Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“Yes, suh.”

“There’s a wall around it with broken glass on top of the wall? Some of the wall has crumbled down, and you can see cinder blocks inside it?”

“That’s it. That’s where I’m at.”

I was at a loss. “Listen to me. You’re not where you think you are. I went to the island southeast of the Chandeleurs, but the house was deserted. You have to find out where you are now and call me back.”

“I got to go. They don’t want me on the phone. They say I cain’t have no excitement.”

“Do you know Alexis Dupree?”

“I ain’t said nothing about Mr. Alexis.”

“Is he there?”

“I cain’t talk no more.”

“Did he do something to you?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Dave. I ain’t gonna call no more. Take care of yourself. Hey, you gonna see me on TV out in California one day. You gonna see me and Blue both. Then tell me I been lying, you.”

After I had hung up the phone, I stared at it. I tried to think back on the things Tee Jolie had told me. Obviously, she was deluded, hyped to the eyes with coke or brown skag, inside a chemically induced schizophrenia. But I believed she had told the truth about one thing: I probably would not be hearing from her again.

I DIDN’T TELL Molly or Alafair about Tee Jolie’s phone call. I didn’t tell anyone except Clete. I no longer trusted my own perceptions, and I wondered if I wasn’t experiencing a psychotic break. Since my return to the department, my colleagues had treated me with respect but also with a sense of caution and a degree of fear, the kind we express around drunk people or those whose mortality has begun to show in their eyes. It’s not a good way to feel about yourself. If you’ve visited the provinces of the dead, you know what I’m talking about. When you hover on the edge of the grave, when you feel that the act of shutting your eyes will cause you to lose all control over your life, that in the next few seconds you will be dropped into a black hole from which you will never exit, you have an epiphany about existence that others will not understand. Every sunrise of your life will become a candle that you carry with you until sunset, and anyone who tries to touch it or blow out its flame will do so at mortal risk. There’s a syndrome called the thousand-yard stare. Soldiers bring it back from places that later are reconfigured into memorial parks filled with statuary and green lawns and rows of white crosses and copses of maple and chestnut trees. But the imposition of a bucolic landscape on a killing field is a poor anodyne for those who fear their fate when they shut their eyes.

It was 7:46 Friday morning, and I was sitting at Clete’s breakfast table, watching him cook at his small stove. “Tee Jolie told you she could see palm trees and ocean waves outside her window?” he said.

“She said she could see the stucco wall with the exposed cinder blocks where the wall crumbled. I mentioned the broken glass on the top of the wall and asked if she was in the house that looked like a fort. She said that’s where she was.”

“It sounds like you gave her the details rather than the other way around, Dave.”

“That’s possible. But she told me she was looking at palm trees and the ocean hitting on a beach.”

“What else did she say?”

“She didn’t know where Pierre Dupree was. When I mentioned the old man, she sounded frightened.”

“That guy should have been put on the bus a long time ago,” Clete said. He scraped a pork chop and two eggs out of the frying pan and slid them off the spatula onto a plate. “You sure you don’t want any?”

“You know how much grease is in that stuff?”

“That’s why I’ve never had problems with arthritis. The grease in your food oils your joints and your connective tissue. Nobody in my family has ever had arthritis.”

“Because they didn’t live long enough,” I

replied.

He sat down across from me and filled my coffee cup and started eating, mopping up the egg yolk with a piece of toast dripping with melted butter. He didn’t lift his eyes when he spoke. “Are you sure you weren’t having a dream?”

“No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure about anything these days,” I replied.

“After the shootout on the bayou, I started having all kinds of weird dreams and hearing voices in my sleep,” he said. “Sometimes I see things when I’m awake that aren’t there.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“After I busted up Lamont Woolsey, I was hauling ass down St. Charles, and I saw the streetcar coming toward me on the neutral ground. The guy at the helm didn’t look like any streetcar conductor I ever saw. Know what I mean?”

“No,” I replied.