Creole Belle (20 page)

T
HAT SAME NIGHT
in New Iberia, the southern sky was filled with strange lights, flashes of electricity that would ignite inside a solitary black cloud and in seconds ripple across the entirety of the heavens
without making a sound. Then a rain front moved across the marshlands and drenched the town and overflowed the gutters on East Main and covered our front yard with a gray and yellow net of dead leaves. At four in the morning, amid the booming of thunder, I thought I heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. I had been dreaming before I woke, and in the dream, large shells fired from an offshore battery were arching out of their trajectory, whistling just before they exploded inside a sodden rain forest.

I felt light-headed when I picked up the phone, part of me still inside the dream that was so real I could not shake it or think my way out of it. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

At first I could hear only static. I looked at the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Who is this?” I said.

“It’s Tee Jolie, Mr. Dave. Can you hear me okay? There’s a bad storm where I’m at.”

Through the window, I could see fog rolling off the bayou into the trees, pushing against the windows and doors. I sat down in a chair. “Where are you?” I said.

“A long ways from home. There’s a beautiful beach here. The sea is green. I wanted to tell you everyt’ing is all right. I scared you at the hospital in New Orleans. I wish I ain’t done that.”

“Nothing is right, Tee Jolie.”

“Did you like the songs I left on your iPod? I dropped it before I gave it to you. It don’t always work right.”

“You said everything is all right. Don’t you know about your sister?”

“What about her? Blue is just Blue. She’s sweet. To tell you the troot’, her voice is better than mine.”

“Blue is dead.”

“What’s that?”

“She was murdered. Her body floated up in St. Mary Parish.”

“You’re breaking up, Mr. Dave. What’s that you said about Blue? The storm is tearing up the boathouse on the beach. Can you still hear me, Mr. Dave?”

“Yes.”

“I cain’t hear you, suh. This storm is terrible. It scares me. I got to go now. Tell Blue and my granddaddy hello. Tell them I couldn’t get t’rew.”

The line went dead, and the words “blocked call” disappeared from the caller identification window. Molly was awake when I got back into bed and lay back on the pillow. “Were you fixing something in the kitchen?” she said.

“No, that was Tee Jolie Melton on the phone.”

Molly raised herself up on one elbow. Each time lightning flashed in the clouds, I could see the freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.

“It woke me up.”

“No, I was awake, Dave. You were talking in your sleep.”

“She said she was sorry for making me worry about her. She doesn’t know her sister is dead.”

“Oh, Dave,” Molly said, her eyes filming.

“These are the things she said. It was Tee Jolie. You think I could forget what her voice sounds like?”

“No, it was not Tee Jolie.”

“She told me she dropped the iPod. That’s why other people can’t hear the songs she put on there.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m telling you what she said. I didn’t imagine it.”

“You’re going to drive us all crazy.”

“You want me to lie to you instead?”

“I almost wish you were drinking again. We could deal with that. But I can’t deal with this.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

I returned to the kitchen and sat in the darkness and looked through the window at the Teche rising over its banks. A pirogue was spinning in the current—empty, with no paddle, rotating over and over as it drifted downstream toward a bend, filling with rainwater that would eventually sink it in the deepest part of the channel. I could not get the image of the sinking pirogue out of my head. I wished I had asked Tee Jolie about the baby she was carrying. I wished I had asked her many things. I felt Molly’s hand on my shoulder.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

“I’ll be along directly.”

“I didn’t mean what I said.”

“Your feelings are justified.”

“I thought you were dreaming about Vietnam. I heard you say ‘incoming.’”

“I don’t remember what I was dreaming about,” I lied, my gaze fixed on the pirogue settling in a frothy whirlpool beneath the current.

U
NLESS A FELON
walks into a police station and confesses his crime, or unless he is caught in the commission of the crime, there are only two ways, from an evidentiary point of view, that the crime is solved and given prosecutable status. A detective either follows a chain of evidence to the suspect, or the detective begins with the suspect and, in retrograde fashion, follows the evidence back to the crime. So far I had no demonstrable evidence to link Pierre Dupree to Tee Jolie Melton or her sister, Blue. But there was one thing I knew about him for certain: He was a liar. He had denied knowing Tee Jolie, even though his painting of the reclining nude looked very much like her; second, he had claimed that years ago he had gotten rid of the safe from which Frankie Giacano had taken Clete Purcel’s IOU.

