Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  The figure stood above him, aiming with both hands, arms outstretched. The suppressor was pointed directly at his mouth. Jesse tried to look through the slits in the mask at the shooter’s eyes. Were they lavender? If he could only explain, he thought. If someone could reach back in time and find the moment when everything went wrong, if someone could understand that he didn’t plan this, that this was the hand he was dealt and it was not of his choosing. If others could understand that, they could all agree to go away and let the past be the past and forget about the injuries he had done to his fellow man and let him start all over. If he could just find the right words.

  “None of y’all know what it was like,” he said. “I broke corn when I was five. My daddy worked nights eleven years to buy ten acres.”

  He tried to make himself stare into the suppressor, but he couldn’t do it. He saw a soapy pink bubble rise from the hole in his chest. The tears in his eyes distorted the room as though he were looking at the world from the bottom of a goldfish bowl. “Tell Varina—”

  His lung was collapsing, and he couldn’t force the words out of his mouth. The figure stepped closer, then squatted next to the tub, gripping the rim with one hand, holding the P226 with the other.

  Jesse waited for the round that would rip through his brain and end the bubbling sound in his throat, but it didn’t happen. He shut his eyes and whispered hoarsely at the masked face. It was a phrase he had learned from his French-speaking father when the father talked about Jesse’s baby sister. Then the words seemed to die on his lips. For just a moment, Jesse Leboeuf thought he heard black people laughing. Oddly, they were not black people in a juke joint, nor were they laughing at him behind his back, as they did when he first wore a policeman’s uniform. They were in a cotton field in North Louisiana at sunset, and the sky and the earth were red and the plants were a deep green and he could smell rain and see it blowing like spun glass in the distance. It was Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, and all the darkies in the parish would be headed into town soon, and he wondered why he hadn’t chosen to celebrate the occasion with them. They had always been kind to him and let him ride on the back of the flatbed when they drove to town, all of them rocking back and forth with the sway of the truck, their bodies warm with the heat of the day, smelling slightly in a good way of the sweat from their work, their legs hanging down in the dust, the children breaking up a watermelon in big meaty chunks. Why hadn’t he gone with them? It would have been fun. He opened his eyes one more time and realized a terrible transformation was taking place in him. He was no longer Jesse Leboeuf. He was dissolving into seawater, his tissue and veins melting and running down his fingertips and pooling around his buttocks. He heard a loud sucking sound and felt himself swirling through the chrome-ringed drain hole at the bottom of the tub. Then he was gone, just like that, twisting in a silvery coil down a pipe to a place where no one would ever celebrate Juneteenth.

  CATIN SEGURA CALLED in the 911 herself. The first emergency personnel to arrive were the Acadian Ambulance Service, followed by deputies from Iberia and St. Mary Parish. Because it was Saturday, many of the neighbors had slept in and seen nothing unusual. When I arrived, the paramedics were already in the bedroom with Catin. There was blood on the sheets and the pillowcase. Her face was dilated with bruises, both wrists scraped raw by Leboeuf’s handcuffs. Through the bathroom door, I could see his bare feet and legs extending over the edge of the tub. No brass had been found in the bedroom or the bathroom.

  “How’d Leboeuf get in?” I asked her.

  She told me. Then she looked at the two paramedics. “Can you guys give us a minute?” I asked.

  They went out of the room, and she told me what Leboeuf had done to her. Her eyes were dulled over, her voice hardly audible, as though she did not want to hear the things she was saying. Twice she had to stop and start over. “It’s his smell,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s on my skin and inside my head. I’ll never be able to wash it off me.”

  “No, this man is dead and has no power over you, Catin. He died the death of an evil man and took his evil with him. Eventually, you’ll think of him as a pitiful creature flailing his arms inside a furnace of his own creation. He can’t touch you. You’re a decent and fine lady. Nothing Leboeuf did can change the good human being that you are.”

