Creole Belle (57 page)

Gretchen Horowitz owned the name on her birth certificate and nothing else. Her childhood was not a childhood and did not have a category. Her umbilical connection to the rest of the human family had been severed and tied off a long time ago. Reverie was a fool’s pursuit and filled with faces she would change into howling Greek masks if she ever saw them again. And morning was a bad time that passed if you didn’t let it get its hooks into you.

Tuesday at nine
A.M
. she drove to Lafayette and bought a video camera, a boom pole, a lighting kit, and a Steadicam. Then she bought a take-out lunch at Fat Albert’s and drove into the park by the university to eat. There was a muddy pond with ducks in the
park, and swing sets and seesaws and a ball diamond and picnic shelters, and dry coulees among the live oaks where children played in the leaves. It was 11:14
A.M
. when she sat down at a plank table in the sunshine and began eating her lunch. In forty-six minutes the morning would be over, and she would step over a line into the afternoon, and that would be that.

At first she paid little attention to the family who had walked from the street onto the park grounds and sat down at a table by the pond. The man had a dark tan and black hair and wore denims and work shoes. His wife had the round face of a peasant and wore a cheap blue scarf on her head and carried a calico cat on her shoulder, a harness and leash on its neck. She had no makeup on her face and seemed to be seeing the park for the first time. It was the child who caught Gretchen’s eye. His hair was blond, his smile unrelenting, his cheeks blooming with color. When he tried to walk, he kept falling down, laughing at his own ineptitude, then getting up and toddling down the slope and falling again.

The family had brought their lunch in a paper bag. The woman placed a jar of sun tea and three peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on a piece of newspaper and cut two of them in half and quartered the third for the child. She had smeared jelly on her hands, and she tried to wipe them clean on the paper bag, then gave it up and said something to her husband. She walked through the live oaks toward the restroom, the leaves gusting out of the coulee in the shade. The husband yawned and rested his head on one hand and stared vacantly at the ball diamond, his eyes half lidded. In under a minute, he had put his head down and was asleep. Gretchen looked at her watch. It was eight minutes until noon.

She finished her lunch and looked at the university campus on the far side of the curving two-lane road that separated it from the park. A marching band was thundering out a martial song on a practice field. The sun was as bright as a yellow diamond through the oak trees, and its refraction inside the branches almost blinded her. She looked back at the table by the pond where the man and his little boy had been sitting. The child was gone.

She stood up from the bench. The mother had not returned from
the restroom, and the husband was sound asleep. The wind was cold and blowing hard, the surface of the pond wimpling in the sunlight like needles that could penetrate the eye. The ducks were in the reeds along the bank, engorged with bread scraps, their feathers ruffling, surrounded by a floating necklace of froth and Styrofoam containers and paper cups. Beyond the plank table where the husband was sitting, Gretchen saw the little boy toddling down the slope toward the water’s edge. She began running just as he fell.

He tumbled end over end down the embankment, his zippered one-piece outfit caking with mud, his face filled with shock. Gretchen charged down the embankment after him, trying to keep her balance, her feet slipping from under her. She was running so fast, she splashed into the water ahead of the little boy and grabbed him up in both arms before he could roll into the shallows. She hefted him against her shoulder and walked back up the embankment and looked into the horrified face of the mother and the blank stare of the father, who had just lifted up his head from the table.

“Oh my God, I fell asleep,” he said. He looked at his wife. “I fell asleep. I ain’t meant to.”

The woman took the child from Gretchen’s arms. “T’ank you,” she said.

“It’s all right,” Gretchen said.

The mother bounced the baby up and down on her chest. “Come play wit’ your cat,” she said. “Don’t be crying, you. You’re okay now. But you was bad. You shouldn’t be walking down by the water, no.”

“He wasn’t bad,” Gretchen said.

“He knows what I mean. It’s bad for him to be by the water ’cause it can hurt him,” the mother said. “That’s what I was saying to him. His father ain’t had no sleep.”

“Why not?” Gretchen said.

“’Cause he works at a boatyard and he ain’t had no work since the oil spill,” the mother said. “He cain’t sleep at night. He worries all the time. He’s that way ’cause he’s a good man.”

