“When I was at the First District, I had to clock him once with a flashlight. Actually, I had to clock him five or six times. He wouldn’t stay down. The guy’s nuts, Streak. I’d lose him.”
Then Clete grinned with self-irony, as he always did when he knew his advice was of no use, and left my office and went into the men’s room across the corridor.
Joe Zeroski grew up in the Irish Channel of New Orleans and quit high school when he was sixteen in order to become a high-rise steelworker. Even as a kid Joe was wrapped so tight his fellow workers treated him as they would gasoline fumes around an open flame. When he was twenty, a notoriously violent and cruel Texas oilman and his bodyguard came into Tony Bacino’s club in the French Quarter and arbitrarily decided to pulverize someone at the bar. The oilman chose a laconic, seemingly innocuous working-class kid who was hunched over a draft beer. The kid was Joe Zeroski. Fifteen minutes later the oilman and his bodyguard were in an ambulance on their way to Charity Hospital.
Two Detroit wrestlers were hired by a construction company to escort scabs through a union picket line. One of them stiff-armed Joe aside. Before the wrestler ever knew what hit him, he was on the ground and Joe was astraddle his chest, packing handfuls of gravel into his mouth while the strikers cheered.
But Joe’s first big score was one he could never claim official recognition for. At twenty-two he made his bones with the Giacano family by taking out a cop killer who had tried to clip Didoni Giacano’s son. Wiseguys and off-duty cops all across New Orleans bought Joe a beer and a shot whenever they saw him.
Joe came into my office like a man who had just clawed his way out of a tomb. He stood flat-footed in the center of the room, slightly hunched, his nostrils white-edged, his hands balling and unballing by his sides.
“Sorry about your daughter, Joe. I hope to be of some help in finding the guy who did this,” I said.
His hair was steel-gray, parted in the middle, sheep-sheared on the sides, and his gray eyes were filled with an analytical glare that seemed to dissect both people and objects with the same level of suspicion. He wore a tweed sports coat, gray slacks, loafers with white socks, and a pink shirt with a charcoal-colored tennis racquet above the pocket. When he stepped closer to my desk, I smelled an odor like heat and stale antiperspirant trapped in his clothes.
“There’s a black kid just made bond. He raped and snuffed a white girl with a shotgun. Why ain’t he in here?” His speech was like most New Orleans working-class people of his generation, an accent and dialect that sounded much more like Brooklyn than the Deep South.
“Because he’s not connected with your daughter’s death,” I replied.
“Yeah? How many people you got around here could do these kinds of things?” he said. When he spoke, he tilted his face upward so that his bottom teeth were exposed in the way a fish’s might.
“We’re working on it, partner,” I said.
“The black kid’s name is Hulin. Bobby Hulin. He lives on an island somewhere.”
“Right. You stay away from him, too.”
He leaned down on my desk, his fists denting my ink blotter. His breath was moist, sour, rife with funk, like the smell a freshly opened grease trap might give off.
“My wife died of leukemia last year. Linda was my only child. I ain’t got a lot to lose. You reading me on this?” he said.
“Wrong way to talk to people who are on your side, Joe,” I said.
“Y’all are lucky I ain’t who I used to be.”
“I’ll walk you to the front door,” I said.
“Flog your joint,” he replied.
So instead I got a drink from the watercooler in the corridor and watched Joe walk toward the front of the courthouse, then I went to check my mail.
But it was not over.
Perry LaSalle had just walked into the department. Joe Zeroski’s head jerked around when he heard Perry give his name to the dispatcher.
“You’re the lawyer for that Hulin kid?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Perry replied.
“It makes you feel good putting a degenerate kills young girls back on the street?” Joe asked.
“Looks like I wandered in at the wrong time,” Perry said.
“My daughter was Linda Zeroski. I find out some shitbag you sprung beat her to death . . .”
He couldn’t finish his sentence. His eyes watered briefly, then he brushed his wrist across his mouth, staring disjointedly into space. Outside, the bells on the railway crossing clanged senselessly in an empty street.
Wally, our three-hundred-pound, hypertensive dispatcher, stopped his work and slipped his horn-rimmed glasses into their leather case and placed the case on his desk and stepped out into the foyer. Clete Purcel stood at the reception counter, motionless, his damp comb clipped inside the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, his pale blue porkpie hat slanted on his head. He inserted a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth and opened the cap on his Zippo but never struck the flint.