Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Abused how?”

“As bad as it gets. So bad you don’t want to know. Dave, don’t look at that.”

I took my hand away from the folder. Clete pulled out a drawer under the table and removed a clear plastic bag of weed and a sheaf of cigarette papers.

“Lay off that stuff,” I said.

“I’ll do what I please.”

“No, you won’t.” I pulled the bag from his hand and opened the front door and shook the weed into the rain. I threw the bag and the papers into a waste can.

“Even my ex didn’t do that.”

“Too bad. What’s in the folder?”

“Let it slide, big mon.”

I picked up the folder regardless and looked at the black-and-white photographs of a small child. I read the medical report written by an emergency room physician. I read the statements of a social worker who threatened to quit her agency if the state didn’t remove the child from the home. I read the report of a Broward County sheriff’s detective detailing the arrest of the mother’s live-in boyfriend and the condition in which he found the child upon his last visit to the mother’s apartment. Most of the photos and the paperwork were almost twenty-five years old. The photos of the child were of a kind you never want to see or remember or discuss with anyone. “Who’s the mother?” I asked.

“A junkie.”

“You knew her?”

“She used to strip and hook out of a joint on Bourbon. She was from Brooklyn originally, but she’d moved to New Orleans, and she and her pimp were running a Murphy game on conventioneers. They blew town on an assault warrant. The john got wise to the scam when the pimp showed up as the outraged husband, because the same pimp had shown up on the same john six months earlier. So the pimp busted up the john with a pair of brass knuckles. How about that for a bunch of geniuses?”

“The pimp is the one who did this?” I was holding one of the photos, the paper shaking slightly in my fingers.

“No, Candy would screw anybody who’d give her heroin. There were always different guys living with her.”

“That’s when you were in Vice?”

“Yeah, and on the grog and pills and anything else I could cook my head with.”

“You got it on with her?”

“Big-time.”

“What’s going on, Cletus?”

He got a beer out of the icebox and ripped the tab and sat down at the table. The scar that ran through his eyebrow and touched the bridge of his nose had flushed a dark pink. He drank from the can and set it down and took his hand away from it and looked at the prints his fingers had left on the coldness of the can. “The kid in those photos had a miserable life.”

“Who is she?”

“You already know

.”

“Tell me.”

“Let it go, Dave.”

“Say it, Cletus.”

“It won’t change anything.”

“Is she alive?”

“You’d better believe it.” He was breathing harder, through his nose, his face shiny under the overhead light.