Creole Belle (34 page)

“You’re Pierre Dupree, aren’t you?” she said.

“I am.”

“Then I’m in the right place. My name is Gretchen Horowitz. I’ve met your wife and your grandfather, so I thought it was time I meet you.”

“How thoughtful. But I have no idea who you are or how you would know my whereabouts,” he said.

“I called your answering service and explained to the woman there that I was from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was going to take a message, but I told her I had to catch a plane this afternoon and I wanted to see you before I left. She was very helpful.”

“You’re with the Guggenheim?”

“I went there once. But I don’t work there. I work for Mr. Purcel. You know Clete Purcel?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure. Your name is Horowitz?”

“That’s right. Do you know Tee Jolie Melton?”

“You lied to my answering service, and now you want to sit down at my table and question me about whom I do or do not know?”

“You mind if I order? I haven’t eaten yet.”

“This is a put-on, isn’t it?”

“You wish.”

“The name is
Hor
owitz, emphasis on the first syllable?”

“Any way you want to say it.”

He set down his fork and removed a granule of crushed ice from the corner of his mouth. He studied her face, his eyes vaguely amused. The two men with him were smiling. One man wore his hair combed straight back, the sideburns buzzed off. There was a thick bump in the top of his nose; his eyes were wide-set and not in line with each other and gave the impression that he saw everything and nothing. The other man was fleshy, too big for his clothes, his neck chafing against a starched collar, his coat flecked with dandruff. He had a small, cruel mouth and wore a big ring on his right hand, inset with a sharp-edged emblem rather than a stone.

“How can I help you, Ms.
Hor
owitz?” Dupree said.

“Here’s the gen on your wife’s situation,” Gretchen said. “She—”

“The what?” Dupree said.

“The gen. That means the ‘background,’ the ‘information.’ Here’s the gen on your wife. She’s sending us signals that she’s trying to screw you on your divorce settlement. So out of nowhere, she comes up with a photo that shows you with Tee Jolie Melton. That’s the singer you told Dave Robicheaux you didn’t know. But your wife has evidence proving that you’re a liar. Except I don’t believe Varina
Leboeuf is trying to screw you. I think she and you are working in concert in order to rat-fuck Mr. Purcel.”

“I see,” Dupree said, snapping his fingers for the waiter.

“You gonna have me eighty-sixed?”

“Oh, no, no. Andre, bring me some more hot water. Ms. Horowitz, all my dealings with my wife are through a lawyer. The other thing she and I work on together is staying out of each other’s way. That’s about all I can tell you, so let’s call this business quits.”

The fleshy man whose collar was biting into his neck said something to his friend. The friend’s hair was greased and as shiny as wire against his scalp. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” Gretchen said.

“It was nothing,” the fleshy man said.

“Something about lipstick?” she said.

The fleshy man shook his head, grinning broadly at his friend. The waiter arrived with a stainless steel teapot, a damp cloth wrapped around the handle; he set it in front of Pierre Dupree and went away.

“I wear lipstick when I work,” Gretchen said. “I wear shades sometimes, too. Sometimes a scarf. Know why that is?”

“No,” the man with the greased hair said. “Clue us in on that.”

“It depersonalizes. Certain things shouldn’t be personal. That’s the way I look at it. What was that about a pig?”

“Don’t know what you mean,” the fleshy man said.

“You said something about lipstick on a pig. That’s what I look like, a pig wearing lipstick?”

“Who would think that?” the fleshy man said.

Gretchen pulled off her shades and set them on the tablecloth, then untied her scarf and shook out her hair. “Now you can get a better idea of what I look like,” she said. “Except now it’s gotten kind of personal. I hate it when that happens.”

Dupree rolled his eyes like a man reaching the limits of his patience. He pulled his napkin from the top of his shirt and dropped it on the table. “Ms. Horowitz,” he said, the Z sound hissing off his teeth, “we have to say good-bye to you now. Say ‘ta-ta’ to everyone and squeeze your way through the dining room and out the door. I’ll ask the waiter to help if you need assistance.”

Another thought besides his own cleverness was obviously on
Pierre Dupree’s mind. He suppressed an obvious laugh by coughing on his hand. “I’m going to take a guess. Miami, right? Family originally from Coney Island? How do y’all say it, ‘Me-ami’?”

