Creole Belle

15

Clete and I went into his inner office, and I told him about my visit to the Dupree plantation. “So you think the old man is actually a war criminal?” he said.

“It’s possible. He claimed he survived Ravensbruck because of his inner discipline and the fact that he did everything his warders told him to do. Listening to him tell it, I had the feeling that those who died brought their deaths upon themselves. He also said he was a friend of Robert Capa. But he didn’t know if Capa was a Communist. On his wall, he has a photo of Italian troops in what I think was the Ethiopian campaign. They used chemical weapons on people who fought with spears and bows and arrows. Why would a victim of the fascists want a photo like that on his wall?”

I could tell I was losing Clete’s attention. “I know that look. What have you done now?” I said.

“Hang on,” he said. He sent Gretchen on an errand, then closed the door and untaped the double-folded manila envelope he had been holding and removed two memory cards. “I creeped Varina’s apartment in Lafayette and her house on Cypremort Point. You were right about the teddy bear on the couch. It’s a nanny-cam. She had another one on a shelf in Lafayette.”

“You broke into her home and her apartment?”

“Not exactly. I showed my PI badge to the apartment manager in Lafayette.”

“How did you get into the house on Cypremort Point?”

“The key was in a flowerpot.”

“How’d you know it was there?”

“She showed me. In case I wanted to let myself in if her old man wasn’t there.” He saw my look. “So I took advantage of her trust. It doesn’t make me feel good,” he said. “You want to watch this stuff or not?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think you should watch it, either.”

“Maybe I’m on tape. You think I should ignore that?” he said, uploading the first card into his computer.

“Don’t give power to it.”

“To what?”

“Evil.”

“You think Varina is evil?”

“I don’t know what she is. Just stay away from her. Stay away from the shit on that card, too.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Give it back to her. Treat it with contempt. Let her live in her own deceit.”

“Maybe I can have a second career as the model on the covers of bodice-buster novels. Will you lighten up? You make me feel awful, Dave.”

“What can I say?”

“Try nothing,” he replied.

He began clicking the keys on his computer, his huge shoulders stressing the fabric in his sport coat, his porkpie hat pulled down on his eyes, as though, unconsciously, he wanted to shield them. The first image on the monitor was that of Varina in the nude, her back to the camera, as she approached a naked man lying on the couch, one hand tucked behind his head, his chest hair like a black fan spread across his sun-browned skin. The figure was not Clete.

“Adios,” I said.

“Come on, Dave. I went this far with it. I don’t want to look at it by myself. I already feel like a pervert.”

Then I said something I never thought I would say to Clete Purcel: “I can’t help you with this one, partner.”

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I looked at the caller ID. Helen Soileau. “Where are you?” she said.

“In Clete’s office.”

“What are those sounds in the background?”

“Turn the speaker off, Clete,” I said.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” she asked.

“Nothing. I was just leaving.”

“You know anything about hammerhead sharks?” she asked.

“They eat stingrays and their own young. The males bite the females until they mate.”

“I mean where they live or feed or whatever.”

“They go where they want. Why are you asking about hammerhead sharks?”

“The pictures are just coming in on the Internet from Lafourche Parish. We found out what happened to Chad Patin,” she said.

A sport fisherman had been trolling with outriggers southwest of Grand Isle when he foul-hooked what he thought was a sand shark. The drag began to accelerate and sing with such velocity that smoke was rising off the reel. To keep from breaking the line, the mate reversed the vessel in the same direction the shark was running. From the stern, you could see a long torpedo-shaped shadow appear briefly beneath a swell, then a dorsal fin slicing through a wave and dipping below the surface again, bubbles trailing after it. For just a moment the line went slack, as though it had been severed, and the mate throttled back the engine and let the boat drift. The slick spots between the waves were undisturbed, the water glistening with a fine sheen like baby oil, the exhaust pipes of the boat gurgling just below the surface. Overhead, pelicans drifted on the breeze, making a wide turn, the way they always do before they cock their wings and plunge down into a wave. However, they seemed to lose interest. Suddenly, a school of baitfish were skittering across a swell, as though someone were flinging handfuls of silvery dimes on the water.

The hammerhead burst to the surface, the line tangled in its gills, streaming blood, its side striped with lesions cut by the steel leader. Its back had been tanned by the sun, giving it the coloration of a sand shark. Its belly was as white as a toadstool that had never seen sunlight. Its eyes, set on the sides of its anvil-like head, gleamed disjointedly, similar to those inside a cubist painting. From nose to tail, it was at least eleven feet long.

