The next Saturday was a festive day for New Iberia, featuring a citywide cleaning of the streets by volunteers, a free crawfish boil in City Park, and a sixteen-mile foot race that began with a grand assemblage of the runners under the trees by the recreation center. At 8 a.m. they took off, jogging down an asphalt road that meandered through the live oaks and out onto the street, their bodies hard and sinewy inside a golden tunnel of mist and sunlight that seemed to have been created especially for the young at heart.
They thundered past an art class that was sketching on the tables under the picnic shelters. Among the runners was every kind of person, the narcissistic and passionately athletic, the lonely and inept who loved any community ritual, and those who humbly ignored their limitations and were content simply to finish the race, even if last.
There was another group, too, whose psychology was less easily defined, whose normal pursuits separated them from their fellowmen but who sought membership in the crowd, perhaps to convince both others and themselves that they were made of the same stuff as the rest of us. On a gold-green morning, under oaks hung with Spanish moss, who would begrudge them their participation in a fine event that ultimately celebrated what was best in ourselves?
Jimmy Dean Styles wore a black spandex gym suit that looked like a shiny plastic graft on his skin. Three of his rappers ran at his side, their hair dyed orange or blue and purple, their eyebrows and noses pierced with jeweled rings. Behind them I saw the door-to-door magazine-and-encyclopedia-and-Bible salesman, Marvin Oates, a soggy sweatband crimped around his hair, his olive skin stretched as tightly as a lampshade on his ribs and vertebrae, his scarlet running shorts wrapped wetly on his loins, emphasizing the crack in his buttocks.
After the runners had streamed by the old brick fire-house onto a neighborhood side street, one member of the art class began to draw furiously on her sketch pad, her face bent almost to the paper, a grinding sound emanating from her throat.
"What's wrong, Rosebud?" the art teacher asked.
But the young black woman, whose name was Rosebud Hulin, didn't reply. Her charcoal pencil filled the page, then she dropped the pencil to the ground and began to hit the table with her fists, trembling all over.
After the race I drove home and showered, then returned to City Park with Alafair and Bootsie for the crawfish boil. The art teacher, who was a nun and a volunteer at the city library, found me at the picnic pavilion by the National Guard Armory, not far from the spot where years ago the man named Legion had opened a knife on a twelve-year-old boy.
"Would you take a walk with me?" she asked, motioning toward a stand of trees by the armory.
She was an attractive, self-contained woman in her sixties and not one to burden others with her concerns or to look for complexities that in the final analysis she believed human beings held no sway over. A large piece of art paper was rolled up in her hands. She smiled awkwardly. "What is it, Sister?" I said when we were alone.
"You know Rosebud Hulin?" she asked.
"Tee Bobby's twin sister?" I replied.
"She's an autistic savant. She can reproduce in exact detail a photograph or painting she's seen only once, maybe one she saw years ago. But she's never been able to create images out of her imagination. It's as though light goes from her eye through her arm onto the page."
"I'm not following you."
"This morning she drew this figure," the art teacher said, unrolling the charcoal drawing for me to see.
I stared down at a reclining female nude, the wrists crossed above the head, a crown of thorns fastened on the brow. The woman's mouth was open in a silent scream, like the figure in the famous painting by Munch. The eyes were oversize, elongated, wrapped around the head, filled with despair.
Two skeletal trees stood in the foreground, with branches that looked like sharpened pikes.
"The eyes are a little like a Modigliani, but Rosebud didn't re-create this from any painting or picture I ever saw," the art teacher said.
"Why are you bringing me this, Sister?"
She gazed at the smoke from cook fires drifting into the trees.
"I'm not sure. Or maybe I'm not sure I want to say. I had to take Rosebud into the rest room and wash her face. That gentle girl tried to hit me."
"Did she tell you why she drew the picture?"
"She always says the pictures she draws are put in her head by God. I think maybe this one came from somewhere else," the art teacher said. "Can I keep this?" I asked.
On Monday I called Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked to speak to Tee Bobby.
"He's at work," she said.
"Where?" I asked.
"The Carousel Club in St. Martinville."
