Creole Belle

8

I went back through the hedge and started my truck and got it out of the traffic and into the parking lot. I knew I had no more than five minutes before the Lafayette Police Department would be at the apartment and all my opportunities to interview Varina would be lost. She had put on a robe and was sitting at a table by the pool, a carton of ice cream melting on the glass tabletop.

“Who shot at me?” I said.

“I have no idea,” she replied.

“Don’t tell me that.”

“You scared my father. You had no right to do that.”

“Nobody scares your father. It’s the other way around. His whole career was invested in terrifying people who have no power.”

“I don’t mean you. I mean what you’re doing. Pierre got mixed up with the Giacano family. On what level, I don’t know. But I know he’s afraid, just like my father is.”

“The Giacanos slid down the pipe when Didi Gee died. The rest of the family are nickel-and-dime lamebrains who couldn’t operate a pizza oven without a diagram. Your father has his vices, but I don’t think fear of the Giacanos is one of them.”

“My lawyer is in the middle of working out a divorce settlement with Pierre. I’m not sure of all the things he’s involved in. My lawyer says maybe I should be careful about what I pray for, meaning what I end up with.”

“Don’t you and Pierre already own an electronic security service of some kind?”

“Not exactly. Pierre and I and my father own half of it together. An international conglomerate bought the rest of the stock a few years ago. I actually got into the business to create a job for my father.”

What she was telling me didn’t coincide with her history. Varina had been an electrical engineering major at LSU and had been involved with high-tech electronic security work since she graduated. “So your lawyer thinks Pierre’s business enterprises might be toxic?” I said.

“At least some of them. He grew up in St. Mary Parish. Back in the 1970s, his mother’s family evicted people from their company homes for even talking to a union representative. The funny thing about them, and this includes Pierre, is they’ve never felt they did anything wrong. They feel no guilt about anything, including infidelity.” She let her eyes shift onto mine.

“You’re talking about Pierre?”

“So you don’t get the wrong idea, I did it back to him. I owned up to it at my church. It was embarrassing, but I’m glad I got it off my chest.”

“Is the grandfather a player in any of this?”

“I don’t know what he is. I always stayed away from him.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Everything. His eyes. The way his teeth show behind his lips when he looks at you. Once he came up behind me and touched the back of my neck. He said, ‘You must be still. There’s a bee in your hair.’ Then he pushed his body against me. It was disgusting. I told Pierre about it, but he said I was imagining things.”

I really didn’t want to hear any more about the grandfather or Varina’s problems with him. “Do the names Tee Jolie and Blue Melton mean anything to you?”

“No, who are they?”

“Girls from St. Martinville. One is missing, and one was found in a block of ice.”

“I read about that.” She shook her head, refocusing her concentration. “What does this have to do with me or Pierre or his grandfather?”

“I think Pierre used Tee Jolie as a model in one of his paintings.”

“I don’t think he uses models. I don’t think he paints anybody. He’s a fraud.”

“Pardon?”

“His talent is like flypaper. Little pieces of other people’s work stick in his head, and he puts them on a canvas and calls the painting his. Every time there’s a real artist in the area, you can see Pierre’s tail disappearing inside his hidey-hole. He’s a sex addict, not an artist. Why would he stay down here if he’s an artist? Wouldn’t he be in New York or Paris or Los Angeles? There’s an art gallery in Krotz Springs, Louisiana?”

“Say that again?”

“Pierre is a freak. I won’t go into detail except to say our bed should have been cruciform in shape. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. None of it seems to register.”

I stared at her blankly, a bit in awe of her ability to control and manipulate a conversation. The first Lafayette PD cruiser to arrive at the crime scene turned in to the parking lot, followed by a sheriff’s cruiser and a second city department vehicle that parked by the curb, on the other side of the hedge. While I still had my thoughts together-which was not easy after a conversation with Varina Leboeuf-I tried to remember everything she had told me. She was intelligent and lovely to look at. Her fine cheekbones and the softness of her mouth and the earnestness in her expression were of a kind that made both the celibate and the happily married question the wisdom of their vows. I also realized that she had managed to deflect the conversation away from specifics about her husband’s criminality to how wretched it was to be married to him. I didn’t know if her depiction of her husband’s sexual habits was true, but I had to hand it to her: Varina could weave a spiderweb and sprinkle it with gold dust and lure you inside and wrap it around both your eyes and your heart, all the while making you enjoy your own entrapment.

