She had gone to bed early, then had been awakened near midnight by a dream of a hard-bodied bird thudding against her window glass. She sat up in bed and looked out the back window but saw only the tops of banana trees and the green slope of her yard that dead-ended against the rear wall of a nineteenth-century brick warehouse. Then she heard the sound again.
She put on a robe and looked out the front window on Bayou Teche and the dark cluster of oaks and the gray stone presence of the ancient convent across the water. She realized the sound came from below her feet, down in the garage, where she parked her car.
She pulled out the drawer to her desk and removed a.25-caliber automatic. In the kitchen she opened the door to the enclosed stairwell that led downstairs and switched on the light. The garage door was shut, locked electronically from the inside, and her tan Honda four-door gleamed softly under the overhead light, its surfaces waxed and immaculately clean. Her ten-speed bicycle, her snow skis and alpine rock-climbing equipment she took to Colorado and Montana on vacation were all placed neatly on hooks and wall shelves, her nylon backpacks and winter jackets glowing with all the colors of the rainbow.
But as she descended the stairs she could feel a presence that didn't belong there, a violation of the fresh white paint on the garage walls, the cement floor that did not have a drop of oil on it, the cleanliness and order that always seemed to define the environment Barbara chose to live in. She smelled an odor, like unwashed hair, bayou water, clothing that had started to rot. A window on the side wall had been pried open, the wall marked with black scuffs from someone's shoes or boots.
She moved around the front of her car and under the window saw a shape curled inside the tarp she used to cover her vegetable garden when there was frost.
She pulled back the slide on the.25 and released it, snicking the small round off the top of the magazine into the chamber.
"If you like, I can just shoot through the canvas. Tell us what your decision is," she said.
Tee Bobby Hulin uncovered his face and pushed himself up on his palms, his back against the wall. His eyes looked scalded; his hair was like dirty string. He wore a pullover, a moth-holed black sweater that emanated an eye-watering stench.
"What in the world do you think you're doing?" Barbara asked.
"I ain't got no place to go. You got to hep me, Miss Barbara," he said.
"Are you retarded? I'm the prosecutor in your case. I'm going to ask that you be sentenced to death."
He covered his head with his arms and pressed his face down on the tops of his knees. His left forearm was perforated with needle tracks that had become infected and looked like a tangle of knotted red wire under his skin.
"What are you shooting?" she asked.
"Speedballs, smack straight up, sometimes smack and whiskey, sometimes I ain't sure. There's a bunch of us cook with the same spoon, shoot with the same works sometimes."
"I'm going to have you picked up. I suggest when you're allowed to use the phone, you contact your attorney. Then you have him call me."
"I used to cut your grass. I run errands for your granddaddy. Perry LaSalle don't care about black people, Miss Barbara. He care about hisself. They gonna kill my gran'mama. They'll kill my sister, too."
"Who's going to kill them?"
He balled both his fists and squeezed them into his temples. "The day I say that, that's the day my gran'mama and sister die. Ain't no place to go wit' it, Miss Barbara," Tee Bobby said.
Barbara released the magazine from the butt of her.25, ejected the round from the chamber, and dropped the magazine and the pistol into the pocket of her robe.
"How many times did you fix today?" she asked.
"T'ree. No, four."
"Get up," she said.
"What for?"
"You're going to take a shower. You stink."
She lifted him by one arm from the floor, then pushed him ahead of her up the stairs.
"You gonna dime me?" he asked.
"Right now I recommend you shut your mouth." She shoved him inside the bathroom door. "I have some of my brother's clothes here. I'm going to throw them and a paper bag inside. When you finish showering, put your dirty things in the paper bag. Then wipe down the shower and the floor and put the soiled towel in the basket. If you ever break into my house again, I'm going to blow your head off."
She shut the bathroom door and punched in a number on the telephone.
"This is Barbara Shanahan. Here's your chance to prove what a great guy you are," she said into the receiver.
"It's one in the morning," I said.
"You want to pick up Tee Bobby at my apartment or would you like him to sweat out a four-balloon load in a jail cell?" she asked.
When I got to Barbara's, Tee Bobby was sitting in the living room, dressed in oversize khakis and a gold and purple LSU T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He kept sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.
"They sent you?" he said.
"Go down to my truck and wait there," I said.
"Detox ain't open. What you up to?" he said.
"I'm about to throw you down the stairs," Barbara said.
After Tee Bobby was gone, she told me everything that had happened.
"Why didn't you have the city cops pick him up?" I asked.
