Creole Belle

“Good try, kid. You want me to describe what’s happening right now? Mommy is going in the bedroom with a dwarf who has a black satchel. He’s gonna turn Mommy’s head into a pinball machine. He’s also a degenerate. Don’t get the wrong idea. We keep an eye on him. But the client doesn’t have parameters, Gretchen. If you don’t come across for us, Mommy is going inside a big waffle iron. Or maybe they’ll turn her into wood chips, feet-first. They’ll send you a video. Want to call me an asshole now? You’ve got ten days, bitch.”

  He broke the connection. When she closed her phone, she felt dead inside, her face numb, as though it had been stung by bumblebees. She stared through the blinds into the darkness. The dog across the bayou was no longer running back and forth. Then she realized why. It had broken its neck running against its own chain.

  BY SUNRISE, THE rain had stopped and the sky was filled with white clouds and the trees were dripping on the sidewalks and dimpling the puddles in the gutters, and I decided to walk to work and to think in a calmer and more reasonable way about all the problems that seemed to beset me. At eleven-fifteen I saw Clete’s maroon convertible coming up the long driveway past the city library and the grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother. When I went outside, all his windows were down and he was smiling at me from behind the wheel, his eyes clear, his face pink and unlined. A long-stemmed lavender rose rested on his dashboard. “How about an early lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria?” he said.

  “You brought me a rose?”

  “No, the gal I was with last night brought me a rose. In fact, her name was Rose.”

  I got in on the passenger side and sat back in the deep leather comfort of the seat. “You look good,” I said.

  “Maybe if I could go three days without booze, I’d rejoin the human race. I got the gen on that Luger I took off of Frankie Gee. It belonged to a guy in the SS by the name of Karl Engels. He was in Paris in 1943, then he dropped off the screen.” He waited for my response. When I didn’t speak, he said, “Say what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “That’s it, a start?”

  “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “No, that’s not it at all. You can’t wait to rain on the parade.”

  Once again I was using all my energies to avoid hurting his feelings and doing a poor job of it. There were few times when Clete was genuinely happy. The irreverent and sardonic humor and outrageous behavior that characterized his life were surrogates for happiness, ephemeral ones at that, and I would have given anything in the world if I could have waved a wand over him and cast out the gremlins constantly sawing at the underpinnings of his life. Then I realized I had not only fallen prey to my old arrogance and hubris—namely, that I could fix other human beings—but I had been so concentrated on protecting Clete’s feelings that I had failed to make the connection between the provenance of the Luger and a detail inside the home office of Alexis Dupree.

  “Jesus, Clete,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  I rubbed my forehead like a man who has had a flashbulb popped in his face. “Dupree has a stunning collection of framed photographs on the walls of his den. One shows Italian troops marching through a bombed-out village in Ethiopia. Another one shows a Crusader castle in the desert. There’s one of the Great Wall in China and one of the Venetian canals. But I kept concentrating on a photo of the defenders of Madrid that Robert Capa supposedly inscribed to Dupree. The photo I ignored was of an indoor cycle track in Paris.”

  “Like a racetrack for bicycles?”

  “Yeah, there was one in Paris that was used as a holding area for Jews rounded up by the SS and the French police. I don’t remember all the details. I think Alexis Dupree’s photographs are a tribute to the Axis attempt to conquer the world.”

  Clete opened a packet of turkey jerky and stuck a piece in his mouth and started chewing. This was the first time I could remember his reaching for something other than a drink or a cigarette when he was agitated. “I can’t believe a guy like that has been sitting under our noses all this time. He’s breathing the same air we do. That’s a disgusting thought. We ought to bulldoze that mausoleum of his into the bayou.”

  “Why blame the house for the occupant?” I said.

  “Places like that are monuments to everything that’s wrong in Louisiana’s history. Slavery, rental convict labor, the White League, corporate plantations, the Knights of the White Camellia, elitist shit-heads figuring out new ways to pay working people as little as they can. Why not put a match to all of it?”

