DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

  The family home was a one-story, wood-frame white building that stood between the state road and a cane field in back. A water oak that was bare of leaves in winter shaded one side of the house during the hot months. The numbered rural mailbox on the road and a carport built on the side of the house, like an afterthought, were the only means we could use to distinguish the house from any other on the same road. The blinds were drawn inside the house. Plastic holy-water receptacles were tacked on the doorjambs and a church calendar and a hand-stitched Serenity Prayer hung on the living room walls. The father was Quentin Boudreau, a sunburned, sandy-haired man who wore wire-rim glasses and a plain blue tie and a starched white shirt that must have felt like an iron prison on his body. His eyes seemed to have no emotion, no focus in them, as though he were experiencing thoughts he had not yet allowed himself to feel. He held his wife's hand on his knee. She was a small, dark-haired Cajun woman whose face was devastated. Neither she nor her husband spoke or attempted to ask a question while Helen and I explained, as euphemistically as we could, what had happened to their daughter. I wanted them to be angry with us, to hurl insults, to make racial remarks, to do anything that would relieve me of the feelings I had when I looked into their faces. But they didn't. They were humble and undemanding and probably, at the moment, incapable of hearing everything that was being said to them. I put my business card on the coffee table and stood up to go. "We're sorry for what's happened to your family," I said. The woman's hands were folded in her lap now. She looked at them, then lifted her eyes to mine. "Amanda was raped?" she said. "That's a conclusion that has to come from the coroner. But, yes, I think she was," I said. "Did they use condoms?" she asked. "We didn't find any," I replied. "Then you'll have their DNA," she said. Her eyes were black and hard now and fixed on mine. Helen and I let ourselves out and crossed the yard to the cruiser. The wind, even full of dust, seemed cool after the long hot day and smelled of salt off the Gulf. Then I heard Mr. Boudreau behind me. He was a heavy man and he walked as though he had gout in one foot. A wing on his shirt collar was bent at an upward angle, like a spear point touching his throat. "What kind of weapon did they use?" he asked. "A shotgun," I said. His eyes bunked behind his glasses. "Did they shoot my little girl in the face?" he asked. "No, sir," I replied. " 'Cause those sons of bitches just better not have hurt her face," he said, and began to weep in his front yard.

