Creole Belle

  I DROVE OUT of the Dupree enclave onto the two-lane and headed back toward New Iberia. To the south, there were clouds that resembled black curds of smoke from an industrial fire, and I wondered if cleanup crews out on the salt were burning off some of the two million gallons of oil from the blowout or if those clouds were just clouds, swollen with rain and electricity and a smell that in summertime is like iodine and seaweed and small baitfish. As I neared New Iberia, the sun went behind the clouds and the wind came up and the cane fields and the corridors of live oaks and the light winking on Bayou Teche turned the world into the Louisiana of my youth. Wilderness enow, the poet wrote. But that’s all it was, a dream, like the lyrics in Jimmy Clanton’s famous song from the year 1958.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, I parked the cruiser in front of Clete Purcel’s office on Main and went inside. Behind the reception desk, Gretchen Horowitz was eating take-out Chinese with chopsticks. Three loungers were sitting on the folding chairs, smoking, grinding out their cigarettes on the floor, and picking at their fingernails. “Where’s Clete?” I said.

  “Not here,” Gretchen said, poking a tangle of noodles into her mouth, not bothering to look at me.

  I reversed the “open” sign on the door so that it read “closed” to the outside world. I dropped the blinds on the door and the big glass window in front. “You three dudes beat it,” I said.

  They didn’t move. One of them was hatchet-faced and had the crystalline-clear eyes of either a meth addict or a psychopath. Another had a rattail haircut and rings in his eyebrows and a dark blue tattoo of a penis and testicles on his throat. The third man was dressed in bib overalls and had the gargantuan proportions and body odor of an elephant in rut. His arms were wrapped with one-color ink from the wrist to the armpit, a form of tattooing that is painful and prolonged and inside the system is called “wearing sleeves.” There were no words inside his tats, but the message to the viewer on the yard was clear: “If you want to finish your time, don’t fuck with me.”

  I opened my badge holder. “I don’t think y’all are from around here. If you’re Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine’s bail skips, I recommend you get your ass back to New Orleans. Regardless, get out of the office and don’t come back until you see me leave.”

  “What if we don’t?” the large man said.

  “We’ll make you take a shower,” I said.

  After they were gone, I locked the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Gretchen said, poking at her noodles.

  “Bringing you up-to-date.”

  “You got accepted by the Premature Ejaculators Society?”

  “Number one, you don’t tell an Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective to fuck himself.”

  “Oh, gee, I feel terrible about that.”

  I dragged a metal chair over to the desk and sat down. She kept eating, never looking up.

  “I’m not sure who you are, Gretchen. Maybe you’re more snap-crackle-and-pop than substance. Maybe you’ve been knocked around a bit. Or maybe you’ve been over on the dark side. It doesn’t matter. The people who live inside Croix du Sud Plantation may look like the rest of us, but they’re not. I cannot tell you what they are, but I can tell you what they are not. The three dudes I just kicked out of here are recidivists who will never figure out they serve the interests of people who want to keep the rest of us distracted. Does any of that make sense to you?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, as though trying to work her way through my question. “I’ve got it. You shut down your friend’s office and run his clients out of town because you have access to knowledge that nobody else does?”

  “You’re an intelligent woman. Why don’t you stop acting like a juvenile delinquent? I just finished talking with Alexis Dupree. While he was in another room, I looked in a journal that he’s evidently kept over the years. There were at least two dozen locks of hair between the last pages.”

  She had been stirring the noodles in the box, but her hand slowed and stopped, and she blinked once and then looked at nothing. “Did you say anything to him?” she asked.

  “No. But I think he knows I saw the locks of hair.”

  “What was the name of the place he was in?”

  “Ravensbrück,” I said.

  “Didn’t they cut the hair off the people they killed?”

  “Yes, particularly in the women’s camps,” I replied.

  “Maybe he’s just an old man on the make. Maybe he’s a trophy-sex addict.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “What are the other possibilities?”

  “He’s a pedophile?”

  “We would have heard about it.”

  “Did the hair look old?”

  “Yeah, most of it.”

  She wrapped her uneaten food in the plastic bag in which it had been delivered and set it in the bottom of the wastebasket. “I told Clete the old man made me feel funny, like his fingers were crawling all over me.” She was studying the floor. Then she looked me full in the face. “He was one of them?”

  “One of what?”

  “He’s not a Jew? He was one of the Nazis who worked in those camps? He herded all those children and women and sick people into the gas chambers? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Pierre says Alexis is not only his grandfather but his father as well,” I said. “So tell me who’s lying and who’s evil and who’s telling the truth. This is the wasp’s nest you threw a rock in.”

  I heard a key turn in the front-door lock and the blinds rattle against the glass when the door swung open. “What’s going on in here?” Clete said, a double-folded manila envelope in his hand.

  “Gretchen was eating some noodles. I kicked three of your clients out. Both of us think Alexis Dupree may have been a Nazi, not a Jewish inmate in a death camp,” I said. “Outside of that, it’s been a pretty dull day.”

  CLETE AND I went into his inner office, and I told him about my visit to the Dupree plantation. “So you think the old man is actually a war criminal?” he said.

