Creole Belle

  © FRANK VERONSKY

  JAMES LEE BURKE is the author of thirty previous novels and two collections of short stories. Named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America in 2009, he has twice received their Crime Novel of the Year award. He is a Guggenheim and Breadloaf fellow and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and three of his novels (Heaven’s Prisoners, Two for Texas, and In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead) have been made into motion pictures. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his wife, Pearl.

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  JACKET PAINTING: RUE ROYAL, BY DIANE MILLSAP

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS

  The Glass Rainbow

  Swan Peak

  The Tin Roof Blowdown

  Pegasus Descending

  Crusader’s Cross

  Last Car to Elysian Fields

  Jolie Blon’s Bounce

  Purple Cane Road

  Sunset Limited

  Cadillac Jukebox

  Burning Angel

  Dixie City Jam

  In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

  A Stained White Radiance

  A Morning for Flamingos

  Black Cherry Blues

  Heaven’s Prisoners

  The Neon Rain

  HACKBERRY HOLLAND NOVELS

  Feast Day of Fools

  Rain Gods

  Lay Down My Sword and Shield

  BILLY BOB HOLLAND NOVELS

  In the Moon of Red Ponies

  Bitterroot

  Heartwood

  Cimarron Rose

  OTHER FICTION

  Jesus Out to Sea

  White Doves at Morning

  The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  The Convict and Other Stories

  Two for Texas

  To the Bright and Shining Sun

  Half of Paradise

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by James Lee Burke

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2012

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burke, James Lee.

  Creole belle / James Lee Burke.

  p. cm.

  1. Robicheaux, Dave (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Police—Louisiana—Fiction.

  3. New Iberia (La.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.U723C74 2012

  813’.54—dc23 2012002542

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4813-3

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4815-7 (ebook)

  In memory of Michael Pinkston,

  Martha Hall, and David Thompson

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  CREOLE BELLE

  FOR THE REST of the world, the season was still fall, marked by cool nights and the gold-green remnants of summer. For me, down in South Louisiana, in the Garden District of New Orleans, the wetlands that lay far beyond my hospital window had turned to winter, one characterized by stricken woods that were drained of water and strung with a web of gray leaves and dead air vines that had wrapped themselves as tightly as cord around the trees.

  Those who have had the following experience will not find my descriptions exaggerated or even metaphorical in nature. A morphine dream has neither walls nor a ceiling nor a floor. The sleep it provides is like a warm bath, free of concerns about mortality and pain and memories from the past. Morpheus also allows us vision through a third eye that we never knew existed. His acolytes can see through time and become participants in grand events they had believed accessible only through history books and films. On one occasion, I saw a hot-air balloon rising from its tether in Audubon Park, a uniformed soldier operating a telegrapher’s key inside the wicker basket, while down below other members of the Confederate Signal Corps shared sandwiches and drank coffee from tin cups, all of them as stately and stiff as figures in a sepia-tinted photograph.

  I don’t wish to be too romantic about my experience in the recovery facility there on St. Charles Avenue in uptown New Orleans. While I gazed through my window at the wonderful green streetcar wobbling down the tracks on the neutral ground, the river fog puffing out of the live oak trees, the pink and purple neon on the Katz & Besthoff drugstore as effervescent as tentacles of smoke twirling from marker grenades, I knew with a sinking heart that what I was seeing was an illusion, that in reality the Katz & Besthoff drugstore and the umbrella-covered sno’ball carts along St. Charles and the musical gaiety of the city had slipped into history long ago, and somewhere out on the edge of my vision, the onset of permanent winter waited for me.

  Though I’m a believer, that did not lessen the sense of trepidation I experienced in these moments. I felt as if the sun were burning a hole in the sky, causing it to blacken and collapse like a giant sheet of carbon paper suddenly crinkling and folding in on itself, and I had no power to reverse the process. I felt that a great darkness was spreading across the land, not unlike ink spilling across the face of a topographic map.

  Many years ago, when I was recovering from wounds I received in a Southeast Asian country, a United States Army psychiatrist told me that my morphine-induced dreams were creating what he called a “world destruction fantasy,” one that had its origins in childhood and the dissolution of one’s natal family. He was a scientist and a learned man, and I did not argue with him. Even at night, when I
lay in a berth on a hospital ship, far from free-fire zones and the sound of ammunition belts popping under a burning hooch, I did not argue. Nor did I contend with the knowledge of the psychiatrist when dead members of my platoon spoke to me in the rain and a mermaid with an Asian face beckoned to me from a coral cave strung with pink fans, her hips spangled with yellow coins, her mouth parting, her naked breasts as flushed with color as the inside of a conch shell.

