Creole Belle (12 page)

I tried to assess what had just occurred. A man who indicated he wanted to deliver a message had gone to my home earlier but had not bothered to go to my office, although he had been told that was where I could be found. Then he had bounced into my driveway and delivered his message, all the while explaining that he didn’t have time to be there. Then he had left, communicating nothing of substance to anyone except the fact that he owned two expensive homes to which we were invited on an unspecified day.

I decided that Pierre Dupree definitely belonged in advertising.

H
ELEN
S
OILEAU CALLED
me at home on Saturday morning. “We’ve got a floater down at the bottom of St. Mary Parish,” she said.

“A homicide?” I asked.

“I don’t know what it is. I’m getting too old for this job. Anyway, I’m going to need you there.”

“Why not let St. Mary handle it?”

“One of the deputies recognized the victim. It’s Blue Melton, Tee Jolie’s sister.”

“Blue drowned?”

“She may have frozen to death.”

“What?”

“Blue Melton floated into the marsh inside a block of ice. The water temperature is seventy degrees. The deputy said her eyes are open and she looks like she’s trying to say something. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

The trip down to the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish didn’t take long. But the geographic distance between St. Mary Parish and other parishes had little to do with the historical distance between St. Mary Parish and the twenty-first century. It had always been known as a fiefdom, owned and run by one family with enormous amounts of wealth and political power. Its sugarcane acreage and processing plants were the most productive in the state. Its supply of black and poor-white labor was of a kind one would associate
with an antebellum economy and mind-set. The oil and natural gas wells punched into its swamps and marshlands brought in unexpected revenues that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand, although the recipients did not feel a great Christian urgency to share their good fortune. The have-nots lived in company houses and did and thought as they were told. No court, clergyman, police official, newspaper publisher, or politician ever challenged the family who ran St. Mary Parish. Any historian studying the structure of medieval society would probably consider St. Mary Parish a model teleported from the thirteenth century.

We drove in Helen’s cruiser down a long two-lane road through flooded gum and willow and cypress trees, the sunlight spangling through the canopy on water that was black in the shade or filmed with a skim of algae that resembled green lace. The road dead-ended on a cusp of oil-streaked beach and a shallow saltwater bay that bled into the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Mary Parish sheriff, two deputies, a crime scene investigator, the coroner, and two paramedics were already at the scene. They were standing in a circle with the blank expressions of people who had just discovered that their vocational training and experience were perhaps of no value. When they glanced up at us in unison, they reminded me of late-night drinkers in a bar who stare at the front door each time it opens, as though the person coming through it possesses an answer to the hopelessness that governs their lives.

The sheriff of St. Mary Parish was not a bad man, but I would not call him a good one. He was trim and tall and wore cowboy boots and western-cut clothes and a short-brim Stetson. He gave the impression of a law officer from a simpler time. However, there was always a cautious gleam in his eyes, particularly when someone was making a request of him, one that might involve the names of people he both served and feared. One person he obviously did not like was Helen Soileau, either because she was a lesbian or because she was a female administrator. There were razor nicks on his jaw, and I suspected the discovery of Blue Melton’s body had robbed him of his day off. The sheriff’s name was Cecil Barbour.

“Thanks for contacting us,” Helen said.

“No thanks are necessary. I didn’t contact you. My deputy did that without my permission,” Barbour replied. The deputy was looking out at the bay, his arms folded across his chest.

“I didn’t know that,” Helen said.

“My deputy is a relative of the girl’s grandfather and says Detective Robicheaux was asking about her. That’s how come he contacted you,” Barbour said. “Look down in the ice. Is that Blue Melton, Detective Robicheaux?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” I replied. “How about putting a tarp over her body?”

“Why should we do that?” Barbour asked.

“Because she’s naked and exposed in death in a way no human being should be,” I replied.

“We have to defrost her before we take her in. Do you object to that?” he said.

“It’s your parish,” I said.

I walked down to the water’s edge, my eyes on the southern horizon, my back to the sheriff. I did not want him to see my expression or the thoughts that probably showed in my eyes. The tide was out, and a dead brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird, was rolling in the frothy skim along the shoals, its feathers iridescent with oil. I could feel my right hand opening and closing at my side. I picked up a pebble and threw it underhanded into a swell. My mouth was dry in the way your mouth is dry when you come off a bender, my heart was beating, and the wind was louder than it should have been, like the sound a conch shell makes at your ear. I turned around and looked at Barbour. His attention had shifted back to the body of Blue Melton. She had been frozen nude inside a block of ice that must have been the size of a bathtub. The salt water and the sun and stored heat in the sand had reduced the block to the size and rough shape of a footlocker. Her blond hair and her blue eyes and her small breasts and nipples seemed protected by only an inch or so of frosted glass. The sheriff was smoking a cigarette, the ash dripping off the end onto the ice.

“Dave’s right,” the coroner said. He was a taciturn man who wore straw gardener’s hats and firehouse suspenders and long-sleeve blue
shirts buttoned at the wrists. “This poor girl has been exposed to enough abuse. Bust off some of that ice and get her on the gurney and cover her up, for God’s sake.”

A few moments later, I was alone with the coroner. “You ever see anything like this?”

“Never,” he replied.

“What do you think we’re looking at?” I asked.

“She was in a big subzero locker of some kind. Maybe on a freighter. There’s no way to know how long she was in the water. Ice creates its own environment and temperature zones. Maybe I can come up with an estimate of when she died, but I don’t know how dependable it will be.”

“Y’all better look at this,” a female paramedic said. She wiped her gloved hand across the ice barely covering Blue’s face, cleaning the melt and ice crystals away like someone brushing powdered snow off a windshield. The sun’s rays had probably magnified inside the ice block and created an air bubble and a pool of water that wobbled around Blue Melton’s head, like Jell-O. “There’s something in her throat. It looks like a piece of red rubber.”

S
ECRETLY,
I
WAS
glad Blue Melton’s body had washed ashore in St. Mary Parish and not in Iberia Parish, because I would not have to notify the grandfather of her death. The rest of the day I tried to forget the images of Blue’s face and hair and embryonic-like arms and tiny feet locked inside a block of ice that could have been sawed out of a glacier. She could not have been over seventeen. What kind of human could do something like that to a young woman? Unfortunately, I knew the answer. There were misogynistic sadists in our midst, in greater numbers than most people could guess at. And how did they get there? Answer: Our system often gives them a free pass.

I prayed that she had not died of drowning or hypothermia. I prayed that the angels had been with her in the moments that led up to her death. I prayed that she heard the echo of a kind and loving voice from her childhood before someone stole her life away. I prayed most of all that one day she would have justice and that a
better man than I would find it for her, and perhaps for her sister, because I feared I was no longer up to doing the job that I had done for most of my adult life.

I
RECEIVED A
call from the coroner Sunday afternoon. “I’m at Iberia Medical. I’ve just finished the postmortem. I’d like for you to come down here,” he said.

“What is it you want to tell me?”

“It’s what I want to show you, not tell you.”

“I appreciate your deference, but your first obligation is to Sheriff Barbour.”

“Two weeks ago my wife and I were having supper in Lafayette. Barbour happened to be sitting at the table next to us. He was wearing a Rolex watch. I suspect it cost in excess of a thousand dollars. I was trying to figure how I could afford a fine watch like that on my salary. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with an answer. Are you coming down here or not?”

Iberia Medical Center was only ten minutes away, located behind oak and palm trees, not far from the turn-bridge where Nelson Canal empties into Bayou Teche. On that same spot in April 1863, Louisiana’s boys in butternut set up a skirmish line in a failed attempt to stop General Banks’s sweep across the southern part of the state. The Episcopalian church on Main was turned into a field hospital for the wounded and the dying, and Union soldiers vandalized and looted the town and were given sanction to rape black women. Up the bayou in St. Martinville, a Catholic priest who tried to shelter women in his church was almost beaten to death by these same soldiers. These events happened, but they are seldom if ever mentioned in history books that deal with the War Between the States.

The coroner was waiting for me in the room where he performed autopsies, a nonabsorbent apron not unlike a butcher’s looped around his neck and tied about the waist. Blue Melton lay on a stainless steel table, one that had a gutter and a drain and a flushing mechanism. She was covered by a sheet, but the side of her face and one eye and a lock of hair were exposed. Her skin had turned
gray or pearly where the tissue was pressed against the bones. “She didn’t die from hypothermia or asphyxiation or blunt trauma. Cause of death was a massive heroin overdose,” the coroner said. “I don’t think she was an intravenous addict. There is only one puncture mark on her body and only one drug in her system. I think she was injected while she was in water, or she was put in water immediately after she was injected. I suspect she was alone when she died.”

“Why?”

The coroner picked up a tray from the counter behind him and held it out so I could see its contents. “I removed this red balloon from her mouth,” he said. “There are traces of heroin in it. There was also this slip of paper inside the balloon. The ink has run badly, but I think you can make out the letters.”

He lifted the strip of paper from the tray with a pair of tweezers and laid it out wetly on the corner of the autopsy table. My eyes filmed when I read the words that Blue Melton had written.

“Can you give me a time frame?” I asked.

“I’d say she’s been dead at least three weeks. That’s a guess. This was a brave girl. I don’t know how she pulled off what she did.”

My eyes were locked on the message Blue had left:
My sister is still alive
. I couldn’t concentrate on what the coroner was saying. “Would you repeat that?”

“It’s hard to say what happened, but chances are the heroin she was injected with came from the balloon she tried to swallow. Considering the amount of heroin that went into her heart, it must have taken an enormous effort to write those words on a piece of paper and place it in the balloon and then conceal it in her mouth. When people are dying, particularly under her circumstances, they don’t usually think about the welfare of others. Did you know her?”

“I used to see her at the convenience store where she worked. I knew her sister, Tee Jolie.”

“The singer?”

“She was more than that.”

“I don’t get your meaning,” he said.

I started to explain, then decided to keep my thoughts to myself. I drove back home in my pickup and sat for a long time on a folding
chair in the shadows down by the bayou. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin curl out of the water into a cypress tree four feet away, its coils slithering and tightening around the branch, its eyes as small as BBs, its tongue flickering. I picked up a pinecone and tossed it at the snake’s head. But the snake ignored me and drew its tail out of the water and secured itself inside the cypress tree’s branches, the leaves already turning from green to yellow in anticipation of winter.

T
HERE ARE THREE
essential truths about law enforcement: Most crimes are not punished; most crimes are not solved through the use of forensic evidence; and informants produce the lion’s share of information that puts the bad guys in a cage.

I couldn’t help Blue or Tee Jolie Melton, but perhaps I could do something about the shooting death of Bix Golightly and the fact that Clete Purcel had been a witness to it and would probably be hounded by the NOPD. I was convinced that Clete was concealing the identity of the shooter, although I had no idea why. Where does a person go in New Orleans for the type of information you can’t find in the Yellow Pages?