Creole Belle

  Catin stepped closer to him, her thumbs hooked on the sides of her belt. “No, you will get in the back of the cruiser, Mr. Leboeuf. You will also lose the attitude. If you don’t like a female deputy or a black female deputy standing on your grass, that’s too bad. I’m going to put my hand on you now and escort you to the cruiser. If you do not do as you are told, you are going to be charged with resisting.”

  “You get this bitch off my property,” Leboeuf said to me.

  “That’s it,” Catin said. She spun him around and shoved him between the shoulder blades into the side of the cruiser. Then she pulled out her handcuffs and reached for his left wrist, as though the situation had been resolved. That was a mistake. Jesse Leboeuf turned around and stiff-armed her in the chest, his face bitten with disdain.

  She stumbled backward, then pulled her can of Mace from her belt. I stepped between her and Leboeuf and held my hands up in front of him, not touching him, moving side to side as he tried to advance toward her. “I’m hooking you up, Jesse,” I said. “You’re under arrest for resisting and assault on a police officer. If you touch my person, I’m going to put you on your knees.”

  His eyes looked hot and small and recessed in his sun-browned face. I could only guess at the thoughts he was having about Catin and the images he carried from a lifetime of abusing people who had no power: black women in the three-dollar cribs on Hopkins; a hobo pulled off a boxcar; a New Orleans pimp who thought he could bring his own girls to town and not piece off the action; an illiterate Cajun wife whose body shrank when he touched her. I could hear Catin breathing next to me. “I need to finish this, Dave,” she said.

  “No, Mr. Jesse is going to be all right,” I said. “Right, Mr. Jesse? This bullshit is over. Give me your word to that effect, and we’ll all go into town and work this out.”

  “Don’t you do this,” Catin said to me.

  “It’s over,” I said. “Right, Jesse?”

  He looked hard at me, then nodded.

  “Shame on you,” Catin said to me.

  We rode in front with Leboeuf in back, unhooked, behind the wire-mesh screen. We didn’t speak until we were at the department, and then it was only to get Leboeuf into a holding cell.

  CATIN WENT IN to see Helen first, then I did. “Catin says you wouldn’t back her up,” Helen said.

  “Call it what you want,” I replied. “I didn’t see too many alternatives at the time.”

  “Nobody is going to knock my deputies around.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You’d bust up an old man and involve one of your deputies in a liability suit? That’s what you’re saying?”

  She picked a pen up from her desk blotter and dropped it in a can full of other pens. “Talk to her. She thinks highly of you.”

  “I will.”

  “While you were gone, I pulled Leboeuf’s phone records,” she said. “I haven’t charged him so far because I don’t want him lawyered up.”

  “What did you find?”

  “He’s made some suspicious calls, put it that way. You think he’s capable of putting a hit on a cop?”

  “Jesse Leboeuf is capable of anything.”

  “Get him in here,” she said.

  On the way to the holding cell, I saw Catin in the corridor. “Walk with me,” I said.

  “Why should I?”

  I rested my hand on her shoulder. “When I was a young second lieutenant in the United States Army, I reported a major who was drunk on duty. Nothing was done about it. Later, this same major sent us down a night trail strung with Bouncing Betties and Chinese toe-poppers. We lost two men that night. I know how it feels when somebody doesn’t back your play. That wasn’t my intention when I stepped in front of Jesse Leboeuf. The real problem was not you but me. The truth is, I hate men like Jesse Leboeuf, and when I deal with them, I sometimes go across lines I shouldn’t.”

  She stopped walking and turned toward me, forcing me to drop my hand from her shoulder. She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine. “Forget it,” she said.

  “Sheriff Soileau wants Leboeuf in her office in a few minutes. I think he’s dirty on some level, but right now we’re not sure what. I wonder if you can do a favor for me.”

  After she and I talked, she walked by herself down to the holding cell while I took a seat in a chair around the corner.

