Creole Belle

  There’s an admission price in this church, but contrary to popular belief, it’s not always monetary. That night Clete Purcel and I drove to the Cajundome and entered the throng working its way through the front doors. Almost all the seats had been taken. The overhead lights created an iridescent sheen above the crowd, which was buzzing like a giant beehive. When Amidee Broussard took the stage, the reaction was electric. The crowd clapped and stomped their feet and laughed as though an old friend had returned to their midst with glad tidings.

  I had to hand it to him. As a speaker, Amidee was stunning. There was an iambic cadence in all his sentences. His diction and voice were as melodic as Walker Percy’s or Robert Penn Warren’s. He made people laugh. Then, without seeming to shift gears, he began to speak of Satan and the apocalyptic warnings in the book of John. He spoke of lakes of fire and halls of torment and sinners impaled like snakes on wooden stakes. He spoke of the sacrifice of Jesus and the scourging and the crown of thorns and the nails in his hands and feet. You could feel the discomfit growing in the crowd, like a tremolo effect across calm water. Broussard was a master at inculcating fear, anxiety, and self-doubt in his constituency. When the tension in the crowd was such that people were clenching their arms tightly across their chests, and breathing through their mouths as though their oxygen supply were being cut off, he raised his hands high in the air and said, “But his ordeal has set us free. Our sins are paid for, just like you pay off a friend’s life insurance policy, just like you pay for his legal fees and hospital bills. Your friend can announce to the whole world, ‘I owe no debt anywhere, because it has already been paid.’ That’s what Jesus has done for you.”

  The change in the audience was instantaneous, as if someone had turned on a huge electric fan and a cool breeze had begun to blow into their faces. At that point I thought he would begin curing the crippled and the terminally ill, hoaxes that are easily perpetrated in a controlled situation. But Amidee was much more sophisticated than his peers. Instead of claiming he possessed the power to heal, or that God healed through him, he told his audience the power was theirs to seize, and all they had to do was reach out and grab it.

  “You heard me right,” he said into the microphone, his silver hair and high forehead gleaming under the lights, his recessed turquoise eyes radiant in his weathered face. “It doesn’t cost you money. You don’t have to pledge or tithe or sign up as a church member. You’ve already given witness by being here. The power of the Holy Spirit is within you. You take it with you wherever you go, and every day it grows stronger. You’re part of a special group now. It’s that easy. If your life doesn’t change after tonight, I want you to come back and tell me that. Know what? I’ve said that ten thousand times, and it’s never happened. And why is that? Because once you’re saved, your salvation can never be taken away from you.”

  I never saw a local audience give anyone a longer and more enthusiastic ovation than Amidee Broussard received that night.

  Clete went to the restroom and rejoined me in the concourse. He was wearing his shades and seersucker suit and a Panama hat and a tropical shirt with the collar outside the jacket, and he looked like a neocolonial on the streets of Saigon. “A guy in the head said there’s a big lawn party for Broussard at a place on the Vermilion River. What do you want to do?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “How do you read this dude?” he asked.

  “I think he could probably sell central heating to the devil,” I replied.

  “He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. I’ve heard worse.”

  “He’s a snake-oil salesman. He’s smarter and more cunning than most, but he’s a fraud, just like Varina Leboeuf and the Duprees.”

  Clete now knew about Varina’s connection to the Chris-Craft boat with the sawfish on the bow, and I saw his expression change at the mention of her name. I rested my hand on his shoulder as we walked toward the exit. “Let her go,” I said.

  “I already have.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. When you sleep with a woman, you always believe you’ve married her. You’re not a one-night-stand man, Cletus.”

  “Why don’t you tell the whole fucking auditorium?”

  “Cool it back there,” a man in front of us said.

  Clete looked around uncertainly. “Oh, excuse me, you’re talking to me? The rest of us don’t have First Amendment rights because you say so? Is that what you were saying?”