“Drink some tea, you,” the husband said. There were carpenter’s bruises on his nails, purple and deep, all the way to the cuticle. “If it ain’t been for you, I cain’t t’ink about what might have happened.”

“It didn’t. That’s what counts,” Gretchen said.

He looked into space, his eyes hollow, as though he were watching an event for which there would have been no form of forgiveness if he had let it occur. “How long I been asleep?”

“Not long. Don’t blame yourself,” Gretchen said. “Your little boy is fine.”

“He’s our only child. My wife cain’t have no more kids.”

“Where’s your car?” Gretchen said.

“We sold it. We rode the bus here,” the mother said.

“Tell you what,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to take your picture on my video camera. Will you let me do that? I make movies.”

The mother gave her a coy look, as though someone were playing a joke on her. “Like in Hollywood or somet’ing?”

“I’m making a documentary on the 1940s musical revue in New Iberia.” She could tell neither of them understood what she was talking about. “Let me get my camera. After you eat, I’ll drive you home.”

“You ain’t got to do that,” the man said.

It was two minutes to noon. The feelings Gretchen had had all morning were gone, but their disappearance was not related to the time of day. She got her video camera from the pickup and focused the lens on the man and woman and child, then showed them the footage. “See? You all are a wonderful family,” she said.

“I ain’t dressed to be on that,” the woman said.

“I think all of you are beautiful,” Gretchen said.

The man and woman seemed embarrassed and looked at each other. “T’ank you for what you done,” the man said.

There was an emotion inside Gretchen that she could not understand. She did not know the name of the family, yet she did not want to ask it. “That’s such a cute little boy,” she said.

“Yeah, he’s gonna be somet’ing special one day, you gonna see,” the mother said.

“I bet he will,” Gretchen said.

“You’re a nice lady,” the woman said.

And so are you
, Gretchen thought,
and your husband is a nice man, and your little boy has the loveliest smile on earth
.

These are the things she thought, but she did not say them, nor did she steal the man and woman’s dignity by trying to give them money when she drove them to their house in a poor section of Lafayette. Inside herself, she felt cleansed in a way she could not explain, and worries about the sunrise and fear of her own memories seemed like silly pursuits that weren’t worth two seconds of her time.

Or was she fooling herself?

She wasn’t sure. But something had dramatically changed in her life. She just didn’t know why.

T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
D
ANA
Magelli called me at the department. “Where’s Purcel?” he asked.

“Haven’t seen him. What’s up?” I replied.

“Last night somebody kicked the shit out of a guy named Lamont Woolsey. Know him?”

“An albino who talks like Elmer Fudd?”

“He’s missing a few teeth, so it’s hard to say who he sounds like. His face looks like a car tire ran over it. He says he doesn’t know who attacked him or why. The neighbors say a guy driving a Caddy convertible did it. A guy wearing a short-brim hat. Sound like anybody you know?”

“If I understand you correctly, the guy isn’t filing charges.”

“That doesn’t mean Purcel can come into New Orleans and wipe his feet on people’s faces any time he wants.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yeah, somebody snatched Ozone Eddy Mouton and a female employee out of Eddy’s tanning parlor. Guess what. The people who saw Purcel stomp the albino’s face say a guy with orange hair was in the albino’s driveway earlier. Sound like coincidence to you?”

“Woolsey is mixed up in at least one homicide, Dana. Run him and you’ll find a blank. How many high rollers can stay off the computer?”

“You listen to me, Dave. If Ozone Eddy and his employee are found in a swamp, Clete Purcel is going to jail as a material witness, and this time I’ll make sure he stays there. By the way, when you see
Purcel, tell him the Vietnamese girl was traumatized by what she saw.”

“What Vietnamese girl?”

“She works for Woolsey. Or did. Some Quaker women picked her up this morning. Her name is Maelee something.”

“That was the name of Clete’s girlfriend in Vietnam.”

“I’m not making the connection,” Dana said.

“She was a Eurasian girl who lived on a sampan. Clete wanted to marry her. The VC murdered her.”

There was silence on the phone.

“You there?” I said.

“I didn’t know that about Purcel. You think Woolsey is hooked up with intelligence people?”

