Creole Belle

  She shut the door that gave onto the main restaurant, her heart pounding. When Pierre Dupree tried to pull himself up, she swung the blackjack down on his neck and shoulders, then hit him across the forearm and the point of one knee.

  The fleshy man was trying to raise himself by holding on to the table and had pulled the tablecloth onto the floor. His teeth were broken off at the gums, and a string of blood and saliva hung from his chin. She swung the blackjack across the side of his face and heard the bone crack. “Treat this as a positive, a great opportunity for weight loss. I’ve heard soup tastes lovely when it’s sucked through a straw,” she said.

  She surveyed the room, catching her breath, the blackjack hanging loosely from her hand. “If you’re thinking about dropping the dime on me, ask yourself if you want a repeat performance,” she said. “I hate to tell you this, but you guys aren’t the first team. Maybe you should think about a career change. Maybe jobs in a Pee-wee Herman theme park.”

  She walked back to Pierre Dupree and squatted down at eye level with him, tapping the end of the blackjack on his nose. His eyes were out of focus, his face mottled with burns. “Think this was bad? I’ve had men do things to me with their penises that make this look like a cakewalk. Next time I’m going to turn you into a quadriplegic.” She nudged one of his eyes wider with the tip of the blackjack. “One other thing: Your grandfather is Jewish, but you called me a kike. You’re a puzzle, Pierre. I might have to look you up again. Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  She wiped off her blackjack on his necktie and put it in her tote bag, then slipped on her shades and tied her scarf on her head and went out the side exit and crossed the street to the Caddy. A soft rain was blowing along the avenue, and the pink neon glow of the restaurant inside the mist made her think of the cotton candy her mother once bought her on a visit to Coney Island.

  CLETE PURCEL HAD spent most of the afternoon lying on a recliner under the live oaks by his cottage in his scarlet knee-length Everlast boxing trunks, a cooler packed with ice and five brands of foreign beer by his side, a pork roast turning on the rotisserie, the smoke drifting through the trees onto the bayou. He had self-medicated to the point where he had almost forgotten his wall-to-wall tryst with Varina Leboeuf and the fact that he had probably gone on tape and may have joined the great American porn pantheon of people like Johnny Wadd Holmes. The latter conclusion was one he could not deal with in the midst of a hangover that was already of monstrous proportions. Time to cauterize the head with a little more flakjuice, he thought. He cracked another bottle of St. Pauli Girl and chugged it to the bottom, upending it until every ounce of foam had drained down his throat.

  Even when rain began to patter on the leaves overhead, he could not make himself get off the recliner and go inside. So he stayed under the trees throughout the shower, the rain hissing on the grill, the smoke wrapping itself around him, a tugboat on the bayou blowing its horn as though in mockery.

  Then he saw his Caddy turn off East Main and bounce over the dip in the motor-court driveway and approach his cottage and parking space. He dropped his empty bottle on the grass and stood up, the trees and rooftops tilting, the Saint Augustine–like carpet nails under his bare feet. Gretchen got out of the car and locked the door and swung her tote bag over her shoulder.

  “I need to have a word with you,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “Other than you boosting my car and my sap and my nine-Mike, no problem at all,” he replied.

  “You got some Lysol?”

  “Under the lavatory. What do you want it for?”

  “To tidy up. What’s for eats?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Come inside. It’s raining,” she said. “Are you getting drunk again?”

  She left the front door of the cottage open. When he went inside, she was spraying his blackjack with disinfectant and cleaning the leather cover with a wad of paper towels.

  “Care to tell me where you went in my car?” he said.

  “To New Orleans. I had a chat with Pierre Dupree and a couple of guys he was having lunch with. Did Alafair Robicheaux call?”

  “Alafair? What does Alafair have to do with this?”

  “Nothing. She was going to download a bunch of information for me on film schools. I want to make movies. I don’t want to write them or act in them, I want to make them.”

