Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“No, I told you. It was for my boyfriend’s birthday, except that’s not what he wanted. What does my tattoo have to do with the old guy?” She squeezed her eyes shut in consternation and exhaled loudly, letting her mouth remain open, as though silently laughing.

“You made these sandwiches for us?” I said.

“I got to make a confessi

on. I think a crab was eating on one of the wieners,” she said. She scratched at a scab on her tattoo. “I’m sorry for probably telling you some lies today. I say things I kind of make up and they seem real, but later, they don’t.”

What can you say to kids like these? You might as well fill reams of paper with all the wisdom of the ancient and the modern world and pack them down a ship’s cannon with a plunger and stand back and ignite the fuse and blow six thousand years of knowledge into confetti and watch it float away on the next wave.

“There’s a torture chamber in that house. You could have been hung up in it. Don’t come back here,” I said.

“Wow, that’s seriously fucked up, man,” Rick said.

Clete and I walked past the dead birds in the compound, not speaking, our weapons across our shoulders, our raincoats flapping in the wind, the sun cold and gaseous in the pewter-colored sky.

Clete stopped. “We didn’t take the sandwiches she fixed,” he said.

“Forget it.”

“It’ll hurt her feelings. What’s the harm? I’ll see you at the plane.”

I waded out into the water and climbed into the cabin of the Cessna. I could think of only a few instances in my life when I had felt as depressed as I did then.

“What’s in that house?” Julie said.

“Pure evil.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing anyone will believe.”

“What’s your podjo doing?”

“He was worried we hurt a young woman’s feelings.”

“That’s why he went back?”

“Clete is a cross between Saint Francis of Assisi and Captain Bly. But you never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box.”

I saw her watching him through the windshield as though seeing him for the first time, her thoughts hidden.

“I’m going to tell you something that maybe I have no right to say, but I’ll say it anyway,” I said. “When people kill themselves, particularly when they bail off buildings or leave blood splatter on the ceiling, it’s usually because of a chemical assault on the brain. They can free themselves of their rage only by creating a legacy of guilt and shame and depression that is equal to their own suffering and that other people will buy into. In their fantasy, they survive their death and witness the discovery of their remains by the people they want to injure. Don’t let that be your fate, Julie. The world belongs to the living. Let the dead stay under their headstones.”

“Boy, you know how to say it, don’t you?”

“I think you’re a nice lady, too good to carry the weight of a guy who decided to mess you up as bad as he could,” I said.

“You’re the only person who ever had the guts to talk to me like that.” She looked in Clete’s direction again. “Something happen between you and your friend?”

“I let him down. Or at least he thinks I did.”

“How?”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s my friend. You don’t let your pals down. Right or wrong, you brass it out. Right?”

“You’re a funny guy, Dave. Here he comes now. He’s smiling. I bet he’s forgotten all about it.”

Clete climbed into the cabin and sat down heavily in the backseat, a smear of mustard on his cheek. His face was flat, his eyes empty when he looked at me. “Let’s blow this dump,” he said.