So where do you start when you want to find out everything you can about a man whose physical dimensions and latent anger give most men serious pause?

His ex-to-be might be a good beginning.

Varina Leboeuf Dupree had once been known as the wet dream of every fraternity boy on the LSU campus. By the time she was twenty-five, she had proved she could break hearts and bank accounts and succeed at business in a male-oriented culture in which women might be admired but were usually thought of as acquisitions. She was certainly nothing like her father, a retired Iberia sheriff’s detective, the mention of whose name would cause black people to lower their eyes lest they reveal the fear and loathing he instilled in them. Jesse Leboeuf had named his daughter for Jefferson Davis’s wife, I suspect in hopes that it would allow her to occupy the social station that would never be his or his wife’s. Unfortunately for him, Varina Leboeuf did things her own way, couldn’t have cared less about her social station, and made sure everyone knew it. In college she wore
her dark brown hair in braids wrapped around her head, sometimes with Mardi Gras beads woven in. She wore peasant dresses to dances, jeans and pink tennis shoes without socks to church, and once, when her pastor asked her to greet a famous televangelical leader at the airport, she arrived barefoot and braless at the Lafayette concourse in an evening gown that looked like sherbet running down her skin.

She was scandalous and beautiful and often had a pout that begged to be kissed. Some condemned her as profligate, but she always seemed to enter into her affairs without anger or need and depart from them in the same fashion. Even though she broke hearts, I had never heard one of her former lovers speak ill of her. In the American South, there is a crude expression often used to define the plantation-bred protocol of both conjugal and extramarital relationships. The statement is offensive and coarse and is of the kind that is whispered with a hand to the mouth, but there is no question about its accuracy inside the world in which I grew up: “You marry up and you screw down.” I heard some women say Varina married up. I didn’t agree. By the same token, I didn’t understand why she had married into the Dupree family or why she had taken up residence in St. Mary Parish, a place where convention and sycophancy and Shintoism were institutions.

On Monday morning I signed out of the office and drove in my pickup down to Cypremort Point, a narrow strip of land extending into West Cote Blanche Bay, where Varina’s father lived among cypress and oak trees in a beachfront house elevated on pilings. Jesse Leboeuf was a Cajun but originally from North Louisiana and the kind of lawman other cops treat with caution rather than respect, in the same way you walk around an unpredictable guard dog, or a gunbull whose presence in the tower can make a convict’s face twitch with anxiety, or a door gunner who volunteers for as much trigger time as possible in free-fire zones. Jesse had abused himself with whiskey and cigarettes for a lifetime but showed no signs of physical decay. When I found him on his back porch, he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette, gazing at the bay, his outboard boat rocking against his small dock. He rose to greet me, his hand enveloping
mine, his face as stolid as boilerplate, his hair flat-topped and boxed and shiny with butch wax. “You want to know where my little girl is at?” he said.

I had left a message on his phone and wondered why he had not simply called me back. But Jesse was not a man whose motivations you openly questioned. “It’s a nice day to take a drive, so I thought I’d stop by,” I said.

He pushed a chair toward me. “You want a drink?” he said.

“I just wanted to ask Miss Varina a couple of questions about her husband.”

“If I was you, I’d leave him alone. Unless you’re planning to shoot him.”

“I have reason to believe he might have ties to the Giacano family.”

He puffed on his cigarette and laughed behind the smoke. “Are you serious?”

“You don’t think Pierre would associate with criminals?”

“The Duprees don’t associate with minorities of any kind, particularly New Orleans dagos. My daughter had all of it she could take.”

“All of what?”

“The fact that the Duprees think their shit don’t stink. The only time they make allowances for other groups of people is when a piece of tail floats by that one of them might be interested in.”

“You’re talking about Pierre?”