  Her eyes never blinked and never left mine. A St. Mary crime-scene investigator and a female deputy from Iberia Parish were waiting in the doorway. I asked them for a few more minutes. They stepped outside on the gallery. “The shooter never spoke?” I said.

  “No,” Catin replied.

  “You have no idea who the shooter was?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Leboeuf took two rounds, then fell into the tub?”

  “I can’t keep it straight in my head. It was something like that.”

  “My guess is Leboeuf was still alive after he fell into the bathtub. But there was no coup de grâce. How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t know. My children stayed overnight with their grandmother. I want to see them,” she said.

  “I’ll take them up to Iberia General to see you. First you have to help me, Catin.”

  “Leboeuf said something in what sounded like French. I don’t speak French. I don’t care what he said or didn’t say. There’s something I left out. I told the person in the mask to kill him. I wanted him to suffer, too.”

  I looked over my shoulder at the doorway. “That has no bearing on what occurred. You roger that, Cat?”

  She nodded.

  “You called the shooter a person, not a man,” I said. “Was the shooter a woman?”

  She looked at the water spots in the wallpaper and on the ceiling. “I’m tired.”

  “Who took the cuffs off you?”

  “The person did.”

  “And you called 911 immediately?”

  “Jesse Leboeuf was left on the street when he should have been in a cage. The department didn’t save my life,” she said. “The shooter did. I hope Jesse Leboeuf is in hell. It’s a sin for me to think that way, and it bothers me real bad.”

  I pressed her hand in mine. “It’s the way you’re supposed to feel,” I said.

  I waved to the paramedics to come back in the bedroom, then I picked up Jesse Leboeuf’s coat and shirt and underwear and hat and half-top boots and holstered .38 snub-nose and stuffed them in a plastic garbage bag. I didn’t hand them over to the crime-scene investigator. I went into the kitchen, where I could be alone, and removed his wallet from his trousers and thumbed through all the compartments. In it was a color photograph of Leboeuf with a little girl on a beach, the waves slate-green and capping behind them. The little girl had curly brown hair and was holding an ice-cream cone and smiling at the camera. Deeper in the wallet, I found a folded receipt for airplane fuel. The name of the vendor was the same as the boat dock whose phone number we had pulled from Jesse Leboeuf’s telephone records. Written in pencil on the back were two navigational coordinates and the words “Watch downdrafts and pilings at west end of cove.”

  I put the gas receipt in my shirt pocket and replaced the rest of Leboeuf’s belongings in the bag. The female deputy from the Iberia department was watching me. “What are you doing, Streak?” she asked.

  “My job.”

  Her name was Julie Ardoin. She was a small brunette woman with dark eyes who always looked too small for her uniform. Her husband had committed suicide and left her on her own, and when she was angered, her stare could make you blink. “Good. You gonna handle the notification?” she said.

  I CALLED MOLLY and told her I wouldn’t be home until noon, then drove down to the Leboeuf home on Cypremort Point. Theologians and philosophers try to understand and explain the nature of God with varying degrees of success and failure. I admire their efforts. But I’ve never come to an understanding of man’s nature, much less God’s. Does it make sense that the same species that created Athenian democracy and the Golden Age of
Pericles and the city of Florence also gifted us with the Inquisition and Dresden and the Nanking Massacre? My insight into my fellow man is probably less informed than it was half a century ago. At my age, that’s not a reassuring thought.

  When I pulled in to Varina Leboeuf’s gravel driveway, the tide was coming in and the sky was lidded with lead-colored clouds and waves were breaking against the great chunks of broken concrete that Jesse Leboeuf had dumped on the back of his property to prevent erosion. Varina opened the inside door onto the screened veranda and walked down the stairs toward my cruiser. I got out and closed the car door behind me and stared into her face. I could hear wind chimes and leaves rustling and the fronds of a palm tree clattering, and smell the salt in the bay, all the indicators of life that were ongoing and unchanged among the quick but that were gone forever for Varina’s father.

  I wanted to state what had happened and get back to town. I wished I had violated protocol and telephoned. I wanted badly to be somewhere else.

