Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Come on, partner.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“Her name is Gretchen.” His hands were propped on his knees, his big shoulders bent forward. He looked like a man experiencing vertigo aboard a pitching ship. “I made some calls to people around Miami and Lauderdale. In Little Havana people talk about a hitter they call Caruso. The old Batistiano and Alpha 66 crowd don’t mess with her. The greaseballs in Miami Beach say she’s like the Irish button men on the west side of New York: all business, no passion, a stone killer. They say maybe she’s the best on the East Coast. I think Caruso might be my daughter, Dave. I feel like somebody drove a nail in my skull.”

CLETE TOOK A shower and dressed and sat down again at the table, his hair wet-combed, his eyes clear. “I didn’t know I had a daughter until Gretchen was fifteen,” he said. “Her mother called collect from the Dade County stockade and said Gretchen was in juvie and I was her father. I don’t think Candy could have cared less about her daughter; she wanted me to bail her out of the can. I got a blood test done on Gretchen. There was no doubt she was mine. In the meantime she’d been transferred from juvie to foster care. Before I could get the custody process in gear, she disappeared. I tried to find her two or three times. I heard she was a hot walker at Hialeah, and she started hanging with some dopers and then got mixed up with some Cuban head cases, guys who think a political dialogue is blowing up the local television station.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

“Think I’m proud I fathered a child who was left in the hands of a sadist? I’m talking about the guy who did what’s in those pictures.”

I waited for him to go on. His beer can was empty, and he was staring at it as though unsure where it came from. He crunched it and tossed it in the trash, his eyes looking emptily into mine.

“What happened to her abuser?” I asked.

“He moved down to Key West. He had a small charter boat business. He used to take people bone fishing out in the flats.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s still there,” Clete said.

I looked at him.

“He’s going to be there a long time,” Clete said.

I didn’t acknowledge the implication. “How can you be sure she’s the one who shot Golightly?”

“Candy sent me pictures showing the two of them together only two years ago. Candy is back on the spike and says Gretchen comes and goes and drops out of sight for a year at a time. She doesn’t know what Gretchen does for a living.”

“You know who killed Bix Golightly. You can’t hold back information like that, Clete.”

“Nobody at NOPD wants to see me anywhere near a precinct building. When is the last time they helped either one of us in an investigation? You were fired, Dave, just like me. They hate our guts, and you know it.”

“Does Gretchen know you’re her father?”

“I’m not sure. I saw her for maybe five minutes when she was in juvie.”

“Does she know you live in New Orleans?”

“Maybe. I can’t remember what I told her when we met. She was fifteen. How many fifteen-year-old girls are thinking about anything an adult says?”

“Who do you think she’s working for?”

“Somebody with a lot of money. The word is she gets a minimum of twenty grand a hit. She’s a pro and leaves no witnesses and no money trail. She has no bad habits and stays under the radar.”

“No witnesses?” I repeated.

“You heard me.”

“Did she see you?”

“After she left, she came back and looked at the alleyway where I was standing,” he said. “Maybe she thought she saw something. Maybe she was just wondering if she picked up all her brass. She was whistling ‘The San Antonio Rose.’ I’m not making this up. Stop looking at me like that.”

HELEN SOILEAU COULD be a stern administrator. She also had a way of forgetting her own lapses in professional behavior (straying arbitrarily into various romantic relationships, whipping her baton across the mouth of a dope dealer who was chugalugging a bottle of chocolate milk after he insulted her), but no one could say she was unfair or afraid to take responsibility when she was wrong.

On Wednesday morning I had a doctor’s appointment and didn’t arrive at work until ten A.M. I was going through my mail when Helen buzzed my extension. “I just got off the phone with Tee Jolie Melton’s grandfather,” she said. “He tried to get ahold of you first, then he called me.”