DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce Page 8

  Perhaps 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 cocktail 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

  In 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."

  We 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 systematicallyhumiliated 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 r
ape 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 nostatute 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 tink I care what some nigger 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.

  Aweek 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?"

  That 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 yousending 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 freshwater. 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 tod
ay," 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 azaleasand four-o'clocks in his yard rippling with color in theshade. 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.