Creole Belle (51 page)

Until he heard the doorknob twist behind him and the door scrape across the throw rug that had knotted under his boot when he shoved Catin Segura into the room. He rose naked from the bed, his body hair glistening with sweat, his mouth and throat choked with phlegm. “Who are you?” he said.

The figure was wearing a hooded jacket and a face mask made of digital camouflage and was pointing a Sig Sauer P226 at him, a sound suppressor screwed onto the barrel. His eyes drifted to Catin’s dresser, where he had placed his .38 snub in its clip-on holster. The .38 was under five feet from where he stood, but the distance could have been five miles. There was salt in his eyes, and he tried to wipe them clean with his fingers. His erection had died, and a vinegary stench was rising from his armpits. He heard the roof creak in the wind.

“The woman invited me here. Ask her,” he said. “Me and her go back. We got us an arrangement.”

He realized he had started to raise his hands without being told and that a kettledrum was pounding in his head. What were the right words to say? What argument could he make to save his life? What verbal deceit could he perpetrate on the person aiming the silenced P226 at his sternum? “That’s military-issue. I was a serviceman myself. United States Air Force,” he said.

The figure moved toward the bed and, with a gloved hand, removed the wadded-up paper towels from Catin Segura’s mouth.

“I know who you are,” Jesse Leboeuf said. “You’re the one that was out at the Point. You got no reason to kill me, girl.”

He tried to hold his eyes on the masked figure, but they were burning so badly that he had to press his palms into the sockets. Red rings receded into his brain, and sweat ran down his chest and stomach and pubic hair and phallus onto the floor.
Reach out and take death into your arms and pull it inside your chest
, he heard a voice say.
It cain’t be as bad as they say. A flash, a moment of pain, and then blackness. Don’t be afraid
.

“Kill him,” Catin Segura said.

“She tole me to do all this. The handcuffs, all of it,” he said. “We need to talk this out. I’m gonna put on my pants, and we’ll sit down and talk. You got to let me give my side of it.”

“He’s lying,” the woman said from the bed.

“It’s her that’s lying. It’s their nature. It’s the way they was raised. I’m not being unfair. I’m not afraid. I know you’re probably a good person. I just want to talk.”

But he was terrified and acted it. He ran for the bathroom, where he had not locked the window, slipping on the rug, slamming into the doorframe, trying to right himself with one hand and reach a spot that was beyond the shooter’s angle of fire. His flab and his genitalia jiggled on his frame; his breath heaved in his chest; his heart felt like it was wrapped with wire. He heard a sound that was like a sudden puncture and the brief escape of air from a tire, just as a round cored through his left buttock and exited his thigh, slinging a horsetail of blood across the wall. He tried to grab the windowsill with one hand and mount the toilet seat so he could knock the screen out of the window with his head and leap to the ground. Then he heard the
phitt
of the suppressor again. The round hit him with the bone-deep dullness of a ball-peen hammer thudding between his shoulder blades, the bullet punching an exit hole above his right nipple. He fell sideways and tumbled over the edge of the bathtub, bringing the shower curtain down on top of him, his legs spread over the tub’s rim as though they had been fitted into stirrups.

The figure stood above him, aiming with both hands, arms outstretched. The suppressor was pointed directly at his mouth. Jesse tried to look through the slits in the mask at the shooter’s eyes. Were they lavender? If he could only explain, he thought. If someone could reach back in time and find the moment when everything went wrong, if someone could understand that he didn’t plan this, that this was the hand he was dealt and it was not of his choosing. If others could understand that, they could all agree to go away and let the past be the past and forget about the injuries he had done to his fellow man and let him start all over. If he could just find the right words.

“None of y’all know what it was like,” he said. “I broke corn when I was five. My daddy worked nights eleven years to buy ten acres.”

