Jolie Blon’s Bounce

a boatmate and fisherman and was proud of the fact that all of his children had graduated from high school.

He had grown up in a time when people of color were not so much physically abused as taken for granted, used as a cheap source of labor, and deliberately kept uneducated and poor. Perhaps an even greater injury done to them came in the form of the white man's lie when they sought redress. On those occasions they were usually treated as children, given promises and assurances that would never be kept, and sent on their way with the feeling that their problems were of their own manufacture.

But I never saw Batist show bitterness or anger about his upbringing. For that reason alone I considered him perhaps the most remarkable man I had ever known.

The lyrics and the bell-like reverberation of Guitar Slim's rolling chords haunted me. Without ever using words to describe either the locale or the era in which he had lived, his song re-created the Louisiana I had been raised in: the endless fields of sugarcane thrashing in the wind under a darkening sky, yellow dirt roads and the Hadacol and Jax beer signs nailed on the sides of general stores, horse-drawn buggies that people tethered in stands of gum trees during Sunday Mass, clapboard juke joints where Gatemouth Brown and Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price played, and the brothel districts that flourished from sunset to dawn and somehow became invisible in the morning light.

'You t'inking about Tee Bobby Hulin?' Batist asked.

'Not really,' I said.

'Boy got a bad seed in him, Dave.'

'Julian LaSalle's?'

'I say let evil stay buried in the graveyard.'

A half hour later I turned off the outside floodlamps and the string of electric lights that ran the length of the dock. Just as I locked the front door of the shop I heard the phone inside ring. I started to let it go, but instead I went back in and reached over the counter and picked up the receiver.

'Dave?' the sheriff's voice said.

'Yeah.'

'You'd better get over to the jail. Tee Bobby just hung himself.'

CHAPTER 4

When the jailer had walked past Tee Bobby's cell and seen his silhouette suspended in midair, he had thrown open the cell door and burst inside with a chair, wrapping one arm around Tee Bobby's waist, lifting him upward while he sawed loose the belt that was wrapped around an overhead pipe.

After he dropped Tee Bobby like a sack of grain on his bunk, he yelled down the hall, 'Find the son of a bitch who put this man in a cell with his belt!'

When I went to see Tee Bobby the next morning in Iberia General, one of his wrists was handcuffed to the bed rail. The capillaries had burst in the whites of his eyes and his tongue looked like cardboard. He put a pillow over his head and drew his knees up to his chest in an embryonic position. I pulled the pillow out of his hands and tossed it at the foot of the bed.

'You might as well plead out,' I said.

'What you talking about?' he said.

'Attempted suicide in custody reads just like a confession. You just shafted yourself.'

'I'll finish it next time.'

'Your grandmother's outside. So is your sister.'

'What you up to, Robicheaux?'

'Not much. Outside of Perry LaSalle, I'm probably the only guy on the planet who wants to save you from the injection table.'

'My sister don't have nothing to do wit' this. You leave her alone. She cain't take no kind of stress.'

'I'm letting go of you, Tee Bobby. I hope Perry gets you some slack. I think Barbara Shanahan is going to put a freight train up your ass.'

He raised himself up on one elbow, the handcuffs clanking tight against the bed rail. His breath was bilious.

'I hear you, boss man. Nigger boy got to swim in his own shit now,' he said.

'Run the Step 'n' Fetch It routine on somebody else, kid,' I said.

I passed Ladice and Rosebud in the waiting room. Rosebud had a cheap drawing tablet open on her thighs and was coloring in it with crayons, her face bent down almost to the paper.

At noon the sheriff buzzed my extension. 'You know that black juke joint by the Olivia Bridge?'

'The one with the garbage piled outside?' I said.

'I want Clete Purcel out of there.'

'What's the problem?'

'Not much. He's probably setting civil rights back thirty years.'

I drove down Bayou Teche and crossed the drawbridge into the little black settlement of Olivia and parked by a ramshackle bar named the Boom Boom Room, owned by a mulatto ex-boxer named Jimmy Dean Styles, who was also known as Jimmy Style or just Jimmy Sty.

Clete sat in his lavender Cadillac, the top down, listening to his radio, drinking from a long-necked bottle of beer.

'What's the haps, Streak?' he said.

'What are you doing out here?'

'Checking on a dude named Styles. Nig and Willie wrote a bond on him about the time No Duh was in central lockup.'

'No Duh said the serial killer was using an alias.'

'Styles used just his first and middle names-Jimmy Dean.'

Clete drank out of the beer bottle and squinted up at me in the sunlight. There was an alcoholic shine in his eyes, a bloom in his cheeks.

'Styles is a music promoter. He's also the business manager for a kid named Tee Bobby Hulin, who's in custody right now for rape and murder. I think maybe you should leave Styles alone until we've finished our investigation.'

Clete peeled a stick of gum and slipped it into his mouth. 'No problem,' he said.

'Did you have trouble inside?'

'Not me. Everything's copacetic, big mon.' Clete's eyes smiled at me while he snapped his gum wetly in his jaw.

A black Lexus pulled into the lot and Jimmy Dean Styles pulled the keys from the ignition and got out and looked at us, flipping the keys back and forth over his knuckles. He had close-set eyes and a nose like a sheep's and the flat chest and trim physique of the middleweight boxer he'd been in Angola, where he'd busted up all comers in the improvised ring out on the yard.

'You're looking good, Jimmy,' I said.

'Yeah, we all be lookin' good these days,' he replied.

'Saw your picture in People magazine. A guy from the Teche doesn't make it in rap every day,' I said.

'I'd like to talk wit' y'all, but I got a call from my bartender. Some big fat cracker was inside, being obnoxious, rollin' the gold on my customers like he was a real cop 'stead of maybe a P.I. does scut work for a bondsman. I better check to see he took his fat ass somewhere else.'

'Hey, that's no kidding? You're a rapper? You've been in People magazine?' Clete said, turning around in the car seat to get a better look at Styles, his mouth grinning.

'You right on top of it, Marse Charlie,' Styles said.

Clete opened the Cadillac's door and put one loafered foot out on the dirt, then rose to his full height, like an