Friday night I experienced what recovering alcoholics refer to as drunk dreams, nocturnal excursions into the past that represent either a desire to get back on the dirty boogie or a fear of it. In my dream I visited a saloon on Magazine Street in New Orleans, where I stood at a mirrored bar with two inches of Beam in a glass and a long-necked Jax on the side. I drank as I did before I entered Alcoholics Anonymous, knocking back doubles with the careless disregard of a man eating a razor blade, confident that this time I would not wake trembling in the morning, filled with rage and self-hatred and an insatiable desire for more drink.
Then I was in another saloon, this one located in an old colonial hotel in Saigon, one with wood-bladed ceiling fans and ventilated shutters on the windows and marble columns and potted palms set between tables that were covered with white linen. I wore a freshly pressed uniform and sat in a tall chair at a teakwood bar next to a friend, an Englishman who owned an export-import company there and who had been an intelligence agent in Hanoi when the Viet Minh, later named the Viet Cong, were America's allies. He wore a white suit and a Panama hat and a trimmed white mustache, and was always kind and deferential toward those who thought they could succeed as colonials where he could not. Aside from his flushed complexion, the enormous quantities of scotch he drank seemed to have little influence on him.
He tapped my glass with his, his blue eyes sorrowful, and said, "You're such a nice young officer. A shame you and your chaps have to die here. Oh, well, give the little buggers hell."
Then it was night and I was looking out on a sea of windswept elephant grass lit by the phosphorous halos of pistol flares. Inside the grass toy men in conical straw hats and black pajamas, armed with captured American ordnance and French and Japanese junk, tripped a wire strung with C-rat cans. The Zippo-tracks cut loose, with a mewing sound like a kitten's, arcing liquid flame over the grass, filling the sky with voices and a smell that no amount of whiskey ever rinses from the soul.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and pushed the sleep out of my eyes. The window curtains were blowing in the wind, and the clouds above the swamp were as black as soot, heat lightning ballooning inside them, and I could smell a trash fire in a coulee and hear the hysterical shrieking sound of a nutria calling to its mate.
I went into the bathroom and opened a bottle of aspirin and poured eight into my hand, then ate them off my palm, biting down on the acidic taste of each, cupping water into my mouth, taking the rush just as if I had eaten a handful of white speed.
I lay back down on top of the sheets, a pillow over my face, but did not sleep again until dawn.
It was Saturday morning and I drove to Morgan City and searched the city newspaper's morgue for an account of a homicide involving the man some called Legion Guidry. It wasn't hard to find. On a weekday night in December of 1966 a freelance writer named William O'Reilly, age thirty-nine, of New York City, had acted belligerent in a bar down by the shrimp docks. When asked to leave, he had pulled a pistol on the bartender. The bartender, one Legion Guidry, had tried to disarm him. William O'Reilly was shot twice, then had staggered into the parking lot, where he died.
The story did not run until two days after the death of the victim and appeared on the second page of the newspaper. The story stated that William O'Reilly had been unemployed for several years and had been dismissed from both a newspaper and a university teaching job for alcohol-related problems.
I turned off the microfilm scanner and looked out the window at the palm trees and rooftops of Morgan City. I could see the bridges over the wide sweep of the Atchafalaya River and the shrimp boats and bust-head saloons down by the waterfront and the dead cypresses in the chain of bays that formed a deep-water channel into the Gulf of Mexico. But to the denizens of America's criminal subculture, Morgan City was more than a piece of Jamaica sawed loose from the Caribbean. It had always been the place to go to if you were on the run and needed a new identity, access to dope, whores, foreign ports, and money that was not on the record. What better place to murder a worrisome alcoholic writer from New York and get away with it, I thought.
That afternoon Clete Purcel came into the bait shop and rented a boat. I had not seen him since he had been released from jail.
"You want to talk about anything?" I asked. "About getting put in the bag with psychopaths like Frankie Dogs? Not really," he said.
"I was going to ask you if you'd had any contact with Legion Guidry."
His face became vague, then he yawned and looked at his watch. "Wow, the fish are waiting," he said.
He loaded his tackle box and cooler and spinning rod and himself into a narrow aluminum outboard and roared down the bayou, splitting the water in a yellow trough behind him. He returned just before dark, sunburned, his face dilated from drinking beer all afternoon, an eleven-pound large-mouth bass iced down in the cooler, the treble hooks of the Rapala still buried deep in its throat.
