Creole Belle

  “You have dreams?” she asked.

  “What kind?” Alafair said.

  “I don’t mean dreams with monsters in them. Maybe just fish jumping around. But you wake up feeling like you had a nightmare, except the images weren’t the kinds of things you see in nightmares.”

  “They’re just dreams. Maybe they represent something that hurt you in the past. But it’s in the past, Gretchen. I have dreams about things I probably saw in El Salvador.”

  “You ever have violent feelings about people?”

  “I was kidnapped when I was little. I bit the guy who did it, and a female FBI agent put a bullet in him. In my opinion, he got what he deserved. I don’t think about it anymore. If I dream about it, I wake up and tell myself it was just a dream. Maybe that’s all any of this is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like a dream in the mind of God. We shouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I wish I could be like you,” Gretchen said.

  “There’s an amphibian out there,” Alafair said.

  Gretchen looked through the window and saw the plane on the bay, not far offshore, floating low in the water, bobbing in the chop. It was painted white, its wings and pontoons and fuselage glowing in the blue band of light on the western horizon. A fiberglass boat with a deep-V hull and flared bow was anchored close by. The cabin of the boat was lighted, the bow straining against the anchor rope, the fighting chairs on the stern rising and falling against a backdrop of black waves. “Where is Varina Leboeuf’s place?” Gretchen asked.

  “Right up there about a hundred yards.”

  Gretchen pulled to the shoulder of the road and cut the headlights and the ignition. Through a break in the flooded cypress and gum trees, she had a clear view of the plane and the boat. She took a small pair of binoculars from her tote bag and got out of the truck and adjusted the lenses. She focused first on the amphibian, then on the boat. “It’s a Chris-Craft. The bow has a painting of a sawfish on it,” she said. “That’s the boat Clete and your father have been looking for, the one that Tee Jolie Melton’s sister was abducted on.”

  Alafair got out and walked around to Gretchen’s side of the truck and stood beside her. Gretchen could see Varina Leboeuf on the stern and, next to her, a man with albino skin and shoulder-length hair that looked like white gold. He was wearing a shirt with blown sleeves and slacks belted high up on his stomach, the way a European might wear them. His forehead and the edges of his face were scrolled with pink scars, as though his face had been transplanted onto the tendons.

  Gretchen handed Alafair the binoculars. “I’ll call Clete and tell him about the boat,” she said.

  “We don’t have service here,” Alafair said.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Confront her.”

  Gretchen took back the binoculars and looked again at the boat and at Varina and the man standing on the deck. The man was heavyset and broad-shouldered, thick across the middle and muscular and solid in the way he stood on the deck. He looked in Gretchen’s direction, as though he had noticed either her or her truck. But that was impossible. She forced herself to keep the binoculars directly on his face. He was backlit by the lights in the cabin, his slacks and shirt flattening in the wind. He leaned over and kissed Varina Leboeuf on the cheek, then boarded the amphibian.

  The plane’s twin engines coughed, then roared to life, the propellers blowing a fine mist back over the fuselage. Gretchen watched the plane gain speed, the pontoons cutting through the chop, the nose and wings abruptly lifting into the air. Her mouth was dry, her face hot, her breath catching in her throat for no reason.

  “Are you okay?” Alafair asked.

  “Yeah, sometimes I have kind of a blackout. More like a short circuit in my head. I look at somebody and can’t breathe and get dizzy and have to sit down.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Since I was a child.”

  “What do you see through the binoculars that I didn’t?”

  “Just that guy with the weird face. He’s like somebody from a dream. When I see a guy like that, maybe on an elevator or in a room with no windows, strange things light up in my head. I’ll go on okay for a few days, then shit starts hitting the fan.”

  “What kind of shit?”

  “I go out and look for trouble. I’ve got a bad history, Alafair. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to scrub out of my life. That guy with the albino skin and pink scars on his face—”

  “What about him? He’s just a guy. He’s made of flesh and blood. Don’t rent space in your head to bad people.”

