Creole Belle

11

That evening at twilight, I saw Clete’s Caddy pull to the curb in front of our house, a woman behind the wheel. Clete got out on the passenger side and walked up to the gallery. The woman pulled away into the traffic and turned the corner just beyond the Shadows, the blue-dot taillights on the Caddy winking in the gloom. I met Clete on the steps. “Was that your temp?” I asked.

“She went to get some aspirin. She got sunburned this morning. I just heard about this guy Patin getting shot outside a club in Lafayette. He’s the guy who tried to pop you with the cut-down?”

“I doubt it. He would have blown town. My guess is he stole the freezer truck at the motel where he was staying and gave it to his brother. But I’m just guessing.”

“You know what’s weird about this, Dave? Why steal a freezer truck to use as a getaway vehicle in a contract hit?”

“You think it wasn’t stolen?” I said.

“It’s a possibility.”

“Varina Leboeuf is suing the department. I think she knows more about this stuff than she pretends.”

He sat down on the steps. The air was filled with the drone of cicadas, fireflies glowing briefly in the trees, then disappearing in curlicues of yellow smoke. “I wonder if she digs older guys,” he said.

“Will you stop that? Go on about the freezer truck.”

“Why drive yourself nuts? You were right from the outset. We’re dealing with some big players. But back to this gal Varina. A woman can only be so beautiful. If your twanger doesn’t go on autopilot when a broad like that walks by, you need to get a refund on your equipment. Don’t tell me your flopper doesn’t have a memory bank. When you were loaded, you racked up some heavy mileage. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“I can’t believe you. We’re talking about multiple homicides, and you can’t get your mind off your johnson.”

“I was talking about yours, not mine. But okay, let’s talk about mine. I think it has X-ray eyes. It sees through my pants. What am I supposed to do, cover it with concrete?” Clete glanced behind him through the screen door. His scalp constricted and his face turned hot pink, the blood draining out of the scar that ran through his eyebrow. “Hi, Molly,” he said. “I didn’t see you there.”

“Hi, Clete,” she said. “Enjoying the evening?”

“I was going to ask Dave to take a walk.” He stood up. “Would you like to go?”

“Bring me some ice cream,” she said.

“Sure,” he said. “I was going to suggest that. Dave and I were just shooting the breeze. I was talking about myself, not anybody else.”

“We always love having you over, Clete,” she said.

I walked with him down the street, toward the Shadows. He looked back at the house. “How long was she there?” he said.

“Forget it. Who was driving your car?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. Gretchen and I were over on East Cote Blanche Bay today. I think I know where the body of Blue Melton was dropped into the water. I think the guys who killed her were on a big yacht and don’t know much about nautical science. How many yacht basins are there along the Louisiana coast, at least the kind that berth boats big enough to accommodate walk-in subzero freezers? Not many. That’s where we need to start, Streak. Looking at people like Ronnie Earl Patin isn’t going to take us to the top.”

“Don’t try to change the subject. You said Gretchen? As in Gretchen Horowitz, your daughter?”

We had walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street, the water flowing dark and high through the pilings below, the sun descending in a burst of orange flame beneath clouds that resembled piled fruit. “I’m telling you this because I think maybe she’s not Caruso,” Clete said.

“How can you say that? You recognized her when she clipped Bix Golightly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t her. There’s something I didn’t tell you. Since we almost bought it on the bayou, I’ve had all this guilt about everything I ever did wrong in my life. I was obsessing about Gretchen and her mother and the fact that I used her mother like a whore, and the fact that Gretchen grew up in a home where a guy burned her with cigarettes when she was a baby, for Christ’s sake. I had these pictures Candy sent me of Gretchen, and I was always looking at them and wondering where she was and how I could undo all the pain I’d caused her. Then I saw this person in a red windbreaker and ball cap splatter Bix Golightly’s buckwheats, and maybe I transposed Gretchen’s image onto the shooter.”

“Is that likely?”

“Yeah, it’s possible,” he said, undeterred in his attempt to avoid conclusions he could not deal with. “She talks rough, but she’s a sweet girl. The problem I got now is she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s getting a little bit too close to me emotionally, in definitely the wrong way, get my drift, and she doesn’t need any more psychological damage done to her because she’s getting the hots for her own father.”

