Creole Belle

2

After the shooting behind my house on Bayou Teche in New Iberia, I underwent three surgeries: one that saved my life at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette; one at the Texas Medical Center in Houston; and the third in New Orleans. A solitary. 32 bullet had struck me between the shoulder blades. It was fired by a woman neither Clete nor I had believed was armed. The wound was no more painful and seemed no more consequential than the sharp smack of a fist. The shooter’s motivation had been a simple one and had nothing to do with survival, fear, greed, or panic: I had spoken down to her and called her to task for her imperious treatment of others. My show of disrespect enraged her and sent her out my back screen door into the darkness, walking fast across the yellowed oak leaves and the moldy pecan husks, oblivious to the dead men on the ground, a pistol extended in front of her with one arm, her mission as mindless and petty as they come. She paused only long enough to make a brief vituperative statement about the nature of my offense, then I heard a pop like a wet firecracker, and a. 32 round pierced my back and exited my chest. Like the dead man walking, I stumbled to the edge of the bayou, where a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler that no one else saw waited for me.

Though my description of that peculiar moment in my career as a police officer is probably not of much significance now, I must add a caveat. If one loses his life at the hands of another, he would like to believe his sacrifice is in the service of a greater cause. He would like to believe that he has left the world a better place, that because of his death at least one other person, perhaps a member of his family, will be spared, that his grave will reside in a green arbor where others will visit him. He does not want to believe that his life was made forfeit because he offended someone’s vanity and that his passing, like that of almost all who die in wars, means absolutely nothing.

One day after Clete’s visit, Alafair, my adopted daughter, brought me the mail and fresh flowers for the vase in my window. My wife, Molly, had stopped at the administrative office for reasons I wasn’t aware of. Alafair’s hair was thick and black and cut short on her neck and had a lustrous quality that made people want to touch it. “We’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.

“You going to take me sac-a-lait fishing?”

“Dr. Bonin thinks you can go home next week. He’s cutting down your meds today.”

“Which meds?” I said, trying to hold my smile in place.

“All of them.”

She saw me blink. “You think you still need them?” she said.

“Not really.”

She held her eyes on mine, not letting me see her thoughts. “Clete called,” she said.

“What about?”

“He says you told him Tee Jolie Melton came to see you at two in the morning.”

“He told you right. She left me this iPod.”

“Dave, some people think Tee Jolie is dead.”

“Based on what?”

“Nobody has seen her in months. She had a way of going off with men who told her they knew movie or recording people. She believed anything anyone told her.”

I picked up the iPod off the nightstand and handed it to Alafair. “This doesn’t belong to the nurses or the attendant or any of the physicians here. Tee Jolie bought it for me and downloaded music that I like and gave it to me as a present. She put three of her songs on there. Put the headphones on and listen.”

Alafair turned on the iPod and tapped on its face when it lit up. “What are the names of the songs?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What are they categorized as?”

“I’m not up on that stuff. The songs are in there. I listened to them,” I said.

The headphones were askew on her ears so she could listen to the iPod and talk to me at the same time. “I can’t find them, Dave.”

“Don’t worry about it. Maybe I messed up the iPod.”

She set it back on the nightstand and placed the headphones carefully on top of it, her hands moving slowly, her eyes veiled. “It’ll be good having you home again.”

“We’ll go fishing, too. As soon as we get back,” I said.

“That depends on what Dr. Bonin says.”

“What do these guys know?”

I saw Molly smiling in the doorway. “You just got eighty-sixed,” she said.

“Today?” I asked.

“I’ll bring the car around to the side entrance,” she said.

I tried to think before I spoke, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to think about. “My meds are in the top drawer,” I said.

Five days had passed since Clete was visited by Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes, and gradually he had pushed the pair of them to the edge of his mind. Golightly had taken too many hits to the head a long time ago, Clete told himself. Besides, he was a basket case even as a criminal; he’d made his living as a smash-and-grab jewelry-store thief, on a par with gang bangers who had shit for brains and zero guts and usually victimized elderly Jews who didn’t keep guns on the premises. Also, Clete had made innocuous calls to his sister and to his niece, who was a student at Tulane, and neither of them mentioned anything of an unusual nature occurring in their lives.

Forget Golightly and Grimes, Clete thought. By mistake, Golightly once put roach paste on a plateful of Ritz crackers and almost croaked himself. This was the guy he was worrying about?

On a sunny, cool Thursday morning, Clete opened up the office and read his mail and answered his phone messages, then told his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, he was going down to Cafe du Monde for beignets and coffee. She took a five-dollar bill from her purse and put it on the corner of her desk. “Bring me a few, will you?” she said.

Miss Alice was a former nun whose height and body mass and gurgling sounds made Clete think of a broken refrigerator he once owned. Before she was encouraged out of the convent, she had been the terror of the diocese, referred to by the bishop as “the mother of Grendel” or, when he was in a more charitable mood, “our reminder that the Cross is always with us.”

Clete picked up the bill off the desk and put it in his shirt pocket. “Those two guys I had trouble with have probably disappeared. But if they should come around while I’m not here, you know what to do.”

She looked at him, her expression impassive.

“Miss Alice?” he said.

“No, I do not know what to do. Would you please tell me?” she replied.

“You don’t do anything. You tell them to come back later. Got it?”

“I don’t think it wise for a person to make promises about situations that he or she cannot anticipate.”

“Don’t mess with these guys. Do you want me to say it again?”

“No, you’ve made yourself perfectly clear. Thank you very much.”

“You want cafe au lait?”

“I’ve made my own. Thank you for asking.”

“We’ve got a deal?”

“Mr. Purcel, you are upsetting me spiritually. Would you please stop this incessant questioning? I do not need to be badgered.”

