Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“The guy’s face was like a death’s-head. I grew up here. The streetcar was a dime when I was a kid. I loved to ride the car downtown and transfer out to Elysian Fields and sometimes go to the amusement park on the lake. I never thought about the streetcar as something you had to be afraid of.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “You worked over Woolsey because he was sexually abusing the Vietnamese girl, and that made you think about the Eurasian girl back in Vietnam and what the VC did because she was in love with a GI. You were blaming yourself again for something that wasn’t your fault.”

“Why are you always fussing at me about my health?”

“I’m not sure that’s the case.”

“You kill me, Streak.”

“Where’s Gretchen?”

“I don’t know. But if I catch Pierre Dupree around her, I’m going to turn him into wallpaper.”

“Did you know a woman’s panties are lying on your rug?”

“Really?” he said. His jaw was swollen with meat and eggs and bread and looked as tight as a baseball. “Want to go to the 1940s revue tonight with me and Julie Ardoin? They’re going to blow the joint down.”

THE PERFORMANCE WAS scheduled to begin in the Sugar Cane Festival Building inside City Park at eight o’clock Friday evening. In that same building, in 1956, I had listened to Harry James perform with Buddy Rich on drums, Willie Smith on alto sax, and Duke Ellington’s arranger Juan Tizol on valve trombone. The band had worn summer tuxes, and James had worn a bloodred carnation in his lapel. For us down here in our provincial Cajun world on the banks of Bayou Teche, the people playing horns and reed instruments on the stage were magical creatures that had descended from the ether. Their black trousers had razor creases, and their dress shoes gleamed, and their trombones and cornets had the brightness of liquid gold. The female singer sang Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” to a swing arrangement, then the orchestra went right into “One O’Clock Jump.” For two hours we were dancing at the Savoy or the Trianon or the Hollywood Palladium, James’s trumpet rising like a bell into the rafters, Buddy Rich’s drums rumbling in the background, the saxophones creating a second melody that was like an ocean wave starting to crest on a beach, all of it building into a crescendo of sound and rhythm that was almost sexual, that left us dry-mouthed and with a sense of longing we couldn’t explain.

Now we were over a half century down the road, almost to the winter solstice and the re-creation of Saturnalia, probably no wiser than our antecedents, our fears of mortality and the coming of night no less real. The live oaks in the park were wrapped with strings of tiny white lights; the Sugar Cane Festival Building was hung with wreaths and thick red ribbons tied in big bows; and families who were undaunted by cold weather were barbecuing under the picnic shelters, the blue smoke of their meat fires hanging as thick as fog in the damp air. Above the wide sweep of the oaks in the park, the sky was black and bursting with stars. The night could not have been more beautiful.

Alafair and Molly and I parked down by the duck pond and joined the crowd entering the building. “There’s Gretchen Horowitz,” Alafair said.

“Pretend you don’t see her,” I said.

“That’s a cheap way to act,” she replied.

“Leave her alone,” I said, putting my hand on her forearm.

“You’re not going to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do, Dave.”

“Will both of you stop it?” Molly said. She stared through the crowd at Gretchen’s hot-rod pickup, which was parked on a concrete pad at the rear of the building. “What’s she doing, anyway?”

“Unloading her film equipment. She’s making a documentary,” Alafair said. “I was going to help her with it.”

“You think she has any talent?” Molly said.

“I think she’s an artist. She has the love of it. What she doesn’t have are friends who are willing to help her,” Alafair said.

“You’re talking about me?” I said.

“No, I’m talking about myself. I gave her the impression that I might help her with her documentary. But I ended up telling her I was busy with my new novel. She got pretty mad about it.”

“At you?” I said, watching Gretchen pull a boom pole from her truck.

“Of course.”

“I’ll meet y’all inside,” I said.

“Don’t,” Alafair said. This time it was she who grabbed my arm.

“Gretchen needs to think about relocation. I think southern California is a fine place to visit this time of year,” I said.

“If you do this, Dave, I’ll move out of the house,” Alafair said.

“Clete is my best friend,” I said. “But he has to get Gretchen Horowitz out of New Iberia. She also needs to understand that members of our family don’t have the answer to her problems, all of which are connected to killing people.”

“Lower your voice,” Molly said.