Creole Belle

  “In some of those camps, there were medical experiments done on children. The color of their eyes was changed synthetically.”

  She released my hand and stared into the dark. “We have to put an end to this. You and Clete and I need to sit down and talk. But more of the same isn’t going to help.”

  “I didn’t make any of it up.”

  I could hear her breathing inside the dampness, as though her lungs were working improperly, as though the smell of the sugar refinery and the black lint off the smokestacks were catching in her throat. I didn’t know whether she was crying or not. I picked at my fingernails and stared at the streetlamps and at the leaves gusting in serpentine lines along the asphalt.

  “What’s that?” she asked, looking into the shadows below the camellia bushes.

  “Somebody left a box on the step.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Take a look.”

  She leaned over and pulled the box toward her by one of the flaps. She brushed away some of the packing material and tried to tilt the box toward her, but it was too heavy. Then she stood up and set it on the steps so the overhead light shone directly down on it. I could hear the bottles inside tinkling against one another. “Johnnie Walker Black Label?” she said.

  “Check out the card.”

  She pulled it from the envelope and read it aloud: “‘Charger would want you to have this. Merry Christmas, Loot.’” She looked at me blankly. “Who’s Charger?”

  “That was the code name of a colonel I served under. He was a giant of a man and went naked in the bush and drank a case of beer a day and blew bean gas all over his tent. He had huge pieces of scar tissue stapled across his stomach where he’d been wounded by a burst from an AK. He was the best soldier I ever knew. He founded the Delta Force.”

  “You never told me about that.”

  “It’s yesterday’s bubble gum.”

  “Why would somebody do this? Do they think sending you a case of Scotch will get you drunk?”

  “Somebody wants me to know he and his buds have access to every detail in my life, including my military record and the fact that I’m a drunk.”

  “Dave, this scares me. Who are these people?”

  “The real deal, right out of the furnace,” I replied.

  WHEN IT CAME to courage and grace under fire, Clete Purcel was not an ordinary man. He grew up in the old Irish Channel in an era when the welfare projects of New Orleans were segregated and the street gangs were made up primarily of kids from blue-collar Italian and Irish homes who fought with chains and knives and broken bottles for control of neighborhoods that most people wouldn’t spit on. The pink scar that resembled a strip of rubber running through his eyebrow to the bridge of his nose had been given to him by a kid from the Iberville Projects. The scars on his back had come from the .22 rounds he took while he carried me unconscious down a fire escape. The scars across his buttocks had come from his father’s razor strop.

  He seldom mentioned the specifics of his two combat tours in Vietnam. He went there and came back and never made an issue of the psychological damage that had obviously been done to him. He still served tea to the mamasan he killed and who had traveled with him from Vietnam to Japan and New Orleans and Vegas and Reno and Polson, Montana, and back to New Orleans and his apartment on St. Ann Street. In terms of physical courage, he had no peer; he ate his pain and swallowed his blood and never let his enemies know he was hurt. I had never known a braver human being.

  But the sense of shame and rejection that was inculcated in Clete by his father was the succubus he could never exorcise, and it was never more apparent than when he was confronted by the odium his name carried with the New Orleans Police Department. The irony was that the department was notorious for its corruption and vigilantism and its targeting of Black Panthers during the 1970s. I knew cops who investigated their own burglaries. I knew a Vice detective who put a hit on his own confidential informant. I knew a patrolwoman who murdered the owners of the restaurant she held up. Sound like exaggeration? The hiring procedures at NOPD were so shabby, the department hired known ex-felons.

  Dwelling on the moral failure of others brought no respite for Clete Purcel. No matter how elegantly he dressed, the man he saw in the mirror not only wore sackcloth and ashes but deserved them.

  He had driven to New Orleans and checked in with his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, and the PI who handled some of his cases when he was out of town. Then he went upstairs to his apartment and picked up the phone and called Dana Magelli, not allowing himself to stop at the refrigerator, where almost every shelf was stocked with Mexican and German beer and chilled bottles of gin and vodka. While he waited for the call to be transferred, he could hear his breath echoing off the receiver.

  “Magelli,” a voice said.

  “It’s Clete Purcel, Dana. I need some help with that Luger you took off me.”

  “Bix Golightly’s piece?”

  “Right. Did you run the serial number?”

  “Why should that be of interest to you?”

  “I think Bix stole the Luger from Alexis Dupree. I think Dupree may be a Nazi war criminal.”

  “I should have known,” Magelli said.

  “Known what?”

  “It’s not enough that you leave shit prints all over New Orleans. Now you’re branching into international affairs.”

  “This isn’t funny, Dana. That old man has a scrapbook full of human hair in his house. Does that sound normal to you?”

  There was a beat. “Where’d you get that information?”

  “Dave Robicheaux saw it. Why do you ask?”

  “Maybe we should talk. Where are you?”

  “At my apartment.”

  “Stay there.”

  “No, I want to come down to the district.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Clete replied.

