Creole Belle Read Online Free PDF

chrysanthemums and geraniums, the wind smelling of night damp and bruised spearmint, the leaves of the philodendron and caladium in the courtyards threaded withhumidity that looked like quicksilver in the shadows. He sat under the colonnade at Café 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.
    He bought a big bag of hot beignets for Miss Alice that cost him twice the amount she had given him. He listened to one song played by a string-and-rub-board band at the entrance to Pirates Alley, then walked back to St. Ann, his mind free of worry.
    As soon as he turned the corner on St. Ann, he saw a large black Buick with charcoal-tinted windows parked illegally in front of his building. By the time he reached the foyer that gave onto his office, hehad little doubt who had parked it there. He could hear the voice of Alice Werenhaus in the courtyard: “I told the pair of you, Mr. Purcel is not here. I also told you not to go inside the premises without his permission. If you do not leave right now, I will have you arrested and placed in the city prison. I will also have your automobile towed to the pound. Excuse me. Are you smirking at me?”
    “We didn’t know we were gonna get a show,” the voice of Waylon Grimes replied.
    “How would you like your face slapped all over this courtyard?” Miss Alice said.
    “How’d you know I’m a guy who likes it rough? You charge extra for that?” Grimes said.
    “What did you say? You repeat that! Right now! Say it again!”
    “You promise to hit me?” Grimes said.
    Clete walked through the shade of the foyer and into the courtyard, squinting in the glare at Grimes and a bald man who wore a suit and carried a clipboard in his hand.
    “What do you think you’re doing, Waylon?” Clete said.
    “Mr. Benoit here is our appraiser. Bix is thinking of buying you out, less the principal and the vig on your marker,” Grimes replied. “But this place looks like it has some serious problems. Right, Mr. Benoit?”
    “You have some settling, Mr. Purcel,” the appraiser said. “You see those stress cracks in the arch over your foyer? I notice the same tension in the upper corners of your windows. I suspect you have trouble opening them, don’t you? That’s because your foundation may