“I apologize.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Clete walked down the street in the shade of the buildings, the scrolled-iron balconies sagging in the middle with the weight of potted roses and bougainvillea and chrysanthemums and geraniums, the wind smelling of night damp and bruised spearmint, the leaves of the philodendron and caladium in the courtyards threaded with humidity that looked like quicksilver in the shadows. He sat under the colonnade at Cafe du Monde and ate a dozen beignets that were white with powdered sugar, and drank three cups of coffee with hot milk, and gazed across Decatur at Jackson Square and the Pontalba Apartments that flanked either side of the square and the sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that separated the pedestrian mall from the park area.

The square was a place that seemed more like a depiction of life in the Middle Ages than twenty-first-century America. Street bands and mimes and jugglers and unicyclists performed in front of the cathedral, as they might have done in front of Notre Dame while Quasimodo swung on the bells. The French doors to the big restaurant on the corner were open, and Clete could smell the crawfish already boiling in the kitchen. New Orleans would always be New Orleans, he told himself, no matter if it had gone under the waves, no matter if cynical and self-serving politicians had left the people of the lower Ninth Ward to drown. New Orleans was a song and a state of mind and a party that never ended, and those who did not understand that simple fact should have to get passports to enter the city.

It was a bluebird day, the flags on the Cabildo straightening in the breeze. Clete had gone to bed early the previous night and his body was free of alcohol and the residue of dreams that he sometimes carried through the morning like cobweb on his skin. It seemed only yesterday that Louis Prima and Sam Butera had jammed all night and blown out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, or that Clete and his partner from New Iberia had walked a beat with nightsticks on Canal and Basin and Esplanade, both of them recently back from Vietnam, both of them still believers in the promise that each sunrise brought.

He bought a big bag of hot beignets for Miss Alice that cost him twice the amount she had given him. He listened to one song played by a string-and-rub-board band at the entrance to Pirates Alley, then walked back to St. Ann, his mind free of worry.

As soon as he turned the corner on St. Ann, he saw a large black Buick with charcoal-tinted windows parked illegally in front of his building. By the time he reached the foyer that gave onto his office, he had little doubt who had parked it there. He could hear the voice of Alice Werenhaus in the courtyard: “I told the pair of you, Mr. Purcel is not here. I also told you not to go inside the premises without his permission. If you do not leave right now, I will have you arrested and placed in the city prison. I will also have your automobile towed to the pound. Excuse me. Are you smirking at me?”

“We didn’t know we were gonna get a show,” the voice of Waylon Grimes replied.

“How would you like your face slapped all over this courtyard?” Miss Alice said.

“How’d you know I’m a guy who likes it rough? You charge extra for that?” Grimes said.

“What did you say? You repeat that! Right now! Say it again!”

“You promise to hit me?” Grimes said.

Clete walked through the shade of the foyer and into the courtyard, squinting in the glare at Grimes and a bald man who wore a suit and carried a clipboard in his hand.

“What do you think you’re doing, Waylon?” Clete said.

“Mr. Benoit here is our appraiser. Bix is thinking of buying you out, less the principal and the vig on your marker,” Grimes replied. “But this place looks like it has some serious problems. Right, Mr. Benoit?”

“You have some settling, Mr. Purcel,” the appraiser said. “You see those stress cracks in the arch over your foyer? I notice the same tension in the upper corners of your windows. I suspect you have trouble opening them, don’t you? That’s because your foundation may be sinking, or you may have Formosan termites eating through the concrete. There’s a possibility here of structural collapse.”

“The roof is caving in? People will be plunging through the floors?” Clete said.

“I don’t know if it would be that bad, but who knows?” Benoit said. He was smiling, his pate shiny in the sunlight. He seemed to be clenching his back teeth to prevent himself from swallowing. “Have you seen any buckling in the floors?”

“This building has been here for over a hundred and fifty years,” Clete said. “I renovated it after Katrina, too.”

“Yeah, it’s old and storm-damaged. That’s why it’s falling apart,” Grimes said.

“Get out of here,” Clete said.

“It don’t work that way, Purcel,” Grimes said. “Under Louisiana law, that marker is the same as a loan agreement signed at a bank. You fucked yourself. Don’t blame other people.”

“Watch your language,” Clete said.

“You worried about the bride of Frankenstein, here? She’s heard it before. You killed a woman. Who are you to go around lecturing other people about respect? I heard you blew her head off in that shootout on the bayou.”

Clete never blinked, but his face felt tight and small and cold in the wind. There was a tremolo in his chest, like a tuning fork that was out of control. He thought he heard the downdraft of helicopters and a sound like tank treads clanking to life and grinding over banyan trees and bamboo and a railed pen inside which hogs were screaming in panic. He smelled an odor that was like flaming kerosene arching out of a gun turret. His arms hung limply at his sides, and his palms felt as stiff and dry as cardboard when he opened and closed his hands. His shirt and tie and sport coat were too tight on his neck and shoulders and chest; he took a deep breath, as though he had swallowed a chunk of angle iron. “I killed two,” he said.

“Say again?” Grimes asked.

“I killed two women, not just one.”

Waylon Grimes glanced at his wristwatch. “That’s impressive. But we’re on a schedule, here.”

“Yes, we should be going,” the appraiser added.

“The other woman was a mamasan,” Clete said. “She was trying to hide in a spider hole while we were trashing her ville. I rolled a frag down the hole. There were kids in there, too. What do you think about that, Waylon?”

Grimes massaged the back of his neck with one hand, his expression benign. Then a short burst of air escaped his mouth, as though he were genuinely bemused. “Sounds like you got issues, huh?” he said.

“Is that a question?”

“No. I wasn’t in the service. I don’t know about those kinds of issues. What I was saying is we’re done here.”

“Then why did you make it sound like a question?”

“I was trying to be polite.”

“The mamasan lives on my fire escape now. Sometimes I leave a cup of tea on the windowsill for her. Look right over your head. There’s her teacup. Are you laughing at me, Waylon?”

“No.”

“If you’re not laughing at me, who are you laughing at?”

