Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Take the money.”

“No. I hope you like the songs. I put t’ree of mine in there. I put one in there by Taj Mahal ’cause I know you like him, too.”

“Are you really here?” I asked.

She cupped her hand on my brow. “You’re burning up, you,” she said.

Then she was gone.

NINE DAYS LATER, a big man wearing a seersucker suit and a bow tie and spit-shined shoes and a fresh haircut and carrying a canvas bag on a shoulder strap came into the room and pulled up a chair by the bed and stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

“You’re not going to smoke that in here, are you?” I asked.

He didn’t bother to answer. His blond hair was cut like a little boy’s. His eyes were bright green, more energetic than they should have been, one step below wired. He set his bag on the floor and began pulling magazines and two city library books and a box of pralines and a carton of orange juice and a Times-Picayune from it. When he bent over, his coat swung open, exposing a nylon shoulder holster and the blue-black .38 with white handles that it carried. He removed a pint bottle of vodka from the bag and unscrewed the cap and poured at least three inches into the carton of orange juice.

“Early in the day,” I said.

He tossed his unlit cigarette end over end into the wastebasket and drank out of the carton, staring out the window at the robins fluttering in the oak trees and the Spanish moss stirring in the breeze. “Tell me if you want me to leave, big mon.”

“You know better than that,” I said.

“I saw Alafair and Molly getting in their car. When are you going home?”

“Maybe in a week. I feel a lot stronger. Where have you been?”

“Running down a couple of bail skips. I still have to pay the bills. I’m not sleeping too good. I think the doc left some lead in me. I think it’s moving around.”

His eyes were bright with a manic energy that I didn’t think was related to the alcohol. He kept swallowing and clearing his throat, as though a piece of rust were caught in it. “The speckled trout are running. We need to get out on the salt. The White House is saying the oil has gone away.”

He waited for me to speak. But I didn’t.

“You don’t believe it?” he said.

“The oil company says the same thing. Do you believe them?”

He fiddled with his fingers and looked into space, and I knew he had something on his mind besides the oil-well blowout on the Gulf. “Something happen?” I said.

“I had a run-in two nights ago with Frankie Giacano. Remember him? He used to burn safes with his cousin Stevie Gee. He was knocking back shots with a couple of hookers in this joint on Decatur, and I accidentally stepped on his foot, and he says, ‘Hey, Clete, glad to see you, even though you probably just broke two of my toes. At least it saves me the trouble of coming to your office. You owe me two large, plus the vig for over twenty years. I don’t know what that might come to. Something like the national debt of Pakistan. You got a calculator on you?’”

Clete drank again from the carton, staring at the birds jittering in the trees, his throat working, his cheeks pooling with color as they always did when alcohol went directly into his bloodstream. He set the carton down on the nightstand and widened his eyes. “So I told him, ‘I’m having a quiet beer here, Frankie, and I apologize for stepping on your needle-nose stomps that nobody but greaseballs wears these days, so I’m going to sit down over there in the corner and order a po’boy sandwich and read the paper and drink my beer, and you’re not going to bother me again. Understood?’

“Then, in front of his skanks, he tells me he peeled an old safe owned by his uncle Didi Gee, and he found a marker I signed for two grand, and all these years the vig was accruing and now I owe the principal and the interest to him. So I go, ‘I think a certain kind of social disease has climbed from your nether regions into your brain, Frankie. Secondly, you don’t have permission to call me by my first name. Thirdly, your uncle Didi Gee, who was a three-hundred-pound tub of whale shit, died owing me money, not the other way around.’

“Frankie says, ‘If you’d be a little more respectful, I would have worked something out. But I knew that was what you were gonna say. For that reason, I already sold the marker to Bix Golightly. By the way, take a look at the crossword puzzle in your newspaper. I was working on it this morning and couldn’t think of a thirteen-letter word for a disease of the glands. Then you walked in and it hit me. The word is “elephantiasis.” I’m not pulling your crank. Check it out.’”

“You think he was lying about selling the marker to Golightly?” I asked.

“Who cares?”

“Bix Golightly is psychotic,” I said.

“They all are.”

“Put away the booze, Clete, at least until afternoon.”

“When you were on the hooch, did you ever stop drinking because somebody told you to?”

It was Indian summer outside, and the sunlight looked like gold smoke in the live oaks. At the base of the tree trunks, the petals of the four-o’clocks were open in the shade, and a cluster of fat-breasted robins were pecking in the grass. It was a fine morning, not one to compromise and surrender to the meretricious world in which Clete Purcel and I had spent most of our adult lives. “Let it go,” I said.