“I went over to Burke Hall at UL and checked out some of your artwork. I thought it was pretty keen,” she said. “What I didn’t understand was why all the figures look like they’re made of rubber. They made me think of ectoplasm or maybe spermicide being squeezed out of a tube. My favorite painting was the abstract, the one that’s all smears and drips, kind of like a big handkerchief someone with a brain hemorrhage blew his nose on.”

Pierre Dupree reached out and took her hand in his. “You have eyes that are like violets. But they don’t fit in your face or with the rest of your coloration,” he said. “Why is that? You’re a woman of mystery.”

She felt his hand tighten on hers, squeezing her fingers into a cluster of carrots.

“No answer?” he said. “No more cute one-liners from our clever little kike from ‘Me-ami’?”

The pain in her hand traveled like a long strand of barbed wire up her wrist and into her arm and shoulder and throat. She felt her eyes water and her bottom lip begin to tremble.

He tightened his grip. “Are you trying to tell me something?” he said. “Did you think perhaps you fucked with the wrong people? Have you experienced a change of heart? Nod if that’s the case.”

With her left hand, she fumbled the top off the teapot and threw the scalding water in his face. A cry rose from Dupree’s throat as if he were being garroted. He jabbed the heels of his hands into his eyes, pushing back his chair, his shrimp cocktail spraying in a pulpy red shower on the tablecloth.

“Waste not, want not. Here’s the rest of it,” she said, and emptied the pot on top of him.

Dupree crashed backward on the floor, his arms wrapped around his head, his legs thrashing. Both of his friends had kicked back their chairs and were headed for her, their faces twisted with rage. She pulled Clete Purcel’s blackjack from her tote sack, the wood handle clenched tightly in her palm. The blackjack was weighted at the large end with a
lump of lead the size of a golf ball, snugged tight inside stitched leather and mounted on a spring that generated a level of torque and velocity that could knock an ox unconscious. She swung it backward across the mouth of the fleshy man and heard his teeth break against his lips. The man with the greased-back hair got one hand on her shirt, but she whipped the blackjack down on his collarbone and saw his mouth open and his shoulder drop as though it had been severed from a string. She was wearing alpine shoes with lug soles, and she kicked him in the groin so hard the blood drained from his face and his knees buckled and he took on the appearance of a griffin crouched in the middle of the room. She whipped the blackjack across his ear and knocked him sideways into a stack of chairs.

She shut the door that gave onto the main restaurant, her heart pounding. When Pierre Dupree tried to pull himself up, she swung the blackjack down on his neck and shoulders, then hit him across the forearm and the point of one knee.

The fleshy man was trying to raise himself by holding on to the table and had pulled the tablecloth onto the floor. His teeth were broken off at the gums, and a string of blood and saliva hung from his chin. She swung the blackjack across the side of his face and heard the bone crack. “Treat this as a positive, a great opportunity for weight loss. I’ve heard soup tastes lovely when it’s sucked through a straw,” she said.

She surveyed the room, catching her breath, the blackjack hanging loosely from her hand. “If you’re thinking about dropping the dime on me, ask yourself if you want a repeat performance,” she said. “I hate to tell you this, but you guys aren’t the first team. Maybe you should think about a career change. Maybe jobs in a Pee-wee Herman theme park.”

She walked back to Pierre Dupree and squatted down at eye level with him, tapping the end of the blackjack on his nose. His eyes were out of focus, his face mottled with burns. “Think this was bad? I’ve had men do things to me with their penises that make this look like a cakewalk. Next time I’m going to turn you into a quadriplegic.” She nudged one of his eyes wider with the tip of the blackjack. “One other thing: Your grandfather is Jewish, but you called me a kike. You’re
a puzzle, Pierre. I might have to look you up again. Enjoy the rest of your day.”

She wiped off her blackjack on his necktie and put it in her tote bag, then slipped on her shades and tied her scarf on her head and went out the side exit and crossed the street to the Caddy. A soft rain was blowing along the avenue, and the pink neon glow of the restaurant inside the mist made her think of the cotton candy her mother once bought her on a visit to Coney Island.

