Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Can I meet your temp?”

“No, she’s tired. What’s this obsession over my temp?”

“Jimmy the Dime called me. He told me Count Carbona gave you a lead on your daughter.”

“Jimmy the Dime should keep his mouth shut.”

“What are you up to, Clete? You think you can change the past?”

“You got to ease up on the batter, Streak. In this case, the batter is me.”

“If that’s the way you want it,” I said.

He crunched down on the peppermint stick and chewed a broken piece in his jaw, making sounds like a horse eating a carrot, his eyes never leaving mine. “We almost died out there on the bank of the bayou, where we used to have dinners on your picnic table. Know why? Because we trusted people we shouldn’t. That’s the way it’s always been. We turned the key on the skells while the white-collar crowd kicked a railroad tie up our ass. That’s not the way this one is going down. Got it, big mon?”

EARLY THE NEXT morning Clete and Gretchen ate a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and fried pork chops and scrambled eggs at Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and then drove to Jeanerette down the old two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche through an idyllic stretch of sugarcane and cattle acreage. Her window was down, and the wind was blowing her hair over her forehead. There was a thin gold chain around her neck, and she was fiddling with the icon attached to it. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.

“The fishing is good, too. So is the food, maybe even better than New Orleans.”

“You sure you want to ’front this guy at his house?”

“Stonewall Jackson used to say ‘Mislead, mystify, and surprise the enemy.’”

“That’s great stuff as long as you have fifty thousand

rednecks stomping ass for you.”

“Is that the Star of David?” he asked.

“This?” she said, fingering the gold chain. “My mother is Jewish, so I’m at least half. I don’t know what my father was. He could have been a Mick or a Swede, because neither my mother nor anybody in her family has reddish-blond hair.”

“You go to temple?”

“Why are you asking about the Star of David?”

“Barney Ross and Max Baer both wore it on their trunks. I don’t know if they went to temple or not. Maybe they wore it for good luck. Is that why you wear it? That’s all I was asking.”

“Who are Max Baer and Barney Ross?” she said.

“Never mind. Look, we’re going into St. Mary Parish. Pierre Dupree owns another home in the Garden District in New Orleans. I suspect he’s here. This place looks like the United States, but it’s not. This is Dupree turf. The rest of us are tourists. You don’t want to get pinched here. I have to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“You know what ‘wet work’ is?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“I’ve had people ask me to do it.”

“Did you?”

“No. I run an honest business. I don’t work for dirtbags, and I don’t jam the family of a skip in order to bring him in. What I’m asking you is did you know some bad guys in Little Havana, maybe some guys who got you into the life? Did you maybe do some stuff you don’t feel good about?”

“I didn’t know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street,” she said. “Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“The only time I felt bad about anything was when I didn’t get even for what people did to me,” she said. “By the way, I don’t like that term ‘in the life.’ I was never ‘in the life.’”