Creole Belle (56 page)

“I look like a vengeful man?”

“Hook yourself up.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“You don’t have to. Just don’t fuck with me or Dave Robicheaux again,” Clete said.

Lamont Woolsey seemed to think about it in a self-amused fashion, then slipped the tongue of the loose manacle through the D-ring and squeezed it into the locking mechanism.

Clete stuck a green-and-white peppermint stick in his mouth, glanced once at Woolsey in the rearview mirror, and floored the Caddy back onto the levee, his tires sprinkling dirt and gravel into the canal.

T
HE TRAFFIC WAS
thin as Clete drove down I-10 along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain and passed the airport and the cutoff that led to New Iberia. Woolsey was staring out the window like a hairless white ape being transported back to the zoo. Thinking derogatory thoughts about Woolsey brought Clete no consolation. His mockery of Woolsey was, in reality, a bitter admission of his own failure. Woolsey had been taken down by a moral imbecile, but Clete had willingly formed a partnership with one. And Eddy being Eddy, he had immediately factored in his girlfriend, who had almost blinded Woolsey with oven cleaner. On top of that, the two of them had probably told Woolsey he was going to be baked alive in a tanning bed, which Clete had never planned to do.

The shorter version was Clete had empowered Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend to torture a man in Clete’s name. Now he was operating a jitney service for the man who had put a hit on him and his best friend. How bad could one guy screw up?

He looked at his passenger in the rearview mirror. “What do you get out of all this, Mr. Woolsey?”

“Enormous sums of money. Want some?”

“You connected to the oil spill?”

“Not me. I’m an export-import man. One of our biggest clients is Vietnam. Some people say it’s the next China. Want to get in on it?”

“I already did. Two tours.”

“Shooting gook and dreaming of nook? Boys will be boys and all that? I bet y’all had some fun.”

“Take a nap. I’ll tell you when you’re home,” Clete said.

“Touch a nerve?”

“Not a chance,” Clete said.

He turned off I-10 and drove up St. Charles Avenue into the Garden District and pulled into Lamont Woolsey’s driveway. Woolsey’s SUV still rested lopsidedly on one of the back rims. The light was burning on the elevated gallery. An Asian girl in a print sundress was standing under it.

“There’s our loyal Maelee,” Woolsey said.

“What’d you say?” Clete asked.

“My sweet young Vietnamese girl. They’re a loyal bunch. And Maelee is as lovely and fragrant as they come.”

“Her name is Maelee?”

“That’s what I said. Do you know her?”

Clete didn’t answer. For a moment he saw a young woman swimming next to a sampan on the edge of the China Sea, her face dipping into a wave.

But the person on the gallery was not a woman. She was a girl, her bare shoulders brown and warm-looking in the light, the flowers on her dress as vibrant as flowers in a tropical garden.

“Is that you, Mr. Lamont?” the girl said. “I was worried. You were gone so long without telling me.”

“See, they’re loyal,” Woolsey said. “The French taught them manners.”

“Why don’t you show some appreciation and answer her?”

“Unlock my handcuffs.”

“I’ve seen her before,” Clete said. “She was the one who waited on Amidee Broussard after his speech at the Cajundome in Lafayette. He sent his steak back.”

“Correct-o. You must have had your eye on her.”

“What’s she doing here?”

“Amidee knew I needed a maid and drove her over. I’ve given her the cottage in back. She seems quite happy with her new situation. Something wrong?”

Clete pulled back the seat in the Caddy and fitted the handcuff key into the lock on Woolsey’s wrist. He could smell onions on Woolsey’s breath and the dried talcum around his armpits. He stepped back while Woolsey got out of the car. Woolsey’s lips looked purple in the gloom, his eyes dancing with light.

“Yeah, there is something wrong,” Clete said. “Neither of you guys has any business around a young girl like that.”

“What’s really bothering you, Mr. Purcel? You still dream about the little flower girls? It’s no fun keeping one’s wick dry, is it? You said you knew a woman named Maelee. She was Vietnamese?”

“She was Eurasian.”