  “It’s possible. He claimed he survived Ravensbrück because of his inner discipline and the fact that he did everything his warders told him to do. Listening to him tell it, I had the feeling that those who died brought their deaths upon themselves. He also said he was a friend of Robert Capa. But he didn’t know if Capa was a Communist. On his wall, he has a photo of Italian troops in what I think was the Ethiopian campaign. They used chemical weapons on people who fought with spears and bows and arrows. Why would a victim of the fascists want a photo like that on his wall?”

  I could tell I was losing Clete’s attention. “I know that look. What have you done now?” I said.

  “Hang on,” he said. He sent Gretchen on an errand, then closed the door and untaped the double-folded manila envelope he had been holding and removed two memory cards. “I creeped Varina’s apartment in Lafayette and her house on Cypremort Point. You were right about the teddy bear on the couch. It’s a nanny-cam. She had another one on a shelf in Lafayette.”

  “You broke into her home and her apartment?”

  “Not exactly. I showed my PI badge to the apartment manager in Lafayette.”

  “How did you get into the house on Cypremort Point?”

  “The key was in a flowerpot.”

  “How’d you know it was there?”

  “She showed me. In case I wanted to let myself in if her old man wasn’t there.” He saw my look. “So I took advantage of her trust. It doesn’t make me feel good,” he said. “You want to watch this stuff or not?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t think you should watch it, either.”

  “Maybe I’m on tape. You think I should ignore that?” he said, uploading the first card into his computer.

  “Don’t give power to it.”

  “To what?”

  “Evil.”

  “You think Varina is evil?”

  “I don’t know what she is. Just stay away from her. Stay away from the shit on that card, too.”


  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Give it back to her. Treat it with contempt. Let her live in her own deceit.”

  “Maybe I can have a second career as the model on the covers of bodice-buster novels. Will you lighten up? You make me feel awful, Dave.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Try nothing,” he replied.

  He began clicking the keys on his computer, his huge shoulders stressing the fabric in his sport coat, his porkpie hat pulled down on his eyes, as though, unconsciously, he wanted to shield them. The first image on the monitor was that of Varina in the nude, her back to the camera, as she approached a naked man lying on the couch, one hand tucked behind his head, his chest hair like a black fan spread across his sun-browned skin. The figure was not Clete.

  “Adios,” I said.

  “Come on, Dave. I went this far with it. I don’t want to look at it by myself. I already feel like a pervert.”

  Then I said something I never thought I would say to Clete Purcel: “I can’t help you with this one, partner.”

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at the caller ID. Helen Soileau. “Where are you?” she said.

  “In Clete’s office.”

  “What are those sounds in the background?”

  “Turn the speaker off, Clete,” I said.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I was just leaving.”

  “You know anything about hammerhead sharks?” she asked.

  “They eat stingrays and their own young. The males bite the females until they mate.”

  “I mean where they live or feed or whatever.”

  “They go where they want. Why are you asking about hammerhead sharks?”

  “The pictures are just coming in on the Internet from Lafourche Parish. We found out what happened to Chad Patin,” she said.

  A SPORT FISHERMAN had been trolling with outriggers southwest of Grand Isle when he foul-hooked what he thought was a sand shark. The drag began to accelerate and sing with such velocity that smoke was rising off the reel. To keep from breaking the line, the mate reversed the vessel in the same direction the shark was running. From the stern, you could see a long torpedo-shaped shadow appear briefly beneath a swell, then a dorsal fin slicing through a wave and dipping below the surface again, bubbles trailing after it. For just a moment the line went slack, as though it had been severed, and the mate throttled back the engine and let the boat drift. The slick spots between the waves were undisturbed, the water glistening with a fine sheen like baby oil, the exhaust pipes of the boat gurgling just below the surface. Overhead, pelicans drifted on the breeze, making a wide turn, the way they always do before they cock their wings and plunge down into a wave. However, they seemed to lose interest. Suddenly, a school of baitfish were skittering across a swell, as though someone were flinging handfuls of silvery dimes on the water.

  The hammerhead burst to the surface, the line tangled in its gills, streaming blood, its side striped with lesions cut by the steel leader. Its back had been tanned by the sun, giving it the coloration of a sand shark. Its belly was as white as a toadstool that had never seen sunlight. Its eyes, set on the sides of its anvil-like head, gleamed disjointedly, similar to those inside a cubist painting. From nose to tail, it was at least eleven feet long.

  All of this was on the sportsman’s cameraphone, along with images of the sportsman and another mate gaffing the shark in the gills and in its mouth and clubbing it with a mallet and finally dragging it high enough on the gunwale to hit it in the head with a hatchet. The sportsman rolled the hammerhead on its back and inserted a knife in its anus and split its belly open. The contents that spilled out on the deck were not what he was expecting to find.

