Creole Belle (60 page)

He stared through the darkness at the house, his head as light as a helium balloon. “Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that or maybe a month down the road, I’m going to get you,” he said.

To whom was he speaking? The Duprees and their hired gumballs? Or the men who would probably try to kill Gretchen? No, Clete’s real enemy had been with him much longer. He had seen him the first time he lay in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, dehydrated from blood expander, his face white from the concussion of a grenade, his neck beaded with dirt rings, his utilities fouled by his own urine. A corpsman had closed off an artery with his thumb, and suddenly the light had come back into Clete’s eyes and air had flowed into his lungs, as cool as if it were blowing across open water. That was when he saw the cloaked and hooded figure with the white face and thin lips and sunken cheeks.
The figure smiled and leaned over and pressed his mouth to Clete’s ear, as though no one else were in the tent. His breath smelled like nightshade and lichen on damp stone and ponded water gone sour in a forest whose canopy seldom admits light.
I can wait
, the hooded figure whispered.
But no matter where you go, you’re mine
.

I
F YOU HAVE
met the very rich, and by the very rich, I mean those who own and live in several palatial homes and have amounts of money that people of average means cannot conceive of, you have probably come away from the experience feeling that you have been taken, somehow diminished and cheapened in terms of self-worth. It’s not unlike getting too close to theatrical people or celebrity ministers or politicians who have convinced us that it is their mandate to lead us away from ourselves.

If you are around the very rich for very long, you quickly learn that in spite of their money, many of them are dull-witted and boring. Their tastes are often superficial, their interests vain and self-centered. Most of them do not like movies or read books of substance, and they have little or no curiosity about anything that doesn’t directly affect their lives. Their conversations are pedestrian and deal with the minutiae of their daily existence. Those who wait on them and polish and chauffeur their automobiles and tend their lawns and gardens are abstractions with no last names or histories worth taking note of. The toil and sweat and suffering of the great masses are the stuff of a benighted time that belongs in the books of Charles Dickens and has nothing to do with our own era. In the world of the very rich, obtuseness may not quite rise to the level of a virtue, but it’s often the norm.

What is most remarkable about many of those who have great wealth is the basic assumption on which they predicate their lives: They believe that others have the same insatiable desire for money that they have, and that others will do anything for it. Inside their culture, manners and morality and money not only begin with the same letter of the alphabet but are indistinguishable. The marble floors and the spiral staircases of the homes owned by the very rich and the chandeliers that ring with light in their entranceways usually have little to do with physical comfort. These things are iconic and votive in nature and, ultimately, a vulgarized tribute to a deity who is arguably an extension of themselves.

The British oil entrepreneur Hubert Donnelly could be called an emissary for the very rich, but he could not be called a hypocrite. He came in person to my office at nine
A.M
. on Thursday. If he was a lawbreaker, and I suspected he was, I had to grant him his brass. He came without a lawyer into the belly of the beast and laid his proposal on my desk. “I want you and Mr. Purcel to work for us,” he said. “You’ll have to travel, but you’ll fly first-class or on private jets and stay at the best hotels. Here’s the starting figure.”

He placed a slip of paper on my desk blotter. The number 215,000 was written on it.

“That’s for the probationary period,” he said. “After six months or so, you’ll get a significant bump.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“You’ll earn it.”

“A guy like me would be a fool to pass it up.”

“Talk it over with your family. Take your time.”

He wore a dark blue suit and a shirt as bright as tin. His grooming was immaculate. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the pits in his cheeks and the way his skin sagged under his jaw.

“You already know this is a waste of time, don’t you?” I said.

“Probably.”

“You’re here anyway.”

“One toggles from place to place and carries out his little duties. I’m sure you do the same.”

“Have you chatted up Lamont Woolsey of late?”

“He and I are not close.”

“I hear somebody stomped his face in.”

“Woolsey has a way of provoking people.”

“Ever hear of a guy by the name of Ozone Eddy Mouton?”

“No, I can’t say that I have.”

“A couple of people were found incinerated inside a car trunk in St. Bernard Parish. I hear even their teeth were melted by the heat.”

He didn’t blink. I watched his eyes. They had a translucence about them that was almost ethereal. They were free of guilt or worry or concern of any kind. They made me think of blue water on a sunny day or the eyes of door-to-door proselytizers who tell you they were recently reborn.

“If you worked for us, you would be free of all these things,” he said. “Why not give it a try? You seem to have the benefits of a classical education. As a soldier, you walked in the footprints of the French and the British, and you know how it’s all going to play out. Do you always want to be a beggar of scraps at the table of the rich? Do you enjoy being part of a system that instills a vice like gambling in its citizenry and placates the poor with bread and circuses?”

“The guys who died on that rig are going to find you one day, Mr. Donnelly.”

“When all else fails, we whip out our biblical dirge, do we?”

“Maybe you’ll have better luck dealing with the dead than I. They go where they want. They sit on your bed at night and stand behind you in the mirror. Once they locate you, they never rest. And you know what’s worse about them?”

He smiled at me and didn’t reply.

“When it’s your time, they’ll be your escorts, and they won’t be delivering you to a very good place. The dead are not given to mercy.”