“I’m laughing because I get tired of hearing you guys talk about the war. If it was so fucking bad, why did you go over there? Give it a rest, man. I read about a guy at the My Lai massacre who told a Vietnamese woman he was gonna kill her baby unless she gave him a blow job. Maybe that was you, and that’s why your head is fucked up. The truth is, I don’t care. Pay your marker or lose your building. Can you fit that into your head? You killed a mamasan? Good for you. You killed her kids, too? Get over it.”

Clete could feel a constriction in one side of his face that was not unlike an electric shock, one that robbed his left eye of sight and replaced it with a white flash of light that seemed to explode like crystal breaking. He knew he had hit Waylon Grimes, but he wasn’t sure where or exactly how many times. He saw Grimes crash through the fronds of a windmill palm and try to crawl away from him, and he saw the appraiser run for the foyer, and he felt Alice Werenhaus trying to grab his arms and wrists and prevent him from doing what he was doing. All of them were trying to tell him something, but their voices were lost in the squealing of the hogs and the Zippo-track rolling through the hooches and the downdraft of a helicopter blowing a rice paddy dry while a door gunner was firing an M60 at a column of tiny men in black pajamas and conical straw hats who were running for the tree line.

Clete picked up Waylon Grimes by the front of his shirt and shoved him through a cluster of banana plants into the side of the building, pinning him by his throat against the wall, driving his fist again and again into the man’s face, saliva and blood stringing across the plaster.

He dropped Grimes to the ground and kicked at him once and missed, then steadied himself with one hand against the wall and brought his foot down with all his weight on Grimes’s rib cage. It was then that Clete knew, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he was not only capable of killing a man with his bare hands but he could literally tear him into pieces with no reservation or feeling whatsoever. That was what he commenced doing.

Out of nowhere, Alice Werenhaus pushed past him, her feet sinking to the ankles in the mixture of black dirt and coffee grinds and guano that Clete used in his gardens, dropping onto all fours and forming a protective arch over Grimes’s body, her homely face terrified. “Please don’t hit him anymore. Oh, Mr. Purcel, you frighten me so,” she said. “The world has hurt you so much.”

Our home was located on a one-acre lot shaded by live oak and pecan trees and slash pines on East Main in New Iberia, right up the street from the Shadows, a famous antebellum home built in the year 1831. Even though our house was also constructed in the nineteenth century, it was of much more modest design, one that was called “shotgun” because of its oblong structure, like a boxcar’s, and the folk legend that one could fire a bird gun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back entrance without ever striking a wall.

Humble abode or not, it was a fine place to live. The windows reached all the way to the ceiling and had ventilated storm shutters, and in hurricane season, oak limbs bounced off our roof without ever shattering glass. I had extended and screened the gallery across the front, and hung it with a glider, and sometimes on hot afternoons I would set up the ice-cream freezer on the gallery and we would mash up blackberries in the cream and sit on the glider and eat blackberry ice cream.

I lived in the house with my daughter, Alafair, who had finished law school at Stanford but was determined to be a novelist, and with my wife, Molly, a former nun and missionary in Central America who had come to Louisiana to organize the sugarcane workers in St. Mary Parish. In back, there was a hutch for our elderly raccoon, Tripod, and a big tree above the hutch where our warrior cat, Snuggs, kept guard over the house and the yard. I had been either a police officer in New Orleans or a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish since I returned from Vietnam. My history is one of alcoholism, depression, violence, and bloodshed. For much of it I have enormous regret. For some of it I have no regret at all, and given the chance, I would commit the same deeds again without pause, particularly when it comes to protection of my own.

Maybe that’s not a good way to be. But at some point in your life, you stop keeping score. It has been my experience that until that moment comes in your odyssey through the highways and byways and back alleys of your life, you will never have peace.

I had been home from the recovery unit nine days and was sitting on the front step, cleaning my spinning reel, when Clete Purcel’s restored Cadillac convertible with the starch-white top and freshly waxed maroon paint job pulled into our driveway, the tires clicking on the gravel, a solitary yellow-spotted leaf from a water oak drifting down on the hood. When he got out of the car, he removed the keys from the ignition and dropped them in the pocket of his slacks, something he never did when he parked his beloved Caddy on our property. He also looked back over his shoulder at the one-way traffic coming up East Main, fingering the pink scar that ran through one eyebrow to the bridge of his nose.

“You run a red light?” I asked.

He sat down heavily next to me, a gray fog of weed and beer and testosterone puffing out of his clothes. The back of his neck was oily, his face dilated. “Remember a guy name of Waylon Grimes?”

“He did some button work for the Giacanos?”

“Button work, torture, extortion, you name it. He came to my place with Bix Golightly. Then he came back with a property appraiser. That’s after he was warned.”

“What happened?”

“He said some stuff about Vietnam and killing women and kids. I don’t remember, exactly. I lost it.”

“What did you do, Clete?”

“Tried to kill him. Alice Werenhaus saved his life.” He took a breath and lifted one arm and placed his hand on top of his shoulder, his face flinching. “I think I tore something loose inside me.”

“Have you been to a doctor?”

“What can a doctor do besides open me up again?”

“Has Grimes filed charges?”

“That’s the problem. He told the ambulance attendants that he fell from my balcony. I think he plans to square it on his own. I think Golightly has given him the addresses of my sister and niece.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Golightly told me he was going to do it unless I paid him for the marker. You know the word about Bix. He’s a nutjob, and he’d gut and stuff his own mother and use her for a doorstop, but he’s straight up when it comes to a debt, either collecting or paying it. What do you think I ought to do?”

“Talk to Dana Magelli at NOPD.”

“What should I tell him? I tried to beat a guy to death, but I’m the victim, and now I need a couple of cruisers to follow my family around?”

“Find something else to use against Grimes,” I said.

“Like what?”

“The death of the child he ran over.”

“The parents are scared shitless. They’re also both junkies. I think Grimes was delivering their skag when he killed their kid.”

“I don’t know what else to offer.”

“I can’t let my sister and niece take the fall for what I did. This is eating my lunch.”

“You stop having the thoughts you’re having.”

“What else am I going to do? Grimes should have been cycled through a septic tank a long time ago.”

