Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“She may have frozen to death.”

“What?”

“Blue Melton floated into the marsh inside a block of ice. The water temperature is seventy degrees. The deputy said her eyes are open and she looks like she’s trying to say something. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

The trip down to the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish didn’t take long. But the geographic distance between St. Mary Parish and other parishes had little to do with the historical distance between St. Mary Parish and the twenty-first century. It had always been known as a fiefdom, owned and run by one family with enormous amounts of wealth and political power. Its sugarcane acreage and processing plants were the most productive in the state. Its supply of black and poor-white labor was of a kind one would associate with an antebellum economy and mind-set. The oil and natural gas wells punched into its swamps and marshlands brought in unexpected revenues that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand, although the recipients did not feel a great Christian urgency to share their good fortune. The have-nots lived in company houses and did and thought as they were told. No court, clergyman, police official, newspaper publisher, or politician ever challenged the family who ran St. Mary Parish. Any historian studying the structure of medieval society would probably consider St. Mary Parish a model teleported from the thirteenth century.

We drove in Helen’s cruiser down a long two-lane road through flooded gum and willow and cypress trees, the sunlight spangling through the canopy on water that was black in the shade or filmed with a skim of algae that resembled green lace. The road dead-ended on a cusp of oil-streaked beach and a shallow saltwater bay that bled into the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Mary Parish sheriff, two deputies, a crime scene investigator, the coroner, and two paramedics were already at the scene. They were standing in a circle with the blank expressions of people who had just discovered that their vocational training and experience were perhaps of no value. When they glanced up at us in unison, they reminded me of late-night drinkers in a bar who stare at the front door each time it opens, as though the person coming through it possesses an answer to the hopelessness that governs their lives.

The sheriff of St. Mary Parish was not a bad man, but I would not call him a good one. He was trim and tall and wore cowboy boots and western-cut clothes and a short-brim Stetson. He gave the impression of a law officer from a simpler time. However, there was always a cautious gleam in his eyes, particularly when someone was making a request of him, one that might involve the names of people he both served and feared. One person he obviously did not like was Helen Soileau, either because she was a lesbian or because she was a female administrator. There were razor nicks on his jaw, and I suspected the discovery of Blue Melton’s body had robbed him of his day off. The sheriff’s name was Cecil Barbour.

“Thanks for contacting us,” Helen said.

“No thanks are necessary. I didn’t contact you. My deputy did that without my permission,” Barbour replied. The deputy was looking out at the bay, his arms folded across his chest.

“I didn’t know that,” Helen said.

“My deputy is a relative of the girl’s grandfather and says Detective Robicheaux was asking about her. That’s how come he contacted you,” Barbour said. “Look down in the ice. Is that Blue Melton, Detective Robicheaux?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” I replied. “How about putting a tarp over her body?”

“Why should we do that?” Barbour asked.

“Because she’s naked and exposed in death in a way no human being should be,” I replied.

“We have to defrost her before we take her in. Do you object to that?” he said.

“It’s your parish,” I said.

I walked down to the water’s edge, my eyes on the southern horizon, my back to the sheriff. I did not want him to see my expression or the thoughts that probably showed in my eyes. The tide was out, and a dead brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, was rolling in the frothy skim along the shoals, its feathers iridescent with oil. I could feel my right hand opening and closing at my side. I picked up a pebble and threw it underhanded into a swell. My mouth was dry in the way your mouth is dry when you come off a bender, my heart was beating, and the wind was louder than it should have been, like the sound a conch shell makes at your ear. I turned around and looked at Barbour. His attention had shifted back to the body of Blue Melton. She had been frozen nude inside a block of ice that must have been the size of a bathtub. The salt water and the sun and stored heat in the sand had reduced the block to the size and rough shape of a foo

tlocker. Her blond hair and her blue eyes and her small breasts and nipples seemed protected by only an inch or so of frosted glass. The sheriff was smoking a cigarette, the ash dripping off the end onto the ice.

“Dave’s right,” the coroner said. He was a taciturn man who wore straw gardener’s hats and firehouse suspenders and long-sleeve blue shirts buttoned at the wrists. “This poor girl has been exposed to enough abuse. Bust off some of that ice and get her on the gurney and cover her up, for God’s sake.”

A few moments later, I was alone with the coroner. “You ever see anything like this?”

“Never,” he replied.

“What do you think we’re looking at?” I asked.

“She was in a big subzero locker of some kind. Maybe on a freighter. There’s no way to know how long she was in the water. Ice creates its own environment and temperature zones. Maybe I can come up with an estimate of when she died, but I don’t know how dependable it will be.”

“Y’all better look at this,” a female paramedic said. She wiped her gloved hand across the ice barely covering Blue’s face, cleaning the melt and ice crystals away like someone brushing powdered snow off a windshield. The sun’s rays had probably magnified inside the ice block and created an air bubble and a pool of water that wobbled around Blue Melton’s head, like Jell-O. “There’s something in her throat. It looks like a piece of red rubber.”

SECRETLY, I WAS glad Blue Melton’s body had washed ashore in St. Mary Parish and not in Iberia Parish, because I would not have to notify the grandfather of her death. The rest of the day I tried to forget the images of Blue’s face and hair and embryonic-like arms and tiny feet locked inside a block of ice that could have been sawed out of a glacier. She could not have been over seventeen. What kind of human could do something like that to a young woman? Unfortunately, I knew the answer. There were misogynistic sadists in our midst, in greater numbers than most people could guess at. And how did they get there? Answer: Our system often gives them a free pass.

I prayed that she had not died of drowning or hypothermia. I prayed that the angels had been with her in the moments that led up to her death. I prayed that she heard the echo of a kind and loving voice from her childhood before someone stole her life away. I prayed most of all that one day she would have justice and that a better man than I would find it for her, and perhaps for her sister, because I feared I was no longer up to doing the job that I had done for most of my adult life.

I RECEIVED A call from the coroner Sunday afternoon. “I’m at Iberia Medical. I’ve just finished the postmortem. I’d like for you to come down here,” he said.

“What is it you want to tell me?”

“It’s what I want to show you, not tell you.”

“I appreciate your deference, but your first obligation is to Sheriff Barbour.”

“Two weeks ago my wife and I were having supper in Lafayette. Barbour happened to be sitting at the table next to us. He was wearing a Rolex watch. I suspect it cost in excess of a thousand dollars. I was trying to figure how I could afford a fine watch like that on my salary. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with an answer. Are you coming down here or not?”