Creole Belle (33 page)

“Are you trying to scare me off?”

He pressed his fingers against his temples. “Hang on a minute. There are some things I can’t talk about without a drink in my hand, otherwise my gyroscope spins out of control and I fall down.” He went into the kitchen and put the shot glasses and the Carta Blanca and the bottle of tequila and the bowl of limes and a salt shaker on the tray and brought them back to the rollaway. He drank his shot glass empty and sipped on the beer and felt it go down cold and bright and hard in his throat. He sucked on a lime and poured another shot, blowing out his breath, gin roses blooming in his cheeks. “I guess I’m going through some kind of physiological change. Hooch seems to go straight into my bloodstream these days, kind of like I’m mainlining. Or throwing kerosene on a fire. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got a dragon walking around in my chest. My nether regions get out of control, too.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink.”

“That’s like telling the pope he shouldn’t work on Sundays.”

“You shouldn’t belittle yourself.”

“Yeah?”

“The world beats up on everybody and breaks most of us,” she said. “Why should we do it to ourselves when it’s going to happen anyway? The only things we take with us are the memories of the good times we had and the good people we knew along the way.”

“I never figured any of that stuff out.”

“You’re a lot more complicated than you pretend.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “It’s almost dark. I’m going to turn on the floor lamp. I don’t like the dark.”

“Why tell me about it?”

“Because I don’t hide anything I do.” She walked to the lamp and clicked it on, then faced him. “Do you like me?”

“I get in trouble, Miss Varina. Lots of it, on a regular basis. I think you’ve had enough trouble in your life already.”

She unbuttoned her shirt and the top of her jeans. “Tell me if you like me.”

“Sure I do.”

“You like the way I look now? Am I too forward? Tell me if I am.”

“I don’t have any illusions about my age and the way I look and the reasons I wrecked my career. I’d better hit the road. I showed bad judgment in coming here. You’re a nice lady, Miss V. It would be an honor to get involved with a lady like yourself, but you’re still married, and this won’t be good for either one of us.”

“If you call me ‘Miss’ again, I’m going to hit you. No, don’t get up. Let me do this for you. Please. You don’t know how important the love of a good man can be. No, not just a good man but a strong man. You are a good man, aren’t you? Oh, Clete, you sweet man. Clete, Clete, Clete, that’s so good. Oh, oh, oh.”

He felt as though a great wave had just curled out of the ocean and knocked him backward into the sand.

I
LOOKED OUT
our back bedroom window early Saturday morning and saw Clete Purcel slouching through the fog like a medieval penitent headed for the side door of the cathedral, hoping no one would see the load of guilt he was carrying. He stared at the house, looking for signs of life, then picked up a folding chair and walked down to the bayou, past Tripod’s hutch, where both Tripod and Snuggs sat on the roof, watching him. Clete’s seersucker coat was sparkling with damp, his wilted necktie and porkpie hat and rumpled shirt as incongruous as formal dress on a hippopotamus.

Molly was still asleep. I slipped on a pair of khakis and a sweater and lit the kitchen stove and set a pot of coffee on the burner and picked up a folding chair from the mudroom and walked down to the bayou. I could barely make out Clete’s shape in the fog. He was leaning forward in his chair, studying the cattails and elephant ears and the water sliding over the cypress knees that marbled the bank. Somewhere deep inside the fog, I heard the giant cogged wheels lifting the drawbridge into the air.

“Did I wake you up?” he said.

“You know me. I’m an early riser,” I replied. I unfolded my chair and sat down beside him. I could smell the booze and weed and the odor of funk and stale deodorant trapped inside his clothes. “Rough night?”

“I guess it depends on how you read it. Varina Leboeuf has a photo of her husband with Tee Jolie Melton. It was taken in a club, maybe one of those zydeco joints up by Bayou Bijoux. I told her to give it to you.”

“I’m glad you did,” I replied, waiting for him to get to the real reason he had come to the house.

“Think it’s enough to get him in the box?”