  I had lost the respect I once had for Varina; I had come to think of her as treacherous and dishonest. I bore her even greater resentment for her seduction and manipulation of a good man like Clete Purcel. But I resented her most because she reminded me in some ways of Tee Jolie Melton. Both women came out of an earlier time. They were alluring and outrageous and irreverent, almost childlike in their profligacy, more victim than libertine. That was the irony of falling in love with my home state, the Great Whore of Babylon. You did not rise easily from the caress of her thighs, and when you did, you had to accept the fact that others had used her, too, and poisoned her womb and left a fibrous black tuber growing inside her.

  Varina wasn’t over ten feet from me now, her hair blowing over her brow, her mouth vulnerable, like that of a child about to be scolded. I looked at the waves cresting and breaking into foam on the chunks of concrete, the petals on the Japanese tulip tree shredding in the wind.

  “My father isn’t here. He went fishing,” she said. “He made a ham-and-egg sandwich and was eating it when he drove out at daybreak. I saw him.”

  “No, that’s not where he went.”

  “He put his poles and tackle box and a shiner bucket in the back of the truck. He wasn’t drinking. He went to bed early last night. Don’t tell me he’s drunk, Dave. I know better. He’s going to be fine.”

  “Your father is dead.”

  She started to speak, but her eyes filmed and went out of focus.

  “Maybe we should go inside,” I said.

  “He was in an accident? He’s dead in an accident?” she said, turning her head away as though avoiding her own words.

  “He was shot to death in Jeanerette.”

  She placed one hand on the rope of a swing suspended from an oak limb. The blood had drained from her face. She was wearing a yellow cowboy shirt with the top snap undone. She began pushing on it with her thumb, knotting the fabric, unable to snap the brad into place, her eyes fastened on mine. “He went to a bar?”

  “He was in the home of an Iberia Parish deputy sheriff. I think you know who I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t. He was going fishing. He’d been looking forward to it all week.”

  “He raped and sodomized Catin Segura. He also beat her severely. A third party came into the house and shot and killed him.”

  “My father isn’t a rapist. Why are you saying all this?” Her breath was coming too fast, she was like someone verging on hyperventilation, the color in her face changing.

  “Do you have any idea who the shooter was?” I asked.

  “I have to sit down. This is a trap of some kind. I know you, Dave. You were out to get my father.”

  “You don’t know me at all. I always believed in you. I thought you were stand-up and honorable. I believed you beat the male-chauvinist oil bums around here at their own game. I was always on your side, but you never saw that.”

  She was crying now, unashamedly, without anger or heat. There was a red dot on her chest where she had almost cut herself trying to snap her shirt. “Where is he?” she said.

  “At Iberia General. Catin is at Iberia General, too. She has two children. I promised to take them to see her. It will probably be years before Catin overcomes the damage that’s been done to her. Would it hurt if you talked to her?”

  “Me?”

  “Sometimes the Man Upstairs gives us a chance to turn things around in a way we never see coming. Do Catin and yourself a favor, Varina.”

  “You want me to go in there and talk to the woman who claims she was sodomized by my father?”

  “I saw her at the crime scene under an hour ago. What happened to that woman is not a claim.”

  I was not sure she was hearing me anymore. She looked as though she were drowning, her eye shadow running, her cheeks wet. She started walking toward the kitchen entrance of her house, trying to hold her back straight, almost twisting her ankle when she stepped in a depression. I caught up with her and put my arm around her shoulders. I thought she might resist, but she didn’t.

  “Listen to me. Cut loose from that fraudulent preacher, the Duprees, Lamont Woolsey, the rackets they’re involved in, the whole nefarious business. There’s still time to turn it around. Say ‘full throttle and fuck it’ and get this stuff out of your life forever.”

  Then she did one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen a bereaved person do. She went up the steps into her kitchen and took a half-gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and sat at the same table where she had gotten Clete Purcel loaded and began eating the ice cream with a spoon, scraping its frozen hardness into curlicues, as though she were the only person in the room.

