down. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins. I could hear him breathing in the silence.
'You went out of your jurisdiction and made a bunch of people mad in St. Martinville. I can live with that. But you've deliberately involved Clete Purcel in department business. That's something I won't put up with, my friend,' he said.
'Clete gave me a lead I didn't have.'
'I got a call earlier from Joe Zeroski. You know what he said? 'This is how you guys solve cases? Fire up the cannibals?' I couldn't think of an adequate reply. Why are you still following Tee Bobby Hulin around?'
'I'm not convinced of his guilt.'
'Who died and made you God, Dave? Tell Purcel he's not welcome in Iberia Parish.'
I focused my gaze on a neutral space, my face empty.
'You AA guys have an expression, don't you, something about not carrying another person's load? How's it
'Something like that.'
'Why go to meetings if you don't listen to what people say at them?' he said.
'Clete thinks Jimmy Dean Styles might be a predator,' I said.
'Go back to your office, Dave. One of us has a thinking disorder.'
Later in the morning I passed the district attorney's office and saw Barbara Shanahan inside, talking to the young salesman who had dragged a suitcase filled with Bibles and encyclopedias and what he termed 'family-type magazines' into my bait shop. What was the name? Oates? That was it, Marvin Oates. He was sitting in a wood chair, bending forward attentively, his eyes crinkling at something Barbara was saying.
I saw him again at noon when I was stopped by the traffic light at the four corners up on the Loreauville Road; this time he was pulling his suitcase on a roller skate up a street in a rural black slum by Bayou Teche. He tapped on the screen door of a clapboard shack that was propped up on cinder blocks. A meaty black woman in a purple dress opened the door for him, and he stepped inside and left his suitcase on the gallery. A moment later he opened the door again and took the suitcase inside with him. I parked in the convenience store at the four corners and bought a soft drink from the machine and drank it in the shade and waited for Marvin Oates to come out of the shack.
Thirty minutes later he walked back out in the sunlight and fitted his bleached cowboy straw hat on his head and began pulling his suitcase down the street. I drove up behind him and rolled down the window. He wore a tie and a navy-blue sports coat in spite of the heat and breathed with the slow inhalation of someone in a steam room. But his face managed to fill with a grin before he even knew whose vehicle had drawn abreast of him.
'Why, howdy do, Mr. Robicheaux,' he said.
'I see you and Barbara Shanahan are pretty good friends,' I said.
His grin remained on his face, as though incised in clay, his eyes full of speculative light. He removed his hat and fanned himself. His ash-blond hair was soggy with sweat and there were gray strands in his sideburns, and I realized he was older than he looked.
'I don't quite follow,' he said. For just a second his gaze lit on the shack he had just left.
'I saw you in Barbara's office this morning,' I replied.
He nodded agreeably, as though a humorous mystery had just been solved. He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and twisted his head and looked down toward the end of the street, although nothing of particular interest was there.
'It's flat burning up, ain't it?' he said.
'In traveling through some of the other southern parishes, have you run across a man by the name of Legion? No first name, no last name, just Legion,' I said.
He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. 'An old man? He worked in Angola at one time? Black folks walk around him. He lives behind the old sugar mill down by Baldwin. Know why I remember his name?' he said. His face lit as he spoke the last sentence.
'No, why's that?' I said.
' 'Cause when Jesus was fixing to heal this possessed man, he asked the demon his name first. The demon said his name was Legion. Jesus cast the demon into a herd of hogs and the hogs run into the sea and drowned.'
'Thanks for your help, Marvin. Did you sell a Bible to the woman in that last house you were in?'
'Not really.'
'I imagine it'd be a hard sell. She hooks in a joint on Hopkins.'
He looked guardedly up and down the road, his expression cautionary now, one white man to another. 'The Mormons believe black people is descended from the lost tribe of Ham. You think that's true?'
'Got me. You want a ride?'
'If you work in the fields of the Lord, you're suppose to walk it, not just talk it.'
His face was full of self-irony and boyish good cheer. Even the streaks of sweat on his shirt, like the stripes a flagellum would make on the chest of its victim, excited sympathy for his plight and the humble role he had chosen for himself. If his smile could be translated into words, it was perhaps the old adage that goodness is its own reward.
I gave him the thumbs-up sign and made a mental note to run his name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., at the first opportunity.
CHAPTER 7
The next night Batist's sister banged down the dirt road in a dilapidated pickup that sounded like a dying animal when she parked it by the bait shop and turned off the ignition.
She sat down heavily at the counter and fished in her purse for a Kleenex and blew her nose, then stared at me as though it were I rather than she who was expected to explain her mission to my bait shop.
'Ain't nobody ever known the true story of what happened on Julian LaSalle's plantation,' she said.
I nodded and remained silent.
'I had bad dreams about Legion since I was a girl. I been afraid that long,' she said.
'Lots of us have bad memories from childhood. We shouldn't think less of ourselves for it, Clemmie,' I said.
'I always tole myself God would punish Legion. Send him to hell where he belong.'
'Maybe that'll happen.'
'It ain't enough,' she said.
Then she told me of the events following the death by fire of Julian LaSalle's wife.
Ladice went back to work in the fields but was not molested by Legion. In fact, he didn't bother any of the black girls or women and seemed preoccupied with other things. Vendors and servicepeople drove out to see him, rather than Julian LaSalle, with their deliveries or work orders for electrical or plumbing repairs on the plantation. Legion sometimes tethered his horse in the shade and went away with the vendors and servicepeople and did not return for hours, as though his duties in the fields had been reduced to a much lower level of priority and status.
Mr. Julian stayed in a guest cottage by the freshwater bay and was rarely seen except when he might emerge at evening in a robe and stand in the gloom of the trees next to the water's edge, unshaved, staring at the wooden bridge that led to the mainland and the community of small houses where most of his employees lived.
Sometimes his employees, perhaps washing their cars in the yard or barbecuing over a pit fashioned from a washing machine, would wave to him in the waning light, but Mr. Julian would not acknowledge the gesture, which would cause his employees to round up their children and go inside rather than let the happiness of their world contrast so visibly with the sorrow of his.
But to most of the black people on the plantation the die was cast three weeks after Mrs. LaSalle's death by an