  The cult of Morpheus is a strange community indeed, and it requires that one take up residence in a country where the improbable becomes commonplace. No matter what I did, nor how many times I disappeared out my window into the mists along St. Charles Avenue, back into an era of rooftop jazz bands and historical streetcars filled with men in bowler hats and women who carried parasols, the watery gray rim of a blighted planet was always out there—intransigent and corrupt, a place where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal.

  IN THE EARLY A.M. on a Friday, I asked the black attendant to open the windows in my room. It was against the rules, but the attendant was an elderly and kind man who had spent five days on a rooftop after the collapse of the levees during Hurricane Katrina, and he wasn’t given to concerns about authority. The windows reached to the ceiling and were hung with ventilated green shutters that were closed during the heat of the day to filter the sun’s glare. The attendant opened both the glass and the shutters and let in the night smell of the roses and camellias and magnolia and rain mist blowing through the trees. The air smelled like Bayou Teche when it’s spring and the fish are spawning among the water hyacinths and the frogs are throbbing in the cattails and the flooded cypress. It smelled like the earth may have smelled during the first days of creation, before any five-toed footprints appeared along the banks of a river.

  Or at least I think the black man opened the windows. Even to this day I cannot be sure of what I said and saw and heard that night. Like the drunkard who fears both his memory and his dreams, I had become cynical about my perceptions, less out of fear that they were illusions than a conviction that they were real.

  After the black man had left the room, I turned my head on the pillow and looked into the face of a Cajun girl by the name of Tee Jolie Melton.

  “Hi, Mr. Dave,” she said. “I read all about the shooting in the papers. You was on television, too. I didn’t know you was here in New Orleans. I’m sorry to see you hurt like this. You was talking French in your sleep.”

  “It’s nice to see you, Tee Jolie. How’d you get in?” I said.

  “T’rew the front door. You want me to come back another time?”

  “Can you get me a glass of water?”

  “I got you better than that. I brought you a Dr Pepper and a lime I cut up, ’cause that’s what you always drank when you came into the club. I brought you somet’ing else, too. It’s an iPod I filled wit’ music. I loaded ‘Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar’ on it, ’cause I knew how you always liked that song.”

  Her eyes were blue-green, her hair long and mahogany-colored with twists of gold in it that were as bright as buttercups. She was part Indian and part Cajun and part black and belonged to that ethnic group we call Creoles, although the term is a misnomer.

  “You’re the best,” I said.

  “Remember when you he’ped me with my car crash? You was so kind. You took care of everyt’ing, and I didn’t have no trouble at all because of it.”

  It wasn’t a car crash. As I recalled, it was at least three car crashes, but I didn’t pursue the point. The most interesting aspect of Tee Jolie’s auto accidents were her written explanations at the scene. To the best of my memory, these were her words:

  “I was backing up when this light pole came out of nowhere and smashed into my bumper.

  “I was turning left, but somebody was blocking the lane, so, trying to be polite, I switched my turn indicator and cut through the school parking lot, but I didn’t have no way of knowing the chain was up on the drive at that time of day, because it never is.

  “When the transmission went into reverse, Mr. Fontenot was putting my groceries in the backseat, and the door handle caught his coat sleeve and drug him across the street into the gas pump that blew up. I tried to give him first aid on the mouth, but he had already swallowed this big wad of gum that the fireman had to pull out with his fingers. I think Mr. Fontenot almost bit off one of the fireman’s fingers and didn’t have the courtesy to say he was sorry.”

  Tee Jolie fixed a glass of ice and Dr Pepper with a lime slice and stuck a straw in it and held it up to my mouth. She was wearing a long-sleeve shirt printed with purple and green flowers. Her skirt was pale blue and fluffy and pleated, and her shoes looked tiny on her feet. You could say that Tee Jolie was made for the camera, her natural loveliness of a kind that begged to be worshipped on a stage or hung on a wall. Her face was thin, her eyes elongated, and her hair full of waves, as though it had been recently unbraided, although that was the way it always looked.

