Creole Belle by James Lee Burke Page A

phone and fooling with something on the dashboard. I walked through the porte cochere until I was abreast of the driver’s window. Pierre Dupree had thick black hair that was as shiny as a raven’s wing. He also had intense green eyes with a black fleck in them. He was at least six feet seven and had a face that would have been handsome except for the size of his teeth. They were too big for his mouth and, coupled with his size, they gave others the sense that in spite of his tailored suits and good manners, his body contained physical appetites and energies and suppressed urges that he could barely restrain.
    “Sorry I missed you earlier, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said through the window.
    “Get down and come in,” I replied.
    He thumbed a breath mint loose from a roll and put it in his mouth and dropped the roll back on the dashboard. “I’ve got to run. It’s about Mr. Purcel. He’s called my office twice regarding a betting slip of some kind. His message said the betting slip was in a safe I inherited from the previous tenant of a building I own. I got rid of that safe years ago. I just wanted to tell Mr. Purcel that.”
    “Then tell him.”
    “I tried. He doesn’t pick up. I’ve got to get back to New Orleans. Will you relay the message?”
    “Do you know a guy named Bix Golightly?”
    “No, but what a grand name.”
    “How about Waylon Grimes or Frankie Giacano?”
    “Everybody in New Orleans remembers the Giacanos. I never knew any of them personally. I really have to go, Mr. Robicheaux. Stop by the plantation in Jeanerette or my home in the Garden District. Bring Alafair. I’d love to see her again. Is she still writing?”
    While he was speaking the last sentence, he was already starting his engine. Then he backed into the street, smiling as though he wereactually listening to my reply. He drove past the Shadows and into the business district.
    I tried to assess what had just occurred. A man who indicated he wanted to deliver a message had gone to my home earlier but had not bothered to go to my office, although he had been told that was where I could be found. Then he had bounced into my driveway and delivered his message, all the while explaining that he didn’t have time to be there. Then he had left, communicating nothing of substance to anyone except the fact that he owned two expensive homes to which we were invited on an unspecified day.
    I decided that Pierre Dupree definitely belonged in advertising.
    H ELEN S OILEAU CALLED me at home on Saturday morning. “We’ve got a floater down at the bottom of St. Mary Parish,” she said.
    “A homicide?” I asked.
    “I don’t know what it is. I’m getting too old for this job. Anyway, I’m going to need you there.”
    “Why not let St. Mary handle it?”
    “One of the deputies recognized the victim. It’s Blue Melton, Tee Jolie’s sister.”
    “Blue drowned?”
    “She may have frozen to death.”
    “What?”
    “Blue Melton floated into the marsh inside a block of ice. The water temperature is seventy degrees. The deputy said her eyes are open and she looks like she’s trying to say something. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
    The trip down to the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish didn’t take long. But the geographic distance between St. Mary Parish and other parishes had little to do with the historical distance between St. Mary Parish and the twenty-first century. It had always been known as a fiefdom, owned and run by one family with enormous amounts of wealth and political power. Its sugarcane acreage and processing plants were the most productive in the state. Its supply of black and poor-white labor was of a kind one would associatewith an antebellum economy and mind-set. The oil and natural gas wells punched into its swamps and marshlands brought in unexpected revenues that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand, although the recipients did not feel a great Christian urgency to share their good fortune. The have-nots