Creole Belle

24

Morning had never been a good time for Gretchen Horowitz. Others on the South Florida coast might wake to birdsong and tropical breezes and sunlight on blue-green water, but for her, the dawn brought with it only one emotion-a pervasive sense of loss and personal guilt and an abiding conviction that there was something obscene and dirty about her physical person. As a little girl, she had bathed herself from head to foot with a washcloth until the water in the tub turned cold and gray, but she had never felt clean. Afterward, she had scrubbed the tub on her knees, rinsing the porcelain surface repeatedly, in fear that the germs she had washed off her skin would be there the next time she bathed.

In middle school she learned there were ways to deal with problems that no educational psychologist would go near. Right after homeroom, the first stall in the girls’ bathroom was the place to be, provided you needed a few pharmaceutical friends such as rainbows, black beauties, Owsley purple, or a little sunshine that glowed inside your head all day, no matter what kind of weather the rest of the world was experiencing. The school day slipped by like a vague annoyance, white noise on the edge of a drowsy interlude before the bell sounded at three o’clock. Her weekday afternoons and evenings took care of themselves and did not require that she think about any issue outside of her head. She sacked groceries at a Winn-Dixie or sat in a movie theater by herself or hung out at the public library or smoked a little dope with a high school football player in the back of his car. When it was dark, she got under the covers in her bedroom and tried not to hear the sounds her mother made when she feigned climax with her johns. It was easy.

But sunrise was a curse, a condition, not a planetary event. The feeling that came with it could not be described as pain, because it had no sharp edges. In fact, the feeling she woke with was one she somehow associated with theft. As the sun broke on the horizon, her sensory system remained trapped inside her sleep, and her skin felt bloodless and dead when she touched it. Her soul, if she had one, seemed made of cardboard. As the darkness faded from her room, she was able to see her school clothes on their hangers in her closet and the absence of anything of value on her dresser and the hairbrush on her nightstand that always looked unclean. She waited for the daylight to burn away the shadows in the room and, in some fashion, redefine its contents. Instead, she knew the shadows were her friends, and the day ahead held nothing for her except glaring surfaces that made her think of glass from a broken mirror. She also knew she was unloved for a reason, and the reason was simple: The girl named Gretchen Horowitz was invisible, and not one person on earth, including the high school football player who placed her hand down there whenever they were alone, had any idea who she was, or where she came from, or what her mother did for a living, or what had been done to her by men even cops were afraid of.

Gretchen Horowitz owned the name on her birth certificate and nothing else. Her childhood was not a childhood and did not have a category. Her umbilical connection to the rest of the human family had been severed and tied off a long time ago. Reverie was a fool’s pursuit and filled with faces she would change into howling Greek masks if she ever saw them again. And morning was a bad time that passed if you didn’t let it get its hooks into you.

Tuesday at nine A.M. she drove to Lafayette and bought a video camera, a boom pole, a lighting kit, and a Steadicam. Then she bought a take-out lunch at Fat Albert’s and drove into the park by the university to eat. There was a muddy pond with ducks in the park, and swing sets and seesaws and a ball diamond and picnic shelters, and dry coulees among the live oaks where children played in the leaves. It was 11:14 A.M. when she sat down at a plank table in the sunshine and began eating her lunch. In forty-six minutes the morning would be over, and she would step over a line into the afternoon, and that would be that.

At first she paid little attention to the family who had walked from the street onto the park grounds and sat down at a table by the pond. The man had a dark tan and black hair and wore denims and work shoes. His wife had the round face of a peasant and wore a cheap blue scarf on her head and carried a calico cat on her shoulder, a harness and leash on its neck. She had no makeup on her face and seemed to be seeing the park for the first time. It was the child who caught Gretchen’s eye. His hair was blond, his smile unrelenting, his cheeks blooming with color. When he tried to walk, he kept falling down, laughing at his own ineptitude, then getting up and toddling down the slope and falling again.

The family had brought their lunch in a paper bag. The woman placed a jar of sun tea and three peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on a piece of newspaper and cut two of them in half and quartered the third for the child. She had smeared jelly on her hands, and she tried to wipe them clean on the paper bag, then gave it up and said something to her husband. She walked through the live oaks toward the restroom, the leaves gusting out of the coulee in the shade. The husband yawned and rested his head on one hand and stared vacantly at the ball diamond, his eyes half lidded. In under a minute, he had put his head down and was asleep. Gretchen looked at her watch. It was eight minutes until noon.

