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JAMES LEE BURKE.
"ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS OF OUR TIME"*
BITTERROOT
"Beautifully crafted prose. . .
The best dialogue this side of Elmore Leonard." —
Entertainment Weekly
HEAVEN'S PRISONERS
"A powerful, compelling book." —
The Denver Post*
THE NEON RAIN
"Like a violent summer storm. . .
Dizzying action. . .Burke's writing is masterful."
—
The Washington Post Book World
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Be sure to read his next Dave Robicheaux novel
LAST CAR TO ELYSIAN FIELDS
Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster
"Even among his most talented contemporaries,
Mr. Burke is something special."
—
The Washington Post
Acclaim for James Lee Burke's
electrifying novels featuring New
Orleans detective Dave Robicheaux
"The real drama comes in Robicheaux's chilling encounter with evil and his recognition of his own fear. The satanic Guidry ... is as compelling a bad guy as any in literature; like Robert Mitchum as Max Cady [in 1962's
Cape Fear],
he reminds us in the most visceral of ways that the world can be an utterly alien place." —
Booklist
"Burke succeeds over and over again in writing harshly lacerating scenes nobody's ever written before—not even him." —
Kirkus Reviews
"To read a Burke novel is to enter a timeless, parallel universe of violent emotions and lush, brooding landscapes.... This is the stunningly talented Burke's 21st book and his best until the next one. ... Though the search for the murderer moves the story, the novel is really the examination of the savage relationships of the characters and the palpable presence of the past."
—Publishers Weekly
"This is Burke at his best."
—
Library Journal
Also Available from Simon & Schuster Audio
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Last Car to Elysian Fields
Bitterroot Purple Cane Road
Heartwood
Lay Down My Sword and Shield Sunset Limited Half of Paradise Cimarron Rose Cadillac Jukebox Heaven's Prisoners
Burning Angel
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
The Convict
Dixie City Jam
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead A Stained White Radiance
The Neon Rain A Morning for Flamingos
Black Cherry Blues
To the Bright and Shining Sun
Two for Texas
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
A NOVEL
JAMES LEE BURKE
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2002 by James Lee Burke
Originally published in hardcover in 2002 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people are involved in the career of an author, just as many are involved in the editing and production of a book, but very few of their names appear on the book jacket. Hence, I would like to give thanks to some of the people who have been so helpful to me and supportive of my work over the last forty years:
My original agent, the late Kurt Hellmer; my first editor, Joyce Hartman, at Houghton Mifflin; Bruce Carrick at Scribner; Martha Lacy Hall, Les Phillabaum, John Easterly, and the late Michael Pinkston at Louisiana State University Press; Rob Cowley at Holt; Roger Donald and Bill Phillips at Little, Brown; Robert Mecoy at Avon; Robert Miller and Brian Defiore at Hyperion; Shawn Coyne at Doubleday; George Lucas at Pocket Books; Carolyn Reidy, Chuck Adams, Michael Korda, and David Rosenthal at Simon & Schuster; and Susan Lamb and Jane Wood at Orion in Great Britain.
I would also like to thank my agents, Philip Spitzer and Joel Gotler, for their many years of commitment to my work, and Patricia Mulcahy, who has edited my work and been a family friend for thirteen years.
Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to my family: my wife, Pearl, and our four children, Jim Jr., Andree, Pamala, and Alafair.
Finally, in the words of Dave Robicheaux, may God bless reference librarians everywhere.
For Rick and Carole DeMarinis
and Paul and Elizabeth Zarzysk
JOLIE BLON'S BOUNCE
CHAPTER 1
G
rowing up during the 1940s in New Iberia, down on the Gulf Coast, I never doubted how the world worked. At dawn the antebellum homes along East Main loomed out of the mists, their columned porches and garden walkways and second-story verandas soaked with dew, the chimneys and slate roofs softly molded by the canopy of live oaks that arched over the entire street.
The stacks of sunken U.S. Navy ships lay sideways in Pearl Harbor and service stars hung inside front windows all over New Iberia. But on East Main, in the false dawn, the air was heavy with the smell of night-blooming flowers and lichen on damp stone and the fecund odor of Bayou Teche, and even though a gold service star may have hung in a window of a grand mansion, indicating the death of a serviceman in the family, the year could have been mistaken for 1861 rather than
Even when the sun broke above the horizon and the ice wagons and the milk delivery came down the street on iron-rimmed wheels and the Negro help began reporting for work at their employers' back doors, the light was never harsh, never superheated or smelling of tar roads and dust as it was in other neighborhoods. Instead it filtered through Spanish moss and bamboo and philodendron that dripped with beads of moisture as big as marbles, so that even in the midst of summer the morning came to those who lived here with a blue softness that daily told them the earth was a grand place, its design vouchsafed in heaven and not to be questioned.
Down the street was the old Frederic Hotel, a lovely pink building with marble columns and potted palms inside, a ballroom, an elevator that looked like a brass birdcage, and a saloon with wood-bladed fans and an elevated, scrolled-iron shoeshine chair and a long, hand- ' carved mahogany bar. Amid the palm fronds and the blue and gray swirls of color in the marble columns were the slot and racehorse machines, ringing with light, their dull pewterlike coin trays offering silent promise to the glad at heart.
Farther down Main were Hopkins and Railroad Avenues, like ancillary conduits into part of the town's history and geography that people did not talk about publicly. When I went to the icehouse on Saturday afternoons with my father, I would look furtively down Railroad at the rows of paintless cribs on each side of the train tracks and at the blowsy women who sat on the stoops, hung over, their knees apart under their loose cotton dresses, perhaps dipping beer out of a bucket two
Negro boys carried on a broom handle from Hattie Fontenot's bar.
I came to learn early on that no venal or meretricious enterprise existed without a community's consent. I thought I understood the nature of evil. I learned at age twelve I did not.
M
y half brother, who was fifteen months younger than I, was named Jimmie Robicheaux. His mother was a prostitute in Abbeville, but he and I were raised together, largely by our father, known as Big Aldous, who was a trapper and commercial fisherman and offshore derrick man. As children Jimmie and I were inseparable. On summer evenings we used to go to the lighted ball games at City Park and slip into the serving lines at barbecues and crab boils at the open-air pavilions. Our larceny was of an innocent kind, I suppose, and we were quite proud of ourselves when we thought we had outsmarted the adult world.
On a hot August night, with lightning rippling through the thunderheads over the Gulf of Mexico, Jimmie and I were walking through a cluster of oak trees on the edge of the park when we saw an old Ford automobile with two couples inside, one in the front seat, one in the back. We heard a woman moan, then her voice mount in volume and intensity. We stared openmouthed as we saw the woman's top half arch backward, her naked breasts lit by the glow from a picnic pavilion, her mouth wide with org*sm.
We started to change direction, but the woman was laughing now, her face sweaty and bright at the open window.
"Hey, boy, you know what we been doin'? It make my puss* feel so good. Hey, come here, you. We been f*ckin', boy," she said.
It should have been over, a bad encounter with white trash, probably drunk, caught in barnyard copulation. But the real moment was just beginning. The man behind the steering wheel lit a cigarette, his face flaring like paste in the flame, then stepped out on the gravel. There were tattoos, like dark blue smears, inside his forearms. He used two fingers to lift the blade out of a pocketknife.
"You like to look t'rew people's windows?" he asked.
"No, sir," I said.
"They're just kids, Legion," the woman in back said, putting on her shirt.
"Maybe that's what they gonna always be," the man said.
I had thought his words were intended simply to frighten us. But I could see his face clearly now, the hair combed back like black pitch, the narrow white face with vertical lines in it, the eyes that could look upon a child as the source of his rage against the universe.
Then Jimmie and I were running in the darkness, our hearts pounding, forever changed
by the knowledge that the world contains pockets of evil that are as dark as the inside of a leather bag.
Because my father was out of town, we ran all the way to the icehouse on Railroad Avenue, behind which was the lit and neatly tended house of Ciro Shanahan, the only man my father ever spoke of with total admiration and trust.
Later in life I would learn why my father had such
great respect for his friend. Ciro Shanahan was one of those rare individuals who would suffer in silence and let the world do him severe injury in order to protect those whom he loved.
O
n a spring night in 1931, Ciro and my father cut their boat engines south of Point Au Fer and stared at the black-green outline of the Louisiana coast in the moonlight. The waves were capping, the wind blowing hard, puffing and snapping the tarp that was stretched over the cases of Mexican whiskey and Cuban rum that my father and Ciro had off-loaded from a trawler ten miles out. My father looked through his field glasses and watched two searchlights sweeping the tops of the waves to the south. Then he rested the glasses on top of the small pilothouse that was built out of raw pine on the stern of the boat and wiped the salt spray off his face with his sleeve and studied the coastline. The running lights of three vessels pitched in the swells between himself and the safety of the shore.
"Moon's up. I done tole you, bad night to do it," he said.
"We done it before. We still here, ain't we?" Ciro said.
"Them boats off the bow? That's state men, Ciro," my father said.
"We don't know that," Ciro said.
"We can go east. Hide the load at Grand Chenier and come back for it later. You listen, you. Don't nobody make a living in jail," my father said.
Ciro was short, built like a dockworker, with red hair and green eyes and a small, down-hooked Irish mouth.
He wore a canvas coat and a fedora that was tied onto his head with a scarf. It was unseasonably cold and his face was windbumed and knotted with thought inside his
scarf.
"The man got his trucks up there, Aldous. I promised we was coming in tonight. Ain't right to leave them people waiting," he said.
"Sitting in an empty truck ain't gonna put nobody in Angola," my father said.
Ciro's eyes drifted off from my father's and looked out at the southern horizon.
"It don't matter now. Here come the Coast Guard. Hang on," he said.
The boat Ciro and my father owned together was long and narrow, like a World War I torpedo vessel, and had been built to service offshore drilling rigs, with no wasted space on board. The pilothouse sat like a matchbox on the stern, and even when the deck was stacked with drill pipe the big Chrysler engines could power through twelve-foot seas. When Ciro pushed the throttle forward, the screws scoured a trough across the swell and the bow arched out of the water and burst a wave into a horsetail spray across the moon.
But the searchlights on the Coast Guard cutter were unrelenting. They dissected my father's boat, burned red circles into his eyes, turned the waves a sandy green and robbed them of all their mystery, illuminating the bait fish and stingrays that toppled out of the crests. The boat's hull pounded across the water, the liquor bottles shaking violently under the tarp, the searchlights spearing through the pilothouse windows far out into the darkness. All the while the moored boats that lay
between my father and the safety of the coastline waited, their cabin windows glowing now, their engines silent.
My father leaned close to Ciro's ear. "You going right into them agents," he said.
"Mr. Julian taken care of them people," Ciro said.
"Mr. Julian taken care of Mr. Julian," my father said.
"I don't want to hear it, Aldous."
Suddenly the boats of the state liquor agents came to life, lurching out over the waves, their own searchlights now vectoring Ciro and my father. Ciro swung the wheel hard to starboard, veering around a sandbar, moving over shallow water, the bow hammering against the outgoing tide.
Up ahead was the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. My father watched the coastline draw nearer, the moss straightening on the dead cypress trunks, the flooded willows and gum trees and sawgrass denting and swaying in the wind. The tarp on the cases of whiskey and rum tore loose and flapped back against the pilothouse, blocking any view out the front window. My father cut the other ropes on the tarp and peeled it off the stacked cases of liquor and heaved it over the gunnel. When he looked at the shore again, he saw a series of sandbars ridging out of the bay like the backs of misplaced whales.
"Oh, Ciro, what you gone and did?" he said.
The boat rocketed between two sandbars, just as someone began firing an automatic weapon in short bursts from one of the state boats. Whiskey and rum and broken glass fountained in the air, then a tracer round landed on the deck like a phosphorous match and a huge handkerchief of flame enveloped the pilothouse.
But Ciro never cut the throttle, never considered giving up. The glass in the windows blackened and snapped in half; blue and yellow and red fire streamed off the deck into the water.
"Head into them leafs!" my father yelled, and pointed at a cove whose surface was layered with dead leaves.
The boat's bow crashed into the trees, setting the canopy aflame. Then my father and
Ciro were overboard, splashing through the swamp, their bodies marbled with firelight.
They ran and trudged and stumbled for two miles through chest-deep water, sloughs, air vines, and sand bogs that were black with insects feeding off cows or wild animals that had suffocated or starved in them.
Three hours later the two of them sat on a dry levee and watched the light go out of the sky and the moon fade into a thin white wafer. Ciro's left ankle was the size of a cantaloupe.
"I'm gonna get my car. Then we ain't touching the liquor bidness again," my father said.
"We ain't got a boat to
touch
it wit'," Ciro said.
"T'ank you "for telling me that. The next time I work for Mr. Julian LaSalle, go buy a gun and shoot me."
"He paid my daughter's hospital bills. You too hard on people, Aldous," Ciro said.
"He gonna pay for our boat?"
My father walked five miles to the grove of swamp maples where he had parked his automobile. When he returned to pick Ciro up, the sky was blue, the wild-flowers blooming along the levee, the air bright with the smell of salt. He came around a stand of willows and stared through the windshield at the scene he had blundered into.
Three men in fedora hats and ill-fitting suits, two of them carrying Browning automatic rifles, were escorting Ciro in wrist manacles to the back of a caged wagon, one with iron plates in the floor. The wagon was hooked to the back of a state truck and two Negroes who worked for Julian LaSalle were already sitting inside it.
My father shoved his transmission in reverse and backed all the way down the levee until he hit a board road that led through the swamp. As he splashed through the flooded dips in the road and mud splattered over his windshield, he tried not to think of Ciro limping in manacles toward the jail wagon. He hit a deer, a doe, and saw her carom off the fender into a tree, her body broken. But my father did not slow down until he was in Morgan City, where he entered the back of a Negro cafe and bought a glass of whiskey
that he drank with both hands.
Then he put his big head down on his arms and fell asleep and dreamed of birds trapped inside the foliage of burning trees.
CHAPTER 2
C
ops, street reporters, and hard-core caseworkers usually hang around with their own kind and form few intimate friendships with people outside their own vocation. They are not reclusive or elitist or self-anointed. They simply do not share the truth of their experience with outsiders. If they did, they would probably be shunned.
In one of the Feliciana parishes, I knew a black man who had been a sergeant in Lt. William Calley's platoon at My Lai. He had stood above the ditch at My Lai and machine-gunned children and women and old men while they begged for their lives. Years later the sergeant's son died of a drug overdose in his front yard. The sergeant believed his son's death was payback for the ditch at My Lai. He covered the walls of his home with pictures and news articles that detailed the atrocity he had participated in and relived his deeds at My Lai twenty-four hours a day.
But the politicians who sent my friend the sergeant into that Third World village would never have to carry his burden, nor would any civil or military authority ever hold them accountable.
That's the way it is. The right people seldom
go down.
Closure is a word that does not work well with the victims of violent crime. If you're a cop and you're lucky, you won't let your point of view put you in late-hour bars.
On a spring Saturday afternoon last year, I answered the phone on my desk at the Iberia Parish Sheriffs Department and knew I had just caught one of those cases that would never have an adequate resolution, that would involve a perfectly innocent, decent family whose injury would never heal.
The father was a cane farmer, the mother a nurse at Iberia General. Their sixteen-year-old daughter was an honor student at the local Catholic high school. That morning she had gone for a ride across a fallow cane field on a four-wheeler with her boyfriend. A black man who had been sitting on his back porch nearby said the fourwheeler had scoured a rooster tail of brown dust out of the field and disappeared in a grove of gum trees, then had rumbled across a wooden bridge into another field, one that was filled with new cane. A low-roofed gray gas-guzzler was parked by the coulee with three people inside. The black man said the driver tossed a beer can out the window and started up his automobile and drove in the same direction as the four-wheeler.
My partner was Helen Soileau. She had begun her career as a meter maid at NOPD, then had worked as a patrolwoman in the Garden District before she returned to her hometown and began her career over again. She
had a masculine physique and was martial and often abrasive in her manner, but outside
of Clete Purcel, my old Homicide partner at NOPD, she was the best police officer I had ever known.
Helen drove the cruiser past the grove of gum trees and crossed the bridge over the coulee and followed a dirt track through blades of cane that were pale green with the spring drought and whispering drily in the wind. Up ahead was a second grove of gum trees, one that was wrapped with yellow crime scene tape.
"You know the family?" Helen asked.
"A little bit," I replied.
"They have any other kids?"
"No," I said.
"Too bad. Do they know yet?"
"They're in Lafayette today. The sheriff hasn't been able to reach them," I said.
She turned and looked at me. Her face was lumpy, her blond hair thick on her
shoulders. She chewed her gum methodically, a question in her eyes.
"We have to inform them?" she said.
"It looks like it," I replied.
"On this kind, I'd like to have the perp there and let the family put one in his ear."
"Bad thoughts, Helen."
"I'll feel as guilty about it as I can," she said.
Two deputies and the black man who had called in the "shots fired" and the teenage boy who had been the driver of the four-wheeler were waiting for us outside the crime scene tape that was wound around the grove of gum trees. The boy was sitting on the ground, in an unplanned lotus position, staring dejectedly into space.
Through the back window of the cruiser I saw an ambulance crossing the wooden bridge over the coulee.
Helen parked the cruiser and we walked into the lee of the trees. The sun was low in the west, pink from the dust drifting across the sky. I could smell a salty stench, like a dead animal, in the coulee.
"Where is she?" I asked a deputy.
He took a cigarette out of his mouth and stepped on it. "The other side of the blackberry bushes," he said.
"Pick up the butt, please, and don't light another one," I said.
Helen and I stooped under the yellow tape and walked to the center of the grove. A gray cloud of insects swarmed above a broken depression in the weeds. Helen looked down at the body and blew out her breath.
"Two wounds. One in the chest, the other in the side. Probably a shotgun," she said. Her eyes automatically began to search the ground for an ejected shell.
I squatted down next to the body. The girl's wrists had been pulled over her head and tied with a child's jump rope around the base of a tree trunk. Her skin was gray from massive loss of blood. Her eyes were still open and seemed to be focused on a solitary wildflower three feet away. A pair of panties hung around one of her ankles.
I stood up and felt my knees pop. For just a moment the trees in the clearing seemed to go in and out of focus.
"You all right?" Helen asked.
"They put one of her socks in her mouth," I said.
Helen's eyes moved over my face. "Let's talk to the boy," she said.
His skin was filmed with dust and lines of sweat had
run out of his hair and dried on his face. His T-shirt was grimed with dirt and looked as though it had been tied in knots before he had put it on. When he looked up at us, his eyes were heated with resentment.
"There were two black guys?" I said.
"Yes. I mean yes, sir," he replied.
"Only two?"
"That's all I saw."
"You say they had ski masks on? One of them wore gloves?"
"That's what I said," he replied.
Even in the shade it was hot. I blotted the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.
"They tied you up?" I said.
"Yes," he replied.
"With your T-shirt?" I asked.
"Yes, sir."
I squatted down next to him and gave the deputies a deliberate look. They walked to their cruiser with the black man and got inside and left the doors open to catch the breeze.
"Let's see if I understand," I said to the boy. "They tied you up with your shirt and belt and left you in the coulee and took Amanda into the trees? Guys in ski masks, like knitted ones?"
"That's what happened," he replied.
"You couldn't get loose?"
"No. It was real tight."
"I have a problem with what you're telling me. It doesn't flush, partner," I said.
"Flush?"
"T-shirts aren't handcuffs," I said.
His eyes became moist. He laced his fingers in his hair.
"You were pretty scared?" I said.
"I guess. Yes, sir," he replied.
"I'd be scared, too. There's nothing wrong in that," I said. I patted him on the shoulder and stood up.
"You gonna catch those damned nigg*rs or not?" he asked.
I joined Helen by our cruiser. The sun was low on the horizon now, bloodred above a distant line of trees. Helen had just gotten off the radio.
"How do you read the kid?" she asked.
"Hard to say. He's not his own best advocate."
"The girl's parents just got back from Lafayette. This one's a pile of sh*t, bwana," she said.