“You can clear all this up by telling Gretchen who you are. Why haven’t you done that?”

It was a mean question to ask. Saint Augustine once said we should not use the truth to injure. In this case, my best friend was experiencing the kind of angst that no one should have to endure. The truth was not going to set Clete free. Instead, it would force him to choose between aiding and abetting several homicides or sending his daughter to the injection table at Angola. I had become his grand inquisitor, and I hated myself for it.

“What am I going to do, Dave?” he asked.

I said something I didn’t plan to say. I said it out of a frame of reference that had nothing to do with reason, justice, right or wrong, legality, police procedure, or even common sense. I said it in the same way the British writer E. M. Forster once said that if he had to make a choice between his friend and his country, he hoped he would have the courage to choose his friend. I said, “Let it play out.”

“You mean that?”

“It’s another one of those deals where you have to say the short version of the Serenity Prayer. You have to step back and let all the worry and complexities and confusion in your life blow away in the wind. You have to trust that the sun will rise in the east and the race will not be to the swift and the rain will fall upon both the just and the unjust. You have to say fuck it and mean it and let the dice roll out of the cup as they will.”

“We’re both going to end up in Angola.”

“That’s what I mean. Fuck it. Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.

“My liver is screaming. I got to have a beer with a couple of raw eggs in it. A couple of shots of Jack wouldn’t hurt, either.”

“Molly wants some ice cream.”

“Clementine’s sells sorbet to go. ‘Let it play out.’ I totally dig that. I think that also includes seriously stomping some ass and taking names. ‘Let it play out.’ Fuckin’ A.” He began churning his big fists as though hitting a speed bag, his teeth like tombstones when he grinned.

He had sucked me in again.

N O ONE LIKES to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love and faith and robs us of all serenity. It steals both our sleep and our sunrise and makes us treacherous and venal and dishonorable. It fills our glands with toxins and effaces our identity and gives flight to any vestige of self-respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat and turns your skin gray and fouls your blood and spiritually eviscerates you to the point where you cannot pray lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you’re about to die, you know what I am talking about. This kind of fear has no remedy except motion, no matter what kind. Every person who has experienced war or natural catastrophe or man-made calamity knows this. The adrenaline surge is so great that you can pick up an automobile with your bare hands, plunge through glass windows in flaming buildings, or attack an enemy whose numbers and weaponry are far superior to yours. No fear of self-injury is as great as the fear that turns your insides to gelatin and shrivels your soul to the size of an amoeba.

If you do not have the option of either fleeing or attacking your adversary, the result is quite different. Your level of fear will grow to the point where you feel like your skin is being stripped off your bones. The degree of torment and hopelessness and, ultimately, despair you will experience is probably as great as it gets this side of the grave.

Seven hours after I had said good night to Clete, I heard dry thunder in the clouds and, in my sleep, thought I saw flashes of heat lightning inside our bedroom. Then I realized I had forgotten to turn off my cell phone and it was vibrating on top of the dresser. I picked it up and walked into the kitchen. The caller ID was blocked. I sat down in a chair at the breakfast table and stared down the back slope at the bayou, where the surface of the water was wrinkling like curdled milk, the flooded elephant ears along the banks bending in the wind. “Who is this?” I said.

At first I heard only a deep breathing sound, like that of a man who was either in pain or whose anxiety was so intense that blood was starting to pop on his brow. “You Dave Robicheaux?” a male voice said.

“That’s right. It’s four in the morning. Who is this, and what do you want?”

“I’m Chad Patin. Ronnie Earl was my brother.”

I thought the caller planned to make an accusation against me, but that was not the case. He must have been using a landline, because his voice was rasping against a larger surface than a cell phone’s. I heard him take a gulp of air, like a man whose head had been held for a long time underwater.

“You still with me, bub?” I said.

“It was me who tried to take you out,” he replied.

“How’d you get my number?”

“They got a file on you. Everything about you is in there.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

I waited and heard liquid being poured into a glass. I heard him drinking from the glass, swallowing sloppily, a man who didn’t care whether Johnnie Walker or brake fluid was sliding down his throat. “I’m jumping out into space on this one,” he said.

“You were the shooter? Not your brother?”

“I agreed to do it. I wish I hadn’t.”

