Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “People know where we are,” I said.

  “No, they don’t,” a voice said behind me.

  Pierre Dupree had come out of a room in back and was combing his hair as he walked. “Friends of ours are within two feet of your wife,” he said. “One of them stole the cell phone out of her purse. You didn’t call her, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Where’s Gretchen?” Clete said.

  “Preparing herself,” Dupree said.

  “For what?” Clete said.

  “An excursion into the Middle Ages. We’re going to find out how much you know, Mr. Purcel, and the names of the people to whom you passed on information that isn’t your business. Believe me, before this is over, you’ll beg to give us information.”

  “Get on with it, Pierre,” Varina said.

  “I’ll make it easy for you. What do you want to know?” Clete said.

  “Where are your files? Who have you told?” Pierre said.

  “Told what?” Clete said.

  “Unfortunately, that’s exactly the reaction we expected from you,” Pierre said. “Maybe you’re even telling the truth. But we have to be sure, and that’s not good news for Gretchen and Alafair.”

  “You plan to kill them anyway, you motherfucker,” Clete said.

  “Not necessarily. Things haven’t been that bad for Tee Jolie. Do you want to see her?” Pierre said.

  “No, we don’t,” I said.

  “That’s strange,” he said. “I found the cell phone she was using to call you. I thought you two were quite close. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Say hello. I’m not taunting you or being cruel. I think she’s quite happy with the way things are. At first she was a little resistant about the abortion, but that’s all past history.”

  “You made her have an abortion?” I said.

  “I didn’t make her do anything. She’s a nice girl. You’re an incurable romantic when it comes to her kind.”

  “Where are Gretchen and Alafair?” Clete said, starting toward Pierre.

  A man with tattoos of a kind we had seen before stepped forward and touched the Taser to the back of Clete’s neck. Clete went down as though he had been blackjacked across the temple. I knelt beside him and cradled his head in my hands. His eyes were crossed, and his nose was bleeding.

  I looked up at the man with the Taser. He was thin and had black hair and was unshaved and wore jeans with suspenders and a lumberjack shirt. He smelled of the woods and the cold; he smelled like a hunter. There was a long tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating an orange carrot inside his left forearm. “I’m going to square this, buddy,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you for being pissed, but if I was you, I’d go with the flow,” he said. “It might work out for you. I carried a badge before I did this.”

  “That’s enough, Mickey,” Pierre said.

  Clete sat up and wiped the blood from his nose on his sleeve. He was slack-jawed and closing and opening his eyes. The back of his neck looked like it had been stung by a jellyfish. From aboveground we heard the sound of a diesel engine cranking to life.

  “That’s the truck your vehicle is being loaded onto, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said. “In five minutes it will be off the property. Before morning your vehicle will be crushed into a ball of tinfoil, and so will you.”

  Pierre walked toward the rear of the basement and rested his hand on a doorknob. “Bring them here,” he said. “I think Mr. Robicheaux deserves a degree of closure. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Talk with her. See what she has to say about her situation.”

  “With who?”

  “The girl of your dreams. Tell me if you think she’s been worth it,” he said.

  He pushed open the door slowly with the flat of his hand, exposing a room whose walls contained floor-to-ceiling plasma screens filled with scenes filmed through the windows of the stucco house on an island southeast of the Chandeleurs. Even the sound of the surf on the beach and the wind in the palm trees was being pumped through a speaker system.

  Tee Jolie Melton was lying on a white brocade couch, wearing a blue evening gown and jewelry around her neck that looked like diamonds and rubies, although I doubted that was what they were. Her head was propped on a tasseled black satin pillow, the twists of gold in her hair still as bright as strings of buttercups. She seemed to smile in recognition. There were scabbed tracks on her forearms. She turned on her hip so she could see me better, but she didn’t try to get up. “That’s you?” she said.

  “It’s Dave Robicheaux, Tee Jolie,” I said.

  “Yeah, I knowed it was you, Mr. Dave. I knowed you’d be along someday.”

  “What’d they do to you, kiddo?”

