"Jolie Blon’s Bounce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

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 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 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? Hep 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 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 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 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.

Her 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.

The 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 shitbag 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 fuck 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.