All of this was on the sportsman’s cameraphone, along with images of the sportsman and another mate gaffing the shark in the gills and in its mouth and clubbing it with a mallet and finally dragging it high enough on the gunwale to hit it in the head with a hatchet. The sportsman rolled the hammerhead on its back and inserted a knife in its anus and split its belly open. The contents that spilled out on the deck were not what he was expecting to find.

A hammerhead has a small mouth for a shark of its size and takes a while to consume its prey. Evidently, this one had managed to eat and swallow everything it had been provided. The dismemberment of the prey looked like it had been done with a saw. The details are not pleasant to narrate. Only two details of the shark’s engorgement were of significance, at least from a forensic or evidentiary point of view. Glimmering among the spill on the deck were a Caucasian hand and part of a forearm. On the hand was a ring. Later, the coroner in Lafourche Parish removed the ring and found the name of Chad Patin engraved inside it. The other forensic detail of importance was the discovery of two. 223 rounds in the back muscles of the victim.

Chad Patin had tried to kill me with a shotgun blast fired from the freezer truck. But as I looked at the images on Helen’s computer screen, I could feel no enmity toward him. When he called me in the middle of the night from Des Allemands, begging for help, I discounted much of what he said, particularly his rant about a cabal of some kind that controlled events in the lives of those at the bottom of the food chain. Also, his mention of a mysterious figure called Angel or Angelle and his description of someone dying inside the iron maiden seemed the stuff of drug-induced psychosis. But I had been selective in listening to Chad Patin. He’d said he transported narcotics and prostitutes from Mexico into the United States. He also indicated he had abandoned his charges in a locked truck and perhaps left them to die of suffocation. Those were statements I believed. He admitted he had tried to kill me and in the same breath asked for money so he could get out of the country. In his mind, the request was perfectly reasonable. I had acted incredulously, but in reality, his point of view was one that people in law enforcement deal with every day. The real problem was not Chad Patin. The real problem lay in my discounting his story about a mysterious island where modern-day people made use of a torture instrument out of medieval Europe.

Helen was tilted back in her swivel chair, chewing on a hangnail, staring at her computer and the frozen image of Chad Patin’s remains on the boat deck. “I don’t get it,” she said.

“Why nobody took the ring off him?” I said.

“ That and the fact that he was dumped overboard. Didn’t they learn anything after they put Blue Melton over the side in a block of ice?”

“Maybe they didn’t put him in the water. Maybe he was running and somebody popped him with a couple of. 223 rounds, maybe from an AR-15 or M16. He fell off the boat, and they couldn’t find him in the dark.”

“You buy that stuff about an island and a torture chamber on it?”

“Patin was reporting something he heard on a tape. Maybe the tape was bogus, something excerpted from a slasher film. Who knows? Somebody fried Patin’s apartment with a flamethrower. That’s a tough act to follow. The bigger problem for me is this person Angel or Angelle. The notion of a cabal is too much like the New World Order or the Trilateral Commission.”

“You don’t believe in conspiracies?”

“Not the kinds that have formal names.”

“Was that a porn film I heard when I called you?”

“Not exactly.”

“You and Clete were watching an old Doris Day movie?”

“Give it a break, Helen. Clete is going through a bad time.”

“So am I. It’s called doing my job. Does he have somebody new working in his office?”

“She’s a temp.”

“What’s her name?”

“You made a crack about a porn film. Varina Leboeuf is probably extorting her lovers. Clete got involved with her.”

“Don’t change the subject. What’s the name of the temp?”

I got up from my chair and opened the door to leave. “Cut Clete a little slack. He’ll deliver. He always does. He’s the best cop either one of us ever knew.”

“I want to meet her.”

“Why?”

“You know why, Pops. Believe it or not, we’re on the same side. But you two guys don’t get to write the rules,” she said.

Clete called me an hour later. “I’m not on those memory cards. But a lot of other guys are,” he said. “A couple of them are insider contractors who got in on the big bucks rebuilding New Orleans. I recognize a couple of shysters and oil guys, and then there were a few guys I never saw before. Anyway, I don’t see any big revelations. Actually, I feel like going outside and puking. I’m not up to this stuff.”

“She’s blackmailing people. You don’t call that a revelation?”

“Maybe she’s just covering her ass.”

“Great choice of words. Listen to yourself.”

“Maybe she’s got a fetish. Who’s perfect? Anyway, she left me out of it.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“What?”

“You’re going back for seconds is what.”

“So she’s a little weird. That doesn’t make her the Lucrezia Borgia of South Louisiana.”

“What does it take? How bad do you have to get hurt before you see what you’re doing to yourself?”

“Maybe I still like her. The apartment manager in Lafayette must have told her I was in her place. But she didn’t dime me.”

