Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“You can come along if you like,” Bix said. “I belong to an all-night health club. We can play some handball. I’m trying to get off of cigarettes and lose some other bad habits I got. Funny seeing you in Algiers. I always lived in the Quarter or uptown and never really dug the lifestyle over here. If it’s not in the Quarter or up St. Charles, it’s not New Orleans. It’s like Muskogee, Oklahoma, you know, downtown Bum Fuck with Merle Haggard singing songs about it. Jump in and we’ll take a spin across the bridge. From the bridge, the lights of the city are beautiful. When you visit New Orleans, you ought to call me. I know all the famous places you won’t find on any map. You want to see the house where that vampire novelist used to live? I can show you the rooftop where the sniper killed all those people in the Quarter. I was born and bred in this city. I’m your man. Believe me, Caruso, Algiers sucks. Why the fuck would you want to hang out here?”

Bix stuck another cigarette in his mouth without ever missing a beat, forgetting he had left one in the ashtray, the cigarette in his mouth bouncing on his bottom lip while he talked on and on, his dignity draining through the soles of his shoes.

Then he felt an engine inside him wind down and stop. He looked at the glove box where he had locked his .25 auto and became silent. He lifted his eyes to the figure standing by the window and removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth. He started to speak, but the words would not come out right. He sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed and tried again. When he heard his own words, he was surprised at the level of calm in them: “You ought to come here during Mardi Gras. Like Wolfman Jack used to say, it’s a toe-curlin’ blast,” he said.

The figure lifted a silenced .22 auto and pointed it with both hands and fired three times into Bix Golightly’s face, hitting him twice in the forehead and once in the mouth, clipping his cigarette in half, the ejected casings tinkling like tiny bells on the asphalt.

The shooter bent over and picked up the ejected rounds as dispassionately and diligently as someone recovering coins dropped on a beach. From the edge of the alleyway, Clete watched the figure walk down the street through a cone of light under a streetlamp and disappear inside the darkness. The shooter’s windbreaker reminded him of the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Then the shooter reversed direction and came back toward the streetlamp and seemed to stare momentarily at the alleyway, uncertain or bemused. Clete edged deeper into the alley. His .38 was clenched in his right hand, the grips biting into his palm, his pulse jumping in his neck. He pressed himself into the brick wall, his own body odor climbing into his nostrils, a vaporlike coldness wrapping itself around his heart. His blood was pounding so loudly in his ears that he couldn’t be sure if the shooter spoke or not. Then he heard the shooter walk away, whistling a tune. Was it “The San Antonio Rose”? Or was he losing his mind?

CLETE’S CADDY PULLED into my drive at five the next morning, the windows and waxed finish running with moisture. I heard him walking on the gravel through the porte cochere and into the backyard. When I disarmed the alarm system and opened the back door, he was sitting on the steps. The oak and pecan trees and slash pines were barely visible inside the fog rolling off Bayou Teche. He told me everything that had happened in Algiers.

“You went into Grimes’s apartment after Golightly got it?” I said.

“I didn’t touch anything.”

“Grimes died with a .357 in his hand?”

“Yeah, he probably let the wrong person in and didn’t realize his mistake until it was too late.”

“Why’d you go into his apartment?”

“Grimes tortured my secretary. I shouldn’t go into his apartment?”

“You didn’t call the shooting in?”

“I called in a shots-fired from a pay phone.”

“You did that later?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s something not coming together here, Clete. You had your piece out when you were in the alley?”

“That’s what I said.”

“But you didn’t try to stop the shooter?”

“Would you eat a round for Bix Golightly?”

Clete was staring into the fog, his big hands cupped on his knees, his porkpie hat low on his forehead, his stomach hanging over his belt. He picked up Snuggs and started wiping the mud off the cat’s paws with his handkerchief, smearing mud and fur on his slacks and sport coat.

“You’re leaving something out,” I said.

“Like what?”

“You’re telling me you froze?”

“I didn’t say that. I just left Golightly to his fate, that’s all. He was born a bad guy, and he went out the same way. The world is better off without him.”

“You’re a witness to a homicide, Clete.”

“What else do you want me to say? I told you what happened. You don’t like what I’ve told you, so you put the problem on me. You got anything to eat?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?” he said, putting Snuggs down.

“Come inside. I’ll get some eggs and bacon started.”