Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “We’ve got one issue here, Cletus: to find Alafair and Gretchen and bring them home. Come on, podna, lock and load. Let go of all this other stuff.”

  His pupils were dilated, his skin stretched tight on his face. He coughed into his palm and wiped it inside his pocket. He pulled his .38 snub from his shoulder holster and let it hang loosely from his right hand. Through a curtain, we could see the orchestra kicking into overdrive. The pianist’s fingers were dancing on the keys, the double-pedal beat of two bass drums building into a throaty roar the way Louie Bellson used to do it, the sound of the saxophones slowly rising in volume like a living presence, starting to compete and blend in with the stenciled clarity of Freddie Slack’s piano score, all of it in four-four time.

  “I’m going to kill every one of them, Streak,” Clete said.

  I started to argue with him, but I didn’t. Though bloodlust and fear and a black flag had served us poorly in the past, sometimes the situation had not been of our choosing, and we’d had little recourse. Ethics aside, when it’s over, you’re always left with the same emotion: You’re glad you’re alive and the others are dead instead of you.

  At the end of the hallway was a narrow space through which I could see people dancing in a cleared area below the stage. All of them were having a good time. A young dark-haired woman in a sequined evening dress was dancing with her eyes tightly shut, her arms pumped, the back of her neck glazed with sweat. She was drunk and her bra strap was showing, and her lipsticked mouth was partially open in an almost lascivious fashion. All of her energies seemed concentrated on a solitary thought, as though she were reaching an orgasmic peak deep inside herself, totally indifferent to her surroundings. The trombone players rose to their feet, the blare of their horns shaking the glass in the windows. I didn’t care about the band or the secret erotic pleasure of others. I wanted my daughter back.

  Clete Purcel was staring at his left palm. In it was a bright scarlet star that looked like it had been freshly painted on his skin.

  I thought he had coughed the blood into his hand. Then I saw him raise his eyes to the plank ceiling above our heads. I slipped my army-issue 1911-model .45 automatic from the leather holster clipped onto my belt. I heard the members of the orchestra pause in the middle of the melody and shout in unison:

  When he jams with the bass and guitar,

  They all holler, “Beat me Daddy, eight to the bar.”

  A two-tiered staircase made of rough-hewn lumber led through an opening in the ceiling. I went ahead of Clete, my .45 held upward. A line of blood drops preceded me up the steps, like red dimes that had spilled from a hole in someone’s trouser pocket. I walked up the last three steps, my left hand on the rail, peering into the darkness. I slipped a penlight out of my coat pocket and clicked it on. The room was stacked with storage boxes and paint cans and Christmas decorations and papier-mâché figures used in the Mardi Gras parade. I shone the light along the boards toward the rear of the room and saw a pool of blood next to a pile of boxes that must have filled a fifteen-inch radius. On the edge of the blood, I saw the gleam of a gold chain and a tiny stamped religious icon.

  Clete was standing behind me and had not seen the blood nor its thickness and amount. “Cover my back,” I said.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Stay on my back, Clete. Please,” I said.

  I stepped forward and shone the light directly on the blood and the gold chain and Star of David. Then I went past the boxes and raised the penlight and moved its small beam across the face of Julie Ardoin. Her throat had been cut and her nails and nose broken; her forearms were sliced with defensive wounds. She had bled out, and her face was white and stark and had the surprised and violated expression that the dead forever stamp on the inside of our eyelids.

  I heard Clete’s weight on the boards behind me. He still had not seen the body. “That’s Gretchen’s chain and medal,” he said.

  “It’s not Gretchen, Clete.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “It’s Julie. Call it in. Don’t look.”

  He almost knocked me down getting to the body. Downstairs, the orchestra had gone into a thunderous drum and horn and saxophone finale that deafened the ears and left the audience screaming for more.

  I CALLED IN the 911 myself and took Clete by the arm and walked him away from the enclosure of boxes where Julie had probably died. I could find no electric switches on the walls, but there was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and when I twisted the bulb, it lit the room in all its starkness. Clete was breathing deep down in his chest, opening and closing his eyes. “I’m going to take Gretchen’s Star of David,” he said.

  “Don’t touch it. There might be prints on it.”

  “No, the chain isn’t broken. She dropped it there for me to find,” he said.

  I didn’t argue. I had seen few instances in my long relationship with Clete Purcel when the world had gotten the upper hand on him and been able to do him serious injury. In this instance, he looked devastated, not only by the murder of his lover but by the simultaneous abduction of his daughter, both of which I was sure he was blaming on himself.

  I looked around and tried to reconstruct what had happened. The loft we were standing in had a second set of steps by the far wall, and it led down to a second side exit. The loft had worked as a kind of bridge for the abductors. They had forced Alafair and Gretchen and Julie into the first-floor hallway, up the steps, down the other side, and out the door and into the park, where Alafair and Gretchen were likely taken away in a vehicle.

  I said all these things to Clete, but I wasn’t sure he was hearing me. “Come on, Cletus. We’ve got to get our girls back.”