  “They ain’t done nothing. It’s just medicine.”

  “It’s heroin.”

  “I couldn’t deliver the baby, see, ’cause I ain’t right inside. Don’t be mad at Pierre. Don’t be mad at me, either. Everyt’ing is gonna be all right, ain’t it?”

  “We’ll be back later, darlin’,” Pierre said. “Mr. Robicheaux and I need to talk over some business.” He closed the door and slipped an iron bolt into a locked position. “She’s a sweet girl.”

  “You turned her into a junkie,” I said.

  “She injected herself. So did her sister,” he replied. “You know your problem, Mr. Robicheaux? You won’t accept people as they are. You’re only interested in them as abstractions. The flesh-and-blood reality isn’t to your liking. It’s you who is the elitist, not I.”

  The door at the bottom of the stairwell that led from aboveground opened, and a man carrying an AK-47 with a banana magazine came inside and closed the door. “This was between the seat and the door of the convertible,” he said.

  “Purcel had an automatic weapon in the front seat?” Pierre said.

  “Yeah, it was covered by a blanket,” the man said.

  “You were riding in the front seat and didn’t see it?” Pierre said to Varina.

  “Oh, I’ve got it. His having a gun is my fault,” she said.

  “I didn’t say that,” he replied. “I was trying to understand how he got an AK-47 into his car without you seeing it. It’s not an unreasonable question.”

  “I don’t know how it got there. He went to the trunk for a blanket. Maybe the gun was in the trunk.”

  “This is foolish talk,” Alexis said. “The two of you are nattering magpies.”

  “Shut up, you pitiful old fuck,” Varina said.

  I saw Clete looking at me, the light in his eyes intensifying. It wasn’t hard to read the message: Divide and conquer.

  “Lamont Woolsey gave you guys up,” I said.

  Varina and Pierre and Alexis all turned and stared at me.

  “Woolsey thinks he’s going down for the hit on Ozone Eddy Mouton and his girlfriend,” I said.

  “Who is Ozone Eddy?” Pierre said, a laugh starting to break on his face.

  “I guess you’re not up-to-date,” I said. “Your buddy Woolsey had Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend burned to death in the trunk of an automobile after Clete stomped Woolsey’s face in. Woolsey doesn’t like the idea of being a tube of lubricant at Angola. So he told me a few things about your operation. I’ve got it on tape, if you want to hear it.”

  “I spoke with him this afternoon,” Pierre said. “He’s fishing in the Bahamas. He seemed quite relaxed to me.”

  I took a chance. “You guys made a lot of money off forged artworks. Then y’all invested it in Varina’s electronic security service and offshore well supply. You should have been multimillionaires many times over. Too bad it turned to shit on you.”

  I could see the pause in their eyes, the doubt, the glimmer of uncertainty and calculation that characterizes the thinking of all manipulators.

  “Somebody has to take the fall for the blowout,” I said. “A lot of people thought the issue was the centralizers down in the hole. That was never it at all, was it? The electronic warning system failed. That’s your area, isn’t it?”

  “Show him,” Alexis said.

  “Show me wh
at?” I said.

  “Dave, I didn’t want this to happen,” Varina said.

  “Yeah, you did, Varina. None of these guys had the brains or charm to run an operation like this. You were always a winner. Men loved and admired you, and women were jealous of you. You could have been anything you wanted. Why’d you throw in with a bunch of losers like these guys?”

  “Show him,” Alexis Dupree repeated, his voice sharpening, the blood draining from around his mouth.

  “You’ve made Gran’père angry,” Pierre said. “That’s not good for you or your friend or Alafair and Gretchen, Mr. Robicheaux. Gran’père doesn’t have parameters. He has appetites of the most unusual kind.”

  He opened a wood door that gave onto a barred cell. The floor was spread with a rubber tarp. A cast-iron sarcophagus had been set horizontally at the rear of the room, its hinged lid open and resting against the wall. At the bottom of the sarcophagus were slits that I suspected were drains. The inside of the lid was patterned with rows of spikes shaped like stalactites. Alafair and Gretchen were sitting in the corner, wrists and ankles fastened behind them with ligatures, mouths taped. Gretchen was bleeding from a cut at her hairline. I saw Alafair’s mouth working, as though trying to loosen the adhesive on her cheeks.