"This case has too many question marks in it," she replied.
"You have doubts about his guilt?"
"I didn't say that. Others were involved. That dead girl deserves better than what she's getting."
Her terry-cloth robe was cinched above her hips. Even in her slippers she was slightly taller than I. In the soft light her freckles looked like they had been feather-dusted on her skin. Her hair was dark red, and she lifted a lock of it off her brow and for just a moment reminded me of a high school girl caught unawares in a camera's lens.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" she asked.
"No reason."
"You taking Tee Bobby to his grandmother's?"
"I thought I'd cuff him to a train track," I said.
A grin started to break at the corner of her mouth.
Tee Bobby was sitting in the passenger seat of my truck when I got downstairs. He had vomited on the gravel and the foulness and density of his breath filled the cab of the truck. His hands were pressed between his legs, his back shivering.
"Are your grandmother and sister in harm's way, Tee Bobby?" I asked before starting the engine.
"I ain't saying no more. I was sick up there. I couldn't keep my thoughts straight."
"Even if you beat the charges, where do you think all this will end?"
"Gonna be back playing my gig."
"You want me to drop you somewhere you can fix?"
We were on the drawbridge over the Teche. I could hear the tires on the steel grid in the silence.
"I ain't got no money," he answered.
"What if I gave you some?"
"You'd do that? I'd really appreciate that. I'll pay you back, too. There's a joint off Loreauville Road. I just need to flatten out the kinks, then maybe join some kind of program."
"I don't think there's a lot of real hope for you, Tee Bobby."
"Oh, man, what you doin' to me?"
"I can't get Amanda Boudreau out of my mind. I see her in my sleep. Does she bother you at all?" I said.
"Amanda hurt me, man, but it wasn't me shot her." His voice was squeezed in his throat, his eyes wet.
"Hurt you how?"
"Made like we couldn't have no kind of relationship. She say it was 'cause I was so much older. But I knowed it was 'cause I'm black."
"You want to come down to the department and make a statement?"
He tried to open the truck door, even though I was up on the Loreauville Road now, speeding past a rural slum by the four corners. I reached across the seat and pulled the door shut, then hit him on the side of the face with my elbow.
"You want to kill yourself, do it on your own time," I said.
He cupped one hand over his ear and cheek, then he began to shake, as though his bones were disconnected.
"I'm gonna be sick. I got to fix, man," he said.
I drove him out in the country to the home of a black minister who ran a shelter for alcoholics and homeless men. When I left, heading up the dirt track toward the highway, the sky was still black, bursting with all the constellations, the pastures sweet with the smell of grass and horses and night-blooming flowers.
It was one of those moments when you truly thank all the spiritual powers of the universe you were spared the fate that could have been yours.
My partner, Helen Soileau, was eating outside at the McDonald's on East Main later the same day when she saw Marvin Oates towing his suitcase filled with his wares up East Main, his powder-blue, long-sleeved shirt damp at the armpits. He paused in the shade of a live oak in front of the old Trappey's bottling plant and wiped his face, then continued on to the McDonald's, took his sack lunch and a thermos out of his suitcase, and began eating at a stone table, outside, under the trees.
An unshaved man with jowls like a St. Bernard was eating at another table a few feet away. He picked up his hamburger and fries and sat down next to Marvin without being invited, sweeping crumbs off the table, flattening a napkin on the stone, knocking over Marvin's thermos. Marvin righted his thermos but remained hunched over his sandwich, his eyes riveted on a neutral spot ten inches in front of his nose.
"You bring your own lunch to a restaurant?" the unshaved man asked.
"I don't know you," Marvin said.
"Yeah, you do. They call me Frankie Dogs. Some people say it's because I look like a dog. But that ain't true. I used to race greyhounds at Biscayne Dog Track. So the people I worked for started calling me Frankie Dogs. You like greyhound racing?"
"I don't gamble."
"Yeah, you do. You're trying to put moves on Zerelda Calucci. That's a big gamble, my friend. One you ain't gonna win. Look at me when I'm talking to you."
"I dint hear Miss Zerelda say that."
"Take the shit out of your mouth. You got a speech defect? Here, I'll give you the short version. Joe Zeroski don't want no peckerwood magazine salesman coming around his niece. You do it again, I'll be paying you a visit."
Marvin nodded solemnly, as though agreeing.
"Good man," Frankie said, and got up from the table and patted Marvin on the back. "I'll tell Joe we don't got no problem. You have a good day." Frankie started to walk away.
