Creole Belle

  He broke his cane pole across his knee and flung both pieces into the bayou and watched them drift upstream and disappear inside the band of bronze sunlight still shimmering on the surface. He continued to stare at the sunset on the water, his huge back rising and falling in the shadows.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “You piss me off sometimes, Dave.”

  “Jesse Leboeuf ate two rounds before he fell into Catin Segura’s bathtub. He said something to the shooter before he died. The shooter could have put one in his mouth or through his forehead but evidently decided not to. For whatever reason, the shooter showed mercy. If Gretchen popped him, maybe she had to. His piece was on the dresser. But she didn’t shoot him a third time, which is what a contract hitter would have done.”

  “What did Leboeuf say?” Clete asked.

  “Catin doesn’t speak French.”

  “You think the shooter was Gretchen?”

  “Who else?”

  “Give her a chance. Let me talk to her before you bring her in.”

  “No dice.”

  “I don’t know where she is. I’m telling you the truth.”

  I believed him. Clete had never lied to me, at least not deliberately. I unfolded the gas receipt I had taken from Jesse Leboeuf’s wallet. “Leboeuf had this receipt for aviation fuel on him when he died. There’re some landing coordinates written on it. The coordinates are southeast of the Chandeleur Islands. I think that’s where Tee Jolie is.”

  Clete rubbed the spot where the mosquito had bitten him. “I don’t like the things you said about Gretchen. Alafair had a loving home. Gretchen had guys shoving their cocks down her throat. That was a lousy crack you made.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. You want in or out?”

  He folded his arms and cleared his throat and spat. “You know anybody with a seaplane?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Julie Ardoin.”

  “The one whose husband killed himself? She’s kind of a pill, isn’t she?”

  “How many normal people does either of us know?” I replied.

  JULIE’S HUSBAND HAD been an offshore pilot and an untreated drug addict and, finally, a Saran-wrapped fundamentalist fanatic who tried to cure his addiction with exorcism and tent revivals. The night he did the Big Exit, he parked his car in the yard and came in the house and told his wife he had a surprise for her, namely that he was clean and had found a cure. He retrieved a double-barrel shotgun from his car trunk and reentered the house and sat down in his favorite chair and told his wife to open her eyes. The butt of the shotgun was propped on the floor between his legs and the twin muzzles under his chin. He was grinning from ear to ear, as though he had found the secret to eternal wisdom. “Keep it between the ditches, baby cakes,” he said. Then he depressed both triggers.

  He left her with a Cessna 182 four-seat amphibian that she learned to pilot and used to pay off his debts. It was bright red and sleek and ideal for landing on freshwater lakes in the wetlands and even out on the salt if the wind wasn’t too bad. Julie kept to herself and never discussed her husband’s suicide, but sometimes I would see her blank out in the middle of a conversation, as though a movie projector had clicked on behind her eyelids and she was no longer with us.

  Clete and I met her at New Iberia’s small airport early Sunday morning. I had convinced Molly and Alafair to visit Molly’s family in Beaumont for the day. I told Julie I would pay for her fuel and flight time if I couldn’t put it on the department. I watched Clete load his duffel bag into the baggage compartment behind the cabin area. The muzzle of his AR-15 and my cut-down Remington pump were sticking out of the bag. “How hot is this going to be, Dave?” she asked.

  “It’s a flip of the coin,” I said.

  “I think I know that island,” she said.

  “You’ve been there?”

  “I think Bob may have flown there.” The wind was blowing hard out of a gray sky, flattening her khakis and blue cotton shirt against her body. “He got mixed up with a televangelist here’bouts. His name is Amidee Broussard. Bob took him on a couple of charters. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “I sure do.”

  “What are we into, Streak?”

  “I haven’t figured it out. It involves the Dupree family in St. Mary Parish and maybe Varina Leboeuf. It may involve some oil guys, too. Maybe Tee Jolie Melton is on that island. Maybe these are the guys who killed her sister.”

  “Does Helen know about this trip?”

  “She’s got enough to worry about as it is.”

