Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “You’re an intelligent man. Why do you work for a collection of shits?” I said.

  “Whom do you think you work for, Mr. Robicheaux?” he said.

  “That’s a valid question.”

  “Will you answer it?” he said.

  “Mr. Woolsey was on a boat that was used in the abduction of a homicide victim. Is this the kind of guy you associate with?”

  “Do I need an attorney?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “I think we’re finished,” he said.

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Then please tell me why you’re following me.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “What difference does it make? Do you think harassing me and Lamont Woolsey is going to stop oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico?”

  “What did Blue Melton know about y’all that was so important you had to kill her? She was seventeen years old. Does that weigh on you at all, Mr. Donnelly?”

  “I’ve killed no one. You have no right to say that.”

  “Get your nose out of the air, bud,” Clete said. “As we speak, Varina Leboeuf is selling your snooty ass down the drain.”

  “Tell me, Mr. Purcel, if what you say is true, why are you staging this little show for us? I don’t wish to offend you gentlemen, but don’t you think it’s time to grow up? An oil company doesn’t deliberately destroy its own drilling apparatus. It was an accident, a blip that is nothing compared to the daily environmental and human cost in the Middle East. I don’t hear you objecting to the things that go on over there. The Saudis cut off people’s heads.”

  Clete lit his cigarette, the smoke drifting out of his mouth, his eyes focused on nothing. “This is our state, Jack. You and your friends are tourists,” he said.

  “I have news for you, friend,” Donnelly said. “The sidewalks you stand on are paid for with money you borrow from foreigners.”

  Donnelly and Woolsey got in the backseat of the Buick. The two security men looked at us from behind their shades, their expressions flat. The wind blew the coat of the man with the bump on his nose, exposing the strap of a shoulder holster. Then all of them drove away, leaving Clete and me in the parking lot, leaves swirling around our shoes.

  “How did that just happen?” Clete said.

  “We came on their turf. It was a mistake,” I said. “Take a look across the street.”

  “At what?”

  “The guy in the pickup truck. It’s Jesse Leboeuf,” I said.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “I hate to guess,” I replied. I began punching in a 911 on my cell phone, but Leboeuf pulled into the traffic before I had finished.

  WHEN I GOT back to the department, I asked Wally, our head dispatcher, if he had received any reports on Jesse Leboeuf. Wally had been with the department for thirty-two years and still lived with his mother and never answered a question directly if there was a chance of turning it into a two-cushion bank shot. A conversation with Wally was as close to water torture as it comes. “You mean the Breat’alyzer test or causing a disturbance on Railroad Avenue?” he said.

  “His daughter told me he was drunk. I guess she knew what she was talking about,” I said, determined not to take the bait.

  “I t’ink he got a free pass on the Breat’alyzer.”

  “Really? Thanks for the feedback.”

  I started toward my office.

  “Down on Railroad, it was a li’l different,” he said.

  “That’s right, you did mention something about Railroad Avenue. Leboeuf got into it with somebody?”

  “You could say that. A new black pimp was working the corner wit’ a couple of rock queens. They were both white. Leboeuf t’ought he’d straighten him out.”

  “No kidding?”

  “A kid wit’ a slingshot fired a marble into the back of Leboeuf’s head.”

  “It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.”

  “You know what I t’ink?”

  “What’s that, Wally?”

  “Pretty sad, an old man full of hate like that, carrying it around all these years.”

  “Don’t waste your sympathies.”

  “He had a t’row-down on him.”

  I stopped. “Say again?”

  “He was carrying a drop. He’s retired. He don’t have no business doing that. He don’t like you, Dave. I wouldn’t want a man like that mad at me, no.”

  I went to my office and called Varina at her father’s home on Cypremort Point.

  “Oh, you again. How nice of you to call,” she said.

  “Your father is obviously having some kind of breakdown. Either get him under control or we’ll lock him up,” I said.

  “He’s taking a nap now and he’s fine, no thanks to you.”

