I awoke early Sunday morning and drove 241 miles to Houston, then got lost in a rainstorm somewhere around Hermann Park and Rice University. When I finally found the Texas Medical Center and the hospital where the sheriff's wife had just undergone a double mastectomy the previous week, the rain had flooded the streets and was thundering on the tops of cars that had pulled to the curb because their drivers could not see through the windshields. I parked in an elevated garage, then splashed across a street and entered the hospital soaking wet.
She was asleep. So was the sheriff, his body curled up on two chairs he had pushed together, a blanket pulled up to his chin. I walked back to the nurses' station. No one was there except for a physician in scrubs. He was a tall, graying man, and he was writing on a clipboard. I asked him if he knew how the sheriff's wife was doing.
"You a friend of the family?" he asked.
"Yes, sir."
"She's a sweetheart," he said, and let his eyes slip off mine so I could read no meaning in them.
"Is the flower shop open downstairs?" I asked.
"I believe it is," he said.
On the way out of the hospital I paid for a mixed bouquet and had it sent up to the sheriffs wife. I signed the card "Your friends in the department" and drove back to New Iberia.
The next morning, Monday, the sheriff and I were both back at work I knocked on his office door and went inside.
"Got a minute?" I said.
He sat behind his desk in a pinstripe suit and turquoise western shirt, his eyes tired, trying not to yawn. "You sound like you have a cold," he said.
"Just some sniffles."
"You get caught in the rain?"
"Not really."
"What's up?" he asked.
I closed the door behind me.
"It was Legion Guidry who worked me over with a blackjack. When he finished, he held my head up by the hair and put his tongue in my mouth and called me his bitch," I said.
It was quiet in the room. The sheriff rubbed his fingers on the back of one hand.
"You were ashamed to tell me this?" he said.
"Maybe."
He nodded. "Write it up and get a warrant," he said.
"It won't stick. Not after all this time," I said.
"If it doesn't, it's because you tore up Jimmy Dean Styles."
"Run that by me again?"
"You do everything in your power to convince people you're a violent, unstable, and dangerous man. Get a warrant. Nobody assaults an officer in my department. I want that son of a bitch in custody."
I started to speak, then decided I'd said enough.
"I think you had another reason for not reporting this," the sheriff said. "I think you planned to pop Guidry yourself."
"I was never big on self-analysis."
"Right," he said.
I got up to leave.
"Hold on," the sheriff said.
"Sir?"
He touched the bald spot in the center of his head, then looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. "My wife and I appreciated the flowers," he said.
I paused in the doorway, my face blank
"I saw you leaving the flower shop at the hospital. I'll never figure you out, Dave. That's not necessarily a compliment," he said.
I guess I should have felt liberated from the deceit I had practiced on the sheriff. In fact, it should have been a fine day. But I stayed restless, discontented, and irritable, without cause or remedy, and the five miles I jogged that evening and the push-ups and bench presses and sets of curls I did with free weights in my backyard did little to relieve the pressure band along one side of my head and the electricity that seemed to jump off the ends of my fingers. That night I thought I heard caterpillars eating inside a pile of wet mulberry leaves under the window, and I pressed the pillow down on my head so I would not have to hear the sound they made.
I dreamed I was teaching a class of police cadets at a community college in north Miami. In my dream I was part of an exchange program with NOPD and Florida law enforcement, and what should have been a vacation in the sun was for me a long drunk in the bars adjacent to Hialeah and Gulfstream Park racetracks. I entered the classroom stinking of cigarette smoke and booze, unshaved, my mouth like cotton, sure that somehow I could get through the hour, with no notes or lesson plan, then find a morning bar in Opa-Locka, where a vodka collins would sweep all the snakes back into their wicker baskets.
Then I realized, as I stood at the lectern, that I had become incoherent and foolish, an object of pity and shame, and the cadets, who had always treated me with respect, had dropped their eyes to the desks in embarrassment for me.
The dream wasn't a fabrication of the unconscious, just an accurate replication of what had actually taken place, and when I woke from it just before dawn, I could not shake the feeling that I was still drunk, still drinking, still caught in the alcoholic web that had made my nights and days a misery for years.
I showered and shaved and went to an early Mass at Sacred Heart, then stayed alone in the church and said the rosary. But when I came out into the daylight the sun and humidity were like a flame on my skin and I curled and uncurled my fists for no reason.
Legion Guidry bonded out of jail at 10 a.m. An hour later I saw him crossing Main Street to eat lunch at Victor's Cafeteria. For just a moment I could taste his tobacco and saliva in my mouth and smell the testosterone on his clothes. My palm ached to fold around the checkered grips of my.45, to feel the heavy, hard, cold weight and the perfect balance of the frame resting securely in my hand.
Zerelda Calucci had tried to find Clete Purcel for two days, then discovered he'd hooked up a bail skip to the D-ring inset in the back floor of his Cadillac and had driven back to New Orleans to deliver the bail skip to the bondsmen for whom he worked.
