After the meeting adjourned, I sat by myself in the living room, the light failing in the trees. When I left, the parking area was deserted, the streets empty. I drove to a pool hall in St. Martinville and drank coffee at the bar and watched some old men playing bouree, the shadows from the blades of a ceiling fan breaking on their faces and hands with the rhythmic certainty of a clock that no one watched.
CHAPTER 18
During the night a 911 caller reported an assault with a deadly weapon in a black slum area off the Loreauville Road. A New Orleans man with orange and purple hair by the name of Antoine Patout had been asleep with his girlfriend in his aunt’s house when an intruder climbed through a window, drew back the sheet from Patout’s rump, and sliced him a half-inch deep across both buttocks. While Patout screamed and his girlfriend wadded the sheet and tried to close his wound, the intruder calmly climbed back out the window into the darkness, at the same time folding his knife and slipping it into his back pocket. No one heard an automobile. The girlfriend told the first officer on the scene that she did not see the assailant’s face, nor could she determine his race, but she thought he was one of the neighbors with whom Patout had quarreled over the rap music he played full-blast almost every night until 1 a.m.
Helen Soileau came into my office early Thursday morning.
“You know the name of the guy with the tie-dye hair, follows Jimmy Dean Styles around?” she asked.
“No.”
“You don’t know the name of the guy you hit across the face with a .45?”
“No, I didn’t check it out.”
“Isn’t he the same guy who smashed a beer bottle on Marvin Oates’s head?”
“Could be, Helen. I’m on the desk.”
“Then get off it. While you’re at it, pull the telephone pole out of your ass,” she replied.
Just before noon I walked down to the sheriff’s office. He was reading a fishing magazine and eating a ham-and-egg sandwich.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said.
He closed the magazine and brushed the crumbs off his mouth with the back of his wrist.
“What is it?” he said.
“I’m sorry about my conduct. It’s not going to happen again.”
“I’m glad to hear you take that position. But you’re on the desk.”
“We’ve got two open homicides. What’s the harm if I help Helen?”
“You tell me. You’ve gone into St. Martin Parish twice now and thrown one black person in the bayou and stomped another one into jelly. We’re lucky we don’t have black people burning down the town. You leave me at a loss for words.”
I could see the genuine bewilderment in his face, as though the simple fact that I worked under his supervision made him doubt his own sanity.
“I guess I dropped in at a bad time,” I said.
“No, it’s just you, Dave. What you’ve never understood is that you resent authority just like the people we lock up. That’s your problem, podna, not all this bullshit you keep dragging into my office,” he said.
“That doesn’t leave a lot unsaid, does it?” I said.
“No, I don’t guess it does,” he replied. He picked up his magazine again, his cheeks blotched with color.
I signed out of the office and wrote the word “dentist” in the destination box. Then I drove my truck across the railway tracks to the shotgun cottage of Marvin Oates.
The yard was covered with trash—shrimp husks, spoiled food, used Q-Tips, disposable female items—that seemed to have been methodically sprinkled from the gallery out to the street. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass and distant rain. I walked around back and saw Marvin in a sweaty T-shirt, scuffed boots, and a beat-up cowboy hat, hacking dead banana trees out of the ground with a machete. A bolt of lightning popped across the bayou in City Park. He looked in the direction of the lightning bolt, as though it contained meaning directed specifically at him. He had not heard me walk up behind him, and he remained motionless, the machete dripping from his hand, listening, watching the storm-clouds that creaked with thunder, the wind blowing leaves out of the trees. “Who threw garbage all over your front yard?” I said.
He jumped at the sound of my voice. “Folks that belong on chain gangs, if you ask me,” he said.
“You seem to be a pretty good student of Scripture, Marvin. Maybe you can help me with a question that’s been bothering me. What does the Old Testament admonition about an eye for an eye actually mean?” I said.
He grinned. “That’s easy. The punishment ain’t s’pposed to be greater than the crime. It’s got to be in equal measure,” he replied.
