Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

FIVE DAYS HAD passed since Clete was visited by Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes, and gradually he had pushed the pair of them to the edge of his mind. Golightly had taken too many hits to the head a long time ago, Clete told himself. Besides, he was a basket case even as a criminal; he’d made his living as a smash-and-grab jewelry-store thief, on a par with gang bangers who had shit for brains and zero guts and usually victimized elderly Jews who didn’t keep guns on the premises. Also, Clete had made innocuous calls to his sister and to his niece, who was a student at Tulane, and neither of them mentioned anything of an unusual nature occurring in their lives.

Forget Golightly and Grimes, Clete thought. By mistake, Golightly once put roach paste on a plateful of Ritz crackers and almost croaked himself. This was the guy he was worrying about?

On a sunny, cool Thursday morning, Clete opened up the office and read his mail and answered his phone messages, then told his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, he was going down to Café du Monde for beignets and coffee. She took a five-dollar bill from her purse and put it on the corner of her desk. “Bring me a few, will you?” she said.

Miss Alice was a former nun whose height and body mass and gurgling sounds made Clete think of a broken refrigerator he once owned. Before she was encouraged out of the convent, she had been the terror of the diocese, referred to by the bishop as “the mother of Grendel” or, when he was in a more charitable mood, “our reminder that the Cross is always with us.”

Clete picked up the bill off the desk and put it in his shirt pocket. “Those two guys I had trouble with have probably disappeared. But if they should come around while I’m not here, you know what to do.”

She looked at him, her expression impassive.

“Miss Alice?” he said.

“No, I do not know what to do. Would you please tell me?” she replied.

“You don’t do anything. You tell them to come back later. Got it?”

“I don’t think it wise for a person to make promises about situations that he or she cannot anticipate.”

“Don’t mess with these guys. Do you want me to say it again?”

“No, you’ve made yourself perfectly clear. Thank you very much.”

“You want café au lait?”

“I’ve made my own. Thank you for asking.”

“We’ve got a deal?”

“Mr. Purcel, you are upsetting me spiritually. Would you please stop this incessant questioning? I do not need to be badgered.”

“I apologize.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Clete walked down the street in the shade of the buildings, the scrolled-iron balconies sagging in the middle with the weight of potted roses and bougainvillea and chrysanthemums and geraniums, the wind smelling of night damp and bruised spearmint, the leaves of the philodendron and caladium in the courtyards threaded with humidity that looked like quicksilver in the shadows. He sat under the colonnade at Café du Monde and ate a dozen beignets that were white with powdered sugar, and drank three cups of coffee with hot milk, and gazed across Decatur at Jackson Square and the Pontalba Apartments that flanked either side of the square and the sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that separated the pedestrian mall from the park area.

The square was a place that seemed more like a depiction of life in the Middle Ages than twenty-first-century America. Street bands and mimes and jugglers and unicyclists performed in front of the cathedral, as they might have done in front of Notre Dame while Quasimodo swung on the bells. The French doors to the big restaurant on the corner were open, and Clete could smell the crawfish already boiling in the kitchen. New Orleans would always be New Orleans, he told himself, no matter if it had gone under the waves, no matter if cynical and self-serving politicians had left the people of the lower Ninth Ward to drown. New Orleans was a song and a state of mind and a party that never ended, and those who did not understand that simple fact should have to get passports to enter the city.

It was a bluebird day, the flags on the Cabildo straightening in the breeze. Clete had gone to bed early the previous night and his body was free of alcohol and the residue of dreams that he sometimes carried through the morning like cobweb on his skin. It seemed only yesterday that Louis Prima and Sam Butera had jammed all night and blown out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, or that Clete and his partner from New Iberia had walked a beat with nightsticks on Canal and Basin and Esplanade, both of them recently back from Vietnam, both of them still believers in the promise that each sunrise brought.

He bought a big bag of ho

t beignets for Miss Alice that cost him twice the amount she had given him. He listened to one song played by a string-and-rub-board band at the entrance to Pirates Alley, then walked back to St. Ann, his mind free of worry.

As soon as he turned the corner on St. Ann, he saw a large black Buick with charcoal-tinted windows parked illegally in front of his building. By the time he reached the foyer that gave onto his office, he had little doubt who had parked it there. He could hear the voice of Alice Werenhaus in the courtyard: “I told the pair of you, Mr. Purcel is not here. I also told you not to go inside the premises without his permission. If you do not leave right now, I will have you arrested and placed in the city prison. I will also have your automobile towed to the pound. Excuse me. Are you smirking at me?”

“We didn’t know we were gonna get a show,” the voice of Waylon Grimes replied.

“How would you like your face slapped all over this courtyard?” Miss Alice said.

“How’d you know I’m a guy who likes it rough? You charge extra for that?” Grimes said.

“What did you say? You repeat that! Right now! Say it again!”

“You promise to hit me?” Grimes said.