  “Then we’d be stuck with ourselves.”

  “That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard anyone say. You should get together with Gretchen.”

  “What’s the deal with Gretchen?”

  “You got me. She woke up looking like she’d been hit by a wrecking ball. I can’t figure her, Dave. One minute she’s a sweet girl, the next she’s the contract hitter who snuffed Bix Golightly’s wick. By the way, Dana Magelli thinks two different shooters capped Waylon Grimes and Frankie Gee.”

  “I don’t need to know about this.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind? That’s smart.”

  “Cut off the head of the snake,” I said.

  “Alexis Dupree?”

  “You got it.”

  “But I shouldn’t be thinking about burning down his house? Streak, if you ever see a psychiatrist, you’re going to end up shooting yourself.”

  “You don’t think getting drunk every day is a form of suicide?”

  “You talking about me?” he said.

  “No, you never hide your feelings or pretend you’re anything other than what you are. I don’t have your candor. That’s what I was saying.”

  “Don’t talk like that, big mon. It makes that lead start moving around in my chest. It’s still in there. I don’t care what the docs say. Dave, we’ve got to make things like they used to be. That’s what it’s about. You get to a certain age, and you go back to where you started out. It’s not wrong to do that, is it?”

  “Thomas Wolfe already said it. You can’t go home again.”

  “I’ve got to have a drink. My liver is flopping. Let’s go to Clementine’s. We can eat at the bar.”

  “I can’t do that,” I replied.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. He started his engine, the joy gone from his face, his cheeks splotched with color, as though he were coming down with a fever.

  I watched him drive through the dappled sunlight, past the grotto and the city library, and turn in to the midday traffic on East Main, the starched white top and waxed surfaces of his Caddy like a tribute to a happier and more innocent time. Then I went into my office and brought up Google on my computer screen and began typing the words “Paris” and “racetrack” and “Jews” into the search window.

  GRETCHEN HOROWITZ DID not contend with the nature of the world. In her opinion, no survivor did. The world was a giant vortex, anchored in both the clouds and the bottom of space, at any given time swirling with a mix of predators and con men and professional victims and members of the herd who couldn’t wait to get in lockstep with everyone around them. She felt little compassion or pity for any of them. But there was a fifth group, the arms and heads and legs of the individuals so tiny they could barely be seen. The children did not make the world. Nor did they have the ability to protect themselves from the cretins who preyed upon them. She did not speculate on the afterlife or the punishment or rewards it might offer. Instead, Gretchen Horowitz wanted to see judgment and massive amounts of physical damage imposed on child abusers in this life, not the next.

  Even popping a cap on them seemed too mild a fate. But to do more than summarily blow them out of their socks would give them power. The three child abusers she’d capped had it coming, she told herself. They’d dealt the play when they declared war on the defenseless. Except there had been others, two of them. She didn’t like to think about the others. She told herself they were killers and sadists and contract assassins who were m
obbed up all the way to New Jersey. They’d both been armed, and both of them had gotten off a shot before they went down. Gretchen’s argument with herself over the others usually lasted through the night into the dawn. The woman named Caruso may have been feared in the underworld, but for Gretchen Horowitz, Caruso had never existed.

  Gretchen did not do well when the center began to come apart. She was not exactly sure what the center was, but she knew it was related to predictability and not letting other people hurt you. You kept it simple, the way people in twelve-step groups did. That meant not getting involved in other people’s problems. You took care of yourself, covered your own back, and drew a line in the sand that other people were told not to cross. When somebody tried to find out if you were blowing smoke, you stepped on his cookie bag. If he had another run at it, you punched his whole ticket. In the meantime, it didn’t hurt to do a good deed or two. You looked out for infants and small kids and girls who fell in with the wrong guys, not just pimps and pushers but guys they had trusted and who threw them away like used Kleenex. Last, when you had a real friend, someone who was stand-up and loyal, you never let him or her down, no matter what price you had to pay.

