'We'd sure like to come in. It's wet out here,' I said.
He pushed open the door, then stepped back in the shadows and removed a pair of blue jeans from a hat rack and put them on with his back to us.
'I got to get my shirt. Excuse me,' he said.
'Don't worry about it. We'll just be a minute. Have you been anywhere tonight?' Helen said.
'To the show. I come home just a little while ago,' he replied.
'Then went right to sleep?' Helen said. She sniffed at the air. 'You smell anything, Dave?'
'Smoke?' I said.
'Something burning in your house?' Helen said.
'No,' Marvin replied.
'It sure smells like it,' she said, and walked through the front room into the middle area of the house and opened his closet. 'I'd swear it was coming from here. You want us to call the fire department?'
'No. What's going on?' Marvin said.
Helen picked up a pair of cordovan cowboy boots from the bottom of the closet. 'These are sure nice. You got any others?' she said.
'I don't think y'all are s'pposed to come in my bedroom. You're s'pposed to have a warrant or something,' Marvin said.
Helen set the boots back on the floor and casually glanced over the shelf above Marvin's row of hanging shirts. She turned around.
'A greaseball named Frankie Dogs got popped tonight, Marvin. You own a gun?' she said.
'No. Why you telling me this?'
'Because he used your head for a toilet brush in McDonald's,' she replied.
Outside, the yard was flooded and rain blew in a mist through the window screen onto Marvin's bedsheets. He pushed the glass down and twisted the lock in the frame. His chest and stomach were flat, his nipples the size of dimes. He pulled the covers off his bed and sat on the dryness of the mattress and looked at nothing, his arms propped on the mattress, his eyes focused on thoughts inside his head.
'The Lord is my light, my sword, and my shield,' he said.
'That's not a bad statement. If I were you, I'd get my side of the situation on record. In my opinion, nobody's going to be missing Frankie Dogs,' I said.
But Marvin Oates was not easily manipulated. 'I been bothering you since I looked the wrong way at your daughter, Mr. Robicheaux. That's my fault, not yours. But I ain't gonna hep y'all hurt me. And I don't want y'all treating me like I'm stupid, either.'
'We're sorry we woke you up, partner,' I said.
Outside, in the cruiser, Helen started the engine and clicked on the windshield wipers. The rain was sliding in torrents off Marvin's roof, the banana fronds whipping in the wind against the side of his porch. The inside of his house was absolutely dark now.
'When's the last time you saw somebody sleep in a damp bed?' Helen said.
'Marvin's an unusual guy,' I replied.
Helen switched on the interior light and studied my face. I felt my eyes break.
'You're not tired at all?' she said.
'No, I feel fine.'
'I saw you go into an aspirin bottle twice tonight. But I don't think those were aspirins in the bottle. You doing whites on the half shell, Dave?'
When the man called Legion was much younger, he hung in Hattie Fontenot's bar down on Railroad Avenue, a tin-roofed frame building that shook with nickelodeon music, the passing of trains, and the drunken shrieks of deranged whores. Cops hung in there, too, because the coffee and boudin and cracklings were free-sometimes the whores, too-and the bouree game at the big round green-felt table in back was in progress twenty-four hours a day.
Negro shoeshine boys brought their wood shine boxes inside and knelt in the tobacco spittle and sawdust and cleaned and polished shoes and boots for ten cents. The white women in the cribs were five dollars, the black ones three. A long-necked Jax or Regal was twenty cents, a shot of whiskey a quarter. A Negro shucked oysters out of the shell and slid them down the bar in a trail of melting ice, briny and cold, a nickel apiece, the sliced lemon free. All the pleasures of the earth were available to any white male who desired them.
Then the times changed, without visible cause or explanation, so rapidly the man the Negroes knew only by the name Legion guessed that forces far to the North, where he had never visited, were behind the events reshaping the Louisiana he had grown up in. The cribs closed and most of the prostitutes drifted away. The state police hauled off the slot machines and sunk them in a hundred feet of salt water. Cops no longer hung in Hattie Fontenot's bar and the color line began to dissolve, then broke like a dam. Black men took the jobs white men had always considered theirs at birth and walked with white women on the street.
But the man named Legion did not change. He wore his starched khaki work shirts and trousers like a uniform, a Lima watch fob hanging from his watch pocket, his cuffs buttoned at the wrists, his straw hat slanted over one eye. He smoked his cigarettes unfiltered, drank his whiskey neat, disdained warnings about diet and lungs and liver, coerced a black girl into bed when he felt like it, and occasionally on a Friday afternoon sat at a back table in Hattie's old bar on Railroad Avenue, a saucer and tiny spoon and demitasse of French coffee by his elbow, a hand of solitaire spread out on the felt cover, as though forty years had not passed and the building still shook with music and the rumble of trains and the disconnected laughter of deranged prostitutes.
He pared out the detritus from each of his fingernails with a penknife and brushed it off the knife blade on the table and watched a loud black man at the bar, the black man knocking back shots, joking with the white barmaid, yelling at people out on the porch. The black man's hair was mowed into his scalp, his skin shiny, his face beaded with either sweat or rainwater. He went to the rest room and reemerged, an idiot's grin on his mouth, flicking his hands to the music playing on the jukebox.
'What's happenin', cap?' he said to Legion.
The black man went to the bar, picked up his shot glass, and was about to drink from it when he looked at the expression on the barmaid's face and saw her eyes riveted on someone behind him.
'You shook piss off your hands on my neck,' Legion said.
'Say what?' the black man said.
'Don't you pretend wit' me, nigger.'
'You out of line, man.'
The black man turned to set down his shot glass, raising his eyebrows at the barmaid, as though she and he were both witness to an aberration from out of the past that had to be temporarily tolerated. Then the black man made a serious mistake. He grinned at Legion.
Legion seized the black man's throat with his left hand and drove him against the wall, shutting down his air, almost lifting him from the floor. Then he inserted the blade of a penknife into the black man's left nostril.
'Mr. Legion, he ain't meant you no harm,' the barmaid said.
'Pick up that phone, I'll be back later,' Legion said.
Ropes of spittle drained from the corners of the black man's mouth. Legion tightened his grip and pushed the black man's head and neck harder into the wall, then worked the knife blade higher into the nostril, wedging the sharpened edge against the rim.
'You ready for it? Tell people your girl closed her legs,' he said.
Legion looked deeply into his victim's eyes, his own face tangled with a twisted light that caused the black man to lose control of his sphincter. Legion hurled him into a chair. 'I'm gonna finish my coffee, me. You clean that chair befo' you go,' he said.
Helen Soileau and I were at the city police station when the anonymous 911 call came in from a passerby who had witnessed the scene in Hattie's old bar through a window. We got in the cruiser and drove down Main toward Railroad, past the Shadows and Perry LaSalle's office.
'Why you want to take a city call?' she asked.
Rainwater was over the curbs now, rippling back from the tires of passing cars into the bamboo that bordered