  The man was as big as Clete and younger, jug-eared, his face like a boiled ham, the kind of tightly wrapped man who sweats inside his clothes and never takes his coat off. “Who are you guys?” he asked.

  “We’re cops. That means beat it, asshole,” Clete said.

  I held Clete by his upper arm until the momentum of the crowd separated us from the man. His arm felt as hard as a pressurized fire hose and was humming with the same level of energy. “What’s the matter with you?” I said.

  “Remember when we walked a beat in the First District? That was the happiest time of my life.”

  “We’re in the bottom of the sixth. It’s not even the seventh-inning stretch yet,” I said.

  “Right, keep telling yourself that,” he replied. “I need a drink.” He took a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and drank it half empty before we reached the Caddy.

  THE PARTY WAS being held inside a magnificent grove of oak trees wrapped with strings of white lights, backdropped by a brightly lit mansion on the Vermilion River that was owned by an oilman from Mississippi. Though the house had a swimming pool in back and probably cost a fortune to build, the final result was a cross between an architectural nightmare and a deliberate celebration of vulgarity and bad taste. The pillars were made of concrete and swollen in the middle like Disney dwarfs; the brickwork had the shiny uniformity of laminated siding, the kind that is rolled and glued onto cinder block. The ceiling-high windows, the most outstanding feature of Louisiana houses, were bracketed with nonoperational shutters painted mint green and bolted flatly on the brick like postage stamps. The patio was a bare concrete pad that had settled and cracked through the center and was infested with fire ants. Through the windows, a visitor could look into a series of rooms carpeted in different colors and filled with furniture that could have been painted with shellac that morning.

  The five acres of front lawn were filled with vehicles, row after row of them, extended-cab pickups and the biggest SUVs on the market. The guests were the glad of heart and the curious and the voyeuristic or those who had recently discovered that salvation and prosperity and the exploitation of the earth’s resources were all part of the same journey.

  The serving tables groaned with bowls of white and dirty rice and étouffée and deep-fried crawfish and boiled shrimp. White-jacketed black waiters sliced pork off a hog on the spit and carved up turkeys and sirloin roasts and smoked hams swimming in pineapple rings and redeye gravy. There were beer kegs in tubs of ice and a three-table bar for those who wanted champagne or highballs. With the breeze off the river and the rustle of the moss in the trees and the smell of meat dripping into an open fire, the night could not have been more perfect. What imperfection could anyone see in the scene taking place before us? Even the Vietnamese serving girls seemed like a testimony to the richness of the New American Empire, one that indeed offered sanctuary to the huddled and downtrodden.

  We found a place on a bench under a spreading oak, and Clete went straight to the drinks table and came back with a Jack on the rocks and a draft Budweiser foaming over the edges of a red plastic cup. “Guess who I just talked to in the line. The guy who was giving us trouble in the concourse. He said he didn’t know we were cops and he was sorry for getting in our face. Can you figure it?”

  “Figure what?”

  “As soon as these guys think you’re in the club, they want to kiss your ass.”

  We were a few feet away from a plank table where people were eating off paper plates. They glanced at us from the corners of their eyes.
“Sorry,” Clete said. “I’ve got a genetic case of logorrhea.”

  A couple of them smiled good-naturedly and went on eating. Clete drank from his cup and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin. “I know you worry about me, big mon, but everything is copacetic,” he said.

  “The only person who doesn’t worry about you is you.”

  “Where’d all these Vietnamese girls come from?”

  “A lot of them got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina.”

  “You ever think about going back to ’Nam?”

  “Almost every night.”

  “John McCain went back. A lot of guys have. You know, to make peace with yourself and maybe some of the people we hurt or who were shooting at us? I hear they treat Americans pretty good today.”

  I knew Clete was not thinking about making peace. He was thinking about the irrevocable nature of loss and about a Eurasian girl who had lived in a sampan on the edges of the South China Sea and whose hair floated off her shoulders like black ink when she walked into the water and reached back for him to take her hand.

