Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Will I learn anything else?”

“There are always possibilities.”

“Would you repeat that?”

Her gaze lingered longer on my face than it should have. “You look picaresque with that cut over your eye.” She touched the side of my face and studied my eyes.

I felt my cheeks coloring. “You always knew how to leave your mark,” I said.

IT WAS RAINING when I walked to work the next morning. Helen Soileau caught me before I could take off my coat. “In my office,” she said.

I was ready for a harangue, but as was often the case in my dealings with Helen, I had misjudged her. “You walked to work in the rain?” she said.

“My pickup is at the glazier’s in Lafayette.”

“The Lafayette PD found the freezer truck burning in a coulee. It was boosted from behind a motel early yesterday,” she said. “You never saw the shooter before?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Give me your coat.”

“What’s going on?”

She took my raincoat from my hand and shook it and hung it on a rack by the door. “Sit down,” she said. “Why did you go to Lafayette without informing me or checking in with Lafayette PD?”

“I was off the clock, and I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“What are we going to do with you, Pops?”

“How about a pay raise?”

“I don’t know why I put up with you. I really don’t. I have a fantasy: You’re the sheriff and I’m you, and I get to do to you what you do to me.”

“I can’t blame you.”

She was sitting behind her desk now, biting on the corner of her lip. I had always been convinced that several distinct and separate people had taken up residence inside her. I was never sure to which of them I would be speaking. She was a genuinely mysterious woman, probably the most complex I had ever known. Sometimes she would pause in midsentence and stare directly into my eyes in a way that made her features sharpen, her cheeks pool with shadow, as though she were having thoughts that the Helen Soileau who came to work that morning would not allow herself to have. All of us believe we have boundaries we won’t cross. I believed Helen had boundaries, too. But I wasn’t sure that either of us knew what they were. I cleared my throat and focused my attention on the raindrops running down the windows.

“You’re supposed to be on the desk and off duty at noon,” she said. “You’re supposed to go home and take naps and throw pinecones in the bayou. Obviously, that’s not what you have in mind. You prefer stirring up the wrong people in New Orleans and going to Lafayette and eating a load of buckshot.”

“I didn’t plan any of this. What do you want me to say?”

“I advise you to say nothing.”

I sighed and raised my hands and dropped them in my lap.

“I think it’s time to put you back on full-time status, bwana,” she said. She narrowed one eye. “It’s the only way I can keep your umbilical cord stapled to the corner of my desk.”

How do you reply to a statement like that? “Thank you,” I said.

“Lafayette PD thinks the shooter was some guy with a personal hard-on,” she said. “They’re looking at a parolee who just got off Camp J, a guy you put away years go. He was staying at the motel where the freezer truck got boosted. You remember a guy by the name of Ronnie Earl Patin?”

“Child molestation, strong-arm robbery, he hurt an elderly man with a hammer about ten years back?” I said.

“That’s the baby.”

“Ronnie Earl was a fat slob. I’m almost certain I’ve never seen either one of the guys in the freezer truck.”

“People can change a lot in ten years, particularly if they’re hoeing out a bean field.”