Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“The better question is how many guys around here are in stag films they don’t know about?” I said.

A HALF HOUR later, Gretchen Horowitz could barely contain her anger as she began dissecting Clete inside the cottage they were sharing at the motor court down the Teche. “You stay out all night and don’t bother to call or leave a message?”

“I’m sorry, Gretchen. I was in the bag. I was doing tequila shots and mixing it with beer, then somebody ripped the hands off the clock.”

“That’s not all you were doing.” She fanned at her face with a magazine.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Get in the shower. I’m going to open up some windows. Why don’t you show some discretion? Who was the broad?”

Clete was taking off his shoes on the edge of the bed. “These things are none of your business,” he said.

“It was Varina Leboeuf, wasn’t it?”

He dropped a shoe on the floor and stood up and took off his shirt. Lipstick was smeared on the collar, and the underarms were dark with sweat. He threw the shirt in the corner. “She had a photo of Pierre Dupree with Tee Jolie Melton. That’s why I went to her place. It was supposed to be business.”

“They’re playing you, Clete.”

“Who’s they?”

“She and her husband.”

“Varina hates his guts.”

“Use your head. From a legal perspective, that photo doesn’t mean squat. Dupree knows you and Dave Robicheaux will eventually find out he knew Tee Jolie. So she provides you with a photo that he can claim he doesn’t remember, and then both of them are off the hook. In the meantime, she gets you on a leash and gains access to everything you and Dave Robicheaux are doing. You’d see that if your brains weren’t in your putz. Get undressed and give me your clothes. I’m going to take them to the Laundromat.”

“Say that again about the two of them working together?”

“Not until you get in the shower,” she said, throwing open a window, flooding the inside of the cottage with sunlight and fresh air.

After she heard the water beating on the sides of the tin stall, she went into the bathroom and picked up his underwear and stuffed it in a dirty-clothes bag. Then she went through his slacks and the top shelf of his closet and his dresser drawers. She opened the bathroom door and leaned inside, steam billowing around her head. “I took your car keys, your sap, and your Beretta,” she said. “Take a nap. While I’m gone, I’ll do your laundry. In the meantime, you keep your harpoon in your tackle box. I’ll be back this evening.”

She got in the Caddy and drove to the McDonald’s on East Main and used the pay phone so there would be no personal record of her calls. Then she bought a fish sandwich and a milk shake to go and rolled down the top on the Caddy. The trip to New Orleans on the four-lane, going through Morgan City, would take only two hours. The sky was a hard blue, the sun so bright she couldn’t look directly at it, but there was a dark border of clouds low on the southern horizon, and the trees were starting to swell with wind. She burned

rubber going down East Main, the unchecked power of the engine throbbing through the steering wheel into her hands.

SHE PARKED THE Caddy on a side street off St. Charles, not far from a restaurant that recently was redone in art deco. After she used the electric motor to put up the top, she tied a scarf on her head and removed a pair of sunglasses from her tote bag and put them on and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. She reached in the bag again and removed a tube of lipstick and rubbed it on her mouth. She could see the old iron green-painted streetcar coming up the neutral ground from the Carrollton district, its bell clanging. The sun had gone behind a rain cloud, and the homes along the avenue, most of them built in the 1850s, had fallen into deep shade, the white paint on them suddenly gray, the only touch of color in the yards from the camellia bushes that bloomed year-round. The barometer had dropped precipitously, the wind had started to gust, and the air was colder and smelled of dust and the advent of winter. Some of the restaurant’s patrons were eating outdoors on a patio covered by a green-and-white-striped nylon awning. The streetcar stopped at the corner, discharging several passengers, then clanged its bell again and lumbered down the tracks through the tunnel of live oaks that extended almost to the Pontchartrain Hotel, near downtown. Gretchen studied the patrons at the tables and tried with no success to see through the smoked-glass windows in the side of the building. When the passengers who had been on the streetcar walked by her, she concentrated on locking the Caddy’s doors, her face angled down. She adjusted the strap of her tote bag on her shoulder and entered the restaurant through a side door.

The maître d’ approached from his station at the front of the restaurant, a menu under his arm. “Would you like a table?” he said.

“I’m supposed to meet Pierre Dupree here. But I don’t see him,” she replied.

“Mr. Dupree and his party have a private room. Please follow me,” the maître d’ said.

Gretchen did not remove her sunglasses or her scarf. When she entered the private dining area in back, she saw an elegantly dressed, tall, black-haired, handsome man sitting at a table with two other men, neither of whom wore a jacket. She pulled up a chair and sat down. The tall man was eating a shrimp cocktail, chewing in the back of his mouth, the fork dwarfed by his big hand. He had tucked a napkin into the top of his shirt. “Are you sure you have the right table, miss?” he said.

“You’re Pierre Dupree, aren’t you?” she said.

“I am.”

“Then I’m in the right place. My name is Gretchen Horowitz. I’ve met your wife and your grandfather, so I thought it was time I meet you.”

“How thoughtful. But I have no idea who you are or how you would know my whereabouts,” he said.

“I called your answering service and explained to the woman there that I was from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was going to take a message, but I told her I had to catch a plane this afternoon and I wanted to see you before I left. She was very helpful.”

“You’re with the Guggenheim?”