Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“What does Ron look like?”

“Neat dresser, good haircut. Maybe he’s been working outdoors. I remember him telling a joke. It was about Camp J or something. Does that mean anything?”

“A lot.”

“He just walked in. He’s got three broads with him. What do you want me to do?”

I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to five. “Keep him there. I’m on my way. If he leaves, get his tag and call the locals.”

“I don’t need a bunch of cops in here, Dave.”

“Everything is going to be fine. If you have to, give Ron and his friends an extra round or two. It’s on me.”

My truck was still at the glazier’s. I checked out an unmarked car and tore down the two-lane past Spanish Lake toward Lafayette, a battery-powered emergency light clamped on the roof.

THE CLUB WAS a windowless box with a small dance floor and vinyl booths set against two walls. The light from the bathrooms glowed through a red-bead curtain that hung from a rear doorway. Outside, the sky was still bright, but when I entered the bar, I could barely make out the people sitting in the booths. I saw Harvey look up from the sink where he was rinsing glasses. I didn’t acknowledge him but went to the corner of the bar, in the shadows, and sat down on a stool. I was wearing my sport coat and a tie, and the flap of my coat covered the holstered .45 clipped onto my belt. The duckboards bent under Harvey’s weight as he walked toward me. His face was round and flat, his Irish mouth so small it looked like it belonged to a goldfish. “What are you having?” he asked.

“A Dr Pepper on ice with a lime slice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black woman in a short skirt and a low-cut white blouse sitting on a barstool. I looked back at Harvey. “You still serve gumbo?”

“Coming up,” he said. He began fixing my drink, letting his gaze rest on a booth by the entrance. I glanced over and saw a blade-faced man and three females. Harvey placed my drink in front of me and picked up a stainless steel dipper and lowered it into a cauldron of chicken gumbo and filled a white bowl and set it and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. He picked up the twenty I had placed on the bar. “I’ll bring your change back in a minute. I got an order waiting over here.”

He took a frosted mug from the cooler and filled it until foam ran over the lip, then poured four shot glasses to the brim and placed the mug and all the glasses on a round tray. The work Harvey did behind a bar was not part of a mystique or of a kind most normal people would notice. But I could not take my eyes off his hands and the methodical way he went about filling the glasses and placing them on the cork-lined tray; nor could I ignore the smell of freshly drawn beer and whiskey that had not been cut with ice or fruit or cocktail mix. I could see the brassy bead in the beer, the strings of foam running down through the frost on the mug. The whiskey had the amber glow of sunlight that might have been aged inside yellow oak, its wetness and density and latent power greater than the sum of its parts, welling over the brim of the shot glasses as though growing in size. I felt a longing inside me that was no different from the desire of a heroin or sex addict or a candle moth that seeks the flame the way an infant seeks its mother’s breast.

I drank from my Dr Pepper and swallowed a piece of shaved ice and tried to look away from the tray Harvey was carrying to the booth by the front door.

“You ever see a li’l boy looking t’rew the window at what he cain’t have?” the black woman in the short skirt said.

“Who you talking about?” I said.

“Who you t’ink?”

“This is my job,” I said. “I check out dead-end dumps that serve people like me.”

“Ain’t nothing that bad if you got a li’l company.”

“You’re too pretty for me.”

“That’s why you looking at them other ladies in the mirror? They ain’t pretty?”

“You want a bowl of gumbo?” I asked.

“Honey, what I got don’t come in no bowl. You ought to try some.”

I winked at her and lifted a spoonful of gumbo to my mouth.

“Darlin’?” she said. Her stool squeaked as she turned toward me. She was pretty. Her skin was as darkly brown as chocolate and unmarked with scars or blemishes, her hair thick and black and freshly washed and blow-dried. “Your slip is showing.”

I pulled the flap of my coat over my .45, my eyes still on the reflections in the bar mirror.

“One of the girls in the boot’ you’re looking at is my li’l sister. I’m gonna walk over there and ax her to go outside wit’ me. We ain’t gonna have no trouble over that, are we?”

“What’s your name?”

“Lavern.”

“You need to stay where you are, Miss Lavern. I’m going to speak to an old acquaintance over there. You and your friends are going to be just fine. Maybe I can buy y’all a drink a little later. But right now y’all need to take your mind off world events. That’s Ronnie Earl Patin in the booth, isn’t it?”

“You ain’t wit’ Lafayette PD.”