Creole Belle (7 page)

“Yes, suh. I talked to a deputy sheriff. But wasn’t nobody interested.”

“Why do you think that?”

“’Cause the deputy tole me Tee Jolie’s got a reputation. This is the way he said it: ‘She got a reputation, and let’s face it, ain’t none of it is good.’ He said she run off in high school and she hung out wit’ young people that sells dope. I axed him which one of them
don’t
sell dope. I called him twice more, and each time he said there ain’t any evidence a crime was committed. I got to sit down, me. I cain’t stand up long. Y’all sure you don’t want coffee?”

“Sir, do you have someone here to help you?” I asked.

“There ain’t no he’p for what I got. I was at Carville eighteen years. I t’ink I scared that deputy. He wouldn’t shake hands wit’ me.”

“You have Hansen’s disease?” I said.

“
That
and everyt’ing else.” For the first time he smiled, his eyes full of light.

“Tee Jolie told me she was living with a man I know,” I said. “She mentioned centralizers. I think this man might be in the oil business. Does any of this sound familiar?”

“No, suh, it don’t.” He had sat down in a straight chair, a photograph of a World War I doughboy hanging behind him. A framed color picture of Jesus, probably cut from a magazine, hung from the opposite wall. The rug was frayed into string along the edges; a moth swam in the glow of the reading lamp. Outside, in the rain, I could see the green and red running lights on a passing barge, the waves from the bow slapping into the elephant ears. He added, “She had a scrapbook, though.”

“Sir?” I said.

“In her room. You want me to get it? It’s got a mess of pictures in there.”

“Don’t get up, sir. With your permission, I’ll go into her room and get it.”

“It’s there on her li’l dresser. She was always proud of it. She called it her ‘celebrity book.’ I tole her, ‘There ain’t no celebrities down here, Tee Jolie, except you.’ She’d say, ‘I ain’t no celebrity, Granddaddy, but one day that’s what I’m gonna be. You gonna see.’”

He looked wistfully into space, as though he’d said more than he should have and had empowered his own words to hurt him. I went into Tee Jolie’s bedroom and found a scrapbook bound in a thick pink plastic cover with hearts embossed on it. I sat back down on the couch and began turning the pages. She had cut out several newspaper articles and pasted them stiffly on the pages: a story about her high school graduation, a photograph taken of her when she was queen of the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, another photo that showed her with the all-girl Cajun band called BonSoir, Catin, a picture of her with the famous Cajun fiddler Hadley Castille.

Among the back pages of the scrapbook was a collection of glossy photographs that she had not mounted. Nor were they the kind that one finds in a small-town newspaper. All of them appeared to have been taken in nightclubs; most of them showed her with older men who wore suits and expensive jewelry. Some of the men I recognized. Two of them were casino people who flew in and out of New Jersey. One man ran a collection agency and sold worthless insurance policies to the poor and uneducated. Another man operated a finance company that specialized in title loans. All of them were smiling the way hunters smiled while displaying a trophy. In every photo, Tee Jolie was dressed in sequined shirts and cowboy boots or a charcoal-black evening gown with purple and red roses stitched on it. She made me think of a solitary flower placed by mistake among a collection of gaudy chalk figures one takes home from an amusement park.

In one photograph there was a figure I did not expect to see in Tee Jolie’s scrapbook. He was standing at the bar behind the main group, wearing a dark suit with no tie, the collar of his dress shirt unbuttoned, a gold chain and gold holy medal lying loosely around his neck, his scalp shining through his tight haircut, his eyebrows disfigured by scar tissue, his mouth cupped like a fish’s when it tries to breathe oxygen at the top of a tank. I handed the photo to Clete
for him to look at. “Do you know who Bix Golightly is?” I asked Mr. DeBlanc.

“I don’t know nobody by that name.”

“He’s in this photo with Tee Jolie and some of her friends.”

“I don’t know none of them people, me. What’s this man do?”

“He’s a criminal.”

“Tee Jolie don’t associate wit’ people like that.”

