Creole Belle (11 page)

Bix walked down to the van, tossing his keys in the air and catching them, a song in his heart. He opened the door and got in and peeled the Velcro-strapped holster off his ankle and locked it in
the glove box. It was no time to get stopped and frisked in Algiers. He inserted the key in the ignition, lighting a cigarette, blowing the smoke at an upward angle out the window, like a dragon that could breathe fire.

He had paid no attention to a figure standing in a doorway across the street. The figure stepped into the light and walked toward the van, wearing a red windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and tight-fitting jeans tucked inside suede boots. The figure’s hands were in plain view. Bix started the engine but did not shift into gear, his cigarette hanging from his mouth, his grin stretched as tight as rubber.

“Is that you, Caruso?” he said. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

The figure did not speak.

“I took a wrong turn off the bridge,” Bix said. “I ought to know better, growing up here and all. You want to get coffee or something? I’m supposed to close a couple of deals tonight. It’s part of a charity drive with the chamber of commerce, can you believe that?”

The figure leaned down as though determining if anyone else was in the van, then stepped back, glancing up and down the street.

“You can come along if you like,” Bix said. “I belong to an all-night health club. We can play some handball. I’m trying to get off of cigarettes and lose some other bad habits I got. Funny seeing you in Algiers. I always lived in the Quarter or uptown and never really dug the lifestyle over here. If it’s not in the Quarter or up St. Charles, it’s not New Orleans. It’s like Muskogee, Oklahoma, you know, downtown Bum Fuck with Merle Haggard singing songs about it. Jump in and we’ll take a spin across the bridge. From the bridge, the lights of the city are beautiful. When you visit New Orleans, you ought to call me. I know all the famous places you won’t find on any map. You want to see the house where that vampire novelist used to live? I can show you the rooftop where the sniper killed all those people in the Quarter. I was born and bred in this city. I’m your man. Believe me, Caruso, Algiers sucks. Why the fuck would you want to hang out here?”

Bix stuck another cigarette in his mouth without ever missing a beat, forgetting he had left one in the ashtray, the cigarette in his
mouth bouncing on his bottom lip while he talked on and on, his dignity draining through the soles of his shoes.

Then he felt an engine inside him wind down and stop. He looked at the glove box where he had locked his .25 auto and became silent. He lifted his eyes to the figure standing by the window and removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth. He started to speak, but the words would not come out right. He sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed and tried again. When he heard his own words, he was surprised at the level of calm in them: “You ought to come here during Mardi Gras. Like Wolfman Jack used to say, it’s a toe-curlin’ blast,” he said.

The figure lifted a silenced .22 auto and pointed it with both hands and fired three times into Bix Golightly’s face, hitting him twice in the forehead and once in the mouth, clipping his cigarette in half, the ejected casings tinkling like tiny bells on the asphalt.

The shooter bent over and picked up the ejected rounds as dispassionately and diligently as someone recovering coins dropped on a beach. From the edge of the alleyway, Clete watched the figure walk down the street through a cone of light under a streetlamp and disappear inside the darkness. The shooter’s windbreaker reminded him of the one worn by James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
. Then the shooter reversed direction and came back toward the streetlamp and seemed to stare momentarily at the alleyway, uncertain or bemused. Clete edged deeper into the alley. His .38 was clenched in his right hand, the grips biting into his palm, his pulse jumping in his neck. He pressed himself into the brick wall, his own body odor climbing into his nostrils, a vaporlike coldness wrapping itself around his heart. His blood was pounding so loudly in his ears that he couldn’t be sure if the shooter spoke or not. Then he heard the shooter walk away, whistling a tune. Was it “The San Antonio Rose”? Or was he losing his mind?

C
LETE’S
C
ADDY PULLED
into my drive at five the next morning, the windows and waxed finish running with moisture. I heard him walking on the gravel through the porte cochere and into the backyard. When I disarmed the alarm system and opened the back door, he was sitting on the steps. The oak and pecan trees and slash pines were barely visible inside the fog rolling off Bayou Teche. He told me everything that had happened in Algiers.

“You went into Grimes’s apartment after Golightly got it?” I said.

“I didn’t touch anything.”

“Grimes died with a .357 in his hand?”

“Yeah, he probably let the wrong person in and didn’t realize his mistake until it was too late.”

“Why’d you go into his apartment?”

“Grimes tortured my secretary. I shouldn’t go into his apartment?”

“You didn’t call the shooting in?”

“I called in a shots-fired from a pay phone.”

“You did that later?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s something not coming together here, Clete. You had your piece out when you were in the alley?”

“That’s what I said.”

“But you didn’t try to stop the shooter?”

“Would you eat a round for Bix Golightly?”

Clete was staring into the fog, his big hands cupped on his knees, his porkpie hat low on his forehead, his stomach hanging over his belt. He picked up Snuggs and started wiping the mud off the cat’s paws with his handkerchief, smearing mud and fur on his slacks and sport coat.

“You’re leaving something out,” I said.

“Like what?”

“You’re telling me you froze?”

“I didn’t say that. I just left Golightly to his fate, that’s all. He was born a bad guy, and he went out the same way. The world is better off without him.”

“You’re a witness to a homicide, Clete.”

“What else do you want me to say? I told you what happened. You don’t like what I’ve told you, so you put the problem on me. You got anything to eat?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?” he said, putting Snuggs down.

“Come inside. I’ll get some eggs and bacon started.”

He took off his hat and rubbed his forehead as though he could smooth the wrinkles out of it. “Just coffee,” he said. “I don’t feel too hot.”

“You pull something loose inside?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“How can I help you if you won’t be square with me?”

