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.”
“You 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?”