  “You gutless sack of shit,” I said to Pierre.

  “You might be formally educated, but you’re a coarse man, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “As Gran’père would say, we can scrub everything out of the lower classes except the genes. Gretchen is going to go first. It’s a nasty business. You can watch it or not. If you choose not to watch, believe me, you will hear it. Where’s the tape you made of Lamont’s confession?”

  “In Clete’s office,” I said.

  “Why is it I don’t believe anything you say? What you don’t understand, Mr. Robicheaux, is that we don’t have anything to lose at this point. Do you think we plan to spend years in litigation while every cent we have is taken away from us? Do you think we plan to sell this beautiful historical home to pay years of legal fees because of you and your friend?”

  “There’s no way you can get away with this, Dupree,” Clete said. “You think Helen Soileau won’t figure out where we are?”

  “Would you like to talk to her?” Pierre said.

  “Can you stop talking, Pierre?” Varina said. “Just for once, please stop talking. I would take a vow of celibacy if you would take a vow of silence.”

  “My, my, daddy’s little angel. If you’re an angel, you’re Lucifer in female form,” Pierre said. “Think back, Varina. Who led these men into our lives again and again? You put your lovers on video while you were screwing. That’s like robbing a bank and leaving your driver’s license inside the vault. Oh, I forgot. You didn’t have to compromise our security situation. Your idiot of a father did that when he told his minions our operation was run by his petit ange.”

  “Don’t speak of my father like that,” Varina said.

  “You asked if I wanted to talk to Helen Soileau,” I said to Pierre.

  “I insist that you do,” he said. “Maybe you’ll finally understand how self-deluded you are and how minuscule your importance is. However, I don’t know if you’ll be up to the shock. What do you think?”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “You’re uneducable, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

  “This isn’t necessary, Pierre,” Varina said.

  “Stop hectoring the man and let him have a little fun,” Alexis said.

  “Excuse me for saying this, Alexis, but I hate both of you,” she said. “When this is over, I’m going to—”

  “What?” Alexis asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she replied. “Look at it this way. How much longer do you have to live? Think of me having a glass of champagne at your graveside. Think of me living in this house. Your grandson is incompetent and can’t run a business by himself or paint his way out of a paper bag. How long do you think it will be before I own everything in your possession?”

  “The only woman I’ve ever known like you was Ilse Koch,” Alexis said.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “The Bitch of Buchenwald, you silly girl,” he replied.

  “What did you mean about Helen?” I said to Pierre.

  He removed a remote control from his coat pocket and clicked a button several times. There was a bank of television monitors at the top of the wall by the entrance, most of them showing the grounds and the bayou and the two-lane highway in front of the plantation. The image on one of them changed to a scene inside a kitchen.

  “That place you’re looking at, Mr. Robicheaux, is just beyond Tee Jolie’s bedroom,” Pierre said. “The figure on the floor is Helen Soileau. She’s quite unconscious right now, and I don’t think she can feel very much pain. I also doubt that she’s aware of her surroundings, so don’t be too alarmed by what you’re about to watch.”

  “What did you do to her?” I asked.

  “She was chloroformed, that’s all,” he replied. He took a small walkie-talkie from his pocket and pushed a button and spoke into it. “Put her inside, fellows.” Then he turned to me. “Watch now. You should enjoy this, since I suspect she’s a pain in the ass to work for. It’s oopsy-daisy time for the lady from Lesbos.”

  Helen was bound hand and foot and lying on her side, and I couldn’t see her face. Two men walked in front of the camera and lifted her into the air and opened the top of a deep-freeze chest and set her inside. One of them looked back at the camera, then shut the lid.

  “I give her about fifteen minutes,” Pierre said. “How much did you tell her about us, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “She never believed what I said about you,” I replied. “No one will. You’re killing people for no reason.”

