Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “If nobody is at the Dupree place, if I’m all wrong, we come straight back. But if we can get our hands on Pierre or Alexis or any of their hired help, we can get the information we need. We can’t blow this one, partner. Rules are for people who want to feel good about themselves in the morning. They’re not for people who want to save their children’s lives.”

  Clete had turned on the heater but was still shivering. I took off my coat and put it over his shoulders.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “I’ve got a corduroy shirt on. I don’t need it,” I replied.

  “I’m not cold. My malaria kicks into gear sometimes.”

  “You’ve got to go to the VA.”

  He coughed deep in his chest and tried to pretend he was clearing his throat. “I’ve got to tell you something, big mon. I haven’t done right by you. Because of me, you protected Gretchen and have probably gotten yourself in a lot of trouble with Helen.”

  “I’m always in trouble with Helen.”

  “When this is over, we’re all going down to the Keys. I’m going to pay for everything. It’s going to be like it used to be. We’re going to fish for marlin in blue water and fill up the locker with kingfish and dive for lobsters on Seven Mile Reef.”

  “You bet,” I said.

  He was looking straight ahead, the soft green glow of the dashboard lighting his face, hollowing his eyes. “I got this sick feeling in my stomach,” he said. “Like everything is ending. Like I’ve been full of shit for a lifetime but I never owned up to it.”

  “Don’t say that about yourself.”

  “Gretchen paid the tab for my mistakes. When you steal a little girl’s childhood, you can never give it back.”

  “You’ve tried to square it for years. Don’t blame yourself, Clete.”

  “I’ve got an AK in the trunk.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s modified, but it’s untraceable. No matter what else happens, the guys who killed Julie are going down.”

  “Can’t let you do that, podna.”

  “You know I’m right. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

  I kept my eyes straight ahead. We were speeding down the two-lane toward Jeanerette, the bayou chained with fog under the moon, the Angus in the fields clustered under the live oaks. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he clicked on the FM station from the university in Lafayette. The DJ was playing “Faded Love” by Bob Wills. I stared at the radio, then at Clete.

  “You said Gretchen was whistling ‘The San Antonio Rose’ the night you saw her clip Bix Golightly?”

  “Do you have to put it that way?”

  “Does it make sense that a girl from Miami would be whistling a Western tune written seventy years ago?”

  “I asked her about that. She said she heard it on a car radio, and it stuck in her head.” He was looking at the road while he spoke.

  “She heard it on a car radio in Algiers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And she didn’t do the hit on Waylon Grimes?”

  “No.”

  “Was the car playing the song not far from Grimes’s place?”

  He looked at me. “I’m not sure. I didn’t ask.”

  “Varina Leboeuf is big on Western art and music and clothes. She collects Indian artifacts from the Southwest.”

  “You think she did the hit on Grimes? Maybe on Frankie Gee at the bus depot in Baton Rouge?”

  “I don’t know. On this one, I’ve been in the dark since Jump Street, Clete.”

  “Join the club,” he said. We came around a bend covered with shadows; he clicked on his brights. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “What’d you think I was going to do? Run her down?”

  “It’s a thought,” I replied.

  Parked by the side of the road was a Saab convertible, its frame mashed down on a collapsed rear tire. Varina Leboeuf stood next to the Saab, drenched in the glare of Clete’s high beams. Behind her, inside a stand of persimmon trees and water oaks, was a cemetery filled with whitewashed brick and stucco crypts, most of them tilted at odd angles, sinking into the softness of the mold and lichen and wet soil that seldom saw daylight.

  I got out on the passenger side. The headlights were in her eyes, and it was obvious she could barely make out who I was. “You sure have bad luck with tires,” I said.

  “Yeah, and I told you why. My ex-husband has tried to screw me out of every dime he could,” she said.

  “Want a lift?”

  “No, I was just about to call AAA,” she replied.

  “The AAA service in this area not only sucks, it’s nonexistent,” I said. “You’re headed for Croix du Sud?”

