Creole Belle

27

The performance was scheduled to begin in the Sugar Cane Festival Building inside City Park at eight o’clock Friday evening. In that same building, in 1956, I had listened to Harry James perform with Buddy Rich on drums, Willie Smith on alto sax, and Duke Ellington’s arranger Juan Tizol on valve trombone. The band had worn summer tuxes, and James had worn a bloodred carnation in his lapel. For us down here in our provincial Cajun world on the banks of Bayou Teche, the people playing horns and reed instruments on the stage were magical creatures that had descended from the ether. Their black trousers had razor creases, and their dress shoes gleamed, and their trombones and cornets had the brightness of liquid gold. The female singer sang Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” to a swing arrangement, then the orchestra went right into “One O’Clock Jump.” For two hours we were dancing at the Savoy or the Trianon or the Hollywood Palladium, James’s trumpet rising like a bell into the rafters, Buddy Rich’s drums rumbling in the background, the saxophones creating a second melody that was like an ocean wave starting to crest on a beach, all of it building into a crescendo of sound and rhythm that was almost sexual, that left us dry-mouthed and with a sense of longing we couldn’t explain.

Now we were over a half century down the road, almost to the winter solstice and the re-creation of Saturnalia, probably no wiser than our antecedents, our fears of mortality and the coming of night no less real. The live oaks in the park were wrapped with strings of tiny white lights; the Sugar Cane Festival Building was hung with wreaths and thick red ribbons tied in big bows; and families who were undaunted by cold weather were barbecuing under the picnic shelters, the blue smoke of their meat fires hanging as thick as fog in the damp air. Above the wide sweep of the oaks in the park, the sky was black and bursting with stars. The night could not have been more beautiful.

Alafair and Molly and I parked down by the duck pond and joined the crowd entering the building. “There’s Gretchen Horowitz,” Alafair said.

“Pretend you don’t see her,” I said.

“That’s a cheap way to act,” she replied.

“Leave her alone,” I said, putting my hand on her forearm.

“You’re not going to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do, Dave.”

“Will both of you stop it?” Molly said. She stared through the crowd at Gretchen’s hot-rod pickup, which was parked on a concrete pad at the rear of the building. “What’s she doing, anyway?”

“Unloading her film equipment. She’s making a documentary,” Alafair said. “I was going to help her with it.”

“You think she has any talent?” Molly said.

“I think she’s an artist. She has the love of it. What she doesn’t have are friends who are willing to help her,” Alafair said.

“You’re talking about me?” I said.

“No, I’m talking about myself. I gave her the impression that I might help her with her documentary. But I ended up telling her I was busy with my new novel. She got pretty mad about it.”

“At you?” I said, watching Gretchen pull a boom pole from her truck.

“Of course.”

“I’ll meet y’all inside,” I said.

“Don’t,” Alafair said. This time it was she who grabbed my arm.

“Gretchen needs to think about relocation. I think southern California is a fine place to visit this time of year,” I said.

“If you do this, Dave, I’ll move out of the house,” Alafair said.

“Clete is my best friend,” I said. “But he has to get Gretchen Horowitz out of New Iberia. She also needs to understand that members of our family don’t have the answer to her problems, all of which are connected to killing people.”

“Lower your voice,” Molly said.

“There’s Pierre Dupree,” Alafair said.

He had moved out of the crowd and was walking toward Gretchen’s pickup, wearing a pin-striped suit with a western shirt and buffed needle-nosed cowboy boots. In the background, through the trees, I could see Clete Purcel parking his maroon convertible by a picnic shelter. He and Julie Ardoin got out, and the two of them headed toward the building.

“Does Clete know Pierre is trying to put moves on Gretchen?” Alafair said.

“Yep.”

“What’s he plan to do about it?” she asked.

“Turn Pierre Dupree into wallpaper. Maybe that was just a metaphor,” I replied.

“I’m going over there,” Alafair said.

“For what?” I said.

“Pierre is evil. Gretchen is fighting a war in her head about forgiveness while this lying piece of shit is giving her a line.”

“Stay with Molly, Alf. I’m asking you, not telling you,” I said. “Please trust me on this.”

“You said you weren’t going to call me that again.”

“I’m just not much good at keeping certain kinds of promises.”

Her eyes studied mine, and I knew she wasn’t thinking about pet names. “I’ve got a bad feeling, Dave.”

“About what?”

“All of this,” she said.

At first Gretchen tried to ignore him, to pretend that either his presence or his absence was of no concern to her. But even as she reached back into the cab of her pickup to retrieve her Steadicam, his shadow seemed to loom above her and block out the lights of the building and invade her thoughts and reduce her in size and importance, as though he knew the location of every weakness in her body and soul. “I hoped you’d be here,” he said.

