Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “A fresh slate also means all bets are off. For you, that’s not good, Mr. Woolsey,” Clete said.

  “Time for you to be gone. Unless I missed something. Are you thinking of sloppy seconds?”

  Clete huffed an obstruction out of his nostrils and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. “I didn’t want to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “I mean in front of the girl I didn’t want to do it. I feel bad about that. She probably feels sorry for you and doesn’t understand that you’re a piece of shit out of choice, not because your mother thought she’d given birth to a sack of Martha White’s self-rising flour. By the way, I want my shirt back.” He paused. “Look, my real problem is I can’t get anyone over here tonight to look in on the girl, so that means we have to work things out right now, here, in your driveway. Are you hearing me? I said take off my shirt. Don’t make me ask you again. I’m sorry I sicced Ozone Eddy and his broad on you. Nobody deserves that, not even you. We’re straight on that, right? I’m glad we have that out of the way. Now give me back my threads. That’s not up for debate. You’re starting to upset me, Mr. Woolsey.”

  “You’re a ridiculous man.”

  “I know,” Clete said. “What’s a fellow going to do?”

  Clete put his entire shoulder into his punch and sent Woolsey crashing into the side of his SUV. He thought it was over and hesitated and eased up when he swung again. But his estimation of Woolsey was wrong. Woolsey righted himself and slipped the second blow and caught Clete squarely on the jaw, snapping his head sideways. Then he hooked his arm behind Clete’s neck and drove his fist into Clete’s rib cage and heart again and again, his phallus pressed against Clete’s thigh, his smell rising into Clete’s face. “How do you like it, laddie? How does it feel to have your ass kicked by a freak?” he said.

  Clete brought his knee up into Woolsey’s groin and saw the man’s mouth open like that of a fish slammed on a hard surface. Clete hit him in the side of the head and managed to hook him once in the eye, but Woolsey wouldn’t go down. He lowered his head, turning his left shoulder forward as a classic open-style fighter would. He slammed his fist into Clete’s heart, then hit him in the same spot a second time, and glazed Clete’s head with a blow that almost tore his ear loose.

  Clete stepped back and set himself, crouching slightly, raising his left hand to absorb Woolsey’s next punch, then drove his fist straight into Woolsey’s mouth. Woolsey’s head hit the SUV, and he went down as though his ankles had been kicked from under him.

  But the engines that drove the rage and violence living inside Clete Purcel were not easily turned off. Like all of his addictions—weed and pills and booze and gambling and Cadillac convertibles and fried food and rock and roll and Dixieland music and women who moaned under his weight as though it only added to their pleasure—bloodlust and the wild release of confronting the monsters that waited for him nightly in his dreams were a drug that he could never have too much of.

  He stomped Woolsey in the head, then grabbed the outside mirror and the roof of the SUV for support and brought the flat of his shoe down on Woolsey’s face, over and over, hammering Woolsey’s head into the door, reshaping his nose and mouth and eyes, whipping strings of blood across the side of the SUV. At that moment Clete genuinely believed that a helicopter was hovering immediately overhead, flattening all the flowers and banana fronds and elephant ears and caladiums and windmill palms that grew in Woolsey’s yard.

  Then the flame that had consumed him shrank into a bright red dot in the center of his mind and died. For just a moment he saw nothing but darkness around him. The thropping sounds of the helicopter blades rose into the sky and disappeared. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, like a shard of glass working its way through the tissue around his lungs. His hands throbbed and seemed too large for his wrists, but he had no awareness at all of his surroundings. He blinked several times and saw Woolsey lying at his feet and the girl standing on the gallery, her hands trembling with shock.

  Clete bent over and tore his shirt from Woolsey’s torso and threw it in the flower bed. “Okay,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “We got that issue off the table. Next time I tell you to take off my threads, take off my threads. That shows a definite lack of class and a definite lack of mutual respect.”

  “Oh, sir, why have you done this?” the Vietnamese girl said.