“I thought this fall we’d be fishing again. Like the old days, when we caught green trout north of Barataria Bay. New Orleans is the only place in the world where people call bass ‘green trout.’ That’s pretty neat, isn’t it?”

“Who was the shooter, Clete?”

A
T 7:45 A.M.
I went to the office, and Clete went to the cottage he rented at a motor court down the bayou. At eleven
A.M
. I called Dana Magelli at the NOPD. I asked him what he had on a double shooting in Algiers. “How do you know we have anything?” he replied.

“Word gets around,” I replied.

“Bix Golightly got it. So did a kid by the name of Waylon Grimes. So far no brass, no prints. It looks like a contract hit. Somebody called in an anonymous shots-fired from a public phone.”

“Why do you think it was a contract job?”

“Aside from the fact that the shooter recovered his brass, he probably used a twenty-two or a twenty-five with a suppressor. The pros like small-caliber guns because the round bounces around inside the skull. Who told you about the shooting, Dave?”

“I got a tip.”

“From who?”

“Maybe from the same guy who called in the shots-fired. He said the shooter was wearing a red windbreaker and a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and jeans stuffed in suede boots. He said Golightly called the shooter Caruso.”

“We’ve already been to Golightly’s condo. A neighbor says a guy who sounds a whole lot like Clete Purcel was hanging around the condo last night. What are you guys up to?”

“Nothing of consequence. Life is pretty boring on the Teche.”

“I think you’re lying.”

“You’re a good man, but don’t ever talk to me like that again,” I said.

“You’re holding back information in a homicide investigation,” he said.

“You ever hear of a hitter named Caruso?”

“No. And if I haven’t, nobody else around here has, either.”

“Maybe there’s a new player in town.”

“Sometimes when people have a near-death experience, they think they don’t have to obey the same rules as the rest of us. You tell Purcel what I said.”

“He’s the best cop NOPD ever had.”

“Yeah, until he killed a federal informant and fled the country rather than face the music.”

I hung up the phone. At noon my half-day shift was over. I walked home under the canopy of live oaks that arched over East Main, the sunlight golden through the leaves, the Spanish moss lifting
in the wind, the autumnal Louisiana sky so hard and perfectly blue that it looked like an inverted ceramic bowl. Molly was at her office down the bayou, where she worked for a relief agency that helped fisher-people and small farmers build their own homes and businesses. Alafair was proofreading the galleys of her first novel at our redwood picnic table in the backyard, Tripod and Snuggs sitting like bookends on either side of the table. I fixed ham-and-onion sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea and carried them outside and sat down next to her.

“Did Pierre Dupree find you?” she said.

“He called?”

“No, he was here about an hour ago.”

“What did he want?” I asked.

“He didn’t say. He seemed in a hurry.”

“Dupree owns a building in New Orleans that used to be the headquarters of Didoni Giacano. There was a safe in the building that contained an old IOU from a card game Clete was in. Clete had paid the debt, but a couple of wiseacres got their hands on the marker and tried to take his office and apartment away from him. What do you know about Dupree?”

“I’ve met him at a couple of parties. He seems nice enough,” she said. She took a bite of her sandwich and avoided my eyes.

“Go on,” I said.

“He’s had a lot of commercial success as an artist. I think he’s a marketing man more than a painter. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

“There isn’t?”

“He owns an ad agency, Dave. That’s what the man does for a living. Not everybody is Vincent van Gogh.”

“When was the first time you wrote a dishonest line in your fiction?”

She drank from her iced tea, her expression neutral, her galley pages fluttering when the wind gusted.

“The answer is you never wrote a dishonest line,” I said.

Her skin was unblemished and dark in the shade, her hair as black as an Indian’s, her features and the luster in her eyes absolutely beautiful. Men had trouble not looking at her, even when they were
with their wives. It was hard to believe she was the same little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged airplane that crashed off Southwest Pass. “There’s Pierre Dupree,” she said.

A canary-yellow Humvee with a big chrome grille had just pulled into the driveway. Through the tinted windshield, I could see the driver talking on a cell phone and fooling with something on the dashboard. I walked through the porte cochere until I was abreast of the driver’s window. Pierre Dupree had thick black hair that was as shiny as a raven’s wing. He also had intense green eyes with a black fleck in them. He was at least six feet seven and had a face that would have been handsome except for the size of his teeth. They were too big for his mouth and, coupled with his size, they gave others the sense that in spite of his tailored suits and good manners, his body contained physical appetites and energies and suppressed urges that he could barely restrain.

“Sorry I missed you earlier, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said through the window.

“Get down and come in,” I replied.

He thumbed a breath mint loose from a roll and put it in his mouth and dropped the roll back on the dashboard. “I’ve got to run. It’s about Mr. Purcel. He’s called my office twice regarding a betting slip of some kind. His message said the betting slip was in a safe I inherited from the previous tenant of a building I own. I got rid of that safe years ago. I just wanted to tell Mr. Purcel that.”

“Then tell him.”

“I tried. He doesn’t pick up. I’ve got to get back to New Orleans. Will you relay the message?”

“Do you know a guy named Bix Golightly?”

“No, but what a grand name.”

“How about Waylon Grimes or Frankie Giacano?”

“Everybody in New Orleans remembers the Giacanos. I never knew any of them personally. I really have to go, Mr. Robicheaux. Stop by the plantation in Jeanerette or my home in the Garden District. Bring Alafair. I’d love to see her again. Is she still writing?”

While he was speaking the last sentence, he was already starting his engine. Then he backed into the street, smiling as though he were
actually listening to my reply. He drove past the Shadows and into the business district.