“It’s not proof of a crime, but it’s a start.”

“Varina came across it by accident. She wanted to do the right thing with it.” He kept his attention fixed on the water and the bream starting to feed among the lily pads. “I agreed to take her on as a client.”

“She wants you to get the gen on her husband?”

“She came into the office yesterday with a minister. She thinks she’s in danger. What should I have done? Kicked her out?”

“That’s all that’s bothering you?”

“More or less.”

“It’s just another gig. If it doesn’t work out, let it go.”

“That’s the way I figured it.”

“I’ve got some coffee on. How about some Grape-Nuts and milk and blackberries?”

“That’d be nice. I didn’t want to wake you up, that’s all. So that’s why I thought I’d sit on the bank awhile and watch the sun come up.”

“What happened last night, Clete?”

He turned and looked at me sideways. He grimaced. “I went out to her old man’s place on Cypremort Point. The old man is in Iberia General.”

I nodded, trying to show no expression.

“We played badminton,” he said. “Then I knocked back a few shots of tequila, and she showed me the photograph. She collects Indian artifacts, all kinds of junk from Santa Fe and around Mesa Verde and other places out west. She goes on archaeological digs. She found some ancient pottery in a cave, bowls that go back to the thirteenth century. That’s when there was a big drought in the Southwest. She knows all about that kind of stuff.”

“People who go on archaeological digs don’t get to keep their artifacts, Clete.”

“Yeah, I brought that up a little later.”

“Later than when?”

“After we got it on.”

“You were in the sack with Varina Leboeuf?”

“In the sack, on a chair, standing up, against the wall, you name it. I think we might have broken some of her old man’s furniture. She’s like a portable volcano. About four
A.M
. she was ready to rock again. We fell on top of her teddy bear.”

“Her what?”

“She has this teddy bear on a couch under all her Indian artifacts.”

“Varina Leboeuf keeps teddy bears in the room where she gets it on with guys our age?”

“Come on, Streak, I already feel like somebody ran over me with a garbage truck. I don’t mean about her. I’m talking about me. I’m old and fat, and all I think about is getting my ashes hauled. It’s the way I am, but having somebody else tell me that about myself doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Go over it again.”

“What for?”

“Just do it. Don’t leave out one detail.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, his hands splayed on his knees, and repeated everything. I cupped my hand on the back of his neck. It felt as hard as iron, the pockmarks in his skin oily and hot and as coarse as pig hide on the edges. He looked at the water, his face wan, his coat almost splitting on his back. “I feel awful,” he said.

“The teddy bear, did it look like an old one?”

“Now that you mention it, no.”

“Think about it, Cletus. What doesn’t fit in the story you just told me?”

“I can’t follow you,” he said. “I feel like the Tijuana Brass is doing a Mexican hat dance inside my head.”

“Varina has a long history with men. She never asks for quarter and never gives it. She’s not a sentimentalist. If Wyatt Earp ever had a female counterpart, it’s Varina Leboeuf.”

“The teddy bear?” he said.

“It doesn’t belong in the picture, does it?”

“Why would she want to trap me with a nanny-cam? Who cares if a guy like me can’t keep his stiff red-eye under control?”

“The better question is how many guys around here are in stag films they don’t know about?” I said.

A
HALF HOUR
later, Gretchen Horowitz could barely contain her anger as she began dissecting Clete inside the cottage they were sharing at the motor court down the Teche. “You stay out all night and don’t bother to call or leave a message?”

“I’m sorry, Gretchen. I was in the bag. I was doing tequila shots and mixing it with beer, then somebody ripped the hands off the clock.”

“That’s not all you were doing.” She fanned at her face with a magazine.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Get in the shower. I’m going to open up some windows. Why don’t you show some discretion? Who was the broad?”

Clete was taking off his shoes on the edge of the bed. “These things are none of your business,” he said.

“It was Varina Leboeuf, wasn’t it?”