Zerelda tracked Marvin Oates down on a side street in New Iberia's old bordello district, where he had dragged his roller-skate-mounted suitcase to the porch of a wood-frame store and was eating from a paper plate filled with rice and beans and sausage in the shade of a spreading oak. A half-block away was a stucco crack house, also shaded by an oak tree, the yard filled with trash, the windows broken, the screens slashed and rusted-out and hanging from the frames. White and black crack whores sat on the porch, walking in turns down to the store for beer or food or cigarettes, but Marvin did not look up from his paper plate when they walked past him.
Zerelda pulled her pearl-white Mustang convertible onto the oyster shells and did not cut the engine.
"Throw your suitcase in the back, sweetie, and let's take a drive," she said.
"Where we going?" Marvin asked.
Her eyes roved over a barked area by his eye, a bruise on his chin. Her face became suffused with pity and anger.
"To straighten out somebody who thinks he's a swinging dick because he can knock around someone half his size. Now get in the car, Marvin," she replied.
"I dint want to cause no trouble, Miss Zerelda," Marvin said.
She opened the car door and started to get out.
"I'm coming," he said.
It was almost dusk when Zerelda crossed the Mississippi River and drove down Canal and into the French Quarter and parked around the corner from Clete's office and upstairs apartment on St. Ann Street. The doors were locked, but a note addressed to an infamous nuisance in the New Orleans underworld was stuck in the corner of a window. It read: "Dear No Duh, I'm over at Nig and Willie's-Clete."
The bail bond office of Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater was located just off Basin, just inside the ragged edges of the Quarter, not far from St. Louis Cemetery and Louis Armstrong Park. Zerelda pulled to the curb and parked next to a cluster of overflowing garbage cans. Down the street and across Basin she could see the old redbrick buildings and the green wood porches of the Iberville Project, a community whose crack addicts and gangbangers and teenage prostitutes would not only mug tourists and roll Johns in die adjacent cemetery but occasionally execute them out of pure meanness. In fact, the city had poured cement barricades across some of the streets leading into the Iberville so that tourists would not drive into it by mistake.
But Marvin Oates's attention was focused on the window of the bail bond office, where Clete was playing cards at a desk with a thin, nattily dressed, deeply tanned man who wore an oxblood fedora with a gray feather in the band and a mustache that looked like it had been grease-penciled on his upper lip.
Marvin's face was wind-burned from the trip to the city, and now he was sweating heavily in the dusk, pinching his mouth dryly in his hand.
"I'll wait out here," he said.
"Nobody's going to hurt you," Zerelda said, getting out of the car.
"That's 'cause I'm staying out here."
She walked around to his side of the convertible. "Comb your hair, sweetie. Then I'm going to take you out to dinner. Don't you ever be afraid. Not when you're with me," she said, and smoothed his hair back up on his head.
His face looked like a fawn's.
Then she went through the door of the bail bond office, her purse swinging heavily from a cloth strap wrapped around her wrist.
"Zerelda, what's the haps? Great coincidence. I wanted No Duh here to check out our man Marvin the Voyeur, see if he wasn't a guy No Duh ran across in central lockup," Clete said.
"Where the fuck do you get off knocking around an innocent boy like that?"
"He has a way of showing up in places where he has no business," Clete replied.
"Oh, yeah?" Zerelda said, and swung her purse with both hands at his head, the cloth bottom bulging with the weight of her.357 Magnum.
He caught the blow on his forearm, but she swung again, this time hitting him squarely across the back of the head.
"Come on, Zerelda, that hurts," Clete said.
"You tub of whale sperm, you thought you could just dump me and get it on with some pisspot at the D.A.'s office?" she said.
"Remember strolling off to the ice cream parlor with dick brain out there? I took that as a signal to get lost. So I got lost," Clete said.
"Well, lose this, you fat fuck," she said, and hit him again.
"What's going on?" No Duh Dolowitz said. "Hey, Nig, we got some people getting hurt out here!"
Nig Rosewater came out of the back office. His porcine neck was as wide as his head inside his starched collar, so his head looked like the crown of a white fireplug mounted on his shoulders. Nig took one look at Zerelda and went back inside his office and closed and bolted the door.
"All right, I'll talk to him! Calm down!" Clete said, and rose from his chair.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Zerelda said.
"That guy is a bullshitter, Zee," Clete said.
She took a step toward him, but he raised his hand in a placating gesture. "All right, we've got no problem here," he said, and went outside in the dusk, into the noise of the street, the smells of stagnant water and over-ripe produce and flowers blooming on the overhanging balconies, the air crisscrossed with birds.
Clete took a deep breath and looked down at Marvin. "If I falsely accused you of something you didn't do, I apologize," Clete said. "But that also means you keep that stupid face out of my life and you don't get anywhere near certain friends of mine. This is as much slack as you get, Jack. We clear on this?"
