Last Car to Elysian Fields Page 10

  “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.

  That 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

  The 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 lamp-shade 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 firehouse 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.

  After 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.

  On 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 Sheriff’s 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 whore, 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 chair.

  That afternoon Helen came into my office and sat on the 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 public 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.

  After 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.