  Gretchen had often wished her mother would nod off on the tar or the mixture of cocaine and whiskey she shot. Candy Horowitz had traded off her daughter’s childhood for her habit and had never felt sorry for anything or anyone except herself. With luck, the dwarf with the satchel would overload her heart and give her the peace she had never found. What more fitting way for Candy to do the Big Exit than to glide into eternity on angel wings trailing streams of China white? That was a cruel thought, Gretchen told herself. Her mother was a child, no different than the defenseless child Gretchen had been when she was molested by at least half a dozen of her mother’s boyfriends. And now Candy Horowitz was in the hands of a man who talked about sticking her inside a wood chipper or a waffle iron.

  Gretchen took the four-lane to New Orleans. The Ford pickup she had bought from T. Coon was a dream, the cab chopped down so the windows looked like slits in a machine-gun bunker, the body lowered on the frame, the Merc engine souped up with dual carburetors and a hot cam and milled heads. The dual Hollywood mufflers probably had been deliberately filled with motor oil in order to carbonize the filters and create a deep-throated rumble that echoed off the asphalt like soft thunder. At Morgan City, she got stuck behind two semis on the high bridge over the Atchafalaya River. Finally, when there was a narrow opening between the lanes, she double-clutched into second and floored the accelerator, passing the trucks so suddenly that both of the drivers swerved. In under ten seconds, the semis had shrunk to the size of toys in her rearview mirror.

  In two hours, she was at Joe & Flo’s Candlelight Hostel, not far from the Quarter, where she had rented a security locker. She removed a hatbox from the locker and got back in her pickup and drove onto the I-10. In minutes she was back on the connector to the four-lane, headed toward New Iberia, the chrome-plated Merc engine humming like a sewing machine. Far down the road, where it traversed miles of flooded woods and the swamp water was coated with a milky-green blanket of algae, she popped the top loose from the hatbox and put her right hand inside. She felt the hard, square outline of the .22 auto and the nine-millimeter Beretta. She also felt the suppressor for the .22 and the magazines and boxes of cartridges for both weapons. The contents of the hatbox were old friends. They didn’t argue or contend or judge. They did as they were asked and became an extension of the will. As a retired button man in Hialeah once told her, “The objective is not the target, Gretchen. The objective is controlling the environment around you. The proper use of your piece gives you that kind of control. After that point, the personal choices are up to you.”

  “What did you do before you were a hitter, Louie?” Gretchen asked.

  “You see The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight?”

  “Yeah, Jerry Orbach played Joe Gallo.”

  “Remember the lion Joe kept in his basement, the one they hooked up to the chain in the car wash? I’m the one who took care of the lion. I participated in history,” he said.

  But neither her fingers on the oiled coldness of the guns nor her reveries about the humorous hit man from Brooklyn could relieve her of the sick feeling in her stomach. No, “sick feeling” didn’t approach the systemic debilitation that seemed to be eating its way through her body. Her palms were stiff and hard and dry when she closed them around the steering wheel. Her face looked gray and unfamiliar when she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. A sour odor rose from her shirt. If she stopped and ate anything, she knew she would throw up. She had thought nothing worse than her childhood could ever happen to her again. Her choices were like multiple doors that all opened onto a furnace. She could either do as she had been told by the man who called himself Marco or become responsible for her mother’s death, one that was fiendish in design. The guns she had owned and used to control her environment had become the trap that was about to rob her of her soul and the lives of her mother and Dave and Alafair Robicheaux and Clete Purcel, the best man she had ever known, one whose goodness was in every inch of his body, every touch of his hand, every kind expression of concern. His selfless affection for her seemed to have no source. He didn’t want anything from her, and he didn’t get mad when she got mad at him. He made no sense at all. He had an affection for her that only a father had for a daughter, a man to whom she had no known blood relation. Why had this fate been visited upon her?

