Creole Belle

  Then she was gone.

  NINE DAYS LATER, a big man wearing a seersucker suit and a bow tie and spit-shined shoes and a fresh haircut and carrying a canvas bag on a shoulder strap came into the room and pulled up a chair by the bed and stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  “You’re not going to smoke that in here, are you?” I asked.

  He didn’t bother to answer. His blond hair was cut like a little boy’s. His eyes were bright green, more energetic than they should have been, one step below wired. He set his bag on the floor and began pulling magazines and two city library books and a box of pralines and a carton of orange juice and a Times-Picayune from it. When he bent over, his coat swung open, exposing a nylon shoulder holster and the blue-black .38 with white handles that it carried. He removed a pint bottle of vodka from the bag and unscrewed the cap and poured at least three inches into the carton of orange juice.

  “Early in the day,” I said.

  He tossed his unlit cigarette end over end into the wastebasket and drank out of the carton, staring out the window at the robins fluttering in the oak trees and the Spanish moss stirring in the breeze. “Tell me if you want me to leave, big mon.”

  “You know better than that,” I said.

  “I saw Alafair and Molly getting in their car. When are you going home?”

  “Maybe in a week. I feel a lot stronger. Where have you been?”

  “Running down a couple of bail skips. I still have to pay the bills. I’m not sleeping too good. I think the doc left some lead in me. I think it’s moving around.”

  His eyes were bright with a manic energy that I didn’t think was related to the alcohol. He kept swallowing and clearing his throat, as though a piece of rust were caught in it. “The speckled trout are running. We need to get out on the salt. The White House is saying the oil has gone away.”

  He waited for me to speak. But I didn’t.

  “You don’t believe it?” he said.

  “The oil company says the same thing. Do you believe them?”

  He fiddled with his fingers and looked into space, and I knew he had something on his mind besides the oil-well blowout on the Gulf. “Something happen?” I said.

  “I had a run-in two nights ago with Frankie Giacano. Remember him? He used to burn safes with his cousin Stevie Gee. He was knocking back shots with a couple of hookers in this joint on Decatur, and I accidentally stepped on his foot, and he says, ‘Hey, Clete, glad to see you, even though you probably just broke two of my toes. At least it saves me the trouble of coming to your office. You owe me two large, plus the vig for over twenty years. I don’t know what that might come to. Something like the national debt of Pakistan. You got a calculator on you?’”

  Clete drank again from the carton, staring at the birds jittering in the trees, his throat working, his cheeks pooling with color as they always did when alcohol went directly into his bloodstream. He set the carton down on the nightstand and widened his eyes. “So I told him, ‘I’m having a quiet beer here, Frankie, and I apologize for stepping on your needle-nose stomps that nobody but greaseballs wears these days, so I’m going to sit down over there in the corner and order a po’boy sandwich and read the paper and drink my beer, and you’re not going to bother me again. Understood?’

  “Then, in front of his skanks, he tells me he peeled an old safe owned by his uncle Didi Gee, and he found a marker I signed for two grand, and all these years the vig was accruing and now I owe the principal and the interest to him. So I go, ‘I think a certain kind of social disease has climbed from your nether regions into your brain, Frankie. Secondly, you don’t have permission to call me by my first name. Thirdly, your uncle Didi Gee, who was a three-hundred-pound tub of whale shit, died owing me money, not the other way around.’

  “Frankie says, ‘If you’d be a little more respectful, I would have worked something out. But I knew that was what you were gonna say. For that reason, I already sold the marker to Bix Golightly. By the way, take a look at the crossword puzzle in your newspaper. I was working on it this morning and couldn’t think of a thirteen-letter word for a disease of the glands. Then you walked in and it hit me. The word is “elephantiasis.” I’m not pulling your crank. Check it out.’”

  “You think he was lying about selling the marker to Golightly?” I asked.

  “Who cares?”

  “Bix Golightly is psychotic,” I said.

  “They all are.”

  “Put away the booze, Clete, at least until afternoon.”

  “When you were on the hooch, did you ever stop drinking because somebody told you to?”