  “I have to clear up something between us, Mr. Leboeuf,” she said through the bars. “I don’t like you or what you represent. You’re a racist and a misogynist, and the world would be better off without you. But as a Christian, I have to forgive you. The reason I’m able to do that is I think you’re a victim yourself. It appears you were loyal to people who are now ratting you out. That must be a terrible fate to live with. Anyway, that’s your business, not mine. Good-bye, and I hope I never see you again.”

  It was a masterpiece. I waited five minutes, then unlocked Leboeuf’s cell door. “The sheriff wants to see you,” I said.

  “I’m getting out?” he said, rising from the wood bench where he had been sitting.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. I cuffed his wrists behind him and made sure as many people as possible witnessed his humiliation while I escorted him to Helen’s office.

  “Y’all don’t have the right to do this to me,” he said.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to think, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be the fall guy on this one,” I replied.

  “Fall guy on what?”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. I opened the door to Helen’s office and sat him down in a chair.

  Helen was standing by the window, backlit by the sun’s glare off Bayou Teche. She smiled pleasantly at him. She was holding half a dozen printouts from the phone company. “Did you know that prior to Dave Robicheaux’s visit to your home yesterday, you hadn’t used your landline or your cell phone in two days?”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” he replied, his hands still cuffed behind him, the strain starting to show.

  “Immediately after Detective Robicheaux left your house, you made three calls: one to the home of Pierre Dupree, one to a boat dock south of New Orleans, and one to a company called Redstone Security. Forty-five minutes later, someone tried to kill Detective Robicheaux.”

  “I called Pierre because him and me and my daughter own half of Redstone. I’m retired, but I still consult for them. I wanted Pierre to know that I’ll sell him my shares in the company at the stock option price if he’ll treat my daughter right in their divorce settlement. The phone call to the boat dock was a misdial. What difference does any of this make, anyway?”

  “You dialed the wrong number?” she said.

  “I guess. I didn’t give it any thought.”

  “Your phone records show you called that same boat dock four times in the last month. Were those all misdials?”

  “I’m old. I get confused,” he said. “You’re talking too fast and trying to trip me up. I want my daughter here.”

  “Lafayette PD was on the shooter from the jump,” Helen said. “He’s a guy you know, Mr. Leboeuf. He doesn’t want to go back to Camp J. Are you going to take his weight? At your age, any sentence can mean life.”

  Leboeuf stared into space, his unshaved cheeks threaded with tiny purple veins. I realized we had been foolish in thinking we could take him over the hurdles. He belonged to that group of people who, of their own volition, eradicate all light from the soul and thereby inure themselves against problems of conscience and any thoughts of restraint in dealing with the wiles of their enemies. I cannot say with certainty what constitutes a sociopath. My guess is they love evil for its own sake, that they chose roles and vocations endowing them with sufficient authority and power to impose their agenda on their fellow man. Was Jesse Leboeuf a sociopath? Or was he something worse?

  “I don’t like you staring at me like that,” he said to me.

  “Did you ever think about the emotional damage you did to the peopl
e you tormented with your slingshot years ago?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When you and your friends went nigger-knocking in the black district.”

  He shook his head. “I have no memory of that,” he replied.

  “Get him out of here,” Helen said.

  I unlocked Leboeuf’s cuffs. He stood up, rubbing his wrists. “You charging me on the beef with the black woman?”

  “You’re free to go, sir,” I replied.

  Leboeuf huffed air out his nose and left Helen’s office, trailing his cigarette odor like a soiled flag. But it wasn’t over. Five minutes later, I was standing by the possessions desk when a deputy handed Leboeuf the manila envelope that contained his wallet and keys and pocket change and cigarette lighter. I watched him put each item back in his pockets, gazing indolently out the window at the oak-shaded grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother.

  “Mind if I have a look at your key chain?” I said.

  “What’s so interesting about it?” he asked.

  “The fob. It’s a sawfish. It’s like the one I think was painted on the bow of the boat that abducted Blue Melton.”

