Creole Belle dr-19

by James Lee Burke

  “They’re here. Those motherfuckers are here.”

  “Stay with me, podna. Who’s there?”

  “It’s them,” he said. “Them.”

  I heard him drop the phone and sounds of scuffling and furniture being knocked over, and then I heard Chad Patin squealing like a pig on its way to slaughter.

  Alafair entered Clete’s New Iberia office on Main at nine A.M. on Friday, expecting to see Clete’s regular receptionist, Hulga Volkmann, behind the desk in the waiting room. Instead, she saw a thick-bodied woman in her mid- or late twenties, with reddish-blond hair cut Dutch-boy-style, sitting behind the desk in jeans, with one foot propped on an open drawer and cotton balls wedged between the toes while she painted lavender polish on each nail. The floor was unswept and littered from the previous day, newspapers and auto-mechanic magazines spilling off the metal chairs. “Mr. Purcel is across the street at Victor’s Cafeteria,” the woman said without looking up. “You need something?”

  “Yeah, who are you, and where is Miss Hulga?”

  “She’s on vacation, and I’m her replacement. Who are you?”

  “Alafair Robicheaux.”

  “Great.” The woman at the desk straightened up in her chair and capped the nail polish and pulled the cotton balls from between her toes and dropped them one at a time into the wastebasket. “That saves me from calling up your father.” She glanced at the top page on a yellow legal pad. “Tell Detective Robicheaux a stolen-vehicle report on the freezer truck was phoned in two hours before Ronnie Earl Patin tried to kill him. Or maybe not tell him that, since he was probably already aware, considering he was the guy who was almost killed. But if it will make your father happy, you can tell him the company that owns the truck doesn’t have any apparent connection to the Patin brothers. Also tell your father that his department should do its own work. End of message.” She looked up at Alafair. Her eyes were the color of violets and didn’t seem to go with the rest of her face. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, who the fuck are you?”

  The young woman’s eyelashes fluttered. “How do I put this? Let’s see, I guess I’m the fuck Gretchen Horowitz. I understand you graduated from Stanford Law. I’ve always wondered what Stanford was like. I went to Miami Dade College. In case you never heard of it, it’s in Miami.”

  “This place is a mess.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Why don’t you clean it up?”

  “Should I start with the puke on the restroom floor or the apple core floating in the toilet bowl?”

  “You might start with getting your feet off the furniture,” Alafair said.

  Gretchen folded back the pages on the legal pad until she reached a clean one, then set the pad and a felt pen on the forward edge of the desk. “Write down whatever you want to tell Mr. Purcel, and I’ll give it to him. Or you can go across the street and help him with his hangover. I don’t think he’d have one if it wasn’t for your father.”

  “My father doesn’t drink.”

  “I know that. He only takes Mr. Purcel to the bar and gets high watching him drink.”

  “Excuse me, miss, but I think you’re probably an idiot. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it in the clinical sense. If that’s true, I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you. I’m sure you have many qualities. I love the vampiric shade of polish on your toenails.”

  Gretchen put two Chiclets in her mouth and slowly chewed them, her mouth open, her eyes indolent. “Can you tell me why people with degrees from Stanford live in a mosquito factory? There must be a reason.”

  Alafair picked up the trash can. “Are you through with this?” she asked.

  “Morning sickness?”

  “No, just doing your job for you.” Alafair began straightening the metal chairs in the waiting room and picking up newspapers and Styrofoam cups from the floor and dropping them in the can.

  “Don’t do that,” Gretchen said.

  “I majored in janitorial studies at Reed. You’ve heard of Reed, I’m sure. It’s in Portland, the home of John Reed the socialist writer, although he was not related to the family who endowed Reed. Did you see the movie Reds? It’s about John Reed. He was a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution in 1915. Portland is in Oregon. That’s the state between California and Washington.”

