Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “She’s here?” Helen said.

  “Her vehicle is parked in the yellow zone. She just came through the restricted entrance.”

  “That girl needs her butt kicked.”

  “I think I’d better get back to my office.”

  “I think you should stay right where you are. Let’s see what our hypocritical little cutie-pie is up to.”

  “Maybe she’s a bit hot-tempered, but I wouldn’t call her a hypocrite.”

  “You know why I love you, Dave? When it comes to women, you’re hopeless.” She waited for me to speak, but I wasn’t going to. “You think she’s the rebel, the reckless and passionate woman who’ll always risk her heart if the right man comes into her life?”

  “How about we drop it?”

  But I had stepped into it. Like many people who are made different, either in the womb or because they grew up in a dysfunctional home, Helen had spent a lifetime puzzling through all the reasons she had been arbitrarily rejected by others. Therapists often identify this particular behavioral syndrome with individuals who are weak and obsessed with concerns that are of no consequence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only reason most of these individuals become survivors and not suicides or serial killers is because they finally figure out that the world did a number on them and their rejection is undeserved and is on the world and not on them.

  “Run the tape backward,” Helen said. “She’s rebellious over issues nobody cares about. She attends a church where most of the people are poor and uneducated and where she’s a superstar. But in politics and business, she’s always on board with the majority and puckering up her sweet mouth to the right people. Let me rephrase that. She’s always squatting down for her nose lube.”

  “That’s kind of rough,” I said.

  “When she was about fifteen, I was an instructor at the gun range. Varina’s summer church camp was sponsoring a rifle team. They’d come shoot for an hour or so every morning. One morning just after a rainstorm, Varina set up at a shooting table under the shed with her bolt-action twenty-two. Nobody had fired a round yet. I was getting some paper targets out of the office when I saw her loading her rifle. I never let the kids load until I had gone downrange and tacked up the targets and returned to the shed. She knew that. She was loading anyway, pushing one shell after another into the magazine, all the time looking downrange. I said, ‘Varina, you don’t load until I tell you.’ But she locked down the bolt as though she hadn’t heard me and raised the stock to her shoulder and let off two rounds before I could get to the table and shut her down. There was a possum in a persimmon tree about thirty feet on the far side of the plywood board we tacked the paper bull’s-eyes on. The possum had three babies on her back. Varina put one round through her side and one through her head.”

  “Sometimes kids don’t think,” I said.

  “That’s the point. She did think. She knew the rules, and she heard me tell her to stop loading, but she went ahead and, with forethought, shot and killed a harmless creature. Speak of the devil.”

  Varina Leboeuf opened Helen’s door without knocking and came inside. She was dressed in jeans and low-topped boots and an orange cowboy shirt. Her mouth was bright with lip gloss, her chest visibly expanding when she breathed, her cheeks streaked with color. “Good, I caught you both,” she said.

  “Ms. Leboeuf, you need to go back downstairs and out the side door and move your vehicle and then come through the front entrance and ask at the reception desk if Detective Robicheaux and I are here,” Helen said. “Then someone will buzz my extension, and I will probably tell that person I’m here and to send you up. Or maybe not.”

  “My attorney is filing a civil suit against your department and the female deputy Catin Whatever. I wanted to tell you that in person, since y’all have a way of assigning secret plots to everyone who doesn’t go along with your agenda.”

  “Suing us for what?” Helen asked.

  “Harassment of my father. Knocking him against the side of a cruiser. Falsely accusing him of whatever you can think up. You know what your problem is, Dave?”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “You’re intelligent, but you work for people who aren’t. I think that creates a daily struggle for you.”

  “Out, Ms. Leboeuf,” Helen said.

  “I’m glad to see my tax money being used so wisely,” Varina said. “Yuck.”

  She went back out the door and did not close it behind her. I followed her down the stairs and out the side exit. She was walking fast, her eyes flashing. “You’re not going to get off that easy, Varina.”

  “Say whatever it is you’re going to say. I’m late.”

  “For what?”

  “To meet with my father’s cardiologist. He keeled over this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you say that upstairs?”

  “You’ll hear a lot more in court.”

  “After that guy almost killed me in front of your apartment, you cleaned the blood and glass off my face and were genuinely concerned about my welfare. You said there were millions of dollars involved in the case I was pursuing. You also indicated that the people who had tried to kill me had no boundaries. You said I should not be such a foolish man.”

  “That has nothing to do with the ill treatment of my father.”

  “I think it does. I think your father is a brutal and violent man who is capable of doing anything he believes he can get away with. I think this civil suit is meant to be a distraction.”

  “My father was raised in poverty in a different era. Do you think it’s fair to look back from the present and judge people who never traveled outside the state of Louisiana in their entire life?”

  “I always admired you, Varina. I hate to see you hurt the female deputy. She didn’t treat your father unjustly. That civil suit will bankrupt her and probably ruin her life and the lives of her children. You want that on your conscience?”