He did something I didn’t expect. He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows splayed on my desk. “I was once like you, determined to impose my moral sense on the rest of the world. I was in Sudan and Libya and Turkistan and Rwanda and the Congo. I was repelled when I saw peasants buried up to their necks and decapitated by earth graders, and women disemboweled with machetes on the roadside.
But I learned to live with it, as I’m sure you and Mr. Purcel did. Don’t rinse your sins at the expense of others, sir. It’s tawdry and cheap stuff and unworthy of a good soldier and a knowledgeable man.”

“Clete Purcel and I have nothing you want.”

“When you cross the wrong Rubicon, you enter a harsh and unpredictable environment, Detective Robicheaux. It’s not a country where you can depend on the kindness of strangers or those who seem to be your friends. Do you get my drift?”

“No, not at all,” I replied.

“That’s too bad. I thought you were a more perceptive man. Good-bye, sir,” he said.

G
RETCHEN
H
OROWITZ DID
not deal well with emotions that involved trust or deconstructing her defense system. Her program had always been simple: Number one, you didn’t empower others to hurt you; number two, when people didn’t heed your warning signs, you taught them the nature of regret; number three, you didn’t let a man get in your head so he could get in your pants.

Her ongoing conversation with herself about Pierre Dupree was causing her problems she had never experienced. The more she thought about him, the more power she gave him. The more she shut him out of her thoughts, the more she lost confidence in herself. Since she was sixteen, she had never run from a problem. She could also say she had never been afraid, or at least she had never let fear stop her from doing anything. Not until now. She was obviously losing control, something she’d believed would never happen to her again. She felt weak and agitated and ashamed, and she felt unclean and refused to look directly at herself in the mirror. Had she secretly always wanted to be in the arms of a large and powerful and handsome man who was rich and educated and knew how to dress? In this case, the same man who had almost broken her fingers in his palm. Did another person live inside her, someone whose self-esteem was so low that she was attracted to her abuser?

She felt her eyes filming, her cheeks burning.

There was no harm in listening to what he had to say, was there? You kept your friends close and your enemies closer, right?

Don’t think thoughts like that
, she told herself.
He wants you in the sack
.

So I won’t let that happen
.

Who are you kidding, girl?

He did a good deed for the little cripple boy. I didn’t make that up. There was no way he could know I’d see him taking the little boy into the church
.

He’s a con man. He’s probably having you surveilled. Tell somebody about this. Don’t act on your own. You’re about to sell out everything you thought you believed in
.

She went into the bathroom and washed her face and sat down on the stool, her head spinning. She could not remember when she’d felt so miserable.

Pierre Dupree was not her only problem, and she knew it. The man named Marco had given her ten days to kill Clete Purcel and Dave and Alafair Robicheaux. Gretchen’s mother was no longer a hostage, but that would not change what was expected of her. She would either deliver or get delivered, along with Clete and his best friend and Alafair. Though her enemies knew where she was, she had no idea where they were, just as Clete had warned her. How could all of these things be happening right when she thought she might be beginning a new life, one that offered a chance at a career in filmmaking?

These were her thoughts when she glanced through the front screen and saw Pierre Dupree pull into her driveway early Thursday afternoon and begin fishing something out of a paper sack. Why was it that everything about him had become a mystery? Even his arrival at her cottage seemed unreal, like part of a dream that had detached itself from her sleep and reappeared during her waking hours. Leaves were drifting down on top of the Humvee, the sunlight on his tinted windows like a yellow balloon wobbling inside dark water. She could hear the heat ticking in the engine and the sprinkler system in the neighbor’s yard bursting to life.

Dupree leaned down and picked up a bouquet of mixed roses
and opened the door of his Humvee. As he walked up on her porch, he was so tall that he almost blocked out the trees and the sky and the church steeple across the street. Even though it was not yet two
P.M
., his beard had already darkened, as though he had shaved in the predawn hours; a strand of black hair hung down over his forehead. There was a dimple in his chin and a dent in the skin at the corner of his mouth, as though he wanted to smile but did not want to be presumptuous. In his left hand, he carried a box wrapped in gold foil and red felt ribbon.

“I was on my way back from the airport in Lafayette and stopped and bought these for you,” he said.

She had rehearsed a reply, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

“Miss Gretchen, I don’t blame you for being suspicious of me,” he said. “I simply wanted to drop these by. If you like, you can give them to someone else. It’s just a small gesture on my part.”

“Come in.”

Had she said that?

“Thank you,” he said, stepping inside. “You have such a nice spot here. It looks so comfortable and restful. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

“It’s all right. I mean the place is all right. I rented it. The furniture came with it.”

“Can I put the flowers in some water?” he asked. He was peering into the back of the house, but he was so close she could smell the heat that seemed to exude from his skin. “Miss Gretchen?”

“Can you what?”

“Put these in a vase. They’ll go well on the dining room table, don’t you think? You know, add a splash of color? Here. You like dark chocolate? You’re not on a diet, are you?”

She couldn’t keep up with what he was saying. Her face was hot, her ears pinging as though she were deep underwater, her air tanks empty, the pressure breaking something inside her head. “There’s a glass jar in the cabinet,” she said.

He walked through the dining room and began filling the jar at the sink, his back to her, his shoulders as broad as an ax handle inside his dress shirt. “I went on a private plane to Galveston early
this morning and dissolved my business connections with a company I never should have been involved with,” he said. “I also settled some financial affairs with my ex. I’m going back to painting full-time. I’m getting rid of my ad business as well.”

He turned around, drying his hands on a paper towel. He crumpled the towel and set it absentmindedly behind him on the drainboard. Then he picked up the towel and began looking for a place to put it.