“A taste of two worlds in one package? Yum-yum.”

The crow’s-feet at the corners of Clete’s eyes had gone flat, but his eyes remained placid and bright green and showed no emotion. “I know a couple of Quaker ladies who work with refugees. They’ll be here tomorrow to talk with the girl and take her somewhere else if she wants to go.”

“What is it you’re really after, Mr. Purcel? Your history with women is well known. You can’t keep your eyes off Maelee, can you? Would you like to go in the cottage with her? She won’t mind. She was very accommodating with Amidee. Last night I tried her myself. I highly recommend her.”

“I think we’re square on the damage Ozone Eddy and his girlfriend did to your face,” Clete said. “That means we’re starting with a clean slate. Is that okay with you?”

“Whatever you say. I’m going to go inside now and have a shower and a hot dinner. Then I’m going to bed down Maelee. I’ve earned that, and she knows it. We’re a colonial empire, Mr. Purcel, although you don’t seem to know that. Everyone benefits. The dominant nation takes the things it needs. Our subjects are only too happy to receive what we give them. It’s win-win for everyone.”

“A fresh slate also means all bets are off. For you, that’s not good, Mr. Woolsey,” Clete said.

“Time for you to be gone. Unless I missed something. Are you thinking of sloppy seconds?”

Clete huffed an obstruction out of his nostrils and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. “I didn’t want to do this.”

“Do what?”

“I mean in front of the girl I didn’t want to do it. I feel bad about that. She probably feels sorry for you and doesn’t understand that you’re a piece of shit out of choice, not because your mother thought she’d given birth to a sack of Martha White’s self-rising flour. By the way, I want my shirt back.” He paused. “Look, my real problem is I can’t get anyone over here tonight to look in on the girl, so that means we have to work things out right now, here, in your driveway. Are you hearing me? I said take off my shirt. Don’t make me ask you again. I’m sorry I sicced Ozone Eddy and his broad on you. Nobody deserves that, not even you. We’re straight on that, right? I’m glad we have that out of the way. Now give me back my threads. That’s not up for debate. You’re starting to upset me, Mr. Woolsey.”

“You’re a ridiculous man.”

“I know,” Clete said. “What’s a fellow going to do?”

Clete put his entire shoulder into his punch and sent Woolsey crashing into the side of his SUV. He thought it was over and hesitated and eased up when he swung again. But his estimation of Woolsey was wrong. Woolsey righted himself and slipped the second blow and caught Clete squarely on the jaw, snapping his head sideways. Then he hooked his arm behind Clete’s neck and drove his fist into Clete’s rib cage and heart again and again, his phallus pressed against Clete’s thigh, his smell rising into Clete’s face. “How do you like it, laddie? How does it feel to have your ass kicked by a freak?” he said.

Clete brought his knee up into Woolsey’s groin and saw the man’s mouth open like that of a fish slammed on a hard surface. Clete hit him in the side of the head and managed to hook him once in the eye, but Woolsey wouldn’t go down. He lowered his head, turning his left shoulder forward as a classic open-style fighter would. He slammed his fist into Clete’s heart, then hit him in the same spot a
second time, and glazed Clete’s head with a blow that almost tore his ear loose.

Clete stepped back and set himself, crouching slightly, raising his left hand to absorb Woolsey’s next punch, then drove his fist straight into Woolsey’s mouth. Woolsey’s head hit the SUV, and he went down as though his ankles had been kicked from under him.

But the engines that drove the rage and violence living inside Clete Purcel were not easily turned off. Like all of his addictions—weed and pills and booze and gambling and Cadillac convertibles and fried food and rock and roll and Dixieland music and women who moaned under his weight as though it only added to their pleasure—bloodlust and the wild release of confronting the monsters that waited for him nightly in his dreams were a drug that he could never have too much of.

He stomped Woolsey in the head, then grabbed the outside mirror and the roof of the SUV for support and brought the flat of his shoe down on Woolsey’s face, over and over, hammering Woolsey’s head into the door, reshaping his nose and mouth and eyes, whipping strings of blood across the side of the SUV. At that moment Clete genuinely believed that a helicopter was hovering immediately overhead, flattening all the flowers and banana fronds and elephant ears and caladiums and windmill palms that grew in Woolsey’s yard.

