Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

They all holler, “Beat me Daddy, eight to the bar.”

A two-tiered staircase made of rough-hewn lumber led through an opening in the ceiling. I went ahead of Clete, my .45 held upward. A line of blood drops preceded me up the steps, like red dimes that had spilled from a hole in someone’s trouser pocket. I walked up the last three steps, my left hand on the rail, peering into the darkness. I slipped a penlight out of my coat pocket and clicked it on. The room was stacked with storage boxes and paint cans and Christmas decorations and papier-mâché figures used in the Mardi Gras parade. I shone the light along the boards toward the rear of the room and saw a pool of blood next to a pile of boxes that must have filled a fifteen-inch radius. On the edge of the blood, I saw the gleam of a gold chain and a tiny stamped religious icon.

Clete was standing behind me and had not seen the blood nor its thickness and amount. “Cover my back,” I said.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Stay on my back, Clete. Please,” I said.

I stepped forward and shone the light directly on the blood and the gold chain and Star of David. Then I went past the boxes and raised the penlight and moved its small beam across the face of Julie Ardoin. Her throat had been cut and her nails and nose broken; her forearms were sliced with defensive wounds. She had bled out, and her face was white and stark and had the surprised and violated expression that the dead forever stamp on the inside of our eyelids.

I heard Clete’s weight on the boards behind me. He still had not seen the body. “That’s Gretchen’s chain and medal,” he said.

“It’s not Gretchen, Clete.”

“Who?” he asked.

“It’s Julie. Call it in. Don’t look.”

He almost knocked me down getting to the body. Downstairs, the orchestra had gone into a thunderous drum and horn and saxophone finale that deafened the ears and left the audience screaming for more.

I CALLED IN the 911 myself and took Clete by the arm and walked him away from the enclosure of boxes where Julie had probably died. I could find no electric switches on the walls, but there was a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and when I twisted the bulb, it lit the room in all its starkness. Clete was breathing deep down in his chest, opening and closing his eyes. “I’m going to take Gretchen’s Star of David,” he said.

“Don’t touch it. There might be prints on it.”

“No, the chain isn’t broken. She dropped it there for me to find,” he said.

I didn’t argue. I had seen few instances in my long relationship with Clete Purcel when the world had gotten the upper hand on him and been able to do him serious injury. In this instance, he looked devastated, not only by the murder of his lover but by the simultaneous abduction of his daughter, both of which I was sure he was blaming on himself.

I looked around and tried to reconstruct what had happened. The loft we were standing in had a second set of steps by the far wall, and it led down to a second side exit. The loft had worked as a kind of bridge for the abductors. They had forced Alafair and Gretchen and Julie into the first-floor hallway, up the steps, down the other side, and out the door and into the park, where Alafair and Gretchen were likely taken away in a vehicle.

I said all these things to Clete, but I wasn’t sure he was hearing me. “Come on, Cletus. We’ve got to get our girls back.”

“Julie fought with them, didn’t she?” he said. “Downstairs in the hallway, she fought back. Julie didn’t take shit off anybody. She told them to fuck off, and they broke her nose and brought her up here and cut her throat.”

“That’s the way I would read it.”

“It’s Pierre Dupree.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“He got to Gretchen. She never had a boyfriend, and he got to her. He wants payback, Dave. Julie was in the way. Dupree has got long-range plans for Gretchen, that son of a bitch.”

“Maybe, but we’re not sure of any of this,” I said.

“He’s got plans for Alafair, too. Don’t lie to yourself.”

“I’m not. What I’m saying is we have to think.”

“They couldn’t nail us at the gig on the bayou, so they’re going to kill our kids,” he said.

“You’re losing it, Clete. The guys who tried to clip us behind my house were cremated. We’re dealing with an entirely separate bunch.”

“The hell we are,” he said. “If there’re two drunks on a ship, they’ll find each other. If there’re two scum-sucking bottom-feeders in the state of Louisiana, they’ll be in the same pond in twenty-four hours.”

“Bobby Joe Guidry said the two gumballs were talking about an amphibian.”

“Forget all the international intrigue and stuff about mysterious islands. These bastards are homegrown.”