“So if you were a judge, what would you do to the people who raped and killed the Boudreau girl?”
“Send them to the Death House up at Angola.”
“Cancel their whole ticket?”
“She never harmed nobody. Them men didn’t have no right to do what they done.”
“I see. This guy Antoine Patout, the one who hit you upside the head with a beer bottle?”
“Miss Helen was already out here. I ain’t gonna talk no more about that fellow got his rear end slashed. Think what y’all want.”
“I think his punishment fit the crime. He broke a bottle on your head and maybe he or some of his friends trashed your yard. So now he won’t be sitting down for a while. But Frankie Dogs was a special case. You know, shoving your face into a toilet bowl like that while other people watched? Maybe he made fun of you while he did it, too. I heard he dumped your magazines and Bibles all over the bathroom floor. I figure a guy like that deserves to get smoked.”
“You asked me a question about the Boudreau girl, but you try to turn my words around and use them against me. People has been doing that to me my whole life, Mr. Robicheaux. I dint think you was that kind of man,” he said.
“It’s nothing personal.”
“When folks treat you simple-minded, it’s real personal.”
He went back to his work, slashing the machete across the base of a banana tree that had already given fruit and whose stalk had gone mushy with rot. He pushed against the stalk until it snapped loose from the root system in a shower of loam, exposing the concentric circles of brown pulp inside.
“See, it’s plumb eaten up with ants and cockroaches. You got to prune back the tree to free it of disease and give it new life. It’s God’s way,” he said, and flung the stalk on a fire.
That afternoon, when I arrived home from work, I saw Perry LaSalle’s Gazelle parked by the cement boat ramp and Perry leaning against the fender, one foot propped on the bumper, the top button of his sports shirt loosened. His relaxed posture made me think of a male model in an ad. But it was a poor disguise for the agitation he was obviously trying to hide. “I’ve got a problem. Or maybe we both do. Yeah, I think your stamp is on this, Dave. Undoubtedly, it’s got the Robicheaux mark,” he said, nodding profoundly.
“On what?” I said.
“Let me run it by you. Actually, it all took place in one of your old haunts,” he said, and told me of the incident that had occurred the previous night on a back road in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Two black women ran a crib next to a bar that had been built in the 1950s, deep inside a woods that admitted almost no light through the canopy, a landlocked elevated piece of swamp strung with air vines, layered with dead leaves and river trash and webbed algae. The people who drank in the bar were leftovers from another era, mostly men who still spoke French and did not shave for days, rarely traveled more than a few parishes from the place of their birth, and considered events in the outside world unimportant and unrelated to their lives.
It was a place where Legion Guidry drank. Either before or after he visited the crib next door.
The two men who sought him out were obviously not from the Atchafalaya Basin. They wore sports coats and open-necked shirts, and although they were dark-featured, their accents were not Cajun. They even seemed viscerally repelled by the litter on the
ground, the rusted cars in the undergrowth, the smoldering pile of garbage behind the bar. When they entered the crib, which was actually a tar paper-and-board shack, with a woodstove for heat and a gasoline-powered generator for electricity, one of the black prostitutes rose from the cot she was resting on and stared mutely at them, waiting for one of them to produce a badge.
“Where’s the guy belongs to that red truck out there?” one of the men asked. He didn’t look at her when he spoke. He had touched a doorknob with his hand when he entered the shack, and he tore a square of paper towel from a roll on the table by the prostitute’s cot and wiped his palm and fingers with it.
“That’s Mr. Legion’s truck,” the woman said.
“I didn’t ask you his name. I asked where he was,” the man said, balling up the paper towel in his hand, looking for a place to throw it.
The black woman wore a halter and a pair of shorts but felt naked in front of the two white men. Their hair was cut short, lightly oiled, neatly combed, their clothes pressed, their shoes shined. They smelled of cologne and had shaved late in the day. They had no sexual interest in her at all, not even a mild curiosity.