T
he family home was a one-story, wood-frame white building that stood between the state road and a cane field in back. A water oak that was bare of leaves in winter shaded one side of the house during the hot months. The numbered rural mailbox on the road and a carport built on the side of the house, like an afterthought, were the only means we could use to distinguish the house from any other on the same road.
The blinds were drawn inside the house. Plastic holy-water receptacles were tacked on
the doorjambs and a church calendar and a hand-stitched Serenity Prayer hung on the living room walls. The father was Quentin Boudreau, a sunburned, sandy-haired man who wore wire-rim glasses and a plain blue tie and a starched white shirt that must have felt like an iron prison on his body. His eyes seemed to have no emotion, no focus in them, as though he were experiencing thoughts he had not yet allowed himself to feel.
He held his wife's hand on his knee. She was a small, dark-haired Cajun woman whose face was devastated. Neither she nor her husband spoke or attempted to ask a question while Helen and I explained, as euphemistically as we could, what had happened to their daughter. I wanted them to be angry with us, to hurl insults, to make racial remarks, to do anything that would relieve me of the feelings I had when I looked into their faces.
But they didn't. They were humble and undemanding and probably, at the moment, incapable of hearing everything that was being said to them.
I put my business card on the coffee table and stood up to go. "We're sorry for what's happened to your family," I said.
The woman's hands were folded in her lap now. She looked at them, then lifted her eyes to mine.
"Amanda was raped?" she said.
"That's a conclusion that has to come from the coroner. But, yes, I think she was," I said.
"Did they use condoms?" she asked.
"We didn't find any," I replied.
"Then you'll have their DNA," she said. Her eyes were black and hard now and fixed on mine.
Helen and I let ourselves out and crossed the yard to the cruiser. The wind, even full of dust, seemed cool after the long hot day and smelled of salt off the Gulf. Then I heard Mr. Boudreau behind me. He was a heavy man and he walked as though he had gout in one foot. A wing on his shirt collar was bent at an upward angle, like a spear point touching his throat.
"What kind of weapon did they use?" he asked.
"A shotgun," I said.
His eyes bunked behind his glasses. "Did they shoot my little girl in the face?" he asked.
"No, sir," I replied.
" 'Cause those sons of bitches just better not have hurt her face," he said, and
began to weep in his front yard.
B
y the next morning the fingerprints lifted from the beer can thrown out of the automobile window at the crime scene gave us the name of Tee Bobby Hulin, a twenty-five-year-old black hustler and full-time smartass whose diminutive size saved him on many occasions from being bodily torn apart. His case file was four inches thick and included arrests for shoplifting at age nine, auto theft at thirteen, dealing reefer in the halls of his high school, and driving off from the back of the local Wal-Mart with a truckload of toilet paper.
For years Tee Bobby had skated on the edge of the system, shining people on, getting by on rebop and charm and convincing others he was more trickster than miscreant. Also, Tee Bobby possessed another, more serious gift, one he seemed totally undeserving of, as though the finger of God had pointed at him arbitrarily one day and bestowed on him a musical talent that was like none since the sad, lyrical beauty in the recordings of Guitar Slim.
When Helen and I walked up to Tee Bobby's gas-guzzler that evening at a drive-in restaurant not far from City Park, his accordion was propped up in the backseat, its surfaces like ivory and the speckled insides of a pomegranate.
"Hey, Dave, what it is?" he said.
"Don't call your betters by their first name," Helen said.
"I gots you, Miss Helen. I ain't done nothing wrong, huh?" he said, his eyebrows climbing.
"You tell us," I said.
He feigned a serious concentration. "Nope. I'm a blank. Y'all want part of my crab burger?" he said.
His skin had the dull gold hue of worn saddle leather, his eyes blue-green, his hair lightly oiled and curly and cut short and boxed behind the neck. He continued to look at us with an idiot's grin on his mouth.
"Put your car keys under the seat and get in the cruiser," Helen said.
"This don't sound too good. I think I better call my lawyer," he said.
"I didn't say you were under arrest. We'd just like a little information from you. Is that a problem?" Helen said.
"I gots it again. White folks is just axing for hep. Don't need to read no Miranda rights to nobody. Sho' now, I wants to hep out the po-lice," he said.
"You're a walking charm school, Tee Bobby," Helen said.
Twenty minutes later Tee Bobby sat alone in an interview room at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department while Helen and I talked in my office. Outside, the sky was ribbed with maroon strips of cloud and the train crossing guards were lowered on the railway tracks and a freight was wobbling down the rails between clumps of trees and shacks where black people lived.
"What's your feeling?" I asked.
"I have a hard time making this clown for a shotgun murder," she said.
"He was there."
"This case has a smell to it, Streak. Amanda's boyfriend just doesn't ring right," she said.
"Neither does Tee Bobby. He's too disconnected about it."
"Give me a minute before you come in," she said.
She went into the interview room and left the door slightly ajar so I could hear her words to Tee Bobby. She leaned on the table, one of her muscular arms slightly touching his, her mouth lowered toward his ear. A rolled-up magazine protruded from the back pocket of her jeans.
"We've got you at the crime scene. That won't go away. I'd meet this head-on," she said.
"Good. Bring me a lawyer. Then I bees meeting it head-on."
"You want us to get your grandmother down here?"
"Miss Helen gonna make me feel guilty now. 'Cause you a big family friend. 'Cause my gran'mama used to wash your daddy's clothes when he wasn't trying to put his hands up her dress."
Helen pulled the rolled-up paper cylinder from her back pocket. "How would you like it if I just slapped the sh*t out of you?" she said.
"I bees likin' that."
She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then touched him lightly on the forehead with the cusp of the magazine.
His eyelids fluttered mockingly, like butterflies.
Helen walked out the door past me. "I hope the D.A, buries that little prick," she said.
I went into the interview room and closed the door.
"Right now your car is being torn apart and two detectives are on their way to your house with a search warrant," I said. "If they find a ski mask, a shotgun that's been fired in the last two days, any physical evidence from that girl on your clothes, even a strand of hair, you're going to be injected. The way I see it, you've got about a ten-minute window of opportunity to tell your side of things."
Tee Bobby removed a comb from his back pocket and ran it up and down the hair on his arm and looked into space. his
Then he put his head down on his folded arms and tapped
feet rhythmically, as though he were keeping time with a tune inside his head.
"You're just going to act the fool?" I said.
"I ain't raped nobody. Leave me be."
I sat down across from him and watched the way his eyes glanced innocuously around the walls, his boredom with my presence, the beginnings of a grin on his mouth as he looked at the growing anger in my face.
"What's wrong?" he said.
"She was sixteen. She had holes in her chest and side you could put your fist into. You get that silly-ass look off your face," I said.
"I got a right to look like I want. You bring me a lawyer or you kick me loose. You ain't got no evidence or you would have already printed me and had me in lockup."
"I'm a half-inch from knocking you across this room, Tee Bobby."
"Yassir, I knows that. This nigg*r's bones is shakin', Cap'n," he replied.
I locked him in the interview room and went down to my office. A half hour later a phone call came in from the detectives who had been sent to Tee Bobby's home on Poinciana Island.
"Nothing so far," one of them said.
"What do you mean 'so far'?" I asked.
"It's night. We'll start over again in the morning. Feel free to join us. I just sorted through a garbage can loaded with week-old shrimp," he replied.
A
t dawn Helen and I drove across the wooden bridge that spanned the freshwater bay on the north side of Poinciana Island. The early sun was red on the horizon, promising another scorching day, but the water in the bay was black and smelled of spawning fish, and the elephant ears and the cypress and flowering trees on the banks riffled coolly in the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico.
I showed my badge to the security guard in the wooden booth on the bridge, and we drove through the settlement of tree-shaded frame houses where the employees of the LaSalle family lived, then followed a paved road that wound among hillocks and clumps of live oaks and pine and gum trees and red-dirt acreage, where black men were hoeing out the rows in lines that moved across the field as precisely as military formations.
The log-and-brick slave cabins from the original LaSalle plantation were still
standing, except they had been reconstructed and modernized by Perry LaSalle and were now used by either the family's guests or lifetime employees whom the LaSalles took care of until the day of their deaths.
Ladice Hulin, Tee Bobby's grandmother, sat in a
wicker chair on her gallery, her thick gray hair hanging below her shoulders, her hands folded on the crook of a walking cane.
I got out of the cruiser and walked into the yard. Three uniformed deputies and a plainclothes detective were in back, raking garbage out of an old trash pit. As a young woman, Ladice had been absolutely beautiful, and even though age had robbed her in many ways, it had not diminished her femininity, and her skin still had the smoothness and luster of chocolate. She didn't ask me onto the gallery.
"They tear up your house, Miss Ladice?" I said.
She continued to look at me without speaking. Her eyes had the clarity, the deepness, the unblinking fixed stare of a deer's.
"Is your grandson inside?" I asked.
"He didn't come home after y'all turned him loose. Y'all put the fear of God in him, if that make you feel good," she replied.
"We tried to help him. He chose not to cooperate. He also showed no feeling at all over the rape and murder of an innocent young girl," I said.
She wore a white cotton dress with a gold chain and religious medal around her neck. A perforated gold-plated dime hung from another chain on her anklebone.
"No feeling, huh?" Then she brushed at the air and said, "Go on, go on, take care of your bidness and be done. The grave's waiting for me. I just wish I didn't have to deal with so many fools befo' I get there."
"I always respected you, Miss Ladice," I said.
She put one hand on the arm of her chair and pushed herself erect.
"He's gonna run from you. He's gonna sass you. It's 'cause he's a scared li'l boy inside. Don't hurt him just 'cause he's scared, no," she said.
I started to speak, but Helen touched me on the arm. The plainclothes in back was waving at us, a dirty black watch cap on a stick in his right hand.
CHAPTER 3
O
ne week later an assistant district attorney, Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan, came into my office without knocking. She was a statuesque, handsome woman, over six feet tall, with white skin and red hair and green eyes. She wore white hose and horn-rim glasses and a pale orange suit and a white blouse, and she seldom passed men anywhere that they did not turn and look at her. But her face always seemed enameled with anger, without cause, her manner as sharp as razor wire. Her dedication to destroying criminals and defense attorneys was legendary. However, the reason for that dedication was a matter of conjecture.
I looked up from the newspaper that was spread on my desk.
"Excuse me for not getting up. I didn't hear you knock," I said.
"I need everything you have on the Amanda Boudreau investigation," she said.
"It's not complete."
"Then give me what you have and update me on a daily basis."
"You caught the case?" I asked.
She sat down across from me. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist, then back at me. "Is it always necessary that I say everything twice to you?" she said.
"The forensics just came in on the watch cap we dug up at Tee Bobby's place. The rouge and skin oils came off Amanda Boudreau," I said.
"Good, let's cut the warrant." As she got up to go, her eyes paused on mine. "Something wrong?"
"This one doesn't hang together."
"The victim's DNA is on the suspect's clothes? His prints are on a beer can at the murder scene? But you have doubts about what occurred?"
"The sem*n on the girl wasn't Tee Bobby's. The man who called in the 'shots fired' said there were three people in the car. But Amanda's boyfriend said only two men accosted him. Where was the other one? The boyfriend said he was tied up with a T-shirt. Why didn't he try to get away?"
"I have no idea. Why don't you find out?" she said.
I hesitated before I spoke again. "I have another problem. I can't see Tee Bobby as a killer."
"Maybe it's because you want it both ways," she said.
"Excuse me?"
"Some people always need to feel good about themselves, usually at the expense of others. In this case at the
expense of a dead girl who was raped while she had a sock stuffed down her throat."
I folded my newspaper and dropped it in the trash can.
"Perry LaSalle is representing Tee Bobby," I said.
"So?"
I got up from my chair and closed the Venetian blinds on the corridor windows.
"You hate the LaSalles, Barbara. I think you asked for this case," I said.
"I don't have any feeling about the LaSalle family one way or another."
"Your grandfather went to prison for old man Julian. That's how he got his job as a security guard on LaSalle's bridge."
"Have the paperwork in my office by close of business. In the meantime, if you ever impugn my motives as a prosecutor again, I'll take you into civil court and fry your sorry ass for slander."
She threw the door open and marched down the corridor toward the sheriff's office. A
uniformed cop watched her sideways while he drank from the water fountain, his eyes glued on her posterior. He grinned sheepishly when he saw me looking at him.
I
t was Friday afternoon and I didn't want to think anymore about Barbara Shanahan or a young girl who had probably been forced to stare into the barrel of a shotgun and wait helplessly while her executioner decided whether or not to pull the trigger.
I drove south of town, down a dusty road, along a tree-lined waterway, to the house built by my father during the Depression. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke in the canopy of the live oaks, and up ahead I saw the dock and bait shop that I operated as a part-time business and a lavender Cadillac convertible parked by the boat ramp, which meant that my old Homicide partner, the bane of NOPD, the good-natured, totally irresponsible, fiercely loyal Clete Purcel, was back in New Iberia.
He had dumped his cooler on a bait table at the end of the dock and was gutting a stringer of ice-flecked sac-a-lait and bream and big-mouth bass with a long,
razor-edged
knife that had no guard on the handle. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts and flip-flops and a Marine Corps utility cap. His whole body was oily with lotion and baked with sunburn, his body hair matted in gold curlicues on his massive arms and shoulders.
I parked my pickup truck in the driveway to the house and walked across the road and down the dock, where Clete was now scaling his fish with a tablespoon and washing them under a faucet and placing them on a clean layer of ice in his cooler.
"It looks like you had a pretty good day," I said. "If I can use your shower, I'll take you and Bootsie and Alafair to Bon Creole." He picked up a salted can of beer off the dock rail and watched me over the bottom of it while he drank. His hair was bleached by the sun, his green eyes happy, one eyebrow cut by a scar that ran across the bridge of his nose.
"You just here for a fishing trip?" I asked. "I got a sh*tload of bail slaps to pick up for Nig and Willie. Plus Nig may have written a bond on a serial killer."
I was tired and didn't want to hear about Clete's ongoing grief as a bounty hunter for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. I tried to look attentive, but my gaze started to wander toward the house, the baskets of impa-tiens swaying under the eaves of the gallery, my wife, Bootsie, weeding the hydrangea bed in the shade.
"Y
ou listening?'' Clete said.
"Sure," I replied.
"So this is how we heard about the serial sex predator or killer or whatever the hell he is. No Duh Dolowitz got nailed trying to creep Fat Sammy Figorelli's skin parlor, but this time Nig says he's had it with No Duh and his half-baked capers, like putting dog sh*t in the sandwiches at a Teamsters convention or impersonating a chauffeur and driving away with the Calucci family's limo.
"So No Duh calls up from central lockup and says Nig and Wee Willie are hypocrites because they wrote the bond on some dude who killed a couple of hookers in Seattle and Portland.
"Nig asks No Duh how he knows this and No Duh goes, ' 'Cause one year ago I was sitting in a cell next to this perverted f*ck while he was pissing and moaning about how he dumped these broads along riverbanks on the West Coast. This same pervert was also talking about two dumb New Orleans Jews who bought his alias and were writing his bond without running his sheet.'
"But Nig's got scruples and doesn't like the idea he might have put a predator back on the street. So he has me start going over every dirtbag he's written paper on for the last two years. So far I've checked out one hundred twenty or one hundred thirty names and I can't come up with anyone who fits the profile."
"Why believe anything Dolowitz says? One of the
Giacanos put dents in his head with a ball peen hammer years ago," I said.
"That's the point. He's got something wrong with his brain. No Duh is a thief who never lies. That's why he's always doing time."
"You're going to take us to Bon Creole?" I asked.
"I said I was, didn't I?"
"I'd really enjoy that," I said.
B
ut I would not be able to free myself that evening from the murder of Amanda Boudreau. I had just showered and changed clothes and was waiting on the gallery for Clete and Bootsie and Alafair to join me when Perry LaSalle's cream-yellow Gazelle, a replica of a 1929 Mercedes, turned off the road into our driveway.
Before he could get out of his automobile, I walked down through the trees to meet him. The top was down on his automobile, and his sun-browned skin looked dark in the shade, his brownish-black hair tousled by the wind, his eyes bright blue, his cheeks pooled with color. He had given up his studies at a Jesuit seminary when he was twenty-one, for no reason he was ever willing to provide. He had lived among street people in the Bowery and wandered the West, working lettuce and beet fields, riding on freight cars with derelicts and fruit tramps, then had returned like the prodigal son to his family and studied law at Tulane.
I liked Perry and the dignified manner and generosity of spirit with which he always
conducted himself. He was a big man, at least six feet two, but he was never grandiose or assuming and was always kind to those less fortunate than he. But like many of us I felt Perry's story was infinitely more complex than his benign demeanor would indicate.
"Out for a drive?" I said, knowing better.
"I hear Battering Ram Shanahan thinks you're soft on the Amanda Boudreau investigation. I hear she wants to use a nail gun on your cojones," he-said.
"News to me," I replied.
"Her case sucks and she knows it."
"Seen any good movies lately?" I asked.
"Tee Bobby's innocent. He wasn't even at the murder scene."
"His beer can was."
"Littering isn't a capital crime."
"It was good seeing you, Perry."
"Come out to the island and try my bass pond. Bring Bootsie and Alafair. We'll have dinner."
"I will. After the trial," I said.
He winked at me, then drove down the road, the sunlight through the trees flicking like gold coins across the waxed surfaces of his automobile.
I heard Clete walking through the leaves behind me. His hair was wet and freshly combed, the top buttons of his tropical shirt open on his chest.
"Isn't that the guy who wrote the book about the Death House in Louisiana? The one the movie was based on?" he said.
"That's the guy," I replied.
Clete looked at my expression. "You didn't like the book?" he asked.
"Two kids were murdered in a neckers' area up the Loreauville Road. Perry made the prosecutor's office look bad."
"Why?"
"I guess some people need to feel good about themselves," I answered.
T
he next morning there was fog in the trees when Alafair and I walked down the slope and opened up the bait shop and hosed down the dock and fired up the barbecue pit on which we prepared links and chicken and sometimes pork chops for our midday customers. I went into the storage room and began slicing open cartons of canned beer and soda to stock the coolers while Alafair made coffee and wiped down the counter. I heard the tiny bell on the
screen door ring and someone come into the shop.
He was a young man and wore a white straw hat coned up on the sides, a pale blue sports coat, a wide, plum-colored tie, gray pants, and shined cordovan cowboy boots. His hair was ash-blond, cut short, shaved on the neck, his skin a deep olive. He carried a suitcase whose weight made his face sweat and his wrist cord with veins.
"Howdy do," he said, and sat down on a counter stool, his back to me. "Could I have a glass of water, please?"
Alafair was a senior in high school now, although she looked older than her years. She stood up on her tiptoes and took down a glass from a shelf, her thighs and rump flexing against her shorts. But the young man turned his head and gazed out the screen at the trees on the far side of the bayou.
"You want ice in it?" she asked.
"No, ma'am, I dint want to cause no trouble. Out of the tap is fine," the young man replied.
She filled the glass and put it before him. Her eyes glanced at the suitcase on the floor and the leather belt that was cinched around the weight that bulged against its sides.
"Can I help you with something?" she asked.
He removed a paper napkin from the dispenser and folded it and blotted the perspiration on his brow. He grinned at her.
"There's days I don't think the likes of me is meant to sell sno'balls in Hades. Is there people up at that house?" he said.
"What are you selling?" she asked.
"Encyclopedias, Bibles, family-type magazines. But Bibles is what I like to sell most of. I aim to go into the ministry or law enforcement. I been taking criminal justice courses over at the university. Could I have one of them fried pies?"
She reached up on the shelf again, and this time his gaze wandered over her body, lingering on the backs of her thighs. When I stepped out of the storage room, his head jerked toward me, the skin tightening around his eyes.
"You want to rent a boat?" I asked.
"No, sir. I was just taking a little rest break on my route. My name's Marvin Oates. Actually I'm from here-bouts," he said.
"I know who are you. I'm a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department."
"Well, I reckon that cuts through it," he said.