  “I saw him earlier today in Lafayette. I think he was following me.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. He had a medical appointment there,” she said.

  “Think back, Varina. My family and I have done nothing to harm you. I tried to be your friend. Alafair popped you in the mouth, but only after you verbally abused her friend. Isn’t it time to man up, or woman up, or whatever you want to call it, and stop blaming others for your problems?”

  “I can’t express how I feel about you,” she replied.

  So much for the Aquinian advice about erring on the side of charity, I thought.

  HELEN CALLED ME from outside the IC unit in Shreveport where her half sister was hospitalized and asked how everything was going in the department. Obviously, she was asking how everything was going with me and Clete and Gretchen Horowitz and my circular and unproductive investigation into the murder of Blue Melton. I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t want to deceive her, nor did I want to add to her troubles while she was already dealing with her half sister’s near-fatal injuries. “We’re doing okay,” I said. “When do you think you might be coming back?”

  “Two or three days, I think. I get the sense you want to ask me or tell me something.”

  “Jesse Leboeuf has been on a drunk and might try to square an old beef or two.”

  “If you have to, put him in the jail ward at Iberia General. I’ll have a talk with him when I get back.”

  “The situation with Gretchen Horowitz has gotten a little more complicated.”

  “In what way?”

  “She told Clete she was given a contract on me and Alafair. She was also told to clip Clete.”

  “You and Clete clean this shit up, Pops. I don’t want to hear that girl’s name again.”

  “Clean it up how?”

  “I don’t care. Just do it. I’m too old for this kiddie-car stuff, and so are you. What else is going on?”

  “Kiddie-car stuff?”

  “Yeah, because I have a hard time taking this girl seriously. If she wants to be Bonnie Parker, she’s picked a pretty small stage to do it on. Anything else on your mind?”

  “I think Alexis Dupree was an SS officer at Auschwitz. I think his real name is Karl Engels.”

  “You’ve got evidence to that effect?”

  “Nothing that’s going to put him in handcuffs.”

  I could hear her breathing in the silence. “Okay, stay with it,” she said. “One way or another, the Duprees are mixed up with Tee Jolie’s disappearance and the murder of her sister. Let’s use whatever we can to make life interesting for them.”

  “I’ve got to be honest with you, Helen. Gretchen Horowitz is the real deal. She’s not to be taken lightly.”

  “Look, sometimes I turn a deaf ear to you and pretend you create problems that in actuality are already there. You’re bothered by injustice and can’t rest till you set things right. In other words, you’re an ongoing pain in the ass. In spite of that, I don’t know what I’d do without you. Say a prayer for Ilene. She might not make it.”

  “I’m sorry, Helen.”

  “Don’t let me down, bwana,” she said, and hung up.

  THAT NIGHT IT rained again, the way it alway
s does with the advent of winter in Louisiana, clogging the rain gutters on the house with leaves, washing the dust and black lint from the sugar mills out of the trees, sometimes filling the air with a smell that has the bright clarity of rubbing alcohol. These things are natural and good, I would tell myself, but sometimes the ticking of the rain on a windowsill or in an aluminum pet bowl can take on a senseless, metronomic beat like a windup clock that has no hands and that serves no purpose except to tell you your time is running out.

  I have never liked sleep. It has always been my enemy. Long before I went to Vietnam, I had nightmares about a man named Mack. He was a professional bourré and blackjack dealer in the gambling clubs and brothels of St. Landry Parish. He seduced my mother when she was drunk and blackmailed her and made her his mistress while my father was working on a drill rig offshore or fur-trapping on Marsh Island. Mack drowned my cats and held his fingers to my nose after he was with my mother. I hated him more than any man I had ever met, and in Vietnam I sometimes saw his face superimposed on those of the Asian men I killed.

  Mack lived in my head for many years and dissipated in importance only after I began to assemble a new collection of specters and demons—the shadowy figures who came out of the trees and used our 105 duds to booby-trap a night trail, the suspended corpse of a suicide dancing with maggots that Clete and I cut down from a rafter, the discovery of a child inside a refrigerator that had been abandoned in a field not far from a playground, a black man strapped in a heavy oak chair, his face and nappy hair bejeweled with sweat just before the hood was dropped over his face.