“I said I would be, didn’t I?” she replied.

“You sure did. Is this your equipment?”

“Whose does it look like?”

“You have to remember, film isn’t my medium.” He was smiling, his collar unbuttoned, the black hair on his chest showing.

“You see movies, though?” she said.

“Sometimes.”

“You ever see The Johnson Patrol? It was about an American patrol in Vietnam. But it was done by the French. It’s one of the best documentaries I ever saw. It made me think of Robert Capa’s work.”

“Who?”

“He was one of the greatest combat photographers who ever lived.”

“I was never that keen on motion pictures and photography. I’m a painter.”

“You don’t like movies?”

He grinned and shrugged. “Sit with me.”

“I’m working.”

“How about a drink afterward?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Pierre.”

“Give me a chance to prove myself.”

She began fitting on the harness of the Steadicam, avoiding his eyes and the way he seemed to deliberately block out the light from the building, like a dark cloak trying to wrap itself around her. She realized he was not looking at her anymore. “There’s your employer,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Mr. Purcel. There in the crowd, going into the building. He’s with Julie Ardoin.” He sucked his teeth.

“Why do you make that sound?”

He tried to smile like a gentleman who doesn’t want to be unkind.

“Sorry, I’m not good at facial sign language,” Gretchen said.

He blew out his breath. “I don’t think Mr. Purcel is a very good judge of character.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“Julie Ardoin is a pilot. She used to do some work for my ex and her father, Jesse Leboeuf. The expression ‘under the radar’ comes to mind.”

“She’s dirty?”

“Because of the mistakes I’ve made in my life, I don’t have the moral authority to speculate about others. That said, I knew Julie’s husband for twenty years. He was a good man and would put his hand in a fire for a friend. His brains ended up on Julie’s ceiling. The coroner put his death down as a suicide. I don’t think that’s what happened. I think your employer is walking into a spiderweb.”

“What kind of work did this woman do for Varina Leboeuf? Don’t jerk me around, Pierre.”

“They were running coke out of Panama. Guns were involved in the deal. I don’t know the details. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’ve changed my life, and the misdeeds of other people aren’t my business. But I think your friend is about to get hurt. I’ll be inside. Let me know if you want to have a drink later.”

He walked away, his cowboy boots clicking on the concrete dance pad, his coat flapping open in the breeze, his handsome face turned into the barbecue smoke blowing from the picnic shelters. The back of his neck looked as graceful as a swan’s, shiny with aftershave. Gretchen felt as though someone had dropped a handful of thumbtacks inside her head.

Gretchen was staring at Pierre Dupree’s back when I walked up behind her. “How are you tonight?” I said.

“How am I?” she replied. “I was doing fine. Until two seconds ago.”

“Yeah, I think I picked up on that. I want you to understand something, Miss Gretchen. Outside of Clete Purcel, there’s probably no one in your life who supports you more than my daughter. She believes you have a great talent, and she thinks you’re a decent and good person. If she’s not helping you out tonight, it’s not because she didn’t want to. She planned to work on her novel, but my wife and I insisted she come with us.”

“Why do you think you have to explain this to me? You think I’m going to hurt her?”

“No, I don’t believe that at all.”

“You make a poor liar.”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to me like that.”

“Bugger off.”

I looked at the crowd. I could no longer see Alafair and Molly. “Do you know martial arts?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I was just curious. It’s part of a mystique these days. A female killer leaving body parts scattered across entire continents, that sort of thing. You never can tell.”

“Why should I kick somebody in the crotch when I can shoot him between the eyes?”

“That’s pretty clever.”

“It was meant as a joke,” she said. “You don’t like me, Mr. Robicheaux. It’s in your eyes and your tone of voice. You think I’m the serpent in the garden. But you’re wrong.”

“Oh?”

“This place was corrupt long before I got here,” she said.

She hefted the rest of her equipment and went inside the building.

The first musician to take the stage was not a re-creator of 1940s music but a Louisiana legend from the 1950s by the name of Dixie Lee Pugh. He had grown up in a backwater shithole on the Mississippi and at age seventeen had become a piano player in a hot-pillow joint across the river in an area known as Natchez Under-the-Hill. Notice that I did not say Dixie Lee was born in a shithole on the Mississippi. Dixie Lee was not born; he was shot out of the womb like a rocket and, ever since, had been ricocheting off every concrete and steel surface in the Western world.