  “Listen, Al-a-far, or whatever your name is, I don’t need a horse’s ass making my day any harder than it already is. Put down the trash can and kindly haul your twat out of here. I’ll tell Mr. Purcel you came to see him. I’ll also tell him I passed on the information your father needed. Okay? ”

  “I don’t mind,” Alafair said.

  “Don’t mind what?”

  “Helping you clean up. Clete shouldn’t have left you with this. He’s a good guy, and everybody around here loves him. But as my father says, Clete has the organizational skill of a scrapyard falling down a staircase.”

  Alafair bent over to pick up a magazine from the floor. She heard Gretchen suppress a laugh. “Something funny?” Alafair said.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Gretchen said. She took a mop and a bucket and a plumber’s helper and a pair of rubber gloves out of the closet and went into the restroom. A moment later, Alafair heard the sloshing sounds of the plumber’s helper at work, then the toilet flushing. Gretchen opened the door wider so she could see into the waiting room, her body still bent over the commode.

  “ Reds was Warren Beatty’s best movie, better even than Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. “Henry Miller did a cameo in there. Did you know he stayed here in New Iberia at that place called the Shadows? You ever see Shampoo? Warren Beatty is one of my all-time favorite actors, second only to James Dean.”

  The reports on the denouement of Chad Patin, whose name the witnesses did not know at the time, had begun coming in to a 911 dispatcher in St. Charles Parish at 4:18 A.M. To whatever degree the abductors were lacking in sophistication, they compensated in terms of due diligence.

  At a small settlement outside Des Allemands, down toward New Orleans, a woman called in a noise complaint. She said her neighbor, who lived in a garage apartment behind an abandoned stucco house encased in dead vines and banana stalks, was having a fight with a woman. When asked how she knew this, she answered that she could hear glass and furniture breaking and someone shrieking like a woman. At least that was her impression, she added.

  At 4:23 A.M. a different caller in the same community reported a burglary in progress at the garage apartment. From his window, he said he could see three men carrying a rolled carpet down the garage apartment stairs. He said a light was attached to the power pole by the apartment, and he was certain he was watching an invasion of his neighbor’s home. Then he realized he was not watching the theft of a carpet but a far more serious crime in progress. “They’re carrying a guy wrapped up with rope. It looks like something is stuffed in his mouth. I think maybe it’s a tennis ball.”

  At 4:26 A.M. the first caller reported in again. “They just drove a SUV t’rew my li’l garden. There’s still one man out there. He’s getting something out of the back of his car. When y’all coming?”

  At 4:31 A.M. the second caller made his next report on his cell phone. So far he had not identified himself, but he did not seem to consider that a problem. “This is me,” he said. “I’m in my car and following them guys up the dirt road. I’m gonna fix their ass, me.”

  “Disengage from what you’re doing, sir,” the female dispatcher said. “Do not try to stop these men. Help is on the way.”

  “What’s gonna happen to that po’ man?” the caller said.

  At 4:33 A.M. the woman caller was back on the line. “The man getting something out of the back of his car? What name they got for that? The thing he was getting, I mean. Soldiers wear it on their back. He walked right up to the garage apartment and pointed it just like you do a hose. There ain’t nothing left. Even the trees are burning. The leaves are coming down on my li’l house.”

  “You’re not making
sense, ma’am. Unless you’re talking about a flamethrower,” the dispatcher said.

  The last 911 call on the tape was from the man who had followed the abductors in his car. “They got on a white boat just sout’ of Des Allemands,” he said. “I’m standing here on the dock. They’re headed down toward the Gulf. It was a tennis ball. It’s right here by my foot. A toot’ is stuck in it, and there’s blood on the toot’. Where was y’all?”

  I had reported my call from Chad Patin ten seconds after the intruders broke into his garage apartment, but my best efforts had not saved him. After Helen and I finished listening to the 911 recordings transmitted to us by the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Department, she stared out her office window, her thumbs hooked in her belt. Her back looked as hard as iron against her shirt. “The guy running this operation is named Angelle?”

