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

CHAPTER 6

The fire at the LaSalle home had started in the kitchen, probably by a dish towel that had been left near an open flame. The fire climbed up the wall and flattened on the ceiling, then spread through a hallway and was sucked by a draft up the staircase onto the second story. Mr. Julian had removed the phone from Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom long ago, after a judge in Opelousas and a U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge complained she was calling them in the middle of the night, claiming that Huey Long had been murdered by agents of Franklin Roosevelt.

The clerk from the plantation store was passing on the road when he saw the windows of the house fill with pink light. He was an excitable man, given to belief in demonic possession and the gift of tongues, and after the heat of the front doorknob seared his hand, he began shouting at the house and throwing dirt clods on the roof to alert those who might be sleeping upstairs.

He picked up a garden rake and broke the glass out of a living room window. The flames mushroomed up through the second and third stories like cold oxygen igniting in a chimney.

The store clerk and the black people from up the road tried to soak the roof with a lawn hose. They scooped dirt with their hands and threw it through the windows into the smoke and hand-carried water buckets from the bay but were finally driven back from the house by the heat radiating from the walls. They heard glass break in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom and saw her hands on the iron grill-work, like the yellow talons of a bird extended through a cage. They never saw more of her physical person than her hands; the rest of her body disappeared in an envelope of flame.

An obese black woman grabbed her daughter and held her tightly against her stomach, smothering her daughter's head with her arms so she would not hear the sounds that came from Mrs. LaSalle's window.

But at Ladice Hulin's house, neither she nor Mr. Julian knew of these events. Legion waited outside for her and Mr. Julian to emerge. There was ash on his khaki clothes, a smear of soot on his cheek and one shirtsleeve.

"You were watching us through the window? You were spying on me?" Mr. Julian said incredulously.

"No, sir, I wouldn't say that. I come here to tell you somet'ing else. It's sad news, yeah. Miz LaSalle got burned up in a fire."

Legion turned his face away, but he watched Mr. Julian out of the corner of his eye to see the reaction his words would cause.

"What? What did you say?" Mr. Julian said. "Your home's gone, too. I hate to be the one to tell you, Mr. Julian."

Mr. Julian's face was bloodless, popping with sweat, even though the temperature was still dropping.

"We'll go back wit' you, Mr. Julian," Ladice said.

"I was the first one in her room. The deadbolt was locked from the outside. I took the key out and stuck it in the other side of the lock, so nobody ain't gonna get the wrong idea, no," Legion said.

"You did what? Say that again?" Mr. Julian said as though he could not sort through Legion's words.

"The key was almost melted. But I moved it to the other side of the lock, me. You ain't got to worry," Legion replied.

But Mr. Julian wasn't listening now. He walked to his car and started the engine and backed one tire into Ladice's garden, then drove down the road under an orange moon toward the smoke that rose from the ruins of his home.

Ladice looked up into Legion's face. He had removed his hat and was running a comb through his hair. His hair was black, like tar from a barrel, the vertical lines in his narrow face like those in a prune.

"You going in the field tomorrow, Ladice. It ain't gonna hep you to sass me about it, either," he said.

She started to speak, but he placed his thumb on her mouth.

“What did Legion do to her?" I asked Batist's sister.

She was a heavy woman, with a big head and wide shoulders and knees that looked like hubcaps. She sat in an overstuffed chair in a gloomy corner of her living room, her large hands squeezing each other in the cone of light from a floor lamp.

"Did Ladice have a child by Mr. Julian?" I asked.

"I ain't said that," she answered.

"Why won't you tell me the rest of the story? Mr. Julian and his wife are both dead," I said.

Batist's sister was silent a moment.

"He still out there. Maybe in St. Mary Parish. Maybe down by New Orleans. Some of the old people say he killed a man in Morgan City," she said.

"Who?" I said.

"Legion. He out there, in the dark. He don't like the sun. His face is pale, like it don't have no blood. I seen him once. It was Legion," she said.

She looked at the tops of her folded hands and would not raise her eyes to mine.

It was late when I got home and Bootsie was asleep. I ate a ham and onion sandwich in the kitchen, then brushed my teeth and lay down by her side and stared at the ceiling in the darkness. I could hear the cries of nutrias out in the swamp, an alligator rolling its tail in the flooded trees, the echo of distant thunder that gave no rain.