Three fifths of his stomach had been surgically removed. He had not only failed at rehab but had been kicked out of the Betty Ford Center his first day in the program. He used to tell me his life’s ambition was to live to 150 and get lynched for rape. None of his outrageous behavior could equal the night he first performed at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn. The host was Alan Freed. Dixie Lee thought he was supposed to close the show, but Freed believed the honor should go to a famous black rocker who had influenced and changed the genre forever. Dixie Lee was told that next time out he would close, but tonight belonged to the older rocker. So he took his place at the piano and went into his signature song, pounding and riffling the keys and screaming into the microphone, the modus operandi for which he was famous. In the middle of the song, he rose to his feet and pulled a pop bottle full of kerosene from inside his jacket and sloshed it all over the piano. When he threw a match on it, the flames exploded in a red-yellow cone and almost took his face off, then dripped onto the keys and ran down the piano legs onto the stage. Dixie Lee was undaunted. He leaned into the fire and thundered out the rest of his song, his coat sleeves burning, his hair singeing, the sprinklers in the ceiling raining down all over the theater.

The kids in the audience went crazy, screaming and jumping up and down for more. A cop hosed down Dixie Lee with a fire extinguisher, but not before he finished the song. When Dixie Lee walked off the stage with smoke rising from his clothes and extinguisher foam sliding down his scorched face, he turned and said to the black rocker, “Follow that, son of a bitch.”

“He was your roommate at SLI?” Alafair said.

We were sitting at the rear of the audience, but I could see Gretchen Horowitz below the far corner of the stage, focusing her camera on Dixie Lee. “In 1956,” I said. “Just before he appeared on The Steve Allen Show.”

“Did you tell Gretchen that?” she said.

“No, why should I?”

“She’d probably like to interview him.”

“She’s dangerous, Alafair. That’s the truth, not an opinion.”

“Down inside she’s a little girl, Dave.”

Alafair was probably right. But the majority of people we send to the injection table go out like children. The irony is that most of them die with dignity, and some die with much more courage than I would expect of myself. They killed other people, and yet in most instances they cannot adequately explain their behavior to themselves or to others. That’s the way they leave the earth, apologizing briefly to the family of the victim, unresisting, sick and gray with fear, their story, whatever it is, dying with them.

Alafair’s suggestion had not been a bad one. What was there to lose in doing a good deed for a woman who might be salvageable? I got up from my seat and walked down the aisle to the spot in the shadows where Gretchen was filming Dixie Lee. His fingers were flying up and down on the keys, strands of his wavy dyed-gold hair hanging in his eyes, his cheeks puffed like a blowfish’s, his blue suede stomps pounding up and down under the piano, his adenoidal accent rising like notes from a clarinet into the rafters. “Dixie Lee is an old friend of mine, Miss Gretchen,” I said. “I bet he’d be happy to give you an interview.”

“Meaning you’ll introduce me?” she said.

“I’d love to.”

“Why?”

“Because Dixie Lee Pugh is probably the best white blues musician in America, and everybody in the business knows it. No one has ever given him the credit he deserves.”

She lowered her camera and looked past me into the recesses of the audience. “You know a broad named Julie Ardoin?”

“Yeah, she’s in the department.”

“What else is she into?”

“Excuse me?”

“Somebody told me she transported coke for Varina and Jesse Leboeuf,” she said.

“I don’t believe that.”

“Somebody told me maybe she killed her husband.”

“Who’s the somebody?”

“Is it true or not?”

“Both stories are ridiculous.”

“I got it. You’ve never had dirty cops here. Those black kids selling dope in their front yards don’t have to piece off their action.”

“I think your source for this nonsense is Pierre Dupree. Maybe it’s time to wise up.”

She looked around as though she could hardly contain her irritation. “I’d really appreciate you leaving me alone,” she said.

“You don’t want the intro to Dixie Lee?”

She brushed at her eyebrow with her thumb, quizzical, as though asking herself a question. I started back toward my seat. “Mr. Robicheaux?” she said behind me.

I stopped and turned around.

“Are you sure this Ardoin broad is straight up?” she said. “I mean really sure? Like you’re willing to bet Clete’s life on it?”

I sat back down as my cell phone vibrated. It was a missed call. I called the number back, but it went to voice mail.

“Who was that from?” Molly said.

“Catin Segura.”

“She called the house earlier. I didn’t pick up in time. I left a note by the phone. You didn’t see it?”

“No. What did she say on the message machine?”

“She just left her name and asked you to call her. I’m sorry, I thought you saw the note.”

“Did it sound urgent?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“To find Clete.”

