"Don"t say no more, man. It won"t do no good. You messed everything up."
He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, blew out his breath, and pointed the pistol downward at my chest.
Baby Feet had on only a bathrobe, his jockey underwear, and a pair of loafers without socks when he appeared in the brick walkway behind the black man.
"What the f.u.c.k do you think you"re doing here?" he said.
The black man stepped back, the revolver drifting to his thigh.
"Mr. Julie?" he said.
"Yeah. What the f.u.c.k you doing? You creeping an apartment in my building?"
"I didn"t know you was living here, Mr. Julie."
Baby Feet took the revolver out of the black man"s hand and eased down the hammer.
"Walter, if I want to, I can make you p.i.s.s blood for six months," he said.
"Yes, suh, I knows that."
"I"m glad you"ve taken that att.i.tude. Now, you get your sorry a.s.s out of here." He pushed the black man toward the entrance. "Go on." He kept nudging the black man along the bricks, then he kicked him hard, as fast as a snake striking, between the b.u.t.tocks. "I said go on, now." He kicked him again, his small pointed shoe biting deep into the man"scrotch. Tears welled up in the man"s eyes as he looked back over his shoulder. "Move it, Walter, unless you want b.a.l.l.s the size of coconuts."
The black man limped down the Dumaine. Baby Feet stood in front of the sprung gate, dumped the sh.e.l.ls from the .38 on the sidewalk, and flung the .38 into the darkness after the black man.
"Come on upstairs and I"ll put your hand in some ice," he said.
I had found my hat and revolver.
"I"m going after that guy," I said.
"Pick him up in the morning. He shines shoes in a barbershop on Calliope and St. Charles. You sure you want to stay in this line of work, Dave?"
He laughed, lit a purple-and-gold cigarette, and put his round, thick arm over my shoulders.
The sheriff was right: Baby Feet might be a movie producer, but he could never be dismissed as a thespian.
CHAPTER 4.
My brief visit with Julie Balboni should have been a forgettable and minor interlude in my morning. Instead, my conversation with him in the truck had added a disturbing question mark in the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. He said he had heard nothing about it, nor had he read about it in the local newspaper. This was ten minutes after Cholo Manelli had told me that he and Baby Feet had been talking about the girl"s death earlier.
Was Baby Feet lying or was he simply not interested in talking about something that wasn"t connected with his well-being? Or had the electroshock therapists in Mandeville overheated Cholo"s brain pan?
My experience with members of the Mafia and sociopaths in general has been that they lie as a matter of course. They are convincing because they often lie when there is no need to. To apply some form of forensic psychology in attempting to understand how they think is as productive as placing your head inside a microwave oven in order to study the nature of electricity.
I spent the rest of the day retracing the geography of Cherry LeBlanc"s last hours and trying to recreate the marginal world in which she had lived. At three that afternoon I parked my truck in the shade by the old wood-frame church in St. Martinville and looked at a color photograph of her that had been given to me by the grandparents. Her hair wasblack, with a mahogany tint in it, her mouth bright red with too much lipstick, her face soft, slightly plump with baby fat; her dark eyes were bright and masked no hidden thought; she was smiling.
Busted at sixteen for prost.i.tution, dead at nineteen, I thought. And that"s what we knew about. G.o.d only knew what else had befallen her in her life. But she wasn"t born a prost.i.tute or the kind of girl who would be pa.s.sed from hand to hand until someone opened a car door for her and drove her deep into a woods, where he revealed to her the instruments of her denouement, perhaps even convinced her that this moment was one she had elected for herself.
Others had helped her get there. My first vote would be for the father, the child molester, in Mamou. But our legal system looks at nouns, seldom at adverbs.
I gazed at the spreading oaks in the church"s graveyard, where Evangeline and her lover Gabriel were buried. The tombstones were stained with lichen and looked cool and gray in the shade. Beyond the trees, the sun reflected off Bayou Teche like a yellow flame.
Where was the boyfriend in this? I thought. A girl that pretty either has a beau or there is somebody in her life who would like to be one. She hadn"t gone far in school, but necessity must have given her a survivor"s instinct about people, about men in particular, certainly about the variety who drifted in and out of a south Louisiana jukejoint.
She had to know her killer. I was convinced of that.
