Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “You know why the title of this movie is wrong?” she said.

  “I never thought about it a lot,” he replied.

  “It’s not about rebelling against anything. It’s the other way around. The movie comes together in the scene at the observatory. Natalie Wood and James Dean and Sal Mineo are hiding from the police and the bullies. James Dean believes he’s responsible for killing Buzz when they played chicken on the bluffs with the stolen cars. When he tries to turn himself in, the bullies hunt him down. James and Natalie and Sal want to be a family because they don’t have families of their own. They’re like the Holy Family inside the manger. They’re not rebels at all. They want to be loved. The only heavens that are real to them are the stars in the top of the planetarium.”

  “Did you know there’s a slipup in that film?” Clete said. “Sal Mineo goes out in the dark with the semi-automatic. James Dean has already taken out the magazine. He tries to tell the cops the gun’s empty, but they shoot Sal anyway. The truth is, the gun wasn’t empty. Sal Mineo fired it earlier, which means a shell was in the chamber.”

  “That’s all you got out of the film? That a great director like Nicholas Ray didn’t know anything about guns? That the cops did what they were supposed to do? Maybe James Dean had already cleared the chamber. It just wasn’t on camera. Or maybe a piece of footage hit the cutting room floor. Many of the people on the set were veterans of World War Two or Korea. You don’t think they knew how to clear a semi-auto?”

  “I was just making an observation.”

  “Don’t pass it on to anyone with a brain. You’ll embarrass yourself.”

  “You know a lot about firearms,” he said.

  “Duh,” she replied.

  He bent behind the TV and pulled out the plug and turned off the overhead light. Even with the pillows packed down on his head and his face shoved into the sofa cushions, he couldn’t get Gretchen’s words out of his head. What had he expected? For Gretchen to turn out to be someone other than the figure in the Orioles baseball cap and red windbreaker he had watched raise a semi-auto eye level to Bix Golightly’s face and pump three rounds into his head and mouth? Gretchen not only knew about guns, she was the kind of person whose residual anger was so great that, given the chance, she would burn out the rifling in the barrel of an automatic weapon and stay high as a kite on it.

  He didn’t fall asleep until the first gray light of dawn touched the eastern sky and the fog from the bayou billowed through the trees and surrounded the walls of his cottage and closed him off from the rest of the world.

  WHEN CLETE AND Gretchen woke, he fixed cereal and coffee for both of them, then fried four eggs and several pieces of bacon and slathered eight slices of bread with mayonnaise and made sandwiches that he wrapped in foil. He went outside and picked a handful of mint leaves from a wet spot below the water hydrant in the flower bed, then washed the leaves and sprinkled them inside a quart bottle of orange juice. He put the sandwiches and orange juice and a sack of frozen shrimp in his ice chest.

  “Want to tell me what you’re doing?” she said, flipping through the pages of a Newsweek magazine.

  “We’re going fishing.”

  “We traded the French Quarter for an Okie motel so we could go fishing in water that smells like the grease pit at the Jiffy Lube?”

  “You know what my favorite line is in Rebel Without a Cause?” he asked. “After James Dean and Buzz have made friends, Buzz says they still have to play chicken with the stolen cars on the cliffs. James Dean asks him why, and Buzz says, ‘You gotta do something for kicks.’ Did I make you mad last night?”

  “No. The only people who ever made me mad are dead or doing hard time,” she replied.

  “Say again?”

  “I’m talking about some of my mother’s boyfriends. One way or another, they got cooled out. The guy who burned me with cigarettes got his out in the flats somewhere. That’s on the back side of Key West. They say his bones and some of his skin got washed out of a sandbank in a storm. Whoever did him stuffed his cigarette lighter down his throat.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy. I just have one regret,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I wish I’d been there for it.”

  They drove to a rental dock and boathouse on East Cote Blanche Bay where Clete kept an eighteen-foot boat mounted with a seventy-five-horsepower Evinrude engine he’d bought at a repo auction. He loaded his saltwater rods and tackle box and ice chest and a big crab net into the boat, and a plastic garbage bag containing six empty coffee cans capped with plastic lids, then hit the starter button and drove the boat out of the slip and into the bay. The sun was hot and bright on the water, the waves dark and full of sand when they crested and broke on the beach. Gretchen was sitting on the bow, wearing cutoff blue jeans and shades and a V-neck T-shirt, without a hat or sunblock.

  “You need to get behind the console and sit next to me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t see.”

  She turned her face into the breeze, her hair blowing. Then she took off her shades and rubbed her eyes and put the shades on again. She slid her rump along the bow and stood up in the cockpit and finally sat down on the cushions. “What do you catch out here?” she asked.

  “A lobster-red sunburn, if you’re not careful.”

  “How many times have you been married?”

  “Once.”

  “Where’s your ex?”

  “Around.”

  “Therapy, the methadone clinic, electroshock, that sort of thing?”

  “You got a mouth on you, you know that?”

  “You have some sunblock?” she asked.

  “Under the seat.”

