Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  I guess what I’m saying is that deep down inside, I believed Clete’s protective feelings for his daughter were justified, that with a different shake of the dice, I could have turned out just like her.

  When he opened his door, he was eating a cheese and lettuce and tomato sandwich, his jaw packed like a baseball.

  “What was the Brit doing in Lafayette?” I said.

  “Telling people that sweet crude tastes like chocolate syrup,” Clete replied.

  I went inside the cottage and sat down. I felt as though I’d aged a decade in the last hour. “Where’s Gretchen?”

  “Search me.”

  “That’s not a good answer.”

  “I’ve thought some things over,” he said. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to protect her, but maybe it’s too late. Maybe she’s too damaged, and so am I. Same with you, Streak. You’re sober, but you’ve got more of me in you than you want to admit. We don’t fit in, and everybody knows it except us. Maybe we should have bought it in the shootout on the bayou.”

  I propped my elbows on his breakfast table and rested my head on the heels of my hands. I felt that something had torn loose behind my eyes and that I couldn’t see Clete or the room correctly. “Who’s playing that song?”

  “What song?” he said.

  “Jimmy Clanton’s ‘Just a Dream.’ You don’t hear it?”

  “No, I don’t hear anything except that workboat deepening the channel in the bayou. You coming down with something?”

  VARINA LEBOEUF WAS good at whatever she did, whether in love, war, or deception. Her suitors had never been unintelligent men, yet most of them, no matter how bad they got hurt, came back for more, and I never heard one of them say he regretted his choice. When the phone rang on my kitchen counter at eleven-ten that night, she was at her best. “You have to help me,” she said. “I know this is outrageous, but I also know your capacity for forgiveness, and I know you never turn away a person who genuinely needs your help and understanding.”

  I tried to think of an adequate response.

  “Hello? Are you there?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m here, and it’s really late,” I said.

  “My father is drunk and believes you sent the Horowitz woman to our house. He says he saw her parked down the road this afternoon.”

  “Why would I send Gretchen Horowitz to your house?”

  “He’s getting more and more irrational. He resents you because you’re educated and you were given advancements at the department that he thought should be his. He believes you and the black female deputy conspired to degrade him in front of his peers.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He has a gun. I don’t want him hurt. He called you a nigger-lover before he left. I’m afraid of what he’s going to do.”

  “Call 911 and make a report.”

  “Dave, if he gets into it with a black deputy, somebody is going to be killed.”

  “Frankly, I don’t care what happens to your father, Varina. He’s an ignorant, stupid man, a racist, and a bully who molested black women and jailed and beat their men. His sin lies not in his ignorance and stupidity but in his choice to stay ignorant and stupid. I’m going to hang up now so you can call 911. Take my number out of your Rolodex.”

  “He’s a sick old man. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. Thanks for asking, though.”

  I was lowering the telephone receiver to the cradle when I heard her voice again, as though her intentions, whatever they were, had taken on a new direction and were shifting into overdrive. “Clete Purcel betrayed my trust and stole something from my home and my apartment. I think you know what that is.”

  I put the receiver back to my ear. “Clete doesn’t always confide in me.”

  “Stop lying. I had some things on video I’m not proud of. But I never used that material against anyone. I’ve had two men try to extort me. One man named me as the third party in a divorce suit. So I decided to get some insurance. That’s all.”

  “You had someone burglarize Clete’s office.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Your father carries a key chain with a fob on it that resembles a sawfish. I think Alexis Dupree gave the fob to him. I also think Alexis Dupree is a Nazi war criminal and your father admired him as a kindred spirit. Except your father finally realized that in Dupree’s eyes, he was a throwback walking around with a Styrofoam spit cup in his hand. Where is Tee Jolie Melton, Varina? Why did y’all have to murder Blue?”

  “I’d get mad at you, Dave, but objectively speaking, you’re not worth the effort. Good God, what did I ever see in you?”

  I CALLED CLETE at six A.M. and woke him up. “Where’s Gretchen?” I said.

  “I think she flew to Miami,” he replied.

  “Varina Leboeuf claims her father saw her at Cypremort Point yesterday.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “What’s she up to, Clete?”

  “She wants to find her mother.”

  “I’m going to have a talk with Helen about Gretchen this morning.”

  I heard him exhale against the receiver. “Is there another way to do this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “A PI friend of mine in Lafayette found the British oil guy. His name is Hubert Donnelly. He and Lamont Woolsey are staying at a motel on Pinhook Road in Lafayette.”

  “After I talk with Helen, I’ll call you back.”

  “Gretchen is still my daughter, no matter what happens.”

  “I don’t know how I should take that.”

  “Any way you want,” he replied. Then he hung up.

  I ate breakfast in the kitchen with Molly while Alafair worked on her new novel in her bedroom. The windows were open, and the morning was cool and fresh and smelled of humus and night damp and the flowers opening in the shadows. I heard Alafair clicking on the old Smith Corona I gave her when she was eight years old. She wrote in a strange fashion, one I never quite understood. She woke in the middle of the night and wrote with a pen in a notebook, typed the words on the Smith Corona in the morning, and then retyped them onto her computer. When I asked her why she did it that way, she replied, “It’s never any good unless you’re sure that not one period or comma is out of place and not one word is used that can be taken out.”