  It was Indian summer outside, and the sunlight looked like gold smoke in the live oaks. At the base of the tree trunks, the petals of the four-o’clocks were open in the shade, and a cluster of fat-breasted robins were pecking in the grass. It was a fine morning, not one to compromise and surrender to the meretricious world in which Clete Purcel and I had spent most of our adult lives. “Let it go,” I said.

  “Let what go?” he asked.

  “The sewer that people like Frankie Giacano and Bix Golightly thrive in.”

  “Only dead people get to think like that. The rest of us have to deal with it.”

  When I didn’t answer, he picked up the iPod and clicked it on. He held one side of the headset close to his ear and listened, then smiled in recognition. “That’s Will Bradley and Freddie Slack. Where’d you get this?”

  “From Tee Jolie Melton.”

  “I heard she disappeared or went off someplace. She was here?”

  “It was about two in the morning, and I turned on the pillow and she was sitting right there, in the same chair you’re sitting in.”

  “She works here?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “After ten P.M. this place is locked up like a convent.”

  “Help me into the bathroom, will you?” I said.

  He set the iPod back on the nightstand and stared at it, the driving rhythms of “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” still rising from the foam-rubber pads on the earphones. “Don’t be telling me stuff like this, Streak,” he said. “I’m not up to it. I won’t listen anymore to that kind of talk.”

  He lifted the orange juice carton and drank from it, fixing one eye on me like a cyclops who was half in the bag.

  CLETE MAINTAINED TWO private investigative offices, one on Main Street in New Iberia, over in the bayou country, and one in New Orleans, on St. Ann in the French Quarter. After Katrina, he bought and restored the building on St. Ann that he had formerly rented. With great pride, he lived on the second floor, above his office, with a fine view from the balcony of St. Louis Cathedral and the oak trees and dark green pike-fenced garden behind it. As a PI, he did scut work for bondsmen and liability lawyers, wives who wanted their unfaithful husbands bankrupted in divorce court, and cuckolds who wanted their wives and their lovers crucified. On the upside of the situation, Clete hired out at nearly pro bono rates to bereaved parents whose missing children had been written off as runaways, or to people whose family members may have been railroaded into prison and even placed on death row.

  He was despised by many of his old colleagues at NOPD and the remnants of the Mob. He was also the bane of the insurance companies because of the massive amounts of property damage he had done from Mobile to Beaumont. He had skipped New Orleans on a murder beef after shooting and killing a federal witness, and he had fought on the side of the leftists in El Salvador. He had also been a recipient of the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts. When a private plane loaded with mobsters crashed into the side of a mountain in western Montana, the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation determined that someone had poured sand in the fuel tanks. Clete threw a suitcase in the back of his rusted-out Caddy convertible and blew Polson, Montana, like it was burning down. He dropped a corrupt Teamster official upside down from a hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool. He poured a dispenser of liquid soap down the throat of a button man
in the men’s room of the New Orleans airport. He handcuffed a drunk congressman to a fireplug on St. Charles Avenue. He opened up a fire hose on a hit man in the casino at the bottom of Canal Street and blew him into a toilet stall like a human hockey puck. He destroyed a gangster’s house on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth-grader, knocking down the walls, troweling up the floors, and crushing the furniture into kindling, even uprooting the shrubbery and flowers and trees and grading them and the lawn furniture into the swimming pool.

  An average day in the life of Clete Purcel was akin to an asteroid bouncing through Levittown.

  Child molesters, pimps, dope dealers, and men who abused women got no slack and feared him as they would the wrath of God. But Clete’s role as the merry prankster and classical trickster of folklore had a price tag. A succubus lived in his breast and gave him no respite. He had carried it with him from the Irish Channel in New Orleans to Vietnam and to the brothels of Bangkok and Cherry Alley in Tokyo and back home to New Orleans. In Clete’s mind, he was not worthy of a good woman’s love; nor did he ever measure up in the eyes of his alcoholic father, a milkman who took out his anger and low self-esteem on his confused and suffering firstborn son.