My memory of him was hazy, an arrest four or five years back on a bad check charge, a P.O.'s recommendation for leniency, Barbara Shanahan acting with the
charity that she was occasionally capable of, allowing him to plead out on time served.
"We'll be seeing you," I said.
"Yes, sir, you got it," he replied, cutting his head.
He tipped his hat to Alafair and hefted up his suitcase and labored out the door as though he were carrying a load of bricks.
"Why do you have to be so hard, Dave?" Alafair said.
I started to reply, then thought better of it and went outside and began laying out split chickens on the grill.
Marvin Oates paused at the end of the dock, set his suitcase down, and walked back toward me. He gazed reflectively at an outboard plowing a foamy yellow trough down the
bayou.
"Is that your daughter, sir?" he asked.
"Yep."
He nodded. "You saw me looking at her figure when her back was turned. But she's good-looking and the way of the flesh is weak, at least it is with me. You're her father and I offended you. I apologize for that."
He waited for me to speak. When I continued to stare into his face, he cut his head again and walked back to his suitcase and hefted it up and crossed the dirt road and
started up my driveway.
"Wrong house, partner," I called.
He lifted his hat in salute and changed direction and headed toward my neighbor's.
M
onday morning I called before I drove out to the LaSalles' island to see Tee Bobby's grandmother. When she let me in, she was wearing a beige dress and white shoes that had been recently polished and her hair was
brushed and fastened in back with a comb. Her living room had throw rugs on the floor and a wood-bladed fan that turned overhead, and the slipcovers on the upholstery were printed with flowery designs. The wind was blowing off the bay, and the red bloom of mimosa and poinciana trees flattened softly against the screens. From the couch Ladice looked at me and waited, her face cautionary, her chest rising and falling.
"Tee Bobby doesn't have an alibi. Or at least not one he'll give me," I said.
"What if I say he was here when that girl died?" she said.
"Your neighbors say he wasn't."
"Then why you bother me, Mr. Dave?"
"People around here are in a bad mood about that girl's death. Tee Bobby is a perfect dartboard for their anger."
"This all started way befo' he was born. Ain't none of this that boy's fault."
"You're going to have to explain that to me."
I heard the back screen door open and saw a young woman walk across the kitchen. She wore pink tennis shoes and an oversize blue dress that hung on her like a sack. She took a soda pop that was already opened from the icebox, a paper straw floating in the bottle's neck. She stood in the doorway, sucking on the straw, her face the twin of Tee Bobby's, her expression vacuous, her eyes tangled with thoughts that probably no one could ever guess at.
"We going to the doctor in a li'l bit, Rosebud. Wait on the back porch and don't be coming back in till I tell you," Ladice said.
The young woman's eyes held on mine a moment, then she pulled the drinking straw off her lips and turned and went out the back screen door and let it slam behind her.
"You look like you got somet'ing to say," Ladice said. "What happened to Tee Bobby and Rosebud's mother?"
"Run off wit' a white man when she was sixteen. Left them two in a crib wit'out no food."
"That's what you meant when you said none of this was Tee Bobby's fault?"
"No. That ain't what I meant at all."
"I see." I stood up to leave. "Some people say old man Julian was the father of your daughter."
"You come into the house of a white lady and ax a question like that? Like you was talking to livestock?" she said.
"Your grandson may end up in the Death House, Ladice. The only friend he seems to have is Perry LaSalle. Maybe that's good. Maybe it isn't. Thanks for your time."
I walked outside, into the yard and the smell of flowers and the sun-heated salty hint of rain out on the Gulf. Across the road I could see peaco*cks on the lawn of the scorched three-story stucco ruins that had been Julian LaSalle's home. I heard Ladice open the screen door behind me.
"What you mean, it ain't good Perry LaSalle's the only friend Tee Bobby got?" she
said.
"A man who's driven by guilt eventually turns on those who make him feel guilty. That's just one guy's observation," I said.
The breeze blew a strand of her hair down on her forehead. She brushed it back into place and stared at me for a long time, then went back into her house and latched the screen door behind her.
A
t sunset an elderly black man named Batist helped me close up the bait shop and chainlock our rental boats to the pilings under the dock. Heat lightning flickered over the Gulf and I could hear the distant rumble of thunder, but the air was dry, the trees along the road coated with dust, and a column of acrid smoke blew from a neighbor's trash fire and flattened in a gray haze on the bayou.
This was the third year of the worst drought in Louisiana's history.
I pressure-hosed the dried fish blood and scales off the cleaning boards, then folded the Cinzano umbrellas that protruded from the spool tables on the dock and went inside the shop.
A few years ago a friend had given me a replica of the classic Wurlitzer jukebox, one whose domed plastic casing swirled with color, like liquid candy that had not been poured into the mold. He had stocked it with 45 rpm records from the 1950s, and I had never replaced them. I dropped in a quarter painted with red nail polish and played Guitar Slim's "The Things That I Used to Do."
I had never heard a voice filled with as much sorrow as his. There was no self-pity in the song, only acceptance of the terrible conclusion that what he loved most in the world, his wife, had become profligate and had not only rejected his love but had given herself to an evil
man.
Guitar Slim was thirty-two when he died of his alcoholism.
"That's old-time blues there, ain't it?" Batist said.
Batist was well into his seventies now, his attitudes intractable, his hair the color of smoke, the backs of his broad hands flecked with pink scars from a lifetime of working on fishing boats and shucking oysters at one of the LaSalle canneries. But he was still a powerful, large man who was confident in himself and took pride in his skill as a boatmate and fisherman and was proud of the fact that all of his children had graduated from high school.
He had grown up in a time when people of color were not so much physically abused as taken for granted, used as a cheap source of labor, and deliberately kept uneducated and poor. Perhaps an even greater injury done to them came in the form of the white man's lie when they sought redress. On those occasions they were usually treated as children, given promises and assurances that would never be kept, and sent on their way with the feeling that their problems were of their own manufacture.
But I never saw Batist show bitterness or anger about his upbringing. For that reason alone I considered him perhaps the most remarkable man I had ever known.
The lyrics and the bell-like reverberation of Guitar Slim's rolling chords haunted me. Without ever using words to describe either the locale or the era in which he had lived, his song re-created the Louisiana I had been raised in: the endless fields of sugarcane thrashing in the wind under a darkening sky, yellow dirt roads and the Hadacol and Jax beer signs nailed on the sides of general stores, horse-drawn buggies that people tethered in
stands of gum trees during Sunday Mass, clapboard juke joints where Gatemouth Brown and Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price played, and the brothel districts that flourished from sunset to dawn and somehow became invisible in the morning light.
"You t'inking about Tee Bobby Hulin?" Batist asked.
"Not really," I said.
"Boy got a bad seed in him, Dave."
"Julian LaSalle's?"
"I say let evil stay buried in the graveyard."
A half hour later I turned off the outside floodlamps and the string of electric lights that ran the length of the dock. Just as I locked the front door of the shop I
heard the phone inside ring. I started to let it go, but instead I went back in and reached over the counter and picked up the receiver.
"Dave?" the sheriff's voice said.
"Yeah."
"You'd better get over to the jail. Tee Bobby just hung himself."
CHAPTER 4
W
hen the jailer had walked past Tee Bobby's cell and seen his silhouette suspended in midair, he had thrown open the cell door and burst inside with a chair, wrapping one arm around Tee Bobby's waist, lifting him upward while he sawed loose the belt that was wrapped around an overhead pipe.
After he dropped Tee Bobby like a sack of grain on his bunk, he yelled down the hall, "Find the son of a bitch who put this man in a cell with his belt!"
When I went to see Tee Bobby the next morning in Iberia General, one of his wrists was handcuffed to the bed rail. The capillaries had burst in the whites of his eyes and his tongue looked like cardboard. He put a pillow over his head and drew his knees up to his chest in an embryonic position. I pulled the pillow out of his hands and tossed it at
the foot of the bed.
"You might as well plead out," I said.
"What you talking about?" he said.
"Attempted suicide in custody reads just like a confession. You just shafted yourself."
"I'll finish it next time."
"Your grandmother's outside. So is your sister."
"What you up to, Robicheaux?"
"Not much. Outside of Perry LaSalle, I'm probably the only guy on the planet who wants to save you from the injection table."
"My sister don't have nothing to do wit' this. You leave her alone. She cain't take no kind of stress."
"I'm letting go of you, Tee Bobby. I hope Perry gets you some slack. I think Barbara Shanahan is going to put a freight train up your ass."
He raised himself up on one elbow, the handcuffs clanking tight against the bed rail. His breath was bilious.
"I hear you, boss man. nigg*r boy got to swim in his own sh*t now," he said.
"Run the Step 'n' Fetch It routine on somebody else, kid," I said.
I passed Ladice and Rosebud in the waiting room. Rosebud had a cheap drawing tablet open on her thighs and was coloring in it with crayons, her face bent down almost to the paper.
A
t noon the sheriff buzzed my extension. "You know that black juke joint by the Olivia Bridge?"
"The one with the garbage piled outside?" I said.
"I want Clete Purcel out of there."
"What's the problem?"
"Not much. He's probably setting civil rights back thirty years."
I drove down Bayou Teche and crossed the drawbridge into the little black settlement of Olivia and parked by
a ramshackle bar named the Boom Boom Room, owned by a mulatto ex-boxer named Jimmy Dean Styles, who was also known as Jimmy Style or just Jimmy Sty.
Clete sat in his lavender Cadillac, the top down, listening to his radio, drinking from a long-necked bottle of beer.
"What's the haps, Streak?" he said.
"What are you doing out here?"
"Checking on a dude named Styles. Nig and Willie wrote a bond on him about the time No Duh was in central lockup."
"No Duh said the serial killer was using an alias."
"Styles used just his first and middle names—Jimmy Dean."
Clete drank out of the beer bottle and squinted up at me in the sunlight. There was an alcoholic shine in his eyes, a bloom in his cheeks.
"Styles is a music promoter. He's also the business manager for a kid named Tee Bobby Hulin, who's in custody right now for rape and murder. I think maybe you should leave Styles alone until we've finished our investigation."
Clete peeled a stick of gum and slipped it into his mouth. "No problem," he said.
"Did you have trouble inside?"
"Not me. Everything's copacetic, big mon." Clete's eyes smiled at me while he snapped his gum wetly in his jaw.
A black Lexus pulled into the lot and Jimmy Dean Styles pulled the keys from the ignition and got out and looked at us, flipping the keys back and forth over his knuckles. He had close-set eyes and a nose like a sheep's
and the flat chest and trim physique of the middleweight boxer he'd been in Angola, where he'd busted up all comers in the improvised ring out on the yard.
"You're looking good, Jimmy," I said.
"Yeah, we all be lookin' good these days," he replied.
"Saw your picture in
People
magazine. A guy from the Teche doesn't make it in rap every day," I said.
"I'd like to talk wit' y'all, but I got a call from my bartender. Some big fat cracker was inside, being obnoxious, rollin' the gold on my customers like he was a real cop 'stead of maybe a P.I. does scut work for a bondsman. I better check to see he took his fat ass somewhere else."
"Hey, that's no kidding? You're a rapper? You've been in
People
magazine?" Clete said, turning around in the car seat to get a better look at Styles, his mouth grinning.
"You right on top of it, Marse Charlie," Styles said.
Clete opened the Cadillac's door and put one loafered foot out on the dirt, then rose to his full height, like an elephant standing up after sunning itself on a riverbank, his grin still in place, the skin on the back of his neck peeling like fish scales. A slapjack protruded from the side pocket of his slacks.
"Being in entertainment, you must get out on the Coast a lot," Clete said.
I gave Clete a hard look, but he didn't let it register.
"See, I travel to promote a couple of groups. That's the way the bidness work. But right now I got to hep my man inside. So I'm cutting this short and telling you I ain't shook nobody's tree. That means they don't be needing to shake mine." Styles placed the flat of his hand on his chest to show his sincerity, then went inside.
"I'm going to join the Klan," Clete said.
I followed Styles inside. The interior was dark, lit only by a jukebox and a neon beer sign over the bar. A woman sat slumped over at the bar, her head on her arms, her eyes closed, her open mouth filled with gold teeth.
She wore pink stretch pants and her black underwear was bunched out over the elastic waistband. Styles pinched her on the rump, hard, his thumb and forefinger catching a thick fold of skin on one buttock.
"This ain't Motel 6, mama. You done fried your tab, too," he said.
"Oh, hi, Jimmy. What's happenin'?" she said lazily, as though waking from a delirium to a friendly face.
"Let's go, baby," he replied, and took her under one arm and walked her to the back door and pushed her out into the whiteness of the day and slammed and latched the door behind her.
He turned around and saw me.
"Sorry about my friend Clete Purcel out there," I said. "But a word of caution. Don't
mess with him again. He'll rip your wiring out."
Styles took a bottle of carbonated water from the cooler and cracked off the cap and dropped it between the duckboards and drank from the bottle.
"What you want wit' me, man?" he asked.
"Tee Bobby may go down on a bad beef. He could use some help."
"I cut Tee Bobby loose. Zydeco and blues ain't my gig no more."
"You cut loose a talent like Tee Bobby Hulin?"
"Big sh*t in South Lou'sana don't make you big sh*t in L.A. I got to piss. You want anything else?"
"Yeah, I'm going to ask you not to manhandle a woman like that again, at least not when I'm around."
"She puked all over the toilet seat. You want to take care of her? Hep me clean it up. I'll drop her by your crib," he replied.
T
wo weeks later Perry LaSalle went bail for Tee Bobby Hulin. Virtually everyone in town agreed that Perry LaSalle was a charitable and good man, although some were beginning to complain about a suspected rapist and murderer being set free, perhaps to repeat his crimes. With time, their sentiments would grow.
That same day a white woman named Linda Zeroski had a shouting argument with her pimp, a black man, on her pickup corner in New Iberia's old brothel district. On the corner was an ancient general store shaded by an enormous oak. In a happier time the store's owner had sold sno'balls to children on their way home from school. Now the apron of dirt yard around the store was occupied each afternoon and evening and all day Saturday and Sunday by young black men with jailhouse art on their arms and inverted ball caps on their heads. If you slowed the car by the corner, they would turn up their palms and raise their eyebrows, which was their way of asking you what you wanted, simultaneously indicating they could supply it—rock, weed, tar, China white, leapers, downers, almost any street drug except crystal meth, which was just starting its odyssey from Arizona to the rural South.
Linda Zeroski did not have to pay for the crack she smoked daily or the tar she injected into her veins. Or the fines she paid in city court or the bonds she
posted for the incremental privilege of dismantling her own life. Her financial affairs were all handled by her pimp, a pragmatic, emotionless man by the name of Washington Trahan, who viewed women as he would bars of soap. Except for Linda Zeroski, who knew how to put slivers of bamboo under his fingernails and ridicule and demean him in public. Washington would have loved to slap her cross-eyed, to drag her by her hair into a car and dump her naked and stoned on a highway, but Linda's background was different from that of his other whor*s.
She had attended college for three years and was the daughter of Joe Zeroski, an exbutton man for the Giacano crime family.
I used to see Linda on her corner, her body heavy with beer fat, her hair bleached and full of snarls, wearing jeans and a shirt without a bra, a cigarette always between her fingers, the smoke crawling up her wrist. Sometimes her father would come to New Iberia and haul her off to a treatment center, but in a week or two she would be back on the corner, offering herself up for whatever use her Johns wished to extract from her.
Sometimes I would pull the cruiser or my truck over and talk to her. She was always pleasant to me and appeared to take pride in the fact she had a friendly relationship with a law officer. In fact, except for Perry LaSalle, who sometimes helped her out at the court, I was probably the only white-collar man she knew on a first-name basis in New Iberia other than Johns. On one occasion I took her to a drive-in for a root beer and a hamburger. I started to ask her straight out why she
allowed men not only to exploit her for their sexual pleasure but, worse, in many instances to use her womb as the depository of their racial anger and their own self-loathing.
But that is the one question you never present to a sad woman like Linda Zeroslri. The answer is one she knows, but she will never share it, and she will forever despise the man who asks it of her.
It was hot and dry the day Tee Bobby bonded out of the parish prison. Across town Linda Zeroski was picked up on her corner by a white man, taken to a motel out on the four-lane, and driven back to her corner. She drank beer in the shade of the live oak with the teenage crack dealers who were all her friends, shouted down her pimp when he accused her of shorting him on his forty percent, then had sex in the back of a black man's car and ate her supper under the tree and tied off her arm in a crack house up the street and cooked a tablespoon of brown tar over a candle flame and shot it into a vein that was as purple and swollen as a tumor.
Just after sunset a gas-guzzler pulled to the curb on Linda's corner and parked under the spreading branches of the live oak. A man in a hat, his face and the color of his hands obscured by shadow, smoked a cigarette behind the wheel while Linda leaned into the passenger-side window and read off her list of prices.
Then she turned and waved good-bye to the crack dealers in front of the store and got into the automobile.
Two hours later Linda Zeroski, the girl who had attended Louisiana State University for three years, sat very still in a straight-back wood chair next to a beached houseboat off Bayou Benoit, her forearms taped to the
chair's arms, a paper sack placed loosely over her head, while a man who wore leather gloves paced in a circle around her.
She tried to make sense of the man's words, to somehow find reason inside the blood rage he was working himself into. If only the brown skag she had shot up would stop hammering in her ears, if only she did not have to breathe through her nose because
of the dirty sock he had stuffed in her mouth.
Then, just as the man wearing leather gloves suddenly ripped into her with both fists, she thought she heard the voice of a little girl inside her. The little girl was calling out her father's name.
H
er body was found just before dawn the next morning by a black man who was running his trotlines in the swamp. The sun was still low on the horizon, veiled in mist, when Helen Soileau and I boarded a St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department boat with two detectives and the coroner and a uniformed deputy from St. Martinville. We headed up Bayou Benoit in the coolness of the early morning, between flooded woods and through bays that were absolutely silent, undimpled by rain or ruffled by wind, the willows and gum trees and moss-hung cypress as still in the green light as if they had been painted against the sky.
The uniformed deputy turned the boat out of the main channel and cut back the throttle and took us through a stand of tupelo gums that were hollowed out by dry rot and whose trunks resonated like drums when the boat's hull scraped against them. Then we saw the desiccated remains of a houseboat that had lain twisted
inside the trees since Hurricane Audrey had struck south Louisiana in 1957, its gray sides strung with blooming morning glories.
Up on a sand spit that looked like the humped back of a whale, Linda Zeroski sat in the wood chair, her head slumped forward, as though she had nodded off to sleep. At her feet were the bloodied pieces of brown paper that had been the bag covering her head. The coroner, who was a decent elderly man known for his planter's hats and firehouse suspenders and bow ties, pulled polyethylene* gloves on his hands and lifted Linda's chin, then gingerly rotated her head from side to side. A breeze suddenly came up and the leaves in the canopy fluttered with sunlight, and I looked into Linda's destroyed face and felt myself swallow.
The coroner stepped back and pulled off his gloves with popping sounds and dropped them in a garbage bag.
"How do you read it, Doc?" Helen asked.
"I'd say she was beaten with fists, probably by somebody who's as powerful with one hand as with the other," he said. "There are fragments of what looks like leather in a couple of the wounds. My guess is he was wearing gloves. Of course, he could have been using a leather-covered instrument, but in that case there would probably be lesions on the top of the skull, where the skin would split more easily."
A St. Martin Parish detective named Lemoyne was writing in a notepad. He was an
overweight man and wore a rain hat and tie and long-sleeved white shirt and galoshes over his street shoes. He kept swiping mosquitoes out of his face.
"What kind of guy are we looking for, Doc?" he asked.
"You ever get drunk and do something you wished you hadn't?" the coroner asked.
The detective seemed to study his notepad. "Yeah, once or twice," he replied.
"The man who did this wasn't drunk. He beat her for a very long time. He enjoyed it immensely. He crushed every bone in her face. One eye is knocked all the way back into
the skull. She may have strangled to death on her own blood. The beating may have gone on after she was dead. What kind of man is he? The kind who looks just like your next-door neighbor," the coroner said.