I heard the front door open behind me. “I thought I heard your voice, Clete. You’re just in time for dinner,” Molly said. “Is everything okay out here?”

Clete turned down the invitation, claiming he was meeting someone for supper down the street at Clementine’s, which meant he would close the bar there and probably sleep in the back of his car that night or in his office on Main or perhaps at the motor court down the bayou, where he rented a cottage. Regardless of how the evening ended, it was obvious Clete had returned to his old ways, mortgaging tomorrow for today, holding mortality at bay with vodka and weed and a case of beer he kept iced down in the backseat of the Caddy, and in this instance maybe toying with the idea of premeditated murder.

After we ate supper, I tried to read the paper and put Clete’s problems with Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly out of my mind. I couldn’t. Clete would always remain the best friend I’d ever had, a man who once carried me down a fire escape with two bullets in his back, a man who would give up his life for me or Molly or Alafair.

“I’m going to take a walk,” I said to Molly. “You want to go?”

She was baking a pie in the kitchen, and there was a smear of flour on her cheek. Her hair was red and cut short, her skin powdered with freckles. Sometimes her gestures and expressions would take on a special kind of loveliness, like a visual song, without her being aware of it. “You’re going to talk to Clete?” she said.

“I guess.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason.”

“Clete won’t talk openly if I’m there.”

“I’ll be back soon,” I said. “You look beautiful.”

I picked up the iPod given to me by Tee Jolie Melton and strolled down East Main under the canopy of live oaks arching over the street. The streetlamps had just come on, and fireflies were lighting in the trees and bamboo along Bayou Teche. I walked out on the drawbridge at Burke Street and looked down the long dark tidal stream that eventually dumped into the Gulf. The tide was coming in, and the water was full of mud and sliding high up on the banks when a boat passed, the lily pads in the shallows rolling like a green carpet. For me, Louisiana has always been a haunted place. I believe the specters of slaves and Houma and Atakapa Indians and pirates and Confederate soldiers and Acadian farmers and plantation belles are still out there in the mist. I believe their story has never been adequately told and they will never rest until it is. I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind-numbing, on a level with telling fond tales about one’s rapist.

But these are dismal thoughts, and I try to put them aside. As I gazed down the Teche, I clicked on the iPod and found one of Tee Jolie’s recordings. She was singing “La Jolie Blon,” the heartbreaking lament that you hear once and never forget for the rest of your life. Then I remembered that Alafair had said she had not been able to find Tee Jolie’s songs in the contents. How was that possible? There on the bridge, in the gloaming of the day, while the last of the sunlight blazed in an amber ribbon down the center of the bayou, while the black-green backs of alligator gars rolled among the lily pads, I listened to Tee Jolie’s beautiful voice rising from the earphones that rested on the sides of my neck, as though she were speaking French to me from a bygone era, one that went all the way back to the time of Evangeline and the flight of the Acadian people from Nova Scotia to the bayou country of South Louisiana. I did not realize that I was about to relearn an old lesson, namely that sometimes it’s better to trust the realm of the dead than the world of the quick, and never to doubt the existence of unseen realities that can hover like a hologram right beyond the edges of our vision.

When I went into Clementine’s, Clete was standing at the bar, a tumbler of vodka packed with shaved ice and cherries and orange slices and a sprig of mint in front of him. I sat down on a stool and ordered a seltzer on ice with a lime slice inserted on the glass’s rim, a pretense that for me probably disguised thoughts that are better not discussed. “You want me to go back to New Orleans with you?” I said.

“No, I put my sister on a cruise, and my niece is visiting a friend in Mobile, so they’re okay for now,” he said.

“How about later on?”

“I haven’t thought it through. I’ll let you know when I do,” he said.

“Don’t try to handle this on your own, Clete. There’re lots of ways we can go at these guys,” I said.

“For instance?”

“Go after Grimes for vehicular homicide of the child.”

“Using what for evidence? The testimony of his junkie parents who already flushed the kid down the drain for their next fix?”

The bar was crowded and noisy. Inside the conversation about football and subjects that were of no consequence, Clete’s face seemed to float like a red balloon, estranged and full of pain. “I grew up around guys like Golightly and Grimes. You know how you deal with them? You take them off at the neck.” He put two aspirins in his mouth and bit down on them. “I’ve got this twisted feeling high up in my chest, like something is still in there and it’s pushing against my lung.” He took a deep drink from his vodka, the ice making a rasping sound against the glass when he set it down on the bar. “You know the biggest joke about all this?” he said.

“About what?”

“Getting shot. Almost croaking. I would have bought it right there on the bayou if the bullet hadn’t hit the strap on my shoulder holster. I got saved by my holster rather than by my piece. That’s the story of my fucking life. If anything good happens to me, it’s because of an accident.”

“Sir, would you hold down your language, please?” the bartender said.

“Sorry,” Clete said.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“No, I like it here. I like the bar and the food and the company, and I have no reason to leave.”

“Meaning I do?” I said.

“You know anybody who goes to a whorehouse to play the piano?” He thought about what he had said and smiled self-effacingly. “I’m just off my feed. I’m actually very copacetic about all this. Is that the iPod you had at the recovery unit?”

“Yeah, I was listening to Tee Jolie Melton’s songs. ‘La Jolie Blon’ is on there.”

“Let me see.” He picked up the iPod from the bar and began clicking through the contents. “There’re only a few songs on here: Will Bradley and Taj Mahal and Lloyd Price.”

“Tee Jolie’s songs are on there, too.”

“They’re not, Dave. Look for yourself.”

I took the iPod back and disconnected it from the headphones and put it in my pocket. “Let’s take a ride up to St. Martinville,” I said.

“What for?” he asked.

“I know where Tee Jolie’s house is.”

“What are we going to do there?”

“I don’t know. You want to stay here and talk about football?”

Clete looked at the bartender. “Wrap me up an oyster po’boy sandwich and a couple of Bud longnecks to go,” he said. “Sorry about the language. I’ve got an incurable speech defect. This is one of the few joints that will allow me on the premises.”