He tried to make himself stare into the suppressor, but he couldn’t do it. He saw a soapy pink bubble rise from the hole in his chest. The tears in his eyes distorted the room as though he were looking at the world from the bottom of a goldfish bowl. “Tell Varina—”

His lung was collapsing, and he couldn’t force the words out of his mouth. The figure stepped closer, then squatted next to the tub, gripping the rim with one hand, holding the P226 with the other.

Jesse waited for the round that would rip through his brain and end the bubbling sound in his throat, but it didn’t happen. He shut his eyes and whispered hoarsely at the masked face. It was a phrase he had learned from his French-speaking father when the father talked about Jesse’s baby sister. Then the words seemed to die on his lips. For just a moment, Jesse Leboeuf thought he heard black people laughing. Oddly, they were not black people in a juke joint, nor were they laughing at him behind his back, as they did when he first wore a policeman’s uniform. They were in a cotton field in North Louisiana at sunset, and the sky and the earth were red and the plants were a deep green and he could smell rain and see it blowing like spun glass in the distance. It was Juneteenth, Emancipation Day, and all the darkies in the parish would be headed into town soon, and he wondered why he hadn’t chosen to celebrate the occasion with them. They had always been kind to him and let him ride on the back of the flatbed when they drove to town, all of them rocking back and
forth with the sway of the truck, their bodies warm with the heat of the day, smelling slightly in a good way of the sweat from their work, their legs hanging down in the dust, the children breaking up a watermelon in big meaty chunks. Why hadn’t he gone with them? It would have been fun. He opened his eyes one more time and realized a terrible transformation was taking place in him. He was no longer Jesse Leboeuf. He was dissolving into seawater, his tissue and veins melting and running down his fingertips and pooling around his buttocks. He heard a loud sucking sound and felt himself swirling through the chrome-ringed drain hole at the bottom of the tub. Then he was gone, just like that, twisting in a silvery coil down a pipe to a place where no one would ever celebrate Juneteenth.

C
ATIN
S
EGURA CALLED
in the 911 herself. The first emergency personnel to arrive were the Acadian Ambulance Service, followed by deputies from Iberia and St. Mary Parish. Because it was Saturday, many of the neighbors had slept in and seen nothing unusual. When I arrived, the paramedics were already in the bedroom with Catin. There was blood on the sheets and the pillowcase. Her face was dilated with bruises, both wrists scraped raw by Leboeuf’s handcuffs. Through the bathroom door, I could see his bare feet and legs extending over the edge of the tub. No brass had been found in the bedroom or the bathroom.

“How’d Leboeuf get in?” I asked her.

She told me. Then she looked at the two paramedics. “Can you guys give us a minute?” I asked.

They went out of the room, and she told me what Leboeuf had done to her. Her eyes were dulled over, her voice hardly audible, as though she did not want to hear the things she was saying. Twice she had to stop and start over. “It’s his smell,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s on my skin and inside my head. I’ll never be able to wash it off me.”

“No, this man is dead and has no power over you, Catin. He died the death of an evil man and took his evil with him. Eventually, you’ll
think of him as a pitiful creature flailing his arms inside a furnace of his own creation. He can’t touch you. You’re a decent and fine lady. Nothing Leboeuf did can change the good human being that you are.”

Her eyes never blinked and never left mine. A St. Mary crime-scene investigator and a female deputy from Iberia Parish were waiting in the doorway. I asked them for a few more minutes. They stepped outside on the gallery. “The shooter never spoke?” I said.

“No,” Catin replied.

“You have no idea who the shooter was?”

“I already told you.”

“Leboeuf took two rounds, then fell into the tub?”

“I can’t keep it straight in my head. It was something like that.”

“My guess is Leboeuf was still alive after he fell into the bathtub. But there was no coup de grâce. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know. My children stayed overnight with their grandmother. I want to see them,” she said.

“I’ll take them up to Iberia General to see you. First you have to help me, Catin.”