  She retrieved a bottle of lotion and unscrewed the cap and began rubbing it on her calves and knees and the tops of her thighs. Then she spread it on her face and the back of her neck and her throat and the top of her chest. Clete opened up the throttle, cutting a trough across the bay, heading southeast toward open water. In the distance, he could see a line of black clouds low on the horizon, electricity forking silently into the water. He made a wide arc until he entered a long flat stretch between the swells. Then he cut the engine and let the boat slide forward on its own wake. “There’s a school of white trout right underneath us,” he said.

  “That’s not why we’re here, is it?” she said.

  “Not really.”

  “What are the coffee cans for?”

  “You see how calm the water is here? It’s because of the shift in the tides. High tide was two hours ago. The tide is on its way back out.” He opened the garbage bag and lifted out three capped coffee cans and set them one by one in the water. “We’re going to see where these guys drift.”

  “Did you ever think about making movies?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “No, I mean it. You’re always thinking. You could be a better movie director than most of the guys around now. I read this article in Vanity Fair on how easy it is to make a successful movie today. You sign on Vin Diesel or any guy with a voice like a rust clot in a sewer pipe, then you blow up shit. You don’t even have to use real explosives. You can create them with a computer. The actors don’t even have to act. They stand around like zombies and imitate Vin Diesel and blow up more shit. I can’t reach my back.”

  He couldn’t track her conversation or line of thought. She turned around in the seat and worked her T-shirt up to the strap on her halter and handed him the bottle of lotion. “Smear some on between my love handles.”

  “What?”

  “I always burn right above my panty line. It hurts for days.”

  “I need you to listen to me and keep your mind off movies a minute, as well as other kinds of distractions.”

  “Are you gay or something? Is that the problem? Because if it’s not, you’re deeply weird.”

  “You need to learn some discretion, G
retchen. You can’t say whatever you feel like to other people.”

  “This from you? Have you checked out your rap sheet recently? You have more entries on it than most criminals.”

  “What do you know about rap sheets?”

  “I watch CSI. Cops in neon shitholes like Las Vegas have billions of dollars to spend on high-tech labs staffed by Amerasian snarfs. In the meantime, hookers and grifters and the casinos are fleecing the suckers all over town.”

  “What’s a snarf?”

  “A guy who gets off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats.”

  “I can’t take this,” Clete said. He reached into the ice chest and retrieved one of the fried-egg-and-bacon sandwiches, wiped the ice off the bread, and bit into it.

  “Can I have one?” she asked.

  “By all means,” he replied, chewing with his eyes wide, like a man trying to keep his balance while standing in front of a wind tunnel.

  “Tell me the truth—you’re not a closet fudge-packer, are you?” she asked.

  He tossed his sandwich over the side. “I’m going to bait our hooks and set up our outriggers. Then we’re going to drift and watch where those cans float. In the meantime, no more movie talk, no more insults, no more invasion of somebody else’s space. Got it?”

  “Where the fuck do you get off talking to me like that?”

  “This is my boat. I’m the skipper. Out at sea, the skipper’s word is absolute.” He looked at her expression. “Okay, I apologize.”

  “You should. You’re a one-man clusterfuck.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “How many times have you seen Rebel Without a Cause?”

  “Four, I think. I saw Paul Newman in The Left Handed Gun six times.”

  “I knew it. You’re like me. You just don’t want to admit it.”

  “Could be, kid.”

  “I don’t usually let any man call me that,” she said, “but for you I might make an exception.” She removed her shades, revealing the violet and magical intensity of her eyes. Her forehead was popping with sweat, her nostrils dilated. “I don’t understand my feelings about you. You’re a nice guy. But every nice guy I’ve ever known ended up wanting something from me. For some of them, that didn’t work out too good. What do you have to say to that?”

  “I’m a used-up jarhead and alcoholic flatfoot with no tread left on his tires. What’s to say?”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Clete drove the boat through a bay that was copper-colored and flecked with a dirty froth when the wind blew. When the keel struck bottom, Gretchen dropped off the bow into the water and waded through the shallows and threw the anchor up on dry sand. Clete stood up in the cockpit and gazed through a pair of binoculars at the line of plastic-capped coffee cans disappearing in the south.

  “I don’t understand what we’re doing,” Gretchen said.

  Clete eased himself over the gunwale and dropped heavily into the shallows and walked up on the beach beside her, the water darkening his khakis up to the knees. “This is the place where the body of Blue Melton floated up,” he said. “If you look to the southeast, you’ll see a channel that flows through the bay and into the Gulf. It’s like an underground river that flows in and out with the tides. I think the guys who dumped her overboard didn’t know much about tidal currents. I believe they intended for her body to sink and be eaten by sharks or crabs. If the body was found, it would look like she fell off a boat and drowned. Because the ice hadn’t melted, I think they were in pretty close to shore. What I’m saying is I think these guys were on a big boat, one with a freezer unit, but they’re not seafarers, and they’re probably not from around here.”

  “Why are rich guys hanging around with a poor Cajun girl from St. Martinville?” Gretchen said.

  “Try sex.”

  “She had a balloon in her mouth?”

  “It probably held the same skag she was injected with. There was a message in it that said her sister was still alive. After she was abducted, somebody decided she knew more than she was supposed to and had her killed. Somebody gave her a hotshot and let her die in a freezer.”

