Jolie Blon's Bounce (Dave Robicheaux 12)

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“None of your business.”

I sat down without being asked.

“You know the name William O’Reilly?” I asked.

“No.”

“He was a writer from New York. Legion shot him to death outside a bar in Morgan City.”

Perry picked up a pen and rotated it in his fingers, then dropped it back on his desk. His office shelves were filled with law and historical books and leather-bound biographies of the classical world. A photograph of the legendary Cajun musician Iry LeJeune hung on the wall. An old canvas golf bag stuffed with mahogany drivers stood in the corner like a reminder of an earlier, more leisurely time.

“Legion’s a leftover from a bygone era. I can’t change what he is or what he’s done,” Perry said. “Sometimes he needs money. I give it to him.”

“I had a recent encounter with this man. I think he’s evil. I don’t mean bad. I mean evil, in the strictest theological sense.”

Perry shook his head. His brownish-black hair was untrimmed and curly at the back of his neck, his eyes deeply blue inside his tanned face. “I thought I’d heard it all,” he said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Here’s an old man, an illiterate Cajun,

who is as much victim as he is victimizer, and you make him out to be the acolyte of Satan.”

“Why is it I always have the sense you glow with blue fire, while the rest of us bumble our way through the moral wilderness?” I said.

“You really know how to go for the throat, Dave.”

“Next time you see Legion, ask him why a police officer would spit in his food,” I said, and got up to go.

“Somebody spit in his food? You?” Perry put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars. He laughed to himself. “You’re a heck of a guy, Dave. By the way, Tee Bobby Hulin passed a lie detector test. He didn’t rape or shoot Amanda Boudreau.”

That afternoon I met Clete Purcel for coffee at McDonald’s on East Main. “So what?” he said. “You get the right polygraph expert, you get the right answers. No Duh Dolowitz always said he could throw the machine off by scrunching his toes.”

“Maybe I’ve helped set up an innocent man.”

“If they’re not guilty for one caper, they’re guilty for another. Innocent people don’t leave their DNA on the person of a murder victim. That kid probably should have been poured out with the afterbirth, anyway.”

I finished my coffee and watched a group of black kids dribbling a basketball down the sidewalk under an oak tree. Clete began to relate another detailed account of his ongoing problems with Zerelda Calucci. He caught the look on my face.

“What, you got to be someplace?” he asked.

“To tell you the truth—”

“I’ll make it fast. Last night I’m grilling a steak with her on the little patio by her cottage, trying to find the right words to use, you know, so I can kind of ease on out of what I’ve gotten myself into without getting hit with a flowerpot. But she keeps brushing against me, pulling the meat fork out of my hand and flipping the steak like I’m a big kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing, smoothing my shirt on my shoulders, humming a little tune under her breath.

“Then for no reason she puts her arms around my neck and pushes her stomach up against me and plants one on my mouth, and suddenly I’m sort of in an awkward manly state again and I’m thinking maybe there’s no need to toss our situation over the gunnels all at once.

“Just when I’m about to suggest we move our operation indoors I hear somebody behind us and I turn around and there’s that hillbilly Bible salesman again, dressed in a white sports coat with a red carnation and his hat in his hand. He goes, ‘I dint know if you found the Bible and the rose I left for you.’

“Zerelda goes, ‘Oh, that was so sweet.’

“So of course I step in my own shit and say, ‘Yeah, thanks for coming around. We’d invite you to have supper with us, but you’ve probably already eaten, so why don’t you come back another time?’

“Zerelda goes, ‘Clete, I don’t believe your rudeness.’

“I say, ‘Sorry. Stay and eat. Maybe if I roast some potatoes there’ll be enough for three.’