But she does associate with people who use other people
, I thought. I took the photo from Clete and showed it to Mr. DeBlanc. “Take a good look at that fellow. Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”

“No, suh, I ain’t seen him, and I don’t know him, and Tee Jolie never talked about him or any of these men. What kind of criminal are we talking about?”

“The kind of guy who gives crime a bad name,” I replied.

His face became sad; he blinked in the lamplight. “She tole me she was falling in love wit’ a man. She said maybe she’d bring him home to meet me. She said he was rich and had gone to col’letch and he loved music. She wouldn’t tell me nothing else. Then one day she was gone. And then her sister left, too. I don’t know why this is happening. They left me alone and never called and just went away. It ain’t fair.”

“What isn’t fair?” Clete asked.

“Everyt’ing. We never broke no laws. We took care of ourself and our place on the bayou and never hurt nobody. That’s my father’s picture up there on the wall. He fought in France in the First World War. His best friend was killed on the last day of the war. He had eight children and raised us up against ever fighting in a war or doing harm to anybody for any reason. Now somebody taken my granddaughters from me, and a deputy sheriff tells me ain’t no evidence of a crime been committed. That’s why I say it ain’t fair.” He struggled to his feet with his two walking canes and went into the kitchen.

“What are you doing, sir?” I asked.

“Fixing y’all coffee.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Yes, suh, I do. I ain’t been a good host. I cain’t find the sugar,
though. I couldn’t find it this morning. I cain’t concentrate on t’ings like I used to.”

I had followed him into the kitchen to dissuade him from putting himself out. The cupboards, which had curtains on them rather than doors, were almost bare. There were no pots on the stove, no smell of cooked food in the air. He pulled a coffee can off a shelf, then accidentally dropped it on the drainboard. The plastic cap popped loose, spilling the small amount of coffee that was inside. “It’s all right. We still got enough for t’ree cups,” he said.

“We have to go, Mr. DeBlanc. Thank you for your courtesy,” I said.

He hesitated, then began scooping the coffee back in the can. “Yes, suh, I understand,” he replied.

Clete and I walked out into the rain and got into the Caddy. Clete didn’t start the engine and instead stared through the windshield at the lamplight glowing in the front windows of the house. “His kitchen looked pretty bare,” he said.

“I suspect he’s in the Meals On Wheels program,” I said.

“You ever see the stuff those old people eat? It looks like diced rabbit food or the kind of crap Iranian inmates eat.”

I waited for him to continue.

“You think Mr. DeBlanc might like a warmed-up po’boy and a cold brew?” he said.

So we took Clete’s foot-long sandwich, which consisted of almost an entire loaf of French bread filled with deep-fried oysters and baby shrimp and mayonnaise and hot sauce and sliced lettuce and tomatoes and onions, and carried it and the two longneck bottles of Bud inside. Then we fixed a pot of coffee and sat down with Mr. DeBlanc at his kitchen table and cut the po’boy in three pieces and had a fine meal while the rain drummed like giant fingers on the roof.

A
LICE
W
ERENHAUS LIVED
in an old neighborhood off Magazine, on the edges of the Garden District, on a block one might associate with the genteel form of poverty that became characteristic of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Even after Katrina, the live oaks
were of tremendous dimensions, their gigantic roots wedging up the sidewalks and cracking the curbs and keeping the houses in shadow almost twenty-four hours a day. But gradually, the culture that had defined the city, for good or bad, had taken flight from Alice’s neighborhood and been replaced by bars on the windows of businesses and residences and a pervading fear, sometimes justified, that two or three kids dribbling a basketball down the street might turn out to be the worst human beings you ever met.

Out of either pride or denial of her circumstances, Alice had not installed a security system in her house or sheathed her windows with bars specially designed to imitate the Spanish grillwork that was part of traditional New Orleans architecture. She walked to Mass and rode the streetcar to work. She shopped at night in a grocery store three blocks away and wheeled her own basket home, forcing it over the broken and pitched slabs of concrete in the sidewalks. On one occasion, a man came out of the shadows and tried to jerk her purse from her shoulder. Miss Alice hit him in the head with a zucchini, then threw it at him as he fled down the street.

