Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“No dice.”

“I don’t know where she is. I’m telling you the truth.”

I believed him. Clete had never lied to me, at least not deliberately. I unfolded the gas receipt I had taken from Jesse Leboeuf’s wallet. “Leboeuf had this receipt for aviation fuel on him when he died. There’re some landing coordinates written on it. The coordinates are southeast of the Chandeleur Islands. I think that’s where Tee Jolie is.”

Clete rubbed the spot where the mosquito had bitten him. “I don’t like the things you said about Gretchen. Alafair had a loving home. Gretchen had guys shoving their cocks down her throat. That was a lousy crack you made.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. You want in or out?”

He folded his arms and cleared his throat and spat. “You know anybody with a seaplane?” he asked.

“Yeah, Julie Ardoin.”

“The one whose husband killed himself? She’s kind of a pill, isn’t she?”

“How many normal people does either of us know?” I replied.

JULIE’S HUSBAND HAD been an offshore pilot and an untreated drug addict and, finally, a Saran-wrapped fundamentalist fanatic who tried to cure his addiction with exorcism and tent revivals. The night he did the Big Exit, he parked his car in the yard and came in the house and told his wife he had a surprise for her, namely that he was clean and had found a cure. He retrieved a double-barrel shotgun from his car trunk and reentered the house and sat down in his favorite chair and told his wife to open her eyes. The butt of the shotgun was propped on the floor between his legs and the twin muzzles under his chin. He was grinning from ear to ear, as though he had found the secret to eternal wisdom. “Keep it between the ditches, baby cakes,” he said. Then he depressed both triggers.

He left her with a Cessna 182 four-seat amphibian that she learned to pilot and used to pay off his debts. It was bright red and sleek and ideal for landing on freshwater lakes in the wetlands and even out on the salt if the wind wasn’t too bad. Julie kept to herself and never discussed her husband’s suicide, but sometimes I would see her blank out in the middle of a conversation, as though a movie projector had clicked on behind her eyelids and she was no longer with us.

Clete and I met her at New Iberia’s small airport early Sunday morning. I had convinced Molly and Alafair to visit Molly’s family in Beaumont for the day. I told Julie I would pay for her fuel and flight time if I couldn’t put it on the department. I watched Clete load his duffel bag into the baggage compartment behind the cabin area. The muzzle of his AR-15 and my cut-down Remington pump were sticking out of the bag. “How hot is this going to be, Dave?” she asked.

“It’s a flip of the coin,” I said.

“I think I know that island,” she said.

“You’ve been there?”

“I think Bob may have flown there.” The wind was blowing hard out of a gray sky, flattening her khakis and blue cotton shirt against her body. “He got mixed up with a televangelist here’bouts. His name is Amidee Broussard. Bob took him on a couple of charters. You know who I’m talking about?”

“I sure do.”

“What are we into, Streak?”

“I haven’t figured it out. It involves the Dupree family in St. Mary Parish and maybe Varina Leboeuf. It may involve some oil guys, too. Maybe Tee Jolie Melton is on that island. Maybe these are the guys who killed her sister.”

“Does Helen know about this trip?”

“She’s got enough to worry about as it is.”

“Tee Jolie Melton is a singer, right? Why would she be with the Duprees? They wouldn’t take time to spit on most of us.”

“What the Duprees can’t have, they take.”

“Tell your friend to ride in back.”

Clete was on the edge of the tarmac, locking up his Cadillac. “You have a problem with Clete?” I asked.

“I need to balance the weight. I don’t need a freight car in the front seat,” she replied.

Clete opened the cabin door of the plane and threw a canvas rucksack of food inside. “Let’s kick some butt,” he said.

We took off buffeting in the wind and flew through a long stretch of low clouds full of rain and popped out on the other side into a patch of blue with a wonderful overview of Louisiana’s wetlands, miles and miles of marsh grass and gum trees and rivers and bayous and flooded woods and sandspits covered with white birds. Through the side window, I could see the plane’s shadow racing across an inaccessible lake that was lime green with algae; then the shadow seemed to leap from the water’s surface and continue across a dense canopy of willows and cypresses that had turned gold with the season. From the air, the wetlands looked as virginal as they had been when John James Audubon first saw them, untouched by the ax and the dredge boat, thousands of square miles that are the greatest argument for the existence of God that I know of.

At the edge of the freshwater marsh, the canals that had been dug in grid fashion from the Gulf were now bulbous in shape, like giant worms that had been stepped on. I didn’t want to look at it, in the same way that you don’t want to look at people throwing litter out of a car window, or at pornography, or at an adult mistreating a child. This was even worse, because the injury to the wetlands was not the result of an individual act committed by a primitive and stupid person; it had been done collectively and with consent, and the damage it had caused was ongoing, with no end in sight. Eventually, most of the green-gray landmass below me would probably turn to silt and be washed away, and there would be no Ionian poet to witness and record its passing, as there had been for the ancient world.

I looked straight ahead at the darkening horizon and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking. We crossed Lafourche and Jefferson parishes and flew over Barataria Bay and then crossed the long umbilical cord of land extending into the Gulf known as Plaquemines Parish, the old fiefdom of Leander Perez, a racist and dictatorial politician who ordered a Catholic church padlocked when the archbishop installed a black man as pastor. In the distance, I could see the smoky-green waters of the Gulf and, on the horizon, a line of blue-black thunderheads forked with lightning.