  He was stabbing his finger in the air. “What happened with Dupree and these other guys?”

  “I beat the living shit out of them. What did you think?”

  “Where?”

  “In a joint up St. Charles. Don’t make a big deal out of it. They had it coming.”

  “You just walked in and walked out and left three guys with their sticks broken?”

  “Yeah, I’d say that covers it. No, I take that back. Something else happened. Dupree called me a kike. His grandfather is a Jew. But he uses anti-Semitic language?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You’re right. The point is you need somebody to take care of you.”

  “Kicking the shit out of a client’s husband is not a caring activity.”

  “I wouldn’t call Varina Leboeuf a client. An easy lay is more like it. Or a one-night punch. Or a sport fuck. Don’t get me started.”

  “Get you started?”

  She began brushing her hair. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Clete?”

  “Not telling you what? I can’t begin to understand what’s in your head. It’s like having a conversation with a hurricane.”

  “Whatever it is you’re hiding. I see it in your eyes when you don’t think I’m looking.”

  “I like you in a special way. That’s all. We’re a lot alike.”

  “‘Special way’? What is that, Sanskrit for ‘deeply weird’? Are you carrying around a lot of guilt about Vietnam and working it out on me? Because if you are, I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t want to see you hurt. You went after these guys because of me. You’ve got to choose your battlefields more carefully, Gretchen. From this point on, these guys will know where you are, but you won’t know where they are. You don’t walk around in plain view while your enemy is wearing camouflage and setting up an L-shaped ambush. You know what an L-shaped ambush is? It’s a meat grinder. We had an expression in Vietnam. We’d say, ‘It’s Vietnam.’ Like the rules there were different and whatever happened didn’t count. The truth is, the whole world is Vietnam. You either use your head and carry your own water and take care of yourself and stay true to your principles, or you walk into a meat grinder.”

  “What’s the zip code on Mars?”

  “Why?”

  “Because that should be your zip code.”

  He sat down on the bed and gazed at the design in the rug. His skin was beaded with rainwater, his hair pasted on his scalp. “The two guys with Dupree, they tried to take you down?” he said.

  “They weren’t art dealers.”

  “And you busted up all three of them? Just with the sap? You never pulled your piece?”

  “I didn’t need to. They’re amateurs, and they fell in their own shit.”

  “In what way?”

  “They made fun of me because I’m a woman, even though they had no idea who I was. They have the judgment of people who abuse restaurant employees who cook and serve their food.”

  “They’ll be coming after you.”

  “Too bad for them.”

  “I’ll bring in the roast and fix you a sandwich. Don’t ever run off with my car or mess with my stuff again.”

  “Whatever,” she said. She was sitting in a straight-back chair. She rubbed the back of one wrist in her eye and gazed wanly out the window at the rain blowing off the rooftops. “Alafair told me about a 1940s musical revue that’s coming up here in December. I thought about doing a documentary on it. It’d be a start, wouldn’t it? Maybe something I could use to get into film school?”

  He started to redirect the conversatio
n back to the problem at hand but gave it up. “I don’t know much about universities.”

  “I was just asking. I never went to many people for advice. My mother was always in and out of rehab. More out than in. I stopped calling her about a year ago. Do you think I have it? I mean the talent or the brains or whatever. You know stuff about history and business and the military that most college-educated people don’t. Do you think somebody like me could make it in Hollywood?”

  “You like Burt Reynolds?”

  “Do I? Did you see Deliverance?”

  “I met him once. Another guy asked him how he got into the film business. Reynolds said, ‘Why grow up when you can make movies?’ I bet they’d name a boulevard after you.”

  “Clete?”

  He turned around, his hand on the doorknob, the mist drifting into the room.

  “Lay off the hooch,” she said. “There’re certain kinds of behavior I can’t deal with, not even when the person is somebody I’m really fond of. I’m sorry if I talked harsh to you.”