  “Who was that on the phone last night?” Molly asked.

  “Varina Leboeuf. She said her father was drunk and out to get me. I didn’t take her seriously. That whole bunch at Croix du Sud Plantation are a tangle of vipers. Their schemes are coming apart, whatever they are, and Varina is trying to save herself.”

  “Why would her father have it in for you?”

  “Years ago someone taught him to hate himself so he’d blame his lot in life on people of color or people who disagree with him. It’s a fine morning. Let’s not talk about these guys.”

  “We have to.”

  “No, we don’t. It’s like reading the Bible,” I said. “We know how the last chapter ends. The good guys win.”

  “You skipped over the part where a lot of the earth gets wiped out.”

  “No story is perfect,” I said.

  We both laughed, in the way we used to laugh when we didn’t have any cares. We divided a hot cinnamon roll and drank the rest of the coffee and hot milk on the stove. Then we went outside and walked down to the edge of Bayou Teche with Snuggs and Tripod flanking us. The air was cold and wonderful rising off the water, the light as soft as pollen on the tree limbs above us. There was no sound at all on the bayou, not even on the drawbridge at Burke Street. Molly took my hand in hers without speaking, and we watched the bream feeding among the lily pads, which were turning brown and curling stiffly along the edges. I wondered how many weeks we might have before the gray, rainy days of the Louisiana winter set in, laying bare the water oaks and the pecan trees, smudging the windows with fog that could be as cold and wet as seepage in the grave.

  WHEN I WENT to the departmen
t, I learned that Helen’s half sister, Ilene, had almost died in an auto accident in Shreveport and that Helen had gone to be by her side. I had been prepared to tell her everything I knew about Gretchen Horowitz and the kidnapping of Candy Horowitz and the contract on me and my family and Clete, and like the guilt-ridden man who finds the church house closed, I found myself with nowhere to take my story.

  I called Clete at his office. “What’s the status of the Brit and Lamont Woolsey this morning?” I said.

  “Funny you asked. I just called Lafayette. The Brit is addressing a chamber of commerce luncheon on Pinhook Road,” he replied. “Dig this. They’re serving oysters on the half shell that they had flown in from Chesapeake Bay. There’s nothing like being safe.”

  THE RESTAURANT WAS located in the older section of Pinhook, where the oak trees had been spared the chain saw and whose gnarled, thick limbs arched over the two-lane and created a leafy, windblown arbor that was truly grand to stand under, particularly when the morning was still fresh and the sunlight cool and filtering through the canopy. It was the kind of moment that made you believe Robert Browning was correct and the naysayers were wrong, that in truth God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

  Unfortunately, all was not right with the world. Giant tentacles of oil that had the color and sheen of feces had spread all the way to Florida, and the argument that biodegradation would take care of the problem would be a hard sell with the locals. The photographs of pelicans and egrets and seagulls encased in sludge, their eyes barely visible, wounded the heart and caused parents to shield their children’s eyes. The testimony before congressional committees by Louisiana fisher-people whose way of life was being destroyed did not help matters, either. The oil company responsible for the blowout had spent an estimated $50 million trying to wipe their fingerprints off of Louisiana’s wetlands. They hired black people and whites with hush-puppy accents to be their spokesmen on television. The company’s CEOs tried their best to look earnest and humanitarian, even though their company’s safety record was the worst of any extractive industry doing business in the United States. They also had a way of chartering their offshore enterprises under the flag of countries like Panama. Their record of geopolitical intrigue went all the way back to the installation of the shah of Iran in the 1950s. Their even bigger problem was an inability to shut their mouths.

  They gave misleading information to the media and the government about the volume of oil escaping from the blown well, and made statements on worldwide television about wanting their lives back and the modest impact that millions of gallons of crude would have on the Gulf Coast. For the media, their tone-deafness was a gift from a divine hand. Central casting could not have provided a more inept bunch of villains.

  Clete and I had seated ourselves in the middle of the banquet room with a clear view of the podium and the long linen-covered table where the guests of honor were seated. On each table was a silver bowl filled with water and floating camellias. Clete ordered a Bloody Mary and a cup of crawfish gumbo, then leaned toward my ear and pointed at the front of the room. “There’s the albino. You see that cocksucker who just came in? That’s Donnelly. Watch him. He’s going to work the room.”

  “How do you know?” I said, trying to ignore the stares we were getting from other tables.

  “I saw him on tape with Varina.” I looked at Clete, waiting for him to explain. “You didn’t want to watch the tapes,” he said. “Good for you. But I did watch them. Believe me when I tell you this guy has got one agenda—getting his hammer polished.”

  Donnelly was eating strips of lobster with his fingers, dipping them gingerly in oil before he placed them in his mouth. His nails were like pink seashells, his hair freshly clipped and stiff and silver on the tips. He looked youthful and healthy, his skin glowing with tan. His only physical imperfection was in the flesh that sagged under his jaw, as though he couldn’t hide the sybarite that lived inside him.