The moon was up and Bootsie's hair was the color of honey on the pillow. She was the only woman I had ever known who had a natural fragrance, like night-blooming gardenias. Her eyes opened and she smiled and turned on her side and put her arm across my chest, one knee over my leg. Her body had the curvature and undulations of a classical Greek sculpture, but her skin was always smooth and soft under my hand, virtually without a wrinkle, as though age had decided to pass her by.

"Anything wrong?" she said.

"No."

"You can't sleep?"

"I'm fine. I didn't mean to wake you."

She touched me under the sheet. "It's all right," she said.

I awoke at dawn and made coffee on the stove. The light was gray in the trees, the Spanish moss motionless in the silence.

"Did you ever hear of an overseer at Poinciana Island by the name of Legion?" I asked Bootsie.

"No, why?"

"When I was twelve, my brother, Jimmie, and I had a bad encounter with some low-rent people in City Park. A man opened a knife on us. One of the women with him called him Legion."

"Why do you ask about him now?"

"His name came up when I was checking out some background material on Tee Bobby. It may not be important."

"By the way, Perry LaSalle came by last night," she said.

"Perry is becoming a pain in the ass," I said.

"He told me you'd say that."

Before I went to the office I drove out to Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked her about the overseer named Legion and the death of Mrs. LaSalle in the fire.

"Mind your own bidness. No, I take that back. Get out of my life altogether," she said, and closed the door in my face.

The next day Perry was at my office door. Before he could speak, I said, "Why were you at my house the other night?"

"One of Barbara Shanahan's colleagues got drunk and shot off his mouth at the country club. Barbara and the D.A. think you're not a team player. I'm calling you as a witness for the defense, Dave. I thought I ought to warn you in advance," he replied.

I went back to the paperwork on my desk and tried to pretend he was not there.

"On another subject, you care to explain to me why you're bothering Ladice Hulin about my grandfather?" he asked.

I put the cap on my pen and looked up at him. "She told me Amanda Boudreau's death was related to events that happened before Tee Bobby was born. What do you think she meant by that?" I said.

"I wouldn't know. But stay out of my family's private life," he replied.

"Your book on capital punishment didn't spare people in the Iberia prosecutor's office. What makes the LaSalles sacrosanct? The fact y'all own some canneries?"

He shook his head and went out the door. I thought he had gone and I got up from my desk to go down the corridor for my mail. But he came back through the door, the blood pooled in his cheeks.

"Where do you get off indicting my family?" he said.

"That case you used in your book, the murder of those teenagers up on the Loreauville Road? The mother of that girl those two fuckheads killed said she heard her daughter's voice out in the front yard at the same hour her daughter died. Her daughter was saying, 'Please help me, Momma.' I don't remember seeing that in either your book or the movie."

"You make a remark about my family again, and cop or no cop, I'm going to bust your jaw, Dave."

"Give your grief to Barbara Shanahan. I think you two deserve each other," I said.

My hands were shaking when I brushed past him.

That night Clete Purcel called the house. I could hear an electric guitar and saxophones and laughter and people talking loudly in the background.

"I can hardly hear you," I said.

"I thought I'd have another run at Jimmy Dean Styles. I'm at a joint he owns in St. Martinville. I thought you'd like to know who's parked across the street."

"It's late, Clete."

"Joe Zeroski. He's got a P.I. with him, his niece, Zerelda Calucci. Her old man was one of the Calucci brothers."

"Tell me about it tomorrow."

"The kid you're looking at for the murder of the girl in the cane field? He's playing here."

"Say again?"

"What's his name? Hulin? He's up there on the bandstand. Anyway, I'd better hit the road. The only other thing white in this place is the toilet bowl. Sorry I bothered you." "Give me a half hour," I said.

I drove up the Teche, under the long canopy of live oaks on the St. Martinville highway, the same road that federal soldiers had marched in 1863, the same road that Evangeline and her lover had walked almost a century before the federals came.