  I DIDN’T LEARN of the incident in the art deco restaurant from Clete. I heard about it Monday morning when I got a phone call from Dana Magelli at NOPD. A patrolwoman had responded to the 911 at the same time the paramedics did. The private dining area was a wreck; blood and at least two teeth were splattered on a tablecloth. But the victims of the attack had helped one another out the back door and driven away in an SUV without making a report.

  “You’re sure one of them was Pierre Dupree?” I said.

  “He’s a regular. The charges were on his AmEx,” Dana said. “Plus, the maître d’ said Dupree had reserved the private room where the attack took place.”

  “Why are you calling me about it?”

  “Because a witness said the assailant drove away in a maroon Cadillac convertible. Because I think this involves Clete Purcel or somebody associated with him. Because we don’t have time for this crap.”

  “A woman beat up these guys?”

  “That’s what a busboy says.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Pierre Dupree?” I asked.

  “He left town. I suspect he’s back in St. Mary Parish. But I don’t think you’re hearing me, Dave. We have the highest homicide rate in the United States. The same people who spread crack cocaine all over South Los Angeles have had a field day here. You tell Clete Purcel he’s not going to wipe his ass on this city again.”

  “The Giacanos got a free pass from NOPD for decades. The only guy who took a few of them down was Purcel. Save the bullshit for somebody else, Dana.”

  “Why is it I thought you’d take that attitude?”

  “Because you’re wrong? Because you’re particularly wrongheaded when it comes to Clete?”

  He hung up. I called Clete’s office. He wasn’t in, but Gretchen Horowitz was. “He doesn’t always say where he goes. Want to leave a message?” she said.

  “No, I want to talk to him, Ms. Horowitz.”

  “Call his cell phone. You have the number?”

  “Can you take the chewing gum out of your mouth?”

  “Hang on,” she said. “Does that make it all better?”

  I decided to take a chance. “If you’re going to bust up somebody in a New Orleans restaurant, why drive a vehicle that every cop in the city recognizes?”

  “I need a fresh stick of gum. Hang on again,” she said. “If you’re talking about Pierre Dupree, here’s how it went down. He tried to break a woman’s hand at his table. He also called her a kike. He also had two mooks with him who attacked her. So all three of them underwent sensitivity training.”

  “Pierre Dupree called you a kike?”

  “I didn’t say he called me anything.”

  “I haven’t met you formally yet, but I’m looking forward to it,” I said.

  “Get yourself a better dialogue writer, Jack. And while you’re at it, go fuck yourself,” she said.

  I eased the phone down into the cradle and signed out a cruiser and followed the back road down Bayou Teche into St. Mary Parish.

  I’VE ACQUIRED LITTLE wisdom with age. For me, the answers to the great mysteries seem more remote than ever. Emotionally, I cannot accept that a handful of evil men, none of whom ever fought in a war, some of whom never served in the military, can send thousands of their fellow countrymen to their deaths or bring about the deaths or maiming of hundreds of thousands of civilians and be lauded for their deeds. I don’t know why the innocent suffer. Nor can I comprehend the addiction that laid waste to my life but still burns like a hot coal buried under the ash, biding its time until an infusion of fresh oxygen blows it alight. I do not understand why my Higher Power saved me from the fate I designed for myself, while others of far greater virtue and character have been allowed to fall by the wayside. I suspect there are answers to all of these questions, but I have found none of them. I think Robert E. Lee was not only a good man but a heavily burdened one who debated long and hard over his decision to take Cemetery Ridge at a cost of eight thousand men. I think that’s why he wrote at the end of his life that he had but one goal, “to be a simple child of God,” because the contradictions of his life were so intense they were almost unbearable.

