Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

CLETE PURCEL WAS determined to find the shooter Bix Golightly had called Caruso just before he ate three rounds fired directly into his face. But if Caruso was the pro Clete thought she was, she would avoid the mistakes and geographical settings common to the army of miscreants and dysfunctional individuals who constitute the criminal subculture of the United States. Few perpetrators are arrested during the commission of their crimes. They get pulled over for DWI, an expired license tag, or throwing litter on the street. They get busted in barroom beefs, prostitution stings, or fighting with a minimum-wage employee at a roach motel. Their addictions and compulsions govern their lives and place them in predictable circumstances and situations over and over, because they are incapable of changing who and what they are. Their level of stupidity is a source of humor at every stationhouse in the country. Unfortunately, the pros—high-end safecrackers and jewel thieves and mobbed-up button men and second-story creeps—are usually intelligent, pathological, skilled in what they do, middle class in their tastes, and little different in dress and speech and behavior from the rest of us.

In the 1980s, out by Lake Pontchartrain, Clete Purcel nailed a home invader who had warrants on him in seventeen states and had only one conviction, for check forgery, on his sheet. He had not only escaped from custody three times, he had successfully passed himself off as a minister, a Dallas oil executive, a stockbroker, a self-help author, a psychotherapist, and a gynecologist. When Clete later transported him to Angola, he asked the home invader, who was hooked to the D-ring in the backseat of the cruiser, how he had acquired all his knowledge, since he had no formal education.

The home invader replied, “Easy. I get a public library card in every city I live in. Everything in every book in that building is free. I also read every story and every column in the morning newspaper, from the first page to the last. Pretty good deal for two bits.”

“How does that help you?” Clete asked.

“Where you been, man? Most kinds of work are based on appearance, not substance. Stick a bunch of ballpoints in your shirt pocket and carry a clipboard and you can play it till you drop.”

Clete believed Caruso was in New Orleans, primarily because Frankie Giacano, the third member of the triad who had tried to scam Clete, was alive. But where would Caruso hole up? Not in the black areas, where there was a high police presence. Nor anyplace where there were hookers or dealers working the corners. No, she’d be in a guesthouse uptown, or in a white working-class neighborhood, or maybe around Tulane and Loyola, where a lot of college kids lived and hung out. Or she might be strolling the streets of the French Quarter in the morning, when the revelers had been replaced by family people who gazed through the windows of the antique stores on Royal or visited St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square or enjoyed coffee and hot milk and beignets under the pavilion at Café du Monde.

So far the only person who had shown any knowledge about Caruso was Count Carbona, aka Baron Belladonna, who had freeze-dried his head with Owsley purple at the Stones concert in Altamont, where the decade of the flower children ended and the music flew away in a helicopter, leaving a dead man on the stage and outlaw bikers beating concertgoers with pool cues.

Clete left his Caddy parked inside the courtyard at his office and walked to the store operated by the Count and Jimmy the Dime. As soon as he entered the store and the tiny bell over the door rang, Clete realized some sea change had taken place in his relationship with Jimmy and the Count. “What’s the haps?” he said.

“What it is, Purcel?” Jimmy replied, not looking up from his cash register.

“I’ve got a couple of tickets to WrestleMania at the arena for the Count, because I know he digs it,” Clete said. “I caught these same guys in Lafayette once. A South American dwarf shot Mr. Moto in the crotch with a blowgun.”

The Count was busying himself in the back of the store, whipping a feather duster across a row of capped jars filled with mushrooms and herbs and pickled amphibians. “I’m looking for a hitter named Caruso,” Clete said. “I think maybe the Count can be of great help to me.”

“Stow it, Purcel,” Jimmy said.

“This one is personal. Don’t you guys stonewall me on this.”

“I got news for you. Everything is personal. Like us getting mixed up in a homicide is personal,” Jimmy said. “Like another nickel in Angola is personal.”

“Did I get Nig and Wee Willie off your case when you couldn’t pay the vig on your bond?” Clete said.

“I burned a candle for you at the cathedral,” Jimmy replied. “I paid for the candle, too.”

“I’m about to arrange your funeral service there unless you stop cracking wise,” Clete said.

“She came in here yesterday,” Jimmy said.

“How did you know it was her?”

“The Count’s seen her. But where, I don’t know, and he ain’t saying.”

“What’d she want?”

“A book on Marie Laveau. Then she saw my cash register and wanted to buy it. She said she has an antique store in the Keys.”

“How about it, Count? Is that straight?” Clete said.

The Count was not answering questions.

“I’m jammed up on this one, you guys. I really need y’all’s help,” Clete said.

Neither man answered. “I’m going to tell y’all something I haven’t told anybody but Dave Robicheaux. I think Caruso is my daughter. She’s had a lousy life and, in my opinion, deserves a better shake than the one she’s had.”

His entreaty was to no avail. He removed two admission tickets to the New Orleans Arena from his wallet and placed them by the cash register. “You might really dig this, Count,” he said. “I once saw the Blimp. He had a curtain of fat hanging down to his knees so he looked like six hundred pounds of nakedness when he climbed into the ring. Plus he had BO you could smell ten rows into the seats. He’d get his opponent in a bear hug and fall on him and smother him in sweat and blubber and GAPO from hell until the guy was screaming for the ref. Nobody can equal the Blimp in terms of gross-out potential, but see what you think.”

“What’s GAPO?” Jimmy said.

“Gorilla armpit odor,” Clete replied.

He went back outside and lit a cigarette by a parking meter and tried to think. A man in a split-tail coat and tattered top hat rode by on a unicycle. A man in a strap undershirt was watering his plants with a hose on a balcony across the street, an iridescent mist blowing from the palm and banana fronds into the sunlight. On the corner, under the colonnade, a lone black kid with iron shoe taps was dancing on the sidewalk, a portable stereo blaring out “When the Saints Go Marching In.”