She finished her lunch and looked at the university campus on the far side of the curving two-lane road that separated it from the park. A marching band was thundering out a martial song on a practice field. The sun was as bright as a yellow diamond through the oak trees, and its refraction inside the branches almost blinded her. She looked back at the table by the pond where the man and his little boy had been sitting. The child was gone.

She stood up from the bench. The mother had not returned from the restroom, and the husband was sound asleep. The wind was cold and blowing hard, the surface of the pond wimpling in the sunlight like needles that could penetrate the eye. The ducks were in the reeds along the bank, engorged with bread scraps, their feathers ruffling, surrounded by a floating necklace of froth and Styrofoam containers and paper cups. Beyond the plank table where the husband was sitting, Gretchen saw the little boy toddling down the slope toward the water’s edge. She began running just as he fell.

He tumbled end over end down the embankment, his zippered one-piece outfit caking with mud, his face filled with shock. Gretchen charged down the embankment after him, trying to keep her balance, her feet slipping from under her. She was running so fast, she splashed into the water ahead of the little boy and grabbed him up in both arms before he could roll into the shallows. She hefted him against her shoulder and walked back up the embankment and looked into the horrified face of the mother and the blank stare of the father, who had just lifted up his head from the table.

“Oh my God, I fell asleep,” he said. He looked at his wife. “I fell asleep. I ain’t meant to.”

The woman took the child from Gretchen’s arms. “T’ank you,” she said.

“It’s all right,” Gretchen said.

The mother bounced the baby up and down on her chest. “Come play wit’ your cat,” she said. “Don’t be crying, you. You’re okay now. But you was bad. You shouldn’t be walking down by the water, no.”

“He wasn’t bad,” Gretchen said.

“He knows what I mean. It’s bad for him to be by the water ’cause it can hurt him,” the mother said. “That’s what I was saying to him. His father ain’t had no sleep.”

“Why not?” Gretchen said.

“’Cause he works at a boatyard and he ain’t had no work since the oil spill,” the mother said. “He cain’t sleep at night. He worries all the time. He’s that way ’cause he’s a good man.”

“Drink some tea, you,” the husband said. There were carpenter’s bruises on his nails, purple and deep, all the way to the cuticle. “If it ain’t been for you, I cain’t t’ink about what might have happened.”

“It didn’t. That’s what counts,” Gretchen said.

He looked into space, his eyes hollow, as though he were watching an event for which there would have been no form of forgiveness if he had let it occur. “How long I been asleep?”

“Not long. Don’t blame yourself,” Gretchen said. “Your little boy is fine.”

“He’s our only child. My wife cain’t have no more kids.”

“Where’s your car?” Gretchen said.

“We sold it. We rode the bus here,” the mother said.

“Tell you what,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to take your picture on my video camera. Will you let me do that? I make movies.”

The mother gave her a coy look, as though someone were playing a joke on her. “Like in Hollywood or somet’ing?”

“I’m making a documentary on the 1940s musical revue in New Iberia.” She could tell neither of them understood what she was talking about. “Let me get my camera. After you eat, I’ll drive you home.”

“You ain’t got to do that,” the man said.

It was two minutes to noon. The feelings Gretchen had had all morning were gone, but their disappearance was not related to the time of day. She got her video camera from the pickup and focused the lens on the man and woman and child, then showed them the footage. “See? You all are a wonderful family,” she said.

“I ain’t dressed to be on that,” the woman said.

“I think all of you are beautiful,” Gretchen said.

The man and woman seemed embarrassed and looked at each other. “T’ank you for what you done,” the man said.

There was an emotion inside Gretchen that she could not understand. She did not know the name of the family, yet she did not want to ask it. “That’s such a cute little boy,” she said.

“Yeah, he’s gonna be somet’ing special one day, you gonna see,” the mother said.

“I bet he will,” Gretchen said.

“You’re a nice lady,” the woman said.

And so are you, Gretchen thought, and your husband is a nice man, and your little boy has the loveliest smile on earth.