Everybody at the bar was smiling. Tell me Clete didn’t have the touch.

Burke, James Lee

Creole Belle

I T WAS RAINING when we drove up the two-lane highway through the long tunnel of trees that led into the black district on the south end of St. Martinville. A couple of nightclubs were lit up inside the rain, and flood lamps burned in front of the old French church in the square and shone on the Evangeline Oak in back, but most of the town was dark except the streetlamps at the intersections and the warning lights on the drawbridge, under which the bayou was running high and yellow, the surface dancing with raindrops.

Tee Jolie had grown up in a community of shacks that once were part of a corporate plantation. The people who lived there called themselves Creoles and did not like to be called black, although the term was originally a designation for second-generation colonials who were of Spanish and continental French ancestry and born in New Orleans or close proximity. During antebellum times, there was another group of mixed ancestry called “free people of color.” During the early civil rights era, the descendants of this group came to be known as Creoles, and some of them joined whites in resisting court-ordered school integration, a fact that always reminds me elitism is with us for the long haul.

Tee Jolie had lived with her mother and younger sister in a two-bedroom cypress house on the bayou, one that had a rust-stained tin roof and pecan and hackberry trees and water oaks in front and clusters of banana plants that grew above the eaves and a vegetable garden in back and a dock on the bayou. When Clete and I drove into the yard, I didn’t know what I expected to find. Maybe I wanted proof that Tee Jolie was all right and living in the New Orleans area and that she actually visited me in the recovery unit on St. Charles Avenue. I didn’t think my visit was self-serving. I wanted to know that she was safe, that she was not among dangerous men, that she would have the baby her lover had told her she could abort, that he would turn out to be a decent man who would marry her and take care of their child, and that all good things would come to Tee Jolie Melton and her new family. That was what I sincerely wished, and I didn’t care whether others thought I was delusional or not.

Clete and I stepped up on the gallery. The wind was blowing in vortexes of rain across the property and on the trees and the great green shiny clusters of flooded elephant ears that grew along the bayou’s banks. When the door opened, we were not prepared for the person silhouetted against a reading lamp in the background. He walked with two canes, his spine so bent that he had to force his chin up to look directly at us. His hands were little more than claws, his skin disfigured by a dermatological disease that sometimes leaches the color from the tissue of black people. It would not be exaggeration to say he had the shape of a gargoyle. But his eyes were the same color as Tee Jolie’s, a blue-green that had the luminosity you might see in a sunlit wave sliding across a coral pool in the Caribbean.

I introduced myself and showed him my badge. I told him I was a friend of Tee Jolie and had recently seen her in New Orleans, and I wondered if she was all right. He had not invited us inside. “You seen her, suh?” he said.

“Yes, she visited me when I was recovering from an injury. Are you her relative?”

“I’m her grandfather. After her mama died, she went away. That was maybe t’ree months ago. Right there on the dock, a man picked her up in a boat, and we ain’t seen or heard from her since. Then her little sister, Blue, went away, too. You ain’t seen Blue, have you?”

“No, sir, I’m afraid not. May we come in?”

“Please do. My name is Avery DeBlanc. You’ll have to excuse the place. It ain’t very neat. Y’all want coffee?”

“No, thank you,” I said. Clete and I sat down on a cloth-covered couch while Mr. DeBlanc continued to stand. “Did you report Tee Jolie’s disappearance?”

“Yes, suh. I talked to a deputy sheriff. But wasn’t nobody interested.”

“Why do you think that?”

“’Cause the deputy tole me Tee Jolie’s got a reputation. This is the way he said it: ‘She got a reputation, and let’s face it, ain’t none of it is good.’ He said she run off in high school and she hung out wit’ young people that sells dope. I axed him which one of them don’t sell dope. I called him twice more, and each time he said there ain’t any evidence a crime was committed. I got to sit down, me. I cain’t stand up long. Y’all sure you don’t want coffee?”

“Sir, do you have someone here to help you?” I asked.

“There ain’t no he’p for what I got. I was at Carville eighteen years. I t’ink I scared that deputy. He wouldn’t shake hands wit’ me.”

“You have Hansen’s disease?” I said.

“ That and everyt’ing else.” For the first time he smiled, his eyes full of light.

“Tee Jolie told me she was living with a man I know,” I said. “She mentioned centralizers. I think this man might be in the oil business. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“No, suh, it don’t.” He had sat down in a straight chair, a photograph of a World War I doughboy hanging behind him. A framed color picture of Jesus, probably cut from a magazine, hung from the opposite wall. The rug was frayed into string along the edges; a moth swam in the glow of the reading lamp. Outside, in the rain, I could see the green and red running lights on a passing barge, the waves from the bow slapping into the elephant ears. He added, “She had a scrapbook, though.”

“Sir?” I said.

“In her room. You want me to get it? It’s got a mess of pictures in there.”

“Don’t get up, sir. With your permission, I’ll go into her room and get it.”

“It’s there on her li’l dresser. She was always proud of it. She called it her ‘celebrity book.’ I tole her, ‘There ain’t no celebrities down here, Tee Jolie, except you.’ She’d say, ‘I ain’t no celebrity, Granddaddy, but one day that’s what I’m gonna be. You gonna see.’”

He looked wistfully into space, as though he’d said more than he should have and had empowered his own words to hurt him. I went into Tee Jolie’s bedroom and found a scrapbook bound in a thick pink plastic cover with hearts embossed on it. I sat back down on the couch and began turning the pages. She had cut out several newspaper articles and pasted them stiffly on the pages: a story about her high school graduation, a photograph taken of her when she was queen of the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, another photo that showed her with the all-girl Cajun band called BonSoir, Catin, a picture of her with the famous Cajun fiddler Hadley Castille.