  “I feel selfish coming here, ’cause it wasn’t just to give you a Dr Pepper and the iPod,” she said. “I came here to ax you somet’ing, but I ain’t gonna do it now.”

  “You can say anything you want, Tee Jolie, because I’m not even sure you’re here. I dream in both the day and the night about people who have been dead many years. In my dreams, they’re alive, right outside the window, Confederate soldiers and the like.”

  “They had to come a long way, huh?”

  “That’s safe to say,” I replied. “My wife and daughter were here earlier, and I know they were real. I’m not sure about you. No offense meant. That’s just the way it is these days.”

  “I know something I ain’t suppose to know, and it makes me scared, Mr. Dave,” she said.

  She was sitting in the chair, her ankles close together, her hands folded on her knees. I had always thought of her as a tall girl, particularly when she was onstage at the zydeco club where she sang, an arterial-red electric guitar hanging from her neck. Now she looked smaller than she had a few moments ago. She lifted her face up into mine. There was a mole by the corner of her mouth. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say.

  “Did you get involved with some bad guys?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t call them that. How come you to ax me that?”

  “Because you’re a good person, and sometimes you trust people you shouldn’t. Good women tend to do that. That’s why a lot of us men don’t deserve them.”

  “Your father was killed in a oil-well blowout, wasn’t he? Out on the Gulf when you was in Vietnam. That’s right, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, he was a derrick man.”

  As with many Creoles and Cajuns, there was a peculiarity at work in Tee Jolie’s speech. She was ungrammatical and her vocabulary was limited, but because of the cadence in her language and her regional accent, she was always pleasant to listen to, a voice from a gentler and more reserved time, even when what she spoke of was not pleasant to think about, in this case the death of my father, Big Aldous.

  “I’m wit’ a man. He’s separated but not divorced. A lot of people know his name. Famous people come to the place where we live. I heard them talking about centralizers. You know what they are?”

  “They’re used inside the casing on drilling wells.”

  “A bunch of men was killed ’cause maybe not enough of those centralizers was there or somet’ing.”

  “I’ve read about that, Tee Jolie. It’s public knowledge. You shouldn’t worry because you know about this.”

  “The man I’m wit’ does bidness sometimes with dangerous people.”

  “Maybe you should get away from him.”

  “We’re gonna be married. I’m gonna have his baby.”

  I fixed my gaze on the glass of Dr Pepper and ice that sat on the nightstand.

  “You want some more?” she asked.

  “Yes, but I can hold it by myself.”

  “Except I see the pain in your face when you move,” she said. She lifted the glass and straw t
o my mouth. “They hurt you real bad, huh, Mr. Dave?”

  “They shot me up proper,” I replied.

  “They shot your friend Mr. Clete, too?”

  “They smacked both of us around. But we left every one of them on the ground. They’re going to be dead for a long time.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  Outside the window, I could hear the rain and wind sweeping through the trees, scattering leaves from the oaks and needles from the slash pines across the roof.

  “I always had my music and the piece of land my father left me and my sister and my mama,” she said. “I sang wit’ BonSoir, Catin. I was queen of the Crawfish Festival in Breaux Bridge. I t’ink back on that, and it’s like it was ten years ago instead of two. A lot can change in a short time, cain’t it? My mama died. Now it’s just me and my li’l sister, Blue, and my granddaddy back in St. Martinville.”

  “You’re a great musician, and you have a wonderful voice. You’re a beautiful person, Tee Jolie.”

  “When you talk like that, it don’t make me feel good, no. It makes me sad.”

  “Why?”

  “He says I can have an abortion if I want.”

  “That’s his offer to you?”

  “He ain’t got his divorce yet. He ain’t a bad man. You know him.”

  “Don’t tell me his name,” I said.

  “How come?”

  Because I might want to put a bullet between his eyes, I thought. “It’s not my business,” I said. “Did you really give me this iPod?”

  “You just saw me.”

  “I can’t trust what I see and hear these days. I truly want to believe you’re real. The iPod is too expensive a gift.”

  “Not for me. He gives me plenty of money.”

  “My wallet is in the nightstand drawer.”

  “I got to go, Mr. Dave.”

  “Take the money.”

  “No. I hope you like the songs. I put t’ree of mine in there. I put one in there by Taj Mahal ’cause I know you like him, too.”

  “Are you really here?” I asked.

  She cupped her hand on my brow. “You’re burning up, you,” she said.