“Leboeuf said something in what sounded like French. I don’t speak French. I don’t care what he said or didn’t say. There’s something I left out. I told the person in the mask to kill him. I wanted him to suffer, too.”

I looked over my shoulder at the doorway. “That has no bearing on what occurred. You roger that, Cat?”

She nodded.

“You called the shooter a person, not a man,” I said. “Was the shooter a woman?”

She looked at the water spots in the wallpaper and on the ceiling. “I’m tired.”

“Who took the cuffs off you?”

“The person did.”

“And you called 911 immediately?”

“Jesse Leboeuf was left on the street when he should have been in a cage. The department didn’t save my life,” she said. “The shooter did. I hope Jesse Leboeuf is in hell. It’s a sin for me to think that way, and it bothers me real bad.”

I pressed her hand in mine. “It’s the way you’re supposed to feel,” I said.

I waved to the paramedics to come back in the bedroom, then I picked up Jesse Leboeuf’s coat and shirt and underwear and hat and half-top boots and holstered .38 snub-nose and stuffed them in a plastic garbage bag. I didn’t hand them over to the crime-scene investigator. I went into the kitchen, where I could be alone, and removed his wallet from his trousers and thumbed through all the compartments. In it was a color photograph of Leboeuf with a little girl on a beach, the waves slate-green and capping behind them. The little girl had curly brown hair and was holding an ice-cream cone and smiling at the camera. Deeper in the wallet, I found a folded receipt for airplane fuel. The name of the vendor was the same as the boat dock whose phone number we had pulled from Jesse Leboeuf’s telephone records. Written in pencil on the back were two navigational coordinates and the words “Watch downdrafts and pilings at west end of cove.”

I put the gas receipt in my shirt pocket and replaced the rest of Leboeuf’s belongings in the bag. The female deputy from the Iberia department was watching me. “What are you doing, Streak?” she asked.

“My job.”

Her name was Julie Ardoin. She was a small brunette woman with dark eyes who always looked too small for her uniform. Her husband had committed suicide and left her on her own, and when she was angered, her stare could make you blink. “Good. You gonna handle the notification?” she said.

I
CALLED
M
OLLY
and told her I wouldn’t be home until noon, then drove down to the Leboeuf home on Cypremort Point. Theologians and philosophers try to understand and explain the nature of God with varying degrees of success and failure. I admire their efforts. But I’ve never come to an understanding of man’s nature, much less God’s. Does it make sense that the same species that created Athenian democracy and the Golden Age of Pericles and the city of Florence also gifted us with the Inquisition and Dresden and the
Nanking Massacre? My insight into my fellow man is probably less informed than it was half a century ago. At my age, that’s not a reassuring thought.

When I pulled in to Varina Leboeuf’s gravel driveway, the tide was coming in and the sky was lidded with lead-colored clouds and waves were breaking against the great chunks of broken concrete that Jesse Leboeuf had dumped on the back of his property to prevent erosion. Varina opened the inside door onto the screened veranda and walked down the stairs toward my cruiser. I got out and closed the car door behind me and stared into her face. I could hear wind chimes and leaves rustling and the fronds of a palm tree clattering, and smell the salt in the bay, all the indicators of life that were ongoing and unchanged among the quick but that were gone forever for Varina’s father.

I wanted to state what had happened and get back to town. I wished I had violated protocol and telephoned. I wanted badly to be somewhere else.

I had lost the respect I once had for Varina; I had come to think of her as treacherous and dishonest. I bore her even greater resentment for her seduction and manipulation of a good man like Clete Purcel. But I resented her most because she reminded me in some ways of Tee Jolie Melton. Both women came out of an earlier time. They were alluring and outrageous and irreverent, almost childlike in their profligacy, more victim than libertine. That was the irony of falling in love with my home state, the Great Whore of Babylon. You did not rise easily from the caress of her thighs, and when you did, you had to accept the fact that others had used her, too, and poisoned her womb and left a fibrous black tuber growing inside her.