  “It’s a problem I’ve got, Maelee. I don’t like guys like Woolsey pretending that they’re Americans and they speak for the rest of us. You’re a nice kid, and you don’t have to put up with the Michelin man here. Some nice ladies are coming to see you tomorrow. In the meantime, stay away from Woolsey. This is my business card. If he lays a hand on you or tries to make you do something you don’t want to, you call that cell phone number.”

  He started up the Caddy and headed down St. Charles, coughing blood on the steering column and dashboard, the streetcar clanging down the neutral ground toward him, the conductor’s eyes cavernous, his face skeletal under the lacquered-billed black cap he wore.

  MORNING HAD NEVER been a good time for Gretchen Horowitz. Others on the South Florida coast might wake to birdsong and tropical breezes and sunlight on blue-green water, but for her, the dawn brought with it only one emotion—a pervasive sense of loss and personal guilt and an abiding conviction that there was something obscene and dirty about her physical person. As a little girl, she had bathed herself from head to foot with a washcloth until the water in the tub turned cold and gray, but she had never felt clean. Afterward, she had scrubbed the tub on her knees, rinsing the porcelain surface repeatedly, in fear that the germs she had washed off her skin would be there the next time she bathed.

  In middle school she learned there were ways to deal with problems that no educational psychologist would go near. Right after homeroom, the first stall in the girls’ bathroom was the place to be, provided you needed a few pharmaceutical friends such as rainbows, black beauties, Owsley purple, or a little sunshine that glowed inside your head all day, no matter what kind of weather the rest of the world was experiencing. The school day slipped by like a vague annoyance, white noise on the edge of a drowsy interlude before the bell sounded at three o’clock. Her weekday afternoons and evenings took care of themselves and did not require that she think about any issue outside of her head. She sacked groceries at a Winn-Dixie or sat in a movie theater by herself or hung out at the public library or smoked a little dope with a high school football player in the back of his car. When it was dark, she got under the covers in her bedroom and tried not to hear the sounds her mother made when she feigned climax with her johns. It was easy.

  But sunrise was a curse, a condition, not a planetary event. The feeling that came with it could not be described as pain, because it had no sharp edges. In fact, the feeling she woke with was one she somehow associated with theft. As the sun broke on the horizon, her sensory system remained trapped inside her sleep, and her skin felt bloodless and dead when she touched it. Her soul, if she had one, seemed made of cardboard. As the darkness faded from her room, she was able to see her school clothes on their hangers in her closet and the absence of anything of value on her dresser and the hairbrush on her nightstand that always looked unclean. She waited for the daylight to burn away the shadows in the room and, in some fashion, redefine its contents. Instead, she knew the shadows were her friends, and the day ahead held nothing for her except glaring surfaces that made her think of glass from a broken mirror. She also knew she was unloved for a reason, and the reason was simple: The girl named Gretchen Horowitz was invisible, and not one person on earth, including the high school football player who placed her hand down there whenever they were alone, had any idea who she was, or where she came from, or what her mother did for a living, or what had been done to her by men even cops were afraid of.

  Gretchen Horowitz owned the name on her birth certificate and nothing else. Her childhood was not a childhood and did not have a category. Her umbilical connecti
on to the rest of the human family had been severed and tied off a long time ago. Reverie was a fool’s pursuit and filled with faces she would change into howling Greek masks if she ever saw them again. And morning was a bad time that passed if you didn’t let it get its hooks into you.

  Tuesday at nine A.M. she drove to Lafayette and bought a video camera, a boom pole, a lighting kit, and a Steadicam. Then she bought a take-out lunch at Fat Albert’s and drove into the park by the university to eat. There was a muddy pond with ducks in the park, and swing sets and seesaws and a ball diamond and picnic shelters, and dry coulees among the live oaks where children played in the leaves. It was 11:14 A.M. when she sat down at a plank table in the sunshine and began eating her lunch. In forty-six minutes the morning would be over, and she would step over a line into the afternoon, and that would be that.