These are the things she thought, but she did not say them, nor did she steal the man and woman’s dignity by trying to give them money when she drove them to their house in a poor section of Lafayette. Inside herself, she felt cleansed in a way she could not explain, and worries about the sunrise and fear of her own memories seemed like silly pursuits that weren’t worth two seconds of her time.

Or was she fooling herself?

She wasn’t sure. But something had dramatically changed in her life. She just didn’t know why.

Tuesday afternoon Dana Magelli called me at the department. “Where’s Purcel?” he asked.

“Haven’t seen him. What’s up?” I replied.

“Last night somebody kicked the shit out of a guy named Lamont Woolsey. Know him?”

“An albino who talks like Elmer Fudd?”

“He’s missing a few teeth, so it’s hard to say who he sounds like. His face looks like a car tire ran over it. He says he doesn’t know who attacked him or why. The neighbors say a guy driving a Caddy convertible did it. A guy wearing a short-brim hat. Sound like anybody you know?”

“If I understand you correctly, the guy isn’t filing charges.”

“That doesn’t mean Purcel can come into New Orleans and wipe his feet on people’s faces any time he wants.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yeah, somebody snatched Ozone Eddy Mouton and a female employee out of Eddy’s tanning parlor. Guess what. The people who saw Purcel stomp the albino’s face say a guy with orange hair was in the albino’s driveway earlier. Sound like coincidence to you?”

“Woolsey is mixed up in at least one homicide, Dana. Run him and you’ll find a blank. How many high rollers can stay off the computer?”

“You listen to me, Dave. If Ozone Eddy and his employee are found in a swamp, Clete Purcel is going to jail as a material witness, and this time I’ll make sure he stays there. By the way, when you see Purcel, tell him the Vietnamese girl was traumatized by what she saw.”

“What Vietnamese girl?”

“She works for Woolsey. Or did. Some Quaker women picked her up this morning. Her name is Maelee something.”

“That was the name of Clete’s girlfriend in Vietnam.”

“I’m not making the connection,” Dana said.

“She was a Eurasian girl who lived on a sampan. Clete wanted to marry her. The VC murdered her.”

There was silence on the phone.

“You there?” I said.

“I didn’t know that about Purcel. You think Woolsey is hooked up with intelligence people?”

“I think he has connections to corporations of some kind,” I said. “Maybe a drilling company. Maybe all of this is related to the oil blowout.”

“Keep Purcel out of the city. I’ll see what I can find out about Woolsey on this end. Why would a meltdown like Ozone Eddy be in Woolsey’s driveway?”

I didn’t have an answer. Dana was a good man who followed the rules and believed in a broken system and probably would never be recognized for the heroic and steadfast and decent police officer that he was. But dwelling on Dana’s decency would not help me with another problem I had been confronted with. Helen Soileau had just returned from Shreveport, where she had stayed almost constantly by the bedside of her half sister. I opened her office door and leaned inside. “It’s good to have you back,” I said.

She was standing behind her desk. “I want all your notes on the Jesse Leboeuf shooting,” she said.

“I don’t think they’ll be very helpful.”

I could see lights of impatience and irritability flicker in her eyes. “Who’s your prime subject, Dave?”

“Gretchen Horowitz.”

“An out-and-out execution?”

“No, she stopped a rape and probably a murder. If you ask me, Jesse got what he deserved.”

“You questioned Horowitz?”

“Yep, but I got nowhere. Here’s what interesting. Before he died, Jesse said something to the killer in French. Catin Segura heard it but says she doesn’t speak French.”

“Catin has no idea who the shooter was?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

“The damage Jesse did to her was off the scale.”

“Where’s Catin now?”

“Back home with her kids. You want me to call her and tell her to come in?”

I saw Helen’s eyes searching in space. “No,” she said. “I’ll talk to her at her house. No evidence at the scene or eyewitness account puts Horowitz there?”

“Nothing.”

“I passed by your door when you were on the phone. Was that Dana Magelli you were taking to?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Maybe Clete busted up a guy named Lamont Woolsey in the Garden District last night.”

“I just don’t believe it,” she said.

“It’s the way it is, Helen.”