I walked to the bar, a ramshackle nineteenth-century wooden building with scaling paint and a sagging upstairs gallery. The inside was dark and cool and almost deserted. A fat black woman was scrubbing the front windows with a brush and a bucket of soap and water. I walked the length of the bar to the small office in back where I had found the owner before. Along the counter in front of the bar"s mirror were rows upon rows of bottles-dark green and slender, stoppered with wet corks; obsidian black with arterial-redwax seals; frosted-white, like ice sawed out of a lake; whiskey-brown, singing with heat and light.
The smell of the green sawdust on the floor, the wood-handled beer taps dripping through an aluminum grate, the Collins mix and the bowls of cherries and sliced limes and oranges, they were only the stuff of memory, I told myself, swallowing. They belong to your Higher Power now. Just like an old girlfriend who winks at you on the street one day, I thought. You already gave her up. You just walk on by. It"s that easy.
But you don"t think about it, you don"t think about it, you don"t think about it.
The owner was a preoccupied man who combed his black hair straight back on his narrow head and kept his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket. The receipts and whiskey invoices on his desk were a magnet for his eyes. My questions couldn"t compete. He kept running his tongue behind his teeth while I talked.
"So you didn"t know anything about her friends?" I said.
"No, sir. She was here three weeks. They come and they go. That"s the way it is. I don"t know what else to tell you."
"Do you know anything about your bartenders?"
His eyes focused on a spot inside his cigarette smoke.
"I"m not understanding you," he said.
"Do you hire a bartender who hangs around with ex-cons or who"s in a lot of debt? I suspect you probably don"t. Those are the kind of guys who set up their friends with free doubles or make change out of an open drawer without ringing up the sale, aren"t they?"
"What"s your point?"
"Did you know she had been arrested for prost.i.tution?"
"I didn"t know that."
"You hired her because you thought she was an honor student at USL?"
The corner of his mouth wrinkled slightly with the beginnings of a smile. He stirred the ashes in the ashtray with the tip of his cigarette.
"I"ll leave you my card and a thought, Mr. Trajan. One way or another we"re going to nail the guy who killed her. In the meantime, if he kills somebody else and I find out that you held back information on me, I"ll be back with a warrant for your arrest."
"I don"t care for the way you"re talking to me."
I left his office without replying and walked back down the length of the bar. The black woman was now outside, washing the front window. She put down her scrub brush, flung the whole bucket of soapy water on the gla.s.s, then began rinsing it off with a hose. Her skin was the color of burnt brick, her eyes turquoise, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sagging like water-filled balloons inside her cotton-print dress. I opened my badge in my palm.
"Did you know the white girl Cherry LeBlanc?" I asked.
"She worked here, ain"t she?" She squinted her eyes against the water spray bouncing off the gla.s.s.
"Do you know if she had a boyfriend, tante?"
"If that"s what you want to call it."
"What do you mean?" I asked, already knowing the answer that I didn"t want to hear.
"She in the bidness."
"Full time, in a serious way?"
"What you call sellin" out of your pants?"
"Was Mr. Trajan involved?"
"Ax him."
"I don"t think he was, otherwise you wouldn"t be telling me these things, tante." I smiled at her.
She began refilling the bucket with clear water. She suddenly looked tired.
"She a sad girl," she said. She wiped the perspiration off her round face with her palm and looked at it. "I tole her they ain"t no amount of money gonna he"p her when some man make her sick, no. I tole her a pretty white girl like her can have anything she want-school, car, a husband wit" a job on them oil rig. When that girl dress up, she look like amovie star. She say, "Jennifer, some people is suppose" to have only what other people let them have." Lord G.o.d, her age and white and believing somet"ing like that."
"Who was her pimp, Jennifer?"
"They come here for her."
"Who?"
"The mens. When they want her. They come here and take her home."
"Do you know who they were, their names?"
"Them kind ain"t got no names. They just drive their car up when she get off work and that po" girl get in."
"I see. All right, Jennifer, this is my card with my telephone number on it. Would you call me if you remember anything else that might help me?"
"I don"t be knowin" anything else, me. She wasn"t goin" to give the name of some rich white man to an old n.i.g.g.e.r."
"What white man?"
"That"s what I tellin" you. I don"t know, me."
"I"m sorry, I don"t understand what you"re saying."