  When she pulled in to the motor court on East Main, a sun shower had just ended, and smoke from Clete’s barbecue pit was hanging in the trees, and red and yellow leaves from a swamp maple were pasted damply on the driveway. The roast on the rotisserie had been burned into a lump of coal. She cut the engine and picked up the hatbox from the passenger seat and went inside Clete’s cottage. The blinds were shut, and the air was gray and dense with an odor that was like moldy towels and dried testosterone and beer that had been sweated through the glands into the bedclothes. A bottle of peppermint schnapps and a half-empty bottle of Carta Blanca were on the breakfast table. Clete was sleeping in his skivvies on the couch, on his side, a pillow over his head. His shirt and trousers lay on the floor.

  Gretchen sat down in a straight-back chair close to the couch and removed the .22 auto and screwed the suppressor on the barrel. Her scalp was tingling, her heart thudding. A tiny pool of perspiration had already formed between her palm and the grips on the .22. Her breath was so loud and ragged in her throat that she thought it would wake him. She lowered the .22 behind her calf and touched Clete on the back. “It’s me,” she said.

  He didn’t move.

  “It’s Gretchen. Wake up,” she said.

  When he didn’t move, she felt a surge of anger and impatience toward him that was irrational, as though he were the source of all her problems and deserved whatever happened to him. Her heart was pounding, her nostrils flaring with fear and angst. She clenched his shoulder with her left hand and shook it. His skin was oily and hot, beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He pulled the pillow from his head and looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes bleary. “What’s the haps?” he said.

  “Are you in the bag again?”

  “Yeah, bad night, bad day. I got to stop drinking,” he replied. He turned over on the couch and supported himself on one elbow. “What time is it?”

  “Forget about the time.”

  “What’s going on, Gretch? What’s that in your hand?”

  She lifted the .22 above the level of the mattress. “This is the piece I used to clip Bix Golightly. On my sixth birthday, he asked me to come into the kitchen and help him make lemonade. My mother had just left for the grocery to buy a cake. He unzipped his pants and pushed my face against his cock. He squeezed my head so tight, I thought he would crush my skull. He told me if I was a bad girl and told my mother what we’d done, that’s how he put it, what we’d done, he’d come back to Miami and bury me in my backyard. I never knew his f
ull name or where he was from. Earlier this year he was at the track in Hialeah with some other gumballs. They told him I did button work for the Mob. He never made the connection between me and the little girl he sodomized. It took me a long time to catch up with him, but I did. What do you think of that, Clete?”

  Clete fingered the sheet that covered his loins, his mouth gray, his lips dry-looking. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

  “Popping a guy?”

  “No, popping a guy who makes a little girl perform oral sex on him on her birthday and threatens to murder her. What are you going to do with that piece?”

  “Use it.”

  “On who?” he asked.

  “The field is wide open.”

  He sat up on the side of the couch. He took the .22 from her hand. The magazine was not in the frame. He pulled back the receiver. The chamber was empty. “Did you take down Frankie Giacano or Waylon Grimes?”

  “No, I didn’t. Golightly and Grimes and Giacano were all supposed to catch the bus. I did Golightly, but I didn’t take money for it. I don’t know who clipped the others.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Clete asked.

  “A guy who smells like he’s been drinking for twenty-four hours?”

  He unscrewed the suppressor from the .22 and handed both the gun and the suppressor back to her. “What else is in that hatbox?”

  “A Beretta nine and a gun-cleaning kit and several extra magazines and boxes of ammo.”

  “I’m your old man. That’s who I am,” he said.

  “Meaning like my boyfriend?”

  “I’m your father.”

  She felt a sharp pain in her heart that spread through her chest and seemed to squeeze the air out of her lungs. Her brow twitched once, like a rubber band snapping, then something shut down the flow of light into her eyes. “Don’t play around with me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “My father died in Desert Storm.”

  “You went to juvie when you were fifteen, then to foster care. Your mother was in the Miami-Dade stockade. I had a blood test done on you. There was no doubt I was your dad. But you ran away from foster care before I could process the custody application. I tried to find you twice on my own, and later, I hired a PI in Lauderdale, but the trail stopped at the track in Hialeah. You were a hot walker there, right?”