“When you get finished with the local cops, hang around and we’ll have some ice cream,” she said.

“Will I learn anything else?”

“There are always possibilities.”

“Would you repeat that?”

Her gaze lingered longer on my face than it should have. “You look picaresque with that cut over your eye.” She touched the side of my face and studied my eyes.

I felt my cheeks coloring. “You always knew how to leave your mark,” I said.

It was raining when I walked to work the next morning. Helen Soileau caught me before I could take off my coat. “In my office,” she said.

I was ready for a harangue, but as was often the case in my dealings with Helen, I had misjudged her. “You walked to work in the rain?” she said.

“My pickup is at the glazier’s in Lafayette.”

“The Lafayette PD found the freezer truck burning in a coulee. It was boosted from behind a motel early yesterday,” she said. “You never saw the shooter before?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Give me your coat.”

“What’s going on?”

She took my raincoat from my hand and shook it and hung it on a rack by the door. “Sit down,” she said. “Why did you go to Lafayette without informing me or checking in with Lafayette PD?”

“I was off the clock, and I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“What are we going to do with you, Pops?”

“How about a pay raise?”

“I don’t know why I put up with you. I really don’t. I have a fantasy: You’re the sheriff and I’m you, and I get to do to you what you do to me.”

“I can’t blame you.”

She was sitting behind her desk now, biting on the corner of her lip. I had always been convinced that several distinct and separate people had taken up residence inside her. I was never sure to which of them I would be speaking. She was a genuinely mysterious woman, probably the most complex I had ever known. Sometimes she would pause in midsentence and stare directly into my eyes in a way that made her features sharpen, her cheeks pool with shadow, as though she were having thoughts that the Helen Soileau who came to work that morning would not allow herself to have. All of us believe we have boundaries we won’t cross. I believed Helen had boundaries, too. But I wasn’t sure that either of us knew what they were. I cleared my throat and focused my attention on the raindrops running down the windows.

“You’re supposed to be on the desk and off duty at noon,” she said. “You’re supposed to go home and take naps and throw pinecones in the bayou. Obviously, that’s not what you have in mind. You prefer stirring up the wrong people in New Orleans and going to Lafayette and eating a load of buckshot.”

“I didn’t plan any of this. What do you want me to say?”

“I advise you to say nothing.”

I sighed and raised my hands and dropped them in my lap.

“I think it’s time to put you back on full-time status, bwana,” she said. She narrowed one eye. “It’s the only way I can keep your umbilical cord stapled to the corner of my desk.”

How do you reply to a statement like that? “Thank you,” I said.

“Lafayette PD thinks the shooter was some guy with a personal hard-on,” she said. “They’re looking at a parolee who just got off Camp J, a guy you put away years go. He was staying at the motel where the freezer truck got boosted. You remember a guy by the name of Ronnie Earl Patin?”

“Child molestation, strong-arm robbery, he hurt an elderly man with a hammer about ten years back?” I said.

“That’s the baby.”

“Ronnie Earl was a fat slob. I’m almost certain I’ve never seen either one of the guys in the freezer truck.”

“People can change a lot in ten years, particularly if they’re hoeing out a bean field.”

“The shooter had features like the edge of an ax. The driver was short. Ronnie Earl wasn’t.”

“Could Pierre Dupree be behind this?”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t seem his style. I wouldn’t rule out Jesse Leboeuf.”

“You don’t think that’s a stretch?” she said.

“When I was a pin boy at the bowling alley out on East Main, Jesse was one of the older boys who bullied the rest of us in the pits. He’d made a slingshot with a hand-carved wood frame and elastic medical tubing and a leather pouch to fit a marble in. On Saturday nights he and his buds would go nigger-knocking down on Hopkins.”

“That was bad stuff, but it was a long time ago,” she said.

“I knew a number of kids like him. Some of them are still around. Know what’s interesting about them? They’re as mean as they were when they were kids. They just know how to hide it better.”

