Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead as though he could smooth the wrinkles out of it. “Just coffee,” he said. “I don’t feel too hot.”

“You pull something loose inside?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“How can I help you if you won’t be square with me?”

“I thought this fall we’d be fishing again. Like the old days, when we caught green trout north of Barataria Bay. New Orleans is the only place in the world where people call bass ‘green trout.’ That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?”

“Who was the shooter, Clete?”

AT 7:45 A.M. I went to the office, and Clete went to the cottage he rented at a motor court down the bayou. At eleven A.M. I called Dana Magelli at the NOPD. I asked him what he had on a double shooting in Algiers. “How do you know we have anything?” he replied.

“Word gets around,” I replied.

“Bix Golightly got it. So did a kid by the name of Waylon Grimes. So far no brass, no prints. It looks like a contract hit. Somebody called in an anonymous shots-fired from a public phone.”

“Why do you think it was a contract job?”

“Aside from the fact that the shooter recovered his brass, he probably used a twenty-two or a twenty-five with a suppressor. The pros like small-caliber guns because the round bounces around inside the skull. Who told you about the shooting, Dave?”

“I got a tip.”

“From who?”

“Maybe from the same guy who called in the shots-fired. He said the shooter was wearing a red windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and jeans stuffed in suede boots. He said Golightly called the shooter Caruso.”

“We’ve already been to Golightly’s condo. A neighbor says a guy who sounds a whole lot like Clete Purcel was hanging around the condo last night. What are you guys up to?”

“Nothing of consequence. Life is pretty boring on the Teche.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“You’re a good man, but don’t ever talk to me like that again,” I said.

“You’re holding back information in a homicide investigation,” he said.

“You ever hear of a hitter named Caruso?”

“No. And if I haven’t, nobody else around here has, either.”

“Maybe there’s a new player in town.”

“Sometimes when people have a near-death experience, they think they don’t have to obey the same rules as the rest of us. You tell Purcel what I said.”

“He’s the best cop NOPD ever had.”

“Yeah, until he killed a federal informant and fled the country rather than face the music.”

I hung up the phone. At noon my half-day shift was over. I walked home under the canopy of live oaks that arched over East Main, the sunlight golden through the leaves, the Spanish moss lifting in the wind, the autumnal Louisiana sky so hard and perfectly blue that it looked like an inverted ceramic bowl. Molly was at her office down the bayou, where she worked for a relief agency that helped fisher-people and small farmers build their own homes and businesses. Alafair was proofreading the galleys of her first novel at our redwood picnic table in the backyard, Tripod and Snuggs sitting like bookends on either side of the table. I fixed ham-and-onion sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea and carried them outside and sat down next to her.

“Did Pierre Dupree find you?” she said.

“He called?”

“No, he was here about an hour ago.”

“What did he want?” I asked.