  His two visitors had parked their car on Decatur and walked up Pirates Alley, past the small bookshop that once was the apartment of William Faulkner, then had mounted the stairs of Clete’s building, where one of them banged loudly on the door with the flat of his fist.

  It was evening, and Clete had just showered after an hour of lifting barbells by the stone well in his courtyard. The sky was mauve-colored and filled with birds, the banana plants in his courtyard rattling in the breeze that blew from Lake Pontchartrain. He had just dressed in new slacks and white socks and Roman sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, his skin still glowing with the warmth of the shower, his hair wet-combed, all the time whistling a tune and looking forward to sitting down at his table over a bowl of crawfish gumbo and loaf of hot buttered French bread. It was the kind of timeless evening in Louisiana when spring and fall and winter and summer come together in a perfect equinox, so exquisite and lovely that the dying of the light seems a violation of a divine ordinance. It was an evening that was wonderful in every way possible. Street musicians were playing in Jackson Square; the air smelled of beignets baking in Café du Monde; the clouds were ribbed like strips of fire above a blue band of light that still clung to the bottom of the sky. Maybe there was even a possibility of turning around in a café and unexpectedly seeing a beautiful woman’s smile. It was an evening that would have been good for anything except an unannounced visit by Bix Golightly and a pimple-faced part-time killer and full-time punk named Waylon Grimes.

  Clete opened the door. “I’m closed for the day. You got business with me, call the office tomorrow and make an appointment,” he said.

  Bix Golightly still had the sloping shoulders and flat chest and vascular forearms and scar tissue around his eyes that had defined him when he boxed at Angola, breaking noses, busting lips and teeth, and knocking his opponents’ mouthpieces over the ropes into the crowd on the green. His face was all bone, the bridge of his nose crooked, his haircut tight, his mouth a mirthless slit. Some people said Bix shot meth. Others said he didn’t have to; Bix had come out of his mother’s womb with a hard-on and had been in overdrive ever since.

  Three tiny green teardrops were tattooed at the corner of his right eye. A red star was tattooed on his throat, right under the jawbone. “I’m glad to see you looking so good,” Bix said. “I heard you and your buddy Robicheaux got shot up. I also heard you capped a woman. Or was it Robicheaux who did the broad?”

  “It was me. What are you doing here, Bix?”

  “Frankie Gee told you about me acquiring your marker?” he said.

  “Yeah, I know all about it. With respect, this business about a marker is bogus,” Clete said. “I think Frankie took you over the hurdles. I hope you didn’t get burned too bad.”

  “If it’s bogus, why is your name signed on it?” Bix asked.

  “Because I used to play bourré with the Figorelli brothers. I lost some money in a pot, but I covered it the following week. How that marker ended up in Didi Gee’s safe, I don’t know.”

  “Maybe because you were stoned out of your head.”

  “That’s a possibility. But I don’t know and I don’t remember and I don’t care.”

  “Purcel, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t care’ don’t flush.”

  “It’d better, because that’s as good as it’s going to get. What’s Waylon doing here?” Clete said.

  “He works for me. Why do you ask?”

  “He killed a four-year-old child, is why,” Clete replied.

  “That was during a robbery. Waylon was the victim, not the guy doing the robbery,” Bix said.

  “He backed up over a kid and made the parents testify that a carjacker did it,” Clete said.

  “That’s news to me,” Bix said, looking at his friend. “What’s this stuff about intimidating the parents, Waylon?”

  “You got me,” Waylon Grimes said. He was a small-boned man with a concave chest and a wispy red pencil mustache and hair that hung like string over his ears. He wore his shirt outside his slacks, the sleeves buttoned at the wrists the way a 1950s hood might, a chain hooked to a wallet in his back pocket. He lit a cigarette, his hands cupped around his lighter. “Want me to go downstairs?”

  “No, stay where you’re at,” Bix said. “Purcel, I’m not greedy. I checked out your finances. You got about fifty grand equity in this place. You can borrow on the equity and give the check to me, since I know you don’t have any cash. But no matter how you cut it, I want thirty large from you. I want it in seven working days, too. Don’t try to stiff me on this, man.”