  “Julie fought with them, didn’t she?” he said. “Downstairs in the hallway, she fought back. Julie didn’t take shit off anybody. She told them to fuck off, and they broke her nose and brought her up here and cut her throat.”

  “That’s the way I would read it.”

  “It’s Pierre Dupree.”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “He got to Gretchen. She never had a boyfriend, and he got to her. He wants payback, Dave. Julie was in the way. Dupree has got long-range plans for Gretchen, that son of a bitch.”

  “Maybe, but we’re not sure of any of this,” I said.

  “He’s got plans for Alafair, too. Don’t lie to yourself.”

  “I’m not. What I’m saying is we have to think.”

  “They couldn’t nail us at the gig on the bayou, so they’re going to kill our kids,” he said.

  “You’re losing it, Clete. The guys who tried to clip us behind my house were cremated. We’re dealing with an entirely separate bunch.”

  “The hell we are,” he said. “If there’re two drunks on a ship, they’ll find each other. If there’re two scum-sucking bottom-feeders in the state of Louisiana, they’ll be in the same pond in twenty-four hours.”

  “Bobby Joe Guidry said the two gumballs were talking about an amphibian.”

  “Forget all the international intrigue and stuff about mysterious islands. These bastards are homegrown.”

  “Yeah, but where does that leave us?”

  “I’ll let you know,” he said, taking off his coat. He knelt down and placed it over Julie Ardoin’s face. When he stood up, there was a tear in the corner of his eye. He coughed before he spoke again. “We pick up Pierre Dupree, but this time out, it doesn’t make the jail.”

  “What if we’re wrong?”

  “You want to wait around here for Helen and the coroner? Wake up. Nobody wants to screw with St. Mary Parish. There’s an old man in that plantation house who probably stuck whole families in ovens. Blue Melton floated up on the beach in a block of ice, and nobody could care less. You know how many unsolved female homicides there are in this state? You know what Alafair and Gretchen might be going through while we’re playing pocket pool up here?”

  My head felt like a piece of ceramic about to crack. “You’re sure it’s
Dupree?”

  “Take it to the bank.”

  “We’re leaving something out. I just can’t put my hand on it.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “I told you, I don’t know. It’s something about a song. I can’t remember.”

  “Bad time for a memory blackout,” he said.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs behind me. Clete and I turned around. Varina Leboeuf had climbed the steps and was standing halfway inside the loft, as though partially disembodied, her hair sparking with confetti, her face as heartbreakingly beautiful as it was when she was a young girl. “What are you two doing up here?” she said.

  “What are you doing here?” Clete replied.

  “I was talking to the ice-cream man. He told me y’all were looking for Alafair.”

  “Why would you be talking to the ice-cream man about Alafair?” I asked.

  “Pierre and his father own part of the frozen-food company. They deliver to offshore rigs. What’s going on?” When we didn’t answer, she glanced at the loft floor. “Where’d this blood come from?”

  “There’s a lot more of it behind those boxes,” Clete said. “It belongs to Julie Ardoin. Take a look-see if you like.”

  Her face seemed to wrinkle like a flower exposed to heat. “She’s been murdered?”

  “Her throat was cut almost to the spine,” Clete said.

  Varina pressed her hand to her mouth. I thought she was going to fall backward to the floor below. Clete reached down and helped her the rest of the way up the steps. She looked steadily into his eyes, as though reaching back into an intimate moment they shared. “I wish you’d killed him,” she said.

  “Killed who?” Clete asked.

  “Lamont Woolsey. I wish you would kill Amidee Broussard, too.”

  “What do Broussard and Woolsey have to do with this?” I said.

  “They’re evil. They use young girls. They deceive people with religion. It’s white slavery. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? Is Julie behind those boxes?”

  “She told me she hardly knew you,” I said.

  “That’s not true. I want to see Julie.”

  “This is a crime scene. You need to leave, Varina,” I said.

  “Why were you down in the hallway?” Clete said.

  “I sponsored the western band. I was going to write them a check,” she said.

  “Where’s Pierre?” he asked.

  “I have no idea. We’ve settled all our business affairs. I hope I never see him again,” she replied. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  She turned and descended the steps, her small hand tightly gripping the rail, the hem of her prairie skirt bouncing on her calves. Clete stared into my face. “Can you read that broad?” he said.

  “Not in a thousand years,” I replied.

  I TOLD MOLLY what had happened and asked her to go home and wait by the phone. It was a foolish request. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Where is Pierre Dupree?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t find him,” I said.

  “Why would they want Alafair?” she said.

  “They were after Gretchen. They only took Alafair because the two of them were together.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” she said.

  “Clete thinks this is all about payback. I don’t agree. I think Gretchen knows too much, and some people in Florida and probably here want her off the board.”

  We were standing at the rear of the audience. The swing orchestra had been called back for an encore and was playing “The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.”

  “Dave, this isn’t happening,” Molly said.

  “But it is. They’ve got my little girl.”

  “She’s my ‘little girl,’ too. I didn’t believe you before. I wish I had,” she said.

