Creole Belle

  “You were the shooter? Not your brother?”

  “I agreed to do it. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “You agreed? Can you translate that?”

  “They were gonna send Ronnie Earl back inside. They weren’t gonna give me any more gigs. I got to make a living.”

  “We ran you through the NCIC computer. You don’t have a sheet.”

  “I was a transporter, girls and sometimes a little skag. I drove the girls up from Mexico. I wasn’t full-time on any of this. One night on the border, I did something. Some people were crowded too tight into the back of the truck. When it went into the ditch, I ran away. The back was locked. It was over a hundred degrees, even at night. Maybe you read about it.”

  “No, I didn’t. Why did you call me?”

  “I need to get out of the country.”

  “And you want me to help you?”

  “I got a few hundred dollars, but it’s not enough. I need at least five t’ousand.”

  “You’re asking this of the man you tried to kill?”

  “The person running all this is named Angel or maybe Angelle. In French, ange means ‘angel.’”

  “I know what it means.”

  “You’re not listening. This is bigger than all of us. They ship women from all over the world. Bosnia, Romania, Russia, Africa, Thailand, Honduras, any shithole where things are coming apart. A guy makes a call and gets any kind of woman or combination of women he wants. That’s just part of it.”

  “What else are they into?”

  “Everything. They own part of everything there is.”

  “Who hired you to kill me?”

  “You’re not listening. We’re nothing down here, just ants running around on a wet log. I’ve heard about an island they got.” His voice started to break, as though he were afraid to look at the images his mind was creating. “They do stuff to people there you don’t want to know about. They got this big iron mold. I saw a photo of what they did to a guy.”

  “Take this to the FBI.”

  “I’ll go inside on attempted murder. I’ll be dead in a week. You saw what they did to Ronnie Earl. The guy who showed me the photo played a tape for me. I heard somebody being put into this iron thing they got. The guy going inside was talking in a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t have to understand it. He was begging and crying, then I heard them closing the door on him. It took a long time for them to close the door. He was screaming all the while. I got to hide someplace, man. Five t’ousand dollars, that’s all it’ll take. I’ll give you all the information I got.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, partner. Why’d you guys use a freezer truck?”

  “Ronnie Earl said nobody would pay attention to it. Why you axing about the truck we drove? I’m telling you about people who aren’t like anybody you ever knew, and you’re worried about a truck? There’s a girl involved, a singer, a Creole girl who was on that island. That’s what Ronnie Earl said. She was big stuff in the zydeco clubs. I don’t remember her name.”

  “Tee Jolie Melton,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Her sister got grabbed, too. You gonna help me or not?”

  “Where can we meet?”

  “You’ll get me the money?”

  “We have funds to help out confidential informants or friends of the court,” I said, wondering at my own willingness to make promises that perhaps I couldn’t keep. “One way or another, we’ll get you out of this.”

  “What’s that iron thing? What do they call it? It’s like from the Middle Ages. I could see part of it in the photo. I could see pieces of the guy on it. It’s got big spikes inside the door. What do they call that, man?”

  “The iron maiden.”

  I heard wind in the receiver, as though he had taken the phone from his ear and mouth.

  “Are you there, Chad?” I said.

  “Oh, man,” he said, the register in his voice suddenly dropping.

  “What’s happening?” I said.

  “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.

  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’être 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.”