“Don’t tell me that,” she said, turning her back to me, her hands on her hips. The muscles in her upper arms looked like rolls of quarters.

“Helen-”

“Don’t say any more. Just leave. Now. Not later. Right now,” she said.

At quitting time, I drove to Clete’s cottage. The air was damp, the sky plum-colored, and stacks of raked leaves were burning and blowing apart in the wind on the far side of the bayou, the ash glowing like fireflies. I didn’t want to accept that winter was upon us and soon frost would speckle the trees and the cane fields that were already being turned into stubble. I was bothered even more by the fact that dwelling too much on the cycle of the seasons could turn one’s heart into a lump of ice.

Clete was barefoot and wearing unpressed slacks and a strap undershirt and was watching the news on television in his favorite deep-cushioned chair. He poured from a pint bottle of brandy into a jelly glass and added three inches of eggnog from a carton. There was a wastebasket by his foot. A roll of toilet paper was tucked between his thigh and the arm of the chair. “Get yourself a Diet Doc,” he said, barely looking at me.

“I don’t want a Diet Doc.”

“Rough day?”

“Not particularly. What’s with the toilet paper?”

“I get the sense Helen is back on the job.”

“Helen’s not the problem. Magelli called. He says you busted up Lamont Woolsey.”

“Woolsey dimed me?”

“No, the neighbors saw you kick his face in.”

“Things got a little out of control. Magelli say anything about Ozone Eddy Mouton and a broad named Connie?”

“He said Eddy and a female employee were kidnapped.”

“It gets worse. On the five o’clock news, there was a story about a pair of bodies found in the trunk of a burned car in St. Bernard Parish. One victim was male, one female. No ID yet. I screwed up real bad on this one, Streak.”

“Maybe it’s somebody else.”

“A hit like that? Even the Giacanos didn’t kill like that. It’s Woolsey.” Clete coughed and wadded up a handful of toilet paper and pressed it to his mouth. Then he compressed the paper tightly in his hand and lowered it into the wastebasket and took a drink of eggnog and brandy from the jelly glass. I sat down on the bed and pulled the wastebasket toward me. “You coughing up blood?” I said.

“No, I had a nosebleed.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Woolsey went down hard. He got off a couple of good shots. I’m fine.”

“I’m taking you to Iberia General.”

“No, you’re not. Whatever is in my chest is going to stay in my chest. Listen to me, Dave. At a certain point in your life, you accept the consequences of your choices, and you play the hand out. I’m not going to have anybody cutting on me or sticking tubes down my throat or injecting radium into my bloodstream. If I catch the bus with an eggnog and Hennessy in my hand, that’s the way it flushes.”

“Hospitals are bad, and eggnog and booze are good. Do you know how dumb that sounds?”

“That’s the only way I know how to think.”

“It’s not funny.”

He got up from his chair and took a long-sleeve scarlet silk shirt off a hanger and put it on, then sat on the side of his bed and began pulling on his socks.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Taking you and Molly and Alafair to dinner. Enjoy the day, Dave. It’s all we’ve got.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”

“We’re running out of time, big mon. I’m talking about with the Duprees and Woolsey and this phony preacher and Varina and whoever the hell else they’re mixed up with. Look at what they did to Ozone Eddy and his broad. They hate our guts. Gretchen tore Pierre Dupree apart with a blackjack. You and I have been rubbing shit in their faces from the jump. It’s a matter of time before they get even. How about those locks of hair the old man keeps in his study?”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Cletus.”

“You’re not hearing me. Helen doesn’t listen. She thinks like an administrator. Administrators don’t believe in conspiracies. If they did, they’d have to resign their jobs. That’s the problem. In the meantime, we’re waiting for Bed-Check Charlie to come through our wire and park one in our ear, if not worse.”

“What are you suggesting?”

He didn’t answer right away. He poured more brandy into his glass, swirling it, watching the eggnog turn brown before he drank it. “Burn them out.”

“You and I? Like the White League?”

“They’re going to kill us, Dave.”

“No, they won’t.”

“They almost got us in the shootout on the bayou. I dream about it every second or third night. You know what’s worst about the dream? We were supposed to die there. That paddle wheeler was real. Both of us were supposed to be on it, and that son of a bitch is still out there, waiting for us in the fog. But this time they’re going to take everybody. You, me, Alafair, Molly, and Gretchen, all of us. That’s what I see in the dream.”