It didn’t take long. He and Julie Ardoin were sitting a short distance away from the beer concession. Clete had placed a large red plastic cup foaming with beer between his feet and was adding to it from a silver hip flask. I sat down next to him and rested my hand on his shoulder. Julie was smiling brightly into my face, a purple and gold LSU cap tilted sideways on her head. “Hi, Dave,” she said.

“What’s happenin’, Julie?” I said.

“A little of this, a little of that,” she said, lifting her beer cup.

“See what Clete is doing? We used to call those B-52s. Sometimes we called them depth charges. They’re guaranteed to eat holes in your stomach and give you a hangover from hell.”

“No gloom and doom tonight, Streak,” Clete said. He had a program in his hand. He wiped at his mouth with the back of his wrist and then studied the program. I saw a smear of blood no bigger than a cat’s whisker on his wrist. “This next band is going to do some western swing,” he said. “Bob Wills and Spade Cooley stuff. Did you know Commander Cody got a lot of his style from Spade Cooley?”

“Are you going to drink that?”

“No, I’m going to wash my socks in it,” he replied.

“You want me to get you a cold drink, Dave?” Julie said.

“No, thanks. Y’all going anywhere later?”

“Haven’t thought about it,” Clete replied. “Maybe to Mulate’s for some fried shrimp. What’s up?”

“Nothing. You know Varina Leboeuf very well, Julie?” I said.

“I know her around. Like everybody does,” she replied.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It means I know her around.”

“You like her?” I said.

“What’s with the attitude, big mon?” Clete said.

“I don’t have an attitude. It was just a question,” I replied.

“Dave, if I want to drink boilermakers, that’s what I’m going to do. If they’re bad for me, that’s the breaks. If they give me a headful of snakes in the morning, they’re my snakes.”

“Dave is just trying to be a friend,” Julie said.

“Yeah, but it’s a grand evening, and we don’t need anybody hanging crepe,” he said.

“Somebody said you did some work for Varina Leboeuf,” I said to Julie.

“Whoever told you that is full of shit,” she replied.

“Where’d you hear this?” Clete said.

“Guess,” I said.

I held my eyes on his. His gaze left mine and went to the front of the building, where Gretchen was standing by the corner of the stage. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said.

“Why don’t we talk about it now?” I said.

“Dave, what the hell is the matter with you?” he said.

“I’ve known you a long time, Julie,” I said. “I always liked you. I didn’t set out to offend you. I have some concerns about a story I heard.”

“No problem. Just remind me not to fly you out to any more islands, because I feel like an idiot for thinking you were a friend.”

“You know Pierre Dupree very well?” I asked.

I saw Clete shake his head. “Dave?” he said.

“What?” I said.

He was wearing a tan suit and a knit tie and penny loafers and a shiny light blue shirt with stripes in it, his Panama hat resting on one knee. His face was as red as a Christmas tree bulb. I could see the wisp of blood in the hair on his wrist and his holstered. 38 inside his coat. “Nothing. What’s the point?” he said.

He upended his boilermaker and drank it all the way to the bottom, his eyes as devoid of expression as green marbles. He crushed the cup under his shoe and stared straight ahead, his pulse beating visibly in his throat, his big hands resting on top of his thighs, like a man too tired to get angry anymore.

I walked back toward the stage just as Dixie Lee Pugh was leaving and the western swing band was filing out from the wings. Gretchen Horowitz was sliding the strap of an equipment bag over her shoulder. “Do you want to meet Dixie?” I said.

“I need to see Clete first,” she replied.

“I just talked to him. I don’t think he’s in the mood for any more consultations.”

“You told him what Pierre said?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“You named me as the source without giving me the chance to talk to him first?”

“Not exactly. But Clete is the closest friend I ever had. He’s also the best man I’ve ever known.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, then reopened them. “I can’t believe you. I see you, but I can’t believe someone like you exists. Is your wife doing some kind of penance for something she did in a former life?”

I stepped closer to her, my mouth three inches from her ear. “You need to understand something, Miss Gretchen. If not for me and your father, Sheriff Soileau would have you in a cage full of people like yourself. As it stands, I may have to resign from the department. Plus, I may have to deal with some serious problems of conscience. This isn’t your fault, it’s mine. But I don’t want to listen to any more of your insults.”

I stepped away from her. Her face was white. Dixie Lee Pugh walked toward us, his hand outstretched. “What’s shakin’, Dave?”

“I’d like to introduce you to Gretchen Horowitz. She wants to interview you for her documentary,” I said.

“You’re looking at the boogie-woogie man from la Louisiane, darlin’,” he said. “Where’d you get those eyes, girl? They look like violets.”

“They came out of my mother’s womb with the rest of the unit,” she replied.