  “Or Angel.”

  “And living on an island somewhere?”

  “That’s what Chad Patin said.”

  “And one of his guys has a flamethrower? This stuff is from outer space. What do you think it’s really about?”

  “Money. A lot of it. Drugs, prostitutes, maybe stolen or forged paintings. At least those things are part of it.”

  “The perps don’t pop cops over drugs and girls and stolen property,” she replied.

  “I think it has some connection to neo-Nazis.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute. That’s just crazy, Dave.”

  “Okay, let’s look at another angle. What is the one subject around here that nobody brings up in a negative way, that no local journalist goes near? A subject so sensitive that people will walk away from you if they sense the wrong words are about to come out of your mouth? What enterprise could that possibly be?”

  “Tell me.”

  “No, you tell me,” I said.

  She manufactured an expression that was meant to be dismissive. I didn’t like to look at it. It made me feel embarrassed for Helen, and it caused me to think less of her, a person I had always admired.

  “You’re too hard on people, bwana,” she said. “This is a poor state with a one-resource economy. Would you really like to go back to the good old days? I don’t think any of us would like living under the old lifestyle of ‘tote that barge and lift that bale.’”

  “What’s the word we’re avoiding here? What is the sacred space that none of us track our irreverent shoes into?”

  “The country wants cheap gasoline. They don’t care how they get it. So the state of Louisiana is everybody’s fuck. What else do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing. You just said it all. You know what this case is about, so stop pretending you don’t.”

  “You’re not going to talk to me like that,” she said.

  “Ask yourself why this conversation offends you. Because I insulted you or I pissed on the sacred cow.”

  “Get out, Dave.”

  She had never spoken to me like that, at least not in that tone. I didn’t care. I was angrier than she was. No, that’s the wrong word. I was disappointed in Helen, and I felt let down in a way I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t shake the funk I was in for the rest of the day.

  12

  That same afternoon, Clete Purcel sat in his swivel chair in his office and through the back window watched the rain dimple the bayou and the fog puff in clouds from under the bridge and the lights of cars crossing the steel grid. His office was housed inside a nineteenth-century two-story building constructed of soft brick, with an iron colonnade over the sidewalk and a patio in back that he had decorated with potted banana plants and a bottlebrush tree and a spool table inset with a beach umbrella under which he often ate his lunch or read his mail in the morning.

  The drizzle was unrelenting, and he was confined to his office and the endless flow of squalor and chicanery that went across his desk blotter, not to mention the worm’s-eye view of the world that was the operational raison d’etre of almost every client who came through his door.

  With an occasional exception.

  Gretchen stepped inside his office and closed the door behind her. “Little Miss Muffet would like to see you. She’s got a guy with her who looks like he has a wig stapled to his scalp,” she said. “Want me to blow them off?”

  He shut and opened his eyes. “I’m trying to translate what you just said.”

  “The broad at the Dupree place with the broom up her ass. The guy didn’t introduce himself. He’s got a Roman collar on. I can tell them they need to make an appointment.”

  “Varina Leboeuf is out there?”

  “Who’d you think I was talking about?”

  “Send her in.”

  Gretchen opened her mouth wide and put her finger in it, as though trying to vomit.

  “Lose the attitude,” he said.

  A moment later, Varina Leboeuf came into Clete’s office, followed by a man in a black suit and lavender collar whose thick silver hair was bobbed in the style of a nineteenth-century western rancher. He had a high, shiny forehead, and turquoise eyes that were recessed in the sockets, and hands like those of a farmer who might have broken hardpan prairie with a singletree plow. His eyes stayed glued on Clete.

  “Hello, Mr. Purcel,” Varina said, extending her hand. “I want to apologize for my abruptness at my father-in-law’s house. I’d had an absolutely terrible day, and I’m afraid I took it out on you and your assistant. This is Reverend Amidee Broussard. He has advised me to hire a private investigator. I understand you’re pretty good at what you do.”