  At first she paid little attention to the family who had walked from the street onto the park grounds and sat down at a table by the pond. The man had a dark tan and black hair and wore denims and work shoes. His wife had the round face of a peasant and wore a cheap blue scarf on her head and carried a calico cat on her shoulder, a harness and leash on its neck. She had no makeup on her face and seemed to be seeing the park for the first time. It was the child who caught Gretchen’s eye. His hair was blond, his smile unrelenting, his cheeks blooming with color. When he tried to walk, he kept falling down, laughing at his own ineptitude, then getting up and toddling down the slope and falling again.

  The family had brought their lunch in a paper bag. The woman placed a jar of sun tea and three peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on a piece of newspaper and cut two of them in half and quartered the third for the child. She had smeared jelly on her hands, and she tried to wipe them clean on the paper bag, then gave it up and said something to her husband. She walked through the live oaks toward the restroom, the leaves gusting out of the coulee in the shade. The husband yawned and rested his head on one hand and stared vacantly at the ball diamond, his eyes half lidded. In under a minute, he had put his head down and was asleep. Gretchen looked at her watch. It was eight minutes until noon.

  She finished her lunch and looked at the university campus on the far side of the curving two-lane road that separated it from the park. A marching band was thundering out a martial song on a practice field. The sun was as bright as a yellow diamond through the oak trees, and its refraction inside the branches almost blinded her. She looked back at the table by the pond where the man and his little boy had been sitting. The child was gone.

  She stood up from the bench. The mother had not returned from the restroom, and the husband was sound asleep. The wind was cold and blowing hard, the surface of the pond wimpling in the sunlight like needles that could penetrate the eye. The ducks were in the reeds along the bank, engorged with bread scraps, their feathers ruffling, surrounded by a floating necklace of froth and Styrofoam containers and paper cups. Beyond the plank table where the husband was sitting, Gretchen saw the little boy toddling down the slope toward the water’s edge. She began running just as he fell.

  He tumbled end over end down the embankment, his zippered one-piece outfit caking with mud, his face filled with shock. Gretchen charged down the embankment after him, trying to keep her balance, her feet slipping from under her. She was running so fast, she splashed into the water ahead of the little boy and grabbed him up in both arms before he could roll into the shallows. She hefted him against her shoulder and walked back up the embankment and looked into the horrified face of the mother and the blank stare of the father, who had just lifted up his head from the table.

  “Oh my God, I fell asleep,” he said. He looked at his wife. “I fell asleep. I ain’t meant to.”

  The woman took the child from Gretchen’s arms. “T’ank you,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” Gretchen said.

  The mother bounced the baby up and down on her chest. “Come play wit’ your cat,” she said. “Don’t be crying, you. You’re okay now. But you was bad. You shouldn’t be walking down by the water, no.”

  “He wasn’t bad,” Gretchen said.

  “He knows what I mean. It’s bad for him to be by the water ’cause it can hurt him,” the mother said. “That’s what I was saying to him. His father ain’t had no sleep.”

  “Why not?” Gretchen said.

  “’Cause he works at a boatyard and he ain’t had no work since the oil spill,” the mother said. “He cain’t sleep at night. He worries all the time. He’s that way ’cause he’s a good man.”

  “Drink some tea, you,” the husband said. There were carpenter’s bruises on his nails, purple and deep, all the way to the cuticle. “If it ain’t been for you, I cain’t t’ink about what might have happened.”

  “It didn’t. That’s what counts,” Gretchen said.

  He looked into space, his eyes hollow, as though he were watching an event for which there would have been no form of forgiveness if he had let it occur. “How long I been asleep?”

  “Not long. Don’t blame yourself,” Gretchen said. “Your little boy is fine.”

  “He’s our only child. My wife cain’t have no more kids.”

  “Where’s your car?” Gretchen said.

  “We sold it. We rode the bus here,” the mother said.

  “Tell you what,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to take your picture on my video camera. Will you let me do that? I make movies.”

  The mother gave her a coy look, as though someone were playing a joke on her. “Like in Hollywood or somet’ing?”