"That's Jimmy Dean Styles's place. Styles told me he wasn't going to let Tee Bobby play there again."
"You ax where he work. I tole you. I said anyt'ing about music?"
I drove up the bayou to St. Martinville and parked in the lot behind the Carousel Club. The garbage piled against the back wall hummed with flies and reeked of dead shrimp. Tee Bobby was using a wide-bladed shovel to scoop up the rotted matter and slugs that oozed from a mound of split vinyl bags.
He was sweating profusely, his eyes like BBs when he looked at me.
"You're doing scut work for Jimmy Sty?" I said.
"Ain't no clubs want to hire me. Jimmy give me a job."
He slung a shovel-load of garbage into the back of a pickup truck His eyes were filled with a peculiar light, the irises jittering.
"You looked like you cooked your head, podna," I said.
"Cain't you leave me be, man?"
"I want to show you something."
I started to unroll his sister's drawing, but he speared his shovel into a swollen bag of garbage and went through the side door of the club. I used a pay phone at the grocery down the street and called the St. Martin Parish Sheriffs Department to let them know I was on their turf, then went inside the club. The chairs were stacked on the tables and a fat black woman was mopping the floor. Tee Bobby sat at the bar, his face in his hands, the streamers from an air-conditioning unit blowing above his head.
I flattened the sketch of the reclining nude on the bar.
"Rosebud drew this. Look at the crossed wrists, the fear and despair in the woman's eyes, the scream that's about to come from her mouth. What's that make you think of, Tee Bobby?" I said.
He stared down at the drawing and took a breath and wet his lips. Then he blew his nose on a handkerchief to hide the expression on his face.
"Perry LaSalle say I ain't got to talk wit' you," he said.
I clenched his wrist and flattened his hand on the paper.
"For just a second feel the pain and terror in that drawing, Tee Bobby. Look at me and tell me you don't know what we're talking about," I said.
He pressed his head down on his fists. His T-shirt was gray with sweat; his pulse was leaping in his throat.
"Why don't you just put a bullet in me?" he said.
"You got a meth problem, Tee Bobby? Somebody giving you crystal to straighten out the kinks?" I said.
He started to speak, then he saw a silhouette out of the corner of his eye. I didn't think his face could look sicker than it did, but I was wrong.
Jimmy Dean Styles walked from his office and crossed the dance floor and went behind the bar. He wore a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest and gray slacks that hung low on the smooth taper of his stomach. He opened a small refrigerator behind the bar and removed a container of coleslaw, then began eating it with a plastic fork, his eyes drifting casually to Rosebud's drawing. He tilted his head curiously.
"What you got, my man?" he asked.
"This is a police matter. I'd appreciate your not intruding," I said.
Styles chewed his food thoughtfully, his eyes focused out the open front door.
"Tee Bobby ain't did you nothing. Let the cat have some peace," he said.
"For a guy who busted him up on the oyster shells, you're a funny advocate," I said.
"Maybe we got our disagreements, but he's still my friend. Look, the man's coming down wit' the flu. Ain't he got enough misery?" Styles said.
I rolled up Rosebud's drawing. "I'll be around," I said.
"Oh, yeah, I know. I got a broken toilet that's the same way. No matter what I do, it just keep running out on the flo'," Styles said.
When I got back to the department, I went into the office of a plainclothes detective who worked Narcotics, his name was Kevin Dartez and he wore long-sleeved white shirts and narrow, knit ties and a pencil-thin black mustache. His younger sister had been what is called a rock queen, or crack whore, and had died of her addiction. Dartez's ferocity toward black dealers who pimped for white girls was a legend in south Louisiana law enforcement.
"You seen any crystal meth around?" I asked.
"Out-of-towners bring it into the French Quarter, That's about it so far," he replied, tilted back in his swivel chair, hands clasped behind his head.
"The Carousel Club in St. Martinville? I wonder if anyone's ever tossed that place. Who owns the Carousel, anyway?" I said.
"Say again?" Dartez said, sitting up straight in his:hair.
That afternoon Helen came into my office and sat on he corner of my desk and looked down at a yellow legal pad she had propped on her thigh.
