Creole Belle (65 page)

I went outside through the front door and circled around the side of the building. The air was cold, the wind biting, and in the north the sky piled with clouds that looked as though they contained both snow and electricity. Bobby Joe Guidry was latching the doors on the freezer compartments of his truck.

“Did you see Miss Julie with a couple of young women?” I asked.

“I didn’t see Miss Julie,” he replied. “There were a couple of young women here, though.”

“What did they look like?”

“One had long black hair. The other one looked kind of AC/DC, know what I mean? Her eyes were purple.”

“That’s my daughter, Alafair, and her friend.”

“Sorry.”

“Where did they go?”

“I gave them ice cream and they went back inside. The one with the black hair is your daughter, Mr. Robicheaux?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Two guys were eyeballing them. One guy had grease in his hair and a bump on his nose. The other guy was fat. His suit looked like he got it out of a laundry bag. I didn’t like the looks of them. They were hanging around a long time, smoking cigarettes out there in the trees. I started to go over there and ask them what they were doing.”

“Why?”

“Because I heard one of them say something when he walked by. He said, ‘Maybe get them on the amphib and throw one of them out.’ Then they laughed. When your daughter and her friend showed up, they stopped talking. They just smoked cigarettes and watched everything from under the tree. I didn’t know that was your daughter, Mr. Robicheaux. I would have come got you.”

“Where’d the two guys go?”

“Through the back door right after your daughter and her friend went inside,” he replied.

I wrote my cell phone number on the back of a business card and handed it to him. “If you see these two guys again, call me.”

“I feel bad about this, Mr. Robicheaux. When I came back from Iraq, I gave up hunting. I promised to do a good deed every day for the rest of my life. I also made a promise that I’d be a protector for people who didn’t have anyone to look after them.”

“You did fine, Bobby Joe.”

“Does that business about an amphibian mean anything to you?” he asked.

I
FOUND
C
LETE
up by the stage. The band had just finished playing “Ida Red” and was giving up the stage to a full orchestra, one dressed in summer tuxes irrespective of the season, just like Harry James’s orchestra. Clete was shielding his eyes from the glare of the spotlights while he searched the crowd for any sign of Gretchen and Alafair and Julie Ardoin. I told him what Bobby Joe Guidry had said. “You think those two asswipes were talking about the seaplane you saw behind Varina’s place? They were talking about throwing somebody out of a plane?” he asked.

“That’s what Guidry said.”

Clete’s face was pale, his eyes looking inward at an image he obviously didn’t want to see. “I saw that once.”

I could hardly hear him above the noise of the audience. “Say again?”

“Some intelligence guys brought two VC onto the Jolly Green. They were roped up and blindfolded. The guy who was the target had to watch the other guy get thrown out the door. We were probably five hundred feet over the canopy.”

“Clean that stuff out of your head. You think Julie Ardoin is in on this?”

“Nobody could take down Gretchen unless she trusted the wrong person.”

“You’re saying Julie is dirty?”

“I don’t know, Dave. Look at my history. I’ve trusted the wrong women all my life.”

“Where do you want to start?” I said.

His eyes swept the balcony and the crowd and the beer concession. “I don’t have any idea. I’ve made a mess of things, and I can’t sort anything out.”

“Follow me,” I said.

We began at the women’s restroom. I banged on the door with my fist and hung my badge holder inside. “Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. “Excuse us, ladies, but we need to come inside.”

I pushed open the door. There was immediate laughter. “Boy, you guys are hard up!” a woman yelled.

“We’re looking for Alafair Robicheaux and Gretchen Horowitz and Julie Ardoin,” I said. “They may be in danger. We need your help.”

The laughter and smiles died. “I know Julie and Alafair,” a woman at a lavatory said. “They ain’t in here, suh.”

“How about in the stalls?” I said.

“They ain’t in here,” the woman repeated.

Regardless, I went from stall to stall, knocking on each door or pushing it open. Clete was looking from side to side, his face burning. “Has anyone in here seen Alafair Robicheaux or Julie Ardoin this evening?” I shouted out.

“By the ice-cream truck,” another woman said.

“Was anyone with them?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” she replied.

The room smelled of perfume and urinated beer. Toilets were flushing. Everyone in the room was staring at me, the frivolous moment gone, a deadness in every person’s face, as though a cold wind had blown through the windows high up on the wall. “Thanks for your help, ladies. We apologize for bothering y’all,” I said.

We went back out in the concourse and climbed the stairs to the balcony and then went back downstairs and through the crowd again. The orchestra had just finished pounding out Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” No one I recognized or spoke to had seen Alafair or Julie Ardoin, at least not in the last twenty minutes. I saw Clete
opening and closing his hands at his sides, a bone flexing in his cheek. “This is a pile of shit,” he said.

“They weren’t abducted by a UFO. Somebody saw them,” I said.

“Except we can’t find that somebody,” he said.

“Where haven’t we looked?”

“Behind the stage?” he said.

“It’s Grand Central Station back there,” I said.

“No, I chased a bail skip in there once. He was at a picnic and tried to hide in a room full of paint buckets and stage costumes.”

“How do we get in?”

He thought about it. “There’s a back door.”

We went back outside into the cold and the damp, musky smell of leaves that had turned from green to yellow and black inside pools of water. We scraped open a heavy metal door in the back of the building just as the orchestra went into Will Bradley and Freddie Slack’s boogie-woogie composition “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”

“God, that gives me the willies,” Clete said.

“What does?”

“That song is on your iPod, the one you said Tee Jolie Melton gave you.”

We were inside a dark hallway, one that smelled of dust and Murphy Oil Soap. “That’s right, Tee Jolie gave it to me. You believe me now?” I said.

