Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“That was the code name of a colonel I served under. He was a giant of a man and went naked in the bush and drank a case of beer a day and blew bean gas all over his tent. He had huge pieces of scar tissue stapled across his stomach where he’d been wounded by a burst from an AK. He was the best soldier I ever knew. He founded the Delta Force.”

“You never told me about that.”

“It’s yesterday’s bubble gum.”

“Why would somebody do this? Do they think sending you a case of Scotch will get you drunk?”

“Somebody wants me to know he and his buds have access to every detail in my life, including my military record and the fact that I’m a drunk.”

“Dave, this scares me. Who are these people?”

“The real deal, right out of the furnace,” I replied.

WHEN IT CAME to courage and grace under fire, Clete Purcel was not an ordinary man. He grew up in the old Irish Channel in an era when the welfare projects of New Orleans were segregated and the street gangs were made up primarily of kids from blue-collar Italian and Irish homes who fought with chains and knives and broken bottles for control of neighborhoods that most people wouldn’t spit on. The pink scar that resembled a strip of rubber running through his eyebrow to the bridge of his nose had been given to him by a kid from the Iberville Projects. The scars on his back had come from the .22 rounds he took while he carried me unconscious down a fire escape. The scars across his buttocks had come from his father’s razor strop.

He seldom mentioned the specifics of his two combat tours in Vietnam. He went there and came back and never made an issue of the psychological damage that had obviously been done to him. He still served tea to the mamasan he killed and who had traveled with him from Vietnam to Japan and New Orleans and Vegas and Reno and Polson, Montana, and back to New Orleans and his apartment on St. Ann Street. In terms of physical courage, he had no peer; he ate his pain and swallowed his blood and never let his enemies know he was hurt. I had never known a braver human being.

But the sense of shame and rejection that was inculcated in Clete by his father was the succubus he could never exorcise, and it was never more apparent than when he was confronted by the odium his name carried with the New Orleans Police Department. The irony was that the department was notorious for its corruption and vigilantism and its targeting of Black Panthers during the 1970s. I knew cops who investigated their own burglaries. I knew a Vice detective who put a hit on his own confidential informant. I knew a patrolwoman who murdered the owners of the restaurant she held up. Sound like exaggeration? The hiring procedures at NOPD were so shabby, the department hired known ex-felons.

Dwelling on the moral failure of others brought no respite for Clete Purcel. No matter how elegantly he dressed, the man he saw in the mirror not only wore sackcloth and ashes but deserved them.

He had driven to New Orleans and checked in with his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, and the PI who handled some of his cases when he was out of town. Then he went upstairs to his apartment and picked up the phone and called Dana Magelli, not allowing himself to stop at the refrigerator, where almost every shelf was stocked with Mexican and German beer and chilled bottles of gin and vodka. While he waited for the call to be transferred, he could hear his breath echoing off the receiver.

“Magelli,” a voice said.

“It’s Clete Purcel, Dana. I need some help with that Luger you took off me.”

“Bix Golightly’s piece?”

“Right. Did you run the serial number?”

“Why should that be of interest to you?”

“I think Bix stole the Luger from Alexis Dupree. I think Dupree may be a Nazi war criminal.”

“I should have known,” Magelli said.

“Known what?”

“It’s not enough that you leave shit prints all over New Orleans. Now you’re branching into international affairs.”

“This isn’t funny, Dana. That old man has a scrapbook full of human hair in his house. Does that sound normal to you?”

There was a beat. “Where’d you get that information?”

“Dave Robicheaux saw it. Why do you ask?”

“Maybe we should talk. Where are you?”

“At my apartment.”

“Stay there.”

“No, I want to come down to the district.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“Yeah, it is,” Clete replied.