"You don"t understand English, you? Where you from? She say they a rich white man maybe gonna get her out of sellin" jellyroll. She say that the last time I seen her, right befo" somebody do them awful t"ings to that young girl. Mister, when they in the bidness, every man got a sweet word in his mouth, every man got a special way to keep jellyroll in his bed and the dollar in his pocket."
She threw the bucket of clear water on the gla.s.s, splashing both of us, then walked heavily with her brushes, cleaning rags, and empty bucket down the alley next to the bar.
THE RAIN FELL THROUGH THE CANOPY OF OAKS AS I DROVE down the dirt road along the bayou toward my house. During the summer it rains almost every afternoon in southern Louisiana. From my gallery, around three o"clock, you could watch the clouds build as high and dark as mountains out on the Gulf, then within minutes the barometer woulddrop, the air would suddenly turn cool and smell like ozone and gun metal and fish sp.a.w.ning, the wind would begin to blow out of the south and straighten the moss on the dead cypress trees in the marsh, bend the cattails in the bayou, and swell and ruffle the pecan trees in my front yard; then a sheet of gray rain would move out of the marsh, across the floating islands of purple hyacinths in the bayou, my bait shop and the canvas awning over my boat-rental dock, and ring as loud on my gallery as marbles bouncing on corrugated tin.
I parked the truck under the pecan trees and ran up the incline to the front steps. My father, a trapper and oil-field roughneck who worked high on the derrick, on what they called the monkey board, built the house of cypress and oak back in the Depression. The planks in the walls and floors were notched and joined with wooden pegs. You couldn"t shove a playing card in a seam. With age the wood had weathered almost black. I think rifle b.a.l.l.s would have bounced off it.
My wife"s car was gone, but through the screen door I could smell shrimp on the stove. I looked for Alafair, my adopted daughter, but didn"t see her either. Then I saw that the horse lot and shed were empty and Alafair"s three-legged c.o.o.n, Tripod, was not in his cage on top of the rabbit hutches or on the chain that allowed him to run along a clothesline between two tree trunks.
I started to go inside, then I heard her horse paw the leaves around the side of the house.
"Alafair?"
Nothing.
"Alf, I"ve got a feeling somebody is doing something she isn"t supposed to."
"What"s that, Dave?" she said.
"Would you please come out here and bring your friends with you?"
She rode her Appaloosa out from under the eave. Her tennis shoes, pink shorts, and T-shirt were sopping, and her tanned skin glistened with water. She grinned under her straw hat.
"Alf, what happened the last time you took Tripod for a ride?"
She looked off reflectively at the rain falling in the trees. Tripod squirmed in her hands. He was a beautiful c.o.o.n, silver-tipped, with a black mask and black rings on his thick tail.
"I told him not to do that no more, Dave."
"It"s "anymore." "
"Anymore. He ain"t gonna do it anymore, Dave."
She was grinning again. Tex, her Appaloosa, was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots on his rump. Last week Tripod had spiked his claws into Tex"s rump, and Alafair had been thrown end over end into the tomato plants.
"Where"s Bootsie?"
"At the store in town."
"How about putting Tex in the shed and coming in for some ice cream? You think you can handle that, little guy?"
"Yeah, that"s a pretty good idea, Dave," she said, as though both of us had just thought our way through a problem. She continued to look at me, her dark eyes full of light. "What about Tripod?"
"I think Tripod probably needs some ice cream, too."
Her face beamed. She set Tripod on top of the hutches, then slid down off her horse into a mud puddle. I watched her hook Tripod to his chain and lead Tex back to the lot. She was eleven years old now. Her body was round and hard and full of energy, her Indian-black hair as shiny as a raven"s wing; when she smiled, her eyes squinted almost completely shut. Six years ago I had pulled her from a wobbling envelope of air inside the submerged wreckage of a twin-engine plane out on the salt.
She hooked Tripod"s chain on the back porch and wentinto her bedroom to change clothes. I put a small amount of ice cream in two bowls and set them on the table. Above the counter a telephone number was written on the small blackboard we used for messages. Alafair came back into the kitchen, rubbing her head with a towel. She wore her slippers, her elastic-waisted blue jeans, and an oversized University of Southwestern Louisiana T-shirt. She kept blowing her bangs out of her eyes.