“Most extortionists don’t call the cops to report the theft of their blackmail materials.”

“Dave, you’re crucifying me for something I haven’t done. I didn’t say I was going to get it on with Varina again. I was just saying nobody is all good or all bad. Look, I’m burning this stuff and forgetting about it. I wish I’d never seen it. I wish I hadn’t gotten in the sack with her. I wish I hadn’t accidentally killed a mamasan and her children in Vietnam. I wish I hadn’t flushed my career with NOPD. My whole life is based on the things I wish I hadn’t done. What else do you want me to say?”

“I think Pierre and Varina and Alexis Dupree are a tighter unit than they let on. They might hate one another, but they’re all in the same lifeboat.”

“Neither of us knows that,” he replied.

“Chad Patin’s remains just showed up in the belly of a hammerhead shark a guy caught south of Grand Isle. Lose the charade with Varina. She knows you’re a kindhearted guy, and she used you.”

“Why don’t you show some fucking respect?”

“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I’m supposed to stand around with my hands in my pockets while other people mess up your head?”

“Say that about Patin again?”

“There were two rifle slugs in the remains. He was probably trying to escape from his abductors when they popped him. He told me about an island run by people who made a tape of a guy being squeezed to death inside an iron maiden. I think he was probably telling me the truth. Wake up, Cletus. Compared to what we’re dealing with, Bix Golightly is the Dalai Lama.”

“Dave?”

“Yeah?”

“You know all that stuff you hear about getting it on with a young woman so you can feel young again?”

“What about it?”

“It works fine. Until you come out of the shower the next morning and look in the mirror and see a mummy looking back at you.”

Clete hung up his desk phone and gazed out the back window at the bayou. A black man seated on an inverted bucket was fishing with a cane pole in the shade of the drawbridge. Water hyacinths grew thickly along the banks, and on the far side was the old gray hospital and convent that had been converted into business offices, all of it shadowed by giant live oaks. The wind was up and the moss was straightening in the trees and the oak leaves were tumbling on the manicured lawn. Clete rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye and felt a great weariness that seemed to have no origin. He lit his Zippo lighter and placed it in the center of an ashtray and, with a pair of tweezers, held the memory cards he had retrieved from Varina Leboeuf’s property over the flame.

He had left his office door open. He failed to notice that Gretchen Horowitz had returned from the errands he had sent her on. She tapped on the doorjamb before entering his office. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, but I heard your conversation,” she said.

He watched the second memory card curl and blacken in the flame of his Zippo. He dropped it into the ashtray. “What about it?” he asked.

“I wish you would trust me more.”

“About what?”

“Everything. If you trusted me, maybe I could help.”

“You’re a kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about, no matter how much you’ve been around.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a kid. That’s what we all want to be. That’s why we screw up our lives, always trying to be something we’re not.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like that. I don’t like what this woman is doing to you.”

“Did you get the mail?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go to FedEx in Lafayette?”

“Yes.”

“Then you did your job. We’re done on this subject.”

“Can I have the rest of the afternoon off?”

“To do what?”

She leaned down on his desk. Her shoulders were too big for her shirt, her upper arms taut with muscle. The violet tint of her eyes seemed to deepen as she looked into his face. “Personal business.”

“I think you should hang around.”

“I want to buy a vehicle for myself. Maybe a secondhand pickup.”

“Stay away from Varina Leboeuf,” he said.

“How about taking your own advice? You’re unbelievable.”

He watched her walk out the front door into the brightness of the day, a cute olive-drab cap tilted on her head, her wide-ass jeans stretched tight on her bottom, her tote bag swinging from her shoulder.

Three hours later, Alafair’s cell phone rang. “Are you working on your novel right now?” Gretchen asked.

“I’ve finished the galleys on the first one. I’ve started a new one,” Alafair replied.

“What’s it about?”

“I’m not sure. I never am. I make it up each day. I never see more than two scenes ahead.”

“You don’t make an outline?”

“No, I think the story is written in the unconscious. You discover it a day at a time. At least that’s the way it seems to work for me.”

“I’ll buy you dinner if you drive me to a couple of car lots,” Gretchen said. “I took a cab to three but didn’t find anything interesting. I don’t want to waste the rest of the day waiting on more cabs.”

“Dave says you tore up Pierre Dupree and two other guys with a blackjack.”

“Shit like that happens sometimes.”

“Where are you?”

Alafair picked up Gretchen at a car lot out by the four-lane. She was standing on the corner, wearing dull red cowboy boots, her jeans stuffed into the tops, cars whizzing by her. She pulled open the passenger door and got inside. “Do the drivers around here drop acid before they get in their automobiles?” she said.