“He ain’t been here yet,” she said.
“This is a waste of time,” the second man said.
“He’s not up at the bar and he’s not here, but his truck is outside. Now, you want to tell me where he is or you want us to walk you out in the trees?” the first man said.
“Mr. Legion got a crab trap. He goes out in the bay and brings it back to the bar and boils up some crabs for his dinner sometimes,” the prostitute replied.
“You never saw us, did you?” the first man said.
“I don’t want no trouble, suh,” she replied, then pulled at the bottom of her shorts to straighten her underwear and dropped her eyes in shame when she saw the looks the two men gave her.
The first man saw a bucket to throw the crumpled square of paper towel in. But he looked in the bucket first and was so revolted by the contents, he simply tossed the paper towel on the table and glanced around the room a last time.
“Y’all live here?” he said.
For the next hour the two men sat in the back of the bar, in the shadows, and played gin rummy and drank a diet soda each and kept their score in pencil on the back of a napkin. The drone of an outboard motor reverberated through a flooded woods outside, then they heard the aluminum bottom of a boat scrape up on land, and a moment later Legion Guidry came through the front door, a cage trap dripping with bluepoint crabs suspended from his fist.
He did not notice the visitors in the back of the bar. He went directly behind the counter to a butane stove where a tall, stainless-steel cauldron was boiling and shook the crabs from the trap into the water. Then he hooked his hat on a wood peg and combed his hair in an oxidized mirror, lit an unfiltered cigarette, and sat down at a table by himself while a mulatto woman brought him a shot of whiskey and a beer on the side and a length of white boudin in a saucer.
“Go tell Cleo I’m gonna be over in a half hour. Tell her I want a fresh sheet, me,” he said to the mulatto woman.
Then he turned and saw the two men in sports coats standing behind him.
“My name’s Sonny Bilotti. Man in town wants to talk to you. We’ll give you a ride,” one of them said. He wore a tan coat and a black shirt and gold-rimmed glasses, and he adjusted the gold watchband on his wrist and smiled slightly when he spoke.
Legion drew in on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke into the dead air. The few people at the bar kept their faces averted, deliberately concentrating on their drinks or the water dripping down the sides of the stainless-steel cauldron into the butane flame. They glanced automatically at the screen door each time it opened, as though the person entering the room were a harbinger of change in their lives.
“I ain’t seen no badge,” Legion said.
“We don’t need a badge for a friendly talk, do we?” said the man who called himself Sonny Bilotti.
“I don’t like nobody bothering me when I eat my dinner. Them crabs is done near boiled. I’m fixing to eat now,” Legion said.
“This guy’s a beaut, isn’t he? We met your girlfriend. She like crabs, too?” the second man said.
“What you talkin’ about?” Legion asked.
“Get up,” the second man said. He had removed his coat and hung it on the back of a chair. His arms were clean of tattoos, firm with the kind of muscle tone that came from working out on machines at a health club. He placed one hand under Legion’s arm and sensed a power there he had underestimated, then for the first time he looked directly into Legion’s eyes.
He released Legion’s arm and reached for the automatic that was stuck down in the back of his slacks. Perhaps for just a moment he felt he had stepped into an improbable photograph that should have had nothing to do with his life, a frozen moment involving a primitive barroom with plank floors, ignorant people bent over their drinks, moonlit Spanish moss in the trees outside the windows, a swamp coated with a patina of algae that was dissected by the tracings of alligators and poisonous snakes.
The blackjack in Legion’s hand crushed the cartilage in the man’s nose and filled his head with a red-black rush of pain that was like shards of glass driven into the brain. He cupped his hands to the blood roaring from his flattened nose and saw his friend Sonny Bilotti try to back away, to raise a hand in protest, but Legion whipped the blackjack across Sonny’s mouth, then swung it across his jaw, breaking bone, and down on the crown of his skull and across his neck and ears, until Sonny Bilotti was on his knees, whimpering, his forehead bent to the floor, his butt in the air like a child’s.