  He shaved and showered and wet-combed his hair, trying to keep his mind empty, trying not to think about the people he was about to see and the situation he was about to place himself in. He put on a flaming-red long-sleeve silk shirt and his gray suit and a pair of black dress shoes he kept stored in velvet bags with drawstrings. Then he took his Panama hat off his closet shelf and fitted it low on his brow and walked down the stairs into the breezeway and told Alice Werenhaus she could go home early.

  “You’re bringing a guest here?” she asked. “Because if you are, you don’t have to hide your behavior from me.”

  “No, it’s just a fine afternoon, and you deserve some time off, Miss Alice.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m raising your salary by one hundred a week.”

  “You pay me adequately. You don’t have to do that.”

  “I just sold a waterfront lot I’ve been hiding from my ex-wife’s lawyers. I’d rather give the capital gains to you than the IRS.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Miss Alice, tax laws are written by rich guys for rich guys. But in answer to your question, yeah, it’s legal. I’m just cleaning house a little bit, know what I mean?”

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “You’re a very good man, Mr. Purcel.”

  “Not really,” he replied.

  “Don’t you dare say that of yourself again,” she said.

  He lifted his hat to her and walked down to the old district headquarters on Royal and Conti and entered the lions’ den.

  DANA MAGELLI CAME out to the reception desk and walked with Clete to his office. Clete knew almost all the personnel in the room, but they looked right through him or found other ways not to see him. Magelli shut the door. Clete gazed through the glass at the cops working at their desks or getting coffee or talking on the telephone. Then he looked out the office window at the palm trees and the motorcycles and cruisers parked at the curb. He also looked at the Crescent City logo painted on their immaculate white paint jobs. He wondered at what exact point he had taken a wrong turn into the cul-de-
sac that had become his life. “You look sharp,” Dana said.

  “What were you going to tell me about the Luger?” Clete asked.

  “It was issued in 1942 to a junior German submarine officer by the name of Karl Engels. But this guy Engels didn’t stay in the navy. He transferred into the SS.”

  “You can run numbers on German ordnance issued in 1942?”

  “How about that?”

  “You went through the CIA or the National Security Agency or something?”

  “No, a reference librarian up St. Charles. She could find the street address of the caveman who invented the wheel.”

  Clete was sitting in a chair by the window, his hat crown-down on Dana’s desk. He put his hand inside his shirt and scratched a place on his shoulder. “What happened to Karl Engels?”

  “My reference friend went through a bunch of German veterans’ organizations and found some records on a Karl Engels who was stationed in Paris until late 1943. And that’s it.”

  “Why’d you have all this interest in the Luger?”

  “It started out as routine. We found information in Golightly’s computer that indicated he was mixed up with Dupree in a stolen-painting scam of some kind. The more I thought about the possible connection between the Luger and Alexis Dupree, the more I thought about something my wife had told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “We’d met Alexis Dupree two or three times at social functions. Everybody had heard about his work in the French underground. My wife is from Wiesbaden. She speaks both German and French and teaches in the language department at Tulane. She heard Dupree speaking German to someone. She said his German was perfect. She went up to him and spoke to him in French. She said he had an accent, a bad one, and it was obvious that French was not his first language.”

  “You think Karl Engels is Dupree?”

  “That’s anybody’s guess.”

  Clete picked up his hat and smoothed the brim. He looked through the glass at the squad room and all the cops at their desks. “I need to get something off my chest,” he said. “Out there, I’m the Invisible Man or the spit on the sidewalk, take your choice. I’ve got no beef about y’all’s attitude toward me. I took money from the Giacanos. I also did security for a mobbed-up guy out west. I haven’t helped matters by knocking around a couple of your detectives. But I never braced a cop who was on the square, not in New Orleans or anywhere else.”

  Dana started to interrupt, but Clete stopped him. “Hear me out. I deserved to get fired and probably worse. Dave Robicheaux didn’t. Y’all treated him rotten, and you’ve never owned up to it.”

  “I didn’t hear Dave complain.”

  “That’s because he’s stand-up. And because he’s stand-up doesn’t make y’all right.”

  “I want to talk with you about something else,” Dana said. “About the night Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly got smoked.”

  “What about it?”

  “I think you called in the shots-fired.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I listened to the tape. Did you have a pencil between your teeth?”

  “What did you want to tell me?” Clete asked.

  “Maybe there was more than one shooter involved.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Bix Golightly got it with a .22. So did Waylon Grimes. But the rounds didn’t come from the same gun. Here’s the rest of it. Whoever popped Frankie Giacano in the Baton Rouge bus depot used the same gun that killed Waylon Grimes.”

  Clete had been preparing to leave Dana’s office, but he leaned back in his chair and stared out the window at the fronds of the palm trees rattling in the wind, without seeming to see them. “So two killers were working together. What’s the big deal in that?”

  “Maybe they were, maybe not. The coroner says Waylon Grimes was dead at least an hour before Golightly died. Grimes got it in his apartment. Golightly got it in his van. Why would two killers be hanging around for an hour to clip Golightly? How would they know he’d be at Grimes’s apartment? I think Golightly was followed.”

  “What was the motivation on the Golightly hit?”

