Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

Clete got to his feet, off balance, and let the bottle drop from his h

and. He stared up the incline at the plantation house. “That fire is spreading. Maybe we should do something about that,” he said.

I had no idea what he meant. I picked up the bottle and walked deeper into the trees and scooped out a hole in the dirt with my foot and dropped the bottle into it and covered it over, my heart sick at the burden I knew Clete would carry for the rest of his life. The pontoon plane streaked past me, lifting out of the fog, banking above a sugarcane field where the stubble burned in long red lines and the smoke hung like dirty gray rags on the fields. As I walked back up the slope, I realized Clete had not gone directly to the house but to a loamy spot next to a clump of wild blackberry bushes on the bayou’s edge and was dragging a heavily laden tarp from a hole, the dirt sliding off the plastic as he worked it up the slope. Two road flares were stuck in his back pockets. He fitted his hands through the grips of two five-gallon gas containers and tried to pick them up. One of them fell hard on the ground and stayed there.

“Help me,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“It’s not over.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“You think I went too far with the old man?”

“What do I know?” I said, avoiding his eyes.

“He had it coming. You know he did. He was evil. The real deal. You know it.”

“Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. I did not let him see my face when I spoke.

“What kind of answer is that?” he said. “Come on, Dave, talk to me.”

I turned and headed up to the house by myself. I could hear him laboring up the incline, dragging one of the fuel containers behind him like a mythological figure pushing a great stone up a hill.

EVEN AS I outdistanced him to the house, I knew I was selling Clete Purcel short. You should never keep score in your life or anyone else’s. And you never measure yourself or anyone else by one deed, whether it’s for good or bad. It had taken me a long time to learn that lesson, so why was I forgetting it now? What Clete had done was wrong, but what he had done was also understandable. What if our situation had turned around on us again? What if Alexis Dupree had been given another chance to get his hands on Gretchen Horowitz and Alafair?

For those who would judge Clete harshly, I’d have to ask them if they ever served tea to the ghost of a mamasan they killed. I’d also ask them how they would like to live with the knowledge that they had rolled a fragmentation grenade into a spider hole where her children tried to hide with their mother. Those were not hypothetical questions for Clete. They were the memories that waited for him every night he lay down to sleep.

I was on the lawn and could see the carriage house and the driveway and the towering oak trees in the front yard. I turned around and looked at Clete, still lumbering after me, the gas container swinging from his arm. “What’s going on, gyrene?” I said.

He set the container down, his chest rising and falling inside his shirt. I walked back to him and removed my coat and pulled it over his shoulders. In the background I could see Alafair and Gretchen down by the coulee, helping Helen Soileau and Tee Jolie to their feet.

“It’s not over,” Clete said.

“You’re right. It never is,” I replied.

“You don’t look too good.”

“I’m okay. It’s just a flesh wound.”

“No, there’s no exit wound. Alafair was wrong, Dave. You’ve got a big leak in you. Sit down in the gazebo. I’ll be back.”

“You know better than that,” I said.

But the adrenaline of the last fifteen minutes was ebbing, and my confidence was fading. The yard and plantation house and windmill palms and azalea and camellia bushes bursting with flowers were going in and out of focus, like someone playing with a zoom lens on a camera.

“Hang tight, Dave,” Clete said.

He went through the kitchen entrance of the house, the gasoline sloshing inside the plastic container, the road flares sticking out of his back pocket, my coat draped on his shoulders. I followed him and was immediately struck by the density of the heat stored in the house. The fire Gretchen started in the dining room had spread along the carpet and climbed up two of the walls and was flattening against the ceiling. Smoke was climbing in a dirty plume through a hole that probably was once a conduit for the exhaust funnel on a gas-fed space heater.

“Clete?” I called out.

There was no answer.

“Clete! Where are you? It’s a match factory in here.”

I saw a door hanging open in the hallway. The gasoline container was sitting next to the doorjamb. Downstairs I could hear metal clanging and pipes rattling and bouncing on concrete. I went down the stairs, holding on to the handrail. A solitary light was burning behind a central heating unit, and I could see shadows moving on the wall, but I couldn’t see Clete. “What are you doing?” I said.