“How long did it take you to get from Jesse Leboeuf’s place to Varina’s apartment?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Bring Leboeuf in,” she said.

Clete Purcel had poured three jiggers of sherry into a glass of milk and gone to sleep before eleven P.M. In his dream, he was standing on a dock under a velvet-black sky on the southernmost tip of Key West, music from a marimba band drifting on the wind behind him, the smoky-green glow of nameless organisms lighting under waves that slid through the pilings without capping. The dream was one he’d had many times and was a safe place to be, but even in his sleep, he knew he had to keep it inviolate and not let it be invaded and destroyed by a milkman who departed for work at four A.M. and often returned home by ten A.M., drunk and unpredictable, sometimes pulling his belt out of his pant loops as soon as he entered the house.

In the dream, the wind was balmy and smelled of salt spray and seaweed and shellfish that had been stranded on the beach by the receding waves. It also smelled of a Eurasian girl who spoke French and English and lived on a sampan in a cove on the edge of the South China Sea, her skin like alabaster traced with the shadows of palm fronds, her nipples as red and inviting as small roses. He could see her walking nude into the water, her hair floating off her shoulders, her teeth white when she smiled at him and extended her hand.

But Clete’s dead father had long ago devised ways of breaking into his inner sanctum, throwing back the bedroom door, his scowl as scalding as an openhanded slap. Sometimes the father poured a sack full of dry rice on the floor and made Clete kneel on the kernels until sunrise; sometimes he sat on the side of the bed and gently touched Clete’s face with a hand that was as callused as a carpenter’s; sometimes he lay down beside Clete and wept as a child would.

Clete could feel himself losing the dream, the marimba music and the salt wind disappearing out an open window, the palm fronds collapsing against their trunks, the Eurasian girl turning her attentions elsewhere. He realized he was hearing the sounds of the street, which he never heard above the hum of his air conditioner. He sat up in bed and reached for the nine-millimeter Beretta he kept between his mattress and box spring. It was gone.

A figure was sitting in a chair by his television set. “Who are you?” he asked.

The figure made no reply.

“You’re about to get the shit kicked out of you,” Clete said. He pulled open the drawer of his nightstand, where he kept a blackjack. The drawer was empty. He put his feet on the floor and adjusted himself inside his skivvies. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you’ve creeped the wrong house.”

In the glow from a streetlamp on the corner, he could see the hands of the figure pick up his Beretta and release the magazine from the frame and pull back the slide and eject the round in the chamber. The figure leaned forward and one by one tossed the Beretta and the magazine and the ejected round on his bed. “I can see why you need some help,” a female voice said. “Your security service has been out of date since Alexander Graham Bell died.”

“Gretchen?”

“That offer you made me, that was on the level?” she said.

“Sure, if you don’t mind working cheap. I work on commission most of the time for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”

“You’re not trying to get in my bread?”

“I would have told you.”

“I get it. You tell girls up front when you’re planning to get it on with them? I bet you get a lot of action that way.”

“You need to stop talking like that.”

“Why were you asking about the scars on my arms?”

“Because you’ve got scars, that’s all. I’ve got lots of them. They mean a person has been around. No, they mean a person has probably paid some dues.”

“You want to know how I got them? It happened before I was supposed to be able to remember anything. But I still have dreams about a man who comes into my room with fingertips that glow with light. You know what the light is?”

“You don’t need to talk about this, Gretchen.”

“You figured it out?”

“Maybe.”

“What kind of man would do that to a baby?”

“A sadist and a coward. A guy who doesn’t deserve to live. Maybe a guy who already got what he deserved.”

“What was that last part?”

“They all go down. It’s just a matter of time. That’s all I was saying. It takes a while, but they go down.”

“I can’t figure you out.”

“You want to work for me or not?”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I like you. I need the help, too.”

“I know where I saw you before.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, his heart seizing up.

“Remember Boog Powell? He played first base for Baltimore. He used to own a boatyard in the Keys. I used to take a charter out of there to Seven Mile Reef. Boog always said mermaids lived under the reef. He was a big kidder.”

“That was probably it.”

“You’re a piece of work,” she said.