  “It’s getting late,” Alexis said. “Start with the girls, Mickey. Be fast about it, too. I’m tired.”

  “I want to do the one called Gretchen,” the fleshy man said.

  “Oh, that’s right, Harold, she broke out your front teeth, didn’t she?” Alexis said. “By all means.”

  “Look, you guys, it’s obvious you make use of people inside the system,” Clete said. “That’s me and Dave. Maybe we can work something out. Look at our record. I don’t know how many guys we’ve cowboyed. You don’t believe me, check my jacket.”

  “You’re not in a seller’s market, Mr. Purcel,” Alexis said.

  “Dave already said it,” Clete replied. “What’s the percentage in snuffing people nobody believes?”

  “And Sheriff Soileau?” Alexis said, an amused gleam in his eye.

  “That’s the breaks, I guess,” Clete said.

  “I knew others like you,” Alexis said. “When we locked them inside the showers, we told them we were creating a special dispensation for those who could prove their mettle. They beat and strangled one another while we watched through a peephole, and after a few minutes we dropped the gas containers through the air vents in the roof.”

  “Shut up and get this over with,” Varina said.

  “Maybe you’ll be part of the entertainment. That would be quite a surprise, wouldn’t it?” Alexis said to her. “Did you know that Caligula did that to his dinner guests?”

  “What?” she said angrily.

  “I wanted to see if you were paying attention,” Alexis said.

  The fat man and the man with greased hair were putting on rubber boots and long rubber gloves. The fat man was looking with anticipation at the cell where Alafair and Gretchen lay bound in the corner.

  “Pierre?” said the man with the greased hair.

  “What is it?”

  “I got a problem. I ate some garlic shrimp for supper. I’m about to download in my pants.”

  “Then go to the bathroom. We’ll wait.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The man with the greased hair lumbered toward a bathroom in the rear of the building, duck-footed, clutching his stomach.

  “Make sure you close the door and turn on the ventil
ator,” said the man with the Bugs Bunny tattoo.

  “That isn’t funny, Mickey,” Pierre said.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  It was Clete Purcel who seemed to reveal a side that no one had ever seen in him. “I can’t take this, Dave. I’d thought I’d be up to it, but I’m not. I got to sit down.”

  “Act with some dignity, Mr. Purcel,” Pierre said.

  “It’s my chest. I’ve got some lead in there. I think it’s next to my heart. I need a chair. I can’t stand up.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Varina said.

  Clete gagged and spat blood on his hand. “I’m going to hit the deck if I don’t sit down.”

  “Get him a chair,” Alexis said.

  “Don’t get near him! Don’t trust this man!” Varina said.

  Clete swayed from side to side, then fell against the wall. Mickey held him up and slapped his cheek. “Hang on, big man,” he said. “You were in the Crotch, right? Time to man up.”

  Clete bent over, his hands on his thighs, as though about to be sick. “I’m going down, Dave. You’ll be on your own. I’m sorry,” he said.

  He crumpled to one knee, his shirt splitting down his spine, his love-handles hanging over his belt, his giant buttocks spreading like an elephant’s.

  “This man is pitiful,” Alexis said.

  “I didn’t sign on for this,” Clete replied, shaking his head.

  “This is the legendary New Orleans badass who capped our guys in the shootout on the bayou?” Mickey said. “What a joke.”

  With his left hand, Clete pulled his trouser leg up and unsnapped the KA-BAR strapped on his calf. He pulled the blade from its scabbard. “Chug on this, bubba,” he said.

  CLETE CLENCHED ONE arm around the throat of the man who had Bugs Bunny on his forearm, and drove the knife into his chest not once but twice, holding him up, using him as a shield. “Dave! The AK!”

  He didn’t have to tell me. I was already running for it. It was propped against the wall by the stairwell, painted with green and black tiger stripes, the banana-shaped magazine dull gray, nicked silver on the edges with wear. As I ran toward the stairwell, I was trying to count inside my head the number of men in the room. How many were there?