  By the next morning the fingerprints lifted from the beer can thrown out of the automobile window at the crime scene gave us the name of Tee Bobby Hulin, a twenty-five-year-old black hustler and full-time smartass whose diminutive size saved him on many occasions from being bodily torn apart. His case file was four inches thick and included arrests for shoplifting at age nine, auto theft at thirteen, dealing reefer in the halls of his high school, and driving off from the back of the local Wal-Mart with a truckload of toilet paper. For years Tee Bobby had skated on the edge of the system, shining people on, getting by on rebop and charm and convincing others he was more trickster than miscreant. Also, Tee Bobby possessed another, more serious gift, one he seemed totally undeserving of, as though the finger of God had pointed at him arbitrarily one day and bestowed on him a musical talent that was like none since the sad, lyrical beauty in the recordings of Guitar Slim. When Helen and I walked up to Tee Bobby's gas-guzzler that evening at a drive-in restaurant not far from City Park, his accordion was propped up in the backseat, its surfaces like ivory and the speckled insides of a pomegranate. "Hey, Dave, what it is?" he said. "Don't call your betters by their first name," Helen said. "I gots you, Miss Helen. I ain't done nothing wrong, huh?" he said, his eyebrows climbing. "You tell us," I said. He feigned a serious concentration. "Nope. I'm a blank. Y'all want part of my crab burger?" he said. His skin had the dull gold hue of worn saddle leather, his eyes blue-green, his hair lightly oiled and curly and cut short and boxed behind the neck. He continued to look at us with an idiot's grin on his mouth. "Put your car keys under the seat and get in the cruiser," Helen said. "This don't sound too good. I think I better call my lawyer," he said. "I didn't say you were under arrest. We'd just like a little information from you. Is that a problem?" Helen said. "I gots it again. White folks is just axing for hep. Don't need to read no Miranda rights to nobody. Sho' now, I wants to hep out the po-lice," he said. "You're a walking charm school, Tee Bobby," Helen said. Twenty minutes later Tee Bobby sat alone in an interview room at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department while Helen and I talked in my office. Outside, the sky was ribbed with maroon strips of cloud and the train crossing guards were lowered on the railway tracks and a freight was wobbling down the rails between clumps of trees and shacks where black people lived. "What's your feeling?" I asked. "I have a hard time making this clown for a shotgun murder," she said. "He was there." "This case has a smell to it, Streak. Amanda's boyfriend just doesn't ring right," she said. "Neither does Tee Bobby. He's too disconnected about it." "Give me a minute before you come in," she said. She went into the interview room and left the door slightly ajar so I could hear her words to Tee Bobby. She leaned on the table, one of her muscular arms slightly touching his, her mouth lowered toward his ear. A rolled-up magazine protruded from the back pocket of her jeans. "We've got you at the crime scene. That won't go away. I'd meet this head-on," she said. "Good. Bring me a lawyer. Then I bees meeting it head-on." "You want us to get your grandmother down here?" "Miss Helen gonna make me feel guilty now. 'Cause you a big family friend. 'Cause my gran'mama used to wash your daddy's clothes when he wasn't trying to put his hands up her dress." Helen pulled the rolled-up paper cylinder from her back pocket. "How would you like it if I just slapped the shit out of you?" she said. "I bees likin' that." She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then touched him lightly on the forehead with the cusp of the magazine. His eyelids fluttered mockingly, like butterflies. Helen walked out the door past me. "I hope the D.A, buries that little prick," she said. I went into the interview room and closed the door. "Right now your car is being torn apart and two detectives are on their way to your house with a search warrant," I said. "If they find a ski mask, a shotgun that's been fired in the last two days, any physical evidence from that girl on your clothes, even a strand of hair, you're going to be injected. The way I see it, you've got about a ten-minute window of opportunity to tell your side of things." Tee Bobby removed a comb from his back pocket and ran it up and down the hair on his arm and looked into space. Then he put his head down on his folded arms and tapped his feet rhythmically, as though he were keeping time with a tune inside his head. "You're just going to act the fool?" I said. "I ain't raped nobody. Leave me be." I sat down across from him and watched the way his eyes glanced innocuously around the walls, his boredom with my presence, the beginnings of a grin on his mouth as he looked at the growing anger in my face. "What's wrong?" he said. "She was sixteen. She had holes in her chest and side you could put your fist into. You get that silly-ass look off your face," I said. "I got a right to look like I want. You bring me a lawyer or you kick me loose. You ain't got no evidence or you would have already printed me and had me in lockup." "I'm a half-inch from knocking you across this room, Tee Bobby." "Yassir, I knows that. This nigger's bones is shakin', Cap'n," he replied. I locked him in the interview room and went down to my office. A half hour later a phone call came in from the detectives who had been sent to Tee Bobby's home on Poinciana Island. "Nothing so far," one of them said. "What do you mean 'so far'?" I asked. "It's night. We'll start over again in the morning. Feel free to join us. I just sorted through a garbage can loaded with week-old shrimp," he replied.

  At dawn Helen and I drove across the wooden bridge that spanned the freshwater bay on the north side of Poinciana Island. The early sun was red on the horizon, promising another scorching day, but the water in the bay was black and smelled of spawning fish, and the elephant ears and the cypress and flowering trees on the banks riffled coolly in the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. I showed my badge to the security guard in the wooden booth on the bridg
e, and we drove through the settlement of tree-shaded frame houses where the employees of the LaSalle family lived, then followed a paved road that wound among hillocks and clumps of live oaks and pine and gum trees and red-dirt acreage, where black men were hoeing out the rows in lines that moved across the field as precisely as military formations. The log-and-brick slave cabins from the original LaSalle plantation were still standing, except they had been reconstructed and modernized by Perry LaSalle and were now used by either the family's guests or lifetime employees whom the LaSalles took care of until the day of their deaths. Ladice Hulin, Tee Bobby's grandmother, sat in awicker chair on her gallery, her thick gray hair hanging below her shoulders, her hands folded on the crook of a walking cane. I got out of the cruiser and walked into the yard. Three uniformed deputies and a plainclothes detective were in back, raking garbage out of an old trash pit. As a young woman, Ladice had been absolutely beautiful, and even though age had robbed her in many ways, it had not diminished her femininity, and her skin still had the smoothness and luster of chocolate. She didn't ask me onto the gallery. "They tear up your house, Miss Ladice?" I said. She continued to look at me without speaking. Her eyes had the clarity, the deepness, the unblinking fixed stare of a deer's. "Is your grandson inside?" I asked. "He didn't come home after y'all turned him loose. Y'all put the fear of God in him, if that make you feel good," she replied. "We tried to help him. He chose not to cooperate. He also showed no feeling at all over the rape and murder of an innocent young girl," I said. She wore a white cotton dress with a gold chain and religious medal around her neck. A perforated gold-plated dime hung from another chain on her anklebone. "No feeling, huh?" Then she brushed at the air and said, "Go on, go on, take care of your bidness and be done. The grave's waiting for me. I just wish I didn't have to deal with so many fools befo' I get there." "I always respected you, Miss Ladice," I said. She put one hand on the arm of her chair and pushed herself erect. "He's gonna run from you. He's gonna sass you. It's 'cause he's a scared li'l boy inside. Don't hurt him just 'cause he's scared, no," she said. I started to speak, but Helen touched me on the arm. The plainclothes in back was waving at us, a dirty black watch cap on a stick in his right hand.