  For me, the greatest riddle involves the nature of evil. Is there indeed a diabolic force at work in our midst, a satanic figure with leathery wings and the breath of a carrion eater? Any police officer would probably say he’d need to look no further than his fellow man in order to answer that question. We all know that the survivors of war rarely speak of their experience. We tell ourselves they do not want to relive the horror of the battlefield. I think the greater reason for their reticence lies in their charity, because they know that the average person cannot deal with the images of a straw village worked over by a Gatling gun or Zippo-tracks, or women and children begging for their lives in the bottom of an open ditch, or GIs hanged in trees and skinned alive. The same applies to cops who investigate homicides, sexual assaults, and child abuse. A follower of Saint Francis of Assisi, looking at the photographs of the victims taken at the time of the injury, would have to struggle with his emotions regarding abolition of the death penalty.

  Regardless, none of this resolves the question. Perhaps there’s a bad seed at work in our loins. Were there two groups of simian creatures vying for control of the gene pool, one fairly decent, the other defined by their canine teeth? Did we descend out of a bad mix, some of us pernicious from the day of our conception? Maybe. Ask any clinician inside the system how a sociopath thinks. He’ll be the first to tell you he doesn’t have a clue. Sociopaths are narcissists, and as such, they believe that reality conforms to whatever they say it is. Consequently, they are convincing liars, often passing polygraph tests and creating armies of supporters. Watch a taped interview of James Earl Ray. His facial expressions are soft wax, the eyes devoid of content, the voice deferential and without emotion or an apparent need to convince the listener.

  Why the digression? Because on my Monday-morning trip over to St. Mary Parish, I realized how severe my limitations were when it came to discerning truth from falsehood and good from evil in my fellow human beings.

  Three miles from Croix du Sud Plantation, I saw a Saab convertible on the left shoulder of the road and a woman changing a tire. She had already removed the lugs and lifted off the flat, but she was having trouble raising the jack high enough to fit the spare on the studs. I pulled the cruiser onto the shoulder and turned on the light bar and crossed the road. Varina Leboeuf was still squatting down in the gravel and struggling with the tire and did not look up at me. Her father was sitting in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette, making no attempt to hide his glower. I turned the handle on the jack and raised the frame of the Saab another two inches. I could feel Jesse Leboeuf’s stare taking off my skin. “Your old man fires up a smoke right after having a heart attack?” I said.

  Varina pushed the spare tire onto the studs and started twisting the lugs on. “Ask him that and see what you get,” she said.

&nbs
p; “Did y’all just come from your husband’s home?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Is Alexis Dupree there? Or your husband?”

  “Both of them are. And I do not consider Pierre my husband.”

  “I thought you couldn’t stand to be around Alexis.”

  “My father needed to talk with him.”

  I leaned down so I could speak to her father through the driver’s window. “Is that right, Jesse?” I said.

  “I don’t like you calling me by my first name,” he replied.

  “Okay, Mr. Jesse. In the past, you gave me the impression that you didn’t want any truck with the Dupree family. Did you change your mind about them?”

  “That old Jew owes me money. I aim to get it from him,” he replied.

  “How is Pierre doing?” I asked Varina.

  “Not feeling very well. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy. Do you know why I had a flat? My goddamn husband put recaps on my Saab so he could save two hundred bucks.” She stood up. There was a smear of grease on her cheek. “What’s your problem of the day, Dave?”

  “Everything. You, your father, your husband Pierre, your grand-father-in-law Alexis. But right now my big problem is mostly you and your involvement with my friend Clete Purcel.”

  “Well, you arrogant fuck.”

  “I always liked you. I wish you hadn’t tried to hurt my friend.”

  “You have no right to talk about my private life. I thought Clete had some class. I can’t believe he discussed our relationship with you.”

  A diesel truck passed, blowing dust and exhaust fumes in its wake, its weight causing the Saab to shudder on the jack. When I looked back at her, her eyes were moist.

  “Why couldn’t your father call up Alexis Dupree rather than come out to his house?” I said.

  “Because I confront people to their face, not over the telephone,” Jesse Leboeuf said from the front seat. “You leave my daughter alone.”