I could feel a cold wind on the back of my neck. I turned around to see if the door was open, but it wasn’t.

“You okay?” Clete said.

No, I wasn’t okay. And neither was he. And I had no way to set things right. Also, at that moment I had no way of knowing that Gretchen and Alafair and, in her sad way, Tee Jolie would write the fifth act in our Elizabethan tale on the banks of Bayou Teche.

Gretchen had rented a cottage in the little tree-shaded town of Broussard, located on the old two-lane highway midway between New Iberia and Lafayette. On Wednesday morning she looked out her front window at a scene she had trouble assimilating. Across the street, Pierre Dupree was walking a child through the side door of a Catholic church. The child could not have been over eight or nine years and wore metal braces on both of his legs. Gretchen took a cup of coffee out on her gallery and sat down on the steps and watched the church. A few minutes later, Dupree came back outside with the little boy and escorted him to a playground and placed him on a swing and began pushing him back and forth. Dupree seemed to take no notice of anyone around him or the fact that he was being watched.

Ten minutes passed, and Dupree strapped the little boy in the front seat of his Humvee. Gretchen set down her coffee cup and walked out onto the swale and leaned on one arm against the live oak that shaded the front of her cottage. Still Dupree did not notice her. He pulled out on the street and drove toward the only traffic signal in town. Then she saw his face reflected in the outside mirror as his brake lights went on. He made a U-turn in the filling station at the intersection and drove back toward her, turning in to her driveway, the shadows of the live oak bouncing on his windshield. He opened the door and got out. “I didn’t realize that was you,” he said.

“Who else do I look like?” she asked, her arm still propped against the tree trunk.

“If you don’t want to talk to me, Miss Gretchen, I understand. But I want you to know I hold no grudge against you.”

“Why is it I don’t believe that?”

“I guess I’m a mighty poor salesman.”

The little boy was looking out the passenger window at her, his head barely above the windowsill. She winked at him.

“This is Gus. He’s my little pal in Big Brothers,” Pierre said.

“Been at it long?” Gretchen said.

“Just of recent. I was enrolling Gus in the Catholic school here. I’m endowing a scholarship fund.”

She nodded and tucked her shirt into her jeans with her thumbs. “How you doin’, Gus?” she said.

“Fine,” the little boy replied. He had a burr haircut and eyes that were mere slits, as though his face had not been fully formed.

“I blame myself for what happened in the restaurant in New Orleans,” Pierre said. “I got involved in some business dealings that had consequences I didn’t foresee. That’s my fault and not yours. I think you’re quite a woman, Miss Gretchen. I’d like to know you better.”

“You’re serious?”

“How many times does a guy meet a one-woman army?” He held his gaze on hers. “At least think about it. What’s to lose? You’ve already shown what you can do if a fellow gets out of line.”

Something was changed about him, she thought, though she couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe it was his hair. It looked freshly washed and blow-dried. Or was it his eyes? They were free of scorn and arrogance. Also, he seemed genuinely happy.

“Is Mr. Dupree treating you all right, Gus?” she said to the little boy.

“We went to the carnival in Lafayette. We went to the zoo, too,” Gus replied.

“How about it?” Dupree said.

“How about what?” she said.

“Having lunch with me and Gus. Then I have to get him back home. It’s a beautiful day.” Again, his eyes lingered on hers. They were warm and seemed free of guile. “Have you ever modeled?”

“Sure, steroid ads when I rode with Dykes on Bikes.”

“Stop it,” he said.

He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. She gazed down the street, her chin raised slightly, her pulse fluttering in her throat.

“I’d love to get you on canvas,” he said. “Come on, have lunch and we’ll talk about it. I’m no Jasper Johns, but I’m not bad at what I do.”

“Sorry, no cigar,” she said.

“I’m disappointed. Keep me in mind, will you? You’re a pistol, Miss Gretchen.”

Her face and palms were tingling as she watched him drive away, the paint job on his Humvee as bright as a yellow jacket in the sunlight. Dammit, she thought. Dammit, dammit, dammit.