Creole Belle Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    F IVE 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 Café 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 café 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