Then the flame that had consumed him shrank into a bright red dot in the center of his mind and died. For just a moment he saw nothing but darkness around him. The thropping sounds of the helicopter blades rose into the sky and disappeared. He felt a sharp pain in his chest, like a shard of glass working its way through the tissue around his lungs. His hands throbbed and seemed too large for his wrists, but he had no awareness at all of his surroundings. He blinked several times and saw Woolsey lying at his feet and the girl standing on the gallery, her hands trembling with shock.

Clete bent over and tore his shirt from Woolsey’s torso and threw it in the flower bed. “Okay,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “We got that issue off the table. Next time I tell you to take off my threads, take off my threads. That shows a definite lack of class and a definite lack of mutual respect.”

“Oh, sir, why have you done this?” the Vietnamese girl said.

“It’s a problem I’ve got, Maelee. I don’t like guys like Woolsey pretending that they’re Americans and they speak for the rest of us. You’re a nice kid, and you don’t have to put up with the Michelin man here. Some nice ladies are coming to see you tomorrow. In the meantime, stay away from Woolsey. This is my business card. If he lays a hand on you or tries to make you do something you don’t want to, you call that cell phone number.”

He started up the Caddy and headed down St. Charles, coughing blood on the steering column and dashboard, the streetcar clanging down the neutral ground toward him, the conductor’s eyes cavernous, his face skeletal under the lacquered-billed black cap he wore.

M
ORNING HAD NEVER
been a good time for Gretchen Horowitz. Others on the South Florida coast might wake to birdsong and tropical breezes and sunlight on blue-green water, but for her, the dawn brought with it only one emotion—a pervasive sense of loss and personal guilt and an abiding conviction that there was something obscene and dirty about her physical person. As a little girl, she had bathed herself from head to foot with a washcloth until the water in the tub turned cold and gray, but she had never felt clean. Afterward, she had scrubbed the tub on her knees, rinsing the porcelain surface repeatedly, in fear that the germs she had washed off her skin would be there the next time she bathed.

In middle school she learned there were ways to deal with problems that no educational psychologist would go near. Right after homeroom, the first stall in the girls’ bathroom was the place to be, provided you needed a few pharmaceutical friends such as rainbows, black beauties, Owsley purple, or a little sunshine that glowed inside your head all day, no matter what kind of weather the rest of the world was experiencing. The school day slipped by like a vague annoyance, white noise on the edge of a drowsy interlude before the bell sounded at three o’clock. Her weekday afternoons and evenings took care of themselves and did not require that she think about any issue outside of her head. She sacked groceries at a Winn-Dixie or
sat in a movie theater by herself or hung out at the public library or smoked a little dope with a high school football player in the back of his car. When it was dark, she got under the covers in her bedroom and tried not to hear the sounds her mother made when she feigned climax with her johns. It was easy.

But sunrise was a curse, a condition, not a planetary event. The feeling that came with it could not be described as pain, because it had no sharp edges. In fact, the feeling she woke with was one she somehow associated with theft. As the sun broke on the horizon, her sensory system remained trapped inside her sleep, and her skin felt bloodless and dead when she touched it. Her soul, if she had one, seemed made of cardboard. As the darkness faded from her room, she was able to see her school clothes on their hangers in her closet and the absence of anything of value on her dresser and the hairbrush on her nightstand that always looked unclean. She waited for the daylight to burn away the shadows in the room and, in some fashion, redefine its contents. Instead, she knew the shadows were her friends, and the day ahead held nothing for her except glaring surfaces that made her think of glass from a broken mirror. She also knew she was unloved for a reason, and the reason was simple: The girl named Gretchen Horowitz was invisible, and not one person on earth, including the high school football player who placed her hand down there whenever they were alone, had any idea who she was, or where she came from, or what her mother did for a living, or what had been done to her by men even cops were afraid of.