Jimmy Dean Styles owned only a half-interest in the nightclub Clete had called from. His business partner was a black bondsman named Little Albert Babineau who had recently made the state news wires after he threw packages of condoms off a Mardi Gras float. Each package was printed with the words "Be Sure You 'Bond' Right. Be Safe with Little Albert. 24-Hour Bail Bonds. Little Albert Will Not Let You Down."

The club was built of plywood that had been painted blue and strung with yellow and purple lights. The window glass and walls literally shook from the noise inside. I pulled in at the back, where Clete waited for me next to his Cadillac. Through the trees below the club I could see a glaze of yellow light on Bayou Teche and the wake of a large boat slapping into the elephant ears along the banks.

"You're not pissed off because I took another run at Styles?" Clete said.

"Why should I be? You never listen to anything I say, anyway."

"How you want to play it?" he asked.

"We need to get Joe Zeroski out of here. What was that you said about a P.I.?"

"It's his niece. I'd like to develop a more intimate relationship with her, except I always get the feeling she'd like to blow my equipment off. Wait till you see the bongos on that broad."

"Will you stop talking like that? I'm not kidding you, Clete. It's an illness."

He put two sticks of gum in his mouth and chewed them loudly, his eyes full of mirth, his head seeming to turn in all directions at once.

"I tell you what. I'll handle Joe, you deal with Zerelda," he said.

Joe Zeroski's car was parked down the block, across the street, in front of a small grocery store. A woman was behind the wheel. Her hair was black and long, the neckline of her blouse plunging, her nails and mouth painted arterial red. I opened my badge holder and lifted it into the light so she could see it. A holstered revolver sat on the seat between the woman and Joe Zeroski.

"We need you to move your car out of here," I said.

"Pull your pud on somebody else's time," she said. I heard Clete snicker behind me.

"Sorry?" I said.

"You're out of your jurisdiction. Go screw yourself," she said.

"You have a permit for that gun?"

"I don't need one. In Louisiana the automobile is an extension of the home. But in answer to your question, yes, I do have a permit. Now, how about moving yourself out of my view?"

I looked across the seat at Joe Zeroski. His stolid face and wide-set eyes had all the malleability of a cinder block.

"She's doing her job," he said.

"Tee Bobby didn't kill your daughter, Joe," I said.

"Then why were you asking about him down at that pickup corner, the one my little girl was abducted from?" he replied.

I blew out my breath and recrossed the street with Clete.

"Lighten up, Streak. I think Zerelda likes you. Notice how she squeezed her.357 when she told you to fuck off?" he said, his eyes beaming.

We went through the side entrance of the nightclub. It was loud and hot inside, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, dense with the smells of whiskey and boiled crabs and beer sweat. Tee Bobby was at the microphone, his long-sleeved lavender shirt plastered against his skin, a red electric guitar hanging from his neck. He drank from a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer and wiped the moisture out of his eyes on his sleeve and stumbled slightly against the microphone, then began singing "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do." His eyes were closed while he sang, his face suffused with a level of emotion that at first glance might have seemed manufactured until you heard the irrevocable sense of loss in his voice.

"Guitar Slim didn't have anything on this guy. Too bad he's a rag nose," Clete said. "How do you know he is?" I asked. "He was snorting lines off the toilet tank. I thought that might be a clue."

We found Jimmy Dean Styles in his office at the rear of the club. He sat at a cluttered desk, above which was a framed autographed photo of Sugar Ray Robinson. He was counting money, his fingers clicking on a calculator. His eyes lifted to mine.

"See, I went out of Angola max-time. That means I ain't got my umbilical cord thumbtacked to some P.O.'s desk. How about respecting that?" he said.

"Where'd you get the autographed photo of Sugar Ray?" I said.

"My grandfather was his sparring partner. You probably don't know that 'cause when you growed up most niggers around here picked peppers or cut cane," he replied.

"You told me you cut Tee Bobby loose. Now I see him up on your bandstand," I said.

"Little Albert Babineau own half this club. He feel sorry for Tee Bobby. I don't. Tee Bobby got a way of stuffing everything he make up his nose. So when he finish his gig tonight, he packing his shit." His eyes shifted to Clete. "Marse Charlie, don't be sitting on my desk."

