“Maybe.”
She shook her head and shifted the transmission into drive.
“I always thought you got a bum deal when you were thrown off the force in New Orleans,” she said.
“Finish your thought,” I said.
“I guess there’re two sides to every story,” she said.
We parked by Hattie Fontenot’s old bar and Helen got out first and slipped her baton into the ring on her gunbelt. We went inside and saw Legion sitting at a back table, playing solitaire, his attention concentrated on his game. The bar stools were all empty; our footsteps were loud on the wood floors that had been scrubbed gray with bleach. The barmaid sat on a stool, hiding behind the cigarette she smoked, her shoulders rounded, her lipsticked mouth as bright as a rose inside the wreaths of smoke and the dyed blond hair that framed her face.
“Where’s the man Legion assaulted?” I asked.
She inhaled on her cigarette and tipped her ashes into a beer cap and watched a bottle fly crawl up the wall, her eyelids fluttering. Helen and I walked toward Legion’s table, dividing as we approached him, Helen slipping her baton from its ring.
“Stand up,” she said.
“A black boy call y’all?” he said, rising from his chair, his hat brim tilting up now, exposing the long, vertical creases in his face.
“That’s a gun in your belt?” Helen said.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with that. State man give me a permit,” Legion said. His hand drifted toward the checkered grips on a chrome-plated .25.
Her baton whipped through the air and cracked across his wrist. The blow was of a bone-bruising kind, one that usually swelled into a plum-colored, blood-filled knot. But Legion showed no reaction other than a flinch in his face, a quiver along the jawline.
“You got me now, bitch. But wait till down the road,” he said.
She shoved him into the wall and kicked his legs apart, pulled the .25 automatic from his belt, and tossed it to me. He started to turn around and she whacked him behind the knee with the baton, a blow that should have crumpled him to the floor. Instead he twisted his neck so she could look into his eyes and read the malevolence in them, his breath reaching out and touching her cheek. But Helen was all business. She hooked him up, crimping the cuffs hard into his wrists.
“You’re under arrest for threatening a police officer,” she said.
“I give a shit, me,” he said. He jerked his head at me. “Pick up my hat, you.”
“You
want your hat? Here,” Helen said, and stepped on the crown, then shoved it down on his ears. “I hear you like to put your tongue in men’s mouths. We just ran a couple of black cross-dressers in. I’ll see what I can arrange.”
After we put Legion in the back of the cruiser and closed the door on him, I touched Helen on the arm.
“What?” she said, her eyes flashing.
“Don’t let this bum put a letter in your jacket,” I said.
Her brow was cut with furrows. She rubbed her palms on her jeans. “I feel like I touched something obscene,” she said.
At the lockup Helen placed Legion in a cell occupied by two heavily perfumed transvestites in spiked heels, sequined blouses, shorts sewn with lace fringe, layers of makeup, auburn wigs, false eyelashes, and Dracula nail polish. They both leaned against the bars, a cant to one hip, flirtation and fuck-you pouts dancing on their faces. I waited at the cell door until Helen was gone.
“You going to be all right in here, Legion?” I asked.
“Sho he is. We gonna take good care of li’l dookie-wookie here,” one of the transvestites said. She pinched a fold of Legion’s cheek between her thumb and forefinger and shook it gingerly, her lips pursed.
At sunrise the night jailer walked down to Legion’s cell to inform him that his lawyer, Perry LaSalle, had just arranged his bail. The transvestites sat close together on a bench in a corner, holding hands, their faces downcast.
“What’s wrong with them?” the jailer said.
“How the hell I know? Where my t’ings at?” Legion said.
Later in the morning the jailer called me at the bait shop.