  “Depends on what it is,” Clete said. He had risen when she entered the room and was standing awkwardly behind his desk, wishing he had put on his sport coat, his fingertips barely touching his desk blotter, his blue-black. 38 strapped across his chest in its nylon holster. “If this is about divorce work, the expense sometimes outweighs the benefits. What we used to call immorality is so common today that it doesn’t have much bearing on the financial settlement. In other words, the dirt a PI can dig up on a spouse is of little value.”

  “See, you’re an honest man,” she said.

  Before Clete could reply, the minister said, “Mr. Purcel, may I sit down? I’m afraid I was running to get out of the rain and got a bit winded. Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don’t recognize.”

  “Would y’all like some coffee?” Clete said.

  “That would be very nice,” the minister said. When he sat down, a tinge of discomfort registered in his face, as though his weight were pressing his bones against the wood of the chair.

  “Are you all right?” Clete said.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “What a magnificent view you have. Did you know that during the War Between the States, a Union flotilla came up the bayou and moored right at the spot by the drawbridge? The troops were turned loose on the town, mostly upon Negro women. It was a deliberate act of terrorism, just like Sherman at the burning of Atlanta.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Clete said.

  “Unfortunately, history books are written by the victors.” The minister’s cheeks were soft and flecked with tiny blue and red capillaries, and his mouth formed a small oval when he pronounced his o ’s. The cadences of his speech seemed to come from another era and were almost hypnotic. “Do you know who wrote those words?”

  “Adolf Hitler did,” Clete replied.

  “It’s very important that you help Ms. Leboeuf. Her husband is not what he seems. He’s a fraudulent and perhaps dangerous man. I think he may have had dealings with criminals in New Orleans, men who are involved in the sale of stolen paintings. I’m not sure, so I don’t want to treat the man unjustly, but I have no doubt he wants to make Ms. Leboeuf’s life miserable.”

  Varina had sat down, smoothing her dress, her gaze fixed on the rain falling on the bayou. Every few seconds, he
r eyes settled on Clete’s, unembarrassed, taking his measure.

  “What do you base that on?” Clete asked.

  “I’m Ms. Leboeuf’s spiritual adviser.” The minister hesitated. “She’s confided certain aspects of his behavior to me that normally are difficult to talk about except in a confidential setting.”

  “I can speak for myself, Amidee,” Varina said.

  “No, no, this was my idea. Mr. Purcel, Pierre Dupree is a dependent and infantile man. In matters of marital congress, he has the appetites of a child. If the implication has unpleasant Freudian overtones, that’s my intention. Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?”

  “I don’t think I need an audiovisual, Reverend,” Clete said. “Why is Dupree a threat to Ms. Leboeuf?”

  “Because he has the business instincts of a simpleton and is teetering on bankruptcy. He sees Ms. Leboeuf as the source of all his troubles and believes she’s out to cause him financial ruin. He’s a weak and frightened man, and like most frightened men, he wishes to blame his failure on his wife. Last night she went out to the Dupree home to get her dog. Pierre told her he’d had it put down.”

  “The dog named Vick?” Clete said to Varina.

  “Pierre said Vick had distemper,” she said. “That’s a lie. You saw him. He was fine. Either Pierre or his grandfather did something to him, maybe hurt him in some way, then had him injected. I feel so bad about Vick, I want to cry. I hate Pierre and his hypocrisy and his arrogance and his two-thousand-dollar suits and his greasy smell. I can’t stand the thought that I let him kill my dog.”

  “No good comes of blaming ourselves for what other people do,” Clete said. “I understand you’re filing a civil suit against the sheriff’s department over an incident at your father’s place. The incident involved Dave Robicheaux. That creates a conflict of interest for me, Ms. Leboeuf. I’d like to help you, but in this instance, I don’t think I can.”

  “I’ve already dropped the suit. It’s not worth the trouble,” she replied.

  Don’t do what you’re about to do, a voice in Clete’s head told him.