"There's a guy outside named Joe Zeroski. I hope he comes in here," Clete said.

"Why's that, Marse Charlie?" Styles said. "He was a mechanic for the Giacanos. Nine or so hits. Your kind of guy," Clete said.

"I'll be worried about that the rest of the night," Styles replied.

Clete stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and stared at Styles, who had gone back to counting a stack of currency, his fingers dancing on the calculator.

I touched Clete on the arm and we walked back through the crowd and out the side door. The parking lot smelled of dust and tar, and the stars were hot and bright above the trees. Clete stared back into the club, his face perplexed.

"That guy's dirty. I don't know what for, but he's dirty." Then he said, "You think his grandfather really sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson?"

"Maybe. I remember he was a boxer."

"What happened to him?"

"He was lynched in Mississippi," I said.

But our evening at the club owned by Jimmy Dean Styles and Little Albert Babineau wasn't over. As Clete and I walked toward my truck, we heard the angry voices of two men behind us, the voices of others trying to restrain or pacify them. Then Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean Styles burst out the back door into the parking lot, with a balloon of people following them.

There was a smear of blood and saliva on Tee Bobby's mouth. He swung at Style’s face and missed, and Styles pushed him down on the oyster shells.

"Touch me again, I'm gonna mess you up. Now haul your freight down the road," Styles said.

Tee Bobby got to his feet. His slacks were torn, his knees lacerated. He ran at Styles, his arms flailing. Styles set himself and hooked Tee Bobby in the jaw and dropped him as though he had used a baseball bat.

Tee Bobby got to his feet again and stumbled toward the crowd, swinging at anyone who tried to help him. One of his shoes was gone and his belt had come loose, exposing the elastic of his underwear.

"You're one sorry-ass, pitiful nigger," Styles said, and fitted his hand over Tee Bobby's face and shoved him backward into the crowd.

Tee Bobby reached in his pocket and flicked open a switchblade knife, but I doubted he had any idea whom he was going to use it on or even where he was. I started toward him.

"Mistake, Dave," I heard Clete say.

I came up behind Tee Bobby and grabbed him around the neck and twisted his wrist. There was little strength in his arm and the knife tinkled on the oyster shells. Then he began to fight, as a girl might, with his elbows and nails and feet. I locked my arms around him and carried him down the bank, through the trees, onto a dock, and flung him as far as I could into the bayou.

He went under, then burst to the surface in a cloud of mud and slapped at the water with both hands until his feet gained the bottom. He slipped and splashed through the shallows, grabbing the stems of elephant ears for purchase, his hair and body strung with dead vegetation.

Then, as the crowd from the nightclub flowed down the bank, someone switched on a flood lamp in the trees, burning away the darkness like a phosphorous flare, lighting me and Tee Bobby Hulin like figures frozen in a photograph of a waterside baptism.

At the edge of the crowd I saw Joe Zeroski and his niece Zerelda. Joe's face was incredulous, as though he had just walked into an open-air mental asylum. Clete lit a cigarette and rubbed the heel of his hand on his temple.

"I don't listen to you? Dave, you just threw a black man in the bayou while two hundred of his relatives watched. Way to go, big mon," he said.

I sat in the sheriffs office early the next morning. He was generally a quiet, avuncular man, looking forward to his retirement and the free time he would have to spend with his grandchildren. He did not contend with either the world or mortality, did not grieve upon the wrongs of his fellowman, and possessed a Rotarian view of both charity and business and saw one as a natural enhancement of the other. But sometimes on a wintry day I would catch him gazing out the window, a liquid glimmer in his eyes, and I knew he was back in his youth, on a long, white road that wound between white hills that were rounded like women's breasts, the road lined with chained-up Marine Corps six-bys and marching men whose coats and boots and steel pots were sheathed with snow.

He had just finished a phone conversation with the chief of police in St. Martinville. He opened the blinds on the window and stared at the crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery for a long time, his shoulders erect to compensate for the way his stomach protruded over his belt. His face was slightly flushed, his small mouth pinched. He removed his suit coat and placed it on the back of his chair, then brushed at the fabric as an afterthought but did not sit down. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

"You went out of your jurisdiction and made a bunch of people mad in St. Martinville. I can live with that. But you've deliberately involved Clete Purcel in department business. That's something I won't put up with, my friend," he said.