  “He’s like Alexis Dupree. These are people who are made different from the rest of us. You don’t know them. Neither does Clete. But I know everything about them.”

  “How?”

  “Because part of them is in me.”

  “That’s not true,” Alafair said. “Come on, the boat is headed for Varina’s dock. Let’s see who these guys are.”

  “I told you I wanted to deal with Varina Leboeuf the way you would. How should I handle it?”

  “You don’t ‘handle’ anything, Gretchen. You step back from bad people and let their own energies consume them. It’s the worst thing you can do to them.”

  “See? You know stuff I never even thought about.”

  They got in the truck and drove down the road to the shell drive that led to Jesse and Varina Leboeuf’s house. Out on the bay, the pilot of the Chris-Craft had throttled back his engine, allowing the boat to drift into the dock. As soon as the hull thumped against the tires that hung from the pilings, Varina stepped off the gunwale onto the planks, and the pilot turned the boat southward and gave it the gas.

  The rain had stopped and the clouds had broken up in the west, and there was a tiny glimmer of purple melt at the bottom of the sky. Gretchen got out of the truck before Alafair did, and walked across the lawn toward Varina Leboeuf. The windmill palms were rattling in the breeze, rain dripping out of the tree limbs overhead. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Gretchen said.

  “You’re not disturbing me. That’s because I’m going into my house now. That means I will not be talking with you, hence there is no reason for you to think you’re disturbing me.”

  “Ms. Leboeuf, that boat you were on was used in a kidnapping, maybe even a homicide,” Gretchen said. “A girl named Blue Melton was forced onto that boat. The next time anybody saw her, she was inside a block of ice.”

  “Then please go back to town and report all this to the authorities.”

  “That’s not why I came out here. I wanted to ask you to leave Clete Purcel alone. He has nothing you want, and even if he did, he wouldn’t use it to hurt you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No, I don’t know what you’re saying. Are you confirming he burglarized my apartment and my father’s house?”

  “I’m saying he doesn’t have anything in his possession that can injure you.”

  “I want you to take the wax out of your ears and listen carefully, you stupid little twat. If I didn’t have to go inside and care for my father right now, I’d make you cut your own switch. Actually, I feel sorry for you. You look like you were injected with steroids that went to the wrong places. Now get out of here before I kick those two watermelons you call an ass down the road.”

  Alafair stepped forward and slapped Varina Leboeuf across the face. “Where do you get off talking to her like that, you lying whore?” she said. “You want another one? Give me an excuse. I would love to rip you apart.”

  Varina Leboeuf’s eyes were watering, her cheek flaming. She started to speak, but her mouth was quivering, and her voice clotted in her throat.

  “You’re not only a liar, you’re an accessory to murder after the fact,” Alafair said. “By the way, how’s it feel to be a porn star? I wonder if your video will make YouTube.”

  Varina’s face looked like a balloon about to burst. The whites of her eyes had turned red as beets. “If you come here aga
in, I’ll kill you.”

  “I told you to give me an excuse,” Alafair said. And with that, she hit Varina across the mouth, so hard the other woman’s chin twisted against her shoulder.

  “YOU DID WHAT?” I said.

  “It was the way she treated Gretchen,” Alafair replied. “She said her ass looked like a pair of watermelons.”

  We were sitting in the living room. Outside, the street was wet and glazed with pools of yellow light from the streetlamp. Lightning that made no sound flared and died in the clouds over the Gulf. “It was her fight, not yours. Why mix in it?” I said.

  “Because I doubt she ever had a real friend or that anyone cared what happened to her.”

  “Varina Leboeuf could have you charged with assault.”

  “She won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “The boat with the sawfish on the bow. She’s hooked up with the people who kidnapped and murdered Tee Jolie’s little sister.”

  “We don’t have any proof of that.”