  “No, I’m not. If it’s any of your business, I’m supposed to meet friends at the Yellow Bowl for supper. I wanted to cancel, but I couldn’t reach them.”

  “Hop in,” I said.

  “I don’t like the way you’ve treated me, Dave.”

  “Get in front, Varina,” Clete said. “Dave can ride in back. It’s time for a truce, isn’t it?”

  While I got in back and Varina got in front, Clete stepped outside the Caddy and removed my coat from his shoulders and tossed it to me.

  “You need this,” I said.

  “I’ve got a blanket in the trunk,” he replied.

  CLETE POPPED THE hatch on the trunk, blocking the view of anyone looking through the back window. He strapped his Marine Corps KA-BAR knife high up on his left calf and pulled his trouser leg over it. Then he lifted a blanket out of the trunk and draped it over his shoulders and picked up his pistol-grip AK-47 and held it in his left hand and covered it with the blanket. When he got back in the car, he tightened the blanket around him and looked into Varina’s face and smiled. “We want to talk to Pierre. Want to help us with that?” he said.

  “No,” she said, staring wanly through the windshield.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I don’t know or care where he is.”

  “Think Pierre is capable of kidnapping or hurting our daughters?” Clete said.

  “He’s a sick man, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “How about his grandfather? Does he qualify as sick?” Clete said.

  “Why ask me?”

  “Because you lived with him. Is Alexis Dupree a sadist?” Clete asked.

  “I’m really tired, Clete,” she said. “I’m sorry about what’s happened. I wish I never met the Dupree family. I don’t know what else to say.”

  Clete dropped the gearshift into drive. “You’re quite a gal,” he said.

  She stared uncertainly at the side of his face as the Caddy inched off the road’s shoulder onto the asphalt, gravel clicking under the tires.

  WE PASSED ALICE Plantation and entered a tunnel of magnificent live oaks that arched over the road, then passed another Greek-columned antebellum home and clanked across the drawbridge and passed a community of trailers leaking rust into the ground and entered the village of Jeanerette, Louisiana, where approximately one-third of the population eked out an existence below the poverty line.

  “How’d you like living over here, Varina?” Clete said.

  “I hated it,” she replied.

  “Where do you want out?”

  “Every place is closed,” she said. “At eight o’clock the whole town turns into a mausoleum. A 747 could crash on it and nobody would notice.”

  “We don’t have time to take you to the Yellow Bowl,” he said.

  “I’ll go with you to Pierre’s and borrow one of his cars.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “Tell me something—does Pierre have a basement in that dump?”

  “There’s a dank hole down there. It has water in it most of the time. Why?”

  “No reason,” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. A guy who owned it in the nineteenth century was a business partner of the guy who created Angola pen. Some
thing like two thousand convicts died when this guy rented them out as slave labor. It’s the kind of history that makes you proud to be an American.”

  “Yes, I know all about that,” she said. “But I’m a bit tired of feeling guilty about things I didn’t do. Maybe people make their own beds.”

  “I wish I had that kind of clarity,” he said. “It must be great.”

  I could see the color climbing in the back of Varina’s neck. As though she could read my thoughts, she turned and looked at me. “Are you just going to sit there?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Would you be gentleman enough to tell your fat fuck of a friend to shut up?”

  I don’t know if the word “entitlement” would apply to Varina’s behavior, or “arrogance” and “narcissism.” She possessed the same surreal mentality common among higher-class women in southern society of years ago. The self-centeredness and disconnection from reality were so egregious that it often made you wonder if you had the problem, not the spoiled bunch who believed the sun rose and set upon their anointed brows. But Varina did not come from that class of people. Her father had been from the red-clay country of North Louisiana and knew the world of sweat and cotton poison and trysts with black girls taken from the field into a barn. Maybe these contradictions were the source of the mystery that lived in her eyes and hovered around her mouth. Most men wish to be beguiled. And nobody was better at it than Varina. No matter how all this played out, I believed she would remain glamorous and seductive, beautiful and unknowable, to the very end.