I heard him scaling and scraping out his fish under a faucet on the dock, then he entered the bait shop and washed his hands and face with soap at a sink in back and helped himself to a sandwich off the shelf and a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter, his eyes clear now. He counted the money out of his wallet for the sandwich and coffee, then lost his concentration and knitted his fingers in front of him.
"I need to put my schlong in a lockbox," he said.
"You're talking about your involvement with Zerelda?"
"I can't believe I was in a cell with Frankie Dogs. He was a bodyguard for one of the guys who probably killed John Kennedy. It's like standing next to a disease."
"Go back to New Orleans for a while."
"That's where all these guys live."
"So pull the plug with Zerelda."
"Yeah," he said vaguely, looking into space, puffing out the air in one cheek, then the other. "I think she's still got the hots for Perry LaSalle, anyway. I guess he poked her a few times, then decided to zip up his equipment. Zerelda says he did the same thing with Barbara Shanahan."
I busied myself at the cash register, then carried out a bucket of water that had drained from the pop cooler and threw it across one of the bait tables. When I came back inside, Clete was looking at me, his face flat.
"You don't want to hear about other people's sex lives?" he said.
"Not particularly."
"Well, you'd better hear this, because this guy LaSalle has thumbtacks in his head and makes a full-time career of finding reasons to jam boards up everybody's ass except his own.
"Barbara and Zerelda used to know each other when Barbara and LaSalle were at Tulane together. Barbara wouldn't have anything to do with LaSalle, because LaSalle's family let Barbara's grandfather do time that should have been theirs. Then one night outside a law-school party on St. Charles, LaSalle saw these gang-bangers tearing up two Vietnamese kids. LaSalle waded into about six of them, so they stomped him into marmalade instead of the Vietnamese.
"Barbara took LaSalle home and cleaned up his cuts and fed him soup and, guess what, they end up doing the horizontal bop.
"Guess what again? LaSalle comes around a few more times for some more boom-boom, then turns her off like she doesn't exist."
"This means he has thumbtacks in his head?" I asked.
"A guy who dumps a woman like Barbara Shanahan? Either he's got shit for brains or he's a closet bone-smoker."
"You called her a woman instead of a broad," I said. Clete raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, I guess I did," he said.
The phone rang. When I got finished with the call, Clete was gone. I caught him at his car, out by the boat ramp.
"The other day the sheriff told me somebody slashed Legion Guidry's truck tires. You were seen in the neighborhood," I said.
"That's a heartbreaking story," he said.
"Stay out of it, Cletus."
"The show is just getting started, big mon," he replied, and drove away.
The following Monday I drove down East Main, past the antebellum and gingerbread homes along the Teche and the shady lawns scattered with the bloom of azalea bushes. I parked by the Shadows, where a tourist bus was unloading, and crossed the street and entered a two-story Victorian house that had been remodeled into the law offices of Perry LaSalle. It was like entering a monument to the past.
Three secretaries sat behind computers in the front office, phones ringing, a fax machine pumping laser-printed correspondence into a basket, but these concessions to modern times were clearly overwhelmed in significance by an enormous glass-encased, sun-faded Confederate battle flag that had been carried by members of the 8th Louisiana Volunteers, its cloth rent by grapeshot or minnie balls, the names Manassas Junction, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Cross Keys, Malvern Hill, Chantilly, and Gettysburg inked into brown patches that were hand-stitched along the flag's border. Oil paintings of LaSalles hung over the fireplace and between the high windows. A Brown Bess musket used by one of them at the Battle of New Orleans was propped on the mantelpiece, a framed letter of gratitude written to Perry's ancestor by Andrew Jackson resting on the flintlock mechanism.
But it was not the LaSalles' historical memorabilia that captured my attention. Through the window I saw a tall man backing a fire-engine-red pickup truck out the driveway. He wore a flower-print shirt and a straw hat, with the brim slanted over his forehead, but I could see the vertical furrows in his face, like those on a prune.
The secretary told me I could go upstairs to Perry's office.
"You look a little battered. What happened?" Perry said from behind his desk.
"Bad day on the job. You know how it is. Who was that backing his truck out your driveway?"