  The top was down on her convertible. She placed her palm on the door, then removed it when she realized how hot the metal had grown in the sun. Her face was pinched, her eyes full of injury.

  “I have to ask you a question,” I said. “I’ve known you since you were a kid and always thought you were a big winner. Someone told me you shot a possum out at the gun range when you were fifteen. The possum was carrying babies.”

  “That’s a damn lie.”

  “Maybe you didn’t mean to. Maybe you saw some leaves moving and meant to hit a branch. Kids do things like that. I did. I shot a big coon like that once, and it still bothers me.”

  “I never shot an animal in my life, and you tell the liar who told you that, who I’m sure is Ms. Bull Dyko of 1969, Helen Soileau, she had better keep her lying mouth shut, because sheriff or no sheriff, I’m going to catch her in public and slap her cross-eyed.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that.”

  The sun went behind a cloud, dropping the bayou and City Hall and the oak trees and the long curved driveway into shadow. Then I saw the heat go out of Varina’s face. “None of this has to happen, Dave. Don’t you see? We live our lives the best we can. The people who make the decisions don’t care about us one way or another. Why give up your life for no reason? When all this is over, nobody will even remember our names.”

  “We’ll remember who we were or who we weren’t,” I replied. “The box score at the end of the game doesn’t change.”

  I expected her to drive away. That wasn’t what she did. She clenched my left hand in hers and shook it roughly, her little nails biting into my palm, almost like an act of desperation. Then she got in her car and drove away, smoothing her hair, her radio playing as she passed the religious grotto, a single column of sunlight splitting her face as though she were two different people created by a painter who could not decide whom he was creating.

  THAT EVENING AT twilight, I saw Clete’s Caddy pull to the curb in front of our house, a woman behind the wheel. Clete got out on the passenger side and walked up to the gallery. The
woman pulled away into the traffic and turned the corner just beyond the Shadows, the blue-dot taillights on the Caddy winking in the gloom. I met Clete on the steps. “Was that your temp?” I asked.

  “She went to get some aspirin. She got sunburned this morning. I just heard about this guy Patin getting shot outside a club in Lafayette. He’s the guy who tried to pop you with the cut-down?”

  “I doubt it. He would have blown town. My guess is he stole the freezer truck at the motel where he was staying and gave it to his brother. But I’m just guessing.”

  “You know what’s weird about this, Dave? Why steal a freezer truck to use as a getaway vehicle in a contract hit?”

  “You think it wasn’t stolen?” I said.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Varina Leboeuf is suing the department. I think she knows more about this stuff than she pretends.”

  He sat down on the steps. The air was filled with the drone of cicadas, fireflies glowing briefly in the trees, then disappearing in curlicues of yellow smoke. “I wonder if she digs older guys,” he said.

  “Will you stop that? Go on about the freezer truck.”

  “Why drive yourself nuts? You were right from the outset. We’re dealing with some big players. But back to this gal Varina. A woman can only be so beautiful. If your twanger doesn’t go on autopilot when a broad like that walks by, you need to get a refund on your equipment. Don’t tell me your flopper doesn’t have a memory bank. When you were loaded, you racked up some heavy mileage. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

  “I can’t believe you. We’re talking about multiple homicides, and you can’t get your mind off your johnson.”

  “I was talking about yours, not mine. But okay, let’s talk about mine. I think it has X-ray eyes. It sees through my pants. What am I supposed to do, cover it with concrete?” Clete glanced behind him through the screen door. His scalp constricted and his face turned hot pink, the blood draining out of the scar that ran through his eyebrow. “Hi, Molly,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “Hi, Clete,” she said. “Enjoying the evening?”

  “I was going to ask Dave to take a walk.” He stood up. “Would you like to go?”

  “Bring me some ice cream,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “I was going to suggest that. Dave and I were just shooting the breeze. I was talking about myself, not anybody else.”

  “We always love having you over, Clete,” she said.

  I walked with him down the street, toward the Shadows. He looked back at the house. “How long was she there?” he said.

  “Forget it. Who was driving your car?”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Gretchen and I were over on East Cote Blanche Bay today. I think I know where the body of Blue Melton was dropped into the water. I think the guys who killed her were on a big yacht and don’t know much about nautical science. How many yacht basins are there along the Louisiana coast, at least the kind that berth boats big enough to accommodate walk-in subzero freezers? Not many. That’s where we need to start, Streak. Looking at people like Ronnie Earl Patin isn’t going to take us to the top.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject. You said Gretchen? As in Gretchen Horowitz, your daughter?”

  We had walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street, the water flowing dark and high through the pilings below, the sun descending in a burst of orange flame beneath clouds that resembled piled fruit. “I’m telling you this because I think maybe she’s not Caruso,” Clete said.