  When I didn’t answer her question, she looked back at the road, then out the side window. Once again, she seemed wan and distant, and I wondered if her statement about people making their own beds was intended to apply to herself rather than to others.

  We drove through the far end of town, the lawns stiff with frost, the houses dark, the moon shining on a backdrop of post-harvest sugarcane fields that were frozen and spiked with stubble and splintered cane. Clete depressed his turn indicator as we approached Croix du Sud. As we turned in to the driveway and passed through the open gates, I could see the blinking red reflection of the left rear light dancing on the stone pillars at the entrance and the deep green waxy leaves of the camellia bushes planted along the driveway, perhaps like a warning of things to come.

  The house was dark except for the light on the porch.

  “Pull around back,” Varina said.

  “Why?” Clete said.

  “Pierre leaves a key above the door. I’m going to take one of his cars.”

  I felt my cell phone throb against my thigh. I opened it and looked at the caller ID. Clete drove past the carriage house and stopped at the edge of the concrete parking pad, the headlights burrowing through the darkness onto the bayou’s surface, where a single-engine pontoon plane was moored inside the fog. The call was from Catin Segura, the female deputy Jesse Leboeuf had beaten and raped. “I lied to you, Dave,” she said.

  CLETE GOT OUT of the Caddy, letting the blanket slip off his shoulders onto the edge of the seat.

  “Lied about what?” I said into the phone.

  “I told you Jesse Leboeuf said something when he was dying in my bathtub,” Catin replied. “I told you I didn’t know what he said because I don’t talk French.”

  “You mean you do speak French?”

  “No, not at all. But I wrote down what the words sounded like.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  Varina had also gotten out of the car and was walking around to the other side, where Clete was standing with one hand on the half-closed driver’s door, his face as cold-looking in the wind as a bluish-white balloon.

  “Are you there?” Catin said.

  “Yeah, go ahead,” I said, getting out of the car.

  “I thought what Leboeuf said might give away who the shooter was. I didn’t want to give up the person who saved my life.”

  “Don’t worry about it. What are the words?”

  “Jam, mon, tea, orange.”

  “Say them again?”

  She repeated them slowly. Though she had written down the words phonetically, if I was correct in my perception, they weren’t far off the mark. The words Jesse had probably spoken were “J’aime mon ’tit ange.”

  “What do the words mean, Dave?”

  “‘I love my little angel,’” I replied.

  The moon broke from behind the clouds, and suddenly the lawn was printed with shadows and shapes that had not been there seconds ago. The leaves of the water oaks were scattered on the grass, each leaf dry and crisp and limned with silver, sculpted like a tiny ship. I removed the phone from my ear and looked at Varina. “Qui t’a pres faire, ’tit ange?” I said.

  “What did you say?” she asked.

  “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘What are you up to, little angel?’ You don’t speak French, Varina? You didn’t learn it from your father? You didn’t study it at LSU?”

  “You think you’ve figured it all out, huh?” she said.

  I put the phone back to my ear, then felt someone screw the muzzle of a revolver into the back of my neck. “Whoa, hoss,” said the man holding the gun. He reached out with his other hand and pulled my cell phone from my palm and closed it. His hair was thick with grease and combed straight back. There was a purple bump on his nose, and his eyes were wide-set and misaligned, as if he possessed two optical systems instead of one.

  He was not alone. Four other men came out of the shadows, all of them armed, one with a Taser. One of them was a fleshy man we had seen once before, in the company of the man whose eyes looked like they had been cut out of paper and glued haphazardly on his face.

  The man with the Taser pulled Clete’s .38 from its holster and threw it into a wall of bamboo that bordered the driveway. Then he pushed Clete against the side of the Caddy and told him to spread his legs.

  “He has a gun strapped on his right ankle,” Varina said.

