care. Before I could get the custody process in gear, she disappeared. I tried to find her two or three times. I heard she was a hot walker at Hialeah, and she started hanging with some dopers and then got mixed up with some Cuban head cases, guys who think a political dialogue is blowing up the local television station.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  “Think I’m proud I fathered a child who was left in the hands of a sadist? I’m talking about the guy who did what’s in those pictures.”

  I waited for him to go on. His beer can was empty, and he was staring at it as though unsure where it came from. He crunched it and tossed it in the trash, his eyes looking emptily into mine.

  “What happened to her abuser?” I asked.

  “He moved down to Key West. He had a small charter boat business. He used to take people bone fishing out in the flats.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s still there,” Clete said.

  I looked at him.

  “He’s going to be there a long time,” Clete said.

  I didn’t acknowledge the implication. “How can you be sure she’s the one who shot Golightly?”

  “Candy sent me pictures showing the two of them together only two years ago. Candy is back on the spike and says Gretchen comes and goes and drops out of sight for a year at a time. She doesn’t know what Gretchen does for a living.”

  “You know who killed Bix Golightly. You can’t hold back information like that, Clete.”

  “Nobody at NOPD wants to see me anywhere near a precinct building. When is the last time they helped either one of us in an investigation? You were fired, Dave, just like me. They hate our guts, and you know it.”

  “Does Gretchen know you’re her father?”

  “I’m not sure. I saw her for maybe five minutes when she was in juvie.”

  “Does she know you live in New Orleans?”

  “Maybe. I can’t remember what I told her when we met. She was fifteen. How many fifteen-year-old girls are thinking about anything an adult says?”

  “Who do you think she’s working for?”

  “Somebody with a lot of money. The word is she gets a minimum of twenty grand a hit. She’s a pro and leaves no witnesses and no money trail. She has no bad habits and stays under the radar.”

  “No witnesses?” I repeated.

  “You heard me.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “After she left, she came back and looked at the alleyway where I was standing,” he said. “Maybe she thought she saw something. Maybe she was just wondering if she picked up all her brass. She was whistling ‘The San Antonio Rose.’ I’m not making this up. Stop looking at me like that.”

  HELEN SOILEAU COULD be a stern administrator. She also had a way of forgetting her own lapses in professional behavior (straying arbitrarily into various romantic relationships, whipping her baton across the mouth of a dope dealer who was chugalugging a bottle of chocolate milk after he insulted her), but no one could say she was unfair or afraid to take responsibility when she was wrong.

  On Wednesday morning I had a doctor’s appointment and didn’t arrive at work until ten A.M. I was going through my mail when Helen buzzed my extension. “I just got off the phone with Tee Jolie Melton’s grandfather,” she said. “He tried to get ahold of you first, then he called me.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “He says there’s a witness to Blue Melton’s abduction. He says St. Martin Parish won’t do anything about it.”

  “We’re out of our jurisdiction,” I said.

  “Not anymore. If the witness’s account is accurate, we just became players. It’s not something I wanted, but that’s the way it is, bwana. I suspect you couldn’t be happier. Check out a cruiser, and I’ll meet you out front.”

  We drove up the two-lane state road to the home of Avery DeBlanc in St. Martinville, up the bayou from the drawbridge and the old cemetery, one that was filled with white crypts. He was waiting for us in a rocking chair on his gallery, both of his walking canes propped across his thighs. He stood up when we approached him, lifting his crippled back as straight as he could. “T’ank y’all for coming,” he said.

  I introduced Helen, then helped him sit down. “Can you tell us again what this little boy told you, Mr. DeBlanc?” I said.

  “Ain’t much to it. The boy lives yonder, down where them pecan trees is at. He said he looked out the window. He said it was night, and a white boat come up the bayou and parked at my li’l dock, and two men got out and went to my house. He said the boat had a fish wit’ a long nose painted on the bow. He said the men went into my house and came back out wit’ Blue. He said he could see all t’ree of them in the porch light. They had a big green bottle and some tall glasses, and they was all drinking out of the glasses and laughing.”

  “When did this happen?” Helen interrupted.

  “The boy ain’t sure. Maybe a mont’ ago. Maybe more. He’s only eleven. He said Blue was walking wit’ the men toward the bayou, and then she wasn’t laughing no more. The two men took her by the arms, and she started fighting wit’ them. He said they took her down to the dock, and he t’inks one of them hit her. He said he couldn’t see good when they was on the dock. The only light come from the nightclub across the bayou. He t’inks the man hit Blue in the face and put her on the boat. He said she cried out once, then didn’t make no more sounds.”

  “The boy didn’t try to tell anybody or call 911?”

  “He was home alone. That li’l boy don’t do nothing wit’out permission,” Mr. DeBlanc said.

  “Where did the boat go? In which direction?” Helen asked.

  “Sout’, back toward New Iberia.”

  “Why is the boy telling you this only now?” I asked.

  “He said his momma tole him it ain’t his bidness. He said his momma tole him my granddaughters ain’t no good. They’re on dope and they hang out wit’ bad men. But it bothered him real bad ’cause he liked Blue, so he tole me about it.”

  “And you told this to the deputy sheriff?” I said.

  “I went to his office. He wrote it down on his li’l pad. He said he’d check it out. But he ain’t come to see me or returned my phone calls, and the boy said ain’t nobody talked to him, either.”

  Helen and I walked down to the dock. The planks were weathered gray, the wood pilings hung with rubber tires. The bayou was high and dark from the rain, the surface wrinkling like old skin each time the wind gusted. I tried to squat down and exam
ine the wood, but a burst of pain, like a nest of tree roots, spread through my chest. For a moment the bayou and the live oaks on the opposite bank and the whitewashed crypts in the cemetery went in and out of focus.

  “I got it, Dave,” Helen said.

  “Give me a minute. I’m fine.”

  “I know. But easy does it, right?”

  “No, I’m going to do it,” I said. I eased down on one knee, swallowing my pain, touching the dock with the tips of my fingers. “See? Nothing to it.”

  “There’s no telling how many times it’s rained on those planks,” she said.

  “Yeah, but the kid didn’t make up that story.”

  “Maybe not. Anyway, let’s have a talk with the deputy or whoever this guy is who can’t get off his ass.”

  “Look at this.” I took my pocketknife from my slacks and opened the blade. The tops of the planks in the dock were washed clean and uniformly gray and free of any residue, but between two planks, I could see several dark streaks, as though someone had spilled ketchup. I cut a splinter loose and wrapped it in my handkerchief.

  “You think it’s blood?” Helen said.

  “We’ll see,” I replied.

  We drove to the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Annex, next to the white-columned courthouse past which twenty thousand Union troops had marched in pursuit of Colonel Mouton’s malnourished Confederate troops in their unending retreat from Shiloh, all the way to the Red River parishes of central Louisiana.

  The plainclothes sheriff’s deputy was Etienne Pollard. He wore a beige suit and a yellow tie and blue shirt, and he looked tan and angular and in charge of the environment around his desk. By his nameplate was a Disney World souvenir cup full of pens with multicolored feathers. While we explained our reason for being there, he never blinked or seemed disturbed by thoughts of any kind. Finally, he leaned back in his swivel chair and gazed at the traffic passing on the square and the tourists entering the old French church on the bayou. His forehead knitted. “What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

  He used the word “it,” not “abduction,” not “assault,” not “homicide.” Blue Melton’s fate had become “it.”