“I’m not sure how to take that.”

“It’s a compliment,” she said. “Sometimes I have to travel. Are you cool with that?”

“No, if you work for me, you work for me.”

She shrugged. “And eBay is killing my antique business, anyway. You got anything to eat? I’m starving.”

BeforeI left the office to bring in Jesse Leboeuf, Helen told me to bring along a black female deputy named Catin Segura. “What for?” I asked.

“Because she’s about to be promoted to detective, and I want her around a good influence.”

“What’s the real reason?”

“What I said.” When I continued to look at her, she added, “If Jesse Leboeuf gives you trouble, I want a witness.”

Catin Segura was a single mother and had a two-year degree in criminal justice from a community college in New Orleans. Like Helen, she had started her career in law enforcement at the NOPD as a meter maid, then had gone to work for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department as a 911 dispatcher. She owned a modest home in Jeanerette and lived there with her two children and was a pleasant and decent and humble woman who was conscientious about her job and the care of her family. In the five years she had been a patrolwoman, no complaint of any kind had ever been filed against her. As we headed down to Cypremort Point in her cruiser, I knew that Helen had made a mistake in assigning Catin to accompany me. There is an old lesson a police officer learns soon or learns late: Evil does not rinse itself out of the human soul. Catin Segura had no business around the likes of Jesse Leboeuf.

The rain had stopped, and through the cruiser’s windshield, I could see a waterspout on the bay, its funnel as bright as spun glass, bending and warping in the sunlight. The cypress trees that stood in freshwater ponds on either side of us were turning gold with the season, and there was a smell in the wind like shrimp or trout schooling up in the coves.

“What’s the story on this guy?” Catin asked.

“He’s just an old man. Don’t pay too much attention to what he says or does.”

She took her eyes off the road. “He’s got some racial issues?”

“He’s one of those guys whose head is like a bad neighborhood. It’s better not to go into it.”

She didn’t speak the rest of the way to Jesse’s house. When we pulled into his yard, he was standing by a barbecue pit under a pecan tree, wrapping a sheet of aluminum foil around a large redfish. He had filled the aluminum foil with sauce piquante and sliced onions and lemons and had perforated it with a fork so the fish could absorb the smoke from the coals. He glanced at us and then picked up a can of beer from a wood table and drank from it, his attention focused on the waterspout on the bay. His shoulders looked as wide as an ax handle. The wind was blowing steadily out of the south, rustling the leaves on the tree limbs above us.

“Sheriff Soileau wants you to help her out with something, Mr. Jesse,” I said. “If you have a few minutes to spare, we can drive you into town.”

“You’re talking about the hermaphrodite?” he said.

“Bad choice of words,” I replied.

“He’p with what?” he asked.

“Better take it up with her. She doesn’t always share everything with me,” I said.

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

“That’s not a good way to talk to a fellow officer,” I said.

“Who’s this?” he asked, looking at Catin.

“Deputy Sheriff Segura, sir,” she said.

Jesse’s eyes traveled up and down her person as though he were examining a side of beef. “I’m fixing to eat,” he said to me. “Tell the hermaphrodite I’ll come in when I’ve got a mind to.”

“No, sir, you need to come in now,” Catin said.

“Did I address you?” Jesse asked.

“Jesse, you know the drill. It’s not up for grabs,” I said.

“I asked this girl a question,” Jesse said.

“Sir, you can go in as a friend of the process or in cuffs,” Catin said.

“You need to do something about this, Robicheaux.”

“Here’s the way I see it, Mr. Jesse,” I said. “There are ponds on both sides of your road that are full of sunfish and goggle-eye perch. You’re surrounded by palm and oak trees and a saltwater bay with schools of both white and speckled trout. You can sail a boat from your yard to Key West, Florida. How many men get to live in a place like that? Sheriff Soileau probably needs about twenty minutes of your time. Is that too much to ask of you, sir?”

“After I’m done with my dinner and washing my dishes and cleaning out my fire pit, I’ll give it some thought,” he replied. “Then I’ll call Sheriff Soileau and take care of the matter. In the meantime, I want y’all out of here.”

