Creole Belle

  “We have the impression you haven’t interviewed the boy who saw Blue Melton abducted,” I replied.

  “The old man called y’all?” he said, grinning at one corner of his mouth.

  “You mean Mr. DeBlanc?” I said.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Yes, Mr. DeBlanc did. He’s a little frustrated,” I said.

  Pollard pinched his eyes. “Here’s the deal on that. Blue Melton was a runaway. She was suspended from school twice, once for smoking dope in the restroom. She and her sister had a reputation for loose behavior. The old man wants to think otherwise. If it’ll make everybody feel better, I’ll look into this boy’s story about somebody dragging the girl onto a boat.”

  “You’ll look into it?” Helen said. “In a homicide investigation, you’ll look into an eyewitness account of an assault on the victim and her possible abduction?”

  “Homicide?” Pollard said.

  “What did you think we were talking about?” Helen said.

  “What homicide?”

  “Blue Melton floated ashore in St. Mary Parish inside a block of ice,” Helen said.

  “When?”

  “Four days ago.”

  “I’ve been on vacation. We were in Florida. I just got back Monday,” Pollard said.

  “Today is Wednesday,” Helen said.

  Pollard took one of the pens from his souvenir cup and twirled it with his thumb and index finger, studying the colored feathers. His skin was as unlined as wet clay turned on a potter’s wheel. The grin returned to the corner of his mouth. I tried to ignore the vacuous glint in his eye.

  “We found what appears to be blood on the DeBlanc dock,” I said.

  Pollard glanced out his office door into the corridor, as though looking for someone hiding just outside the doorway. “She was in a block of ice?” he said. “That’s what y’all are saying? In this kind of weather?”

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  “You had me going. The sheriff put y’all up to this, didn’t he?” he said. He shook his head, an idiot’s grin painted on his mouth, waiting for us to acknowledge our charade.

  We interviewed the eleven-year-old who had seen Blue Melton forced onto a boat that had an emblem of a fish painted on the bow. He said the fish looked like it was smiling, but he could add little to what he had already told the grandfather. His time reference was not dependable, and it was obvious he was afraid and wanted to tell us whatever he thought would please us. People wonder how justice is so often denied to those who need and deserve it most. It’s not a mystery. The reason we watch contrived television dramas about law enforcement is that often the real story is so depressing, nobody would believe it.

  WHEN WE GOT back to New Iberia, I went to the office of our local newspaper, The Daily Iberian. The previous month the drawbridge at Burke Street had been stuck three nights in a row, jamming up barge and boat traffic north and south of the bridge. Each night a staff photographer had taken many photographs from the bridge, although the paper had run only a few of them. He sat down with me and showed me all his pictures on a computer screen. The photographer was an overweight, good-natured man who wheezed when he bent forward to explain the images. “The moon was up, so I had some nice lighting,” he said. “The small boats could get under the bridge without any problem, but some of them got behind the barges and had to wait longer than they planned. You see the boat you’re looking for?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” I said.

  He cleared the screen and brought up another set of photos, then another. “How about these?” he said.

  “Behind the tugboat. Can you blow up that image?” I said.

  “Sure,” he replied. “It’s funny you noticed that particular boat. The guy driving it was impatient and got out of line and worked his way past a barge full of shale that had been waiting two hours.”

  The boat was sleek and white and constructed of fiberglass, with a deep-V hull and a flared bow and outriggers for saltwater trolling. I suspected it was a Chris-Craft, but I couldn’t be sure. “Can you sharpen the bow?” I asked.

  “Probably not a whole lot, but let’s see,” the photographer replied.

  He was right. The image was partially obscured by another boat, but I could make out the shape of a fish, thick through the middle, cartoonish in its dimensions. It seemed to have a snout. Maybe a marlin or a bottlenose dolphin? The image was like one I had seen somewhere, as though in a dream. I tried to remember, without success.

  “You have any other photos?” I asked.

  “No, that’s it, Dave,” the photographer said.

  “Did you see a girl on board?”