  “Will you be all right if I leave?” I asked.

  She looked at me blankly. I repeated my question.

  “Look in the garage. You’ll see his spinning rod and ice chest and tackle box are gone. He was going to stop for shiners. He was going after sac-a-lait at Henderson Swamp.”

  I put my business card on the table. “I’m sorry for your loss, Varina.”

  She rested her forehead on her hand, her face wan. “He was poor and uneducated. Nobody ever helped him. All y’all did was condemn him. You should have helped him, Dave. You grew up poor. Your parents were illiterate, just like his. You could have been his friend and helped him, but you didn’t.”

  “Not everyone who grew up poor took out his grief on people of color. Your father wanted to do payback on me and probably took Catin as a second choice. That doesn’t make me feel too good, Varina,” I said. “Jesse victimized black women for decades. This time he got nailed. That’s the sum total of what happened. If you want to hear the truth, visit Iberia General and talk to Catin and cut the bullshit.”

  “How can you talk to me like this? I just lost my father.”

  “Your father dealt the play. Unless you accept that fact, you’ll carry his anger the rest of your life.”

  “I wouldn’t go in that woman’s hospital room at gunpoint.”

  “Good-bye, Varina,” I said.

  I went outside and closed the screen door softly behind me and walked to the cruiser. I thought I heard her crying, but I had decided that Varina Leboeuf could not be helped by me or probably anyone else. I was glad that I was alive and that I owned my own soul and that I didn’t have to drink. To others, these might seem like minor victories, but when you are in the presence of the genuinely afflicted, you realize that the smallest gifts can be greater in value than the conquest of nations.

  I WENT TO an A.A. meeting and to Mass that afternoon. Molly and I and Alafair had supper at home, and later, I drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. I knocked on the door, then realized he was down the slope, standing under the oaks by the bayou’s edge, fishing in an unlikely spot with a cane pole. I knew he had heard the sound of my pickup and that certainly he had heard me walk up behind him. But he continued to study his bobber floating on the edge of the current, the bronze glaze of the late sun flashing on the rippl
es. A mosquito was drawing blood from the back of his neck. I wiped it off his skin with my hand. “Got a reason for ignoring me?” I asked.

  “I saw the news about Leboeuf, and I know what’s coming,” he replied.

  “Where is Gretchen?”

  “I haven’t seen her today.”

  “I need to bring her in.”

  “Then do it.”

  “She got her mother loose from those guys in Florida?”

  “Yeah, I told you.”

  “How did she pull it off?”

  “How do you think?” he said.

  “She popped somebody?”

  “Gretchen hasn’t done anything that we haven’t. We’ve probably done worse. Remember those Colombians? How about the time we went after Jimmie Lee Boggs? How about the way we nailed Louis Buchalter? Tell me you didn’t enjoy being under a black flag.”

  I didn’t want to think about the years Clete and I had stayed high on booze and racetracks and the smell of cordite and, in my case, rage-induced blackouts that allowed me to do things I would never do in a rational state of mind. I did not want to say any more about his daughter; nonetheless, I did. “I think Gretchen may have been lying to you, Clete.”

  He started to turn around but lifted his bobber out of the water and threw it and his sinker and hook farther out in the current. There was only a tiny thread of worm on the hook. “Lying about what?” he said.

  “She claims she didn’t clip Waylon Grimes and Frankie Giacano. She told you she only clipped Bix Golightly, a guy who molested her and had it coming.”

  “He didn’t just molest her. He forced his dick into her mouth.”

  “I know that. But doesn’t it seem too convenient that Grimes and Frankie Gee get capped by somebody else? How about the abduction of her mother? Now the mother is free, and as soon as Gretchen is back in New Iberia, Jesse Leboeuf gets his eggs scrambled. In every situation, Gretchen is the victim.”

  “Right or wrong, she’s my daughter. Of all people, you should understand that.”

  “Alafair doesn’t do contract hits for the Mob.”