  “Tee Jolie Melton is a singer, right? Why would she be with the Duprees? They wouldn’t take time to spit on most of us.”

  “What the Duprees can’t have, they take.”

  “Tell your friend to ride in back.”

  Clete was on the edge of the tarmac, locking up his Cadillac. “You have a problem with Clete?” I asked.

  “I need to balance the weight. I don’t need a freight car in the front seat,” she replied.

  Clete opened the cabin door of the plane and threw a canvas rucksack of food inside. “Let’s kick some butt,” he said.

  We took off buffeting in the wind and flew through a long stretch of low clouds full of rain and popped out on the other side into a patch of blue with a wonderful overview of Louisiana’s wetlands, miles and miles of marsh grass and gum trees and rivers and bayous and flooded woods and sandspits covered with white birds. Through the side window, I could see the plane’s shadow racing across an inaccessible lake that was lime green with algae; then the shadow seemed to leap from the water’s surface and continue across a dense canopy of willows and cypresses that had turned gold with the season. From the air, the wetlands looked as virginal as they had been when John James Audubon first saw them, untouched by the ax and the dredge boat, thousands of square miles that are the greatest argument for the existence of God that I know of.

  At the edge of the freshwater marsh, the canals that had been dug in grid fashion from the Gulf were now bulbous in shape, like giant worms that had been stepped on. I didn’t want to look at it, in the same way that you don’t want to look at people throwing litter out of a car window, or at pornography, or at an adult mistreating a child. This was even worse, because the injury to the wetlands was not the result of an individual act committed by a primitive and stupid person; it had been done collectively and with consent, and the damage it had caused was ongoing, with no end in sight. Eventually, most of the green-gray landmass below me would probably turn to silt and be washed away, and there would be no Ionian poet to witness and record its passing, as there had been for the ancient world.

  I looked straight ahead at the darkening horizon and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking. We crossed Lafourche and Jefferson parishes and flew over Barataria Bay and then crossed the long umbilical cord of land extending into the Gulf known as Plaquemines Parish, the old fiefdom of Leander Perez, a racist and dictatorial politician who ordered a Catholic church padlocked when the archbishop installed a black man as pastor. In the distance, I could see the smoky-green waters of the Gulf and, on the horizon, a line of blue-black thunderheads forked with lightning.

  Clete was sleeping with his head on his chest. I could feel the airframe shuddering in the updrafts. “That’s Grand Gosier Island,” Julie said. “I’m going down on the deck. Hold on to your ass.”

  WE MADE A wide turn east of the national wildlife refuge, rain hitting the windshield, the wings wet and slick and bright against a sky growing blacker by the minute. In the distance, I could see an island with a biscuit-colored apron of beach around it and a cove on the near side and a compound with palm trees in it. My ears began popping as we started our descent. “Anybody want a ham-and-onion sandwich?” Clete said.

  “Tell him to shut up unless he wants to walk,” Julie said, her eyes fixed on the cove and the waves sliding across a sandbar at the entrance and capping inside it.

  We leveled out at about one hundred feet above the water, the rai
n hitting as hard as pellets on the windshield and cabin roof, a downdraft pounding us so violently that for a moment I didn’t hear the engine. Up ahead I could see a strip of beach and pilings sticking out of the surf and what appeared to be a fortress with ten-foot walls around it. The tapered trunks of palm trees extended above the walls, beating in the wind. Our plane dipped down toward the water, then suddenly, the pontoons smacked the surface, and a dirty spray of foam blanketed the windshield and whipped back in strings across the side windows. A piling that probably once supported a dock or jetty missed the starboard wing by under six feet.

  “Wow!” Clete said. “What do you do for kicks on your days off?”

  Julie had cut the engine and was opening and closing her mouth, as though clearing her ears. “Would you mind?” she said.

  “Mind what?” Clete said.