  “I want a retroactive patent on the wheel, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get one,” Clete replied.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” Waylon said.

  “It’s broken,” Clete said.

  “You got a broad back there?” Waylon said.

  Clete stepped forward, forcing the two visitors backward onto the landing, a brass marching band coming to life in his head. “You listen, you little piece of shit,” he said. “If you ever come here again, I’m going to start pulling parts off you. That’s not a metaphor. I’m going to rip your arms and legs off your body and kick them up your ass. You want to crack wise? I hope you do, because I’m going to bust your spokes right now, head to foot.”

  Waylon took a deep puff off his cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly, like balls of damp cotton rising from his mouth. He dropped the cigarette on the landing and ground it out flatly under his shoe and glanced at Bix Golightly, his expression contemplative. “I’ll be down at the Vietnamese grocery,” he said.

  “No, we’re gonna iron this out,” Bix said. “You don’t talk to my employees like that, Purcel. Besides, we got a lot of commonalities. Did you know we used to ball the same broad, the one with the king-size jugs?”

  “This guy is a jerk and a welcher, Bix,” Waylon said. “Why waste your time talking to him? You know how it’s gonna play out.” He walked down the stairs, as indifferent to his employer as he was to Clete’s threat. He paused at the bottom, the wind blowing through the brick foyer, ruffling his clothes. He looked up the stairs at Clete. “About that kid who got himself crunched under the car? He was a Mongoloid and still wearing diapers, even though he was four years old. The only reason his parents kept him around was the state aid they got. He was also playing in the driveway, where he wasn’t supposed to be, primarily because his parents weren’t watching him. If you ask me, he’s better off now.”

  Before Clete could respond, Bix Golightly stepped closer to him, blocking Clete’s view of the foyer, his body heat and the astringent smell of his deodorant rising into Clete’s face. “Can you read my ink?” he said.

  “What about it?”

  “Tell me what it says.”

  “The teardrops mean you popped three guys for the A
ryan Brotherhood. The red star on your carotid tells ambitious guys to give it their best shot. You’re a walking fuck-you to every swinging dick on the yard.”

  “You think you’re a tough guy because you ate a couple of bullets on the bayou? ‘Tough’ is when you got nothing to lose, when you don’t care about nothing, when you don’t even care if you’re going to hell or not. Are you that tough, Purcel?”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “I’m gonna send an appraiser out to look at your property. We got a small window of opportunity here. Don’t let this thing get out of control.”

  “Don’t blow your nose too hard, Bix. I think your brains are starting to melt.”

  Bix took a folded piece of lined notebook paper from his shirt pocket and handed it to Clete. “Check out the addresses there and see if I got them right.”

  Clete unfolded the piece of notebook paper and stared at the letters and numbers penciled on it, his scalp shrinking. “What if I shove this down your throat?” he said.

  “Yeah, you can do that, provided you don’t mind Waylon knowing where your sister and your niece live. Smells like you’re cooking gumbo in there. Have a nice evening. I love this neighborhood. I always wanted to live in it. Don’t get your dork stuck in the lamp socket on this.”

  AFTER THE SHOOTING behind my house on Bayou Teche in New Iberia, I underwent three surgeries: one that saved my life at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette; one at the Texas Medical Center in Houston; and the third in New Orleans. A solitary .32 bullet had struck me between the shoulder blades. It was fired by a woman neither Clete nor I had believed was armed. The wound was no more painful and seemed no more consequential than the sharp smack of a fist. The shooter’s motivation had been a simple one and had nothing to do with survival, fear, greed, or panic: I had spoken down to her and called her to task for her imperious treatment of others. My show of disrespect enraged her and sent her out my back screen door into the darkness, walking fast across the yellowed oak leaves and the moldy pecan husks, oblivious to the dead men on the ground, a pistol extended in front of her with one arm, her mission as mindless and petty as they come. She paused only long enough to make a brief vituperative statement about the nature of my offense, then I heard a pop like a wet firecracker, and a .32 round pierced my back and exited my chest. Like the dead man walking, I stumbled to the edge of the bayou, where a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler that no one else saw waited for me.