  I thought she was going to argue with me, but she didn’t. “I did something dumb, Dave. Varina has confirmation that Clete took the memory cards out of her nanny-cams.”

  “Clete destroyed them.”

  “She can never be sure of that. What if there’s somebody on them she doesn’t want anybody to know about?”

  “Don’t worry about that. You did the best you could. Don’t make a burden out of tomorrow,” I said.

  “I think I set a bad example for Gretchen tonight. She kept telling me she wanted to handle Varina Leboeuf in the way I would. A few minutes later, I slapped Varina’s face into next week.”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. I’m always proud of you, Alf.”

  “You said you wouldn’t call me that anymore.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Call me whatever you want,” she said.

  I WAS SERIOUS when I said Alafair should have been in law enforcement. At the onset of her last semester at Stanford, her professors released her from class and gave her credit for clerking at the Ninth District Court in Seattle. The judge with whom she worked, an appointee of President Carter, was a distinguished jurist, but Alafair had an opportunity to clerk at the United States Supreme Court and would have done so, except her meddling father didn’t want her living in D.C. Regardless, her career in the Justice Department was almost assured. Instead, she chose to return to New Iberia and become a novelist.

  Her first book was a crime novel set in Portland, where she attended undergraduate school. Perhaps because she had an undergraduate degree in forensic psychology, she had extraordinary insight into aberrant behavior. She also knew how to use the Internet in ways that were virtually miraculous.

  When she turned on her computer Tuesday morning, her Google news alert had posted four entries in her mailbox. “Better come in here, Dave,” she called from her bedroom.

  The news stories originated with a small wire service in the Midwest. A man who owned rows of grain silos along railroad tracks throughout Kansas and Nebraska had died unexpectedly and left behind an eclectic collection of art that ranged from Picasso sketches done during the Blue Period to pretentious junk that the grain-elevator magnate probably bought at avant-garde salons in Paris and Rome. The heirs donated the entire collection to a university. Included in it were three Modigliani paintings. Or at least that was what they seemed to be. The curator at the university art museum said they were not only fakes, they were probably part of a hoax that had been perpetrated on private collectors for several decades.

  The operational principle of the scam was the same used in all con games. The scammers would seek out a victim who either wanted something for nothing or was basically dishonest himself. The private collector would be told the Modigliani paintings were stolen and could be purchased for perhaps half of their real worth. The collector would also be told that he was not committing a crime, because the museum or private collection from which the paintings had been stolen had indirectly victimized either Modigliani or his inner circle, all of whom were poor and probably sold the paintings for next to nothing.

  The scam worked because Modigliani’s paintings were in wide circulation, many of them having been used by the artist or his mistress to pay hotel and food bills, and were comparably easy to forge and difficult to authenticate.

  “I think this is the connection between Bix Golightly and Pierre Dupree,” Alafair said. “Golightly was probably fencing Pierre’s forgeries as stolen property. If you look at Pierre’s paintings, you can see Modigliani’s influence on him. Remember when you looked at the photo of Pierre’s nude on the sofa? You said the figure in it was Tee Jolie, and I said the painting was generic and was like Gauguin’s work. The painting of Tee Jolie was like a famous nude by Modigliani. Here, look.”

  She clicked the image of the Modigliani painting onto the screen. “The swanlike neck and the elongated eyes and the coiffured hair and the prim mouth and the warmth in the skin are all characteristics you see in Pierre’s paintings. Pierre isn’t a bad imitator. But I’d bet he’s both greedy and jealous. Not long ago Modigliani’s painting was auctioned off at Sotheby’s for almost seventy million.”

  “I think you’re probably right,” I said. “Clete broke in to Golightly’s apartment the night he was killed and said there was evidence he was fencing stolen or forged artwork. When you think about it, it’s the perfect scam. All you need is a buyer with sorghum for brains and too much money in the bank. Even if the buyer discovers he’s been suckered, he can’t call the cops without admitting he thought he was buying stolen paintings rather than forged paintings.”