  “How can you say that? You recognized her when she clipped Bix Golightly.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t her. There’s something I didn’t tell you. Since we almost bought it on the bayou, I’ve had all this guilt about everything I ever did wrong in my life. I was obsessing about Gretchen and her mother and the fact that I used her mother like a whore, and the fact that Gretchen grew up in a home where a guy burned her with cigarettes when she was a baby, for Christ’s sake. I had these pictures Candy sent me of Gretchen, and I was always looking at them and wondering where she was and how I could undo all the pain I’d caused her. Then I saw this person in a red windbreaker and ball cap splatter Bix Golightly’s buckwheats, and maybe I transposed Gretchen’s image onto the shooter.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” he said, undeterred in his attempt to avoid conclusions he could not deal with. “She talks rough, but she’s a sweet girl. The problem I got now is she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s getting a little bit too close to me emotionally, in definitely the wrong way, get my drift, and she doesn’t need any more psychological damage done to her because she’s getting the hots for her own father.”

  “You can clear all this up by telling Gretchen who you are. Why haven’t you done that?”

  It was a mean question to ask. Saint Augustine once said we should not use the truth to injure. In this case, my best friend was experiencing the kind of angst that no one should have to endure. The truth was not going to set Clete free. Instead, it would force him to choose between aiding and abetting several homicides or sending his daughter to the injection table at Angola. I had become his grand inquisitor, and I hated myself for it.

  “What am I going to do, Dave?” he asked.

  I said something I didn’t plan to say. I said it out of a frame of reference that had nothing to do with reason, justice, right or wrong, legality, police procedure, or even common sense. I said it in the same way the British writer E. M. Forster once said that if he had to make a choice between his friend and his country, he hoped he would have the courage to choose his friend. I said, “Let it play out.”

  “You mean that?”

  “It’s another one of those deals where you have to say the short version of the Serenity Prayer. You have to step back and let all the worry and complexities and confusion in your life blow away in the wind. You have to trust that the sun will rise in the east and the race will not be to the swift and the rain will fall upon both the just and the unjust. You have to say fuck it and mean it and let the dice roll out of the cup as they will.”

  “We’re both going to end up in Angola.”

  “That’s what I mean. Fuck it. Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.

  “My liver is screaming. I got to have a beer with a couple of raw eggs in it. A couple of shots of Jack wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  “Molly wants some ice cream.”

  “Clementine’s sells sorbet to go. ‘Let it play out.’ I totally dig that. I think that also includes seriously stomping some ass and taking names. ‘Let it play out.’ Fuckin’ A.” He began churning his big fists as though hitting a speed bag, his teeth like tombstones when he grinned.

  He had sucked me in again.

  NO ONE LIKES to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love and faith and robs us of all serenity. It steals both our sleep and our sunrise and makes us treacherous and venal and dishonorable. It fills our glands with toxins and effaces our identity and gives flight to any vestige of self-respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat and turns your skin gray and fouls your blood and spiritually eviscerates you to the point where you cannot pray lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you’re about to die, you know what I am talking about. This kind of fear has no remedy except motion, no matter what kind. Every person who has experienced war or natural catastrophe or man-made calamity knows this. The adrenaline surge is so great that you can pick up an automobile with your bare hands, plunge through glass windows in flaming buildings, or attack an enemy whose numbers and weaponry are far superior to yours. No fear of self-injury is as great as the fear that turns your insides to gelatin and shrivels your soul to the size of an amoeba.

  If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, the result is quite different. Your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped off your bones. The degree of torm
ent and hopelessness and, ultimately, despair you will experience is probably as great as it gets this side of the grave.

  Seven hours after I had said good night to Clete, I heard dry thunder in the clouds and, in my sleep, thought I saw flashes of heat lightning inside our bedroom. Then I realized I had forgotten to turn off my cell phone and it was vibrating on top of the dresser. I picked it up and walked into the kitchen. The caller ID was blocked. I sat down in a chair at the breakfast table and stared down the back slope at the bayou, where the surface of the water was wrinkling like curdled milk, the flooded elephant ears along the banks bending in the wind. “Who is this?” I said.

  At first I heard only a deep breathing sound, like that of a man who was either in pain or whose anxiety was so intense that blood was starting to pop on his brow. “You Dave Robicheaux?” a male voice said.

  “That’s right. It’s four in the morning. Who is this, and what do you want?”

  “I’m Chad Patin. Ronnie Earl was my brother.”

  I thought the caller planned to make an accusation against me, but that was not the case. He must have been using a landline, because his voice was rasping against a larger surface than a cell phone’s. I heard him take a gulp of air, like a man whose head had been held for a long time underwater.

  “You still with me, bub?” I said.

  “It was me who tried to take you out,” he replied.

  “How’d you get my number?”

  “They got a file on you. Everything about you is in there.”

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  I waited and heard liquid being poured into a glass. I heard him drinking from the glass, swallowing sloppily, a man who didn’t care whether Johnnie Walker or brake fluid was sliding down his throat. “I’m jumping out into space on this one,” he said.