He dropped a shoe on the floor and stood up and took off his shirt. Lipstick was smeared on the collar, and the underarms were dark with sweat. He threw the shirt in the corner. “She had a photo of Pierre Dupree with Tee Jolie Melton. That’s why I went to her place. It was supposed to be business.”

“They’re playing you, Clete.”

“Who’s
they
?”

“She and her husband.”

“Varina hates his guts.”

“Use your head. From a legal perspective, that photo doesn’t mean squat. Dupree knows you and Dave Robicheaux will eventually find out he knew Tee Jolie. So she provides you with a photo that he can claim he doesn’t remember, and then both of them are off the hook. In the meantime, she gets you on a leash and gains access to everything
you and Dave Robicheaux are doing. You’d see that if your brains weren’t in your putz. Get undressed and give me your clothes. I’m going to take them to the Laundromat.”

“Say that again about the two of them working together?”

“Not until you get in the shower,” she said, throwing open a window, flooding the inside of the cottage with sunlight and fresh air.

After she heard the water beating on the sides of the tin stall, she went into the bathroom and picked up his underwear and stuffed it in a dirty-clothes bag. Then she went through his slacks and the top shelf of his closet and his dresser drawers. She opened the bathroom door and leaned inside, steam billowing around her head. “I took your car keys, your sap, and your Beretta,” she said. “Take a nap. While I’m gone, I’ll do your laundry. In the meantime, you keep your harpoon in your tackle box. I’ll be back this evening.”

She got in the Caddy and drove to the McDonald’s on East Main and used the pay phone so there would be no personal record of her calls. Then she bought a fish sandwich and a milk shake to go and rolled down the top on the Caddy. The trip to New Orleans on the four-lane, going through Morgan City, would take only two hours. The sky was a hard blue, the sun so bright she couldn’t look directly at it, but there was a dark border of clouds low on the southern horizon, and the trees were starting to swell with wind. She burned rubber going down East Main, the unchecked power of the engine throbbing through the steering wheel into her hands.

S
HE PARKED THE
Caddy on a side street off St. Charles, not far from a restaurant that recently was redone in art deco. After she used the electric motor to put up the top, she tied a scarf on her head and removed a pair of sunglasses from her tote bag and put them on and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. She reached in the bag again and removed a tube of lipstick and rubbed it on her mouth. She could see the old iron green-painted streetcar coming up the neutral ground from the Carrollton district, its bell clanging. The sun had gone behind a rain cloud, and the homes along the avenue, most of them built in the 1850s, had fallen into deep shade, the white
paint on them suddenly gray, the only touch of color in the yards from the camellia bushes that bloomed year-round. The barometer had dropped precipitously, the wind had started to gust, and the air was colder and smelled of dust and the advent of winter. Some of the restaurant’s patrons were eating outdoors on a patio covered by a green-and-white-striped nylon awning. The streetcar stopped at the corner, discharging several passengers, then clanged its bell again and lumbered down the tracks through the tunnel of live oaks that extended almost to the Pontchartrain Hotel, near downtown. Gretchen studied the patrons at the tables and tried with no success to see through the smoked-glass windows in the side of the building. When the passengers who had been on the streetcar walked by her, she concentrated on locking the Caddy’s doors, her face angled down. She adjusted the strap of her tote bag on her shoulder and entered the restaurant through a side door.

The maître d’ approached from his station at the front of the restaurant, a menu under his arm. “Would you like a table?” he said.

“I’m supposed to meet Pierre Dupree here. But I don’t see him,” she replied.

“Mr. Dupree and his party have a private room. Please follow me,” the maître d’ said.

Gretchen did not remove her sunglasses or her scarf. When she entered the private dining area in back, she saw an elegantly dressed, tall, black-haired, handsome man sitting at a table with two other men, neither of whom wore a jacket. She pulled up a chair and sat down. The tall man was eating a shrimp cocktail, chewing in the back of his mouth, the fork dwarfed by his big hand. He had tucked a napkin into the top of his shirt. “Are you sure you have the right table, miss?” he said.