C
LETE
P
URCEL HAD
spent most of the afternoon lying on a recliner under the live oaks by his cottage in his scarlet knee-length Everlast boxing trunks, a cooler packed with ice and five brands of foreign beer by his side, a pork roast turning on the rotisserie, the smoke drifting through the trees onto the bayou. He had self-medicated to the point where he had almost forgotten his wall-to-wall tryst with Varina Leboeuf and the fact that he had probably gone on tape and may have joined the great American porn pantheon of people like Johnny Wadd Holmes. The latter conclusion was one he could not deal with in the midst of a hangover that was already of monstrous proportions.
Time to cauterize the head with a little more flakjuice
, he thought. He cracked another bottle of St. Pauli Girl and chugged it to the bottom, upending it until every ounce of foam had drained down his throat.

Even when rain began to patter on the leaves overhead, he could not make himself get off the recliner and go inside. So he stayed under the trees throughout the shower, the rain hissing on the grill, the smoke wrapping itself around him, a tugboat on the bayou blowing its horn as though in mockery.

Then he saw his Caddy turn off East Main and bounce over the dip in the motor-court driveway and approach his cottage and parking space. He dropped his empty bottle on the grass and stood up, the trees and rooftops tilting, the Saint Augustine–like carpet nails under his bare feet. Gretchen got out of the car and locked the door and swung her tote bag over her shoulder.

“I need to have a word with you,” he said.

“What about?”

“Other than you boosting my car and my sap and my nine-Mike, no problem at all,” he replied.

“You got some Lysol?”

“Under the lavatory. What do you want it for?”

“To tidy up. What’s for eats?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Come inside. It’s raining,” she said. “Are you getting drunk again?”

She left the front door of the cottage open. When he went inside, she was spraying his blackjack with disinfectant and cleaning the leather cover with a wad of paper towels.

“Care to tell me where you went in my car?” he said.

“To New Orleans. I had a chat with Pierre Dupree and a couple of guys he was having lunch with. Did Alafair Robicheaux call?”

“
Alafair?
What does Alafair have to do with this?”

“Nothing. She was going to download a bunch of information for me on film schools. I want to make movies. I don’t want to write them or act in them, I want to make them.”

He was stabbing his finger in the air. “What happened with Dupree and these other guys?”

“I beat the living shit out of them. What did you think?”

“Where?”

“In a joint up St. Charles. Don’t make a big deal out of it. They had it coming.”

“You just walked in and walked out and left three guys with their sticks broken?”

“Yeah, I’d say that covers it. No, I take that back. Something else happened. Dupree called me a kike. His grandfather is a Jew. But he uses anti-Semitic language?”

“That’s not the point.”

“You’re right. The point is you need somebody to take care of you.”

“Kicking the shit out of a client’s husband is not a caring activity.”

“I wouldn’t call Varina Leboeuf a client. An easy lay is more like it. Or a one-night punch. Or a sport fuck. Don’t get me started.”

“Get
you
started?”

She began brushing her hair. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Clete?”

“Not telling you
what
? I can’t begin to understand what’s in your head. It’s like having a conversation with a hurricane.”

“Whatever it is you’re hiding. I see it in your eyes when you don’t think I’m looking.”

“I like you in a special way. That’s all. We’re a lot alike.”

“‘Special way’? What is that, Sanskrit for ‘deeply weird’? Are you carrying around a lot of guilt about Vietnam and working it out on me? Because if you are, I don’t like it.”

“I don’t want to see you hurt. You went after these guys because of me. You’ve got to choose your battlefields more carefully, Gretchen. From this point on, these guys will know where you are, but you won’t know where
they
are. You don’t walk around in plain view while your enemy is wearing camouflage and setting up an L-shaped ambush. You know what an L-shaped ambush is? It’s a meat grinder. We had an expression in Vietnam. We’d say, ‘It’s Vietnam.’ Like the rules there were different and whatever happened didn’t count. The truth is, the whole world is Vietnam. You either use your head and carry your own water and take care of yourself and stay true to your principles, or you walk into a meat grinder.”

“What’s the zip code on Mars?”

“Why?”

“Because that should be your zip code.”