The 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 thecharity 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.
Monday 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 wasbrushed 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 peacocks 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.
At sunset an elderly black man named Batist helped me close up the bait shop and chain-lock 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 i
n 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 instands 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
When 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. Nigger boy got to swim in his own shit 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.
At 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 bya 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 namesJimmy 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'sand 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 shit in South Lou'sana don't make you big shit 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? He
p me clean it up. I'll drop her by your crib," he replied.
Two 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 itrock, 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 sheposted 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 whores. She had attended college for three years and was the daughter of Joe Zeroski, an ex-button 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 sheallowed 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 thechair'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.