  “Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” I said.

  “Would you go with me?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “You believe spirits hang around for a while? They don’t take off right away to wherever they’re supposed to go?”

  I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t sure he was talking to me any longer.

  “The girl I had over there was named Maelee. I told you that already, huh?” he said.

  “She must have been a great woman, Clete.”

  “If I’d stayed away from her, she’d still be alive. Sometimes I want to find the guys who did it and blow up their shit. Sometimes I want to sit down and explain to them what they did, how they punished an innocent, sweet girl because of a guy from New Orleans who wasn’t much different from them. We thought we were fighting for our country just like they thought they were fighting for theirs. That’s what I’d tell them. I’d meet their families and tell them the same thing. I’d want them all to know we didn’t get over the war, either. We’re dragging the chain forty years down the road.”

  He swirled the whiskey and ice in his cup, then drained it and crunched the ice between his molars. His cheeks had the red blush of ripe peaches, his eyes aglow with an alcoholic benevolence, one that always signaled an unpredictable metabolic change taking place in his system. “There’s Amidee Broussard. Check out the dude sitting with him,” he said.

  I tried to see through the crowd, but my angle was wrong, and I couldn’t get a clear view of Broussard’s table.

  “Gretchen said she saw Varina on board that Chris-Craft with an albino. I don’t know if I’d call this guy an albino or not,” Clete said. “His face looks like a piece of white rubber somebody sewed onto his skull. You think that’s the guy?”

  I took a barbecue sandwich off a tray a waiter was passing around, then stood up so I could see Broussard’s table. I cradled the sandwich in a napkin and ate it and tried to hide my interest in Broussard while I watched him and his friend. As a police officer, I had learned many years ago that you learn more by seeing than listening. Why? All perps lie. That’s a given. All sociopaths lie all the time. That’s also a given. Any truth you learn from them comes in the form of either what they don’t say or what their eyes and hands tell you. A refusal to blink usually indicates deception. A drop in the register of the voice and a blink right after a denial means you tighten the screw. Evasion and begging the question and telling half a truth are indicators of a habitual liar whose methodology is to wear you down. It’s not unlike playing baseball. Have you ever gone up against a left-handed pitcher who hasn’t shaved in three days and looks like his wife just kicked him out of the house? You either read his sign language or you get your head torn off.

  When you watch a man like Amidee Broussard, if he’s deprived by distance of his ability to deceive with words, what things do you look for? You ignore the ceramic smile, the work-worn, sun-freckled hands of the farm boy and the bobbed white hair of a frontier patriarch. You look at the eyes and where they go. He was being served dinner from the kitchen rather than from the buffet tables. The black waiter who put Broussard’s steak before him wore sanitary plastic mittens, although none of the other serving personnel did. After the waiter set the plate down, Broussard offered no word of appreciation, no show of recognition; he never paused in his conversation with the man who had the surreal face of someone you thought lived only in the imagination.

  I dropped the rest of my sandwich in a trash barrel and began walking toward the Broussard table. A Vietnamese girl was refilling his water glass and picking up the dirty dishes from the tablecloth. There was no mistaking the direction of Broussard’s eyes. They darted to her cleavage when she bent over, and they followed her hips as she walked away. His dentures looked as stiff as bone. “You think our man might be having impure thoughts?” Clete said.

  Before we reached the table, we were joined by the man who had given us trouble at the Cajundome. “Hey, y’all fixing to talk to Reverend Amidee?” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s our plan,” Clete said.

  “Come on, I know him. I went fishing with him and Lamont Woolsey. Lamont had so much protective clothing on, he looked like he was wearing a hazmat suit.”

  “Woolsey is the guy with the latex skin?” Clete said.

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” the man said. He looked at me and extended his hand. It was as hard and rough as brick. “I’m Bobby Joe Guidry.”

  “How you doing, Bobby Joe?” I said.

  “I was a drunkard for fifteen years. Up until I met Amidee six months ago. Not one drink since.”