Among the back pages of the scrapbook was a collection of glossy photographs that she had not mounted. Nor were they the kind that one finds in a small-town newspaper. All of them appeared to have been taken in nightclubs; most of them showed her with older men who wore suits and expensive jewelry. Some of the men I recognized. Two of them were casino people who flew in and out of New Jersey. One man ran a collection agency and sold worthless insurance policies to the poor and uneducated. Another man operated a finance company that specialized in title loans. All of them were smiling the way hunters smiled while displaying a trophy. In every photo, Tee Jolie was dressed in sequined shirts and cowboy boots or a charcoal-black evening gown with purple and red roses stitched on it. She made me think of a solitary flower placed by mistake among a collection of gaudy chalk figures one takes home from an amusement park.

In one photograph there was a figure I did not expect to see in Tee Jolie’s scrapbook. He was standing at the bar behind the main group, wearing a dark suit with no tie, the collar of his dress shirt unbuttoned, a gold chain and gold holy medal lying loosely around his neck, his scalp shining through his tight haircut, his eyebrows disfigured by scar tissue, his mouth cupped like a fish’s when it tries to breathe oxygen at the top of a tank. I handed the photo to Clete for him to look at. “Do you know who Bix Golightly is?” I asked Mr. DeBlanc.

“I don’t know nobody by that name.”

“He’s in this photo with Tee Jolie and some of her friends.”

“I don’t know none of them people, me. What’s this man do?”

“He’s a criminal.”

“Tee Jolie don’t associate wit’ people like that.”

But she does associate with people who use other people, I thought. I took the photo from Clete and showed it to Mr. DeBlanc. “Take a good look at that fellow. Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”

“No, suh, I ain’t seen him, and I don’t know him, and Tee Jolie never talked about him or any of these men. What kind of criminal are we talking about?”

“The kind of guy who gives crime a bad name,” I replied.

His face became sad; he blinked in the lamplight. “She tole me she was falling in love wit’ a man. She said maybe she’d bring him home to meet me. She said he was rich and had gone to col’letch and he loved music. She wouldn’t tell me nothing else. Then one day she was gone. And then her sister left, too. I don’t know why this is happening. They left me alone and never called and just went away. It ain’t fair.”

“What isn’t fair?” Clete asked.

“Everyt’ing. We never broke no laws. We took care of ourself and our place on the bayou and never hurt nobody. That’s my father’s picture up there on the wall. He fought in France in the First World War. His best friend was killed on the last day of the war. He had eight children and raised us up against ever fighting in a war or doing harm to anybody for any reason. Now somebody taken my granddaughters from me, and a deputy sheriff tells me ain’t no evidence of a crime been committed. That’s why I say it ain’t fair.” He struggled to his feet with his two walking canes and went into the kitchen.

“What are you doing, sir?” I asked.

“Fixing y’all coffee.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Yes, suh, I do. I ain’t been a good host. I cain’t find the sugar, though. I couldn’t find it this morning. I cain’t concentrate on t’ings like I used to.”

I had followed him into the kitchen to dissuade him from putting himself out. The cupboards, which had curtains on them rather than doors, were almost bare. There were no pots on the stove, no smell of cooked food in the air. He pulled a coffee can off a shelf, then accidentally dropped it on the drainboard. The plastic cap popped loose, spilling the small amount of coffee that was inside. “It’s all right. We still got enough for t’ree cups,” he said.

“We have to go, Mr. DeBlanc. Thank you for your courtesy,” I said.

He hesitated, then began scooping the coffee back in the can. “Yes, suh, I understand,” he replied.

Clete and I walked out into the rain and got into the Caddy. Clete didn’t start the engine and instead stared through the windshield at the lamplight glowing in the front windows of the house. “His kitchen looked pretty bare,” he said.

“I suspect he’s in the Meals On Wheels program,” I said.

“You ever see the stuff those old people eat? It looks like diced rabbit food or the kind of crap Iranian inmates eat.”

I waited for him to continue.

“You think Mr. DeBlanc might like a warmed-up po’boy and a cold brew?” he said.

So we took Clete’s foot-long sandwich, which consisted of almost an entire loaf of French bread filled with deep-fried oysters and baby shrimp and mayonnaise and hot sauce and sliced lettuce and tomatoes and onions, and carried it and the two longneck bottles of Bud inside. Then we fixed a pot of coffee and sat down with Mr. DeBlanc at his kitchen table and cut the po’boy in three pieces and had a fine meal while the rain drummed like giant fingers on the roof.

Alice Werenhaus lived in an old neighborhood off Magazine, on the edges of the Garden District, on a block one might associate with the genteel form of poverty that became characteristic of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Even after Katrina, the live oaks were of tremendous dimensions, their gigantic roots wedging up the sidewalks and cracking the curbs and keeping the houses in shadow almost twenty-four hours a day. But gradually, the culture that had defined the city, for good or bad, had taken flight from Alice’s neighborhood and been replaced by bars on the windows of businesses and residences and a pervading fear, sometimes justified, that two or three kids dribbling a basketball down the street might turn out to be the worst human beings you ever met.

Out of either pride or denial of her circumstances, Alice had not installed a security system in her house or sheathed her windows with bars specially designed to imitate the Spanish grillwork that was part of traditional New Orleans architecture. She walked to Mass and rode the streetcar to work. She shopped at night in a grocery store three blocks away and wheeled her own basket home, forcing it over the broken and pitched slabs of concrete in the sidewalks. On one occasion, a man came out of the shadows and tried to jerk her purse from her shoulder. Miss Alice hit him in the head with a zucchini, then threw it at him as he fled down the street.

Her friends were few. Her days at the convent had been marked by acrimony and depression and the bitter knowledge that insularity and loneliness would always be her lot. Ironically, the first sunshine in her adult life came in her newly found career as a secretary for an alcoholic private investigator whose clientele could have been characters lifted from Dante’s Inferno. She pretended to be viscerally offended by their vulgarity and narcissism, but there were occasions on an inactive day when she caught herself glancing through the window in hopes of seeing a betrayed wife headed up the street, out for blood, or one of Nig Rosewater’s bail skips about to burst through the door in need of secular absolution.

