Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “Yeah, and you searched my apartment and my office without a warrant,” Clete said.

  “Do you deny driving Frankie Gee to the bus depot and buying him a ticket?”

  “Getting a safecracker out of New Orleans is a crime?”

  “You paid cash for his ticket to L.A. When did you start doing financial favors for sociopaths?”

  “I saw Frankie give a quarter to a homeless guy once. So I figured he couldn’t be all bad. Of course, he threw the quarter into the homeless guy’s eye and blinded him.”

  “There are people I work with who want to see you hung by your colon from an iron hook.”

  “That’s their problem. By the way, do you know Didi Gee actually did that to a guy?”

  “I know you didn’t follow the bus to Baton Rouge so you could shoot Frankie in a toilet stall. But some of my colleagues think you’re irrational enough to do anything. When I leave this room, I have to convince these same people you’re the wrong guy. Why did you buy Frankie his ticket out of town?”

  “Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes are both dead because they tried to run a scam on me. Frankie was their partner. I figured he was next. Enough is enough. Frankie was a shitbag, but he didn’t deserve getting his brains blown all over a toilet bowl.”

  “You were protecting Frankie out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Characterize it any way you want, Dana.”

  “Who do you think killed Grimes and Golightly?”

  “I chase bail skips and take pictures of husbands porking the maid.”

  “I’m going to square with you. The only thing preventing the prosecutor’s office from charging you with murder is the fact that somebody much smaller than you and wearing western clothes was seen leaving the men’s room right after Frankie was left in a pool of blood. You ought to learn who your friends are, Clete.”

  “I can go now?”

  “No, you can’t. You’re under arrest.”

  “For what?”

  “Possession of stolen property. The German Luger under your car seat.”

  “I took the Luger off of Frankie Gee. I didn’t want him parking one in my brisket.”

  “Well, Frankie screwed you from inside a body bag. How do you like that?”

  “Where was the Luger stolen from?”

  “See what your lawyer can find out before you enter your plea.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “We can hold you as a material witness indefinitely. The possession charge is a bone for my colleagues. They’ll accuse me of doing favors for you and Dave, but eventually, they’ll forget about it. No, no need to thank me. I like taking the heat for you two.”

  “You had my Caddy towed. You rousted me on a phony beef. Your colleagues are bums. I’m supposed to be grateful?” Clete rubbed the fatigue from his face and looked wanly out the window. “Put me in an isolation unit, will you? I’m not up to the tank.”

  “You were protecting Frankie Gee from somebody.”

  “Yeah, from whoever was trying to smoke him.”

  “Who?”

  Clete seemed to think for a long time, his forehead propped on the heel of his hand. Then he looked up at Dana Magelli as though he had just come to a profound conclusion. “I saw the trusty headed down to the tank with the food cart. If I don’t go to the tank, can I still have a sandwich and coffee?” he said.

  IN CLETE’S VIEW, few people understood what jails represented or what it was like to be confined in one, regardless of the duration. People were not locked in jails simply because they had committed crimes. The commission of the crime was secondary to the larger issue, namely, that jails provide a home for defective and often hapless people who can’t cut it on the outside. In an era when minor offenders have to get on a waiting list to serve their sentences, almost anyone stacking serious time in a parish, state, or federal prison is not only pathological or brain-dead but would not have it any other way, at least in the gospel according to Clete.

  He knew from his own life that in many ways, a jail is like a late-hour low-bottom bar, one with no windows or clocks or direct lighting. Once you are safely inside, time stops, and so do all comparisons. No matter how much damage you have done to your life, no matter how shameful and degrading and cowardly and depraved your conduct has become, there is always somebody on the tier who has been dealt a worse hand or committed worse deeds than you.

  The biggest downside of incarceration, however, isn’t stacking the time. It’s the realization that you are in the right place and you put yourself there so someone else could feed and take care of you. Titty-babies come in all stripes, many of them with tats from the wrist to the armpit. It isn’t coincidence that mainline recidivists usually have a heavy commitment to topless bars.

  Clete didn’t have all of these thoughts, but he had some of them, and each applied to him. He no longer kept tally of the holding cells and booking rooms he had been in or the times he had been hooked on a chain and transported from jail to morning court, the professional miscreants on the chain eyeing him cautiously. Was it accident that again and again he found himself in their midst, trying to rationalize his behavior, staring at a urine-streaked drainhole in the floor while a night-count man went down the corridor, raking his baton across the bars on the cells? Miscreants broke into the slams, not out of them. They all knew one another, shared needles and women the way ragpickers share clothes, passing their diseases around without remorse or recrimination. The die had been cast for most of them the day they were born. What was Clete’s excuse?