  “Believe what?”

  “That you were dealing with something that’s diabolic. I wish I had believed every crazy story you told me.”

  “Have you seen Varina Leboeuf in the last few minutes?” I asked.

  “She was going out the front door. She stopped and put her hand on me and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I didn’t know what she meant. You think she’s involved?”

  “I gave up trying to figure Varina out. She reminds me of Tee Jolie in some ways. I’d like to believe in her, but faith has its limits.”

  “Forgive me for saying this, but I hate both those women,” Molly said.

  Up on the stage, three female singers imitating the Andrews Sisters went into the chorus of a song that, with the passage of time, had somehow made the years between 1941 and 1945 a golden era rather than one that had cost the lives of thirty million people.

  Clete and I waited outside in the cold while at least eight emergency vehicles began to turn in to both the north and south entrances of the park and thread their way through the oak trees. Clete wore no coat and was starting to shiver. I used my cell phone to call the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department and ask that a cruiser be sent to the Croix du Sud Plantation.

  “What are we supposed to be looking for?” the deputy asked.

  “We have a homicide and a double abduction in New Iberia,” I replied. “I want y’all to find out who’s home and who isn’t at the Dupree place.”

  “What would the Dupree family know about an abduction?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s why we’re requesting your assistance.”

  “You’d better talk with the sheriff about this.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Duck hunting at Pecan Island. Problem is, I’m not supposed to give out his private number.”

  “What does it take to get you to do your job?” I said.

  I didn’t get to hear his reply. Clete Purcel tore the phone out of my hand. “You listen, you little piece of shit,” he said. “You go out to Croix du Sud and knock on their door and look in their windows and crawl under the house if you have to. Then you call us back and tell us what you find. If you don’t, I’m going to come over there and kick a telephone pole up your ass.”

  Clete closed the phone and handed it back to me. He looked at my expression. “What?” he said.

  “We need these guys on our side. I thought I was making some progress,” I replied.

  “With St. Mary Parish? Progress for those guys is acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation,” he said.

  “Bring your car around. You’re going to catch pneumonia.”

  “You coming?”

  “You’ve got to give me a minute, Clete.”

  He looked at his watch. “We need to do this together, Streak. Don’t depend on the locals. We’re the guys with the vested interest. We take Pierre Dupree into Henderson Swamp.”

  His skin was prickled, and he was jiggling up and down, but it wasn’t because of the cold. His eyes were wider than they should have been, his breath sour. He rotated his head on his neck and straightened his back, his shoulder rig tightening across his chest. When I touched his back, I could feel his body heat through the fabric.

  An ambulance pulled to the rear of the Sugar Cane Festival Building, and two paramedics got out and removed a gurney from the back. Three cruisers pulled in behind the ambulance, the light from their flashers bouncing off the buildings and the oak trees. I looked for Helen Soileau but didn’t see her. A moment later, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I was surprised. It was the deputy Clete had threatened. “Robicheaux?” he said.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “I had a deputy do a check at the Dupree place. Nobody is home. The only light on is the porch light. The deputy walked around back. Nobody is home.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “What did I just say?”

  “One of the abduction victims is my daughter. If I don’t get her back, I’m going to be looking you up,” I said. I broke the connection. I looked at Clete. “That was St. Mary Parish. Nobody is home at Croix du Sud.”

  “I don’t buy it,” he said.

  “Because you don’t want to,”
I said.

  “No, I scoped the place out. There was a guard standing in back by the gazebo. I took my eyes off him for two seconds and he was gone, and I mean gone. There was no way he could have entered the house or walked around the side without me seeing him. He never moved ten feet from that gazebo.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “There’s got to be a subterranean entrance somewhere close to the gazebo. You ever hear stories about tunnels or basements in that place?”

  “No. But the house is over a hundred and fifty years old. There’s no telling what’s under it.”

  “I’m going out there. You coming or not?”

  I knew what would happen if I stayed at the Sugar Cane Festival Building. I would have to take charge of the crime scene and wait on the coroner and coordinate with Helen and make sure all the evidence was bagged and tagged and the scene secured and the body removed and taken to Iberia General. Then I would have to send someone, if not myself, to notify Julie’s family. In the meantime, word would leak out that a woman had been murdered in the building, and the next problem on my hands would be crowd control. While all this was taking place, my daughter would be in the hands of men who had the mercy of centipedes.

  A deputy got out of a cruiser holding a video camera and a Steadicam. “I found these by the entrance to the park, Dave. They’d already been run over. Does this have anything to do with Alafair being kidnapped?”

  “Give them to the tech. We need any prints we can lift off them,” I said. Clete was already walking toward his Caddy. “Wait up!” I said.

  WE HEADED OUT of the park and, in some ways, I suspected, out of my career in law enforcement. At a certain age, you accept that nothing is forever, not even the wintry season that seems to define your life. I began dialing Molly’s cell number to tell her where I was.

  “Don’t tell anyone where we’re going, Dave,” Clete said.

  “That makes no sense.”