Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

I CALLED IN sick Monday and spent the early-morning hours raking leaves in the backyard. I piled them in stacks by the water’s edge and soaked them with kerosene and set them ablaze and watched the curds of smoke rise through the trees and break apart in the wind. I felt like a man coming off a bender, wanting to invest the rest of his life in garden chores and fixing his roof and oiling his fishing tackle and sanding the barnacles off a boat he left half filled with rainwater for the last year. I wanted to take every misadventure and wrong choice in my life and set it on fire with the leaves and watch it burn into a pile of harmless ash.

I wanted to be rid forever of martial thoughts and the faces of the men I had killed and the images of dead children and animals in third-world villages. I wanted to slip through the dimension into a place where moth and rust did not have their way, where thieves did not break in and steal. I felt sickened by my own life and the evil that seemed to pervade the earth. I wanted to find a gray-green tree-dotted tropical stretch of land on the watery rim of creation that had not been stained by war and the poisons of the Industrial Age. I was convinced that Eden was not a metaphor or a legend and that somehow it still lay within our grasp if only we could find the path that led back into it. If it had existed once, it could exist again, I told myself. I wondered if the dead who seemed to wander the earth were not seeking it, too, over and over, feeling their way through the darkness, searching for the place that lay somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

I guess these were strange thoughts to have on the cusp of winter, inside the smoke of a leaf fire that contained both the fecund smell of the earth and a petrochemical accelerant, but could there be a more appropriate season and moment?

I did not hear the footsteps of the person standing behind me while I heaped layer upon layer of blackened leaves onto the flames, my face hot, my eyes stinging with humidity.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” Gretchen said.

I stepped back from the fire and turned around and propped the bottom of the rake on the ground. “That’s one way to put it.”

“I’m not staying with Clete. I’ve got my own place. What do you want?”

“Did you have to pop somebody when you rescued your mother?”

“I scared a couple of guys, but no, I didn’t hurt them. You can check out my mother. She’s holed up in Key Largo, coked to the eyes. Something else you want to know?”

“Yeah, after you put two rounds into Jesse Leboeuf, he said something to you in French. Remember what it was?”

“I’m here about Clete, Mr. Robicheaux. He has to choose between me and you, and it’s tearing him up. I don’t want him taking my weight.”

“Then tell me what Leboeuf said before he died.”

Her eyes followed a speedboat that had just roared past us, splitting the bayou with a frothy yellow trough, the wake sliding through the cypress roots.

“They’re going to send people after you,” she said.

“Answer the question. Why not get your old man off the hook? The Leboeuf shooting was probably justified. You stopped a rape in progress. Leboeuf was armed and a threat to both you and Catin Segura. You can skate.”

She was breathing through her nose, her nostrils white around the edges. “You want me to confess to snuffing a cop in a place like this?”

“You probably saved Catin’s life. If you’d wanted to summarily execute Leboeuf, you would have parked a third round in him while he was lying in the bathtub. That means you have a conscience.”

“Roust me if you want. Tell my landlord I have AIDS. Do all the dog shit you guys do when you can’t make your case, but lay off Clete.”

“You’ve got it turned around, Miss Gretchen. Clete saw you put three rounds in Bix Golightly’s face. You made him a witness to a homicide and an accessory after the fact. You’ve done a major clusterfuck on your father. You just haven’t figured that out yet.”

Her breathing had grown louder, the blood draining from around her mouth. “The guys who kidnapped my mother are pretty dumb, but they were smart enough to know the difference between cooperation and going over a gunwale with cinder blocks wired around their necks. The contract came down from a guy who talks like he has a speech defect, like he can’t pronounce an R. Did you see Lawrence of Arabia? Remember how Peter O’Toole dressed? The guy who sounds like Elmer Fudd wraps himself up like Peter O’Toole because he’s afraid of the sunlight. Know anybody like that?”

“The albino, Lamont Woolsey?”

“God, you’re smart,” she said.

CLETE PURCEL WAS not a fan of complexities. Or rules. Or concerns about moral restraint when it came to dealing with c

hild molesters, misogynists, rapists, and strong-arm robbers who jackrolled old people. Clete wasn’t sure which category Lamont Woolsey fit into, but he didn’t care. The chains and hooks and manacles and piranha tank and dried blood in the room we found on the island southeast of the Chandeleurs gave Lamont Woolsey the status of crab bait.

Woolsey had used a credit card to pay for his stay in a hotel on Pinhook Road in Lafayette. It took Clete’s secretary, Alice Werenhaus, ten minutes to get the billing address. It was uptown in New Orleans, right off Camp Street, one block from the old home of the Confederate general John Bell Hood. Clete called me from his cottage. “I’m going to dial him up, Dave. He’s going to know it’s our ring, too,” he said.

“Be careful. Dana Magelli doesn’t want us wiping our feet on his turf anymore,” I said.

“Dana’s okay. People give him a bad time because he’s Italian. That’s the advantage of being Irish. Nobody expects much from a pagan race.”

“Who told you that?”

“I did. You don’t think I read? You don’t think I have a brain? Listen, I wasn’t fair to you on the island. I didn’t mean what I said about going our separate ways. That’s never going to happen. Diggez-vous, big mon? The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever. You copy that?”

“You got it, bud.”