Catin stepped closer to him, her thumbs hooked on the sides of her belt. “No, you will get in the back of the cruiser, Mr. Leboeuf. You will also lose the attitude. If you don’t like a female deputy or a black female deputy standing on your grass, that’s too bad. I’m going to put my hand on you now and escort you to the cruiser. If you do not do as you are told, you are going to be charged with resisting.”

“You get this bitch off my property,” Leboeuf said to me.

“That’s it,” Catin said. She spun him around and shoved him between the shoulder blades into the side of the cruiser. Then she pulled out her handcuffs and reached for his left wrist, as though the situation had been resolved. That was a mistake. Jesse Leboeuf turned around and stiff-armed her in the chest, his face bitten with disdain.

She stumbled backward, then pulled her can of Mace from her belt. I stepped between her and Leboeuf and held my hands up in front of him, not touching him, moving side to side as he tried to advance toward her. “I’m hooking you up, Jesse,” I said. “You’re under arrest for resisting and assault on a police officer. If you touch my person, I’m going to put you on your knees.”

His eyes looked hot and small and recessed in his sun-browned face. I could only guess at the thoughts he was having about Catin and the images he carried from a lifetime of abusing people who had no power: black women in the three-dollar cribs on Hopkins; a hobo pulled off a boxcar; a New Orleans pimp who thought he could bring his own girls to town and not piece off the action; an illiterate Cajun wife whose body shrank when he touched her. I could hear Catin breathing next to me. “I need to finish this, Dave,” she said.

“No, Mr. Jesse is going to be all right,” I said. “Right, Mr. Jesse? This bullshit is over. Give me your word to that effect, and we’ll all go into town and work this out.”

“Don’t you do this,” Catin said to me.

“It’s over,” I said. “Right, Jesse?”

He looked hard at me, then nodded.

“Shame on you,” Catin said to me.

We rode in front with Leboeuf in back, unhooked, behind the wire-mesh screen. We didn’t speak until we were at the department, and then it was only to get Leboeuf into a holding cell.

Catin went in to see Helen first, then I did. “Catin says you wouldn’t back her up,” Helen said.

“Call it what you want,” I replied. “I didn’t see too many alternatives at the time.”

“Nobody is going to knock my deputies around.”

“What would you have done?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“You’d bust up an old man and involve one of your deputies in a liability suit? That’s what you’re saying?”

She picked a pen up from her desk blotter and dropped it in a can full of other pens. “Talk to her. She thinks highly of you.”

“I will.”

“While you were gone, I pulled Leboeuf’s phone records,” she said. “I haven’t charged him so far because I don’t want him lawyered up.”

“What did you find?”

“He’s made some suspicious calls, put it that way. You think he’s capable of putting a hit on a cop?”

“Jesse Leboeuf is capable of anything.”

“Get him in here,” she said.

On the way to the holding cell, I saw Catin in the corridor. “Walk with me,” I said.

“Why should I?”

I rested my hand on her shoulder. “When I was a young second lieutenant in the United States Army, I reported a major who was drunk on duty. Nothing was done about it. Later, this same major sent us down a night trail strung with Bouncing Betties and Chinese toe-poppers. We lost two men that night. I know how it feels when somebody doesn’t back your play. That wasn’t my intention when I stepped in front of Jesse Leboeuf. The real problem was not you but me. The truth is, I hate men like Jesse Leboeuf, and when I deal with them, I sometimes go across lines I shouldn’t.”

She stopped walking and turned toward me, forcing me to drop my hand from her shoulder. She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine. “Forget it,” she said.

“Sheriff Soileau wants Leboeuf in her office in a few minutes. I think he’s dirty on some level, but right now we’re not sure what. I wonder if you can do a favor for me.”

After she and I talked, she walked by herself down to the holding cell while I took a seat in a chair around the corner.

“I have to clear up something between us, Mr. Leboeuf,” she said through the bars. “I don’t like you or what you represent. You’re a racist and a misogynist, and the world would be better off without you. But as a Christian, I have to forgive you. The reason I’m able to do that is I think you’re a victim yourself. It appears you were loyal to people who are now ratting you out. That must be a terrible fate to live with. Anyway, that’s your business, not mine. Good-bye, and I hope I never see you again.”