“Did Dave tell you we were roommates in college?” Dixie Lee replied.

“You have my sympathies,” she said. She walked down the side aisle toward the rear of the building, her equipment bag swinging on her rump.

“She runs a charm school?” Dixie Lee said.

“I gave her a bad time before you walked up. She’s not to blame,” I said.

His eyes were roving over the crowd, alighting on a familiar face here and there, his paunch resting on his belt. I wondered if he was remembering the glory years and the teenage girls who had fought to touch his shoes when he sang onstage at the Louisiana Hayride, the appearances on American Bandstand, the popping of flashbulbs when he descended the steps from an airliner with his new bride at Heathrow Airport.

“Let’s get some ice cream,” he said.

“Ice cream?”

“I’ve been clean and sober three years now. There’s a truck outside. Look up in the balcony. They’re all eating ice cream. It’s free.”

“I’m happy for you, Dixie.”

“What was the deal with the photographer?”

“Somebody stole her childhood, so she lives every day of her life full of rage.”

“She was molested?” he said, his gaze coming back on mine.

I nodded.

“I’d say she’s ahead of the game.”

“How do you mean?”

“If that happened to me, I think I’d be killing people. Instead, this gal is making films. Sounds like she’s done all right, don’t you think?”

The western band’s first number was “Cimarron.” I was about to rejoin Alafair and Molly and take a pass on Dixie Lee’s invitation when something in our conversation began to bother me, like a piece in a mosaic that is cut wrong and doesn’t fit no matter which way you turn it. I looked up at the balcony again. It was filled with children eating ice cream from paper bowls with plastic spoons. They were not eating Popsicles or soft ice cream from a mechanical dispenser. They were eating ice cream that had been hand-scooped from hard-frozen containers, the kind that neighborhood vending trucks didn’t carry.

“You said there’s a truck outside and the ice cream is free?” I asked.

Either Dixie Lee didn’t hear my question or he didn’t consider it worth answering. His deep-set eyes were looking at the crowd and at the tinseled confetti someone was throwing out of the balcony into the beam of the spotlight.

“What kind of truck?” I said.

“A freezer truck. Who cares?” he said. “Look at the women in this place. Great God Almighty, tell me this world ain’t a pleasure. Pull your tallywhacker out of the hay baler and join the party, Dave.”

I went outside into the coldness of the night and the brilliance of the stars and the smell of barbecue smoke and crawfish boiling in a cauldron of cob-corn and artichokes and whole potatoes, and I saw a tan-colored freezer truck parked between the Sugar Cane Festival Building and the picnic shelters. There were rows of latched freezer compartments on either side of it, and against the background of the tiny white lights strung in the oak trees, its surfaces looked armored and hard-edged and cold to the touch, like a tank parked in the middle of a children’s playground. It was the same kind of truck the Patin brothers used when they tried to blow my head off. The driver was wearing a brown uniform and a cap with a lacquered bill and a scuffed leather jacket, and he was scooping French-vanilla ice cream out of a big round container on a picnic table and placing it in paper bowls for a line of children. His head and face reminded me of an upended ham, his eyes serious with his work, his mouth a tight seam. But when he looked up at me, he smiled in recognition. “I’ll be darned. Remember me?” he said.

“You’re Bobby Joe Guidry,” I replied. “You were in Desert Storm.”

“That’s me.”

“Clete Purcel and I met you at that outdoor dinner for Amidee Broussard. I told you to check out a dispatcher’s job with the department.”

“That’s right. But the job didn’t offer enough hours. Everything worked out okay, though. I just started driving for this offshore supply company. I’m going to meetings, too. You helped me out a lot.”

“You deliver food for deepwater rigs?”

“Yeah, every kind of frozen food there is. I drive to Morgan City and Port Fourchon, mostly.”

“How’d you get on with the company?”

“A lady in your department gave me a number and told me to call them up. She told me to use her name.”

“Which lady, Bobby Joe?”

“Miss Julie. I saw her inside the building just a few minutes ago.”

“What’s her last name, podna?”

“Ardoin. I heard her husband wasn’t any good, but to my mind, Miss Julie is a fine lady.”

“What did you hear about Miss Julie’s husband?”

“He got in with the wrong guys and was flying coke and weed into the country. That’s why he killed himself. Maybe it’s just one of those stories, though.”

“I never heard those stories, Bobby Joe.”

“You probably wouldn’t. He flew out of Lake Charles and Lafayette. Better get some of this ice cream. It’s going fast,” he said.

When I went back into the building, the western swing band was blaring out “The San Antonio Rose,” the horns so loud that the floor was quaking under our feet.