"You forgotta your Bigga Mac," Marvin said into the dead space in front of him.
Frankie stopped, straightening his shoulders above the enormous breadth of his stomach. He walked back to the table and propped one arm on it and leaned down toward Marvin's face.
"What'd you say?" he asked.
"You lefta a bigga mess. It don'ta looka good."
"That's what I thought you said. Check you out later. Say, I like your tie," Frankie said.
"Later" turned out to be a passage of five minutes, when Marvin finished eating and went into the men's room. Frankie Dogs came through the door right behind him and drove Marvin's face into the tile wall above the urinal, then wheeled him around and buried his fist in Marvin's stomach.
A middle-aged man was exiting the toilet stall, belting his trousers.
"Out of the way! We got an emergency here!" Frankie said, shoving the man aside and plunging Marvin's head into the toilet bowl.
Then Frankie repeatedly flushed the toilet, pressing Marvin's face deeper into the vortex swirling about his ears. When the manager burst through the door, Frankie pulled Marvin out of the bowl by his collar, a curtain of water cascading onto the floor. Marvin lay half unconscious against the wall, a long strand of wet toilet paper hanging from one ear.
"You people need to clean this place up. It ain't sanitary," Frankie said to the manager, gesturing at the paper towels someone had left scattered on the washbasin.
That evening I drove to Baron's, our local health club, and worked out on the machines, lightly at first, then increasing the weight incrementally as the pain and the stiffness from the beating Legion had given me gradually dissipated in my muscles and bones. Then I went into the aerobics room, which was empty now, and did a series of leg-lifts and push-ups and curls with thirty-pound dumbbells. I could feel the blood swell in my arms, my palms ring with the tremolo of the dumbbells when I clanged them down on the steel rack. I wasn't out of the woods yet, but at least I didn't feel as though I had been rope-drug down a staircase.
I sat in a folding chair, a towel draped over my head, and touched the floor with my hands, constricting the muscles in my stomach at the same time. When I glanced up, I saw Jimmy Dean Styles enter at the far end of the room and begin pounding the heavy bag with a pair of dull red slip-on gloves, smacking the bag so hard, sweat showered from his head.
He used the classic stance of Sugar Ray Robinson, his weight forward, raised on the balls of his feet, his chin tucked into his shoulder, his left jab aimed eye-level at an opponent, his right hook a blur of light. A row of stitches was ridged across one cheek, like a centipede embedded in the skin. With his sheep's nose and close-set eyes, a ragged line of beard along his jawbones, his profile could have been lifted from a mural depicting an Etruscan gladiator.
But Jimmy Dean Styles was not one who performed or forfeited his own well-being for the entertainment of the upper classes.
A college girl and her boyfriend had just entered the room. The girl was rich, a well-known loud presence at the club, vacuous, obtuse, spoiled, protected by her family's wealth, totally unaware of the tolerance that other people extended to her. Her blond hair was moist with sweat, tied up on her head, her white shorts rolled up high on her tanned thighs. She plugged a tape into the stereo and began an aerobic dance routine, kicking at the air, chewing gum, the stereo's speakers loud enough to rattle glass.
"Like, I don't want to create no problem here, but I don't need my eardrums blown out," Styles shouted, lowering his gloves to his sides.
But she kept up her routine, her hands on hips now, her breasts bouncing, her mouth counting one-two, one-two, her eyes shifting to Jimmy Dean Styles for a moment, then looking straight ahead again, one-two, one-two, her attention now concentrated on her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.
"Say, maybe you ain't heard me, but there ain't no aerobic class in here right now. That means I didn't come in here for no Excedrin headache," Styles tried to yell above the music.
She paused and blotted her face with a towel, then wiped her arms and the top of her chest and threw the towel on the carpet. I thought she was going to pull the tape from the stereo, but instead she did a cartwheel all the way across the room, exhaled a self-congratulatory deep breath, then filled a paper cone with water at the cooler and brushed strands of hair off her forehead in the mirror.
Styles dialed down the volume of the music and picked up a second pair of heavy-bag gloves from a chair and tossed them to the girl's boyfriend.
"Here, I'll show you how to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," he said.
"I don't box," the boy replied, his eyes looking away from Styles. There was a flush in his cheeks, like the color of a window-ripened peach. The softness in his arms, his narrow chest, the insularity he tried to wrap himself in, had probably made him the target of bullies all his life. "I mean, I probably would be just wasting your time," he added, wondering which excuse would be acceptable.