"Clete gave me a lead I didn't have."

"I got a call earlier from Joe Zeroski. You know what he said? 'This is how you guys solve cases? Fire up the cannibals?' I couldn't think of an adequate reply. Why are you still following Tee Bobby Hulin around?"

"I'm not convinced of his guilt."

"Who died and made you God, Dave? Tell Purcel he's not welcome in Iberia Parish."

I focused my gaze on a neutral space, my face empty.

"You AA guys have an expression, don't you, something about not carrying another person's load? How's it go? You'll break your own back without making the other person's burden lighter?" the sheriff said.

"Something like that."

"Why go to meetings if you don't listen to what people say at them?" he said.

"Clete thinks Jimmy Dean Styles might be a predator," I said.

"Go back to your office, Dave. One of us has a thinking disorder."

Later in the morning I passed the district attorney's office and saw Barbara Shanahan inside, talking to the young salesman who had dragged a suitcase filled with Bibles and encyclopedias and what he termed "family-type magazines" into my bait shop. What was the name? Oates? That was it, Marvin Oates. He was sitting in a wood chair, bending forward attentively, his eyes crinkling at something Barbara was saying.

I saw him again at noon when I was stopped by the traffic light at the four corners up on the Loreauville Road; this time he was pulling his suitcase on a roller skate up a street in a rural black slum by Bayou Teche. He tapped on the screen door of a clapboard shack that was propped up on cinder blocks. A meaty black woman in a purple dress opened the door for him, and he stepped inside and left his suitcase on the gallery. A moment later he opened the door again and took the suitcase inside with him. I parked in the convenience store at the four corners and bought a soft drink from the machine and drank it in the shade and waited for Marvin Oates to come out of the shack.

Thirty minutes later he walked back out in the sunlight and fitted his bleached cowboy straw hat on his head and began pulling his suitcase down the street. I drove up behind him and rolled down the window. He wore a tie and a navy-blue sports coat in spite of the heat and breathed with the slow inhalation of someone in a steam room. But his face managed to fill with a grin before he even knew whose vehicle had drawn abreast of him.

"Why, howdy do, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

"I see you and Barbara Shanahan are pretty good friends," I said.

His grin remained on his face, as though incised in clay, his eyes full of speculative light. He removed his hat and fanned himself. His ash-blond hair was soggy with sweat and there were gray strands in his sideburns, and I realized he was older than he looked.

"I don't quite follow," he said. For just a second his gaze lit on the shack he had just left.

"I saw you in Barbara's office this morning," I replied.

He nodded agreeably, as though a humorous mystery had just been solved. He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and twisted his head and looked down toward the end of the street, although nothing of particular interest was there.

"It's flat burning up, ain't it?" he said.

"In traveling through some of the other southern parishes, have you run across a man by the name of Legion? No first name, no last name, just Legion," I said.

He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. "An old man? He worked in Angola at one time? Black folks walk around him. He lives behind the old sugar mill down by Baldwin. Know why I remember his name?" he said. His face lit as he spoke the last sentence.

"No, why's that?" I said.

" 'Cause when Jesus was fixing to heal this possessed man, he asked the demon his name first. The demon said his name was Legion. Jesus cast the demon into a herd of hogs and the hogs run into the sea and drowned."

"Thanks for your help, Marvin. Did you sell a Bible to the woman in that last house you were in?"

"Not really."

"I imagine it'd be a hard sell. She hooks in a joint on Hopkins."

He looked guardedly up and down the road, his expression cautionary now, one white man to another. "The Mormons believe black people is descended from the lost tribe of Ham. You think that's true?"

"Got me. You want a ride?"

"If you work in the fields of the Lord, you're suppose to walk it, not just talk it."

His face was full of self-irony and boyish good cheer. Even the streaks of sweat on his shirt, like the stripes a flagellum would make on the chest of its victim, excited sympathy for his plight and the humble role he had chosen for himself. If his smile could be translated into words, it was perhaps the old adage that goodness is its own reward.

I gave him the thumbs-up sign and made a mental note to run his name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., at the first opportunity.