These moments of introspection made her wonder if a thinly disguised pagan might not be living inside her skin.

On the day after Clete Purcel went to New Iberia to tend his office, a sudden thunderstorm had swept ashore south of the city, bringing with it the smell of brine and sulfa and a downpour in her neighborhood that flooded the streets and filled the gutters and yards with floating leaves. The clouds were bursting with electricity when she got off the streetcar on St. Charles and walked toward Magazine, the thunder booming over the Gulf like cannons firing in sequence. The air was cool and fresh and had a tannic odor that made her think of long-standing water poured from a wood barrel. She felt an excitement about the evening that she couldn’t quite explain, as though she were revisiting her childhood home in Morgan City where the storm clouds over the Gulf created a light show every summer evening, the wind straightening the palms on the boulevard where she had lived, a jolly Popsicle man in a white cap driving his truck down to the baseball diamond in the park.

When she walked up on the gallery of her small house and unlocked the door, her cat, Cedric, was waiting to be let in. He was a pumpkin-size orange ball of fur with white paws and a star on his face who left seat smears all over her breakfast table and was never corrected for it. He ran ahead of her into the house and attacked his food bowl while she turned on the television in the living room and filled the house with the sounds of CNN and a family she didn’t have.

She filled a teakettle with water and lit the gas range and set the kettle to boil, and put a frozen dinner in the microwave, and glanced out the side window at a man in a hooded raincoat walking down the alley, his shoulders rounded, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his red tennis shoes splashing in the puddles. He disappeared from her line of vision. She picked up her cat, cradling him heavily in one arm, and tugged playfully on the furry thickness of his tail. “What have you been doing all day, you little fatty?” she said.

Cedric pushed against her grasp with his hind feet, indicating that he wanted to be bounced up and down. For some unaccountable reason, he changed his mind and twisted in her arms and jumped onto the breakfast table, staring out the rear window at the alley. Alice peered out the window and saw a neighbor lift the top of his Dumpster and drop a vinyl sack of garbage inside.

“You’re a big baby, Cedric,” Alice said.

She heard the microwave ding and took the preprepared container of veal and potatoes and peas out and fixed a cup of tea and sat down and ate her supper. Later she lay back on a reclining chair in front of the television and watched the History Channel and fell asleep without ever realizing she was falling asleep.

When she woke, the thunderstorm had passed and flashes of electricity were flaring silently in the clouds, briefly illuminating the trees and puddles of floating leaves in her yard. Cedric was on the rear windowsill, flicking a paw at a raindrop running down the glass. Then someone twisted the mechanical bell on the front door, and she slipped off the night chain and pulled open the door without first checking to see who her visitor was.

He was black, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with a goatee that looked like wire protruding from his chin. He wore a dark rain jacket, the hood hanging on his back. Through the screen, she could smell his body odor and unbrushed teeth and the unrinsed detergent in his clothes. Under one arm he was clutching a cardboard box that had no top.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I’m selling chocolate for the Boys Town Fund.”

“Where do you live?”

“In St. Bernard Parish.”

She tried to see his shoes, but her line of vision was obstructed by the paneling at the bottom of the door. “There’s a white man who picks up you kids in the Lower Nine and drops you off in neighborhoods like mine. You have to pay him four dollars for each chocolate bar you don’t bring back, and the rest is yours. Is that correct?”

He seemed to think about what she had said, his eyes clouding. “It’s for the Boys Town Fund.”

“I can’t give you any money.”

“You don’t want no candy?”

“You’re working for a dishonest man. He uses children to deceive and cheat people. He robs others of their faith in their fellow man. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning toward the street, his gaze shifting off hers.

“If you need to use the bathroom, come in. If you want a snack, I’ll fix you one. But you should get away from the man you’re working for. Do you want to come in?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I ain’t meant to bother you.”

“Were you in my alleyway a while ago? What kind of shoes are you wearing?”

“What kind of shoes? I’m wearing the kind I put on this morning.”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“I got to go. The man is waiting for me on the corner.”

“Come see me another time and let’s talk.”

He looked at her warily. “Talk about what?”

“Anything you want to.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll do that,” he said.

After she closed the inside door, she looked through the side window and watched him walk up the street under the overhang of the trees. He did not stop at any of the other houses. Why had he stopped at only hers? She stepped out on the gallery and tried to see down the sidewalk, but the boy was gone. Maybe he had gone up a driveway to a garage apartment. That was possible, wasn’t it? Otherwise… She didn’t want to think about otherwise.

As she chained the door, she heard a Dumpster lid clang in the alley and the subdued thunder of rap music from inside a closed vehicle and a tree limb scraping wetly across the side of her house. She heard Cedric run across the linoleum in the kitchen.

“Where are you going, you fat little pumpkin head?” she said.

She glanced in her hallway and in her bedroom and in her clothes closet, but Cedric was nowhere to be seen. Then she felt a coldness in the wall that separated the guest room from the bath. She opened the door and stared numbly at the curtains blowing from the open window, one from which the screen had been removed.

She turned around in the hallway, her heart beating hard, just as a man in a purple ski mask and black leather gloves and red tennis shoes stepped out of the bathroom and swung his fist into the middle of her face. “You’re sure a stupid bitch,” he said. “You live in a neighborhood like this without a security system?”

When she woke up, she didn’t know if she had been knocked unconscious by the blow of her assailant or by her head striking the floor. All she knew was that she was in her kitchen, stretched out on the linoleum, her wrists wrapped with duct tape and the duct tape wrapped through the handle on the oven door. The only light in the kitchen came from the gas flame under the teakettle and the glow around the edge of the blinds from a streetlamp in the alley.

Her attacker was standing above her, breathing through the mouth hole in his mask, his gloved hands opening and closing at his sides. “You like opera?” he said. His pronunciation was strange, as though the inside of his mouth had been injured or he were wearing dentures that didn’t fit. “Answer my question, bitch.”

“Who are you?” she said.