  The light fixture outside his holding cell was defective and kept flickering like a damaged insect, causing him to blink constantly, until his eyelids felt like sandpaper. The paint in the cell was a yellowish-gray and still bore the watermarks and soft decay from five days of submersion during Katrina, when the inmates were left by their warders to slosh about in their own feces until they were rescued by a group of deputies from Iberia Parish. Drawings of genitalia were scratched on the walls, and the names of inmates had been burned onto the ceiling with twists of flaming newspaper, probably during the storm. The toilet bowl had no seat, and the rim was encrusted with dried matter that Clete didn’t want to think about. As he lay on the metal bench against the back wall, his arm across his eyes, he wondered why people always felt compassion toward political prisoners. A political prisoner had the solace of knowing he had done nothing to deserve his fate. The miscreant knew he had ferreted his way into the belly of the beast deliberately, in the same way a tumblebug burrows its way into feces. Could a person have worse knowledge about himself?

  At eight-fifteen A.M. a screw unlocked Clete’s cell door. The screw was a dour lifetime employee of the system, with creases as deep as a prune’s in his face and five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning. “You just got sprung,” he said.

  “Nig Rosewater is out there?” Clete said.

  “Nig Rosewater hasn’t been up this early since World War Two.”

  “Who bailed me out?”

  “A woman.”

  “Who?”

  “How would I know? Why don’t you take your problems somewhere else, Purcel?”

  For some reason, the remark and the flatness of the screw’s tone bothered Clete in a way he couldn’t define. “I do something to set you off?”

  “Yeah, you’re here,” the screw said.

  THE GIRL HE had met in the nightclub way down in Terrebonne Parish was standing in the foyer on the other side of the possessions desk, her chestnut hair backlit by the sunlight out on the street. “You went my bail?” Clete said.

  “You’re good for it, aren’t you?”

  “How’d you know my name? How’d you know I was in the can?”

  “A friend of mine at Motor Vehicles ran your tag. I called your office, and your secretary told me where you were.”

  “That doesn’t sound right. Miss Alice doesn’t give out that kind of information.”

  “I kind of lied when I said I was your niece and it
was an emergency.” A pale blue cloth purse embroidered with an Indian design hung from her shoulder. She opened it and removed Clete’s Zippo lighter. “You left this on the bar at the club. It has the globe and anchor on it. I thought you’d want it back.”

  “You bet,” he said.

  “Why’d you go charging out of the club? You hurt my feelings.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re pretty easy to jerk around. Maybe you should take some happy pills.”

  “I used to. That’s why I don’t take them anymore.”

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “Are you gonna invite me to breakfast or not?”

  “Let’s go to Café du Monde. I love it there in the morning. It’s entirely different from the crowd you see there at night. The whole Quarter is that way. Do you know why I was in the can?”

  “Suspicion of theft or something?”

  They were out on the street now, in the freshness of the morning and the noise of the city. “They were looking at me for a homicide,” he said.

  She was unlocking the passenger door of her rental Honda, her gaze fixed on the traffic, not seeming to listen. “Yeah?” she said.

  “A guy by the name of Frankie Giacano got clipped in the Baton Rouge bus terminal. Somebody came up behind him in a toilet stall and put three rounds in his head,” he said.

  When they got in her Honda, she put the keys in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. “Say that again?”

  “A safecracker, a guy by the name of Frankie Gee, got shot and killed in Baton Rouge. NOPD wanted to put it on me,” Clete said.

  In the silence, he held his eyes on hers, barely breathing, studying every aspect of her face. He could feel his lungs tighten and his heart start to swell, as though no oxygen were reaching his blood, as though a vein might pop in his temple. She moistened her lips and returned his stare. “If we go to breakfast, you won’t run off on me again, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because I really wouldn’t like that.”

  If there was a second meaning in her words, he couldn’t tell. All the way to Café du Monde, he watched the side of her face as though seeing part of himself, not necessarily a good one, that he had never recognized.

  THEY GOT A table under the pavilion with a fine view of Jackson Square and the cathedral and the Pontalba Apartments. The sky was blue, the myrtle bushes and windmill palms and banana plants in the square covered with sunshine. It was the kind of crisp green-gold late-fall day in Louisiana that seems so perfect in its dimensions that winter and even mortality are set at bay. “So you’re a private investigator?” she said.

  “I used to be with the NOPD, but I messed up my career. It’s my fault, not theirs. I started over, know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “I worked for some mobbed-up guys in Reno and Montana. But I got clear of them. I have a friend named Dave Robicheaux. He says it’s always the first inning. You get up one morning and say fuck it and start over.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Antiques, collectibles, that kind of stuff. I’ve got a little store in Key West, but most of my sales are on the Internet.”

  “You didn’t know my name, but you ran my tag and traced me to the jail and got me back on the street. You even brought me my cigarette lighter. Not many people could pull that off. Maybe you have a gift.”

  “My mother said my father was a marine who got killed in the first Iraqi war, so that’s why I brought you your lighter. I was never sure if my mother was telling me the truth. She should have had a turnstile on her bedroom door.”

  “What I’m saying is I could use an assistant,” Clete said.

  “Are you having hot flashes or something?” she asked, biting into a beignet.

  “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I have blood pressure issues.”

  “You ought to take better care of yourself,” she said. “This junk we’re eating isn’t helping either your blood pressure or your cholesterol count.”