“You agreed? Can you translate that?”

“They were gonna send Ronnie Earl back inside. They weren’t gonna give me any more gigs. I got to make a living.”

“We ran you through the NCIC computer. You don’t have a sheet.”

“I was a transporter, girls and sometimes a little skag. I drove the girls up from Mexico. I wasn’t full-time on any of this. One night on the border, I did something. Some people were crowded too tight into the back of the truck. When it went into the ditch, I ran away. The back was locked. It was over a hundred degrees, even at night. Maybe you read about it.”

“No, I didn’t. Why did you call me?”

“I need to get out of the country.”

“And you want me to help you?”

“I got a few hundred dollars, but it’s not enough. I need at least five t’ousand.”

“You’re asking this of the man you tried to kill?”

“The person running all this is named Angel or maybe Angelle. In French, ange means ‘angel.’”

“I know what it means.”

“You’re not listening. This is bigger than all of us. They ship women from all over the world. Bosnia, Romania, Russia, Africa, Thailand, Honduras, any shithole where things are coming apart. A guy makes a call and gets any kind of woman or combination of women he wants. That’s just part of it.”

“What else are they into?”

“Everything. They own part of everything there is.”

“Who hired you to kill me?”

“You’re not listening. We’re nothing down here, just ants running around on a wet log. I’ve heard about an island they got.” His voice started to break, as though he were afraid to look at the images his mind was creating. “They do stuff to people there you don’t want to know about. They got this big iron mold. I saw a photo of what they did to a guy.”

“Take this to the FBI.”

“I’ll go inside on attempted murder. I’ll be dead in a week. You saw what they did to Ronnie Earl. The guy who showed me the photo played a tape for me. I heard somebody being put into this iron thing they got. The guy going inside was talking in a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t have to understand it. He was begging and crying, then I heard them closing the door on him. It took a long time for them to close the door. He was screaming all the while. I got to hide someplace, man. Five t’ousand dollars, that’s all it’ll take. I’ll give you all the information I got.”

“It doesn’t work that way, partner. Why’d you guys use a freezer truck?”

“Ronnie Earl said nobody would pay attention to it. Why you axing about the truck we drove? I’m telling you about people who aren’t like anybody you ever knew, and you’re worried about a truck? There’s a girl involved, a singer, a Creole girl who was on that island. That’s what Ronnie Earl said. She was big stuff in the zydeco clubs. I don’t remember her name.”

“Tee Jolie Melton,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s it. Her sister got grabbed, too. You gonna help me or not?”

“Where can we meet?”

“You’ll get me the money?”

“We have funds to help out confidential informants or friends of the court,” I said, wondering at my own willingness to make promises that perhaps I couldn’t keep. “One way or another, we’ll get you out of this.”

“What’s that iron thing? What do they call it? It’s like from the Middle Ages. I could see part of it in the photo. I could see pieces of the guy on it. It’s got big spikes inside the door. What do they call that, man?”

“The iron maiden.”

I heard wind in the receiver, as though he had taken the phone from his ear and mouth.

“Are you there, Chad?” I said.

“Oh, man,” he said, the register in his voice suddenly dropping.

“What’s happening?” I said.

“They’re here. Those motherfuckers are here.”

“Stay with me, podna. Who’s there?”

“It’s them,” he said. “Them.”

I heard him drop the phone and sounds of scuffling and furniture being knocked over, and then I heard Chad Patin squealing like a pig on its way to slaughter.

Alafair entered Clete’s New Iberia office on Main at nine A.M. on Friday, expecting to see Clete’s regular receptionist, Hulga Volkmann, behind the desk in the waiting room. Instead, she saw a thick-bodied woman in her mid- or late twenties, with reddish-blond hair cut Dutch-boy-style, sitting behind the desk in jeans, with one foot propped on an open drawer and cotton balls wedged between the toes while she painted lavender polish on each nail. The floor was unswept and littered from the previous day, newspapers and auto-mechanic magazines spilling off the metal chairs. “Mr. Purcel is across the street at Victor’s Cafeteria,” the woman said without looking up. “You need something?”

“Yeah, who are you, and where is Miss Hulga?”

“She’s on vacation, and I’m her replacement. Who are you?”

“Alafair Robicheaux.”