  “I’m sorry, I just wasn’t paying that much attention. Maybe there were two guys in the cabin. The only reason I remember them is because they were pretty rude about pushing their way ahead of the other boats.”

  “Do you remember what they looked like?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  “How about the painting of the fish on the bow? You remember any details about it?”

  “Yeah, it was like the paintings you see in photographs of World War Two bomber planes, like Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam.”

  I thanked him for his time and went back to my office. It was past noon, and officially I was off the clock. I checked my mail and returned a couple of phone calls and thumbed through my in-basket. For the first time in years, there seemed to be no pressing matters on my desk. So why was I standing in the middle of my office rather than walking out the front door and down the street to my house, where I would fix ham-and-onion sandwiches and eat with Alafair?

  There was only one answer to my question: Clete Purcel had told me he’d seen his out-of-wedlock daughter cap Bix Golightly. I wanted to go into Helen Soileau’s office and tell her that. Or call Dana Magelli at the NOPD. What was wrong with making a clean breast of it?

  Answer: Clete Purcel would be in the cook pot; he had not seen his daughter since she was fifteen, and his identification of her as Golightly’s killer was problematic; last, the NOPD and the Orleans Parish district attorney were in the process of investigating and prosecuting New Orleans cops who had shot and killed innocent people during Katrina, in one instance trying to hide their guilt by burning the victim’s body. Other than exploiting the opportunity to ruin Clete’s career, how much time would the DA be willing to invest in finding the killer of men like Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes?

  My conscience wouldn’t let go of me. I went down to Helen’s office, perhaps secretly hoping she wouldn’t be there and the issue would be set in abeyance and would somehow resolve itself. When she saw me through the glass, she waved me inside. “Did you have any luck at The Daily Iberian?”

  “I was going to write you a memo in the morning. The photographer has a shot of a white fiberglass boat that has a fish painted on the bow. I suspect the guys on board are the ones who abducted Blue Melton.”

  “Can you see them in the photo?”

  “Not at all.”

  “You wanted this case, Dave. The boat’s presence at the bridge gives us jurisdiction. What are you down about?”

  I repeated everything Clete had told me about his daughter, about her status as a killer, about the fact that the woman Bix had called Caruso before he died was, in Clete’s opinion, his errant daughter, Gretchen. Helen sat motionlessly in the chair while I spoke, her chest rising and falling, unblinking, her hands resting on her desk blotter. When I finished, there was complete silence in the room. I cleared my throat and waited. No more than ten seconds passed, but each of those seconds was like an hour. Her gaze locked on mine. “I’m not interested in thirdhand information about a street killing in New Orleans,” she said. I started to speak, but she cut me off. “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “My office is not a confessional, and I’m not a personal counselor. Do you copy that?”

  “I do.”

  “You tell Clete Purcel he’s not going to drag his prob
lems into my parish.”

  “Maybe you should do that.”

  “What if I twist your head off and spit in it instead?”

  “I’m going to ask that you not speak to me like that.”

  She stood up from her desk, her face tight, her breasts as hard-looking as cantaloupes against her shirt. “I was your partner for seven years. Now I’m your supervisor. I’ll speak to you in any fashion I think is appropriate. Don’t push me too far, Dave.”

  “I told you the truth. You didn’t want to hear it. I’m done.”

  “I can’t begin to tell you how angry you make me,” she said.

  Maybe I had handled it wrong. Maybe I had been self-serving in dumping my problems of conscience on Helen’s rug. Or maybe it was she who was out of line. Regardless, it wasn’t the best day of my life.

  CLETE PURCEL WAS determined to find the shooter Bix Golightly had called Caruso just before he ate three rounds fired directly into his face. But if Caruso was the pro Clete thought she was, she would avoid the mistakes and geographical settings common to the army of miscreants and dysfunctional individuals who constitute the criminal subculture of the United States. Few perpetrators are arrested during the commission of their crimes. They get pulled over for DWI, an expired license tag, or throwing litter on the street. They get busted in barroom beefs, prostitution stings, or fighting with a minimum-wage employee at a roach motel. Their addictions and compulsions govern their lives and place them in predictable circumstances and situations over and over, because they are incapable of changing who and what they are. Their level of stupidity is a source of humor at every stationhouse in the country. Unfortunately, the pros—high-end safecrackers and jewel thieves and mobbed-up button men and second-story creeps—are usually intelligent, pathological, skilled in what they do, middle class in their tastes, and little different in dress and speech and behavior from the rest of us.