  “I’m making a documentary on the 1940s musical revue in New Iberia.” She could tell neither of them understood what she was talking about. “Let me get my camera. After you eat, I’ll drive you home.”

  “You ain’t got to do that,” the man said.

  It was two minutes to noon. The feelings Gretchen had had all morning were gone, but their disappearance was not related to the time of day. She got her video camera from the pickup and focused the lens on the man and woman and child, then showed them the footage. “See? You all are a wonderful family,” she said.

  “I ain’t dressed to be on that,” the woman said.

  “I think all of you are beautiful,” Gretchen said.

  The man and woman seemed embarrassed and looked at each other. “T’ank you for what you done,” the man said.

  There was an emotion inside Gretchen that she could not understand. She did not know the name of the family, yet she did not want to ask it. “That’s such a cute little boy,” she said.

  “Yeah, he’s gonna be somet’ing special one day, you gonna see,” the mother said.

  “I bet he will,” Gretchen said.

  “You’re a nice lady,” the woman said.

  And so are you, Gretchen thought, and your husband is a nice man, and your little boy has the loveliest smile on earth.

  These are the things she thought, but she did not say them, nor did she steal the man and woman’s dignity by trying to give them money when she drove them to their house in a poor section of Lafayette. Inside herself, she felt cleansed in a way she could not explain, and worries about the sunrise and fear of her own memories seemed like silly pursuits that weren’t worth two seconds of her time.

  Or was she fooling herself?

  She wasn’t sure. But something had dramatically changed in her life. She just didn’t know why.

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON DANA Magelli called me at the department. “Where’s Purcel?” he asked.

  “Haven’t seen him. What’s up?” I replied.

  “Last night somebody kicked the shit out of a guy named Lamont Woolsey. Know him?”

  “An albino who talks like Elmer Fudd?”

  “He’s missing a few teeth, so it’s hard to say who he sounds like. His face looks like a car tire ran over it. He says he doesn’t know who attacked him or why. The neighbors say a guy driving a Caddy convertible did it. A guy wearing a short-brim hat. Sound like anybody you know?”

  “If I underst
and you correctly, the guy isn’t filing charges.”

  “That doesn’t mean Purcel can come into New Orleans and wipe his feet on people’s faces any time he wants.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Yeah, somebody snatched Ozone Eddy Mouton and a female employee out of Eddy’s tanning parlor. Guess what. The people who saw Purcel stomp the albino’s face say a guy with orange hair was in the albino’s driveway earlier. Sound like coincidence to you?”

  “Woolsey is mixed up in at least one homicide, Dana. Run him and you’ll find a blank. How many high rollers can stay off the computer?”

  “You listen to me, Dave. If Ozone Eddy and his employee are found in a swamp, Clete Purcel is going to jail as a material witness, and this time I’ll make sure he stays there. By the way, when you see Purcel, tell him the Vietnamese girl was traumatized by what she saw.”

  “What Vietnamese girl?”

  “She works for Woolsey. Or did. Some Quaker women picked her up this morning. Her name is Maelee something.”

  “That was the name of Clete’s girlfriend in Vietnam.”

  “I’m not making the connection,” Dana said.

  “She was a Eurasian girl who lived on a sampan. Clete wanted to marry her. The VC murdered her.”

  There was silence on the phone.

  “You there?” I said.

  “I didn’t know that about Purcel. You think Woolsey is hooked up with intelligence people?”

  “I think he has connections to corporations of some kind,” I said. “Maybe a drilling company. Maybe all of this is related to the oil blowout.”

  “Keep Purcel out of the city. I’ll see what I can find out about Woolsey on this end. Why would a meltdown like Ozone Eddy be in Woolsey’s driveway?”

  I didn’t have an answer. Dana was a good man who followed the rules and believed in a broken system and probably would never be recognized for the heroic and steadfast and decent police officer that he was. But dwelling on Dana’s decency would not help me with another problem I had been confronted with. Helen Soileau had just returned from Shreveport, where she had stayed almost constantly by the bedside of her half sister. I opened her office door and leaned inside. “It’s good to have you back,” I said.