Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

Iberia Medical Center was only ten minutes away, located behind oak and palm trees, not far from the turn-bridge where Nelson Canal empties into Bayou Teche. On that same spot in April 1863, Louisiana’s boys in butternut set up a skirmish line in a failed attempt to stop General Banks’s sweep across the southern part of the state. The Episcopalian church on Main was turned into a field hospital for the wounded and the dying, and Union soldiers vandalized and looted the town and were given sanction to rape black women. Up the bayou in St. Martinville, a Catholic priest who tried to shelter women in his church was almost beaten to death by these same soldiers. These events happened, but they are seldom if ever mentioned in history books that deal with the War Between the States.

The coroner was waiting for me in the room where he performed autopsies, a nonabsorbent apron not unlike a butcher’s looped around his neck and tied about the waist. Blue Melton lay on a stainless steel table, one that had a gutter and a drain and a flushing mechanism. She was covered by a sheet, but the side of her face and one eye and a lock of hair were exposed. Her skin had turned gray or pearly where the tissue was pressed against the bones. “She didn’t die from hypothermia or asphyxiation or blunt trauma. Cause of death was a massive heroin overdose,” the coroner said. “I don’t think she was an intravenous addict. There is only one puncture mark on her body and only one drug in her system. I think she was injected while she was in water, or she was put in water immediately after she was injected. I suspect she was alone when she died.”

“Why?”

The coroner picked up a tray from the counter behind him and held it out so I could see its contents. “I removed this red balloon from her mouth,” he said. “There are traces of heroin in it. There was also this slip of paper inside the balloon. The ink has run badly, but I think you can make out the letters.”

He lifted the strip of paper from the tray with a pair of tweezers and laid it out wetly on the corner of the autopsy table. My eyes filmed when I read the words that Blue Melton had written.

“Can you give me a time frame?” I asked.

“I’d say she’s been dead at least three weeks. That’s a guess. This was a brave girl. I don’t know how she pulled off what she did.”

My eyes were locked on the message Blue had left: My sister is still alive. I couldn’t concentrate on what the coroner was saying. “Would you repeat that?”

“It’s hard to say what happened, but chances are the heroin she was injected with came from the balloon she tried to swallow. Considering the amount of heroin that went into her heart, it must have taken an enormous effort to write those words on a piece of paper and place it in the balloon and then conceal it in her mouth. When people are dying, particularly under her circumstances, they don’t usually think about the welfare of others. Did you know her?”

“I used to see her at the convenience store where she worked. I knew her sister, Tee Jolie.”

“The singer?”

“She was more than that.”

“I don’t get your meaning,” he said.

I started to explain, then decided to keep my thoughts to myself. I drove back home in my pickup and sat for a long time on a folding chair in the shadows down by the bayou. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin curl out of the water into a cypress tree four feet away, its coils slithering and tightening around the branch, its eyes as small as BBs, its tongue flickering. I picked up a pinecone and tossed it at the snake’s head. But the snake ignored me and drew its tail out of the water and secured itself inside the cypress tree’s branches, the leaves already turning from green to yellow in anticipation of winter.

THERE ARE THREE essential truths about law enforcement: Most crimes are not punished; most crimes are not solved through the use of forensic evidence; and informants produce the lion’s share of information that puts the bad guys in a cage.

I couldn’t help Blue or Tee Jolie Melton, but perhaps I could do something about the shooting death of Bix Golightly and the fact that Clete Purcel had been a witness to it and would probably be hounded by the NOPD. I was convinced that Clete was concealing the identity of the shooter, although I had no idea why. Where does a person go in New Orleans for the type of information you can’t find in the Yellow Pages?

The best source I ever had in New Orleans was a former spieler at a strip club on Bourbon Street known as Jimmy the Dime. Jimmy’s nickname came from the fact that with one phone call, he could connect you with any action you were looking for, maybe a card game or access to counterfeit money that sold for twenty cents on the dollar or a brick of Acapulco gold. In terms of underworld activity, he was a minor offender and never a rat. His troubles usually came about from his bizarre and anachronistic frame of reference, which in his case was that of a Depression-era Irish tenement kid for whom dysfunction and living on the rim were as natural as the rising and setting of the sun.

Jimmy had a house in the Holy Cross section of the Ninth Ward when Hurricane Katrina struck the city. Rather than pay attention to the evacuation order or even listen to the news, Jimmy had watched a porn film on cable the morning the storm made landfall. When a tidal wave blew his house into rubble, Jimmy climbed onto a giant inner tube in polka-dot boxer shorts, with an umbrella and two six-packs of Bud and a Walkman and half a dozen joints in a Ziploc bag, and floated on the waves for thirty-six hours. He was fried to a crisp and almost run down by a Coast Guard boat and ended up in the branches of a tree down in Plaquemines Parish.

Jimmy’s eccentricities, however, were nothing compared to those of his full-time podjo and part-time business partner, Count Carbona, also known as Baron Belladonna. The Count wore a black cape and a purple slouch hat and had a face like a vertical chunk of train rail. The Count shaved off his eyebrows and was obsessed with the female rock-and-roll singers he believed lived under Lake Pontchartrain. If anyone asked how he knew about the women under the lake, the Count explained that he communicated with them daily through the drain in his lavatory. The Count’s current underwater drainpipe pal was Joan Jett.

After I finished work at noon on Monday, I drove to New Orleans and visited Jimmy and the Count at their book and voodoo store down by Dauphine and Barracks. In spite of Katrina, the windows looked like they had not been washed since the fall of the city to Union forces in 1862. The shelves and the array of worthless books on them stayed under a patina of dirt that Jimmy moved from place to place in the shop with his feather duster. In back were cartons of hand-painted tortoise shells and mason jars that contained pickled lizards and snakes and birds’ eggs and alligators’ feet. On the back wall was a garish painting of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans.

“You know anything about Bix Golightly getting capped, Jimmy?” I said.

“There’s not a lot of mourning going on about that,” he replied. He was drinking a

bottle of soda behind the counter, next to a beautiful antique brass cash register, his face florid, his hair as white as meringue, his stomach draped over his belt. “Remember that Louis Prima song, how’s it go, ‘I’ll be standing on the corner plastered when they bring your body by’?”

“Any rumors about why he got capped?”

“He was in the AB. The AB is for life. Maybe he made the wrong guys mad about something.”

“Waylon Grimes got popped the same night, probably by the same hitter. Grimes wasn’t in the AB.”

“The word was Bix was into a new racket, something that was more uptown. Also that he was out of his depth, that him and Frankie Giacano and Waylon Grimes decided they were gonna get even with Clete Purcel and make a few bucks at the same time. You talk to Purcel?”

“Clete didn’t do it, Jimmy.”

“Who filled up a guy’s convertible with concrete? Or packed a cue ball into a guy’s mouth? Or dragged a guy’s mobile home onto a drawbridge and set it on fire? Let me think.”

“Have you heard of a new button man in town, somebody named Caruso?”