  “Removing your onion breath from my face.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  The rain was dancing on the chop and drumming on the wings and roof. The wind had pushed us into the shallows almost to the beach. There were wheels built into the pontoons, and I wondered why Julie didn’t take us onto the sand, but I did not want to ask. I suspected she was feeling less and less sure about the wisdom of our mission, and I couldn’t blame her. The walls around the house, like the house itself, were built of stucco and painted magenta. The glass from broken bottles was strewn along the top of the walls, but the security measure was of no value. The walls had been breached and reduced to rubble in several places, probably by Hurricane Katrina, exposing the cinder blocks inside. The interior of the compound was littered with flotsam and tangles of seaweed and shrimp nets and rotting tarps and hundreds of dead birds. The entirety of the beach was dotted with tar balls.

  Clete and I put on our raincoats and hats and dropped down in the shallows up to our knees. Clete pulled his duffel bag from the baggage compartment and slung it over his shoulder. Through the rain, I could see a boat with two outboard engines and a small cabin moored on the south side of the island.

  “I’ll come with you,” Julie said.

  “Better stay here,” I said. “We might have to get out of Dodge sooner than we planned.”

  “I thought I’d ask. Suit yourself,” she said, her voice almost lost in the rain.

  I smiled at her and tried to indicate I appreciated her gesture, but Julie was not the kind of person you made a show of protecting, not if you wanted to retain her friendship.

  Clete and I walked out of the surf onto the sand. The smell from the dead birds was eyewatering. Clete looked over his shoulder at the plane and at the silhouette of Julie Ardoin inside it. “She’s cute,” he said.

  “Will you concentrate on the objective?”

  He blew his breath on his palm and smelled it. “You got any mints?” he said.

  “I can’t believe you.”

  “What did I do wrong? I just said she’s cute. I take that back. She’s more than cute. I bet she’s heck on wheels. Is she getting it on with anybody?”

  “When will you grow up?”

  “I was just asking. When she yelled at me, my johnson started doing jumping jacks. That only happens with a very few women. It’s not my fault.” He pulled the Remington from the bag and handed it to me, then slung the AR-15 upside down on his right shoulder. “Oops, at ten o’clock,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A campfire. By that boat. I saw somebody look at us from behind that tree.”

  Beyond the angle of the wall, I could see the salt-eaten, sun-scalded, wind-polished trunk and root system of a thick tree, one that had probably floated from the Mississippi or Alabama or Florida coastline. Clete and I worked our way along the edge of the wall until we reached a berm that sloped down to the beach and a polyethylene tent staked into the sand with aluminum pins. The rain had slackened, but the wind was blowing hard, popping the tent.

  The barrel of the shotgun was cradled across my left arm; there was no round in the chamber. “My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “I need to see y’all’s hands out here in the light. Do it now.”

  Clete moved left, unslinging his rifle. He had jungle-clipped two magazines together with electrician’s tape, so when one magazine was empty, he could release it and insert the second one in the frame with hardly any interruption in his rate of fire. Water was dripping off his hat brim; his face looked as taut as a bleached muskmelon. He held up two fingers.

  “Did you hear me?” I called out.

  There was no answer.

  I moved around to the front of the tent so I could see through the flap. The campfire had flattened in the wind and smelled from a can of beans that had boiled over and burned in the ashes. I could smell another odor, too.

  The boy and the girl inside looked like they were in their late teens or early twenties. It wasn’t their age that defined them. They were tanned from head to foot, as though they had never lived anywhere except under a blazing sun. Their eyes were lustrous and too big for their faces, like the eyes of anorexics or survivors of famines. The girl was sitting barefoot on an air mattress and wearing cutoff blue jeans and a halter. She pulled a shirt over her left arm, covering a tattoo, then took a hit off a pair of roach clips, even though I had already identified myself as a sheriff’s detective. They said their names were Sybil and Rick and that they were from Mobile and were taking refuge from the storm. Rick wore sandals without socks and a Speedo swimsuit and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt that exposed the bleached tips of the hair under his arms. He and Sybil climbed out of the tent, smiling broadly, neither of them showing any reaction to the cold wind.

  “Who’s up in the house?” I asked.