“Great.” The woman at the desk straightened up in her chair and capped the nail polish and pulled the cotton balls from between her toes and dropped them one at a time into the wastebasket. “That saves me from calling up your father.” She glanced at the top page on a yellow legal pad. “Tell Detective Robicheaux a stolen-vehicle report on the freezer truck was phoned in two hours before Ronnie Earl Patin tried to kill him. Or maybe not tell him that, since he was probably already aware, considering he was the guy who was almost killed. But if it will make your father happy, you can tell him the company that owns the truck doesn’t have any apparent connection to the Patin brothers. Also tell your father that his department should do its own work. End of message.” She looked up at Alafair. Her eyes were the color of violets and didn’t seem to go with the rest of her face. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, who the fuck are you?”

The young woman’s eyelashes fluttered. “How do I put this? Let’s see, I guess I’m the fuck Gretchen Horowitz. I understand you graduated from Stanford Law. I’ve always wondered what Stanford was like. I went to Miami Dade College. In case you never heard of it, it’s in Miami.”

“This place is a mess.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why don’t you clean it up?”

“Should I start with the puke on the restroom floor or the apple core floating in the toilet bowl?”

“You might start with getting your feet off the furniture,” Alafair said.

Gretchen folded back the pages on the legal pad until she reached a clean one, then set the pad and a felt pen on the forward edge of the desk. “Write down whatever you want to tell Mr. Purcel, and I’ll give it to him. Or you can go across the street and help him with his hangover. I don’t think he’d have one if it wasn’t for your father.”

“My father doesn’t drink.”

“I know that. He only takes Mr. Purcel to the bar and gets high watching him drink.”

“Excuse me, miss, but I think you’re probably an idiot. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it in the clinical sense. If that’s true, I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you. I’m sure you have many qualities. I love the vampiric shade of polish on your toenails.”

Gretchen put two Chiclets in her mouth and slowly chewed them, her mouth open, her eyes indolent. “Can you tell me why people with degrees from Stanford live in a mosquito factory? There must be a reason.”

Alafair picked up the trash can. “Are you through with this?” she asked.

“Morning sickness?”

“No, just doing your job for you.” Alafair began straightening the metal chairs in the waiting room and picking up newspapers and Styrofoam cups from the floor and dropping them in the can.

“Don’t do that,” Gretchen said.

“I majored in janitorial studies at Reed. You’ve heard of Reed, I’m sure. It’s in Portland, the home of John Reed the socialist writer, although he was not related to the family who endowed Reed. Did you see the movie Reds? It’s about John Reed. He was a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution in 1915. Portland is in Oregon. That’s the state between California and Washington.”

“Listen, Al-a-far, or whatever your name is, I don’t need a horse’s ass making my day any harder than it already is. Put down the trash can and kindly haul your twat out of here. I’ll tell Mr. Purcel you came to see him. I’ll also tell him I passed on the information your father needed. Okay? ”

“I don’t mind,” Alafair said.

“Don’t mind what?”

“Helping you clean up. Clete shouldn’t have left you with this. He’s a good guy, and everybody around here loves him. But as my father says, Clete has the organizational skill of a scrapyard falling down a staircase.”

Alafair bent over to pick up a magazine from the floor. She heard Gretchen suppress a laugh. “Something funny?” Alafair said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Gretchen said. She took a mop and a bucket and a plumber’s helper and a pair of rubber gloves out of the closet and went into the restroom. A moment later, Alafair heard the sloshing sounds of the plumber’s helper at work, then the toilet flushing. Gretchen opened the door wider so she could see into the waiting room, her body still bent over the commode.

“ Reds was Warren Beatty’s best movie, better even than Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. “Henry Miller did a cameo in there. Did you know he stayed here in New Iberia at that place called the Shadows? You ever see Shampoo? Warren Beatty is one of my all-time favorite actors, second only to James Dean.”

The reports on the denouement of Chad Patin, whose name the witnesses did not know at the time, had begun coming in to a 911 dispatcher in St. Charles Parish at 4:18 A.M. To whatever degree the abductors were lacking in sophistication, they compensated in terms of due diligence.