  “He was in the rackets for forty years. He had a sheet for statutory rape and child molestation in Texas and Florida. He did smash-and-grabs on old people and paid his whores in counterfeit. There’s nothing this guy didn’t do. The real question is how he survived as long as he did. You were at the Golightly hit, weren’t you?”

  “I was in the vicinity.”

  “Are you going to tell me what you saw?”

  “What difference does it make? I’ve got zero credibility with both the department and the DA’s office.”

  “What if I could get you back in?”

  “In the department, with a shield?”

  “It could happen.”

  “See you around.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “No, I owe you one.”

  When Clete walked outside into the mix of shadow and sunlight on the buildings, he thought he could hear music from the clubs on Bourbon and smell the salt air off the Gulf and the coffee in Café du Monde and the flowers blooming on the balconies along Royal. Or maybe it was all in his imagination. Either way, it was a grand afternoon, one that presaged an even better evening and access to all the fruits the world had to offer.

  CLETE HAD CALLED Gretchen the same afternoon and told her he was in New Orleans and would not be back in New Iberia until Thursday morning.

  “Did you find out anything about the Luger?” she asked.

  “Yeah, the guy who owned it was SS and stationed in Paris in 1943,” Clete said. “That’s as far as I got. You going to be okay till I get back?”

  “Take it to the bank,” she replied.

  But when she went to bed that night with her cell phone under her pillow, she didn’t feel like taking anything to the bank. Her dreams made her frown in her sleep, as though a hot red light were shining through her eyelids. She woke and opened the door and looked outside, although she wasn’t sure why. The trees above the cottage were thrashing in the wind, and lightning snapped across the heavens, the thunder so loud that the surface of the bayou trembled as though the earth were shaking.

  It was 12:14 A.M. when her cell phone vibrated under the pillow. She sat on the side of the mattress and opened the phone and placed it against her ear, knowing that only one person would call her at this hour. “Raymond?” she said.

  “You’re close. Call me Raymond’s successor. I’m talking to Caruso, right?” an unfamiliar voice said.

  “No, you’re talking to Gretchen Horowitz.”

  “I’ve seen you around Key West. When we get our business out of the way, I’d like to hook up with you.”

  “I hope you’re imitating a jerk. Because if you’re not, you’ve got a real problem. Where’s Raymond?”

  “Swimming to Havana.”

  “Did you hurt Raymond?”

  “Me? I don’t hurt anybody. I make phone calls. If I was you, I’d listen and stop asking questions.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Marco.”

  “You don’t sound like a Marco. How about I call you asshole instead?”

  “We’ll talk about that in a minute. We’ve got another job for you.”

  “I told Raymond, and now I’ll tell you. I’m in the antique business full-time.”

  “Wrong. You’re in the life, and that’s where you’re gonna stay. You’ve got three targets. Guess who they are.”

  She had left the blinds open, and she could see the leaves of the live oaks flickering against the sky and hear thunder rumbling in the south. Across the bayou a large, thick-haired dog had wound its chain around an iron pole and was trying to run to its doghouse, clanging the chain taut each time it tried. The dog was wet and trembling with fear. Gretchen cleared her throat before she spoke. “I think you’ve got a hearing problem,” she said. “I’m out. I wish I’d never been in. But I’m out. That means don
’t push your luck.”

  “This is the threesome: Clete Purcel, Dave Robicheaux, and the daughter, Alafair. If you want to, you can clip Robicheaux’s wife for a bonus. You can make it look like an accident, or you can cowboy the bunch. It’s your call. But Purcel and Robicheaux and his daughter all go down.”

  “Who’s the client?”

  “It don’t work that way, Gretchen.”

  “Don’t call me again. Don’t send anybody else here, either. If you do, I’ll cancel their ticket, and then I’ll cancel yours.”

  “We dropped by your mother’s place in Coconut Grove. I’ll put her on. Be patient with her. She’s a little woozy. I don’t think she’s used to China white.” He took the phone from his mouth. “Hey, Candy. It’s your daughter. She wants your advice about something.”

  Gretchen heard someone fumbling with the phone, dropping it once and picking it up. “Hello?” said a woman’s voice in slow motion.

  “Mama?”

  “Is that you, baby? I was so worried. Are you having a good time in New Orleans?”

  “Listen to me, Mama. You need to get away from these guys. Don’t let them give you any more dope.”

  “I’m in recovery now. I just shoot twice a day. Marco said you wanted some advice.”

  “Mama, answer by saying yes or no. Are you in Miami?”

  “Of course I’m in Miami. That’s where I live. That’s where you bought me the house.”

  “You’re not at the house now. You’re somewhere else. I need to know where that is,” Gretchen said. “Tell me where it is without them knowing. Can you do that, Mama? Tell me how long you were in a car before you got to where you are now.”

  Gretchen heard the sound of someone fastening his grip around the phone, scraping it against a hard surface. “That wasn’t a smart move,” Marco said.

  “No, it’s you who made the dumb move. I haven’t seen my mother in over a year. You think I’m going to clip three people for someone I never want to see again?”