“What kind of car are you looking for?” Alafair asked.

“Something that’s cheap with a hot engine.” Gretchen gave directions to a car lot on the edge of town.

“You know a lot about cars?” Alafair said.

“A little. But forget about that. Clete told me you were number one in your class at Stanford Law.”

“There’s no official rating of graduates at Stanford, but I had a four-point GPA. My adviser said if I was ranked, I’d probably be first in my class.”

“You were born in a grass hut? You make me feel like a basket case. I’m sending in my application forms to the University of Texas. I think you have to be interviewed to get into the film program. I’m a little nervous about that.”

“Why should you be nervous?”

“Because I’ve always had a tendency of sending certain kinds of signals to men when I wanted something from them. Like maybe they could get into my pants if things went right for me. I pretended to myself that wasn’t what I was doing, but it was. I’d find a middle-aged guy who couldn’t control where his eyes went and home in on him.”

“Stop talking about yourself like that. If you have to go to Austin for an interview, I’ll go with you.”

“You’d do that?”

“Gretchen, talent doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s background or education. Did you ever see Amadeus? It’s the story of Mozart and his rivalry with Antonio Salieri. Salieri hated Mozart because he thought God had given this great talent to an undeserving idiot. Talent isn’t earned, it’s given. It’s like getting hit by lightning in the middle of a wet pasture. People don’t sign up for it.”

“If I could talk like you.”

“I told you to quit demeaning yourself. You’re the kind of person writers steal lines from. What kind of people do you think make movies? Most of them belong in detox or electroshock. The rest are narcissists and nonpathological schizophrenics. That’s why Los Angeles has more twelve-step meetings than any other county in the United States. Can you see your local Kiwanis Club making Pulp Fiction?”

“I’ve got to write that down.”

“No, you don’t. You have better lines in your own head.”

“I’m one of the people you just mentioned?”

“Anybody can be normal. Count your blessings,” Alafair said.

She turned in to a used-car lot that, only two weeks earlier, had been a cow pasture. The car seller was a notorious local character by the name of T. Coon Bassireau. His business enterprises had ranged from burial insurance to car-title loans to storefront counseling centers that billed Medicaid to treat street people who had to be taught the names of their illnesses. He also patented a vitamin tonic that contained 20 percent alcohol and was guaranteed to make the consumer feel better. He swindled pensioners out of their savings in a Mexican biotech scam and once dumped a bargeload of construction debris in a pristine swamp. But the big score for T. Coon came in the form of deteriorating train tracks across southern Louisiana. Whenever there was a freight derailment, particularly one involving tanker cars, he and his brother, a liability lawyer, distributed T-shirts to people in the neighborhoods along the tracks.

The message printed on the back read: HAVE TOXIC SMELLS IN YOUR HOUSE FROM THE TRAIN WRECK? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A LARGE CASH SETTLEMENT. CALL T. COON BASSIREAU. T. COON IS YOUR FRIEND. The 800 number was emblazoned in red on the front and back.

He stood proudly under the vinyl banner that stretched across his new car lot. Half a dozen American flags, their staffs speared into the ground, popped in the breeze. A battery-lit portable sign that read WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS glittered by the entranceway. T. Coon wore sideburns that flared like grease pencil on his cheeks, and a Stetson and a shiny magenta shirt with pearl snap buttons and a Stars and Bars belt buckle as big as the bronze plate on a heliograph. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots, a man at peace with both Caesar and God.

Gretchen walked past him without speaking and examined the two rows of junker cars and trucks T. Coon had assembled in the pasture. “You ladies want to go for a test drive?” he said. “You can do anyt’ing you want here. Just ax. For ladies like y’all, I’ll lower my price any day of the week and twice on Sunday and t’ree times on Monday.” He crossed his heart. “If I’m lying, dig me up and spit in my mout’.”

“Tell your mechanic to wipe the sawdust off the transmission cases,” Gretchen said.

“I’m lost here,” T. Coon said.

“You packed the transmission cases with sludge and sawdust to tighten up the gears. I bet you put oil on the brake linings to keep them from squeaking. The odometer numbers are a joke. I wouldn’t sit on the seats unless they’d been sprayed for crab lice.”

“I’m blown away by this,” he said.

“There’s not a car on the lot that’s not a shitbox. Your tires are so thin, the air is showing through. I think some of these cars came from Florida. They’re rusted with salt from the bottom up.”

“This is some kind of put-on.”

“Who are you that I should put you on?”

T. Coon’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth. “I’m making a living here.”

“You see that Ford truck with the chrome engine?”