  It’s my belief that images like these cannot be exorcised from one’s memory. They travel with you wherever you go and wait for their moment to come aborning again. If you are rested and the day is sunny and cool and filled with the fragrances of spring, the images will probably remain dormant and seem to have little application in your life. If you are fatigued or irritable or depressed or down with the flu, you’ll probably be presented with a ticket to your unconscious, and the journey will not be a pleasant one. One thing you can count on: Sleep is a flip of the coin, and you are powerless inside its clutches unless you’re willing to drink or drug yourself into oblivion.

  It was 11:07 P.M., and I was reading under the lamp in the living room. The kitchen was dark and I could see the message light on the machine blinking on and off, like a hot drop of blood that glowed and died and then glowed again. Molly and Alafair were awake, and I could have gotten up and retrieved the message without disturbing anyone, but I didn’t want to, in the same way you sometimes hesitate to answer the door when the knock is more forceful than it should be, the face of your visitor obscured by shadows.

  “Did you drop your pills in the bathroom sink?” Molly said behind my chair.

  “Maybe. I don’t remember,” I replied.

  “Over half of them are gone. They have morphine in them, Dave.”

  “I know that. That’s why I try not to use them.”

  “But you’ve been taking them?”

  “I was taking them two or three times a week. Maybe not even that much. I haven’t felt a need for them in the last few days.”

  She sat down across from me, the capped plastic bottle in her hand. She held her eyes on mine. “Can you go without them altogether?”

  “Yeah, toss them out. I should have done that already.” But my words sounded both hollow and foolish, like those of a man standing in a breadline and pretending he doesn’t need to be there.

  “It’s late. Let’s go to sleep,” she said.

  I closed my book and looked at the title. It was a novel about British soldiers in the Great War, written by an eloquent man who had been gassed and wounded and had seen his best friends mowed down by Maxim guns, but I could remember hardly anything in it, as though my eyes had moved across fifty pages and registered almost nothing. “Maybe you and Alafair should visit your aunt in Galveston,” I said. “Just for a few days.”

  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  I stood up and pulled the tiny chain on the reading lamp. Through the doorway, I could see the reflection of the red light in the window glass above the sink. The driveway was completely black, and in the window glass, the red light was like a beacon on a dark sea. “Tee Jolie is out there somewhere,” I said.

  “She’s dead, Dave.”

  “I don’t believe that. She brought me the iPod in the recovery unit in New Orleans. I talked to her on the phone. She’s alive.”

  “I can’t have this kind of conversation with you anymore,” Molly said.

  She went back in the bedroom and closed the door. I sat for a long time in the dark, the message machine blinking in sync with my heart, daring me to push the play button. Maybe with a touch of the finger, I could be back on the full-tilt boogie, free of worry and moral complications, delighting in the violence I could visit upon my enemies, getting back on the grog at the same time, surrendering myself each day to the incremental alcoholic death that preempted my fear of the grave.

  The rain seemed to rekindle its energies, thudding as hard as hail on the roof. I walked into the kitchen and stood at the counter and pressed the play button with my thumb.

  “Hi, Mr. Dave,” the voice said. “I hope you don’t mind me bothering you again, but I’m real scared. There ain’t nobody here except a nurse and a doctor that comes sometimes ’cause of a problem I got. I need to get off this island, but I ain’t sure where it is. The people that owns it has got a big boat. One of the men here said we was sout’east of the chandelier. That don’t make no sense. Mr. Dave, the man I’m wit’ is a good man, but I ain’t sure about nothing no more. I don’t know where Blue is at. They say she’s all right, that she went out to Hollywood ’cause her voice is good as mine is and she’s gonna do fine out there. The medicine they been giving me makes me kind of crazy. I ain’t sure what to believe.”