T
he next afternoon Clete Purcel dropped by my office. He was living in a lovely old stucco motor court, shaded by live oaks, on Bayou Teche, and he was trying to convince me to go fishing with him that evening. Then something out the window caught his attention.
"Is that Joe Zeroski coming up the walk?" he asked.
"Probably."
"What's he doing around here?"
"The prostitute who was killed on Bayou Benoit yesterday? That was his daughter," I said.
"I didn't make the connection. I'll wait for you outside."
"What's wrong?"
"He and I have a history."
"Over what?"
"When I was at the First District, I had to clock him once with a flashlight. Actually, I had to clock him five or
six times. He wouldn't stay down. The guy's nuts, Streak. I'd lose him."
Then Clete grinned with self-irony, as he always did when he knew his advice was of no use, and left my office and went into the men's room across the corridor.
Joe Zeroski grew up in the Irish Channel of New Orleans and quit high school when he was sixteen in order to become a high-rise steelworker. Even as a kid Joe was wrapped so tight his fellow workers treated him as they would gasoline fumes around an open flame. When he was twenty, a notoriously violent and cruel Texas oilman and his bodyguard came into Tony Bacino's club in the French Quarter and arbitrarily decided to pulverize someone at the bar. The oilman chose a laconic, seemingly innocuous working-class kid who was hunched over a draft beer. The kid was Joe Zeroski. Fifteen minutes later the oilman and his bodyguard were in an ambulance on their way to Charity Hospital.
Two Detroit wrestlers were hired by a construction company to escort scabs through a union picket line. One of them stiff-armed Joe aside. Before the wrestler ever knew what hit him, he was on the ground and Joe was astraddle his chest, packing handfuls of gravel into his mouth while the strikers cheered.
But Joe's first big score was one he could never claim official recognition for. At twenty-two he made his bones with the Giacano family by taking out a cop killer who had tried to clip Didoni Giacano's son. Wiseguys and off-duty cops all across New Orleans bought Joe a beer and a shot whenever they saw him.
Joe came into my office like a man who had just
clawed his way out of a tomb. He stood flat-footed in the center of the room, slightly hunched, his nostrils white-edged, his hands balling and unballing by his sides.
"Sorry about your daughter, Joe. I hope to be of some help in finding the guy who did this," I said.
His hair was steel-gray, parted in the middle, sheep-sheared on the sides, and his gray eyes were filled with an analytical glare that seemed to dissect both people and objects with the same level of suspicion. He wore a tweed sports coat, gray slacks, loafers with white socks, and a pink shirt with a charcoal-colored tennis racquet above the pocket. When he stepped closer to my desk, I smelled an odor like heat and stale antiperspirant trapped in his clothes.
"There's a black kid just made bond. He raped and snuffed a white girl with a shotgun. Why ain't he in here?" His speech was like most New Orleans working-class people of his generation, an accent and dialect that sounded much more like Brooklyn than the Deep South.
"Because he's not connected with your daughter's death," I replied.
"Yeah? How many people you got around here could do these kinds of things?" he
said. When he spoke, he tilted his face upward so that his bottom teeth were exposed in the way a fish's might.
"We're working on it, partner," I said.
"The black kid's name is Hulin. Bobby Hulin. He lives on an island somewhere."
"Right. You stay away from him, too."
He leaned down on my desk, his fists denting my ink
blotter. His breath was moist, sour, rife with funk, like the smell a freshly opened grease trap might give off.
"My wife died of leukemia last year. Linda was my only child. I ain't got a lot to lose. You reading me on this?" he said.
"Wrong way to talk to people who are on your side, Joe," I said.
"Y'all are lucky I ain't who I used to be."
"I'll walk you to the front door," I said.
"Flog your joint," he replied.
So instead I got a drink from the watercooler in the corridor and watched Joe walk toward the front of the courthouse, then I went to check my mail.
But it was not over.
Perry LaSalle had just walked into the department. Joe Zeroski's head jerked around when he heard Perry give his name to the dispatcher.
"You're the lawyer for that Hulin kid?" he asked.
"That's right," Perry replied.
"It makes you feel good putting a degenerate kills young girls back on the street?" Joe asked.
"Looks like I wandered in at the wrong time," Perry said.
"My daughter was Linda Zeroski. I find out some sh*tbag you sprung beat her to death . . ."
He couldn't finish his sentence. His eyes watered briefly, then he brushed his wrist across his mouth, staring disjointedly into space. Outside, the bells on the railway crossing clanged senselessly in an empty street.
Wally, our three-hundred-pound, hypertensive dispatcher, stopped his work and slipped his horn-rimmed glasses into their leather case and placed the case on his
desk and stepped out into the foyer. Clete Purcel stood at the reception counter, motionless, his damp comb clipped inside the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, his pale blue
porkpie hat slanted on his head. He inserted a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth and opened the cap on his Zippo but never struck the flint.
"You all right, Joe?" Clete asked.
Joe stared at Clete, his temples pulsing with tiny veins.
"What the f*ck
you
doing here?" he asked.
Then Perry LaSalle decided to continue on his way to the sheriffs office. "I'm sorry for your loss, sir," he said.
He accidentally brushed against Joe's arm.
Joe blindsided him and hooked him murderously in the jaw, the blow whipping Perry's face sideways, flinging spittle against the wall. Then Joe hit him below the eye and a third time in the mouth before Clete caught him from behind and wrapped his huge arms around Joe's chest and lifted him off the ground and slammed his face down on a desk.
But Joe freed one arm and ripped an elbow into Clete's nose, splattering blood across Clete's cheek. The dispatcher and I both grabbed Joe and threw him against the desk again and kicked his legs apart and pushed the side of his face down on a dirty ashtray.
"Put your wrists behind you! Do it now, Joe!" I said.
Then Joe Zeroski, who had killed perhaps nine men, sank to one knee, the backs of his thighs trembling, his arms forming a tent over his head as he tried to hide the shame and grief in his face.
CHAPTER 5
I
walked with Perry LaSalle into the men's room and held his coat for him while he washed his face with cold water. There was a cluster of red bumps under his right eye and blood in his saliva when he spit.
"You cutting that guy loose?" he asked.
"Unless you want to press charges," I replied.
He felt his mouth and looked in the mirror. His eyes were still angry. Then, as though realizing his expression was uncharacteristic of the Perry LaSalle we all knew, he blew out his breath and grinned.
"Maybe I'll catch him down the road," he said.
"I wouldn't. Joe Zeroski was a hit man for the Giacano family," I said.
His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want me to read them. He took his coat from my hand and put it on and combed his hair in the mirror. Then he stopped.
"Are you staring at me for some reason, Dave?" he asked.
"No."
"You think I'm bothered because this guy was a meatball for the Giacanos?" he said.
"On my best day I can't even take my own inventory, Perry," I said.
"Save the Twelve Step stuff for a meeting, old pard," he replied.
A few minutes later I walked with Clete Purcel to his car. The top was down and a half-dozen fishing rods were propped against the backseat. We watched Perry LaSalle's Gazelle pull out of the parking lot and cross the train tracks and turn onto St. Peter Street.
"He's not going to file on Zeroski?" Clete asked.
"Perry's grandfather ran rum with the Giacanos during Prohibition. I don't think Perry wants to be reminded of the association," I said.
"Everybody ran rum back then," Clete said.
"Somebody else did his grandfather's time. You're not going to try to square that elbow in the nose, are you?"
Clete thought about it. "It wasn't personal. For a button man Joe's not a bad guy."
"Great standards."
"This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense," he said.
I
worked late at the office that evening. The eight-by-ten death photos of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau were spread on my desk. The body postures and faces of the dead always tell a story. Sometimes the
jaw is slack, the mouth
robbed of words, as though the
dying person has
suddenly discovered the fraudulent nature of the world. Perhaps
the gaze is focused on a shaft of sunlight through a tree, or a tear is sealed in the corner of the eye, or the palms lie open as though surrendering the spirit. I would like to believe that those who die violently are consoled by presences that care for and protect them in a special way. But the eyes of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau haunted me, and I wanted to find their killers and do something horrible to them.
On the way home I drove to the pickup corner where Linda Zeroski had gotten into an automobile under a spreading oak and driven off, without concern, into a sunset that looked like purple and red smoke against the western sky. The teenage crack dealers who had supposedly been her friends were bored with my questions, then irritated that I was interrupting the flow of business on the corner. When I did not leave, they glanced at one another, formulating a different response, as though I were not there. Their voices became unctuous, their faces sincere, and they indicated to a man they would certainly call my office if they heard any information that might be helpful.
I started to get back into my truck. Then I stopped and walked back under the oak
tree.
"Does Tee Bobby Hulin ever swing by the corner?" I asked.
"Tee Bobby likes them when they sweet, white, and sixteen. I don't see nothing like that 'round here, suh," one kid said. The others snickered.
"What are you telling me?" I asked.
"Tee Bobby got his own thing. It just ain't got nothing to do wit' us," the same kid said.
They lowered their heads in the shadows, suppressing their grins, kicking at the dust, their eyes flicking with amusem*nt at one another. I walked back to my truck and got in. The heat lightning in the south pulsed like quicksilver in the clouds.
J
oe
Zeroski had asked how many individuals in our area were capable of the crimes committed against the persons of his daughter and Amanda Boudreau. Could Tee Bobby have been involved in the abduction of Linda Zeroski? Tee Bobby's grandmother had said that Tee Bobby's present trouble had started before he was born. Maybe it was time to find out what she had meant.
I drove home and parked in the drive and went into the bait shop. Batist was by himself, eating a sandwich at the counter.
"How well do you know Tee Bobby?" I asked.
"Good enough so's I don't want to know him," he answered.
"You think he could rape and murder a young girl?"
"What I t'ink don't count."
"What do you know about Ladice Hulin's relationship to the LaSalle family?"
He finished his coffee and stared out the screen at the bream night-feeding on the moths that fried themselves on the floodlamps and fell into the water.
"Stories about white men and black field women ain't never good, Dave. You want to hear it, my sister growed up with Ladice," he said.
I told my wife, Bootsie, I'd eat supper late, and Batist
and I drove to his sister's small house outside Loreauville, where I listened to a tale that took me back into the Louisiana of my boyhood.
B
ut actually, even before Batist's sister began her account, I already knew much of the LaSalle family's history, not because I necessarily admired them or even found them interesting, but because their lives had become the mirror and measure of our own. In one fashion or another the town had been a participant in all their deeds, all their reversals of fortune, for good or bad, from the time the first cabins were hewn and notched out of cypress on the banks of Bayou Teche, to the federal occupation in 1863 and later the restoration of the old oligarchy by the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction, into modern times when Cajuns and people of color were deliberately kept uneducated and poor in order to ensure the availability of a huge and easily manipulated labor pool.
The LaSalles had believed colonial Louisiana would allow them to realize all the grandiose dreams that Robespierre's guillotine had denied some of their family members. But they soon learned that revolutionary France had not quite finished paying back their kind for centuries of royal arrogance. In fact, they were the bunch Napoleon Bonaparte selected as the target for his most successful large-scale swindle. They paid large sums to obtain land grants in Louisiana from his government, only to discover in 1803 that Napoleon had sold the land from under their feet to the Americans in order to finance his wars.
But the LaSalles were a resilient group, not to be undone by a Corsican usurper or their new egalitarian neighbors. They bought slaves whom James Bowie and his business partner, Jean Lafitte, were smuggling into Louisiana from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. They drained swamps and felled forests and later laid log roads and railway tracks for steam engines across acreage that was so black and rich with sediment from the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that any kind of seed would grow on it if the seed were simply thrown on the ground and stepped upon.
Like his predecessors, Julian LaSalle was a practical man who did not argue or contend with the world. Perhaps his family had built its wealth upon the backs of slave
labor, but that had been the ethos of the times and he felt no guilt about it. He paid what was considered a fair wage to his field hands, saw to their medical care, always kept his word, and during the Great Depression never turned a man in need from his door.
As a little boy I saw him when my father took me with him to Provost's Bar and Pool Room. Mr. Julian, as we called him, was a dark-haired, handsome man with a cleft chin, who wore suspenders and linen suits and Panama hats and two-tone shoes, like an American you might see at a Havana racetrack. He never sat at the bar but always stood, a cigar in one hand, a tumbler of bourbon and ice in the other. On Saturday afternoons Provost's was always filled with both business and blue-collar men, the floor spread with green sawdust, sometimes littered with football betting cards. Mr. Julian treated all the patrons there with equal respect, bought drinks for the old men at the domino and bouree tables, and walked away when
other men used racist language or told bawdy jokes. He was wealthy and educated, but his graciousness and good nature inspired in others admiration rather than envy.
There were stories about his involvement with black women, one in particular, but someone was always quick to offer that Mr. Julian's wife suffered from cancer and other illnesses and had been in a sanitarium in the North, that her hysterical behavior at Mass was such that even a sympathetic priest had reluctantly asked her not to attend. Who could expect Mr. Julian to abide what even the church could not?
But Batist’s sister did not begin her story with Mr. Julian. Instead she told of an overseer on Poinciana Island, a lean, rough-grained, angular man who wore sunglasses, western boots, a straw cowboy hat, and khaki clothes when he sat atop his horse and rode among the black workers in the fields. The year was 1953, a time when the white overseer on a Louisiana plantation had the same powers over those in his charge as his antebellum antecedents did. No one knew his origins, but his name was Legion, and the first day he appeared in the field one worker, who had been a convict on Angola Farm, looked into Legion's face and at first opportunity leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles back to New Iberia and never returned to ask for his pay.
"You say his name was Legion?" I asked Batist's sister.
"That's the name he give us. Didn't have no first name, didn't have no last name. We didn't even have to call him 'Mister.'Just 'Legion,'" she replied.
He believed clothes kept the heat off the body, and he buttoned his shirt at the throat and wrists, no matter how
humid and hot the weather became. The back of his shirt was peppered with sweat by midday, and while the blacks ate their sandwiches of company-store balogna and potted meat in a grove of gum trees, he tethered his horse under a solitary live oak in the middle of a pepper field and sat in a folding chair a black man hand-carried to him for that purpose. He ate the boudin or pork chops and dirty rice the blacks said a prostitute at Hattie Fontenot's bar prepared and wrapped in wax paper for him each morning.
He took the girls and women he wanted from the field, indicating with a nod of the head for one of them to follow his horse into a canebrake or pine thicket, where he dismounted from the saddle and stripped nude and told me girl or woman to remove her underpants and lie down and open her legs, his language as mechanical and dehumanized as the violence of his copulation and the release of his animus as he plunged inside the girl or woman, his upper torso propped up stiffly on his arms, as though he did not want to touch any more of her body than was necessary.
Afterward the girl or woman had to wash him. His body was as rough as animal hide, they said, welted with knife scars, the insides of his forearms blue with tattoos that looked like the crudely drawn figures in old black-and-white movie cartoons.
Then the day came when his eyes settled on Ladice Hulin.
"Go up yonder in them gum trees and sit in the shade," he said.
"I got to pick to the end of the row, suh. Then I got the other row. Or I'm gonna come up short," she said.
He reached down and lifted the cloth sack out of her hand and tied its loose end to his saddle pommel.
"The pepper juice giving you blisters. You need to soak your hands in milk at night. It gonna take the sting right out," he said.
"They don't be hurting, Legion. I promise. I got to get my row," Ladice said.
This time he didn't reply. He turned his horse in a circle and came up behind her and let the horse's forequarters knock against her.
"Legion, my daddy expecting to see me this afternoon. He coming down from the quarters. I got to be out here in the row where he can see me," she said.
"You ain't got a daddy, girl. Don't make me ax you again, no," Legion said.
The other workers, bent over in the pepper bushes, never looked up from their own fear and grief with the sun and heat and blistered fingers and the ball of pain that grew steadily in the small of the back through the long afternoon. Ladice wiped the dust and sweat off her face with her dress and began the walk to the gum trees in whose midst
was a thorn bush, one with deep green leaves and red flowers that looked like drops of blood in the hot shade.
She heard a car honk on the road. She turned and saw Mr. Julian in his Lincoln Continental, its whitewall tires and wirewheels gleaming in the sunlight, like a shining invention that had appeared out of a cloud. He got out in the road, wearing a longsleeved white shirt with purple garters on the sleeves and seersucker pants and a Panama hat on the back of his head. His smile was wonderful, and he was looking at her, his face filled with goodness, the influence of his presence so immediate that Legion dropped her sack to the ground and dismounted from the saddle and led his horse toward the road, so his employer would not be forced to look up at him and address him on horseback.
The easy smile never left Mr. Julian's face, but she could hear his words drifting across the rows on the
wind.
"I'm surprised to see you bump a young woman with your horse like that, Legion. I suspect that was an accident, wasn't it?" he said.
"Yes, sir. I tole her I was sorry about that," Legion
said.
"That's good. 'Cause you're a good man. Let's don't have a conversation like this again."
Ladice picked up her sack and got back in the row and stooped over and began picking the peppers whose juice sometimes caused her hands to swell as though they had been
stung by bumblebees. She glanced sideways at Mr. Julian, at the way he held himself, the cleft in his chin, the sheen on his hair when he removed his hat, his red tie blowing over his shoulder in the wind. Physically, Legion towered over Mr. Julian, but Legion stood in silence, like a chastised child, motionless, while Mr. Julian unsnapped the cover on his gold vest watch and looked at the time and snapped the cover shut again, then began discussing a deep-sea fishing trip he wanted to take.
While he talked his eyes remained fastened on Ladice.
"Don't be t'inking you special, girl. Don't be that kind of fool," an old woman in the next row said.
A week later Mr. Julian gave Ladice a job in the big house and new dresses to wear to work and the apartment over the garage to live in. She knew the price he would extract but
did not think less of him for it. In fact, his obvious need, his male dependency, the fact that he wanted her, that he had chosen her out of all the women in the quarters, that any night he would come for her, all his weaknesses exposed, these thoughts made her cheeks burn and her breath rise like a shard of glass in her chest.
She entertained herself with fantasies as she worked in the ornate silence of his house, dusting the antique chairs that were never sat in, placing cut flowers in a large silver bowl on a dining room table that was never used, listening for the little bell by Mrs. LaSalle's bedside, the only lifeline the old woman had to the world beyond her bedroom. The Negro boys who had courted Ladice only a week earlier seemed part of a distant memory now, one of parked cars behind juke joints and insects humming in the hot darkness or a hurried coupling on a stale-smelling mattress in a corncrib.
She sensed a new power in herself among all those who lived by the rules and strange parameters that governed life on Poinciana Island. On her first visit to the plantation store after moving up to the big house, the clerk called her "Miss Ladice," and Legion and another white man stepped aside when she crossed the gallery to the parking lot.
It was during her second week at the big house, just after sunset, when she was fresh from her bath and dressed in clean clothes, that she heard the weight of Mr. Julian's footsteps on the garage apartment stairs. Her hand moved to the switch for the outside light.
"There's no need to turn that on. It's only I," he said through the screen door.
She stood still, her hands folded demurely in front of
her, unsure whether she should act first by pushing open
the door for him, wondering if even that small a courtesy would indicate a foreknowledge about his behavior that
he would find insulting and presumptuous.
When she didn't speak, he said, "Am I disturbing you, Ladice?"
"No, suh, you ain't. I mean, you aren't." She held the door open. "Would you like to come in, suh?"
"Yes, I couldn't sleep. I left Miz LaSalle's window open so I could listen for her bell. I understand you've graduated from high school."
"Yes, suh. I went t'ree years at plantation school and one at St. Edward's."
"Have you thought about college?"
"The closest for colored is Southern in Baton Rouge. I ain't got the money for that."
"There're scholarships. I could help with one," he said.
But he was not hearing his own words now. His eyes lingered on her mouth, the thickness of her hair, her skin that was as smooth as melted chocolate, the lovely heart shape of her face. She saw him swallow and an expression like both shame and lust suffuse his face. His hands cupped her shoulders, then he bent toward her and kissed her cheek and let his hands slip down her arms and over her waist and onto the small of her back.