  “I’ve got two offices, one here and one in New Iberia. That’s on Bayou Teche, about two hours west. How long are you going to be in town?”

  “I’m not big on clocks and calendars.”

  “You think you could work for a guy like me?”

  “You married?”

  “Not now. Why do you ask?”

  “You act strange. I don’t think you’re on the make, but I can’t quite figure you.”

  “What’s to figure?”

  “You never asked my name. It’s Gretchen Horowitz.”

  “Glad to meet you, Gretchen. Come work for me.”

  “I never saw you at Little Yankee Stadium. It was somewhere else, wasn’t it?”

  “Who cares?” he said.

  “What did you do in the Crotch?”

  “Tried to stay alive.”

  “You kill any people while you were staying alive?”

  “I did two combat tours in Vietnam. Who told you the Corps was called the Crotch?”

  “I get around. I picked up some of my mother’s habits. Mostly the bad ones.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that now,” he said.

  She gazed at him without replying. He realized her eyes were violet in the daylight as well as in the evening shadows, and they engendered feelings in him that he could not deal with.

  “Thanks for the beignets. You don’t mind walking to your office, do you?” she said. “It’s across the square and about a block down, right? See you around, big boy. Keep it in your pants.”

  She left five dollars under her plate for the waitress. After she was gone, he pressed his fingers against his temples and tried to put together what she had just said. How did she know where his office was, and how did she know the exact distance? Had she followed the Greyhound to Baton Rouge and popped Frankie Gee in the stall? Had his seed produced a psychopath? Even though a breeze was blowing off the river, the scent of her perfume seemed to hang on every surface she had touched.

  THAT SAME NIGHT in New Iberia, the southern sky was filled with strange lights, flashes of electricity that would ignite inside a solitary black cloud and in seconds ripple across the entirety of the heavens without making a sound. Then a rain front moved across the marshlands and drenched the town and overflowed the gutters on East Main and covered our front yard with a gray and yellow net of dead leaves. At four in the morning, amid the booming of thunder, I thought I heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. I had been dreaming before I woke, and in the dream, large shells fired from an offshore battery were arching out of their trajectory, whistling just before they exploded inside a sodden rain forest.

  I felt light-headed when I picked up the phone, part of me still inside the dream that was so real I could not shake it or think my way out of it. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

  At first I could hear only static. I looked at the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Who is this?” I said.

  “It’s Tee Jolie, Mr. Dave. Can you hear me okay? There’s a bad storm where I’m at.”

  Through the window, I could see fog rolling off the bayou into the trees, pushing against the windows and doors. I sat down in a chair. “Where are you?” I said.

  “A long ways from home. There’s a beautiful beach here. The sea is green. I wanted to tell you everyt’ing is all right. I scared you at the hospital in New Orleans. I wish I ain’t done that.”

  “Nothing is right, Tee Jolie.”

  “Did you like the songs I left on your iPod? I dropped it before I gave it to you. It don’t always work right.”

  “You said everything is all right. Don’t you know about your sister?”

  “What about her? Blue is just Blue. She’s sweet. To tell you the troot’, her voice is better than mine.”

  “Blue is dead.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She was
murdered. Her body floated up in St. Mary Parish.”

  “You’re breaking up, Mr. Dave. What’s that you said about Blue? The storm is tearing up the boathouse on the beach. Can you still hear me, Mr. Dave?”

  “Yes.”

  “I cain’t hear you, suh. This storm is terrible. It scares me. I got to go now. Tell Blue and my granddaddy hello. Tell them I couldn’t get t’rew.”

  The line went dead, and the words “blocked call” disappeared from the caller identification window. Molly was awake when I got back into bed and lay back on the pillow. “Were you fixing something in the kitchen?” she said.

  “No, that was Tee Jolie Melton on the phone.”

  Molly raised herself up on one elbow. Each time lightning flashed in the clouds, I could see the freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.

  “It woke me up.”

  “No, I was awake, Dave. You were talking in your sleep.”

  “She said she was sorry for making me worry about her. She doesn’t know her sister is dead.”

  “Oh, Dave,” Molly said, her eyes filming.

  “These are the things she said. It was Tee Jolie. You think I could forget what her voice sounds like?”

  “No, it was not Tee Jolie.”

  “She told me she dropped the iPod. That’s why other people can’t hear the songs she put on there.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m telling you what she said. I didn’t imagine it.”

  “You’re going to drive us all crazy.”

  “You want me to lie to you instead?”

  “I almost wish you were drinking again. We could deal with that. But I can’t deal with this.”

  “Then don’t,” I said.

  I returned to the kitchen and sat in the darkness and looked through the window at the Teche rising over its banks. A pirogue was spinning in the current—empty, with no paddle, rotating over and over as it drifted downstream toward a bend, filling with rainwater that would eventually sink it in the deepest part of the channel. I could not get the image of the sinking pirogue out of my head. I wished I had asked Tee Jolie about the baby she was carrying. I wished I had asked her many things. I felt Molly’s hand on my shoulder.