  “That’s great. My friend has met the reverend, but I haven’t. Can you introduce me?” I said.

  Clete and I both shook hands with Broussard, but I don’t think he saw or heard either of us. He never stopped chewing his salad and never quite took his eyes off the Vietnamese waitress. Clete and I and Bobby Joe Guidry pulled up folding chairs to his table and sat down among a group of people who seemed to share no commonalities except their faith in Amidee Broussard, a man who knew the will of God and also what was best for their country.

  “You’ve got a collection of the biggest SUVs I’ve ever seen,” Clete said. He’d already snagged another whiskey on the rocks, at least four fingers of it, drinking it in sips while he talked. “What kind of vehicle do you drive?”

  “It’s a dandy, a Chevrolet Suburban. I can fit nine people in it,” Broussard said.

  The Vietnamese waitress set a ketchup bottle and a bottle of steak sauce by Broussard’s plate. He patted her kindly on the forearm, looking up brightly at her. “Would you take this steak back? It’s still red in the middle.”

  “Yes, sir. I sorry. I bring it back to you all cooked, Reverend Amidee,” she replied.

  “That’s a good girl. You give that cook a good fussing-out while you’re at it,” he said. He continued to look at her as she walked away, but this time he did not let his eyes drop below her waist. “A beautiful girl.”

  “You think we kicked enough raghead butt over there to keep the oil flowing?” Clete said.

  Please don’t blow it, Clete, I thought.

  “What was that about ragheads?” Broussard said.

  “I was talking about the price of gas. That Suburban must get the mileage of a motor home packed with concrete,” Clete said.

  I tried to interject myself into the conversation and stop Clete from wrecking our situation. “I think I know you,” I said to Lamont Woolsey. “You’re a friend of Varina Leboeuf.”

  His eyes made me think of dark blue marbles floating in milk, his mouth duck-billed, his nose shiny with moisture, even though the night air was cool and getting cooler. I had never seen anyone with such strange coloration or with such a combination of peculiar features, nor had I ever seen anyone whose eyes were so deeply blue and yet devoid of moral light.

  “Yes, I’m familiar with Ms. Leboeuf. I don??
?t recall seeing you while I was in her company,” he said. The accent was Carolinian or Tidewater, the vowels rounded, the R’s slightly bruised. That he’d chosen the word “familiar” to describe his relationship with a woman didn’t seem to bother him.

  “I think she was on your boat, the one that has a sawfish painted on the bow,” I said.

  His eyes fixed on mine, hard and so blue they were almost purple. “I don’t remember that.”

  Take a chance, I heard a voice say. “Don’t you live on an island somewhere?”

  “I did. I grew up in the Georgia Sea Islands.”

  “You ever hear of a guy named Chad Patin? He took a shot at me.”

  “Why would I know someone like that?” Woolsey said.

  “This guy Patin was a couple of quarts down. He told me this crazy story about a medieval instrument called the iron maiden. He said it was on an island someplace. It works like a grape press. Except people are put inside it and not grapes.”

  Woolsey’s head swiveled on his shoulders, as though he were surveying the crowd. His hands rested on the tablecloth, as round and pale as dough balls, his chest as puffed as a peacock’s. “Who are you?”

  “Dave Robicheaux is the name. I’m a homicide detective in Iberia Parish.”

  He fingered a gold cross that hung from his neck. His eyes came back to mine. “I think you and your friend have had too much to drink.”

  “I don’t drink,” I replied.

  He stretched his legs out before him, popping his knees, and smiled at me. “Maybe you should start. A snootful gives a fellow a wonderful excuse to say whatever is on his mind. He can apologize later and have it both ways.”

  “I never thought of it like that. You’re not up to speed on iron maidens, huh?”

  He scratched the back of his neck, then put on a pair of sunglasses that were tinted almost black. “No, I’ve met no maidens recently, iron or otherwise.”

  “How about a kid named Blue Melton?”