"I've found three or four people who say they saw Tee Bobby with Amanda Boudreau. But it was always in a mblic place, like he'd see her and try to strike up a conversation," she said.
"You think they had some kind of secret relationship?" I asked.
"None I could find. I get the sense Tee Bobby was just a routine pain in the ass Amanda tried to avoid."
I dropped a paper clip I had been fiddling with on my desk blotter and rubbed my forehead.
"How do you think it's going to go?" I asked.
"The fact Tee Bobby and Amanda were seen together provides another explanation for Amanda's DNA being on Tee Bobby's watch cap. The right jury, he might skate."
"I think we need to start over," I said.
"Where?"
"Amanda's boyfriend," I replied.
After school hours we drove up the Teche to the little town of Loreauville. The pecan trees were in new leaf; a priest was watering his flowers in front of the Catholic church; kids were playing softball in a schoolyard. The moderate-size brick grocery that advertised itself as a supermarket, the saloon on the corner by the town's only traffic signal, the humped dark green shapes of the oaks along the bayou were out of a Norman Rockwell world of years ago. Down the main thoroughfare was an independently owned drive-in hamburger joint, the parking lot sprinkled with teenagers.
In their midst was Amanda's boyfriend, whose name was Roland Chatlin, in starched khakis and a green and white Tulane T-shirt, bouncing a golf ball off the side of the building. When Helen and I approached him, he was drinking a soda pop and talking to a friend and, amazingly, seemed not to recognize us. All the kids in the parking lot were white.
"Remember us?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah, you," he said, chewing gum, his eyes lighting now.
"Step over here, please," I said.
"Sure," he replied, blowing out his breath, slipping his hands into his pockets.
"Your inability to help us is causing us all kinds of problems, Roland. You tell us two black guys in ski masks murdered Amanda, but that's as far as we get," I said.
"Sir?" he said.
"You've got no idea who they were. You can't tell us what their voices sounded like. You can't even tell us how tall they were. I've got the feeling maybe you don't want us to catch them," I said.
"Look at us, not at the ground," Helen said. "Your hands were tied with nothing but your shirt. You could have gotten loose if you'd wanted to, couldn't you? But you were too scared. Maybe you even begged. Maybe you told these guys their identity was safe. When people fear for their lives, they do all kinds of things they're ashamed of later, Roland. But it was pretty hard to just lie there and listen to them rape your girl, wasn't it?" I said.
"Maybe it's time to get it off your chest, kid," Helen said.
"Have you ever seen Tee Bobby Hulin play in a local club?" I asked.
"Yes, sir. I mean, I don't remember."
He had dark hair and light skin, arms without muscular definition, narrow hips, and a feminine mouth. Involuntarily he felt for a religious medal through the cloth of his shirt.
"Out at the crime scene you called them niggers. You don't care for black people, Roland?" I said.
"I was mad when I said that."
"I don't blame you. Which guy shot her?" I said.
"I don't know. I didn't think they were gonna-"
"They weren't gonna what?" I said.
"Nothing. You got me mixed up. That's why you're here. My daddy says I don't have to talk to y'all anymore."
Then his face darkened, as though the politeness toward adults that was mandatory in his world had been replaced by other instincts.
"They shove people around at school. They take the little kids' lunch money. They carry guns in their cars. Why don't you go after them?" he said vaguely, sweeping his hand at the air.
"Hear this, Roland," Helen said. "If you know who these guys are and you're lying to us, I'm going to find the shotgun that killed Amanda and jam it up your ass and pull the trigger myself. Tell that to your old man."
Two nights later the air was cool and dry, and the cypress trees in the swamp bloomed with heat lightning. Clete came into the bait shop as I was closing up. I smelled him before I saw him.
He helped himself to a water glass off a wall shelf and sat down heavily at the counter and unscrewed the cap from a pint bottle of bourbon wrapped in a brown-paper sack. A noxious fog, an odor of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and beer sweat, begin to fill the shop like a living presence. Clete poured four fingers of whiskey in his glass and drank it slowly, watching me turn the electric fan on an overhead shelf in his direction. The lid of his left eye was swollen, a bruise like a small blue mouse in the crow's-feet at the corner.