“I think he has connections to corporations of some kind,” I said. “Maybe a drilling company. Maybe all of this is related to the oil blowout.”

“Keep Purcel out of the city. I’ll see what I can find out about Woolsey on this end. Why would a meltdown like Ozone Eddy be in Woolsey’s driveway?”

I didn’t have an answer. Dana was a good man who followed the rules and believed in a broken system and probably would never be recognized for the heroic and steadfast and decent police officer that he was. But dwelling on Dana’s decency would not help me with another problem I had been confronted with. Helen Soileau had just returned from Shreveport, where she had stayed almost constantly by the bedside of her half sister. I opened her office door and leaned inside. “It’s good to have you back,” I said.

She was standing behind her desk. “I want all your notes on the Jesse Leboeuf shooting,” she said.

“I don’t think they’ll be very helpful.”

I could see lights of impatience and irritability flicker in her eyes. “Who’s your prime subject, Dave?”

“Gretchen Horowitz.”

“An out-and-out execution?”

“No, she stopped a rape and probably a murder. If you ask me, Jesse got what he deserved.”

“You questioned Horowitz?”

“Yep, but I got nowhere. Here’s what interesting. Before he died, Jesse said something to the killer in French. Catin Segura heard it but says she doesn’t speak French.”

“Catin has no idea who the shooter was?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“I’m asking you.”

“The damage Jesse did to her was off the scale.”

“Where’s Catin now?”

“Back home with her kids. You want me to call her and tell her to come in?”

I saw Helen’s eyes searching in space. “No,” she said. “I’ll talk to her at her house. No evidence at the scene or eyewitness account puts Horowitz there?”

“Nothing.”

“I passed by your door when you were on the phone. Was that Dana Magelli you were taking to?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Maybe Clete busted up a guy named Lamont Woolsey in the Garden District last night.”

“I just don’t believe it,” she said.

“It’s the way it is, Helen.”

“Don’t tell me that,” she said, turning her back to me, her hands on her hips. The muscles in her upper arms looked like rolls of quarters.

“Helen—”

“Don’t say any more. Just leave. Now. Not later. Right now,” she said.

A
T QUITTING TIME
, I drove to Clete’s cottage. The air was damp, the sky plum-colored, and stacks of raked leaves were burning and blowing apart in the wind on the far side of the bayou, the ash glowing like fireflies. I didn’t want to accept that winter was upon us and soon frost would speckle the trees and the cane fields that were already being turned into stubble. I was bothered even more by the
fact that dwelling too much on the cycle of the seasons could turn one’s heart into a lump of ice.

Clete was barefoot and wearing unpressed slacks and a strap undershirt and was watching the news on television in his favorite deep-cushioned chair. He poured from a pint bottle of brandy into a jelly glass and added three inches of eggnog from a carton. There was a wastebasket by his foot. A roll of toilet paper was tucked between his thigh and the arm of the chair. “Get yourself a Diet Doc,” he said, barely looking at me.

“I don’t want a Diet Doc.”

“Rough day?”

“Not particularly. What’s with the toilet paper?”

“I get the sense Helen is back on the job.”

“Helen’s not the problem. Magelli called. He says you busted up Lamont Woolsey.”

“Woolsey dimed me?”

“No, the neighbors saw you kick his face in.”

“Things got a little out of control. Magelli say anything about Ozone Eddy Mouton and a broad named Connie?”

“He said Eddy and a female employee were kidnapped.”

“It gets worse. On the five o’clock news, there was a story about a pair of bodies found in the trunk of a burned car in St. Bernard Parish. One victim was male, one female. No ID yet. I screwed up real bad on this one, Streak.”

“Maybe it’s somebody else.”

“A hit like that? Even the Giacanos didn’t kill like that. It’s Woolsey.” Clete coughed and wadded up a handful of toilet paper and pressed it to his mouth. Then he compressed the paper tightly in his hand and lowered it into the wastebasket and took a drink of eggnog and brandy from the jelly glass. I sat down on the bed and pulled the wastebasket toward me. “You coughing up blood?” I said.

“No, I had a nosebleed.”

“How long has this been going on?”