"I'm a foolish old man who has little in the way of a married life, Ladice. If you wish, I'll leave," he said.
"No, suh. You ain't got to go. I mean, you don't got to go," she replied.
He kissed her neck and touched the points of her breasts with his fingers and unbuttoned her shirt and blue jeans. He helped her slip her shirt off her arms and held one of her hands while she stepped out of her jeans, then walked her to the narrow bed in the room off the kitchen and unhooked her bra and laid her down on the bed and removed her panties.
"Mr. Julian, ain't you gonna use somet'ing?" she asked.
"Yes," he said, his voice hoarse, the folds of flesh in his throat red and bewhiskered in the moonglow through the window.
There was a sadness in his eyes she had never seen in a white person's before.
"You feel bad about somet'ing, Mr. Julian?"
"What I do is a sin. I've made you part of it, too."
She took his hand and flattened it on her breast. "Feel my heart beating? It ain't a sin when a woman's heart beats like that," she said, and held him with her eyes.
He sat on the edge of the mattress and kissed her stomach and the insides of her thighs and put her nipples in his mouth, then he entered her and came within seconds, his back shaking while she stroked the curly locks of hair on the back of his neck.
"I'm sorry. I didn't give you satisfaction," he said.
"It's all right, suh. Lie on your back. Let me show you somet'ing," she said.
Then she mounted him and lifted his sex and placed it inside her and closed her knees and thighs tightly against him. She looked into his eyes in a way she had never dared look at a white man, probing his thoughts, controlling his sensations with the movements of her loins,
leaning down to kiss him as she might a child. She came at the same time as he and she felt a surge of power and electricity in her thighs and genitalia and breasts that made her cry out involuntarily, not as much in pleasure as with a sense of triumph she never thought she could experience.
Through the window she heard the tiny bell ring in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom.
"I always fix Mrs. LaSalle a sandwich and a glass of milk at this time of night," he said.
"I can do it, suh."
"No, your duties are in the downstairs of the house. That's where you work and remain, Ladice, unless I'm away and Mrs. LaSalle calls you."
There was a sharpness in his voice that made her blink. She covered herself with the sheet and pulled her knees up in front of her. She had only to look into his eyes for a second to realize that a transformation had taken place in him since his moment of need had passed. He began dressing, his face composed now, his chin pointed upward while he buttoned his shirt. Ladice stared into the shadows and removed a strand of hair from her forehead, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes veiled.
Then she lay back on the pillow with one arm behind her head and watched him prepare to leave.
"Good night, Ladice," he said.
She looked at him indifferently and did not answer.
You gonna be back. Won't be long, either. See who talks down to who next time, she said to herself.
T
he following week the tiny bell on Mrs. LaSalle's nightstand rang when Mr. Julian was in town. Ladice
climbed the stairs and stood in Airs. LaSalle's doorway in her maid's black dress and frilled apron.
"Yes, ma'am?" she said.
Mrs. LaSalle had forced her husband to put iron grill-work over the windows, although there had never been a burglary on the island, and she never allowed the windows to be unlocked or opened. The air in the room was oppressive and smelled of camphor and urine. Mrs. LaSalle's skin looked like candle wax, her hair like a tangled red flame on the pillow of her tester bed. Her eyes were dark, larger than they should have been, luminous with either the cancer in her body or the fits of insanity that took possession of her mind.
"What happened to the other nigra girl?" she asked.
"Mr. Julian said you wanted her sent away, ma'am," Ladice replied.
"That sounds like someone's fabrication. Why would I want to do that? Never mind. Come here. Let me look at you."
Ladice walked closer to the tester bed. Mrs. LaSalle's pink nightgown was sunken into her chest, where her breasts had been removed.
"Why, you're a juicy little thing, aren't you?" she said.
"Ma'am?"
"I'm incontinent. I want you to rinse my panties."
"Excuse me?"
"Are you deaf? Remove my panties and rinse them. I've soiled them."
"I cain't be doing that, ma'am."
"You impudent thing."
"Yessum," Ladice said. She turned and left the room.
That night Mr. Julian was at her door.
"My wife says you sassed her," he said.
"I don't see it that way," Ladice replied.
He opened the screen door and stepped inside without being invited. He was much taller than she, his shadow blocking out the evening light that shone through the trees outside. But she didn't move. She wore jeans and sandals and a blue V-necked T-shirt and a gold-plated chain with a small purple stone around her throat. Her body felt cool and fresh from the cold bath she had just taken, and she had put perfume behind her ears, and one lock of her hair hung down over her eye.
"I need to know what happened today, Ladice," he said.
"If Miz LaSalle want her clothes laundered, I'll be glad to carry them on down to the washing machine. I'll iron them, too," Ladice said.
"I see. I think maybe this was just a miscommunication in language," he said.
She didn't reply. His eyes softened and moved over her face and studied her mouth. His hand touched her arm.
"My momma and uncle are picking me up to go to town," she said.
"Will you be back later?"
She moved the lock of hair from her eyebrow. "I t'ink my momma want me to stay over wit' her tonight," she said.
"Yes, I'm sure she's lonely sometimes. I'm very fond of you, Ladice."
"Good night, Mr. Julian."
"Yes, well, I guess good night it is, then," he said.
But his words did not coincide with his immobility
and the longing in his face. She held her eyes steadily on his until he actually blinked and color came into his throat. Then his jawbone flexed and he let himself out the door.
She watched him through the window as he crossed his yard to the back of his house, tearing angrily at the knot in his necktie.
Maybe your wife will let you rinse her panties, she said
to herself, and felt surprise at the vitriolic nature of
her thoughts.
I
n her naiveté she thought their arrangement, love affair, whatever people wished to call it, would aim itself at a dramatic denouement, like a sulfurous match suddenly igniting the dryness of her life, bringing it to an end in some fashion, perhaps even a destructive one, that would set her free from the world she had grown up in.
But the long, humid days of summer blended one into another, as did Mr. Julian's nocturnal visits and the depression and sleeplessness they engendered in her. She no longer thought about control or power or her status among the other blacks on Poinciana Island. Her familiarity with Mr. Julian made her think of him with pity, when she thought of him at all, and his visits for her were simply a biological matter, in the same way her other bodily functions were, and she wondered if this wasn't indeed the attitude that all women developed when they coupled out of necessity. It wasn't a sin; it was just boring.
Then it was fall and she could smell gas from the swamp at night and the faint, salty odor of dead fish that had been trapped in tidal pools by the bay. Sometimes she would lie awake in her bed and listen to the moths
hitting on her screens, destroying their wings as they tried to reach the nightlight in the bathroom. She wondered why they were created in such a way, why they would des-
troy themselves in order to fly onto an electrically heated white orb that eventually killed them. When she had these thoughts, she covered her head with a pillow so she could not hear the soft thudding of the moths' bodies against the screens.
But the venal and pernicious nature of her relationship with Julian LaSalle and his family and Poinciana Island, and its cost to her, would reveal itself in a way she had never guessed.
In November she boarded a Greyhound bus and rode across the Atchafalaya Swamp to Baton Rouge. She stayed in the old Negro district called Catfish Town, where juke joints and shotgun shacks left over from the days of slavery still lined both sides of the streets. Her first morning in the city she took a cab to the campus of Southern University and entered the administration building and told a white-haired black woman in a business suit she wanted to pre-enroll in the nursing program for the spring semester.
"Did you graduate from high school?" the woman asked.
"Yessum."
"Where?"
"In New Iberia."
"No, I mean what was the name of the school?"
"I got a certificate from plantation school. I went to St. Edward's, too."
"I see," the woman said. Her eyes seemed to cloud. "Fill out this application and return it with your transcripts. You could have done this through the mail, you know."
"Ma'am, is there somet'ing you ain't telling me?"
"I didn't mean to give that impression," the woman replied.
When Ladice walked outside, the air was sunlit and cool and smelled of burning leaves. A marching band was practicing beyond a grove of trees, the notes of a martial song rising off the brass and silver instruments into a hard blue sky. For some reason she could not explain, the expectation of football games and Saturday-night dances and corsages made of chrysanthemums and gin fizzes in the back of a coupe had become
the province of others, one she would not share in.
One month later the mail carrier told Ladice he had left a letter from Southern University for her at the plantation post office. She walked down the dirt road in the dusk, between woods that smelled of pine sap and dust on the leaves and fish heads that raccoons had strewn among the trunks. The sun burned like a flare on a marshy horizon that was gray with winterkill.
She took the envelope from the hand of the postal clerk and walked back to the garage apartment and put it on her breakfast table under a salt shaker and lay down on her bed and went to sleep without opening the letter.
It was dark when she awoke. She turned on the kitchen light and washed her face in the bathroom, then sat down at the table and read the two brief paragraphs that had been
written to her by the registrar. When she had finished, she refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope and walked down to Julian LaSalle's front door, not the back, and knocked.
He was in slippers and a red silk bathrobe when he opened the door, his reading glasses tilted down on his nose.
"Is something wrong?" he asked.
"My credits from plantation school ain't no good."
"Beg your pardon?"
"Southern will take my credits from St. Edward's. The ones from plantation school don't count. You must have knowed that when you said you would get me a scholarship to Southern. Did you know that, Mr. Julian?"
"We provide a free school on Poinciana. Most people would find that generous. I'm not familiar with the accreditation system at Southern University."
"I t'ink I'm gonna be moving back to the quarters."
"Now, listen," he said. He looked over his shoulder, up the curved stairs that led to the second floor. "We'll talk about this tomorrow."
She wadded up the envelope and the letter and threw it over his shoulder onto his living room rug.
T
he following Thursday, the one night he always spent playing gin rummy with his wife, Mr. Julian drove to Ladice's house, where she now lived with her mother on a dead-end, isolated road lined with slash pines. It was cold and smoke from wood fires hung as thick as cotton in the trees. She watched him through the front window as he studied her vegetable garden, thumb and forefinger pinched on his chin, his eyes busy with thoughts that had nothing to do with her garden.
When he entered the house, he removed his hat.
"There's a Catholic college for colored students in
New Orleans. I had a talk with the dean's office this morning. Would you be willing to take some preparatory courses?" he said.
She had been ironing when he had driven up to the house, and she picked up the iron from the pie pan it sat in and sprinkled a shirt with water from a soda bottle and ran the iron hissing across the cloth. She hadn't bathed that day, and she could smell her own odor in her clothes.
"If I take these courses, how I know I'm gonna get in?" she asked.
"You have my word," he replied.
She nodded and touched at the moisture on her forehead with her wrist. She wanted to tell him to leave, to take his promises and manipulations and mercurial moods back to his home, back to the wife whose cancer of the spirit was greater than the disease that attacked her body. But she thought about New Orleans, the streetcars clattering down the oak- and palm-lined avenues, the parades during Mardi Gras, the music that rose from the French Quarter into the sky at sunset
"You ain't fooling me, Mr. Julian?" she said.
Then she knew how weak she actually was, how much she wanted what he could give her, and consequently, when all was said and done, how easily she would always be used either by him or someone like him. She felt a sense of shame about herself, her life, and most of all her self-delusion that she had ever been in control of Julian LaSalle.
"I passed your mother and uncle on the road. Will they be back soon?" he said, and rubbed her arm with his palm.
"No. They gone to Lafayette," she said, wondering at
how easy it was to become complicitous in her own exploitation.
He removed the iron from her hand and put his arms around her and rubbed his face in her hair and pressed her tightly against his body.
"I'm dirty. I been on my feet all day," she said.
"You're lovely anytime, Ladice," he said. He led her to her bedroom, which was lit only by a bedside lamp, and pulled her T-shirt over her head and pushed her jeans down over her hips.
"It's Thursday. You don't have a sitter for Miz LaSalle on Thursday night," she said.
"She's taking a nap. She'll be fine," he replied. Then he was on top of her, his body trembling, his lips on her breasts.
She fixed her eyes on the smoke in the slash pines outside, the fireflies that lit like sparks in the limbs, the moon that was orange with dust from the fields. She thought she heard a pickup truck clanking by on the road, but the sound of its engine was absorbed by the distant whistle of a Southern Pacific freight rumbling through the wetlands toward New Orleans. She closed her eyes and thought of New Orleans, where the mornings always smelled of mint and flowers and chicory coffee and beignets frying in someone's kitchen.
She felt his body constrict and tighten and his loins shudder, then his weight left her and he was lying next to her, his breath short, his hair damp against her cheek. After a moment he widened his eyes, like a man returning to the world that constituted his ordinary life. He sat on the side of the mattress, his pale back sweaty and etched by vertebrae.
Then he did something he had never done in the aftermath of their lovemaking. He patted her on top of the hand and said, "In another time and place we might have made quite a pair, you and I. You're an extraordinary woman. Don't let anybody ever tell you otherwise."
The inside of the room seemed filled with mist or smoke, and the fireflies in the tops of the trees seemed brighter than they should have been. She wondered if she was coming down with a cold or if she had lost a part of her soul and no longer knew who she was. She rose from the bed, still naked, and went to the window.
"Turn out the light," she said.
He clicked off the lamp on the bedside table and the room dropped into darkness. She
looked out the window and realized it was too late in the year for fireflies, that the red pinpoints of light in the pines were sparks tumbling out of the sky.
But it was not the threat of fire to her own house that made her heart stop. The narrow, grained face of Legion the overseer suddenly moved into her vision, no more than three feet on the other side of the glass. His eyes raked her nude body even as he was tipping his hat.
CHAPTER 6
T
he fire at the LaSalle home had started in the kitchen, probably by a dish towel that had been left near an open flame. The fire climbed up the wall and flattened on the ceiling, then spread through a hallway and was sucked by a draft up the staircase onto the second story. Mr. Julian had removed the phone from Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom long ago, after a judge in Opelousas and a U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge complained she was calling them in the middle of the night, claiming that Huey Long had been murdered by agents of Franklin Roosevelt.
The clerk from the plantation store was passing on the road when he saw the windows of the house fill with pink light. He was an excitable man, given to belief in demonic possession and the gift of tongues, and after the heat of the front doorknob seared his hand, he began shouting at the house and throwing dirt clods on the roof to alert those who might be sleeping upstairs.
He picked up a garden rake and broke the glass out of a living room window. The flames mushroomed up through the second and third stories like cold oxygen igniting in a chimney.
The store clerk and the black people from up the road tried to soak the roof with a lawn hose. They scooped dirt with their hands and threw it through the windows into the smoke and hand-carried water buckets from the bay but were finally driven back from the house by the heat radiating from the walls. They heard glass break in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom and saw her hands on the iron grill-work, like the yellow talons of a bird extended through a cage. They never saw more of her physical person than her hands; the rest of her body disappeared in an envelope of flame.
An obese black woman grabbed her daughter and held her tightly against her stomach, smothering her daughter's head with her arms so she would not hear the sounds that
came from Mrs. LaSalle's window.
B
ut at Ladice Hulin's house, neither she nor Mr. Julian knew of these events. Legion waited outside for her and Mr. Julian to emerge. There was ash on his khaki clothes, a smear of soot on his cheek and one shirtsleeve.
"You were watching us through the window? You were spying on me?" Mr. Julian said incredulously.
"No, sir, I wouldn't say that. I come here to tell you somet'ing else. It's sad news, yeah. Miz LaSalle got burned up in a fire."
Legion turned his face away, but he watched Mr. Julian out of the corner of his eye to see the reaction his words would cause.
"What? What did you say?" Mr. Julian said. "Your home's gone, too. I hate to be the one to tell you, Mr. Julian."
Mr. Julian's face was bloodless, popping with sweat, even though the temperature was still dropping.
"We'll go back wit' you, Mr. Julian," Ladice said.
"I was the first one in her room. The deadbolt was locked from the outside. I took the key out and stuck it in the other side of the lock, so nobody ain't gonna get the wrong idea, no," Legion said.
"You did what? Say that again?" Mr. Julian said as though he could not sort through Legion's words.
"The key was almost melted. But I moved it to the other side of the lock, me. You ain't got to worry," Legion replied.
But Mr. Julian wasn't listening now. He walked to his car and started the engine and backed one tire into Ladice's garden, then drove down the road under an orange moon
toward the smoke that rose from the ruins of his home.
Ladice looked up into Legion's face. He had removed his hat and was running a comb through his hair. His hair was black, like tar from a barrel, the vertical lines in his narrow face like those in a prune.
"You going in the field tomorrow, Ladice. It ain't gonna hep you to sass me about it, either," he said.
She started to speak, but he placed his thumb on her mouth.
W
hat did Legion do to her?" I asked Batist's sister.
She was a heavy woman, with a big head and wide shoulders and knees that looked like hubcaps. She sat in
an overstuffed chair in a gloomy corner of her living room, her large hands squeezing each other in the cone of light from a floor lamp.
"Did Ladice have a child by Mr. Julian?" I asked.
"I ain't said that," she answered.
"Why won't you tell me the rest of the story? Mr. Julian and his wife are both dead," I said.
Batist's sister was silent a moment.
"He still out there. Maybe in St. Mary Parish. Maybe down by New Orleans. Some of the old people say he killed a man in Morgan City," she said.
"Who?" I said.
"Legion. He out there, in the dark. He don't like the sun. His face is pale, like it don't have no blood. I seen him once. It was Legion," she said.
She looked at the tops of her folded hands and would not raise her eyes to mine.
It was late when I got home and Bootsie was asleep. I ate a ham and onion sandwich in the kitchen, then brushed my teeth and lay down by her side and stared at the ceiling in the darkness. I could hear the cries of nutrias out in the swamp, an alligator rolling its tail in the flooded trees, the echo of distant thunder that gave no rain.
The moon was up and Bootsie's hair was the color of honey on the pillow. She was the only woman I had ever known who had a natural fragrance, like night-blooming gardenias. Her eyes opened and she smiled and turned on her side and put her arm across my chest, one knee over my leg. Her body had the curvature and undulations of a classical Greek sculpture, but her skin was always
smooth and soft under my hand, virtually without a wrinkle, as though age had decided to pass her by.
"Anything wrong?" she said.
"No."
"You can't sleep?"
"I'm fine. I didn't mean to wake you."
She touched me under the sheet. "It's all right," she said.
I
awoke at dawn and made coffee on the stove. The light was gray in the trees, the Spanish moss motionless in the silence.
"Did you ever hear of an overseer at Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?" I asked Bootsie.
"No, why?"
"When I was twelve, my brother, Jimmie, and I had a bad encounter with some lowrent people in City Park. A man opened a knife on us. One of the women with him called him Legion."
"Why do you ask about him now?"
"His name came up when I was checking out some background material on Tee Bobby. It may not be important."
"By the way, Perry LaSalle came by last night," she said.
"Perry is becoming a pain in the ass," I said.
"He told me you'd say that."
Before I went to the office I drove out to Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked her about the overseer named Legion and the death of Mrs. LaSalle in the fire.
"Mind your own bidness. No, I take that back. Get
out of my life altogether," she said, and closed the door in my face.
T
he next day Perry was at my office door. Before he could speak, I said, "Why were you at my house the other night?"
"One of Barbara Shanahan's colleagues got drunk and shot off his mouth at the country club. Barbara and the D.A. think you're not a team player. I'm calling you as a witness for the defense, Dave. I thought I ought to warn you in advance," he replied.
I went back to the paperwork on my desk and tried to pretend he was not there.
"On another subject, you care to explain to me why you're bothering Ladice Hulin about my grandfather?" he asked.
I put the cap on my pen and looked up at him. "She told me Amanda Boudreau's death was related to events that happened before Tee Bobby was born. What do you think she meant by that?" I said.
"I wouldn't know. But stay out of my family's private life," he replied.
"Your book on capital punishment didn't spare people in the Iberia prosecutor's office. What makes the LaSalles sacrosanct? The fact y'all own some canneries?"
He shook his head and went out the door. I thought he had gone and I got up from my desk to go down the corridor for my mail. But he came back through the door, the blood pooled in his cheeks.
"Where do you get off indicting my family?" he said.
"That case you used in your book, the murder of those teenagers up on the Loreauville Road? The mother of that
girl those two f*ckheads killed said she heard her daughter's voice out in the front yard at the same hour her daughter died. Her daughter was saying, 'Please help me, Momma.' I don't remember seeing that in either your book or the movie."