"You got a reason for trying to blow me out the door?" he asked.
"Nope. How you doin', Cletus?"
"Joe Zeroski is back in town. At my motor court with Zerelda Calucci and half the greaseballs in New Orleans. Last night I'm trying to take a nap and this collection of shitbags are cooking sausages on a hibachi ten feet from my window and playing a Tony Bennett tape loud enough to be heard in Palermo. So I make the mistake of talking to them like they're human beings, asking them politely to dial it down a few notches so I can get some sleep.
"What do I get? Nothing, like I'm not there. I go, 'Look, just face your stereo the other way, okay?' One guy says, 'Hey, Purcel, I got your ten-inch frank right here. You want it with mustard?' and grabs his flopper while the other greaseballs laugh.
"So I go back inside, take a shower, put on fresh clothes, comb my hair, give these assholes every chance to go somewhere else. When I go outside, they're still there, except now Zerelda Calucci is sitting at the picnic table with them, the tops of her ta-tas sticking out like beach balls, her shorts rolled up so tight they almost split when she crosses her legs.
"So I walk over and ask her out for a late dinner, figuring that ought to put the lasagna through the fan if nothing else won't. She sits there, scraping the label off a beer bottle with her thumbnail, rolling it into little balls, then goes, 'I don't mind.'
"I try to use the wet dream of the Mafia to provoke these guys, and instead she agrees to have dinner with me. The greaseballs know better than to say dick about it, either. I put on my sports coat and back my convertible around to pick her up. Except here comes Perry LaSalle in his Gazelle. Zerelda gets this look on her face like she's creaming in her pants and I'm back in my room, watching TV, dinner date canceled, LaSalle and Zerelda over in her room, blinds drawn."
He finished his glass of whiskey and opened a can of beer and broke a raw egg in the glass and poured the beer on top of it. He took a drink and stared out the window into the darkness, an unfocused light in his eyes.
"So good riddance," I said.
"I did some checking on that dude. You know why he didn't finish at the Jesuit seminary? He couldn't keep it in his pants."
"What are you talking about, Clete?"
"He belongs to Sexaholics Anonymous. The guy's a gash hound. Why is it everybody in this town has some kind of problem? I don't know why I keep coming over here."
I turned off the outside floodlamps, and the bayou went dark and the tops of the cypresses were green and ruffling in the moonlight.
"Where'd you get die mouse?" I asked.
"I got up at four in the morning and walked into a door," he replied.
At the office the next morning I glanced at the state news section of the Times Picayune and saw an Associated Press article describing the homicide of a waitress outside Franklin, Louisiana. Her name was Ruby Gravano, a member of that group of marginal miscreants I had known for years in New Orleans, what I called the walking wounded, whose criminal deeds became a kind of incremental suicide, as though they were doing penance for sins committed in a previous incarnation. The body had been found by a roadside, not far from the banks of Bayou Teche, the clothes torn off her back. The article described her injuries as massive, which usually meant the details could not be published in a family newspaper.
I started out my door toward Helen's office and almost collided into Clete Purcel. He was dressed in a tan suit and a powder-blue shirt with a rolled collar and a tie with a horse painted on it and shined cordovan loafers. His cheeks were shiny with aftershave lotion.
"Have a cup of coffee with me. I'm a little wired right now," he said.
"Got a lot of work to do, Cletus," I said.
"Fill me in on this Shanahan broad."
"What?"
"I asked her out to lunch. I told her I had some helpful information on an armed robber she's prosecuting."
"Can't you let one day go by without stirring something up?"
He snuffed down in his nose and nodded to a uniformed deputy passing in the corridor. The deputy did not acknowledge him.
"I'm sorry. I'll catch you another time," Clete said.
"Come inside," I said.
I closed the office door behind us. Before he could speak, I said, "Remember Ruby Gravano?"
"A hooker, used to live in a flophouse by Lee Circle?"
"She was killed last night. Maybe beaten to death."