  “It’s a goddamn fish. What kind of craziness are you trying to put on me now?”

  “I remember where I saw that emblem painted on another boat many years ago. It was in sixty feet of water, south of Cocodrie. The sawfish was on the conning tower of a Nazi submarine. It was sunk by a Coast Guard dive-bomber in 1943. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Give your guff to the devil,” he replied.

  Later, I made two calls to the boat dock whose number Helen had pulled from Leboeuf’s phone records. In each instance the man I spoke with said he knew nothing of a white boat with a sawfish painted on the bow.

  THAT EVENING, CLETE Purcel pulled his Caddy to the curb one house down from ours and walked back across our yard to the front door, tapping softly, as though preoccupied about something. When I answered the door, I could see the Caddy in the shadows, a solitary spark of red sunlight showing through the live oaks that towered over it. The air was humid and warm, the trees along the bayou pulsing with birds. Clete untwisted the cellophane on a thin green-striped stick of peppermint candy and put it in his mouth. “Where’d you get the cuts on your face?” he asked.

  “A situation in Lafayette. Why’d you park up the street?”

  “I’ve got an oil leak.”

  “I thought you were in New Orleans. Come inside.”

  “I think NOPD still wants to hang Frankie Giacano’s murder on me. I’ll be at the motor court. I’ll see you later. I just wanted to tell you I was back in town.”

  Through the gloom, I could see someone sitting in the passenger seat, even though the top was up. “Who’s with you?”

  “A temp I put on.”

  “What kind of temp?”

  “The kind that does temporary jobs.”

  “A guy tried to take my head off with a cut-down yesterday. He was using double-aught bucks. Lafayette PD thinks it was a guy I helped send away about ten years ago. A retired plainclothes named Jesse Leboeuf may have sicced him on me.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”

  “None of your business. Is this guy Leboeuf connected to Pierre Dupree or any of this stuff with Golightly and Grimes and Frankie Gee?”

  “Leboeuf is Pierre Dupree’s father-in-law.”

  “This guy is like a stopped-up toilet that keeps backing up on the floor. I think maybe we should do a home call.”

  “Better listen to the rest of it,” I said.

  We sat down on the gallery steps, and I told him about the shooting by Varina Leboeuf’s apartment in Bengal Gardens, the heisted freezer truck that the shooter and his driver had used, the connection between the Leboeufs and Pierre Dupree and a group called Redstone Security, and the key-chain fob cast in the miniature shape of a sawfish carried by Jesse Leboeuf.

  “And there was a sawfish on that old wreck that used to drift up and down the continental shelf?” Clete said.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Leboeuf is a crypto-Nazi or something?”

  “I doubt if he could spell the word,” I said.

  “This isn’t connecting for me, Dave. We’re talking about the emblem on a Chris-Craft that kidnapped the Melton girl and now about a sawfish on a submarine and a key chain? And the guy with the key chain is the father-in-law of a guy who’s part Jewish?”

  “That pretty much sums it up.”

  “The shooter suspect, this guy Ronnie Earl Patin, is not in custody, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You make him for the shooter?”

  “I saw him for maybe two seconds before he fired into my windshield. The Ronnie Earl Patin I sent up the road was a blimp. The guy in the freezer truck wasn’t. Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”

  “My latest squeeze. She works for the Humane Society and adopts pathetic losers like me.”

  I laid my arm across his shoulders. They felt as hard and solid as boulders in a streambed. “Are you getting in over your head, partner?”

  “Will you stop that? I’m not the problem here. It’s you that almost caught a faceful of buckshot. Listen to me. This deal has something to do with stolen or forged paintings. They go into private collections owned by guys who want power over the art world. They not only want to own a rare painting, they want to make sure nobody ever sees it except them. They’re like trophy killers who hide the cadavers.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “It’s no secret. There’s a criminal subculture that operates in the art world. The clientele are greedy, possessive assholes and are easy to take over the hurdles. Golightly had e-mails from well-known art fences in Los Angeles and New York. I confirmed the names with NYPD and a couple of PIs in L.A.”