Perry gazed out the window at the traffic passing on the street. "Oh, that fellow?" he said casually. "That's Legion, the guy you were asking about once before."
"He's your client?"
"I didn't say that."
"Then what's he doing here?"
"None of your business."
I sat down without being asked.
"You know the name William O'Reilly?" I asked.
"No."
"He was a writer from New York. Legion shot him to death outside a bar in Morgan City."
Perry picked up a pen and rotated it in his fingers, men dropped it back on his desk. His office shelves were filled with law and historical books and leather-bound biographies of the classical world. A photograph of the legendary Cajun musician Iry Lejeune hung on the wall. An old canvas golf bag stuffed with mahogany drivers stood in the corner like a reminder of an earlier, more leisurely time.
"Legion's a leftover from a bygone era. I can't change what he is or what he's done," Perry said. "Sometimes he needs money. I give it to him."
"I had a recent encounter with this man. I think he's evil. I don't mean bad. I mean evil, in the strictest theological sense."
Perry shook his head. His brownish-black hair was untrimmed and curly at the back of his neck, his eyes deeply blue inside his tanned face. "I thought I'd heard it all," he said.
"Beg your pardon?"
"Here's an old man, an illiterate Cajun, who is as much victim as he is victimizer, and you make him out to be the acolyte of Satan."
"Why is it I always have the sense you glow with blue fire, while the rest of us bumble our way through the moral wilderness?" I said.
"You really know how to go for the throat, Dave."
"Next time you see Legion, ask him why a police officer would spit in his food," I said, and got up to go.
"Somebody spit in his food? You?" Perry put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars. He laughed to himself. "You're a heck of a guy, Dave. By the way, Tee Bobby Hulin passed a he detector test. He didn't rape or shoot Amanda Boudreau."
That afternoon I met Clete Parcel for coffee at McDonald's on East Main.
"So what?" he said. "You get the right polygraph expert, you get the right answers. No Duh Dolowitz always said he could throw the machine off by scrunching his toes."
"Maybe I've helped set up an innocent man."
"If they're not guilty for one caper, they're guilty for another. Innocent people don't leave their DNA on the person of a murder victim. That kid probably should have been poured out with the afterbirth, anyway."
I finished my coffee and watched a group of black kids dribbling a basketball down the sidewalk under an oak tree. Clete began to relate another detailed account of his ongoing problems with Zerelda Calucci. He caught the look on my face.
"What, you got to be someplace?" he asked.
"To tell you the truth-"
"I'll make it fast. Last night I'm grilling a steak with her on the little patio by her cottage, trying to find the right words to use, you know, so I can kind of ease on out of what I've gotten myself into without getting hit with a flowerpot. But she keeps brushing against me, pulling the meat fork out of my hand and flipping the steak like I'm a big kid who doesn't know what he's doing, smoothing my shirt on my shoulders, humming a little tune under her breath.
"Then for no reason she puts her arms around my neck and pushes her stomach up against me and plants one on my mouth, and suddenly I'm sort of in an awkward manly state again and I'm thinking maybe there's no need to toss our situation over the gunnels all at once.
"Just when I'm about to suggest we move our operation indoors I hear somebody behind us and I turn around and there's that hillbilly Bible salesman again, dressed in a white sports coat with a red carnation and his hat in his hand. He goes, 'I dint know if you found the Bible and the rose I left for you.'
"Zerelda goes, 'Oh, that was so sweet.'
"So of course I step in my own shit and say, 'Yeah, thanks for coming around. We'd invite you to have supper with us, but you've probably already eaten, so why don't you come back another time?'
"Zerelda goes, 'Clete, I don't believe your rudeness.'
"I say, 'Sorry. Stay and eat. Maybe if I roast some potatoes there'll be enough for three.'
"She says, 'Well, just eat by yourself, Clete Purcel.' And the two of them walk on down the street to the ice cream parlor. I've gotten blown out of the water twice by a meltdown who pulls a suitcase full of magazines and Bibles around town on a roller skate. My self-esteem is on a level with spit on the sidewalk."
"It sounds like you're off the hook with Zerelda. Count your blessings," I said.
He rubbed his face against his hand. I could hear his whiskers against his skin.
