Joe Zeroski's car was parked down the block, across the street, in front of a small grocery store. A woman was behind the wheel. Her hair was black and long, the neckline of her blouse plunging, her nails and mouth painted arterial red. I opened my badge holder and lifted it into the light so she could see it. A holstered revolver sat on the seat between the woman and Joe Zeroski.
'We need you to move your car out of here,' I said.
'Pull your pud on somebody else's time,' she said. I heard Clete snicker behind me.
'Sorry?' I said.
'You're out of your jurisdiction. Go screw yourself,' she said.
'You have a permit for that gun?'
'I don't need one. In Louisiana the automobile is an extension of the home. But in answer to your question, yes, I do have a permit. Now, how about moving yourself out of my view?'
I looked across the seat at Joe Zeroski. His stolid face and wide-set eyes had all the malleability of a cinder block.
'She's doing her job,' he said.
'Tee Bobby didn't kill your daughter, Joe,' I said.
'Then why were you asking about him down at that pickup corner, the one my little girl was abducted from?' he replied.
I blew out my breath and recrossed the street with Clete.
'Lighten up, Streak. I think Zerelda likes you. Notice how she squeezed her.357 when she told you to fuck off?' he said, his eyes beaming.
We went through the side entrance of the nightclub. It was loud and hot inside, the air hazy with cigarette smoke, dense with the smells of whiskey and boiled crabs and beer sweat. Tee Bobby was at the microphone, his long-sleeved lavender shirt plastered against his skin, a red electric guitar hanging from his neck. He drank from a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer and wiped the moisture out of his eyes on his sleeve and stumbled slightly against the microphone, then began singing 'Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.' His eyes were closed while he sang, his face suffused with a level of emotion that at first glance might have seemed manufactured until you heard the irrevocable sense of loss in his voice.
'Guitar Slim didn't have anything on this guy. Too bad he's a rag nose,' Clete said. 'How do you know he is?' I asked. 'He was snorting lines off the toilet tank. I thought that might be a clue.'
We found Jimmy Dean Styles in his office at the rear of the club. He sat at a cluttered desk, above which was a framed autographed photo of Sugar Ray Robinson. He was counting money, his fingers clicking on a calculator. His eyes lifted to mine.
'See, I went out of Angola max-time. That means I ain't got my umbilical cord thumbtacked to some P.O.'s desk. How about respecting that?' he said.
'Where'd you get the autographed photo of Sugar Ray?' I said.
'My grandfather was his sparring partner. You probably don't know that 'cause when you growed up most niggers around here picked peppers or cut cane,' he replied.
'You told me you cut Tee Bobby loose. Now I see him up on your bandstand,' I said.
'Little Albert Babineau own half this club. He feel sorry for Tee Bobby. I don't. Tee Bobby got a way of stuffing everything he make up his nose. So when he finish his gig tonight, he packing his shit.' His eyes shifted to Clete. 'Marse Charlie, don't be sitting on my desk.'
'There's a guy outside named Joe Zeroski. I hope he comes in here,' Clete said.
'Why's that, Marse Charlie?' Styles said. 'He was a mechanic for the Giacanos. Nine or so hits. Your kind of guy,' Clete said.
'I'll be worried about that the rest of the night,' Styles replied.
Clete stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and stared at Styles, who had gone back to counting a stack of currency, his fingers dancing on the calculator.
I touched Clete on the arm and we walked back through the crowd and out the side door. The parking lot smelled of dust and tar, and the stars were hot and bright above the trees. Clete stared back into the club, his face perplexed.
'That guy's dirty. I don't know what for, but he's dirty.' Then he said, 'You think his grandfather really sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson?'
'Maybe. I remember he was a boxer.'
'What happened to him?'
'He was lynched in Mississippi,' I said.
But our evening at the club owned by Jimmy Dean Styles and Little Albert Babineau wasn't over. As Clete and I walked toward my truck, we heard the angry voices of two men behind us, the voices of others trying to restrain or pacify them. Then Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean Styles burst out the back door into the parking lot, with a balloon of people following them.
There was a smear of blood and saliva on Tee Bobby's mouth. He swung at Style’s face and missed, and Styles pushed him down on the oyster shells.
'Touch me again, I'm gonna mess you up. Now haul your freight down the road,' Styles said.
Tee Bobby got to his feet. His slacks were torn, his knees lacerated. He ran at Styles, his arms flailing. Styles set himself and hooked Tee Bobby in the jaw and dropped him as though he had used a baseball bat.
Tee Bobby got to his feet again and stumbled toward the crowd, swinging at anyone who tried to help him. One of his shoes was gone and his belt had come loose, exposing the elastic of his underwear.
'You're one sorry-ass, pitiful nigger,' Styles said, and fitted his hand over Tee Bobby's face and shoved him backward into the crowd.
Tee Bobby reached in his pocket and flicked open a switchblade knife, but I doubted he had any idea whom he was going to use it on or even where he was. I started toward him.
'Mistake, Dave,' I heard Clete say.
I came up behind Tee Bobby and grabbed him around the neck and twisted his wrist. There was little strength in his arm and the knife tinkled on the oyster shells. Then he began to fight, as a girl might, with his elbows and nails and feet. I locked my arms around him and carried him down the bank, through the trees, onto a dock, and flung him as far as I could into the bayou.
He went under, then burst to the surface in a cloud of mud and slapped at the water with both hands until his feet gained the bottom. He slipped and splashed through the shallows, grabbing the stems of elephant ears for purchase, his hair and body strung with dead vegetation.
Then, as the crowd from the nightclub flowed down the bank, someone switched on a flood lamp in the trees, burning away the darkness like a phosphorous flare, lighting me and Tee Bobby Hulin like figures frozen in a photograph of a waterside baptism.
At the edge of the crowd I saw Joe Zeroski and his niece Zerelda. Joe's face was incredulous, as though he had just walked into an open-air mental asylum. Clete lit a cigarette and rubbed the heel of his hand on his temple.
'
I sat in the sheriffs office early the next morning. He was generally a quiet, avuncular man, looking forward to his retirement and the free time he would have to spend with his grandchildren. He did not contend with either the world or mortality, did not grieve upon the wrongs of his fellowman, and possessed a Rotarian view of both charity and business and saw one as a natural enhancement of the other. But sometimes on a wintry day I would catch him gazing out the window, a liquid glimmer in his eyes, and I knew he was back in his youth, on a long, white road that wound between white hills that were rounded like women's breasts, the road lined with chained-up Marine Corps six-bys and marching men whose coats and boots and steel pots were sheathed with snow.
He had just finished a phone conversation with the chief of police in St. Martinville. He opened the blinds on the window and stared at the crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery for a long time, his shoulders erect to compensate for the way his stomach protruded over his belt. His face was slightly flushed, his small mouth pinched. He removed his suit coat and placed it on the back of his chair, then brushed at the fabric as an afterthought but did not sit