  “It’s not just stolen artwork. It’s bigger than that,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “What do you know about this Redstone Security group?”

  “They’re out of Galveston and Fort Worth, I think. They did a lot of government contract work in Iraq. I’ve heard stories about their people indiscriminately killing civilians.”

  “Can I meet your temp?”

  “No, she’s tired. What’s this obsession over my temp?”

  “Jimmy the Dime called me. He told me Count Carbona gave you a lead on your daughter.”

  “Jimmy the Dime should keep his mouth shut.”

  “What are you up to, Clete? You think you can change the past?”

  “You got to ease up on the batter, Streak. In this case, the batter is me.”

  “If that’s the way you want it,” I said.

  He crunched down on the peppermint stick and chewed a broken piece in his jaw, making sounds like a horse eating a carrot, his eyes never leaving mine. “We almost died out there on the bank of the bayou, where we used to have dinners on your picnic table. Know why? Because we trusted people we shouldn’t. That’s the way it’s always been. We turned the key on the skells while the white-collar crowd kicked a railroad tie up our ass. That’s not the way this one is going down. Got it, big mon?”

  EARLY THE NEXT morning Clete and Gretchen ate a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and fried pork chops and scrambled eggs at Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and then drove to Jeanerette down the old two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche through an idyllic stretch of sugarcane and cattle acreage. Her window was down, and the wind was blowing her hair over her forehead. There was a thin gold chain around her neck, and she was fiddling with the icon attached to it. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.

  “The fishing is good, too. So is the food, maybe even better than New Orleans.”

  “You sure you want to ’front this guy at his house?”

  “Stonewall Jackson used to say ‘Mislead, mystify, and surprise the enemy.’”

  “That’s great stuff as long as you have fifty thousand
rednecks stomping ass for you.”

  “Is that the Star of David?” he asked.

  “This?” she said, fingering the gold chain. “My mother is Jewish, so I’m at least half. I don’t know what my father was. He could have been a Mick or a Swede, because neither my mother nor anybody in her family has reddish-blond hair.”

  “You go to temple?”

  “Why are you asking about the Star of David?”

  “Barney Ross and Max Baer both wore it on their trunks. I don’t know if they went to temple or not. Maybe they wore it for good luck. Is that why you wear it? That’s all I was asking.”

  “Who are Max Baer and Barney Ross?” she said.

  “Never mind. Look, we’re going into St. Mary Parish. Pierre Dupree owns another home in the Garden District in New Orleans. I suspect he’s here. This place looks like the United States, but it’s not. This is Dupree turf. The rest of us are tourists. You don’t want to get pinched here. I have to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You know what ‘wet work’ is?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “I’ve had people ask me to do it.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I run an honest business. I don’t work for dirtbags, and I don’t jam the family of a skip in order to bring him in. What I’m asking you is did you know some bad guys in Little Havana, maybe some guys who got you into the life? Did you maybe do some stuff you don’t feel good about?”

  “I didn’t know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street,” she said. “Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “The only time I felt bad about anything was when I didn’t get even for what people did to me,” she said. “By the way, I don’t like that term ‘in the life.’ I was never ‘in the life.’”

  Clete passed a plantation on the Teche that had been built miles downstream in 1796 and brought brick by brick up the bayou in the early 1800s and reassembled on its present site. Then he entered the spangled shade of live oaks that had been on the roadside for over two hundred years, and passed a second antebellum plantation, one with enormous white columns. He crossed the drawbridge and drove by a trailer slum and entered the small town of Jeanerette, where time seemed to have stopped a century ago and the yards of the Victorian homes along the main street were bursting with flowers, the lawns so blue and green and cool in appearance that you felt you could dive into them as you would into a swimming pool. Clete approached the home of Pierre Dupree and turned in to the gravel lane that led to the wide-galleried entrance of the main house, the gigantic oak limbs creaking above.