Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“As soon as these guys think you’re in the club, they want to kiss your ass.”

We were a few feet away from a plank table where people were eating off paper plates. They glanced at us from the corners of their eyes.

“Sorry,” Clete said. “I’ve got a genetic case of logorrhea.”

A couple of them smiled good-naturedly and went on eating. Clete drank from his cup and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin. “I know you worry about me, big mon, but everything is copacetic,” he said.

“The only person who doesn’t worry about you is you.”

“Where’d all these Vietnamese girls come from?”

“A lot of them got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina.”

“You ever think about going back to ’Nam?”

“Almost every night.”

“John McCain went back. A lot of guys have. You know, to make peace with yourself and maybe some of the people we hurt or who were shooting at us? I hear they treat Americans pretty good today.”

I knew Clete was not thinking about making peace. He was thinking about the irrevocable nature of loss and about a Eurasian girl who had lived in a sampan on the edges of the South China Sea and whose hair floated off her shoulders like black ink when she walked into the water and reached back for him to take her hand.

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” I said.

“Would you go with me?”

“If you want me to.”

“You believe spirits hang around for a while? They don’t take off right away to wherever they’re supposed to go?”

I didn’t answer him. I wasn’t sure he was talking to me any longer.

“The girl I had over there was named Maelee. I told you that already, huh?” he said.

“She must have been a great woman, Clete.”

“If I’d stayed away from her, she’d still be alive. Sometimes I want to find the guys who did it and blow up their shit. Sometimes I want to sit down and explain to them what they did, how they punished an innocent, sweet girl because of a guy from New Orleans who wasn’t much different from them. We thought we were fighting for our country just like they thought they were fighting for theirs. That’s what I’d tell them. I’d meet their families and tell them the same thing. I’d want them all to know we didn’t get over the war, either. We’re dragging the chain forty years down the road.”

He swirled the whiskey and ice in his cup, then drained it and crunched the ice between his molars. His cheeks had the red blush of ripe peaches, his eyes aglow with an alcoholic benevolence, one that always signaled an unpredictable metabolic change taking place in his system. “There’s Amidee Broussard. Check out the dude sitting with him,” he said.

I tried to see through the crowd, but my angle was wrong, and I couldn’t get a clear view of Broussard’s table.

“Gretchen said she saw Varina on board that Chris-Craft with an albino. I don’t know if I’d call this guy an albino or not,” Clete said. “His face looks like a piece of white rubber somebody sewed onto his skull. You think that’s the guy?”

I took a barbecue sandwich off a tray a waiter was passing around, then stood up so I could see Broussard’s table. I cradled the sandwich in a napkin and ate it and tried to hide my interest in Broussard while I watched him and his friend. As a police officer, I had learned many years ago that you learn more by seeing than listening. Why? All perps lie. That’s a given. All sociopaths lie all the time. That’s also a given. Any truth you learn from them comes in the form of either what they don’t say or what their eyes and hands tell you. A refusal to blink usually indicates deception. A drop in the register of the voice and a blink right after a denial means you tighten the screw. Evasion and begging the question and telling half a truth are indicators of a habitual liar whose methodology is to wear you down. It’s not unlike playing baseball. Have you ever gone up against a left-handed pitcher who hasn’t shaved in three days and looks like his wife just kicked him out of the house? You either read his sign language or you get your head torn off.

When you watch a man like Amidee Broussard, if he’s deprived by distance of his ability to deceive with words, what things do you look for? You ignore the ceramic smile, the work-worn, sun-freckled hands of the farm boy and the bobbed white hair of a frontier patriarch. You look at the eyes and where they go. He was being served dinner from the kitchen rather than from the buffet tables. The black waiter who put Broussard’s steak before him wore sanitary plastic mittens, although none of the other serving personnel did. After the waiter set the plate down, Broussard offered no word of appreciation, no show of recognition; he never paused in his conversation with the man who had the surreal face of someone you thought lived only in the imagination.

I dropped the rest of my sandwich in a trash barrel and began walking toward the Broussard table. A Vietnamese girl was refilling his water glass and picking up the dirty dishes from the tablecloth. There was no mistaking the direction of Broussard’s eyes. They darted to her cleavage when she bent over, and they followed her hips as she walked away. His dentures looked as stiff as bone. “You think our man might be having impure thoughts?” Clete said.

Before we reached the table, we were joined by the man who had given us trouble at the Cajundome. “Hey, y’all fixing to talk to Reverend Amidee?” he said.

“Yeah, that’s our plan,” Clete said.

“Come on, I know him. I went fishing with him and Lamont Woolsey. Lamont had so much protective clothing on, he looked like he was wearing a hazmat suit.”

“Woolsey is the guy with the latex skin?” Clete said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” the man said. He looked at me and extended his hand. It was as hard and rough as brick. “I’m Bobby Joe Guidry.”