  In the 1980s, out by Lake Pontchartrain, Clete Purcel nailed a home invader who had warrants on him in seventeen states and had only one conviction, for check forgery, on his sheet. He had not only escaped from custody three times, he had successfully passed himself off as a minister, a Dallas oil executive, a stockbroker, a self-help author, a psychotherapist, and a gynecologist. When Clete later transported him to Angola, he asked the home invader, who was hooked to the D-ring in the backseat of the cruiser, how he had acquired all his knowledge, since he had no formal education.

  The home invader replied, “Easy. I get a public library card in every city I live in. Everything in every book in that building is free. I also read every story and every column in the morning newspaper, from the first page to the last. Pretty good deal for two bits.”

  “How does that help you?” Clete asked.

  “Where you been, man? Most kinds of work are based on appearance, not substance. Stick a bunch of ballpoints in your shirt pocket and carry a clipboard and you can play it till you drop.”

  Clete believed Caruso was in New Orleans, primarily because Frankie Giacano, the third member of the triad who had tried to scam Clete, was alive. But where would Caruso hole up? Not in the black areas, where there was a high police presence. Nor anyplace where there were hookers or dealers working the corners. No, she’d be in a guesthouse uptown, or in a white working-class neighborhood, or maybe around Tulane and Loyola, where a lot of college kids lived and hung out. Or she might be strolling the streets of the French Quarter in the morning, when the revelers had been replaced by family people who gazed through the windows of the antique stores on Royal or visited St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square or enjoyed coffee and hot milk and beignets under the pavilion at Café du Monde.

  So far the only person who had shown any knowledge about Caruso was Count Carbona, aka Baron Belladonna, who had freeze-dried his head with Owsley purple at the Stones concert in Altamont, where the decade of the flower children ended and the music flew away in a helicopter, leaving a dead man on the stage and outlaw bikers beating concertgoers with pool cues.

  Clete left his Caddy parked inside the courtyard at his office and walked to the store operated by the Count and Jimmy the Dime. As soon as he entered the store and the tiny bell over the door rang, Clete realized some sea change had taken place in his relationship with Jimmy and the Count. “What’s the haps?” he said.

  “What it is, Purcel?” Jimmy replied, not looking up from his cash register.

  “I’ve got a couple of tickets to WrestleMania at the arena for the Count, because I know he digs it,” Clete said. “I caught these same guys in Lafayette once. A South American dwarf shot Mr. Moto in the crotch with a blowgun.”

  The Count was busying himself in the back of the store, whipping a feather duster across a row of capped jars filled with mushrooms and herbs and pickled amphibians. “I’m looking for a hitter named Caruso,” Clete said. “I think maybe the Count can be of great help to me.”

  “Stow it, Purcel,” Jimmy said.

  “This one is personal. Don’t you guys stonewall me on this.”

  “I got news for you. Everything is personal. Like us getting mixed up in a homicide is personal,” Jimmy said. “Like another nickel in Angola is personal.”

  “Did I get Nig and Wee Willie off your case when you couldn’t pay the vig on your bond?” Clete said.

  “I burned a candle for you at the cathedral,” Jimmy replied. “I paid for the candle, too.”

  “I’m about to arrange your funeral service there unless you stop cracking wise,” Clete said.

  “She came in here yesterday,” Jimmy said.

  “How did you know it was her?”

  “The Count’s seen her. But where, I don’t know, and he ain’t saying.”

  “What’d she want?”

  “A book on Marie Laveau. Then she saw my cash register and wanted to buy it. She said she has an antique store in the Keys.”

  “How about it, Count? Is that straight?” Clete said.

  The Count was not answering questions.