It was a masterpiece. I waited five minutes, then unlocked Leboeuf’s cell door. “The sheriff wants to see you,” I said.

“I’m getting out?” he said, rising from the wood bench where he had been sitting.

“Are you kidding?” I said. I cuffed his wrists behind him and made sure as many people as possible witnessed his humiliation while I escorted him to Helen’s office.

“Y’all don’t have the right to do this to me,” he said.

“I don’t want to tell you how to think, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be the fall guy on this one,” I replied.

“Fall guy on what?”

“Suit yourself,” I said. I opened the door to Helen’s office and sat him down in a chair.

Helen was standing by the window, backlit by the sun’s glare off Bayou Teche. She smiled pleasantly at him. She was holding half a dozen printouts from the phone company. “Did you know that prior to Dave Robicheaux’s visit to your home yesterday, you hadn’t used your landline or your cell phone in two days?”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” he replied, his hands still cuffed behind him, the strain starting to show.

“Immediately after Detective Robicheaux left your house, you made three calls: one to the home of Pierre Dupree, one to a boat dock south of New Orleans, and one to a company called Redstone Security. Forty-five minutes later, someone tried to kill Detective Robicheaux.”

“I called Pierre because him and me and my daughter own half of Redstone. I’m retired, but I still consult for them. I wanted Pierre to know that I’ll sell him my shares in the company at the stock option price if he’ll treat my daughter right in their divorce settlement. The phone call to the boat dock was a misdial. What difference does any of this make, anyway?”

“You dialed the wrong number?” she said.

“I guess. I didn’t give it any thought.”

“Your phone records show you called that same boat dock four times in the last month. Were those all misdials?”

“I’m old. I get confused,” he said. “You’re talking too fast and trying to trip me up. I want my daughter here.”

“Lafayette PD was on the shooter from the jump,” Helen said. “He’s a guy you know, Mr. Leboeuf. He doesn’t want to go back to Camp J. Are you going to take his weight? At your age, any sentence can mean life.”

Leboeuf stared into space, his unshaved cheeks threaded with tiny purple veins. I realized we had been foolish in thinking we could take him over the hurdles. He belonged to that group of people who, of their own volition, eradicate all light from the soul and thereby inure themselves against problems of conscience and any thoughts of restraint in dealing with the wiles of their enemies. I cannot say with certainty what constitutes a sociopath. My guess is they love evil for its own sake, that they chose roles and vocations endowing them with sufficient authority and power to impose their agenda on their fellow man. Was Jesse Leboeuf a sociopath? Or was he something worse?

“I don’t like you staring at me like that,” he said to me.

“Did you ever think about the emotional damage you did to the people you tormented with your slingshot years ago?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“When you and your friends went nigger-knocking in the black district.”

He shook his head. “I have no memory of that,” he replied.

“Get him out of here,” Helen said.

I unlocked Leboeuf’s cuffs. He stood up, rubbing his wrists. “You charging me on the beef with the black woman?”

“You’re free to go, sir,” I replied.

Leboeuf huffed air out his nose and left Helen’s office, trailing his cigarette odor like a soiled flag. But it wasn’t over. Five minutes later, I was standing by the possessions desk when a deputy handed Leboeuf the manila envelope that contained his wallet and keys and pocket change and cigarette lighter. I watched him put each item back in his pockets, gazing indolently out the window at the oak-shaded grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother.

“Mind if I have a look at your key chain?” I said.

“What’s so interesting about it?” he asked.

“The fob. It’s a sawfish. It’s like the one I think was painted on the bow of the boat that abducted Blue Melton.”

“It’s a goddamn fish. What kind of craziness are you trying to put on me now?”

“I remember where I saw that emblem painted on another boat many years ago. It was in sixty feet of water, south of Cocodrie. The sawfish was on the conning tower of a Nazi submarine. It was sunk by a Coast Guard dive-bomber in 1943. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Give your guff to the devil,” he replied.

Later, I made two calls to the boat dock whose number Helen had pulled from Leboeuf’s phone records. In each instance the man I spoke with said he knew nothing of a white boat with a sawfish painted on the bow.