  Donnelly wiped his fingers on a napkin and rose from his chair and began shaking hands and introducing himself to the people around him, moving from one table to the next, until he was standing directly in front of ours. His eyes were bluish-gray, his hand soft inside mine when I took it. “It’s nice meeting you. I hope both you gentlemen enjoy my little talk,” he said.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” I replied.

  Then I realized he was not actually seeing or hearing me. His eyes were fixed on the people behind me, or on the wall, or in neutral space, but not on me or on Clete. He saw them in a collective fashion, as part of a purpose, but he didn’t see the individual whose hand he was shaking. It was strange to find myself extending my hand to a man who I was convinced did not care whether I lived or died, and I wondered how such a man took in so many people, and I wondered why I was actually holding his hand in mine.

  I heard Clete drain his Bloody Mary down to the ice, then set the glass heavily on the table. “I’ve seen you in the movies,” he said before Donnelly could get away.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Have you ever done any character roles? Maybe a low-budget independent film. I’m sure I’ve seen you in one,” Clete said.

  “I’m afraid I have no experience of that kind,” Donnelly said. “You must be thinking of someone else.”

  “A romantic comedy, maybe,” Clete said. “I’m sure of it. It’ll come to me. Just give me a minute. You ever do any film work in Tijuana?”

  “It’s been such a pleasure meeting you,” Donnelly said.

  “Do you have a big mole on your left rear cheek?” Clete asked.

  Donnelly kept moving, but the back of his neck was flaming.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I said to Clete.

  “I found a bug in my office this morning. I wanted to send him a message,” Clete said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I can’t prove who put it in there. Now lighten up.” He snapped his fingers for the waiter and ordered another Bloody Mary.

  Donnelly sat back down and cleaned his hands with a hand wipe. Later, two men in navy blue suits, shades, and shined black shoes entered the room and stood by the door. They looked like they were wearing makeup, perhaps to cover a serious bruising. Clete touched me on the arm. “Check it out,” he said.

  “I see them. You think they’re the guys Gretchen busted up?”

  He pulled the celery stick out of his second drink and began chewing on it, making loud crunching noises. “See the guy with the greased hair and the bump on his nose and the scalp job around his ears? He’s got to be one of them. She said the second guy was fat. She broke off some of his teeth up front. Maybe we should forget about the Brit and the albino and tune this pair up.”

  “No, we don’t get into it with anybody.”

  “Whatever you say. Waiter, I need a refill.”

  Hubert Donnelly went to the podium and smiled politely while he was introduced. Then he launched into a long presentation of all the remedial measures his company and others were undertaking in order to undo the damage they had done. His tone was confessional and humble and filled with references to the men who had died on the rig. A medieval penitent on the road to Canterbury could not have been more contrite. The audience was made up of business-people who had a vested interest in the drilling industry and should have been receptive to the emotional nature of his delivery. In this instance, local rage trumped both unctuousness and long-term profit, and Donnelly’s mojo was not sliding down the pipe.

  He loosened his tie and put aside his prepared remarks. I began to realize the level of my own naïveté about the intelligence and complexity of the enemy. Donnelly wasn’t an oil executive or a geologist. I wasn’t sure which company he worked for or why he was here. He kept referencing electronic technology and talking about oceanic grids and the Atlantic community of nations that depended on oil from the Persian Gulf. He wasn’t talking about a business anymore but a nongovernmental empire that encompassed most of the world and dr
ove the engines in it, all of it maintained by corporate interests that could never be compartmentalized or separated one from the other. Flags and national borders were an illusion, he said. The issue was energy, and it had been the issue since 1914. His teeth were small and crooked and looked crowded inside his mouth. He began talking about T. E. Lawrence. I doubted that more than three or four people in the room were listening.

  Clete stirred the ice in his drink with a fresh celery stick. “I think our man is losing it,” he said.

  “I’m not sure about that,” I said.

  People were looking at their watches and trying not to yawn. When Donnelly finally sat down, he might have just climbed from the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. Later, Clete and I followed him and Woolsey into the parking lot. Clete had stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and was snapping and unsnapping the top of his Zippo. The two men in shades and navy blue suits were leaning against a Buick out in the sunlight, watching us, seemingly indifferent to the heat radiating off the metal.

  As I looked at Donnelly and Lamont Woolsey and their hired security men, I experienced a strange sensation I couldn’t quite define. I felt that I was part of a grand folly, not only here, outside the restaurant, but in every aspect of my professional life, in the same way that the survivors of Flanders Fields and the Battle of the Somme had come to think of their war as the Grand Illusion. I also felt I had just listened to a cynic tell the truth in a way that was so candid, it would never be recognized as such nor have any influence on anyone or anything.

  “You got a minute, Mr. Donnelly?” I said, opening my badge holder.

  “What is it?” he said, turning around, the dappled shade of the live oaks sliding back and forth on his face.