“I’m not sure. I got a feeling this isn’t real, Dave.”

“What isn’t?”

“Like I said before. We were supposed to die in the gig on the bayou. The real surprise is maybe we did die. We just haven’t figured it out yet. I’ve heard stories about people’s souls wandering for a long time before they’re willing to let go of the world.”

“We’ve got one issue here, Cletus: to find Alafair and Gretchen and bring them home. Come on, podna, lock and load. Let go of all this other stuff.”

His pupils were dilated, his skin stretched tight on his face. He coughed into his palm and wiped it inside his pocket. He pulled his .38 snub from his shoulder holster and let it hang loosely from his
right hand. Through a curtain, we could see the orchestra kicking into overdrive. The pianist’s fingers were dancing on the keys, the double-pedal beat of two bass drums building into a throaty roar the way Louie Bellson used to do it, the sound of the saxophones slowly rising in volume like a living presence, starting to compete and blend in with the stenciled clarity of Freddie Slack’s piano score, all of it in four-four time.

“I’m going to kill every one of them, Streak,” Clete said.

I started to argue with him, but I didn’t. Though bloodlust and fear and a black flag had served us poorly in the past, sometimes the situation had not been of our choosing, and we’d had little recourse. Ethics aside, when it’s over, you’re always left with the same emotion: You’re glad you’re alive and the others are dead instead of you.

At the end of the hallway was a narrow space through which I could see people dancing in a cleared area below the stage. All of them were having a good time. A young dark-haired woman in a sequined evening dress was dancing with her eyes tightly shut, her arms pumped, the back of her neck glazed with sweat. She was drunk and her bra strap was showing, and her lipsticked mouth was partially open in an almost lascivious fashion. All of her energies seemed concentrated on a solitary thought, as though she were reaching an orgasmic peak deep inside herself, totally indifferent to her surroundings. The trombone players rose to their feet, the blare of their horns shaking the glass in the windows. I didn’t care about the band or the secret erotic pleasure of others. I wanted my daughter back.

Clete Purcel was staring at his left palm. In it was a bright scarlet star that looked like it had been freshly painted on his skin.

I thought he had coughed the blood into his hand. Then I saw him raise his eyes to the plank ceiling above our heads. I slipped my army-issue 1911-model .45 automatic from the leather holster clipped onto my belt. I heard the members of the orchestra pause in the middle of the melody and shout in unison:

When he jams with the bass and guitar
,

They all holler, “Beat me Daddy, eight to the bar.”

A two-tiered staircase made of rough-hewn lumber led through an opening in the ceiling. I went ahead of Clete, my .45 held upward. A line of blood drops preceded me up the steps, like red dimes that had spilled from a hole in someone’s trouser pocket. I walked up the last three steps, my left hand on the rail, peering into the darkness. I slipped a penlight out of my coat pocket and clicked it on. The room was stacked with storage boxes and paint cans and Christmas decorations and papier-mâché figures used in the Mardi Gras parade. I shone the light along the boards toward the rear of the room and saw a pool of blood next to a pile of boxes that must have filled a fifteen-inch radius. On the edge of the blood, I saw the gleam of a gold chain and a tiny stamped religious icon.

Clete was standing behind me and had not seen the blood nor its thickness and amount. “Cover my back,” I said.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Stay on my back, Clete. Please,” I said.

I stepped forward and shone the light directly on the blood and the gold chain and Star of David. Then I went past the boxes and raised the penlight and moved its small beam across the face of Julie Ardoin. Her throat had been cut and her nails and nose broken; her forearms were sliced with defensive wounds. She had bled out, and her face was white and stark and had the surprised and violated expression that the dead forever stamp on the inside of our eyelids.

I heard Clete’s weight on the boards behind me. He still had not seen the body. “That’s Gretchen’s chain and medal,” he said.

“It’s not Gretchen, Clete.”

“Who?” he asked.

“It’s Julie. Call it in. Don’t look.”

He almost knocked me down getting to the body. Downstairs, the orchestra had gone into a thunderous drum and horn and saxophone finale that deafened the ears and left the audience screaming for more.

I
CALLED IN
the 911 myself and took Clete by the arm and walked him away from the enclosure of boxes where Julie had probably died. I could find no electric switches on the walls, but there was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and when I twisted the bulb, it lit the room in all its starkness. Clete was breathing deep down in his chest, opening and closing his eyes. “I’m going to take Gretchen’s Star of David,” he said.

“Don’t touch it. There might be prints on it.”

“No, the chain isn’t broken. She dropped it there for me to find,” he said.

I didn’t argue. I had seen few instances in my long relationship with Clete Purcel when the world had gotten the upper hand on him and been able to do him serious injury. In this instance, he looked devastated, not only by the murder of his lover but by the simultaneous abduction of his daughter, both of which I was sure he was blaming on himself.

I looked around and tried to reconstruct what had happened. The loft we were standing in had a second set of steps by the far wall, and it led down to a second side exit. The loft had worked as a kind of bridge for the abductors. They had forced Alafair and Gretchen and Julie into the first-floor hallway, up the steps, down the other
side, and out the door and into the park, where Alafair and Gretchen were likely taken away in a vehicle.

I said all these things to Clete, but I wasn’t sure he was hearing me. “Come on, Cletus. We’ve got to get our girls back.”

“Julie fought with them, didn’t she?” he said. “Downstairs in the hallway, she fought back. Julie didn’t take shit off anybody. She told them to fuck off, and they broke her nose and brought her up here and cut her throat.”

“That’s the way I would read it.”

“It’s Pierre Dupree.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“He got to Gretchen. She never had a boyfriend, and he got to her. He wants payback, Dave. Julie was in the way. Dupree has got long-range plans for Gretchen, that son of a bitch.”