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “I’ll call the FBI in Baton Rouge today, but I usually don’t get very far with them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Clete and I are not considered reliable sources.”

  “Fuck them,” she said.

  “How about it on the language, Alafair? At least in the house.”

  “Is it okay to use it in the yard? If not, how about on the sidewalk?”

  Don’t buy into it, I heard a voice say. “Can you make me a promise about Varina?”

  “Stay away from her?”

  “No, that’s not it at all. Be aware of what she is. And her father. And Alexis and Pierre Dupree and what they represent.”

  “Which is what?”

  “They’re working for somebody else. Somebody who is even more powerful and dangerous than they are.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “We’re minions down here, not players. Everything that happens here is orchestrated by outsiders or politicians on a pad. It’s a depressing conclusion to come to. But it’s the way things are. We take it on our knees for anybody who brings his checkbook.”

  RHETORIC IS CHEAP stuff and about as useful as a thimbleful of water in the desert. When I was a boy and pitching American Legion baseball in the 1950s, a catcher from the old Evangeline League gave me some advice I never forgot, although I don’t necessarily recommend that other people follow it. The Evangeline League was as rough and raw as it got. Cows sometimes grazed in the outfield, and so many of the overhead lights were burned out that sometimes the fielders couldn’t find the ball in the grass. Players smoked in the dugout, threw Vaseline balls and spitters, and slung bats like helicopter blades at the pitcher. They also fist-fought with umpires and one another, came in with their spikes up, and frequented Margaret’s infamous brothel en masse in Opelousas, a practice that on the team bus was called “running up the box score.” My friend the bush-league catcher from New Iberia tried to keep things simple, however. His advice was “Always keep the ball hid in your glove or behind your leg. Don’t never let the batter see your fingers on the stitches. When they crowd the plate, float one so close to the guy’s twanger, he’ll think he was circumcised. Then t’row your slider on the outside of the plate. He’ll swing at it to show he ain’t a coward,
but he won’t hit it. Then t’row a changeup, ’cause he’ll be expecting the heater instead. If he gets mean and starts shaking his bat at you, don’t even take your windup. Dust him wit’ a forkball.”

  The question was where and when to throw the forkball. At the office that morning, I saw an ad for an evangelical rally at the Cajundome in Lafayette. The centerpiece of the rally was none other than Amidee Broussard, the minister I had seen leaving the Dupree home through the side door.

  Beginning perhaps in the 1970s, Pentecostal and fundamentalist religion took on a new life and began to grow exponentially in southern Louisiana. There are probably numerous explanations for the phenomenon, but the basic causes are rather simple: the influence of televised religion that was as much entertainment as it was theology; and the deterioration of the Acadian culture in which my generation grew up. In the 1950s courthouse records were still handwritten in formal French, and Cajun French was spoken almost entirely in the rural areas of the parish; in cities like Lafayette or New Iberia, perhaps half of the population spoke French as their first language. But during the 1960s, Cajun children were not allowed to speak French on school property, and the language that Evangeline and her people brought with them from Nova Scotia in 1755 fell into decline and became associated with ignorance and failure and poverty. The fisher-people of southern Louisiana became ashamed of who they were.

  My experience has been that when people are frightened and do not understand the historical changes taking place around them, they seek magic and power to solve their problems. They want shamans who can speak in tongues, even Aramaic, the language of Jesus. They want to see the lame and the blind and the incurably diseased healed onstage. They want the Holy Spirit to descend through the roof of the auditorium and set their souls on fire. And they want a preacher who can pound a piano like Jerry Lee Lewis but sing gospel lyrics written by angels. The blood of Christ and the waters of baptism and the hypnotic rant of a clairvoyant all become one entity, a religion that has no name and no walls, a faith you carry like a burning sword, one that will cause your enemies to cower.