"You make a remark about my family again, and cop or no cop, I'm going to bust your jaw, Dave."
"Give your grief to Barbara Shanahan. I think you two deserve each other," I said.
My hands were shaking when I brushed past him.
T
hat night Clete Purcel called the house. I could hear an electric guitar and saxophones and laughter and people talking loudly in the background.
"I can hardly hear you," I said.
"I thought I'd have another run at Jimmy Dean Styles. I'm at a joint he owns in St. Martinville. I thought you'd like to know who's parked across the street."
"It's late, Clete."
"Joe Zeroski. He's got a P.I. with him, his niece, Zerelda Calucci. Her old man was one of the Calucci brothers."
"Tell me about it tomorrow."
"The kid you're looking at for the murder of the girl in the cane field? He's playing here."
"Say again?"
"What's his name? Hulin? He's up there on the bandstand. Anyway, I'd better hit the road. The only other thing white in this place is the toilet bowl. Sorry I bothered you." "Give me a half hour," I said.
I drove up the Teche, under the long canopy of live oaks on the St. Martinville highway, the same road that federal soldiers had marched in 1863, the same road that Evangeline and her lover had walked almost a century before the federals came.
Jimmy Dean Styles owned only a half-interest in the nightclub Clete had called from. His business partner was a black bondsman named Little Albert Babineau who had recently made the state news wires after he threw packages of condoms off a Mardi Gras float. Each package was printed with the words "Be Sure You 'Bond' Right. Be Safe with Little Albert. 24-Hour Bail Bonds. Little Albert Will Not Let You Down."
The club was built of plywood that had been painted blue and strung with yellow and purple lights. The window glass and walls literally shook from the noise inside. I pulled in at the back, where Clete waited for me next to his Cadillac. Through the trees below the club I could see a glaze of yellow light on Bayou Teche and the wake of a large boat slapping into the elephant ears along the banks.
"You're not pissed off because I took another run at Styles?" Clete said.
"Why should I be? You never listen to anything I say, anyway."
"How you want to play it?" he asked.
"We need to get Joe Zeroski out of here. What was that you said about a P.I.?"
"It's his niece. I'd like to develop a more intimate relationship with her, except I always get the feeling she'd like to blow my equipment off. Wait till you see the bongos on that broad."
"Will you stop talking like that? I'm not kidding you, Clete. It's an illness."
He put two sticks of gum in his mouth and chewed them loudly, his eyes full of mirth, his head seeming to turn in all directions at once.
"I tell you what. I'll handle Joe, you deal with Zerelda," he said.
Joe Zeroski's car was parked down the block, across the street, in front of a small grocery store. A woman was behind the wheel. Her hair was black and long, the neckline of her blouse plunging, her nails and mouth painted arterial red. I opened my badge holder and lifted it into the light so she could see it. A holstered revolver sat on the seat between the woman and Joe Zeroski.
"We need you to move your car out of here," I said.
"Pull your pud on somebody else's time," she said. I heard Clete snicker behind me.
"Sorry?" I said.
"You're out of your jurisdiction. Go screw yourself," she said.
"You have a permit for that gun?"
"I don't need one. In Louisiana the automobile is an extension of the home. But in answer to your question, yes, I do have a permit. Now, how about moving yourself out of my view?"
I looked across the seat at Joe Zeroski. His stolid face and wide-set eyes had all the malleability of a cinder block.
"She's doing her job," he said.
"Tee Bobby didn't kill your daughter, Joe," I said.
"Then why were you asking about him down at that pickup corner, the one my little girl was abducted from?" he replied.
I blew out my breath and recrossed the street with Clete.
"Lighten up, Streak. I think Zerelda likes you. Notice how she squeezed her .357 when she told you to f*ck off?" he said, his eyes beaming.
We went through the side entrance of the nightclub. It was loud and hot inside, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, dense with the smells of whiskey and boiled crabs and beer sweat. Tee Bobby was at the microphone, his long-sleeved lavender shirt plastered against his skin, a red electric guitar hanging from his neck. He drank from a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer and wiped the moisture out of his eyes on his sleeve and stumbled slightly against the microphone, then began singing "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." His eyes were closed while he sang, his face suffused with a level of emotion that at first glance might have seemed manufactured until you heard the irrevocable sense of loss in his voice.
"Guitar Slim didn't have anything on this guy. Too bad he's a rag nose," Clete said. "How do you know he is?" I asked. "He was snorting lines off the toilet tank. I thought that might be a clue."
We found Jimmy Dean Styles in his office at the rear of the club. He sat at a cluttered desk, above which was a framed autographed photo of Sugar Ray Robinson. He was counting money, his fingers clicking on a calculator. His eyes lifted to mine.
"See, I went out of Angola max-time. That means I ain't got my umbilical cord thumbtacked to some P.O.'s desk. How about respecting that?" he said.
"Where'd you get the autographed photo of Sugar Ray?" I said.
"My grandfather was his sparring partner. You probably don't know that 'cause when you growed up most nigg*rs around here picked peppers or cut cane," he replied.
"You told me you cut Tee Bobby loose. Now I see him up on your bandstand," I said.
"Little Albert Babineau own half this club. He feel sorry for Tee Bobby. I don't. Tee Bobby got a way of stuffing everything he make up his nose. So when he finish his gig tonight, he packing his sh*t." His eyes shifted to Clete. "Marse Charlie, don't be sitting on my desk."
"There's a guy outside named Joe Zeroski. I hope he comes in here," Clete said.
"Why's that, Marse Charlie?" Styles said. "He was a mechanic for the Giacanos. Nine or so hits. Your kind of guy," Clete said.
"I'll be worried about that the rest of the night," Styles replied.
Clete stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and stared at Styles, who had gone back to counting a stack of currency, his fingers dancing on the calculator.
I touched Clete on the arm and we walked back through the crowd and out the side door. The parking lot smelled of dust and tar, and the stars were hot and bright above the trees. Clete stared back into the club, his face perplexed.
"That guy's dirty. I don't know what for, but he's dirty." Then he said, "You think his grandfather really sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson?"
"Maybe. I remember he was a boxer."
"What happened to him?"
"He was lynched in Mississippi," I said.
But our evening at the club owned by Jimmy Dean Styles and Little Albert Babineau wasn't over. As Clete and I walked toward my truck, we heard the angry voices of two men behind us, the voices of others trying to restrain or pacify them. Then Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean Styles burst out the back door into the parking lot, with a balloon of people following them.
There was a smear of blood and saliva on Tee Bobby's mouth. He swung at Style’s face and missed, and Styles pushed him down on the oyster shells.
"Touch me again, I'm gonna mess you up. Now haul your freight down the road," Styles said.
Tee Bobby got to his feet. His slacks were torn, his knees lacerated. He ran at Styles, his arms flailing. Styles set himself and hooked Tee Bobby in the jaw and dropped
him as though he had used a baseball bat.
Tee Bobby got to his feet again and stumbled toward the crowd, swinging at anyone who tried to help him. One of his shoes was gone and his belt had come loose, exposing the elastic of his underwear.
"You're one sorry-ass, pitiful nigg*r," Styles said, and fitted his hand over Tee Bobby's face and shoved him backward into the crowd.
Tee Bobby reached in his pocket and flicked open a switchblade knife, but I doubted he had any idea whom he was going to use it on or even where he was. I started toward him.
"Mistake, Dave," I heard Clete say.
I came up behind Tee Bobby and grabbed him around the neck and twisted his wrist. There was little strength
in his arm and the knife tinkled on the oyster shells. Then he began to fight, as a girl might, with his elbows and nails and feet. I locked my arms around him and carried him down the bank, through the trees, onto a dock, and flung him as far as I could into the bayou.
He went under, then burst to the surface in a cloud of mud and slapped at the water with both hands until his feet gained the bottom. He slipped and splashed through the shallows, grabbing the stems of elephant ears for purchase, his hair and body strung with dead vegetation.
Then, as the crowd from the nightclub flowed down the bank, someone switched on a flood lamp in the trees, burning away the darkness like a phosphorous flare, lighting me and Tee Bobby Hulin like figures frozen in a photograph of a waterside baptism.
At the edge of the crowd I saw Joe Zeroski and his niece Zerelda. Joe's face was incredulous, as though he had just walked into an open-air mental asylum. Clete lit a cigarette and rubbed the heel of his hand on his temple.
"
I
don't listen to you? Dave, you just threw a black man in the bayou while two hundred of his relatives watched. Way to go, big mon," he said.
I
sat in the sheriffs office early the next morning. He was generally a quiet, avuncular man, looking forward to his retirement and the free time he would have to spend with his grandchildren. He did not contend with either the world or mortality, did not grieve upon the wrongs of his fellowman, and possessed a Rotarian view of both charity and business and saw one as a natural enhancement of the other. But sometimes on a wintry day I
would catch him gazing out the window, a liquid glimmer in his eyes, and I knew he was back in his youth, on a long, white road that wound between white hills that were rounded like women's breasts, the road lined with chained-up Marine Corps six-bys and marching men whose coats and boots and steel pots were sheathed with snow.
He had just finished a phone conversation with the chief of police in St. Martinville. He opened the blinds on the window and stared at the crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery for a long time, his shoulders erect to compensate for the way his stomach protruded over his belt. His face was slightly flushed, his small mouth pinched. He removed his suit coat and placed it on the back of his chair, then brushed at the fabric as an afterthought but did not sit down. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red
veins. I could hear him breathing in the silence.
"You went out of your jurisdiction and made a bunch of people mad in St. Martinville. I can live with that. But you've deliberately involved Clete Purcel in department business. That's something I won't put up with, my friend," he said.
"Clete gave me a lead I didn't have."
"I got a call earlier from Joe Zeroski. You know what he said? 'This is how you guys solve cases? Fire up the cannibals?' I couldn't think of an adequate reply. Why are you still following Tee Bobby Hulin around?"
"I'm not convinced of his guilt."
"Who died and made you God, Dave? Tell Purcel he's not welcome in Iberia Parish."
I focused my gaze on a neutral space, my face empty.
"You AA guys have an expression, don't you, something about not carrying another person's load? How's it
go?
You'll break your own back without making the other person's burden lighter?" the sheriff said.
"Something like that."
"Why go to meetings if you don't listen to what people say at them?" he said.
"Clete thinks Jimmy Dean Styles might be a predator," I said.
"Go back to your office, Dave. One of us has a thinking disorder."
L
ater in the morning I passed the district attorney's office and saw Barbara Shanahan inside, talking to the young salesman who had dragged a suitcase filled with Bibles and encyclopedias and what he termed "family-type magazines" into my bait shop. What was the name? Oates? That was it, Marvin Oates. He was sitting in a wood chair, bending forward attentively, his eyes crinkling at something Barbara was saying.
I saw him again at noon when I was stopped by the traffic light at the four corners up on the Loreauville Road; this time he was pulling his suitcase on a roller skate up a street in a rural black slum by Bayou Teche. He tapped on the screen door of a clapboard shack that was propped up on cinder blocks. A meaty black woman in a purple dress opened the door for him, and he stepped inside and left his suitcase on the gallery. A moment later he opened the door again and took the suitcase inside with him. I parked in the convenience store at the four corners and bought a soft drink from the machine and drank it in the shade and waited for Marvin Oates to come out of the shack.
Thirty minutes later he walked back out in the sunlight and fitted his bleached cowboy straw hat on his head and began pulling his suitcase down the street. I drove up behind him and rolled down the window. He wore a tie and a navy-blue sports coat in
spite of the heat and breathed with the slow inhalation of someone in a steam room. But his face managed to fill with a grin before he even knew whose vehicle had drawn abreast of him.
"Why, howdy do, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.
"I see you and Barbara Shanahan are pretty good friends," I said.
His grin remained on his face, as though incised in clay, his eyes full of speculative light. He removed his hat and fanned himself. His ash-blond hair was soggy with sweat and there were gray strands in his sideburns, and I realized he was older than he looked.
"I don't quite follow," he said. For just a second his gaze lit on the shack he had just left.
"I saw you in Barbara's office this morning," I replied.
He nodded agreeably, as though a humorous mystery had just been solved. He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and twisted his head and looked down toward the end of the street, although nothing of particular interest was there.
"It's flat burning up, ain't it?" he said.
"In traveling through some of the other southern parishes, have you run across a man by the name of Legion? No first name, no last name, just Legion," I said.
He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. "An old man? He worked in Angola at one time? Black folks walk
around him. He lives behind the old sugar mill down by Baldwin. Know why I remember his name?" he said. His face lit as he spoke the last sentence.
"No, why's that?" I said.
" 'Cause when Jesus was fixing to heal this possessed man, he asked the demon his name first. The demon said his name was Legion. Jesus cast the demon into a herd of hogs and the hogs run into the sea and drowned."
"Thanks for your help, Marvin. Did you sell a Bible to the woman in that last house you were in?"
"Not really."
"I imagine it'd be a hard sell. She hooks in a joint on Hopkins."
He looked guardedly up and down the road, his expression cautionary now, one white man to another. "The Mormons believe black people is descended from the lost tribe of Ham. You think that's true?"
"Got me. You want a ride?"
"If you work in the fields of the Lord, you're suppose to walk it, not just talk it."
His face was full of self-irony and boyish good cheer. Even the streaks of sweat on his shirt, like the stripes a flagellum would make on the chest of its victim, excited sympathy for his plight and the humble role he had chosen for himself. If his smile could be translated into words, it was perhaps the old adage that goodness is its own reward.
I gave him the thumbs-up sign and made a mental note to run his name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., at the first opportunity.
CHAPTER 7
T
he next night Batist's sister banged down the dirt road in a dilapidated pickup that sounded like a dying animal when she parked it by the bait shop and turned off the ignition.
She sat down heavily at the counter and fished in her purse for a Kleenex and blew her nose, then stared at me as though it were I rather than she who was expected to explain her mission to my bait shop.
"Ain't nobody ever known the true story of what happened on Julian LaSalle's plantation," she said.
I nodded and remained silent.
"I had bad dreams about Legion since I was a girl. I been afraid that long," she said.
"Lots of us have bad memories from childhood. We shouldn't think less of ourselves for it, Clemmie," I said.
"I always tole myself God would punish Legion. Send him to hell where he belong."
"Maybe that'll happen."
"It ain't enough," she said.
Then she told me of the events following the death by fire of Julian LaSalle's wife.
L
adice went back to work in the fields but was not molested by Legion. In fact, he didn't bother any of the black girls or women and seemed preoccupied with other things. Vendors and servicepeople drove out to see him, rather than Julian LaSalle, with their deliveries or work orders for electrical or plumbing repairs on the plantation. Legion sometimes tethered his horse in the shade and went away with the vendors and servicepeople and did not return for hours, as though his duties in the fields had been reduced to a much lower level of priority and status.
Mr. Julian stayed in a guest cottage by the freshwater bay and was rarely seen except when he might emerge at evening in a robe and stand in the gloom of the trees next to the water's edge, unshaved, staring at the wooden bridge that led to the mainland and the community of small houses where most of his employees lived.
Sometimes his employees, perhaps washing their cars in the yard or barbecuing over a pit fashioned from a washing machine, would wave to him in the waning light, but Mr. Julian would not acknowledge the gesture, which would cause his employees to round up their children and go inside rather than let the happiness of their world contrast so visibly with the sorrow of his.
But to most of the black people on the plantation the die was cast three weeks after Mrs. LaSalle's death by an event that to outsiders would seem of little importance.
A bull alligator, one that was at least twelve feet long, had come out of the bay in the early dawn and caught a terrapin in its jaws. Down the bank, a black woman had left her diapered child momentarily unattended in the backyard. When the child began crying, the alligator lumbered out of the mist into the yard, rheumy-eyed, pieces of sinew and broken terrapin shell hanging from its teeth, its green-black hide slick with mud and strung incongruously with blooming water hyacinths.
The mother bolted hysterically into the yard and scooped her child into her arms and ran all the way down the road to the plantation store, screaming Mr. Julian's name.
Mr. Julian knew every alligator nesting hole on or near the island, the sandbars where they fed on raccoons, the corners and cuts in the channels where they hung in the current waiting for nutria and muskrat to swim across their vision.
Mr. Julian hunted rogue alligators in his canoe. He'd paddle quietly along the bank, then stand suddenly, his balance perfect, lift his deer rifle to his shoulder, and drill a solitary .30-06 round between the alligator's eyes.
Mr. Julian had his faults, but neglecting the safety of a child was not one of them.
The woman who had run to the plantation store was told by the clerk to return home, that someone would take care of the gator that had strayed into her yard.
"Mr. Julian gonna bring his gun down to my house?" she said.
"Legion is handling things right now," the clerk said.
"Mr. Julian always say tell him when a gator come up
in the yard. He say go right on up to the house and bang on the do'," the woman said.
The clerk removed a pencil from behind his ear and wet the point in his mouth and wrote something on a pad. Then he took a peppermint cane out of a glass case and gave it to the woman's child.
"I'm putting a note for Legion in his mailbox. You seen me do hit. Now you take your
baby on home and don't be bothering folks about this no more," he said.
But three days passed and no one hunted the rogue alligator.
The same black woman returned to the store. "You promised Legion gonna get rid of that gator. Where Mr. Julian at?" she said.
"Send your husband down here," the clerk said.
"Suh?" the woman said.
"Send your man here. I want to know if y’all plan to keep working on Poinciana Island," the clerk said.
Two days later Legion and another white man showed up behind the black woman's house and flung a cable and a barbed steel hook through the fork of a cypress tree on the water's edge. They spiked one end of the cable into the cypress trunk and baited the hook with a plucked chicken carcass and a dead blackbird and threw the hook out into the lily pads.
That night, under a full moon, the gator slipped through the reeds and the hyacinths and the layer of algae that floated in the shallows and struck the bait. Its tail threw water onto the bank for fifteen feet.
In the morning the gator lay in the shallows, exhausted, hooked solidly through the top of the snout, through sinew and bone, so that its struggle was useless,
no matter how often it wrenched against the cable or thrashed the water with its tail.
Legion left the gator on the hook until dusk, when he and two other white men backed a truck up to the cypress tree and looped the free end of the cable through the truck's bumper. Then they pulled the cable through the fork of the tree, grinding off the bark, hoisting the gator halfway out of the water, its pale yellow stomach spinning in the last red glow of sunlight in the west.
Legion slipped on a pair of rubber boots and waded into the shallows and swung an ax into the gator's head. But the angle was bad and the gator was only stunned. Legion swung again, whacking the blade into its neck, then he hit it again and again, like a man who knows the strength and courage and ferocity of his adversary is greater than his own and that his own efforts would be worthless on an equal playing field. Finally the gator's
stubby legs quivered stiffly and its tail knotted over and became motionless in the hyacinths below.
Legion and his two workmen skinned out the carcass and left the meat to rot and took the hide to a tanner in Morgan City.
The next afternoon Ladice's mother received a call from a white woman who ran a laundry in New Iberia. The white woman said one of her regular girls was sick and she needed Ladice's mother to fill in. That evening. Not the next day. That evening or not at all.
Just after dark Legion came to Ladice's house. He didn't knock; he simply opened the front door and walked into the front room. His khakis were starched and pressed, his jaws freshly shaved. The top of a thick silver watch,
with a Lima construction fob on it, protruded from the watch pocket in his trousers. He removed a toothpick from his mouth.
"You getting along all right?" he asked.
She was cutting bread that she had just baked and her face was hot from the oven, her T-shirt damp with perspiration against her breasts.
"My mother gonna be back soon, Legion."
"Your mother's working at the laundry tonight. I give her name to Miz Delcambre. I thought y'all could use the money." He cupped his hand on her shoulder.
"Don't mess wit' me," she said.
His hand left her person, but she could feel his breath on her skin, his loins an inch from one of her buttocks.
"You gonna tell Mr. Julian on me?" he asked.
"If you make me."