Her friends were few. Her days at the convent had been marked by acrimony and depression and the bitter knowledge that insularity and loneliness would always be her lot. Ironically, the first sunshine in her adult life came in her newly found career as a secretary for an alcoholic private investigator whose clientele could have been characters lifted from Dante’s
Inferno
. She pretended to be viscerally offended by their vulgarity and narcissism, but there were occasions on an inactive day when she caught herself glancing through the window in hopes of seeing a betrayed wife headed up the street, out for blood, or one of Nig Rosewater’s bail skips about to burst through the door in need of secular absolution.

These moments of introspection made her wonder if a thinly disguised pagan might not be living inside her skin.

On the day after Clete Purcel went to New Iberia to tend his office, a sudden thunderstorm had swept ashore south of the city, bringing with it the smell of brine and sulfa and a downpour in her neighborhood that flooded the streets and filled the gutters and yards with floating leaves. The clouds were bursting with electricity
when she got off the streetcar on St. Charles and walked toward Magazine, the thunder booming over the Gulf like cannons firing in sequence. The air was cool and fresh and had a tannic odor that made her think of long-standing water poured from a wood barrel. She felt an excitement about the evening that she couldn’t quite explain, as though she were revisiting her childhood home in Morgan City where the storm clouds over the Gulf created a light show every summer evening, the wind straightening the palms on the boulevard where she had lived, a jolly Popsicle man in a white cap driving his truck down to the baseball diamond in the park.

When she walked up on the gallery of her small house and unlocked the door, her cat, Cedric, was waiting to be let in. He was a pumpkin-size orange ball of fur with white paws and a star on his face who left seat smears all over her breakfast table and was never corrected for it. He ran ahead of her into the house and attacked his food bowl while she turned on the television in the living room and filled the house with the sounds of CNN and a family she didn’t have.

She filled a teakettle with water and lit the gas range and set the kettle to boil, and put a frozen dinner in the microwave, and glanced out the side window at a man in a hooded raincoat walking down the alley, his shoulders rounded, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his red tennis shoes splashing in the puddles. He disappeared from her line of vision. She picked up her cat, cradling him heavily in one arm, and tugged playfully on the furry thickness of his tail. “What have you been doing all day, you little fatty?” she said.

Cedric pushed against her grasp with his hind feet, indicating that he wanted to be bounced up and down. For some unaccountable reason, he changed his mind and twisted in her arms and jumped onto the breakfast table, staring out the rear window at the alley. Alice peered out the window and saw a neighbor lift the top of his Dumpster and drop a vinyl sack of garbage inside.

“You’re a big baby, Cedric,” Alice said.

She heard the microwave ding and took the preprepared container of veal and potatoes and peas out and fixed a cup of tea and sat down and ate her supper. Later she lay back on a reclining chair
in front of the television and watched the History Channel and fell asleep without ever realizing she was falling asleep.

When she woke, the thunderstorm had passed and flashes of electricity were flaring silently in the clouds, briefly illuminating the trees and puddles of floating leaves in her yard. Cedric was on the rear windowsill, flicking a paw at a raindrop running down the glass. Then someone twisted the mechanical bell on the front door, and she slipped off the night chain and pulled open the door without first checking to see who her visitor was.

He was black, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with a goatee that looked like wire protruding from his chin. He wore a dark rain jacket, the hood hanging on his back. Through the screen, she could smell his body odor and unbrushed teeth and the unrinsed detergent in his clothes. Under one arm he was clutching a cardboard box that had no top.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I’m selling chocolate for the Boys Town Fund.”

“Where do you live?”

“In St. Bernard Parish.”

She tried to see his shoes, but her line of vision was obstructed by the paneling at the bottom of the door. “There’s a white man who picks up you kids in the Lower Nine and drops you off in neighborhoods like mine. You have to pay him four dollars for each chocolate bar you don’t bring back, and the rest is yours. Is that correct?”

He seemed to think about what she had said, his eyes clouding. “It’s for the Boys Town Fund.”

“I can’t give you any money.”

“You don’t want no candy?”

“You’re working for a dishonest man. He uses children to deceive and cheat people. He robs others of their faith in their fellow man. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning toward the street, his gaze shifting off hers.