Creole Belle by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

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 Cletefor 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