"I wonder what it was like for Mr. Julian's wife to be locked in that burning room, grabbing that hot grillwork with her bare hands, trying to pull open the do' he locked from the outside. Don't nobody else know how that po' woman died, no," Legion said.
Ladice drew the butcher knife through the loaf of bread. The knife was thick at the top, the color of an old five-cent piece, wood-handled, the cutting edge ground on an emery wheel. She felt the knife snick into the chopping board. Legion touched her cheek with the ball of his finger.
"Mr. Julian sold me a quarter hoss for ten dollars. I liked that hoss so much, me, I went back and bought four more, same price," he said.
"What I care?" she said.
"Them hoss worth a hunnerd-fifty apiece. Why you t'ink he give me such a good price?" Legion said.
She concentrated on her work and tried to hide the expression on her face, but he could see the recognition grow in the corner of her eye. He stroked her hair and the callused edges of his fingers brushed lightly against her skin. Then he slipped his hand down her back and she felt his sex swelling against her. "You t'ink you worth more than them hoss, Ladice?" he asked.
His words were like an obscene presence on her skin, as though Legion knew her in a way that no one else did, knew the truth about her real worth, as though all her self-deception and vanity and her attempt to manipulate Mr. Julian's carnality for her own
ends had made her deserving of anything Legion wished to do to her. He placed his hand loosely on her wrist, then removed the knife from her grasp and set it in a pan of greasy water and picked her up against his chest, locking his arms around her rib cage, squeezing until her head reared back in pain and her knees opened and clenched his hips and her hands fought to find purchase around his neck.
"A colored man ever hold you that tight, Ladice?" he said.
He carried her in that position through the curtained entrance to her bedroom.
After he dropped her on top of the quilt, her eyes brimming with water, he sat on the side of the bed and formed a triangle over her with his arms and sternum and stared into her face. "I ain't a bad man, no. I'm gonna treat you a whole lot better than that old man. You gonna see, you," he said.
P
erhaps she tried to report Legion to Mr. Julian. No one ever knew. Mr. Julian received no visitors and was often unwashed and drunk. He forgot to feed his Labrador retriever and the animal had to beg food scraps from the back doors of Negro homes along the bay. To people on East Main, where most of his peers lived, he was an object of pity when they saw him escorted by his elderly black chauffeur into the doctor's office for his medical appointments. On one occasion an old friend, a man who had been a recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Great War, persuaded Mr. Julian to join him at the Frederic Hotel for a meal. At the table Mr. Julian became very still and his face filled with shame. The elderly ex-soldier did not understand and wondered what he could have said to hurt his friend, then realized that Mr. Julian had soiled himself.
But one fine morning Mr. Julian awoke before dawn, seemingly a new man, and worked in his flower garden and bathed in a great iron tub in the washhouse behind the cottage and watched the sun rise and the mullet fly on the bay. He packed a suitcase and whistled a song and dressed in a white linen suit and put on his Panama hat and had his driver take him to the train depot in New Iberia, where he caught the Sunset Limited for New Orleans.
From the club car, a drink in his hand, he watched the familiar world he had grown up in, one of columned homes and oak-lined streets and gentle people, slip past the window.
In New Orleans he checked into a luxury hotel on Canal and while unpacking he heard a woman weeping through the wall. When he knocked on her door, she told him her husband had left her and their ten-year-old daughter and she was sorry for her emotional behavior.
He drank whiskey sours in the bar and danced with the co*cktail waitress. That evening he dined at the Court of Two Sisters and strolled through the French Quarter and attended a religious service in a storefront church whose congregation was composed mostly of black people. In front of St. Louis Cemetery he talked about baseball with a beat cop and put a twenty-dollar bill in the begging can of a blind woman.
A formal dance was being held at his hotel, and he stood in the entrance of the ballroom and watched the dancers and listened to the orchestra, his hat held loosely on his fingers, his face marked with a wistfulness that caused the hostess to invite him inside. Then he stopped for a cup of coffee in the bar and asked that a dozen roses and a dish of ice cream, with cinnamon sprinkled on it, be sent up to his room. When the tray was delivered on a cart, he instructed the waiter to leave it in the corridor.
A few moments later Mr. Julian moved the cart in front of the door of the woman whose husband had abandoned her and their daughter. He tapped with the brass knocker on her door and went back inside his room and opened the French doors that gave onto the balcony and looked out at the pink glow of the sky over Lake Pontchartrain while the curtains puffed in the breeze around his head. Then Julian LaSalle mounted the rail on the balcony and like a giant white crane sailed out over the streetcars and the flow of traffic and the neon-lit palm trees along the neutral ground twelve stories below.
CHAPTER 8
I
n the morning I ran the name of Marvin Oates, the Bible salesman, through the NCIC computer.
But the sheet I got back contained no surprises. Besides his arrest on a bad check charge, he had been picked up for nothing more serious than petty theft and failure to appear, panhandling in New Orleans, and causing a disturbance at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles.
"
"You know a guy named Marvin Oates?" I asked Helen.
She was gazing out my office window, her hands in her back pockets.
"His mother was a drunk who used to drift in and out of town?" she asked.
"I'm not sure."
"She was from Mississippi or Alabama. They used to live by the train tracks. What about him?"
"He was trying to sell door-to-door out by my house. I didn't like the way he looked at Alafair."
"Get used to it."
"Pardon?"
"Your daughter's beautiful. What do you expect?"
She laughed to herself as she walked out the door.
I waited five minutes, then went down the corridor to her office.
"You ever hear of an overseer on Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?" I asked.
"No. Who is he?" she replied.
"This character Oates says 'Legion' is the name of a demon in the New Testament. Oates believes people of color are descended from the lost tribe of Ham. Think Oates might be unusual in any way?"
She brushed at her nose with a Kleenex and went back to reading an open file on her desk.
"Take a ride with me down to Baldwin," I said.
"What for?"
"I thought I might check out a guy from my boyhood."
W
e drove south on the four-lane, through sugarcane acreage that had been created out of the alluvial flood-plain of Bayou Teche. The sky was sealed with clouds that had the bright sheen of silk or steam but offered no rain, and I could see cracks in the baked rows of the cane fields and dust devils spinning across the road and breaking apart on the asphalt. The air smelled like salt and the odor a streetcar gives off when it scotches across an electrical connection. Up ahead was the gray outline of an abandoned sugar mill.
When we are injured emotionally or systematically
humiliated or made to feel base about ourselves in our youth, we are seldom given the opportunity later to confront our persecutors on equal terms and to show them up for the cowards they are. So we often create a surrogate scenario in which the vices of our tormentors, the fears that fed their cruelty, the self-loathing that drove them to hurt the innocent, eventually consume them and make them worthy of pity and in effect drive them from our lives.
But sometimes the dark fate that should have been theirs just does not shake properly out of the box.
Helen pulled off the road and stopped at a small grocery store in front of a cluster of shacks. In the distance the rectangular tin outline of the sugar mill was silhouetted against the sky. On the side of the grocery was a crude porte cochere and under it sat a thin, black-haired man in a blood-smeared butcher's apron, peeling potatoes and onions into a stainless-steel cauldron that was boiling on a grated butane burner that rested on the ground. Close by, a gunnysack crackling with live crawfish lay on top of a wood worktable.
I opened my badge holder. "I was looking for a fellow by the name of Legion," I said.
"Legion Guidry?" the man said. He dropped the peeled onions and potatoes into the cauldron and dumped a bowl of artichokes and husked yellow corn on top of them.
"I only know him by the name Legion," I said.
"He don't come in here," the man said.
"Where's he live?" I asked.
The man shook his head and didn't reply. He turned his back on me and began cutting open a box of seasoning.
"Sir, I asked you a question," I said.
"He works at the casino. Go ax up there. He don't come in here," the man replied. He raised his finger for added emphasis.
Helen and I drove to the casino on the Indian reservation, a garish obscenity of a building that had been constructed in what was once a rural Indian slum overgrown with persimmons and gum trees and swamp maples. Now the poor whites and blacks, the trusting and the naive, the working-class pensioners and the welfare recipients and those who signed their names with an
X,
crowded the gaming tables inside an air-conditioned, hermetically sealed, sunless environment, where cigarette smoke clung to the skin like damp cellophane. Collectively they managed to feed enormous sums of money into an apparatus that funneled most of it to
Las Vegas and Chicago, all with the blessing of the State of Louisiana and the United States government.
A St. Alary Parish deputy sheriff, directing traffic in the casino parking lot, told us where we could find the man named Legion. The man who had once lived in my childhood dreams was down the road, under a picnic shelter, eating a barbecue sandwich on top of a paper towel that he had spread neatly on the table to catch his crumbs. He wore a starched gray uniform, with dark blue flaps on the pockets, and a polished brass name tag on his shirt, with his title, Head of Security, under the engraved letters of his name. His hair was still black, with white streaks in it, his face creased vertically with furrows like those in dried fruit. A crude caricature of a naked woman was tattooed with blue ink on the underside of each of his forearms. I looked at him a long time without speaking.
"Can I hep you wit' somet'ing?" he said.
"You were an overseer at Poinciana Island?" I asked.
He folded the paper towel around his sandwich and pitched it toward the trash barrel. It struck the side of the barrel and fell apart on the ground.
"Who want to know?" he asked.
I opened my badge holder in my palm.
"I used to be. A long time ago," he said.
"You rape a black woman by the name of Ladice Hulin?" I asked.
He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it and exhaled the smoke across the tops of his cupped fingers. Then he removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it.
"That bitch still spreadin' them rumor, huh?" he said.
"Let me run something else by you, Legion. That's the name you go by, right? Legion? No first name, no last name?" I said.
"I know you?" he asked.
"Yeah, you do. My brother and I walked up on you and some other white trash while y'all were copulating in an automobile. You opened a knife on me. I was twelve years old."
His eyes shifted on mine and stayed there. "You're a goddamn liar," he said.
"I see," I said. I looked at my feet and thought about the mindless animus in his stare, the arrogance and stupidity and insult in his words, the ignorance that he and his kind used like a weapon against their adversaries. I heard Helen shift her weight on the gravel. "What I wanted to run by you, Legion, is the fact there's no
statute of limitations on a homicide. Nor on complicity in a homicide. You getting my drift on this?"
"No."
"Julian LaSalle's wife was locked in her room the night she burned to death. That's called negligent homicide. You removed the key from the deadbolt and inserted it on the inside of the door in order to protect Mr. Julian. Then you blackmailed him."
He stood up from the picnic table and put his pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
"You t’ink I care what some nigg*r done tole you?" He cleared his throat and spat a glob of phlegm two inches from my shoe. A trace of splatter, like strands of cobweb, clung to the cuff of my trouser leg.
"How old are you, sir?" I asked.
"Seventy-four."
"I'm going to stick it to you. For all the black women you molested and raped, for all the defenseless people you humiliated and degraded. That's a promise, partner." He lifted his chin and rubbed the whiskers on his throat, the cast in his green eyes as ancient and devoid of moral light as those in a prehistoric, scale-covered creature breaking from the
egg.
A
week passed. Clete Purcel went back to New Orleans, then returned to New Iberia to hunt down more of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine's bail skips. On Monday Clete and I went to Victor's, a cafeteria located on Main Street in a refurbished nineteenth-century building with a high, stamped ceiling, where cops and businesspeople and attorneys often ate lunch.
"Check out the pair by the cashier," Clete said.
I turned around and saw Zerelda Calucci and Perry LaSalle at a small table, their heads bent toward each other, a solitary rose in a small vase between them.
But Clete and I were not the only ones who had taken notice of them. Barbara Shanahan was eating at another table, her muted anger growing in her face.
When Clete and I walked outside, Zerelda and Perry were across the street in the parking lot. Perry opened the passenger door of his Gazelle for Zerelda to get inside. Barbara Shanahan stood on the sidewalk in a white suit, staring at them, her eyes smoldering.
"What's the deal with Zerelda Calucci and Perry?" I asked.
"Ask
him,"
she replied.
"I'm asking you."
"She was always one of his on-again, off-again groupies. Perry likes to think of himself as the great benefactor of the underclass. It's part of his mystical persona."
"She's Joe Zeroski's niece. Zeroski thinks Tee Bobby Hulin killed both the Boudreau girl and his daughter. Why's Zerelda hanging with Tee Bobby's defense attorney?"
"Duh, I don't know, Dave. Why don't you research the LaSalle family history? Are you sure you're in the right line of work?" Barbara said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.
"God, you're stupid," she replied.
She crossed the street and walked down to the bayou, where she lived by herself in a waterfront apartment surrounded by banana trees.
"That broad gives me a boner just watching her walk," Clete said.
"Clete, will you—" I began.
"How long ago was she LaSalle's punch?" he said.
"Why do you always have to ask questions that offer a presumption as a truth? Why don't you show a little humility about other people once in a while?"
"Right," he said, sticking a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his face thoughtful. "You think she might dig an older guy?"
T
hat afternoon I was visited by the parents of Amanda Boudreau. They sat side by side in front of my desk, their faces impassive, their eyes never lingering on any particular object, as though they were sitting in a vacuum and addressing voices and concerns that were alien to all their prior experience. They wore their best clothes, probably purchased at a discount store in Lafayette, but they looked like people who might have recently drowned and not become aware of their fate.
"We don't know what's going on," the father said.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand," I said.
"A woman came to our house yesterday. She told us she was a detective," he said.
"Her name was Calucci. Zerelda Calucci," the mother said.
"She asked how long Amanda was seeing Tee Bobby Hulin," the father said.
"What?" I said.
"She said our daughter was seeing Bobby Hulin," the mother said.
"Why's she saying this about our daughter? Why you
sending out people like this to our house?" the father said.
"Zerelda Calucci is not a police officer. She's a private investigator from New Orleans. I suspect she's now working for the defense," I said.
They were both silent for several moments, their faces pinched with the knowledge that they had been deceived, that again someone had stolen something from their lives.
"People are saying you don't believe Bobby Hulin killed Amanda," the mother said.
I tried to return her and her husband's stare, but I felt my eyes break.
"I guess I'm not sure what happened out there," I said.
"This morning we took flowers out to the spot where Amanda died. Her blood is still on the grass. You can come out there with me and look at our daughter's blood and maybe that'll hep you see what happened," the father said.
"Call me if the Calucci woman bothers you again," I said.
"What for?" the mother asked.
"Pardon?" I said.
"I said, 'What for?' I don't think you're on our side, Mr. Robicheaux. I saw the man who killed our daughter in the grocery store this morning, buying coffee and doughnuts and orange juice, laughing with the cashier. Now people are saying Amanda was his girlfriend, the man who tied her up with a jump rope and killed her with a shotgun. I think y'all ought to be ashamed, you most of all," she said.
I looked out the window of my office until she and her husband were gone.
T
hat evening, after work, I drove south of town and crossed the freshwater bay onto Poinciana Island. As I followed the winding road through hillocks and cypress and gum trees and live oaks that were almost two centuries old, I could feel the attraction that had probably kept the LaSalles and their vision of themselves intact for so many generations. The island was as close to Eden as the earth got. The evening sky was ribbed with purple and red clouds. In the trees I could see deer and out on the bay flying fish that were bronze and scarlet in the sunset. The lichen on the oaks, the lacy canopy overhead, the pooled water and the mushrooms and layers of blackened leaves and pecan husks back in the shade, all created a sense of botanical insularity that had not been tainted by the clank of engines and the smells of gasoline and diesel or the heat that rose from city cement. In effect, Poinciana Island had successfully avoided the twentieth century.
If I owned this place, would I willingly give it up? If I had to deal in slaves to keep it, would I not be tempted to allow the Prince of Darkness to have his way with my business affairs once in a while?
These were thoughts I didn't care to dwell on.
Perry lived in a two-story house constructed of soft, variegated brick that had been recovered from torn-down antebellum homes in South Carolina. The royal palms that towered over the house had been transported by boat from Key West, their enormous root balls wrapped in canvas that was wet down constantly with buckets of fresh
water. The one-acre pond in back, which had a dock with a pirogue moored to it (no motorized boats were allowed on the island), had been stocked years ago with fingerling bass, and now some of them had grown to fifteen pounds, their backs as dark green and thick across as moss-slick logs when they roiled the surface among the lily pads.
And that's where I saw Perry, on a scrolled-iron bench by the waterside, casting a lure in a long arc out over the dimpled stillness of the pond's surface.
But he was lost in his own thoughts, and they did not seem happy ones, when I walked up behind him.
"Having any luck?" I asked.
"Oh, Dave, how you doin'? No, it's slow tonight."
"Try a telephone crank. It works every time," I said.
He smiled at my joke.
"Amanda Boudreau's parents were in to see me today," I said. "It wasn't a good experience. Zerelda Calucci went to their house and gave them the impression she was a police officer."
"Maybe it was a misunderstanding," Perry said.
"She's working for you?"
"You could say that."
"What's Joe Zeroski have to say about that?"
"I don't know. He's back in New Orleans. Listen, Dave, Zee is a good P.I. She's found two people who say they saw Amanda Boudreau and Tee Bobby together. The Boudreau girl's DNA was on his watch cap, all right, but it didn't get there at the crime scene."
"Tee Bobby is almost fourteen years older than Amanda Boudreau was. She was a straight-A, traditional Catholic girl who didn't hang around juke joints or petty criminal wiseasses."
"What you mean is she didn't hang around black musicians."
"Read it any way you want. I get the sense you're using this Calucci woman for your own ends."
"You come out to my house without calling, then you insult me. You're too much, Dave."
"A friend of mine thinks you and Barbara Shanahan were an item at one time."
"I suspect you're talking about that trained rhino who follows you around, what's his name, Purcel? He's an interesting guy. Tell him to keep his mouth off me and Barbara Shanahan."
Through the trees I could see the sun glimmering on the bay like points of fire.
"When I walked down to the pond and saw you on the bench here, I was put in mind of Captain Dreyfus. It's a foolish comparison, I guess," I said.
He reeled in his lure until it was snug against the tip of his rod, then idly flicked drops of water off it onto the pond's surface.
"I like you, Dave. I really do. Just cut me a little slack, will you?" he said.
"By the way, I ran down a guy named Legion, one of your old overseers. He raped Ladice Hulin. Can you figure out how a guy like that became head of security at the casino? Something else, too. Zerelda Calucci comes from a Mafia family. Is that how you know her, through your grandfather's old connections?" I said.
Perry's lips parted and the blood drained out of his cheeks. He clenched his fishing rod in his hand and walked up the embankment toward his house, the azaleas
and four-o'clocks in his yard rippling with color in the
shade.
Then he flung the fishing rod against a porch column and walked back down the slope and faced me, his hands balled into fists.
"Get this straight. Barbara might hate my guts, but I respect her. Number two, I'm not my grandfather, you self-righteous son of a bitch. But that doesn't mean he was a bad man. Now get off my property," he said.
CHAPTER 9
T
he next Saturday was a festive day for New Iberia, featuring a citywide cleaning of the streets by volunteers, a free crawfish boil in City Park, and a sixteen-mile foot race that began with a grand assemblage of the runners under the trees by the recreation center. At 8
a.m.
they took off, jogging down an asphalt road that meandered through the live oaks and out onto the street, their bodies hard and sinewy inside a golden tunnel of mist and sunlight that seemed to have been created especially for the young at heart.
They thundered past an art class that was sketching on the tables under the picnic shelters. Among the runners was every kind of person, the narcissistic and passionately athletic, the lonely and inept who loved any community ritual, and those who humbly ignored their limitations and were content simply to finish the race, even if last.
There was another group, too, whose psychology was less easily defined, whose normal pursuits separated them from their fellowmen but who sought membership in the crowd, perhaps to convince both others and themselves that they were made of the same stuff as the rest of us. On a gold-green morning, under oaks hung with Spanish moss, who would begrudge them their participation in a fine event that ultimately celebrated what was best in ourselves?
Jimmy Dean Styles wore a black spandex gym suit that looked like a shiny plastic graft on his skin. Three of his rappers ran at his side, their hair dyed orange or blue and purple, their eyebrows and noses pierced with jeweled rings. Behind them I saw the door-to-door magazine-and-encyclopedia-and-Bible salesman, Marvin Oates, a soggy sweatband crimped around his hair, his olive skin stretched as tightly as a lampshade on his ribs and vertebrae, his scarlet running shorts wrapped wetly on his loins, emphasizing the crack in his buttocks.