  On the machine I heard a door slam in the background and another voice speaking, one I didn’t recognize. Then the recording ended.

  The Chandeleur Islands, I thought. The barrier islands that formed the most eastern extreme of Louisiana’s landmass. That had to be it. I woke Molly and asked her to come into the kitchen. She was half asleep, her cheek printed by the pillow. “I thought I heard a woman’s voice,” she said.

  “You did. Listen to this.”

  I replayed Tee Jolie’s message. When it was over, Molly sat down by the breakfast table and stared at me. She was wearing a pink nightgown and fluffy slippers. She seemed dazed, as though she couldn’t extract herself from a dream.

  “You’re not going to say anything?” I asked.

  “Don’t get anywhere near this.”

  “She’s asking for help.”

  “It’s a setup.”

  “You’re wrong. Tee Jolie would never do anything like that.”

  “When will you stop?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Believing people who know your weakness and use it against you.”

  “Mind telling me what this great weakness is?”

  “You’re willing to love people who are corrupt to the core. You turn them into something they’re not, and we pay the price for it.”

  I took a carton of milk out of the icebox and walked down to the picnic table in the backyard and sat down with my back to the house and drank the carton half empty. I could hear Tripod’s chain tinkling as he dragged it down the wire stretched between two live oaks. I reached down and picked him up and set him on my lap. He rubbed his head against my chest and flipped over on his back, waiting for me to scratch his stomach, his thick tail swishing back and forth. A tug passed on the bayou, its green and red running lights on, its wake slapping against the cypress roots. I longed to pour a half pint of whiskey into the milk carton and chugalug it in one long swallow, until I pushed all light out of my eyes and sound from my ears and thoughts from my mind. At that moment I would have swallowed broken glass for a drink. I knew I would not fall asleep before dawn.

&n
bsp; At 6:13 A.M., just as I finally nodded off, the phone rang. It was Clete Purcel. “Gretchen’s back from Miami,” he said.

  “So what?” I said.

  “She says she found her mother.”

  “Keep her away from Molly and Alafair and me.”

  I hung up the phone, missing the cradle and dropping the receiver on the floor, waking my wife.

  JESSE LEBOEUF HAD never thought of himself as a prejudiced man. In his mind, he was a realist who looked upon people for what they were and what they were not, and he did not understand why that was considered bad in the eyes of others. People of color did not respect a white man who lowered himself to their level. Nor did they wish to live with whites or be on an equal plane with them. Any white person who had grown up with them knew that and honored the separations inherent in southern culture. Saturday-night nigger-knocking was a rite of passage. If anyone was to blame for it, it was the United States Supreme Court and the decision to integrate the schools. Shooting Negroes with BB guns and slingshots and throwing firecrackers on the galleries and roofs of their homes didn’t cause long-term damage to anyone. They had to pay some dues, like every immigrant group, if they wanted to live in a country like this. How many people in those homes had been born in Charity Hospital and raised on welfare? Answer: all of them. How would they like living in straw villages back in Africa, with lions prowling around the neighborhood?

  But when Jesse reviewed his life, he stumbled across an inalterable fact about himself that he didn’t like to brood upon. In one way or another, he had always needed to be around people of color. He not only went to bed with Negro girls and women as a teenager, he found himself coming back for more well into his forties. They feared him and shrank under his weight and cigarette odor and the density of his breath, while their men slunk away into the shadows, the whites of their eyes yellow and shiny with shame. After each excursion into the black district, Jesse felt a sense of power and control that no other experience provided him. Sometimes he made a point of drinking in a mulatto bar near Hopkins just after visiting a crib, drinking out of a bottle of Jax in the corner, looking nakedly into the faces of the patrons. His sun-browned skin was almost as dark as theirs, but he always wore khaki clothes and half-top boots and a fedora and a Lima watch fob, like a foreman or a plantation overseer would wear. The discomfort Jesse caused in others was testimony that the power in his genitals and the manly odor in his clothes were not cosmetic.