  “I’m jammed up on this one, you guys. I really need y’all’s help,” Clete said.

  Neither man answered. “I’m going to tell y’all something I haven’t told anybody but Dave Robicheaux. I think Caruso is my daughter. She’s had a lousy life and, in my opinion, deserves a better shake than the one she’s had.”

  His entreaty was to no avail. He removed two admission tickets to the New Orleans Arena from his wallet and placed them by the cash register. “You might really dig this, Count,” he said. “I once saw the Blimp. He had a curtain of fat hanging down to his knees so he looked like six hundred pounds of nakedness when he climbed into the ring. Plus he had BO you could smell ten rows into the seats. He’d get his opponent in a bear hug and fall on him and smother him in sweat and blubber and GAPO from hell until the guy was screaming for the ref. Nobody can equal the Blimp in terms of gross-out potential, but see what you think.”

  “What’s GAPO?” Jimmy said.

  “Gorilla armpit odor,” Clete replied.

  He went back outside and lit a cigarette by a parking meter and tried to think. A man in a split-tail coat and tattered top hat rode by on a unicycle. A man in a strap undershirt was watering his plants with a hose on a balcony across the street, an iridescent mist blowing from the palm and banana fronds into the sunlight. On the corner, under the colonnade, a lone black kid with iron shoe taps was dancing on the sidewalk, a portable stereo blaring out “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  Wrong time of day, wrong place, wrong tune, wrong century, kid, Clete thought, then tried to remember when he had been this depressed. He couldn’t.

  He felt someone touch him on the shoulder. He turned and looked into the hawklike glare that constituted Count Carbona’s gaze. “Good earth,” the Count said.

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. Are you talking about the name of a book?”

  The Count continued to stare into Clete’s face. “I’m no code breaker, Co
unt,” Clete said.

  The Count pressed a book of paper matches into Clete’s palm. The cover had a satin-black finish with words embossed in silver letters.

  “This joint is in Terrebonne Parish?” Clete said. “That’s what you’re telling me? Caruso left this in your store?”

  The Count’s cheeks creased with the beginnings of a smile.

  CLETE WAITED IN his office until sunset, then drove deep into Terrebonne Parish, south of Larose, almost to Lake Felicity, down where the wetlands of Louisiana dissolve into a dim gray-green line that becomes the Gulf of Mexico. The sun was an orange melt in the west, veiled with smoke from a sugar refinery or a grass fire, the moss in the dead cypress trees lifting in the breeze. The nightclub and barbecue joint advertised on the book of matches was located in a clearing at the end of a dirt road, right at the edge of a saltwater bay, the trees strung with multicolored Japanese lanterns. Clete thought he could hear the sounds of an accordion and fiddle and rub-board drifting out of a screened pavilion behind the nightclub.

  He had put on his powder-blue sport coat and gray slacks and had shined his oxblood loafers and bought a new fedora with a small feather in the band. Before he got out of the Caddy, he gargled with a small amount of Listerine and spat it out the window. He also took off his shoulder holster and put it under the seat, along with his heavy spring-loaded leather-wrapped blackjack shaped like a darning sock. When he entered the nightclub, the refrigeration was set so low, the air felt like ice water.

  He sat at the bar and laid out his cigarettes and his Zippo lighter in front of him and ordered a Bud and gazed out the back window at the last spark of sun on the bay and at the band inside the screened pavilion. He salted his beer and drank it slowly, enjoying each moment of it in his mouth, letting its coldness slide down his throat, lighting places inside him that only the addicted know about. He didn’t have long to wait before he knew she was in the room. How or why he knew she was there, he couldn’t explain. He felt her presence before he saw her in the bar mirror. He smelled her perfume before he turned on the stool and watched her drop a series of coins in the jukebox. He saw her midriff and exposed navel and the baby fat on her hips and resented its exposure to other men in a way that was completely irrational. He looked at the fullness of her breasts and the tightness of her jeans and the thickness of her reddish-blond Dutch-boy haircut and felt protectiveness rather than erotic attraction. He felt as though someone else had slipped into his skin and was thinking thoughts that were not his.