  “They come and go, man. They’ve got this big fucking yacht you wouldn’t believe,” Rick said. His hair was black and oily and as thick as carpet weave; it hung in rings on his shoulders and resembled a seventeenth-century wig on his narrow head. “If the yacht is anchored on the other side of the island, that means they’re here, no fucking mistake about it.”

  “That’s what we were doing when y’all came,” Sybil said. She opened her mouth wider than necessary when she spoke, and huffed out her breath instead of laughing.

  “Doing what?” Clete asked.

  “What Rick just said. We were fucking,” she replied.

  Clete looked at me.

  “Why are y’all in a tent and not on your boat?” I asked.

  “I got seasick and puked,” Sybil said. She huffed out her breath. “I always get seasick when it rains, and then I puke. I got to brush my teeth.”

  “Who owns this place?” I said.

  Rick turned to Sybil. “What’s the name of that old dude?”

  “I can’t remember.” She felt her head. “My hair’s wet. This weather sucks. Where’d y’all say you’re from?”

  “New Iberia, Louisiana. I’m with the sheriff’s department there.”

  “This isn’t Louisiana, man,” Rick said.

  “Then where are we?” Clete asked.

  “Fuck if I know,” Rick replied.

  Sybil combed her hair with her fingernails. The wind puffed the sleeves of her shirt, and I saw the tattoo of tangled barbed wire wrapped around her upper left arm. More important, I saw a red swastika tattooed like a clasp in the center of the wire.

  “Is the old dude named Alexis Dupree?” I said.

  “I don’t know, man. He’s just a kindly old dude, maybe a little weird, but there’s a lot of that going around these days,” Rick said. “Y’all want to eat some hot dogs? They’re a little bit scorched, but they’re not bad with mustard.”

  “I tell you what, you guys sit tight while my friend and I look around,” I said. “By the way, Miss Sybil, I like your tattoo. Where’d you get it?”

  She began fooling with her hands, examining them as though she had just discovered them. “I used to have this biker boyfriend that was kind of nuts on the subject of Nazi memorabilia and shit, so I told him I had a surprise for
him on his birthday, but he got real pissed off ’cause he thought he was gonna get a blow job instead.”

  “Yeah, that’s fucked up, isn’t it, man?” Rick said, pointing a finger at me to emphasize his disappointment with the world.

  “Like Dave says, hang loose. We’ll be back and chat you up on some of this stuff,” Clete said. “Go easy on the stash.”

  “That’s not gonna be a problem, is it? Because if it is, we’ll get rid of it,” Rick said. He smiled vacantly. “Actually, we’re in recovery now, so maybe we shouldn’t be smoking it, huh?”

  “A big ten-four on that,” Clete said.

  I heard Clete say “Jesus, God” under his breath, then we walked back up the berm and entered the compound and found ourselves surrounded by the stench of dead birds; their feathers ruffled every time the wind gusted. Clete choked and held a handkerchief to his mouth. “You see the tracks inside that girl’s thighs?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, my eyes on the house.

  “Think she and her boyfriend were coming here to shoot up?”

  “Probably. Maybe Alexis Dupree has acolytes in the drug culture.”

  “Those palm trees aren’t from the Gulf Coast.”

  He was right. They had probably been transplanted from South Florida. They hadn’t rooted properly, and their fronds were yellow and frayed by the wind. The entire compound reeked of contrivance and artifice, a shabby attempt to create a Caribbean ambiance in an inhospitable environment where fresh water had to be brought in by boat and pumped into a tank that stood on steel stanchions behind the house. It was like a movie set. It was the kind of place that seemed indicative of the Duprees, people who not only had chosen to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome but were satisfied to have one eye in the kingdom of the blind.

  “How do you want to play it?” Clete said.

  “Let’s knock on the door and see who’s home,” I replied.

  “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “It’s just a building.”

  “No, it’s got something really bad inside it. I can feel it. Maybe it’s that stink. You see the eyes of those kids? They haven’t even started their lives, and they’re already zombies.” He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.