"I heard she was out of the life. You talk to her pimp?" he said.
"Beeler something?"
"Beeler Grissum. I think she married him," Clete said.
"Thanks, Cletus."
He opened the office door. "I'll let you know how my lunch came out. This is a class broad, Dave." He blew his breath on his palm and sniffed it. "Oh, man, I smell like; puke. I got to brush my teeth."
The sheriffs wife, who was a mild and genteel woman, happened to be passing in the corridor. She shut and opened her eyes, as though she were riding in an airplane that had just hit an air pocket.
Helen Soileau and I checked out a cruiser and drove the thirty miles down to Franklin, then stopped by the sheriffs department and got directions to Ruby Gravano's, which turned out to be a one-story, weathered, late-Victorian frame house, with ventilated window shutters and high windows and a wide gallery hung with flower baskets. An oak tree that must have been two hundred years old grew in the side yard, a broken rope swing dangling in the dust.
Ruby's husband, Beeler Grissum, who was from north Georgia or South Carolina, sat on the steps, cracking peanuts and flicking them to a turkey in the yard. Two or three years ago, in a Murphy scam gone bad, a John had delivered a martial-arts kick into Beeler's face that had broken his neck Today his body had the contours of a sack of potatoes, his chin held erect by a leather and steel neck brace, so that his head looked like a separate part of his anatomy positioned inside a cage. His hair was dyed platinum, like a professional wrestler's, combed straight back on his scalp. He rotated his upper torso as we approached the steps, a vague recognition swimming into his face.
"Sorry about your wife, Beeler," I said.
He removed a peanut from the sack in his hand, then offered the sack to us.
"No, thanks," I said. "The sheriff thinks maybe Ruby was thrown from a car."
"He wasn't there. But if that's what he says," Beeler said.
As I remembered him, he had been a carnival man before he was a pimp and had lived most of his life off the computer. His speech was flat, adenoidal, laconic, so lacking in joy or passion or remorse or emotion of any kind that the listener felt Beeler did not care enough about others or the world or even his own fate to lie.
"Two women have been murdered recently in Iberia Parish. Maybe Ruby's death is connected to them," I said.
He looked into space and seemed to think about my words. He scratched a place under his eye with one fingernail.
"It ain't her death brought you here then. It's the cases you ain't been able to solve?" he said.
"I wouldn't put it that way," I said.
"Don't matter. It's my fault," he said.
"I don't follow you," I said.
"We had a fight. She took off in my truck. Sometimes she'd go to a colored blues joint, sometimes to the casino on the reservation. She kept all her tips in a fruit jar. She had a thing for poker machines."
"Was she involved with another man?" Helen asked.
"She was out of the life. She been a one-man woman since. Most ex-whores are. Don't be talking about her like that," he replied.
"Can you let us have a picture of your wife?" Helen asked.
"I reckon."
He went into the house and returned with a photograph of Ruby and himself that was tucked with several others inside a gold-embossed Bible. He handed it to Helen. Ruby's hair was full and black, but the gauntness of her face made her hair look like a wig on a mannequin.
"Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain't gonna catch him," he said.
"You want to explain that?" Helen said.
"I just did," Beeler replied.
He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying good-bye.
That night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house.
A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road.
"You looking for somebody?" I asked.
"You," he said. "The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor."
He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear.
"Mistake to come around my house, Legion," I said.
"That's what you t'ink," he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull.
I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather-sheathed darning sock.
"I'm a police officer," I heard myself say.
"Don't matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain't gonna want to tell nobody about it," he replied.
He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist's drill hollowing into marrow.
He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand.
I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wet newspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn't have raised my arms to ward off the blow.
He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me.
"How you feel?" he asked.
He waited in the silence for my reply.
"I'll ax you again," he said.
"Go fuck yourself," I whispered.
He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his tongue inside. I could taste tobacco and decayed food and bile in his saliva and smell the road dust and body heat and dried sweat in his shirt.
"Go tell them all what I done to you. How I whipped you like a dog and used you for my bitch. How it feel, boy? How it feel?" he said.