James Burke - Creole Belle

Though my description of that peculiar moment in my career as a police officer is probably not of much significance now, I must add a caveat. If one loses his life at the hands of another, he would like to believe his sacrifice is in the service of a greater cause. He would like to believe that he has left the world a better place, that because of his death at least one other person, perhaps a member of his family, will be spared, that his grave will reside in a green arbor where others will visit him. He does not want to believe that his life was made forfeit because he offended someone’s vanity and that his passing, like that of almost all who die in wars, means absolutely nothing.

One day after Clete’s visit, Alafair, my adopted daughter, brought me the mail and fresh flowers for the vase in my window. My wife, Molly, had stopped at the administrative office for reasons I wasn’t aware of. Alafair’s hair was thick and black and cut short on her neck and had a lustrous quality that made people want to touch it. “We’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.

“You going to take me sac-a-lait fishing?”

“Dr. Bonin thinks you can go home next week. He’s cutting down your meds today.”

“Which meds?” I said, trying to hold my smile in place.

“All of them.”

She saw me blink. “You think you still need them?” she said.

“Not really.”

She held her eyes on mine, not letting me see her thoughts. “Clete called,” she said.

“What about?”

“He says you told him Tee Jolie Melton came to see you at two in the morning.”

“He told you right. She left me this iPod.”

“Dave, some people think Tee Jolie is dead.”

“Based on what?”

“Nobody has seen her in months. She had a way of going off with men who told her they knew movie or recording people. She believed anything anyone told her.”

I picked up the iPod off the nightstand and handed it to Alafair. “This doesn’t belong to the nurses or the attendant or any of the physicians here. Tee Jolie bought it for me and downloaded music that I like and gave it to me as a present. She put three of her songs on there. Put the headphones on and listen.”

Alafair turned on the iPod and tapped on its face when it lit up. “What are the names of the songs?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What are they categorized as?”

“I’m not up on that stuff. The songs are in there. I listened to them,” I said.

The headphones were askew on her ears so she could listen to the iPod and talk to me at the same time. “I can’t find them, Dave.”

“Don’t worry about it. Maybe I messed up the iPod.”

She set it back on the nightstand and placed the headphones carefully on top of it, her hands moving slowly, her eyes veiled. “It’ll be good having you home again.”

“We’ll go fishing, too. As soon as we get back,” I said.

“That depends on what Dr. Bonin says.”

“What do these guys know?”

I saw Molly smiling in the doorway. “You just got eighty-sixed,” she said.

“Today?” I asked.

“I’ll bring the car around to the side entrance,” she said.

I tried to think before I spoke, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to think about. “My meds are in the top drawer,” I said.

Five days had passed since Clete was visited by Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes, and gradually he had pushed the pair of them to the edge of his mind. Golightly had taken too many hits to the head a long time ago, Clete told himself. Besides, he was a basket case even as a criminal; he’d made his living as a smash-and-grab jewelry-store thief, on a par with gang bangers who had shit for brains and zero guts and usually victimized elderly Jews who didn’t keep guns on the premises. Also, Clete had made innocuous calls to his sister and to his niece, who was a student at Tulane, and neither of them mentioned anything of an unusual nature occurring in their lives.

Forget Golightly and Grimes, Clete thought. By mistake, Golightly once put roach paste on a plateful of Ritz crackers and almost croaked himself. This was the guy he was worrying about?

On a sunny, cool Thursday morning, Clete opened up the office and read his mail and answered his phone messages, then told his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, he was going down to Cafe du Monde for beignets and coffee. She took a five-dollar bill from her purse and put it on the corner of her desk. “Bring me a few, will you?” she said.

Miss Alice was a former nun whose height and body mass and gurgling sounds made Clete think of a broken refrigerator he once owned. Before she was encouraged out of the convent, she had been the terror of the diocese, referred to by the bishop as “the mother of Grendel” or, when he was in a more charitable mood, “our reminder that the Cross is always with us.”

Clete picked up the bill off the desk and put it in his shirt pocket. “Those two guys I had trouble with have probably disappeared. But if they should come around while I’m not here, you know what to do.”

She looked at him, her expression impassive.

“Miss Alice?” he said.

“No, I do not know what to do. Would you please tell me?” she replied.

“You don’t do anything. You tell them to come back later. Got it?”

“I don’t think it wise for a person to make promises about situations that he or she cannot anticipate.”

“Don’t mess with these guys. Do you want me to say it again?”

“No, you’ve made yourself perfectly clear. Thank you very much.”

“You want cafe au lait?”

“I’ve made my own. Thank you for asking.”

“We’ve got a deal?”

“Mr. Purcel, you are upsetting me spiritually. Would you please stop this incessant questioning? I do not need to be badgered.”

“I apologize.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Clete walked down the street in the shade of the buildings, the scrolled-iron balconies sagging in the middle with the weight of potted roses and bougainvillea and chrysanthemums and geraniums, the wind smelling of night damp and bruised spearmint, the leaves of the philodendron and caladium in the courtyards threaded with humidity that looked like quicksilver in the shadows. He sat under the colonnade at Cafe du Monde and ate a dozen beignets that were white with powdered sugar, and drank three cups of coffee with hot milk, and gazed across Decatur at Jackson Square and the Pontalba Apartments that flanked either side of the square and the sidewalk artists who had set up their easels along the piked fence that separated the pedestrian mall from the park area.

The square was a place that seemed more like a depiction of life in the Middle Ages than twenty-first-century America. Street bands and mimes and jugglers and unicyclists performed in front of the cathedral, as they might have done in front of Notre Dame while Quasimodo swung on the bells. The French doors to the big restaurant on the corner were open, and Clete could smell the crawfish already boiling in the kitchen. New Orleans would always be New Orleans, he told himself, no matter if it had gone under the waves, no matter if cynical and self-serving politicians had left the people of the lower Ninth Ward to drown. New Orleans was a song and a state of mind and a party that never ended, and those who did not understand that simple fact should have to get passports to enter the city.

It was a bluebird day, the flags on the Cabildo straightening in the breeze. Clete had gone to bed early the previous night and his body was free of alcohol and the residue of dreams that he sometimes carried through the morning like cobweb on his skin. It seemed only yesterday that Louis Prima and Sam Butera had jammed all night and blown out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, or that Clete and his partner from New Iberia had walked a beat with nightsticks on Canal and Basin and Esplanade, both of them recently back from Vietnam, both of them still believers in the promise that each sunrise brought.