“It’s a hot rod. It belongs to my nephew.”

“I ran the plate two days ago. It’s registered in your name. You use it as a leader and claim your nephew won’t sell it unless the figures are right. What are the right figures?”

“My nephew might take fifteen t’ousand.”

“Give me the keys,” Gretchen said.

She got in the pickup and fired it up and spun rubber on the grass and swung out on the highway, the dual exhausts throbbing on the asphalt. A few minutes later, she was back, the exposed chrome engine ticking with heat. She left the keys in the ignition and got out of the cab. “I’ll give you eight. In cash, right now. It’ll have to be re-primed and painted and the interior entirely redone. The only things good about it are the chop and channel jobs and the Merc engine and the Hollywood mufflers. The rest of it blows.”

“I cain’t believe I’m being verbally assaulted like this. I feel like I inebriated a whole bottle of whiskey and am having delusions.”

She opened her tote bag and removed a brown envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. “Tell me what you want to do,” she said.

“Make it nine,” he said.

“Make it eight.”

“Make it eighty-five hunnerd. The tires are almost brand-new.”

“That’s why you’re not getting seventy-five hundred,” she said. “Stop trying to see down my shirt.”

T. Coon wore a stupefied expression, like a man who had just gotten off a centrifuge. “We got to do some paperwork in my office, that li’l trailer over there. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll leave the door open. Jesus Christ, where you from, lady? You got your spaceship parked somewhere? You need a job? I’m serious here. I got an entry-level position we can talk about.” He looked at her expression to see what effect his words were having. “Okay, I was just axing.”

Half an hour later, Gretchen followed Alafair to a restaurant on the highway and bought seafood dinners for both of them. Through the window, Alafair could see a blue-black darkness taking hold in the sky and gulls that had been blown inland circling over a cane field. “I’ve got another favor to ask you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’d like to live my life the way you do. Maybe you could give me a reading list and some tips on things.”

“That’s flattering, but why not just be your own person?”

“If I was who I started out to be, I’d be in prison or worse. I’ve got an advantage over other people who write novels and make movies. I lived inside a world that most people couldn’t imagine. Did you ever see Wind Across the Everglades, the story of James Audubon trying to put the bird poachers out of business? I know those kinds of people, how they think and talk and spend their time. I know about racetracks and drug smuggling in the Keys and CIA people in Little Havana and the money that gets laundered through the pari-mutuel windows.”

“I think you’re probably a real artist, Gretchen. You don’t have to model yourself on me. Just stay true to your own principles.”

“I need you to go with me to see Varina Leboeuf.”

“You want to do this because of Clete?”

“Varina Leboeuf tapes the men she goes to bed with. Clete doesn’t have any judgment about women. I need to have a talk with her, but in the way you would do it, not in the way I usually do things. I need you there as a witness, too. I don’t want her making up lies about me later.”

Alafair was eating a deep-fried soft-shell crab. She put it down and gazed at the seagulls cawing above the cane field. The sky was completely dark now, the clouds rippling with flashes of yellow light. “Clete can take care of himself. Maybe you should leave things alone.”

“You’re smarter than me about almost everything, Alafair, but you’re wrong about this. Most people think society is run by lawyers and politicians. We believe this because those are the people we see on the news. But the only reason we see these people on the news is because they own the media, not people like us. When things have to be taken care of-I’m talking about the kind of things nobody wants to know about-there’s a small bunch that does the dirty work. Maybe you don’t believe this.”

“That’s the way cynics think. And they think that way because it’s uncomplicated and easy,” Alafair said.

“Did you see Mississippi Burning, the story of the boys who were murdered by the Klan and buried in an earthen dam?” Gretchen said. “In the movie, the FBI outsmarts the Klan and turns them against each other and gets them to start copping pleas. But that’s not what happened. Hoover sent a Mafia hit man down there, and he beat the crap out of three guys who were only too glad to turn over the names of the killers.”

“What are you going to say to Varina?”

“Not much. You don’t have to go. I’ve asked a lot of you already.”

“Maybe it’s better I not.”

“I can’t blame you. I try to stay out of other people’s lives. But I don’t think Clete has much chance against Varina Leboeuf. I don’t think he sees everything that’s involved, either.”

“What’s that last part mean?” Alafair asked.

“I’ve known a lot of bad people in Florida. They all had connections in Louisiana. Some of them may have been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. How do you think the crack got in the projects here? It just showed up one day? The money from the crack paid for AK-47s that went to Nicaragua. But who gives a shit, right?”

“This is becoming an expensive dinner.”

“That’s why I said you don’t have to go with me.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Alafair said.