“On another subject, you care to explain to me why you’re bothering Ladice Hulin about my grandfather?” he asked.
I put the cap on my pen and looked up at him. “She told me Amanda Boudreau’s death was related to events that happened before Tee Bobby was born. What do you think she meant by that?” I said.
“I wouldn’t know. But stay out of my family’s private life,” he replied.
“Your book on capital punishment didn’t spare people in the Iberia prosecutor’s office. What makes the LaSalles sacrosanct? The fact y’all own some canneries?”
He shook his head and went out the door. I thought he had gone and I got up from my desk to go down the corridor for my mail. But he came back through the door, the blood pooled in his cheeks.
“Where do you get off indicting my family?” he said.
“That case you used in your book, the murder of those teenagers up on the Loreauville Road? The mother of that girl those two fuckheads killed said she heard her daughter’s voice out in the front yard at the same hour her daughter died. Her daughter was saying, ‘Please help me, Momma.’ I don’t remember seeing that in either your book or the movie.”
“You make a remark about my family again, and cop or no cop, I’m going to bust your jaw, Dave.”
“Give your grief to Barbara Shanahan. I think you two deserve each other,” I said.
My hands were shaking when I brushed past him.
That night Clete Purcel called the house. I could hear an electric guitar and saxophones and laughter and people talking loudly in the background. “I can hardly hear you,” I said.
“I thought I’d have another run at Jimmy Dean Styles. I’m at a joint he owns in St. Martinville. I thought you’d like to know who’s parked across the street.”
“It’s late, Clete.”
“Joe Zeroski. He’s got a P.I. with him, his niece, Zerelda Calucci. Her old man was one of the Calucci brothers.”
“Tell me about it tomorrow.”
“The kid you’re looking at for the murder of the girl in the cane field? He’s playing here.”
“Say again?”
“What’s his name? Hulin? He’s up there on the bandstand. Anyway, I’d better hit the road. The only other thing white in this place is the toilet bowl. Sorry I bothered you.”
“Give me a half hour,” I said.
I drove up the Teche, under the long canopy of live oaks on the St. Martinville highway, the same road that federal soldiers had marched in 1863, the same road that Evangeline and her lover had walked almost a century before the federals came.
Jimmy Dean Styles owned only a half-interest in the nightclub Clete had called from. His business partner was a black bondsman named Little Albert Babineau who had recently made the state news wires after he threw packages of condoms off a Mardi Gras float. Each package was printed with the words “Be Sure You ‘Bond’ Right. Be Safe with Little Albert. 24-Hour Bail Bonds. Little Albert Will Not Let You Down.”
The club was built of plywood that had been painted blue and strung with yellow and purple lights. The window glass and walls literally shook from the noise inside. I pulled in at the back, where Clete waited for me next to his Cadillac. Through the trees below the club I could see a glaze of yellow light on Bayou Teche and the wake of a large boat slapping into the elephant ears along the banks.
“You’re not pissed off because I took another run at Styles?” Clete said.
“Why should I be? You never listen to anything I say, anyway.”
“How you want to play it?” he asked.
“We need to get Joe Zeroski out of here. What was that you said about a P.I.?”
“It’s his niece. I’d like to develop a more intimate relationship with her, except I alwa
ys get the feeling she’d like to blow my equipment off. Wait till you see the bongos on that broad.”
“Will you stop talking like that? I’m not kidding you, Clete. It’s an illness.”
He put two sticks of gum in his mouth and chewed them loudly, his eyes full of mirth, his head seeming to turn in all directions at once.