  “She’d be the one to know. I porked her once,” Clete said. “While I was drunk.”

  “You and Dave brought this on yourselves,” Varina said. “And you’re foolish if you think anyone cares.”

  The man with the Taser ran his free hand under Clete’s armpits and down his sides. Then he felt Clete’s crotch and inside his thighs and pulled up Clete’s right trouser leg and unstrapped the hideaway .25-caliber auto.

  “You put your hand on my dick again, I’m going to break your nose, Taser or no Taser,” Clete said.

  The man straightened his back and smiled. “You’re not my type,” he said.

  The man with the greased hair crushed my cell phone under his foot and removed my .45 from my clip-on holster, then told me to spread myself against the side of the car.

  “I’m clean,” I said.

  “I believe you. But you know the drill. We’re all pros here, man. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.” His breath made the side of my face wrinkle as he moved his hands down my sides. “You don’t like garlic shrimp with tomato sauce? That makes two of us. Remind me never to eat around here again.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” I said to Varina.

  “Out of my hands,” she replied.

  “Don’t lie.”

  “Dave, do you think you’re going to change anything?” she said. “There are billions of dollars at stake, and you and your rhinoceros of a friend who keeps his brains stuffed in his penis come along and fuck up everything for everyone. I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Yeah, we’re pretty stupid, all right, because neither Clete nor I had any idea what we stumbled into. Is my daughter alive?”

  “Maybe. But I haven’t been downstairs, so I can’t say,” she replied.

  “Downstairs?” I said.

  “You asked for this. It’s all on you. Just the same, I feel sorry for y’all and your daughters,” she said.

  “You think you can make us all disappear?” I said. “That nobody is going to know we came he
re?”

  “Do you know how many convicts are buried in this yard?” she replied. “You see any monuments to them? Have you ever read any news accounts about their deaths?”

  “Those men died over a hundred years ago,” I said.

  “How about the eleven who died in the blowout? How about all the soldiers blown apart by IEDs so people can have cheap gas? You see a lot of national hand-wringing about them?” she said.

  On the edge of my vision, I saw an erect figure walk out of the shadows. He was wearing a velvet smoking jacket and a Tyrolean hat and an immaculate white shirt. “Oh, welcome, welcome, welcome to our egalitarian heroes,” Alexis Dupree said. “I hope you’ll enjoy the rest of your evening. Do you want to chat with your little friend Tee Jolie, Mr. Robicheaux? I know she’ll be happy to see you. Your daughter will be, too.”

  “Get finished with this,” Varina said. She hugged her arms around herself. “I’m cold.”

  The man with greased hair pushed the muzzle of his revolver into my ear. In the distance, I heard a freight train blowing down the line and thought I felt the heavy rumble of the freight and tanker cars through the earth. That was not what I felt at all. A ten-by-eight-foot square of lawn was lifting from the ground by the gazebo, like a doorway to a subterranean kingdom that even Dante could not imagine.

  THE SUBSTRUCTURE OF the plantation home had been entirely reengineered. The ceiling was high and beamed with oak, the floor done with terrazzo and spread with throw rugs with Mediterranean colors and designs. But the walls were not walls; they were giant plasma screens that showed tropical sunsets and beaches dotted with palm trees and waves sliding onto beaches as white as granulated sugar. The main room contained conventional burgundy leather chairs and couches and a bar and a glass-topped table. There were other rooms in back, some with doors, some without. “Is my daughter back there?” I said.

  “Perhaps,” Alexis said. “How do you like our visual display? Here, look in this side room. You seemed to admire my collection of wartime photography. Would you like to see some movie footage from the last century?”

  He pushed open a door that gave onto an office. There were four separate screens on two walls, all of them showing black-and-white images of German troops razing a village, Stukas dive-bombing a city, Jewish shops being destroyed during Kristallnacht, families climbing down from boxcars, the children terrified, all of them being herded through a barbed-wire corridor into a prison camp.