  “Why are we talking about this now?”

  “My buddy Dave keeps insisting that we’re up against some big players. I told him we were dealing with the same collection of lamebrains we’ve been locking up for thirty years. I was wrong.” Clete looked at the giant trunk of an uprooted cypress that had washed up onto the beach in a storm, now lying sun-bleached and worm-scrolled and polished by wind and salt next to a stand of gum and persimmon trees. “Sit down a minute, Gretchen.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I asked you to. I don’t know how to say this. Three New Orleans lowlifes who tried to scam me out of my office building and apartment got whacked. The mechanic who did the job was probably an out-of-towner, maybe somebody who’s been mobbed up for a while. These three guys were criminals and knew the rules of the game. They made their bet and lost. The girl who floated up here wasn’t a player. She was an innocent girl that a bunch of real cocksuckers got their hands on and murdered. Her sister, Tee Jolie Melton, may be in the hands of those same guys. You smell that?”

  Gretchen turned her face into the breeze. They were sitting in the shade on the cypress trunk, the metallic reflection of the bay as bright and eye-watering as the arc from an electric welding torch. “It smells like a filling station,” she said.

  “You can’t see it yet, but it’s oil. Nobody knows how much of it is out there. The drilling company sank it with dispersants so there would be no way to accurately calculate how many barrels they’d be held responsible for spilling. Tee Jolie Melton said something to Dave about her boyfriend being mixed up with some guys who were talking about centralizers. Dave thinks the boyfriend is Pierre Dupree. Maybe the blowout was caused because there weren’t enough centralizers in the casing. But everybody already knows that, so that’s not the issue.”

  “Yeah, I think I got all that. Go back to what you said about the three guys who messed with you and got shot.”

  “They’re dead. End of story. Maybe the person who smoked them did the world a favor, know what I’m saying?”

  “No, I don’t. Not at all.”

  “The hitter was somebody who goes by the name Caruso.”

  “Like the singer?” she said.

  “Yeah, when Caruso sings, everyone else becomes silent. Permanently.”

  “Sounds like urban-legend Mafia bullshit to me. You ever go to Miami in the winter? The whole beach is littered with greaseballs. They have physiques like tadpoles. Before they leave New York, they get chemical tans. Their skin looks like orange sherbet with black hair. My mother used to turn tricks in a couple of big hotels on the beach. She said some of these guys wore prosthetic penises inside their Speedos. Most of these pitiful fucks have day jobs on sanitation trucks. If they weren’t in the union, they’d be on welfare.”

  Clete hung his head, his hands folded between his knees, his eyes unfocused. The wind was cool inside the shade, the leaves of the gum trees rustling overhead. His boat was rocking in the small waves sliding back off the beach.

  “Did I say the wrong thing?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “I love Louisiana.”

  She rested her hand on the back of his neck, her fingernails touching his hairline and the pockmarks in his skin. He felt her nails move back and forth inside his hair, as though she were stroking a cat. “Under it all, you’re a tender man,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody like you.”

  AS I SAT in Helen’s office on Thursday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the shooting death of Ronnie Earl Patin, I wondered how things might have worked out if I had gotten Patin into custody at Lafayette PD. But if my perceptions were correct, a black hooker at the bar had notified someone that Patin was hooked to my bumper in cuffs and about to be housed in the city jail. Which meant the people behind his death and behind the attempt on my life and probably
behind the deaths of Blue Melton and Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly and Frankie Giacano had influence and power and control that went far beyond the crime families that once operated out of Galveston and New Orleans. In other words, Ronnie Patin had been DOA no matter what I did or didn’t do.

  Or was I falling into that category of people who saw conspiracies at work in every level of society?

  “Let’s see if I’ve got this right, Dave,” Helen said. “You think Patin’s brother was the shooter in the freezer truck?”

  “I’m not sure. I think Ronnie Earl boosted the truck. I think the shooter in it looked like Ronnie after he’d lost a hundred pounds. Ronnie said his brother was dead or living in Kansas.”

  “Patin didn’t know which?”

  “I wouldn’t call him a family-values kind of guy.”

  “I just talked to the chief of police in Lafayette. He said no one heard the shot or saw who killed Patin. There were no shell casings and no outside surveillance cameras at any building on the street. The chief wonders why you didn’t coordinate with him before you went to the club.”

  “I wasn’t sure the guy there was Ronnie Earl.”

  “You should have let Lafayette handle it.”

  Maybe she was right. When I didn’t reply, she said, “Second-guessing others is a bad habit of mine. Maybe Lafayette PD would have sent a couple of uniforms and spooked the guy out the back door. What a crock, huh, bwana?”

  I was standing by her window, with a fine view of Bayou Teche and the lawn that sloped down to the water and the camellia bushes growing on the far bank and the shady grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. I saw a black Saab convertible turn off East Main and come up the long curved driveway past the grotto and park below our building, its waxed surfaces glittering like razor blades. A woman got out and walked across the grass through the side entrance. I could not see her face, only the top of her head and her figure and the martial fashion in which she walked. “Are you expecting Varina Leboeuf?” I asked.