“My daughter is getting shut of them, that’s all that counts.” He watched a boat with outriggers cutting across the chop. He took a last hit on his cigarette and flicked it out on the water. “Isn’t this oil spill enough to worry about? Yesterday afternoon my crab traps was loaded to the top of the wire. When I put them in the boiler, every one of them had oil inside the shell. I hear it’s the same with the oyster beds. They say there’s shitloads of sludge plumb to the continental shelf.” He lit another cigarette and puffed on it, the smoke leaking slowly from his mouth.

“I think Pierre Dupree is dirty,” I said.

“Dirty for what?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sounds like you got a problem.”

“You ever see a boat around here with the emblem of a fish on the bow? A Chris-Craft with a white hull?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

I was getting nowhere. I asked for his daughter’s phone number.

“Why not just leave her alone?” he said.

“I think Pierre Dupree may know something about the murder of the girl who floated up inside a block of ice in St. Mary Parish.”

“Then go talk to Pierre. He’s a son of a bitch. I don’t like cluttering up my day talking about a son of a bitch. My daughter don’t need to be talking about him, either. Why don’t y’all let us be, Robicheaux?”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Dave.”

“You’re on my property, and I’ll call you what I goddamn please.”

“Do you want somebody who respects Miss Varina to interview her or some young guy who just got kicked up to plainclothes?”

“You’re a hardtail. You always were. That’s why you got where you are. That’s not meant as a compliment.” He wrote a telephone number on a scrap of newspaper and handed it to me. “She’s in Lafayette.” Then he raised his index finger at me, the nail as pointy as a piece of horn. “Treat her right. If you don’t, you and I will talk again.”

“Tell you what. I’ve got one more question for you, Mr. Jesse. You said the Duprees are snobs and they don’t associate with minorities of any kind. The grandfather is Jewish and a survivor of a Nazi extermination camp. Does it make sense to say the Duprees don’t associate with minorities? Didn’t Pierre buy his office building from a member of the Giacano family? Or are Italian-Americans not minorities? I have a little trouble tracking your thought processes.”

Jesse’s skin was brown and deeply lined, like the skin on a terrapin’s neck, an ugly purple birthmark buried in his hairline. He got up from his chair, taller than I, unstooped by age, an odor of tobacco and dried sweat emanating from his clothes. He looked me in the face with a glower that made me want to step back from him. He rubbed his jaw, his eyes never leaving mine, and I could hear the sound of his whiskers against the calluses on his palm. I wanted him to speak, to indicate what he was thinking; I wanted him to be more
than an emotional condition that was impossible to read or understand. More succinctly, I wanted him to be human so I did not have to fear him. But not another word passed from his lips. He climbed the stairs that led into his screened porch and closed and latched the door behind him, never looking back, his shoulders stiff with hatred of his fellow man.

There was a Japanese tulip tree by the edge of the water. A hard gust of wind blew a shower of pink and lavender petals on top of the waves sliding in with the tide. I thought about Blue Melton’s body inside the block of ice and the fact that Jesse Leboeuf had shown no reaction when I mentioned that his son-in-law might be involved with her death. Was he simply obtuse and insensitive? Or was it no accident that his skin was reminiscent of an early reptilian creature cracking its way out of the egg?

I drove back up the road through a corridor of oak and gum trees strung with Spanish moss and caught the four-lane to Lafayette.

T
HE TRUTH WAS
, I had no idea what kind of investigation I was pursuing. I knew that three low-wattage gangsters had tried to run a scam on Clete Purcel and cheat him out of his apartment and office building. I also knew that Clete had creeped Bix Golightly’s condo in the Carrollton district and found e-mails that indicated Golightly was fencing stolen or forged paintings. Was that all I was looking at, a gumball like Golightly selling hot or copied artwork for twenty cents on the dollar at best?

The sugarcane crop was in full harvest, and the highway was ribbed with dried gumbo strung from the fields by tractors and cane wagons. Traffic was backed up from the Lafayette city limits, and I got stuck behind an empty cane wagon blowing dirt and lint all over my windows. I clamped my emergency flasher on the roof of my pickup, but the driver of the tractor either couldn’t see me or didn’t care. I swung around him and tried to stay in the left lane but got caught in another jam after I crossed the bridge over the Vermilion River and entered the city.