  CHAPTER 3

  One week later an assistant district attorney, Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan, came into my office without knocking. She was a statuesque, handsome woman, over six feet tall, with white skin and red hair and green eyes. She wore white hose and horn-rim glasses and a pale orange suit and a white blouse, and she seldom passed men anywhere that they did not turn and look at her. But her face always seemed enameled with anger, without cause, her manner as sharp as razor wire. Her dedication to destroying criminals and defense attorneys was legendary. However, the reason for that dedication was a matter of conjecture. I looked up from the newspaper that was spread on my desk. "Excuse me for not getting up. I didn't hear you knock," I said. "I need everything you have on the Amanda Boudreau investigation," she said. "It's not complete." "Then give me what you have and update me on a daily basis." "You caught the case?" I asked. She sat down across from me. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist, then back at me. "Is it always necessary that I say everything twice to you?" she said. "The forensics just came in on the watch cap we dug up at Tee Bobby's place. The rouge and skin oils came off Amanda Boudreau," I said. "Good, let's cut the warrant." As she got up to go, her eyes paused on mine. "Something wrong?" "This one doesn't hang together." "The victim's DNA is on the suspect's clothes? His prints are on a beer can at the murder scene? But you have doubts about what occurred?" "The semen on the girl wasn't Tee Bobby's. The man who called in the 'shots fired' said there were three people in the car. But Amanda's boyfriend said only two men accosted him. Where was the other one? The boyfriend said he was tied up with a T-shirt. Why didn't he try to get away?" "I have no idea. Why don't you find out?" she said. I hesitated before I spoke again. "I have another problem. I can't see Tee Bobby as a killer." "Maybe it's because you want it both ways," she said. "Excuse me?" "Some people always need to feel good about themselves, usually at the expense of others. In this case at theexpense of a dead girl who was raped while she had a sock stuffed down her throat." I folded my newspaper and dropped it in the trash can. "Perry LaSalle is representing Tee Bobby," I said. "So?" I got up from my chair and closed the Venetian blinds on the corridor windows. "You hate the LaSalles, Barbara. I think you asked for this case," I said. "I don't have any feeling about the LaSalle family one way or another." "Your grandfather went to prison for old man Julian. That's how he got his job as a security guard on LaSalle's bridge." "Have the paperwork in my office by close of business. In the meantime, if you ever impugn my motives as a prosecutor again, I'll take you into civil court and fry your sorry ass for slander." She threw the door open and marched down the corridor toward the sheriff's office. A uniformed cop watched her sideways while he drank from the water fountain, his eyes glued on her posterior. He grinned sheepishly when he saw me looking at him.