At a small settlement outside Des Allemands, down toward New Orleans, a woman called in a noise complaint. She said her neighbor, who lived in a garage apartment behind an abandoned stucco house encased in dead vines and banana stalks, was having a fight with a woman. When asked how she knew this, she answered that she could hear glass and furniture breaking and someone shrieking like a woman. At least that was her impression, she added.

At 4:23 A.M. a different caller in the same community reported a burglary in progress at the garage apartment. From his window, he said he could see three men carrying a rolled carpet down the garage apartment stairs. He said a light was attached to the power pole by the apartment, and he was certain he was watching an invasion of his neighbor’s home. Then he realized he was not watching the theft of a carpet but a far more serious crime in progress. “They’re carrying a guy wrapped up with rope. It looks like something is stuffed in his mouth. I think maybe it’s a tennis ball.”

At 4:26 A.M. the first caller reported in again. “They just drove a SUV t’rew my li’l garden. There’s still one man out there. He’s getting something out of the back of his car. When y’all coming?”

At 4:31 A.M. the second caller made his next report on his cell phone. So far he had not identified himself, but he did not seem to consider that a problem. “This is me,” he said. “I’m in my car and following them guys up the dirt road. I’m gonna fix their ass, me.”

“Disengage from what you’re doing, sir,” the female dispatcher said. “Do not try to stop these men. Help is on the way.”

“What’s gonna happen to that po’ man?” the caller said.

At 4:33 A.M. the woman caller was back on the line. “The man getting something out of the back of his car? What name they got for that? The thing he was getting, I mean. Soldiers wear it on their back. He walked right up to the garage apartment and pointed it just like you do a hose. There ain’t nothing left. Even the trees are burning. The leaves are coming down on my li’l house.”

“You’re not making sense, ma’am. Unless you’re talking about a flamethrower,” the dispatcher said.

The last 911 call on the tape was from the man who had followed the abductors in his car. “They got on a white boat just sout’ of Des Allemands,” he said. “I’m standing here on the dock. They’re headed down toward the Gulf. It was a tennis ball. It’s right here by my foot. A toot’ is stuck in it, and there’s blood on the toot’. Where was y’all?”

I had reported my call from Chad Patin ten seconds after the intruders broke into his garage apartment, but my best efforts had not saved him. After Helen and I finished listening to the 911 recordings transmitted to us by the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Department, she stared out her office window, her thumbs hooked in her belt. Her back looked as hard as iron against her shirt. “The guy running this operation is named Angelle?”

“Or Angel.”

“And living on an island somewhere?”

“That’s what Chad Patin said.”

“And one of his guys has a flamethrower? This stuff is from outer space. What do you think it’s really about?”

“Money. A lot of it. Drugs, prostitutes, maybe stolen or forged paintings. At least those things are part of it.”

“The perps don’t pop cops over drugs and girls and stolen property,” she replied.

“I think it has some connection to neo-Nazis.”

“I don’t believe that for a minute. That’s just crazy, Dave.”

“Okay, let’s look at another angle. What is the one subject around here that nobody brings up in a negative way, that no local journalist goes near? A subject so sensitive that people will walk away from you if they sense the wrong words are about to come out of your mouth? What enterprise could that possibly be?”

“Tell me.”

“No, you tell me,” I said.

She manufactured an expression that was meant to be dismissive. I didn’t like to look at it. It made me feel embarrassed for Helen, and it caused me to think less of her, a person I had always admired.

“You’re too hard on people, bwana,” she said. “This is a poor state with a one-resource economy. Would you really like to go back to the good old days? I don’t think any of us would like living under the old lifestyle of ‘tote that barge and lift that bale.’”

“What’s the word we’re avoiding here? What is the sacred space that none of us track our irreverent shoes into?”

“The country wants cheap gasoline. They don’t care how they get it. So the state of Louisiana is everybody’s fuck. What else do you want me to say?”

“Nothing. You just said it all. You know what this case is about, so stop pretending you don’t.”

“You’re not going to talk to me like that,” she said.

“Ask yourself why this conversation offends you. Because I insulted you or I pissed on the sacred cow.”

“Get out, Dave.”

She had never spoken to me like that, at least not in that tone. I didn’t care. I was angrier than she was. No, that’s the wrong word. I was disappointed in Helen, and I felt let down in a way I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t shake the funk I was in for the rest of the day.