"The twelve disciples are my road signs. I ain't afraid of no bullies. There ain't no detours in heaven, either," Marvin said.
"What?" Clete said.
"I dint do nothing wrong. I think you was trying to seduce Miss Barbara and somebody messed it up for you. So you put it on me 'cause I give her a Bible."
"You listen, shit-for-brains-"
Marvin got out of the car and lifted his suitcase from the backseat, wrapping the pull strap around his wrist, blade-faced under the brim of his hat, a hot bead of anger buried in his eye.
"Come back, Marvin," Zerelda said from the doorway of the bail bond office.
But Marvin pulled his suitcase down the street between the rows of dilapidated cottages toward Basin, his rumpled pale blue sports coat and coned straw hat and cowboy boots almost lost in the mauve-colored thickness of the evening. Then he crossed Basin amid a blowing of horns and a screeching of tires and tugged his suitcase on its roller skate over the curb and into the bowels of the Iberville Project.
"You're mean through and through, Clete. I don't know what I ever saw in you," Zerelda said.
But Clete wasn't listening. No Duh was staring into me distance, into the glow of sodium lamps that rose in a dusty haze above the project.
"You know him?" Clete asked.
"Yeah, I definitely seen that guy before," No Duh said.
"You sure?" Clete said.
"No doubt about it. I don't forget a face. Particularly not no nutcase."
"Where did you see him, No Duh?" Clete asked, his exasperation growing.
"He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the coloreds for Fat Sammy Figorelli. It was a scam to get them to sign loans at twenty percent. What, you thought he was somebody else?" No Duh said.
He tilted his head curiously at Clete, his mustache like the extended wings of a tiny bird.
What did Marvin Oates mean by 'There ain't no detours in heaven'?" Clete asked the next day as he walked with me from the office to Victor's Cafeteria.
"Who knows? I think it's a line from a bluegrass song," I replied.
"Zerelda Calucci says I'm butt crust."
"How you doing with Barbara?" I said, trying to change the subject.
"Marvin dimed me with her, too. You think the Peeping Tom was Legion Guidry?"
"Yeah, I do," I said.
Clete chewed on a hangnail and spit it off his tongue. We were walking past the crumbling, whitewashed crypts of St. Peter's Cemetery now.
"I put flowers on my old man's grave when I was in New Orleans. It was a funny feeling, out there in the cemetery, just me and him," he said.
"Yeah?" I said.
"That's all. He had a crummy life. It wasn't a big deal," he said. He took off his porkpie hat and refitted it on his head, turning his face away so I could not see the expression in his eyes.
That afternoon Perry LaSalle asked me to stop by his office. When I got there, he was just locking the doors. The gallery and lawn and flower beds were deep in shadow, and his face had a melancholy cast in the failing light.
"Oh, hello, Dave," he said. He sat down on the top step of the gallery and waited for me to join him. Through the window behind him I could see the glass-framed Confederate battle flag of the 8th Louisiana Vols that one of his ancestors had carried in northern Virginia, and I wondered if indeed Perry was one of those souls who belonged in another time, or if he was a deluded creature of his own manufacture, playing the role of a tragic scion who had to expiate the sins of his ancestors, when in fact he was simply the beneficiary of wealth that had been made on the backs of others.
"Fine evening," I said, looking across the street at the Shadows plantation house and the bamboo moving in the wind and the magnificent, lichen-encrusted, moss-hung canopy of the live oaks.
"I've got to cut you loose," Perry said.
"You're resigning as my lawyer?"
"Legion Guidry is my client, too. You've got him up on assault charges. I can't represent both of you."
I nodded and put a stick of gum in my mouth and didn't respond.
"No hard feelings?" he said.
"Nope."
"I'm glad you see it that way."
"What's this guy have on you?" I asked.
He rose from the steps and buttoned his coat, removed his sunglasses from their case, and blew dust off the lenses. He started to speak, then simply walked to his car and drove away into the sunlight that still filled the streets of the business district.
I parked my truck in the backyard and went into the kitchen, where Bootsie was fixing supper. I sat down at the table with a glass of iced tea.
"You're disappointed in Perry?" she said.
"He helped organize migrant farm workers in the Southwest. He was a volunteer worker at a Dorothy Day mission in the Bowery. Now he's the apologist for a man like Legion Guidry. His behavior is hard to respect."
She turned from the stove and set a bowl of etouffee on the table with a hot pad and blotted her face on her sleeve. I thought she was going to argue.
"You're better off without him," she said.
"How?"
"Perry might have taken a vacation from the realities of his life in his youth, but he's a LaSalle first, last, and always."
"Pretty hard-nosed, Boots."
"You just learning that?"
She stood behind me and mussed my hair and pressed her stomach against my back. Then I felt her hands slip down my chest and her breasts against my head.
"We can put dinner in the oven," I said.
I felt her straighten up, her hands relax on my shoulders, then I realized she was looking through the hallway, out into the front yard.
"You have a visitor," she said.