Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“They hung her up and beat the shit out of her,” he said.

Varina Leboeuf lay on the floor, surrounded by broken plaster and pieces of water pipe Clete had torn out of the ceiling. Manacles from separate sets of handcuffs were locked on her wrists. When she looked up at me, I could hardly recognize her face.

“She says Pierre told the gumballs to do it,” Clete said.

In spite of his wounds, he picked Varina up on his shoulder and labored up the stairs with her as though she were a sack of feed. “I’m going to finish up here. Take her outside,” he said.

“Time to dee-dee, Cletus.”

“Not yet,” he replied.

I managed to get Varina Leboeuf out on the lawn while Clete went to work inside. I couldn’t tell if she knew what was going on. I believed she was wicked and she used people and discarded them when they were no longer of value to her. I believed she was heartless and mean-spirited and narcissistic and understood no emotions other than her own pain or the pleasure she experienced during moments of self-gratification. I also felt I couldn’t judge her. In her own mind, she thought of herself as normal and believed her misdeeds were somehow necessary. The worst irony of all was that in many ways, her perspective wasn’t totally dissimilar to Tee Jolie’s. They were for sale in different ways, but just the same, they were for sale.

I left her on the lawn and went back inside. Clete had traversed the entire first floor of the home and returned to the kitchen, where the gas container was resting upside down in the sink. He removed the road flares from his back pockets and stared at me, waiting to see what his beat partner from the old First District in New Orleans was going to say. The color had left his face, from either blood loss or exhaustion. I could feel the heat through the dining room wall.

“I checked the old man’s study,” he said. “The place is vacuumed. We’ll never prove any of the things we’ve learned about these people. It’s the right thing to do, Streak. Some of those guys might still be out there.”

He waited for me to reply.

“Streak?” he said.

“Do it,” I said.

He pulled the plastic cap off a flare and inverted the cap and struck the tip of the flare against the striker. When the flare burst alight, he walked into the hallway with it and tossed it into the living room. Either because of the preheated condition of the house or the influx of cold oxygen from outside, the moment of ignition produced a stunning effect. The rooms abruptly filled with the rosy coloration of a sunset during the summer solstice. The glow intensified and seemed to gather in the water-stiffened wallpaper, the oak floors, the walnut balustrades, the antique furniture, and the bookshelves lined with leather-bound collectibles. We backed out the kitchen door into the coldness of the night as the entire house lit up in a strange and sequential fashion, as though someone were running from room to room, clicking on a series of lamps with red shades.

I heard no glass break, no explosion of a gas main, no violent sounds of studs and joists and nails wrenching apart in the heat. Instead, Croix du Sud Plantation was slowly collapsing and devolving back into itself, whispering its own story on the wind, sparks stringing off the roof, the only earthly reminder of the slaves and convicts who had built and maintained it disappearing with it inside the smoke.

Clete and I walked toward the coulee to rejoin Alafair and Helen and Gretchen. Our wounds were severe, but we would survive them. We were out of step and out of sync with the world and with ourselves, and knowing this, we held on to each other like two men in a gale, the fire burning so brightly behind us that the backs of our necks glowed with the heat.

IN THE SPRING Molly and Alafair and I returned to our old haunts in Key West, and three days later, Clete Purcel joined us at the motel on the foot of the island. Key West is a fine place to visit, and it reminds me in many ways of old New Orleans, with its gingerbread houses and palm trees and genteel sense of decay and neon-scrolled pretense at vice that in reality is an illusion. At one time it was the real thing. Like South Louisiana, it originated as a displaced piece of the Spanish and French colonial world that floated across the Caribbean and affixed itself to the southern rim of the United States.

Its culture was antithetical to the Enlightenment. Its residents were pirates and slavers and mulatto and Hispanic whores and American adventurers who hoped to create personal fiefdoms in the West Indies and Nicaragua. Its veneer of Christianity disguised a pagan world that provided a home to people who could never live in a society that was Anglo-Saxon in origin and governed by the descendants of Puritans. License and lucre constituted its ethos. Those who didn’t like it could take up sweet-potato farming in Georgia.

Almost year-round, the air was warm and smelled of salt and rain and tropical flowers from all over the world. The winter was not really winter at all, and therein may lie Key West’s greatest charm. If one does not have to brood upon the coming of winter and the shortening of the days and the fading of the light, then perhaps one does not have to brood upon the coming of death. When the season is gentle and unthreatening and seems to renew itself daily, we come to believe that spring and the long days of summer may be eternal after all. When we see the light trapped high in the sky on a summer evening, is it possible we are looking through an aperture at our future rather than at a seasonal phenomenon? Is it possible that the big party is jus

t beginning?