"After Zerelda and Gomer are gone, Frankie Dogs comes up to me and says, 'I seen that guy before.'
"I ask him where, like at that point I really care.
"Frankie Dogs says, 'He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the niggers up Tchoupitoulas. The vacuum cleaners cost four hundred dollars, but they were Korean junk. He'd talk the niggers into signing a loan they'd never get out of.'
"I say, 'Thanks for telling me that, Frankie.'
"Frankie goes, 'He was around three or four times looking for Zerelda. Joe don't want him here. You ain't got to worry about him kicking you out of the sack.'"
Clete blew air out his nose and picked up his coffee cup and stared out the window, as though he couldn't believe the implication that the success of his love life was dependent upon the Mafia's intercession.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"Nothing. I moved out of the motor court. Why is stuff like this always happening to me?" he said.
Search me, I thought.
The next day I tried to concentrate on the investigation into the murder of Linda Zeroski. But the pimps and crack dealers and street whores who had been Linda's friends all stonewalled me and I got absolutely nowhere. I had another problem, too. I could not get the man named Legion off my mind. In the midst of a conversation or a meal, I would see his mouth leaning down to mine and smell the tobacco odor of his breath, the dried testosterone on his clothes, and I would have to break from whatever I was doing and walk away from the curious stares I received from others.
The first story I had heard about Legion had been told to me by Batist's sister. I remembered her describing Legion's arrival on Poinciana Island and the ex-convict who had taken one look at the new overseer and leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles into New Iberia, never to return, even for his pay.
I made a phone call to a retired Angola gun-bull by the name of Buttermilk Strunk, then signed out of the office and drove to a small pepper farm and tin-roofed white frame house not far from the entrance of the prison. Buttermilk was not a rotund, happy, doughlike creature, as his name might suggest. Instead, he was one of those for whom psychiatrists and theologians do not have an adequate category.
It is difficult to describe in a convincing way the kind of place Angola was in the Louisiana of my youth, primarily because no society wishes to believe itself capable of the kinds of abuse that occur when we allow our worst members, usually psychopaths themselves, to have sway over the powerless.
For the inmates on the Red Hat gang, which was assigned to the levee along the river, it was double time and hit-it-and-git-it from sunrise to sunset, or what the guards called "cain't-see to cain't-see." The guards on the Red Hat gang arbitrarily shot and killed and buried troublesome convicts without ever missing a beat in the work schedule. The bones of those inmates still rest, unmarked, under the buttercups and the long green roll of the Mississippi levee.
The sweatboxes were iron cauldrons of human pain set in concrete on Camp A, where Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Welch did their time. Convicts who passed out on work details were stretched on anthills. Trusty guards, mounted on horseback and armed with chopped-down double-barreled shotguns, had to serve the time of any inmate they let escape. There was a high attrition rate among convicts who tried to run.
I sat at the kitchen table with Buttermilk Strunk, the curtains puffing in the breeze. His face was like a pie plate, his skin almost hairless, his eyes baby-blue, so pure in color they seemed incapable of moral doubt. His breath wheezed inside his massive chest, and he smelled of soap and talcum powder and the whiskey he drank from a jelly glass. His shirt was scissored off below his nipples, and the place where his liver was located looked as if a football had been sewn beneath the skin there. After he had retired from the prison, he had worked for five years for the state police. Whenever a convict ran, the state always called upon Buttermilk Strunk to bring him back. Buttermilk killed eight men and never returned a living convict to the prison system.
"Remember a guard named Legion, Cap? Maybe last name of Guidry?" I asked.
His eyes left mine uncertainly, then came back. "He worked at Camp I. That's when it was half female," he replied.
"Know much about him?"
"They run him off. Some of the colored girls said he was molesting them."
"That's all you recall about him?"
"Why you want to know?"
"I've had trouble with him."
He started to take a drink from his jelly glass, then set it down. He got up from the table and poured his glass in the sink and rinsed it under the faucet.
"Did I say something wrong?" I asked.
"You read much of Scripture?"
"A bit"
"Then you seen his name before. Don't you drag that man into my life and don't you tell nobody I was talking about him, either. You best be on your way, Mr. Robicheaux," he said, his mouth puckered, his eyes steadfastly avoiding mine.
The next day Barbara Shanahan showed me a side to her character that made me reconsider all my impressions about her.