Joe blindsided him and hooked him murderously in the jaw, the blow whipping Perry's face sideways, flinging spittle against the wall. Then Joe hit him below the eye and a third time in the mouth before Clete caught him from behind and wrapped his huge arms around Joe's chest and lifted him off the ground and slammed his face down on a desk.
But Joe freed one arm and ripped an elbow into Clete's nose, splattering blood across Clete's cheek. The dispatcher and I both grabbed Joe and threw him against the desk again and kicked his legs apart and pushed the side of his face down on a dirty ashtray.
'Put your wrists behind you! Do it now, Joe!' I said.
Then Joe Zeroski, who had killed perhaps nine men, sank to one knee, the backs of his thighs trembling, his arms forming a tent over his head as he tried to hide the shame and grief in his face.
CHAPTER 5
I walked with Perry LaSalle into the men's room and held his coat for him while he washed his face with cold water. There was a cluster of red bumps under his right eye and blood in his saliva when he spit.
'You cutting that guy loose?' he asked.
'Unless you want to press charges,' I replied.
He felt his mouth and looked in the mirror. His eyes were still angry. Then, as though realizing his expression was uncharacteristic of the Perry LaSalle we all knew, he blew out his breath and grinned.
'Maybe I'll catch him down the road,' he said.
'I wouldn't. Joe Zeroski was a hit man for the Giacano family,' I said.
His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want me to read them. He took his coat from my hand and put it on and combed his hair in the mirror. Then he stopped.
'Are you staring at me for some reason, Dave?' he asked.
'No.'
'You think I'm bothered because this guy was a meatball for the Giacanos?' he said.
'On my best day I can't even take my own inventory, Perry,' I said.
'Save the Twelve Step stuff for a meeting, old pard,' he replied.
A few minutes later I walked with Clete Purcel to his car. The top was down and a half-dozen fishing rods were propped against the backseat. We watched Perry LaSalle's Gazelle pull out of the parking lot and cross the train tracks and turn onto St. Peter Street.
'He's not going to file on Zeroski?' Clete asked.
'Perry's grandfather ran rum with the Giacanos during Prohibition. I don't think Perry wants to be reminded of the association,' I said.
'Everybody ran rum back then,' Clete said.
'Somebody else did his grandfather's time. You're not going to try to square that elbow in the nose, are you?'
Clete thought about it. 'It wasn't personal. For a button man Joe's not a bad guy.'
'Great standards.'
'This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense,' he said.
I worked late at the office that evening. The eight-by-ten death photos of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau were spread on my desk. The body postures and faces of the dead always tell a story. Sometimes the jaw is slack, the mouth robbed of words, as though the dying person has suddenly discovered the fraudulent nature of the world. Perhaps the gaze is focused on a shaft of sunlight through a tree, or a tear is sealed in the corner of the eye, or the palms lie open as though surrendering the spirit. I would like to believe that those who die violently are consoled by presences that care for and protect them in a special way. But the eyes of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau haunted me, and I wanted to find their killers and do something horrible to them.
On the way home I drove to the pickup corner where Linda Zeroski had gotten into an automobile under a spreading oak and driven off, without concern, into a sunset that looked like purple and red smoke against the western sky. The teenage crack dealers who had supposedly been her friends were bored with my questions, then irritated that I was interrupting the flow of business on the corner. When I did not leave, they glanced at one another, formulating a different response, as though I were not there. Their voices became unctuous, their faces sincere, and they indicated to a man they would certainly call my office if they heard any information that might be helpful.
I started to get back into my truck. Then I stopped and walked back under the oak tree.
'Does Tee Bobby Hulin ever swing by the corner?' I asked.
'Tee Bobby likes them when they sweet, white, and sixteen. I don't see nothing like that 'round here, suh,' one kid said. The others snickered.
'What are you telling me?' I asked.
'Tee Bobby got his own thing. It just ain't got nothing to do wit' us,' the same kid said.
They lowered their heads in the shadows, suppressing their grins, kicking at the dust, their eyes flicking with amusement at one another. I walked back to my truck and got in. The heat lightning in the south pulsed like quicksilver in the clouds.
Joe Zeroski had asked how many individuals in our area were capable of the crimes committed against the persons of his daughter and Amanda Boudreau. Could Tee Bobby have been involved in the abduction of Linda Zeroski? Tee Bobby's grandmother had said that Tee Bobby's present trouble had started before he was born. Maybe it was time to find out what she had meant.
I drove home and parked in the drive and went into the bait shop. Batist was by himself, eating a sandwich at the counter.
'How well do you know Tee Bobby?' I asked.
'Good enough so's I don't want to know him,' he answered.
'You think he could rape and murder a young girl?'
'What I t'ink don't count.'
'What do you know about Ladice Hulin's relationship to the LaSalle family?'
He finished his coffee and stared out the screen at the bream night-feeding on the moths that fried themselves on the floodlamps and fell into the water.
'Stories about white men and black field women ain't never good, Dave. You want to hear it, my sister growed up with Ladice,' he said.
I told my wife, Bootsie, I'd eat supper late, and Batist and I drove to his sister's small house outside Loreauville, where I listened to a tale that took me back into the Louisiana of my boyhood.
But actually, even before Batist's sister began her account, I already knew much of the LaSalle family's history, not because I necessarily admired them or even found them interesting, but because their lives had become the mirror and measure of our own. In one fashion or another the town had been a participant in all their deeds, all their reversals of fortune, for good or bad, from the time the first cabins were hewn and notched out of cypress on the banks of Bayou Teche, to the federal occupation in 1863 and later the restoration of the old oligarchy by the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction, into modern times when Cajuns and people of color were deliberately kept uneducated and poor in order to ensure the availability of a huge and easily manipulated labor pool.