Legion picked up the sports coat from the chair where the second man had hung it and wiped his blackjack on the cloth.
“This been fun. Tell Robicheaux to send me some more like y’all,” he said.
Then he dragged each man by his collar to the screen door and shoved him with his boot into a pool of dirty water.
But those guys weren’t cops, were they?” Perry said. “Who knows? Maybe they’re out of New Orleans,” I said.
“They sound like greaseballs?”
“Could be,” I replied, looking up the slope at my house among the trees, avoiding his stare.
“Why would greaseballs want to talk to Legion Guidry?”
“Ask him.”
“I tried to. He was in my office this afternoon. He’s convinced himself we’re writing a book together and he’s in it. He thinks you sent these guys to do him in and that maybe I helped you.”
“That’s the breaks,” I said.
“Say again?”
“Who cares what he thinks? Why do you represent a cretin like that, anyway?” I said.
“You’re a police officer I have to get out of jail on a felony assault and you call my other clients cretins?”
“Want to come in and have dinner?” I said.
“What’s between you and Legion Guidry? Did you sic a couple of wiseguys on him?”
“Adios,” I said.
“I think your pet hippo, that character Purcel, he’s mixed up in this, too. Tell him I said that. While you’re at it, tell him to keep his shit out of Barbara Shanahan’s life,” he said.
I picked the newspaper up off the lawn and walked through the deepening shade of the trees and up the steps of the gallery into my house. When I saw Bootsie at the sink, I kissed her on the back of the neck and touched her rump. She turned and threw a wet dish towel at my head.
The next day was Friday. I walked to Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and ate lunch by myself. It was dark and cool under the high, stamped-tin ceiling, and I drank coffee and watched the lunch crowd thin out at one o’clock. The front door opened and inside the glare of white light from the street I saw the slightly stooped, simian silhouette of Joe Zeroski. He headed for my table, brushing past a customer and a waitress. “I need to talk,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Not here. In my car.”
“Nop
e.”
“What, I got bad breath?”
“Is that a piece under your coat?”
“I got a permit. You believe that?”
“Sure, it’s a great country. Come to my office,” I replied.
He thought for a moment, his fingers working at his sides, his facial muscles like stone.
“So I’ll find you another time,” he said.
“Bad attitude, Joe,” I said, but he was gone.
It was too fine a day to worry about Joe Zeroski. The air was sweet and balmy from a morning sun-shower. Leaves floated on the bayou and the floral bloom in the yards along East Main was absolutely beautiful. But Joe Zeroski bothered me and I knew why. Clete Purcel had wound up his clock and broken off the key, and even Clete now regretted it.
That evening I was counting receipts out of the cash register at the bait shop when I heard someone behind me. I turned and looked into Joe Zeroski’s flat-plated face. He was dressed in dark blue jeans, a checkered sports shirt, a yellow cap, and new tennis shoes. He held a cheap rod and reel in his hand, the price tag still dangling from one of the eyelets.
“Your sign says guided fishing trips,” he said.
Twenty minutes later I cut the gas feed on the outboard and we coasted out of a channel into an alcove of moss-strung cypress trees that were lacy with new leaf. The sun was a red cinder through the canopy, the wind down, the water so still inside the shelter of the trees you could hear the bream and goggle-eyed perch popping along the edges of the hyacinths. Joe cast his lure across the clearing, right into a tree trunk, hanging the treble hook deep in the bark.
“I’ll row us over,” I said.
“Forget it,” he said, and broke off his line. “How many guys you heard I popped?”
“Nine?”
“It’s closer to three or four. I never done it on a contract, either. They all come after me or a friend or the man I worked for first. Can you relate to that?”
I cast a Rapala deep between the trees, reeled the slack out of the line, and handed Joe the rod.