After the runners had streamed by the old brick fire-house onto a neighborhood side street, one member of the art class began to draw furiously on her sketch pad, her face bent almost to the paper, a grinding sound emanating from her throat.
"What's wrong, Rosebud?" the art teacher asked.
But the young black woman, whose name was Rosebud Hulin, didn't reply. Her charcoal pencil filled the page, then she dropped the pencil to the ground and began to hit the table with her fists, trembling all over.
A
fter the race I drove home and showered, then returned to City Park with Alafair and Bootsie for the
crawfish boil. The art teacher, who was a nun and a volunteer at the city library, found me at the picnic pavilion by the National Guard Armory, not far from the spot where years ago the man named Legion had opened a knife on a twelve-year-old boy.
"Would you take a walk with me?" she asked, motioning toward a stand of trees by the armory.
She was an attractive, self-contained woman in her sixties and not one to burden others with her concerns or to look for complexities that in the final analysis she believed human beings held no sway over. A large piece of art paper was rolled up in her hands. She smiled awkwardly. "What is it, Sister?" I said when we were alone.
"You know Rosebud Hulin?" she asked.
"Tee Bobby's twin sister?" I replied.
"She's an autistic savant. She can reproduce in exact detail a photograph or painting she's seen only once, maybe one she saw years ago. But she's never been able to create images out of her imagination. It's as though light goes from her eye through her arm onto the page."
"I'm not following you."
"This morning she drew this figure," the art teacher said, unrolling the charcoal drawing for me to see.
I stared down at a reclining female nude, the wrists crossed above the head, a crown of thorns fastened on the brow. The woman's mouth was open in a silent scream, like the figure in the famous painting by Munch. The eyes were oversize, elongated, wrapped around the head, filled with despair.
Two skeletal trees stood in the foreground, with branches that looked like sharpened pikes.
"The eyes are a little like a Modigliani, but Rosebud
didn't re-create this from any painting or picture I ever
saw," the art teacher said.
"Why are you bringing me this, Sister?"
She gazed at the smoke from cook fires drifting into
the trees.
"I'm not sure. Or maybe I'm not sure I want to say. I
had to take Rosebud into the rest room and wash her
face. That
gentle girl tried to hit me."
"Did she tell you why she drew the picture?"
"She always says the pictures she draws are put in her
head by God. I think maybe this one came from somewhere else," the art teacher said. "Can I keep this?" I asked.
O
n Monday I called Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked to speak to Tee Bobby.
"He's at work," she said.
"Where?" I asked.
"The Carousel Club in St. Martinville."
"That's Jimmy Dean Styles's place. Styles told me he wasn't going to let Tee Bobby play there again."
"You ax where he work. I tole you. I said anyt'ing about music?"
I drove up the bayou to St. Martinville and parked in the lot behind the Carousel Club. The garbage piled against the back wall hummed with flies and reeked of dead shrimp. Tee Bobby was using a wide-bladed shovel to scoop up the rotted matter and slugs that oozed from a mound of split vinyl bags.
He was sweating profusely, his eyes like BBs when he looked at me.
"You're doing scut work for Jimmy Sty?" I said.
"Ain't no clubs want to hire me. Jimmy give me a job."
He slung a shovel-load of garbage into the back of a pickup truck His eyes were filled with a peculiar light, the irises jittering.
"You looked like you cooked your head, podna," I said.
"Cain't you leave me be, man?"
"I want to show you something."
I started to unroll his sister's drawing, but he speared his shovel into a swollen bag of garbage and went through the side door of the club. I used a pay phone at the grocery down the street and called the St. Martin Parish Sheriffs Department to let them know I was on their turf, then went inside the club. The chairs were stacked on the tables and a fat black woman was mopping the floor. Tee Bobby sat at the bar, his face in his hands, the streamers from an air-conditioning unit blowing above his head.
I flattened the sketch of the reclining nude on the bar.
"Rosebud drew this. Look at the crossed wrists, the fear and despair in the woman's eyes, the scream that's about to come from her mouth. What's that make you think of, Tee Bobby?" I said.
He stared down at the drawing and took a breath and wet his lips. Then he blew his nose on a handkerchief to hide the expression on his face.
"Perry LaSalle say I ain't got to talk wit' you," he said.
I clenched his wrist and flattened his hand on the paper.
"For just a second feel the pain and terror in that drawing, Tee Bobby. Look at me and tell me you don't know what we're talking about," I said.
He pressed his head down on his fists. His T-shirt was gray with sweat; his pulse was leaping in his throat.
"Why don't you just put a bullet in me?" he said.
"You got a meth problem, Tee Bobby? Somebody giving you crystal to straighten out the kinks?" I said.
He started to speak, then he saw a silhouette out of the corner of his eye. I didn't think his face could look sicker than it did, but I was wrong.
Jimmy Dean Styles walked from his office and crossed the dance floor and went behind the bar. He wore a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest and gray slacks that hung low on the smooth taper of his stomach. He opened a small refrigerator behind the bar and removed a container of coleslaw, then began eating it with a plastic fork, his eyes drifting casually to Rosebud's drawing. He tilted his head curiously.
"What you got, my man?" he asked.
"This is a police matter. I'd appreciate your not intruding," I said.
Styles chewed his food thoughtfully, his eyes focused out the open front door.
"Tee Bobby ain't did you nothing. Let the cat have some peace," he said.
"For a guy who busted him up on the oyster shells, you're a funny advocate," I said.
"Maybe we got our disagreements, but he's still my friend. Look, the man's coming down wit' the flu. Ain't he got enough misery?" Styles said.
I rolled up Rosebud's drawing. "I'll be around," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I know. I got a broken toilet that's the same way. No matter what I do, it just keep running out on the flo'," Styles said.
When I got back to the department, I went into the office of a plainclothes detective who worked Narcotics, his name was Kevin Dartez and he wore long-sleeved white shirts and narrow, knit ties and a pencil-thin black mustache. His younger sister had been what is called a rock queen, or crack whor*, and had died of her addiction. Dartez's ferocity toward black dealers who pimped for white girls was a legend in south Louisiana law enforcement.
"You seen any crystal meth around?" I asked.
"Out-of-towners bring it into the French Quarter, That's about it so far," he replied, tilted back in his swivel chair, hands clasped behind his head.
"The Carousel Club in St. Martinville? I wonder if anyone's ever tossed that place. Who owns the Carousel, anyway?" I said.
"Say again?" Dartez said, sitting up straight in his :hair.
T
hat afternoon Helen came into my office and sat on he corner of my desk and looked down at a yellow legal pad she had propped on her thigh.
"I've found three or four people who say they saw Tee Bobby with Amanda Boudreau. But it was always in a mblic place, like he'd see her and try to strike up a conversation," she said.
"You think they had some kind of secret relationship?" I asked.
"None I could find. I get the sense Tee Bobby was just a routine pain in the ass Amanda tried to avoid."
I dropped a paper clip I had been fiddling with on my desk blotter and rubbed my forehead.
"How do you think it's going to go?" I asked.
"The fact Tee Bobby and Amanda were seen together provides another explanation for Amanda's DNA being on Tee Bobby's watch cap. The right jury, he might skate."
"I think we need to start over," I said.
"Where?"
"Amanda's boyfriend," I replied.
A
fter school hours we drove up the Teche to the little town of Loreauville. The pecan trees were in new leaf; a priest was watering his flowers in front of the Catholic church; kids were playing softball in a schoolyard. The moderate-size brick grocery that advertised itself as a supermarket, the saloon on the corner by the town's only traffic signal, the humped dark green shapes of the oaks along the bayou were out of a Norman Rockwell world of years ago. Down the main thoroughfare was an independently owned drive-in hamburger joint, the parking lot sprinkled with teenagers.
In their midst was Amanda's boyfriend, whose name was Roland Chatlin, in starched khakis and a green and white Tulane T-shirt, bouncing a golf ball off the side of the building. When Helen and I approached him, he was drinking a soda pop and talking to a friend and, amazingly, seemed not to recognize us. All the kids in the parking lot were white.
"Remember us?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah, you," he said, chewing gum, his eyes lighting now.
"Step over here, please," I said.
"Sure," he replied, blowing out his breath, slipping his hands into his pockets.
"Your inability to help us is causing us all kinds of problems, Roland. You tell us two black guys in ski masks murdered Amanda, but that's as far as we get," I said.
"Sir?" he said.
"You've got no idea who they were. You can't tell us what their voices sounded like. You can't even tell us how tall they were. I've got the feeling maybe you don't want us to catch them," I said.
"Look at us, not at the ground," Helen said. "Your hands were tied with nothing but your shirt. You could have gotten loose if you'd wanted to, couldn't you? But you were too scared. Maybe you even begged. Maybe you told these guys their identity was safe. When people fear for their lives, they do all kinds of things they're ashamed of later, Roland. But it was pretty hard to just lie there and listen to them rape your girl, wasn't it?" I said.
"Maybe it's time to get it off your chest, kid," Helen said.
"Have you ever seen Tee Bobby Hulin play in a local club?" I asked.
"Yes, sir. I mean, I don't remember."
He had dark hair and light skin, arms without muscular definition, narrow hips, and a feminine mouth. Involuntarily he felt for a religious medal through the cloth of his shirt.
"Out at the crime scene you called them nigg*rs. You don't care for black people, Roland?" I said.
"I was mad when I said that."
"I don't blame you. Which guy shot her?" I said.
"I don't know. I didn't think they were gonna—"
"They weren't gonna what?" I said.
"Nothing. You got me mixed up. That's why you're here. My daddy says I don't have to talk to y'all anymore."
Then his face darkened, as though the politeness toward adults that was mandatory in his world had been replaced by other instincts.
"They shove people around at school. They take the little kids' lunch money. They carry guns in their cars. Why don't you go after
them?"
he said vaguely, sweeping his hand at the air.
"Hear this, Roland," Helen said. "If you know who these guys are and you're lying to us, I'm going to find the shotgun that killed Amanda and jam it up your ass and pull the trigger myself. Tell
that
to your old man."
T
wo nights later the air was cool and dry, and the cypress trees in the swamp bloomed with heat lightning. Clete came into the bait shop as I was closing up. I smelled him before I saw him.
He helped himself to a water glass off a wall shelf and sat down heavily at the counter and unscrewed the cap from a pint bottle of bourbon wrapped in a brown-paper sack. A noxious fog, an odor of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and beer sweat, begin to fill the shop like a living presence. Clete poured four fingers of whiskey in his glass and drank it slowly, watching me turn the electric fan on an overhead shelf in his direction. The lid of his left eye was swollen, a bruise like a small blue mouse in the crow's-feet at the corner.
"You got a reason for trying to blow me out the door?" he asked.
"Nope. How you doin', Cletus?"
"Joe Zeroski is back in town. At my motor court with Zerelda Calucci and half the greaseballs in New Orleans. Last night I'm trying to take a nap and this collection of sh*tbags are cooking sausages on a hibachi ten feet from my window and playing a Tony Bennett tape loud enough to be heard in Palermo. So I make the mistake of talking to them like they're human beings, asking them politely to dial it down a few notches so I can get some sleep.
"What do I get? Nothing, like I'm not there. I go, 'Look, just face your stereo the other way, okay?' One guy says, 'Hey, Purcel, I got your ten-inch frank right here. You want it with mustard?' and grabs his flopper while the other greaseballs laugh.
"So I go back inside, take a shower, put on fresh clothes, comb my hair, give these assholes every chance to go somewhere else. When I go outside, they're still there, except now Zerelda Calucci is sitting at the picnic table with them, the tops of her ta-tas
sticking out like beach balls, her shorts rolled up so tight they almost split when she crosses her legs.
"So I walk over and ask her out for a late dinner, figuring that ought to put the lasagna through the fan if nothing else won't. She sits there, scraping the label off a beer bottle with her thumbnail, rolling it into little balls, then goes, 'I don't mind.'
"I try to use the wet dream of the Mafia to provoke these guys, and instead she agrees to have dinner with me. The greaseballs know better than to say dick about it, either. I put on my sports coat and back my convertible around to pick her up. Except here comes Perry LaSalle in his Gazelle. Zerelda gets this look on her face
like she's creaming in her pants and I'm back in my room, watching TV, dinner date canceled, LaSalle and Zerelda over in her room, blinds drawn."
He finished his glass of whiskey and opened a can of beer and broke a raw egg in the glass and poured the beer on top of it. He took a drink and stared out the window into the darkness, an unfocused light in his eyes.
"So good riddance," I said.
"I did some checking on that dude. You know why he didn't finish at the Jesuit seminary? He couldn't keep it in his pants."
"What are you talking about, Clete?"
"He belongs to Sexaholics Anonymous. The guy's a gash hound. Why is it everybody in this town has some kind of problem? I don't know why I keep coming over here."
I turned off the outside floodlamps, and the bayou went dark and the tops of the cypresses were green and ruffling in the moonlight.
"Where'd you get die mouse?" I asked.
"I got up at four in the morning and walked into a door," he replied.
A
t the office the next morning I glanced at the state news section of the
Times Picayune
and saw an Associated Press article describing the homicide of a waitress outside Franklin, Louisiana. Her name was Ruby Gravano, a member of that group of marginal miscreants I had known for years in New Orleans, what I called the walking wounded, whose criminal deeds became a kind of incremental suicide, as though they were doing penance
for sins committed in a previous incarnation. The body had been found by a roadside, not far from the banks of Bayou Teche, the clothes torn off her back. The article described her injuries as massive, which usually meant the details could not be published in a family newspaper.
I started out my door toward Helen's office and almost collided into Clete Purcel. He was dressed in a tan suit and a powder-blue shirt with a rolled collar and a tie with a
horse painted on it and shined cordovan loafers. His cheeks were shiny with aftershave lotion.
"Have a cup of coffee with me. I'm a little wired right now," he said.
"Got a lot of work to do, Cletus," I said.
"Fill me in on this Shanahan broad."
"What?"
"I asked her out to lunch. I told her I had some helpful information on an armed robber she's prosecuting."
"Can't you let one day go by without stirring something up?"
He snuffed down in his nose and nodded to a uniformed deputy passing in the corridor. The deputy did not acknowledge him.
"I'm sorry. I'll catch you another time," Clete said.
"Come inside," I said.
I closed the office door behind us. Before he could speak, I said, "Remember Ruby Gravano?"
"A hooker, used to live in a flophouse by Lee Circle?"
"She was killed last night. Maybe beaten to death."
"I heard she was out of the life. You talk to her pimp?" he said.
"Beeler something?"
"Beeler Grissum. I think she married him," Clete said.
"Thanks, Cletus."
He opened the office door. "I'll let you know how my lunch came out. This is a class broad, Dave." He blew his breath on his palm and sniffed it. "Oh, man, I smell like ;
puke. I got to brush my teeth."
The sheriffs wife, who was a mild and genteel woman, happened to be passing in the corridor. She shut and opened her eyes, as though she were riding in an airplane that had just hit an air pocket.
H
elen Soileau and I checked out a cruiser and drove the thirty miles down to Franklin, then stopped by the sheriffs department and got directions to Ruby Gravano's, which turned out to be a one-story, weathered, late-Victorian frame house, with ventilated window shutters and high windows and a wide gallery hung with flower baskets. An oak tree that must have been two hundred years old grew in the side yard, a broken rope swing dangling in the dust.
Ruby's husband, Beeler Grissum, who was from north Georgia or South Carolina, sat on the steps, cracking peanuts and flicking them to a turkey in the yard. Two or three years ago, in a Murphy scam gone bad, a John had delivered a martial-arts kick into Beeler's face that had broken his neck Today his body had the contours of a sack of potatoes, his chin held erect by a leather and steel neck brace, so that his head looked like a separate part of his anatomy positioned inside a cage. His hair was dyed platinum, like a professional wrestler's, combed straight back on his scalp. He rotated his upper torso as we approached the steps, a vague recognition swimming into his face.
"Sorry about your wife, Beeler," I said.
He removed a peanut from the sack in his hand, then offered the sack to us.
"No, thanks," I said. "The sheriff thinks maybe Ruby was thrown from a car."
"He wasn't there. But if that's what he says," Beeler said.
As I remembered him, he had been a carnival man before he was a pimp and had lived most of his life off the computer. His speech was flat, adenoidal, laconic, so lacking in joy or passion or remorse or emotion of any kind that the listener felt Beeler did not care enough about others or the world or even his own fate to lie.
"Two women have been murdered recently in Iberia Parish. Maybe Ruby's death is connected to them," I said.
He looked into space and seemed to think about my words. He scratched a place un-
der his eye with one fingernail.
"It ain't her death brought you here then. It's the cases you ain't been able to solve?" he said.
"I wouldn't put it that way," I said.
"Don't matter. It's my fault," he said.
"I don't follow you," I said.
"We had a fight. She took off in my truck. Sometimes she'd go to a colored blues joint, sometimes to the casino on the reservation. She kept all her tips in a fruit jar. She had a thing for poker machines."
"Was she involved with another man?" Helen asked.
"She was out of the life. She been a one-man woman since. Most ex-whor*s are. Don't be talking about her like that," he replied.
"Can you let us have a picture of your wife?" Helen asked.
"I reckon."
He went into the house and returned with a photograph of Ruby and himself that was tucked with several others inside a gold-embossed Bible. He handed it to Helen. Ruby's hair was full and black, but the gauntness of her face made her hair look like a wig on a mannequin.
"Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain't gonna catch him," he said.
"You want to explain that?" Helen said.
"I just did," Beeler replied.
He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying good-bye.
T
hat night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the
lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house.
A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road.
"You looking for somebody?" I asked.
"You," he said. "The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor."
He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear.
"Mistake to come around my house, Legion," I said.
"That's what you t'ink," he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull.
I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather-sheathed darning sock.
"I'm a police officer," I heard myself say.
"Don't matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain't gonna want to tell nobody about it," he replied.
He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist's drill hollowing into marrow.
He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand.
I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wet
newspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn't have raised my arms to ward off the blow.
He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me.
"How you feel?" he asked.
He waited in the silence for my reply.
"I'll ax you again," he said.
"Go f*ck yourself," I whispered.
He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his tongue inside. I could taste tobacco and decayed food and bile in his saliva and smell the road dust and body heat and dried sweat in his shirt.
"Go tell them all what I done to you. How I whipped you like a dog and used you for my bitch. How it feel, boy? How it feel?" he said.
CHAPTER 10
T
he sunrise in the morning was pink and misty, like the colors and textures inside a morphine dream, and through the window at Iberia General I could see palm trees and oaks hung with moss along the Old Spanish Trail and a white crane lifting on extended wings off the surface of the bayou.
The sheriff sat hunched in a chair at the foot of my bed, staring at the steam rising from his paper coffee cup, his face angry, conflicted with thought.
Clete stood silently against one wall, rolling a match-stick from side to side in his mouth, his massive arms folded on his chest. Through the open door I saw Bootsie in
the hall, talking to a physician in green scrubs.
"The guy comes out of nowhere, beats the sh*t out of you with a sap, gives no explanation, and drives off?" the sheriff said.
"That's about it," I said.
"You didn't get a license number?" he asked.
"The lights were off on the dock. There was mud on the tag."
The sheriff started to look at Clete, then forced his eyes back on me, not wanting to recognize Clete as a legitimate presence in the room.
"So I'm to conclude maybe one of our clientele got discharged from Angola and decided to square an old beef? Except the cop he clocked, one with thirty years' experience, didn't recognize him. That makes sense to you?" he said.
"It happens," I said.
"No, it doesn't," he replied.
I kept my eyes flat, my expression empty. My face felt out of round, my forehead as large as a muskmelon. When I moved any part of my body, the pain telegraphed all the way through my system and a wave of nausea rose into my mouth.
"You mind if we have a minute alone?" the sheriff said to Clete.
Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and flipped it into the wastebasket.