  It was Friday afternoon and I didn't want to think anymore about Barbara Shanahan or a young girl who had probably been forced to stare into the barrel of a shotgun and wait helplessly while her executioner decided whether or not to pull the trigger. I drove south of town, down a dusty road, along a tree-lined waterway, to the house built by my father during the Depression. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke in the canopy of the live oaks, and up ahead I saw the dock and bait shop that I operated as a part-time business and a lavender Cadillac convertible parked by the boat ramp, which meant that my old Homicide partner, the bane of NOPD, the good-natured, totally irresponsible, fiercely loyal Clete Purcel, was back in New Iberia. He had dumped his cooler on a bait table at the end of the dock and was gutting a stringer of ice-flecked sac-a-lait and bream and big-mouth bass with a long, razor-edged knife that had no guard on the handle. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts and flip-flops and a Marine Corps utility cap. His whole body was oily with lotion and baked with sunburn, his body hair matted in gold curlicues on his massive arms and shoulders. I parked my pickup truck in the driveway to the house and walked across the road and down the dock, where Clete was now scaling his fish with a tablespoon and washing them under a faucet and placing them on a clean layer of ice in his cooler. "It looks like you had a pretty good day," I said. "If I can use your shower, I'll take you and Bootsie and Alafair to Bon Creole." He picked up a salted can of beer off the dock rail and watched me over the bottom of it while he drank. His hair was bleached by the sun, his green eyes happy, one eyebrow cut by a scar that ran across the bridge of his nose. "You just here for a fishing trip?" I asked. "I got a shitload of bail slaps to pick up for Nig and Willie. Plus Nig may have written a bond on a serial killer." I was tired and didn't want to hear about Clete's ongoing grief as a bounty hunter for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. I tried to look attentive, but my gaze started to wander toward the house, the baskets of impa-tiens swaying under the eaves of the gallery, my wife, Bootsie, weeding the hydrangea bed in the shade. "You listening?'' Clete said. "Sure," I replied. "So this is how we heard about the serial sex predator or killer or whatever the hell he is. No Duh Dolowitz got nailed trying to creep Fat Sammy Figorelli's skin parlor, but this time Nig says he's had it with No Duh and his half-baked capers, like putting dog shit in the sandwiches at a Teamsters convention or impersonating a chauffeur and driving away with the Calucci family's limo. "So No Duh calls up from central lockup and says Nig and Wee Willie are hypocrites because they wrote the bond on some dude who killed a couple of hookers in Seattle and Portland. "Nig asks No Duh how he knows this and No Duh goes, ' 'Cause one year ago I was sitting in a cell next to this perverted fuck while he was pissing and moaning about how he dumped these broads along riverbanks on the West Coast. This same pervert was also talking about two dumb New Orleans Jews who bought his alias and were writing his bond without running his sheet.' "But Nig's got scruples and doesn't like the idea he might have put a predator back
on the street. So he has me start going over every dirtbag he's written paper on for the last two years. So far I've checked out one hundred twenty or one hundred thirty names and I can't come up with anyone who fits the profile." "Why believe anything Dolowitz says? One of theGiacanos put dents in his head with a ball peen hammer years ago," I said. "That's the point. He's got something wrong with his brain. No Duh is a thief who never lies. That's why he's always doing time." "You're going to take us to Bon Creole?" I asked. "I said I was, didn't I?" "I'd really enjoy that," I said.

  But I would not be able to free myself that evening from the murder of Amanda Boudreau. I had just showered and changed clothes and was waiting on the gallery for Clete and Bootsie and Alafair to join me when Perry LaSalle's cream-yellow Gazelle, a replica of a 1929 Mercedes, turned off the road into our driveway. Before he could get out of his automobile, I walked down through the trees to meet him. The top was down on his automobile, and his sun-browned skin looked dark in the shade, his brownish-black hair tousled by the wind, his eyes bright blue, his cheeks pooled with color. He had given up his studies at a Jesuit seminary when he was twenty-one, for no reason he was ever willing to provide. He had lived among street people in the Bowery and wandered the West, working lettuce and beet fields, riding on freight cars with derelicts and fruit tramps, then had returned like the prodigal son to his family and studied law at Tulane. I liked Perry and the dignified manner and generosity of spirit with which he always conducted himself. He was a big man, at least six feet two, but he was never grandiose or assuming and was always kind to those less fortunate than he. But like many of us I felt Perry's story was infinitely more complex than his benign demeanor would indicate. "Out for a drive?" I said, knowing better. "I hear Battering Ram Shanahan thinks you're soft on the Amanda Boudreau investigation. I hear she wants to use a nail gun on your cojones," he-said. "News to me," I replied. "Her case sucks and she knows it." "Seen any good movies lately?" I asked. "Tee Bobby's innocent. He wasn't even at the murder scene." "His beer can was." "Littering isn't a capital crime." "It was good seeing you, Perry." "Come out to the island and try my bass pond. Bring Bootsie and Alafair. We'll have dinner." "I will. After the trial," I said. He winked at me, then drove down the road, the sunlight through the trees flicking like gold coins across the waxed surfaces of his automobile. I heard Clete walking through the leaves behind me. His hair was wet and freshly combed, the top buttons of his tropical shirt open on his chest. "Isn't that the guy who wrote the book about the Death House in Louisiana? The one the movie was based on?" he said. "That's the guy," I replied. Clete looked at my expression. "You didn't like the book?" he asked. "Two kids were murdered in a neckers' area up the Loreauville Road. Perry made the prosecutor's office look bad." "Why?" "I guess some people need to feel good about themselves," I answered.