We scuba-dived off Seven Mile Reef and trolled for marlin and, in the evening, cooked redfish wrapped in tinfoil on a hibachi on the beach in front of our motel down at the southernmost point on the island. The waves were black at night and strung with foam when they capped on the sandbars, and toward dawn, when the stars went out of the sky, the sun would rise without warning in an explosion of light on the eastern rim of the world, and the water outside our motel window would be flat and calm and turquoise and blue, dimpled with rain rings, and sometimes a flying fish would be sailing through the air as though determined to begin a new evolutionary cycle.

It was grand to be there on the watery edge of my country, amid its colonial past and its ties to the tropical world of John James Audubon and Jean Lafitte and missionaries who had knelt in the sand in the belief that they had found paradise. I wanted to forget the violence of the past and the faces of the men we had slain. I wanted to forget the dissembling and prevarications that constituted the official world in which I made my living, and most of all, I wanted to forget the lies that I had told others about the events on the bayou.

They were lies of omission. The larger truth about the oil blowout on the Gulf of Mexico was not one that many people were interested in. Corporate villains are loathsome. Almost all of them avoid media exposure because they come across as corrupt, arrogant, and tone-deaf. We stare at their testimony before a congressional committee and ask ourselves how this or that gnome of a man was allowed to do so much damage to the rest of us. None of these men can function without sanction. Nations, like individuals, give up an addiction or a vice when they’re ready and not until then. In the meantime, you can join Candide in his garden or drive yourself crazy proselytizing those who have no interest in your crusade, such as the street people in Mallory Square. These may not be the happiest alternatives in the world, but they’re the only ones that I’ve been able to come up with.

Helen Soileau returned to her job, and after fighting with insomnia and nightmares for two months, she began seeing a psychotherapist. She sought out crowds and enjoyed loud parties and sometimes stayed later than she should have and went home with people whose names she wasn’t sure of in the morning. She did not mind elevators, as long as there were not more than two or three people in them. Airplanes were more of a challenge. Her fear had nothing to do with heights or a loss of control. She was supposed to undergo an MRI in Lafayette, but at the last moment she could not force herself to enter the metal cylinder. She was filled with shame and depression and failure, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw a stranger created by the Duprees when they locked the woman named Helen Soileau inside the freezer.

For that reason, if for no other, I was glad the Duprees were dead and glad that Varina Leboeuf was awaiting trial in the Iberia Parish stockade. I was also glad that I could do a good deed by convincing Helen to take a leave of absence and get on the Sunset Limited and join us among the coconut palms and ficus trees on a stretch of warm beach not far from the home of Ernest Hemingway.

My face was scarred, and Clete had undergone two surgeries, one for the wound in his side and one to remove the lead fragments that had moved next to his heart. I suspect we made an odd group out on the beach, but I didn’t care. Is there any worse curse than approval? Have you ever learned anything new from people who accept the world as it is? The bravest individuals I have ever known appear out of nowhere and perform heroic deeds we normally associate with paratroopers, but they’re so nondescript that we can’t remember what they look like after they have left the room. Saint Paul said there may be angels living among us, and this may have been the bunch he was writing about. If so, I think I have known a few of them. Regardless, it’s a fine thing to belong to a private club based on rejection and difference. I’ll go a step further. I believe excoriation is the true measure of our merit.

When Clete and I were with NOPD, we knew a black cross-dresser and male prostitute by the name of Antoine Ledoux who was raped repeatedly in Angola and came out a juicer and a junkie. But he got clean with the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group and opened a shoeshine stand by the bus depot and freed himself of a predatory New Orleans subculture that only Tennessee Williams has written about honestly. All this happened before I was in A.A., so I asked Antoine one day how he managed to find a sanctuary from all the misery and pain that had constituted his daily life. Antoine replied, “Sometimes t’ings happen to you that ain’t your fault. When you come out on the other side, you ain’t never the same again. You paid your dues, and you got your own church wit’ your private pew. It’s the place where they cain’t hurt you no more. See? It’s simple.”

After our third week in the Keys, I received a postcard from Tee Jolie Melton forwarded from the department. She was living in West Hollywood, with guess who as a roommate? You’ve got it. None other than Gretchen Horowitz. The card read:

Dear Mr. Dave,

Gretchen has got a job at Warner Bros. and is taking classes at night at film school. We are so excited. WB is the studio where Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny were invented. I’m singing in a club and am going to make a demo. Our neighborhood is all men. Gretchen says don’t worry, they’re real safe. Are you okay now, Mr. Dave? You was hurt so bad.

The card was signed with the initials TJM because she had no more room on which to write. The next day I received a second card with the abbreviation “Cont.” at the top rather than a salutation. It read: