Creole Belle (39 page)

“Tell your mechanic to wipe the sawdust off the transmission cases,” Gretchen said.

“I’m lost here,” T. Coon said.

“You packed the transmission cases with sludge and sawdust to tighten up the gears. I bet you put oil on the brake linings to keep them from squeaking. The odometer numbers are a joke. I wouldn’t sit on the seats unless they’d been sprayed for crab lice.”

“I’m blown away by this,” he said.

“There’s not a car on the lot that’s not a shitbox. Your tires are so thin, the air is showing through. I think some of these cars came from Florida. They’re rusted with salt from the bottom up.”

“This is some kind of put-on.”

“Who are
you
that I should put you on?”

T. Coon’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth. “I’m making a living here.”

“You see that Ford truck with the chrome engine?”

“It’s a hot rod. It belongs to my nephew.”

“I ran the plate two days ago. It’s registered in your name. You use it as a leader and claim your nephew won’t sell it unless the figures are right. What are the right figures?”

“My nephew might take fifteen t’ousand.”

“Give me the keys,” Gretchen said.

She got in the pickup and fired it up and spun rubber on the grass and swung out on the highway, the dual exhausts throbbing on the asphalt. A few minutes later, she was back, the exposed chrome engine ticking with heat. She left the keys in the ignition and got out of the cab. “I’ll give you eight. In cash, right now. It’ll have to be re-primed and painted and the interior entirely redone. The only things good about it are the chop and channel jobs and the Merc engine and the Hollywood mufflers. The rest of it blows.”

“I cain’t believe I’m being verbally assaulted like this. I feel like I inebriated a whole bottle of whiskey and am having delusions.”

She opened her tote bag and removed a brown envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. “Tell me what you want to do,” she said.

“Make it nine,” he said.

“Make it eight.”

“Make it eighty-five hunnerd. The tires are almost brand-new.”

“That’s why you’re not getting seventy-five hundred,” she said. “Stop trying to see down my shirt.”

T. Coon wore a stupefied expression, like a man who had just gotten off a centrifuge. “We got to do some paperwork in my office, that li’l trailer over there. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll leave the door open. Jesus Christ, where you from, lady? You got your spaceship parked somewhere? You need a job? I’m serious here. I got an entry-level position we can talk about.” He looked at her expression to see what effect his words were having. “Okay, I was just axing.”

Half an hour later, Gretchen followed Alafair to a restaurant on the highway and bought seafood dinners for both of them. Through the window, Alafair could see a blue-black darkness taking hold in the sky and gulls that had been blown inland circling over a cane field. “I’ve got another favor to ask you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’d like to live my life the way you do. Maybe you could give me a reading list and some tips on things.”

“That’s flattering, but why not just be your own person?”

“If I was who I started out to be, I’d be in prison or worse. I’ve got an advantage over other people who write novels and make movies. I lived inside a world that most people couldn’t imagine. Did you ever see
Wind Across the Everglades
, the story of James Audubon trying to put the bird poachers out of business? I know those kinds of people, how they think and talk and spend their time. I know about racetracks and drug smuggling in the Keys and CIA people in Little Havana and the money that gets laundered through the pari-mutuel windows.”

“I think you’re probably a real artist, Gretchen. You don’t have to model yourself on me. Just stay true to your own principles.”

“I need you to go with me to see Varina Leboeuf.”

“You want to do this because of Clete?”

“Varina Leboeuf tapes the men she goes to bed with. Clete doesn’t have any judgment about women. I need to have a talk with her, but
in the way you would do it, not in the way I usually do things. I need you there as a witness, too. I don’t want her making up lies about me later.”

Alafair was eating a deep-fried soft-shell crab. She put it down and gazed at the seagulls cawing above the cane field. The sky was completely dark now, the clouds rippling with flashes of yellow light. “Clete can take care of himself. Maybe you should leave things alone.”

“You’re smarter than me about almost everything, Alafair, but you’re wrong about this. Most people think society is run by lawyers and politicians. We believe this because those are the people we see on the news. But the only reason we see these people on the news is because they own the media, not people like us. When things have to be taken care of—I’m talking about the kind of things nobody wants to know about—there’s a small bunch that does the dirty work. Maybe you don’t believe this.”

“That’s the way cynics think. And they think that way because it’s uncomplicated and easy,” Alafair said.

“Did you see
Mississippi Burning
, the story of the boys who were murdered by the Klan and buried in an earthen dam?” Gretchen said. “In the movie, the FBI outsmarts the Klan and turns them against each other and gets them to start copping pleas. But that’s not what happened. Hoover sent a Mafia hit man down there, and he beat the crap out of three guys who were only too glad to turn over the names of the killers.”

“What are you going to say to Varina?”

“Not much. You don’t have to go. I’ve asked a lot of you already.”

“Maybe it’s better I not.”

“I can’t blame you. I try to stay out of other people’s lives. But I don’t think Clete has much chance against Varina Leboeuf. I don’t think he sees everything that’s involved, either.”

“What’s that last part mean?” Alafair asked.

“I’ve known a lot of bad people in Florida. They all had connections in Louisiana. Some of them may have been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. How do you think the crack got in the
projects here? It just showed up one day? The money from the crack paid for AK-47s that went to Nicaragua. But who gives a shit, right?”

“This is becoming an expensive dinner.”

“That’s why I said you don’t have to go with me.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Alafair said.

G
RETCHEN
H
OROWITZ HAD
never understood what people called “shades of gray.” In her opinion, there were two kinds of people in the world, doers and takers. The doers did a number on the takers. Maybe there were some people in between, but not many. She liked to think she was among the not many. The not many set their own boundaries, fought under their own flag, gave no quarter and asked for none in return. Until recently, she had never met a man who had not tried to use her. Even the best of them, a high school counselor and a professor at the community college, had turned out to be unhappily married and, in a weak moment, filled with greater need than charity in their attitude toward her, one of them groping her in his office, the other begging her to go with him to a motel in Key Largo, then weeping with remorse on her breast.

That was when she tried women. In each instance she felt mildly curious before the experience and empty and vaguely embarrassed after, as though she had been a spectator rather than a participant in her own tryst. She saw a psychiatrist in Coral Cables who treated her with pharmaceuticals. He also told her that she had never been loved and, as a consequence, was incapable of intimacy. “What can I do about that?” she asked.

“It’s not all bad. Eighty percent of my patients are trying to escape emotional entanglements,” he replied. “You’re already there. What I
think you need is an older and wiser man, namely a paternal figure in your life.”

“I have feelings I didn’t tell you about, Doc,” she said. “On a bright, clear day out on the ocean, without a problem in the world, I have this urge to do some payback. On a couple of occasions I acted on my urge, one time with a guy who owned a skin joint and asked me out on his boat. Things got pretty entangled. At least for him. Want to hear about it?”

Later that day the receptionist called Gretchen and told her that the psychiatrist was overloaded and would be referring her to a colleague.

Alafair left her car in town and rode with Gretchen down to Cypremort Point. On the western horizon a thin band of blue light was sealed under clouds as black as a skillet’s lid, and waves were sliding across the darkness of the bay, smacking against the shoals. Gretchen could smell the salt in the air and the rain in the trees and the leaves that had been blown onto the asphalt and run over by other vehicles. But inside the coldness of the smell and the freshness of the evening, she could not take her eyes off the rain rings on the surface of the swells. They reminded her of a dream she’d been having since she was a child. In it, giant hard-bodied fish with the grayish-blue skin of dolphins rose from the depths and burst through the surface, then arched down into the rings they had created with their own bodies, slipping into darkness again, their steel-like skin glistening. The dream had always filled her with dread.

“You have dreams?” she asked.

“What kind?” Alafair said.

“I don’t mean dreams with monsters in them. Maybe just fish jumping around. But you wake up feeling like you had a nightmare, except the images weren’t the kinds of things you see in nightmares.”

“They’re just dreams. Maybe they represent something that hurt you in the past. But it’s in the past, Gretchen. I have dreams about things I probably saw in El Salvador.”

“You ever have violent feelings about people?”

“I was kidnapped when I was little. I bit the guy who did it, and a female FBI agent put a bullet in him. In my opinion, he got what he
deserved. I don’t think about it anymore. If I dream about it, I wake up and tell myself it was just a dream. Maybe that’s all any of this is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like a dream in the mind of God. We shouldn’t worry about it.”

“I wish I could be like you,” Gretchen said.

“There’s an amphibian out there,” Alafair said.

Gretchen looked through the window and saw the plane on the bay, not far offshore, floating low in the water, bobbing in the chop. It was painted white, its wings and pontoons and fuselage glowing in the blue band of light on the western horizon. A fiberglass boat with a deep-V hull and flared bow was anchored close by. The cabin of the boat was lighted, the bow straining against the anchor rope, the fighting chairs on the stern rising and falling against a backdrop of black waves. “Where is Varina Leboeuf’s place?” Gretchen asked.

“Right up there about a hundred yards.”

Gretchen pulled to the shoulder of the road and cut the headlights and the ignition. Through a break in the flooded cypress and gum trees, she had a clear view of the plane and the boat. She took a small pair of binoculars from her tote bag and got out of the truck and adjusted the lenses. She focused first on the amphibian, then on the boat. “It’s a Chris-Craft. The bow has a painting of a sawfish on it,” she said. “That’s the boat Clete and your father have been looking for, the one that Tee Jolie Melton’s sister was abducted on.”

Alafair got out and walked around to Gretchen’s side of the truck and stood beside her. Gretchen could see Varina Leboeuf on the stern and, next to her, a man with albino skin and shoulder-length hair that looked like white gold. He was wearing a shirt with blown sleeves and slacks belted high up on his stomach, the way a European might wear them. His forehead and the edges of his face were scrolled with pink scars, as though his face had been transplanted onto the tendons.

Gretchen handed Alafair the binoculars. “I’ll call Clete and tell him about the boat,” she said.

“We don’t have service here,” Alafair said.

“What do you want to do?”

“Confront her.”

Gretchen took back the binoculars and looked again at the boat and at Varina and the man standing on the deck. The man was heavyset and broad-shouldered, thick across the middle and muscular and solid in the way he stood on the deck. He looked in Gretchen’s direction, as though he had noticed either her or her truck. But that was impossible. She forced herself to keep the binoculars directly on his face. He was backlit by the lights in the cabin, his slacks and shirt flattening in the wind. He leaned over and kissed Varina Leboeuf on the cheek, then boarded the amphibian.

The plane’s twin engines coughed, then roared to life, the propellers blowing a fine mist back over the fuselage. Gretchen watched the plane gain speed, the pontoons cutting through the chop, the nose and wings abruptly lifting into the air. Her mouth was dry, her face hot, her breath catching in her throat for no reason.

“Are you okay?” Alafair asked.

“Yeah, sometimes I have kind of a blackout. More like a short circuit in my head. I look at somebody and can’t breathe and get dizzy and have to sit down.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Since I was a child.”

“What do you see through the binoculars that I didn’t?”