"Better put 'em on, my man," Styles said, then threw a left-right combination that stopped a half-inch from the boy's nose.
"Okay, you showed me. Thanks."
"Here, I'll do it again. You ready? Tell me if you're not ready. Don't blink. I told you not to blink," Styles said.
"I'm no good at this," the boy said.
Styles's fists flashed, zipping by the boy's eyes and chin, causing him to flinch and cower, the old stain of fear and shame and failure creeping into his face.
Styles smiled, pulled the glove from his right hand.
"Hey, didn't mean nothing by it. Right coaching, you could kick some ass. Ax your lady over there. She know a killer when she see one," he said. He put his finger in his mouth and then placed a glob of spit inside the boy's ear.
Ten minutes later I was alone in the steam room when Styles came in, naked, a towel tied around his neck. He sat down on the ledge, his buttocks splaying on the moist tiles.
"You don't like white people much, do you?" I said.
He felt the hard row of stitches in his cheek and untied the towel from his neck and spread it across his thighs and phallus.
"A couple of cops rousted me outside my crib. Tore the carpet out of my car. I heard them say your name. Like maybe you tole them I was dealing," Styles said.
"They gave you those stitches?" I asked.
"I ain't done you nothing, man. Why you always on my case?"
"You make life hard for people of your own race."
He studied the drops of water running down the wall. His skin was gold, dripping in the clouds of steam. He bit down softly on the corner of his lip.
"You ax if I like white people. My grandfather use to say just a few white folks was bad. No matter how bad he got treated, he always say that. They chained him to a tree and burned him to death wit' a blowtorch. Now, I'm gonna do my steam," he said.
"You were out at Poinciana Island, asking about Tee Bobby's sister. Why are you so interested in the welfare of an autistic girl?"
"'Cause Tee Bobby's grandmother and Rosebud got nobody to care for them. That don't fit in your head, that's your motherfucking problem, man."
He glared into my face, his nostrils flaring with a visceral hatred of me or the authority I represented or perhaps a lifetime of dealing with the worst members of the white race.
"You don't got nothing more clever to say?" he asked.
"No," I replied.
"That's good, man." He cupped his palm on his sex and massaged his shoulders against the hot tiles, his eyes closed, his face oily in the heat.
"Your grandfather was the victim of Klansmen and misanthropes. But you're not. You use the suffering of others to justify your own evil. It's the mark of a coward," I said.
He leaned forward, his forearms propped on his thighs, closing and opening his hands, as though considering a reckless course of action. He stood up, the towel dropping from his loins. His body was networked with rivulets of sweat. He scratched a place below his stitches, his eyes taking my measure.
"I seen you earlier in the dressing room. Eating some pills out of a li'l vial. Them ain't M amp;M's. You was taking the rush, man. You call me a coward? You used other cops to do this to my face, kick my feet out from under me while my wrists was cuffed behind my back. You got a problem, man, but it ain't me."
He went out of the door, past the big window on the steam room, his flip-flops slapping, a smile at the corner of his mouth.
I showered and changed into my street clothes and stuffed my gym shorts and soiled T-shirt and socks into my workout bag. Bootsie's diet pills, which I had taken from our medicine cabinet, lay in the bottom of the bag. I thought of Jimmy Dean Styles, the sneer on his face, the calculated insult of his words, and I felt my bowels slide in and out, a pang of anger rip through my chest as bright and sharp as a piece of scissored tin. I dropped two of the diet pills in my mouth and cupped a handful of water from the faucet and swallowed. The rush went through my system with the warm and soft glow of an old-fashioned, like the caress of a destructive ex-girlfriend reentering your life.
Outside, the wind was blowing hard, the palms whipping on the neutral ground, the sky bursting with trees of lightning. Garbage cans and newspapers bounced through the streets, the air smelling of dust and distant rain. Jimmy Dean Styles was putting up the top on a red convertible. A short, heavyset white woman, with bleached hair that looked as if it had been electrified in a microwave, stood behind Styles and watched him clamp down the convertible's top, patiently holding a yogurt cone wrapped in a napkin. I couldn't place her at first, then I remembered seeing her with Linda Zeroski, hanging on the same corner where Linda had been picked up the night she died.
Styles took the cone from her hand and hugged her close and licked a huge swath out of the yogurt, then fed the cone to the woman as he would a pet, her neck snugged tightly in his bare armpit.
"How you like it, my man? I'm talking about my car. You could use a 'sheen like this. Put a li'l boom-boom in yo' bam-bam, know what I mean?" Styles said, laughing openly at me now.