  A hammerhead has a small mouth for a shark of its size and takes a while to consume its prey. Evidently, this one had managed to eat and swallow everything it had been provided. The dismemberment of the prey looked like it had been done with a saw. The details are not pleasant to narrate. Only two details of the shark’s engorgement were of significance, at least from a forensic or evidentiary point of view. Glimmering among the spill on the deck were a Caucasian hand and part of a forearm. On the hand was a ring. Later, the coroner in Lafourche Parish removed the ring and found the name of Chad Patin engraved inside it. The other forensic detail of importance was the discovery of two .223 rounds in the back muscles of the victim.

  Chad Patin had tried to kill me with a shotgun blast fired from the freezer truck. But as I looked at the images on Helen’s computer screen, I could feel no enmity toward him. When he called me in the middle of the night from Des Allemands, begging for help, I discounted much of what he said, particularly his rant about a cabal of some kind that controlled events in the lives of those at the bottom of the food chain. Also, his mention of a mysterious figure called Angel or Angelle and his description of someone dying inside the iron maiden seemed the stuff of drug-induced psychosis. But I had been selective in listening to Chad Patin. He’d said he transported narcotics and prostitutes from Mexico into the United States. He also indicated he had abandoned his charges in a locked truck and perhaps left them to die of suffocation. Those were statements I believed. He admitted he had tried to kill me and in the same breath asked for money so he could get out of the country. In his mind, the request was perfectly reasonable. I had acted incredulously, but in reality, his point of view was one that people in law enforcement deal with every day. The real problem was not Chad Patin. The real problem lay in my discounting his story about a mysterious island where modern-day people made use of a torture instrument out of medieval Europe.

  Helen was tilted back in her swivel chair, chewing on a hangnail, staring at her computer and the frozen image of Chad Patin’s remains on the boat deck. “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “Why nobody took the ring off him?” I said.

  “That and the fact that he was dumped overboard. Didn’t they learn anything after they put Blue Melton over the side in a block of ice?”

  “Maybe they didn’t put him in the water. Maybe he was running and somebody popped him with a couple of .223 rounds, maybe from an AR-15 or M16. He fell off the boat, and they couldn’t find him in the dark.”

  “You buy that stuff about an island and a torture chamber on it?”

  “Patin was reporting something he heard on a tape. Maybe the tape was bogus, something excerpted from a slasher film. Who knows? Somebody fried Patin’s apartment with a flamethrower. That’s a tough act to follow. The bigger problem for me is this person Angel or Angelle. The notion of a cabal is too much like the New World Order or the Trilateral Commission.”

  “You don’t believe in conspiracies?”

  “Not the kinds that have formal names.”

  “Was that a porn film I heard when I called you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You and Clete were watching an old Doris Day movie?”

  “Give it a break, Helen. Clete is going through a bad time.”

  “So am I. It’s called doing my job. Does he have somebody new working in his office?”

  “She’s a temp.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “You made a crack about a porn film. Varina Leboeuf is probably extorting her lovers. Clete got involved with her.”

  “Don’t change the subject. What’s the name of the temp?”

  I got up from my chair and opened the door to leave. “Cut Clete a little slack. He’ll deliver. He always does. He’s the best cop either one of us ever knew.”

  “I want to meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why, Pops. Believe it or not, we’re on the same side. But you two guys don’t get to write the rules,” she said.

  CLETE CALLED ME an hour later. “I’m not on those memory cards. But a lot of other guys are,” he said. “A couple of them are insider contractors who got in on the big bucks rebuilding New Orleans. I recognize a couple of shyste
rs and oil guys, and then there were a few guys I never saw before. Anyway, I don’t see any big revelations. Actually, I feel like going outside and puking. I’m not up to this stuff.”

  “She’s blackmailing people. You don’t call that a revelation?”

  “Maybe she’s just covering her ass.”

  “Great choice of words. Listen to yourself.”

  “Maybe she’s got a fetish. Who’s perfect? Anyway, she left me out of it.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going back for seconds is what.”

  “So she’s a little weird. That doesn’t make her the Lucrezia Borgia of South Louisiana.”

  “What does it take? How bad do you have to get hurt before you see what you’re doing to yourself?”

  “Maybe I still like her. The apartment manager in Lafayette must have told her I was in her place. But she didn’t dime me.”

  “Most extortionists don’t call the cops to report the theft of their blackmail materials.”

  “Dave, you’re crucifying me for something I haven’t done. I didn’t say I was going to get it on with Varina again. I was just saying nobody is all good or all bad. Look, I’m burning this stuff and forgetting about it. I wish I’d never seen it. I wish I hadn’t gotten in the sack with her. I wish I hadn’t accidentally killed a mamasan and her children in Vietnam. I wish I hadn’t flushed my career with NOPD. My whole life is based on the things I wish I hadn’t done. What else do you want me to say?”

  “I think Pierre and Varina and Alexis Dupree are a tighter unit than they let on. They might hate one another, but they’re all in the same lifeboat.”

  “Neither of us knows that,” he replied.

  “Chad Patin’s remains just showed up in the belly of a hammerhead shark a guy caught south of Grand Isle. Lose the charade with Varina. She knows you’re a kindhearted guy, and she used you.”

  “Why don’t you show some fucking respect?”

  “You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I’m supposed to stand around with my hands in my pockets while other people mess up your head?”