DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

  Cops call it a "drop" or sometimes a "throw-down." It can be a tear-gas pen, a toy pistol, or perhaps the real article, the serial numbers burned off with acid or on an emery wheel. Or it can be a switchblade knife. When a shooting goes bad and the suspect is on the ground with his dead hand open and a set of car keys falls from his palm rather than the pocket-size automatic you thought you saw, either you can tell the truth at an Internal Affairs inquiry and be hung out to dry on a meat hook, perhaps even do serious time in a mainline joint with the same people you put there, or you can untape the drop from your ankle, wipe it with a handkerchief, throw it on the corpse, and ask God to look in the other direction. "Barbara must like you a lot," Perry said as we drove through a long tunnel of oaks toward New Iberia, the top of his Gazelle down, the air warm, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade. "Why's that?" I asked. "She called me to get you out of the can. Normally she treats me like chewing gum on the bottom of a theater seat." He turned his head, his cheeks ruddy, his brownish-black hair blowing on his brow. "Purcel saw the fight but didn't try to stop it?" "Better ask Clete about that." "He wouldn't commit perjury for you, would he?" "Clete?" I replied.

  The next morning was Wednesday. I reported to work and walked down the corridor to my office as thoughnothing unusual had occurred the previous day. Wally the dispatcher gave me a thumbs-up and two uniformed deputies patted me on the shoulder as I passed. I didn't do as well with the sheriff. "You're confined to desk duties until we clear up this mess in St. Martinville," he said, leaning in the door. I nodded. "Nothing to say?" he asked. "Friends back their friends' play," I said. "My department isn't going to be the O.K. Corral, either," he replied, and went back down the corridor, the heat rising in his face. At noon I drove to Perry LaSalle's law office across from the Shadows, unaware I was about to have one of those experiences that teach you that your knowledge of human behavior will always be inadequate, that weakness and the capacity for self-abasement seem to reside in us all. Perry asked me to write out what had happened in Jimmy Dean Styles's nightclub. While I wrote on a legal pad, he gazed down on the street, on the caladiums along his front walk, the live oaks under which Louisiana's boys in butternut retreated up the Teche in 1863, the columned homes on whose upstairs verandas people still served tea and highballs in the afternoon, regardless of the season or the historical events that might shake the rest of the world. After I had finished a very short description of my attack on Jimmy Dean Styles, ending the account in the passive voice ("a switchblade knife was found under a nearby table by local officers"), I waited for Perry to detach himself from whatever he was watching down below. "Sir?" I said. "Oh, yes, sorry, Dave," he said, frowning as he read the legal pad. "I didn't do a very good job?" I said. "No, no, it's fine. There's someone here to see me." Before he had finished his sentence, Legion Guidry stood in the doorway. His khakis were freshly ironed, stiff with starch, his eyes hard to see under the brim of his straw hat. But I could smell the maleness of his odor, a hint of sweat, onions and hamburger, diesel fuel perhaps splashed on his boots, grains of cigarette tobacco that he picked off his tongue. "What he doin' here?" he asked. "A little legal work. That's what I do for a living," Perry said, trying to ignore the insult. "This son of a bitch spit in my food," Legion said. "Have a seat downstairs, Legion. I'll be right with you," Perry said. "What y'all doin', you? What's on that tablet there?" "It has nothing to do with you. I give you my word on that," Perry said. "Gimme that," Legion said. "Mr. Dave and I have private business to conduct here. Legion, don't do that. This is my office. You need to respect that," Perry said. "You got the man in your office called me a queer. He ain't no 'mister' to me," Legion said, his hand crimped on the legal pad, the paper creasing from the pressure of his thumb. "What this say?" "Dave, do you mind waiting downstairs?" Perry said, his face reddening with embarrassment. "I have to go back to the office. I'll see you later," I said. I walked out of the air-conditioning into the midday sounds of the city, the heat suddenly more oppressive, the gasoline fumes from the street more offensive. I heard Perry open the door behind me and come down the walk, trying to smile, to reclaim what dignity he could from the situation. "He's old and uneducated. He's frightened by what he doesn't understand. It's our fault. We denied these people opportunity and access at every turn. Now we have to pay for it," he said. Wrong, Perry. Not we, I thought.

  That evening I sat by myself for a long time in the backyard. The sky was purple, full of birds, the sun a molten red inside a bank of rain clouds. I felt Bootsie's hands on my shoulders. "Perry LaSalle called. He says the assault charge probably won't hold up. Something about Clete seeing a knife," she said. "Clete's testimony is a little bit of an ethical problem," I said. "Why?" "He wasn't there. He went in later and threw a switchblade under a table." I felt her hands leave my shoulders. "Dave, this seems to go from bad to worse," she said. "Clete's a loyal friend. The sheriff isn't." "He's an elected official. What's he supposed to do? Let you kick the shit out of anyone you don't like?" she said. I got up from the picnic table and walked down the driveway to my truck. I heard her on the grass behind me, but I started the engine and backed onto the road,then shifted into first gear and drove away, her face slipping past the window like a pale balloon, her words lost in the wind.

  The 7 P.M. Wednesday night AA meeting was held in the living room of a small gray house owned by the Episcopalian church, arbored by live oaks, across from the massive stone outline of old Iberia High. The neighborhood, with its firehouse, its ubiquitous trees, its streets glistening from a sun shower, its lawns and small porches on which a boy on a bicycle sailed the afternoon newspaper, the flashing signals dinging at an empty rail crossing, was an excursion into the America that perhaps all of us are nostalgic for, a country secure between its oceans and content with its working-class ambitions, somehow in my mind forever identified with an era when a minor league baseball game or an evening radio show was considered a special pleasure. It was a Big Book meeting, one in which the participants read from the book that is the centerpiece of the fellowship known as Alcoholics Anonymous. But my purpose in being there was to do what AA members call a Fifth Step, or, more specifically, to admit the exact nature of my wrongs. Most of the people there were from middle-class backgrounds and did not use profanity at meetings or discuss their sexual lives. By and large, they were the same people you would see at a PTA gathering. When it was my turn to speak, I realized that the world in which I lived and worked and looked upon as fairly normal was not one you shared with people whose worst legal sins might reach the level of a traffic ticket. I told them all of it. How I had stolen and eaten my wife's diet pills for the amphetamine in them, then had kicked it up into high gear with white speed I had taken from an evidence locker. How I had bludgeoned Jimmy Dean Styles's face with my fists, breaking his nose and lips, knocking his bridge down his throat, grabbing his head and smashing it repeatedly on the bar, my hands slick with his blood and the sweat out of his hair, while an insatiable white worm ate a hole in the soft tissue of my brain and I ground my teeth together with a need that no amount of sex or violence or dope would relieve me of, that nothing other than whiskey and whiskey and whiskey would ever satisfy. The room was silent when I finished. A well-dressed woman got up from her chair and went into the bathroom, and we could hear the water running in the lavatory while she kept clearing her throat behind the door. The discussion leader that evening was a genial, silver-haired, retired train conductor from Mississippi. "Well, you got it off your chest, Dave. At least you're not aiming to kill anybody now," he said, starting to smile. Then he looked at my face and dropped his eyes. 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 br />
  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 sheriffs 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'thave 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 trashshrimp husks, spoiled food, used Q-Tips, disposable female itemsthat 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 stormclouds 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'p-posed 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, butyou 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 die 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 tra
p. 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. “Yall 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 blue-point 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 swungit 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.