“A guy who’s gonna turn you into an opera star. I’ll put you on the phone so you can yodel to a friend of yours. I heated up your teapot for you.”

“I know who you are. Shame on you.”

“That’s a dumb thing to say. Why do you think I’m wearing this mask?”

“Because you’re a coward.”

“It means you got a chance to live. But the odds of that happening aren’t as good as they were a few seconds ago. Your cat is hiding under the bed.”

She tried to read the expression in his eyes inside his mask, to no avail.

“Has the kitty got your tongue?” he said.

“Leave him alone.”

He looked over his shoulder at the microwave. “I think he might make a nice fit.”

“Friends are coming over anytime. You’ll be punished for whatever you do here. You’re a nasty little man. I should have let Mr. Purcel have his way with you.”

He leaned over her, looking straight down into her face. “You don’t have friends, lady. Nothing is gonna help you. Accept that. You’re totally in my power, and you’re gonna do everything I say. I think I’m gonna alter my plan a little bit. What do they call that place in Kentucky where people take vows of silence?” He snapped his fingers, his glove making a whispering sound. “Gethsemane? I said I was gonna make an opera singer out of you, but that’s not a good idea. You’d wake up the whole neighborhood. I’m gonna give you my own vow of silence. Open wide.”

When she refused, he clenched the bottom of her chin and stuffed a dishrag in her mouth and pressed a strip of tape across her cheeks and lips. “There,” he said, standing erect. “You look like a balloon that’s about to pop. That’s not far from wrong.”

He turned off the flame on the stove and picked up a hot pad from the drainboard and lifted the teakettle off the burner. “Where do you want it first?” he asked.

She felt sweat popping on her brow, her throat gagging on the dishrag and her own saliva, her shoes coming off her feet as she thrashed against the linoleum. He tipped the spout of the teakettle down and slowly scalded one of her legs and then the other. “How’s that feel? That’s just for openers,” he said.

It became obvious that he was not prepared for what came next. Alice Werenhaus flexed both of her upper arms and her massive shoulders and tore the handle out of the oven door, rising to her feet like a behemoth emerging from an ancient bog. She ripped the tape from her face and pulled the dishrag from her mouth and drove her fist into a spot right between her assailant’s eyes.

The blow sent him crashing into the wall. She picked up a bread box and smashed it over his head, then opened the door to the pantry and pulled a Stillson pipe wrench loose from a washtub full of tools. The Stillson felt as heavy as a shot put, its serrated grips mounted on a long shaft. Her assailant was getting to his feet when she caught him across the buttocks. He screamed and arched his back in an inverted bow, as though it had been broken, one hand fluttering behind to protect himself from a second blow. Alice swung again, this time across his shoulders, and a third time high up on his arm, and a fourth time on the elbow, each blow thudding into bone.

He stumbled through her living room and jerked open the front door, his nose bleeding through his mask. She hit him again, this time across the spine, knocking him through the screen onto the gallery. She followed him outside, catching him in the rib cage, knocking him onto the sidewalk, beating him across the thighs and knees as he picked himself up and began running down the street, careening off balance, like a bagful of broken sticks trying to reassemble itself.

Her ears were roaring with sound, her lungs screaming for air, her heart swollen with adrenaline. The black kid with the box of chocolate candy was staring at her in disbelief.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“I done what you tole me. I quit my job. I ain’t give back the chocolate bars, either.”

She wanted to say something to him, but she couldn’t catch her breath or even remember what she had planned to say.

“Your cat just run out the door. I’ll go catch him.”

“No, he’ll come back.”

“You ain’t gonna hit nobody else wit’ that wrench, are you?”

The world was spinning around her, and she had to hold on to a tree limb so she would not fall down. Nor could she find breath enough or the right words to answer the boy’s question.

I went back to work at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department on a half-day schedule the morning after the thundershower, primarily because we needed the income. But in all honesty, I loved my job and the place where I worked. The department had been consolidated with the city police and had moved from the courthouse to a big brick colonial-style building behind the library, with a lovely view of a tree-shaded religious grotto and Bayou Teche and City Park on the far side of the water. It was a sunny, cool, rain-washed morning my first day back, and the sheriff, whose name was Helen Soileau, and some of my colleagues had placed flowers on my desk, and as I sat down in my swivel chair and looked at the glaze of sunlight on the bayou and the wind blowing hundreds of arrowpoints across the water’s surface, I felt that perhaps Indian summer would never end, that the world was a grand place after all, and that I should never let the shadows of the heart stain my life again.

Then Clete Purcel came in at ten A.M. and told me he had just gotten a phone call from Alice Werenhaus and that she had been attacked in her house by a masked intruder she believed was Waylon Grimes.

“How does she know it was Grimes?” I said.

“He scalded both of her legs with a teakettle and talked about stuffing her cat in the microwave. Know a lot of guys with an MO like that?” He was pacing up and down, breathing through his nose.

“What are you planning to do?” I asked.

“Guess.”

“Clete, something isn’t adding up here. One, there’s no explanation for your marker being found in a safe owned by Didi Giacano. Didi has been dead for almost twenty-five years. Where has the safe been all this time? His office was on South Rampart, but I thought it caught fire or something.”

“It did. Some PR or marketing guy restored it. He’s from around here. Pierre something. Look, that’s not the point. Alice Werenhaus was tortured by a degenerate who has already killed a child and done four or five contract hits I know of. Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly have been on the planet far too long.”

My office door was closed. Through the glass, I saw Helen Soileau smile and pass in the corridor. “I won’t be party to this,” I said.

“Who asked you to?”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I don’t know what to do. Grimes couldn’t get to my sister or niece, so he went after an old woman, an ex-nun, for Christ’s sakes, the same woman who stopped me from tearing him apart. You think Golightly or Grimes is going to be shaken up by NOPD? That’s like warning the devil about his overdue library books.”

“We were born in the wrong era, Cletus.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We don’t get to blow up their shit at the O.K. Corral.”

“That’s what you think,” he replied.

I wished I hadn’t heard that last remark.