“Barbara must like you a lot,” Perry said as we drove through a long tunnel of oaks toward New Iberia, the top of his Gazelle down, the air warm, the four-o’clocks blooming in the shade.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“She called me to get you out of the can. Normally she treats me like chewing gum on the bottom of a theater seat.” He turned his head, his cheeks ruddy, his brownish-black hair blowing on his brow. “Purcel saw the fight but didn’t try to stop it?”
“Better ask Clete about that.”
“He wouldn’t commit perjury for you, would he?”
“Clete?” I replied.
The next morning was Wednesday. I reported to work and walked down the corridor to my office as though nothing unusual had occurred the previous day. Wally the dispatcher gave me a thumbs-up and two uniformed deputies patted me on the shoulder as I passed. I didn’t do as well with the sheriff. “You’re confined to desk duties until we clear up this mess in St. Martinville,” he said, leaning in the door.
I nodded.
“Nothing to say?” he asked.
“Friends back their friends’ play,” I said.
“My department isn’t going to be the O.K. Corral, either,” he replied, and went back down the corridor, the heat rising in his face.
At noon I drove to Perry LaSalle’s law office across from the Shadows, unaware I was about to have one of those experiences that teach you that your knowledge of human behavior will always be inadequate, that weakness and the capacity for self-abasement seem to reside in us all.
Perry asked me to write out what had happened in Jimmy Dean Styles’s nightclub. While I wrote on a legal pad, he gazed down on the street, on the caladiums along his front walk, the live oaks under which Louisiana’s boys in butternut retreated up the Teche in 1863, the columned homes on whose upstairs verandas people still served tea and highballs in the afternoon, regardless of the season or the historical events that might shake the rest of the world.
After I had finished a very short description of my attack on Jimmy Dean Styles, ending the account in the passive voice (“a switchblade knife was found under a nearby table by local officers”), I waited for Perry to detach himself from whatever he was watching down below.
“Sir?” I said.
“Oh, yes, sorry, Dave,” he said, frowning as he read the legal pad.
“I didn’t do a very good job?” I said.
“No, no, it’s fine. There’s someone here to see me.”
Before he had finished his sentence, Legion Guidry stood in the doorway. His khakis were freshly ironed, stiff with starch, his eyes hard to see under the brim of his straw hat. But I could smell the maleness of his odor, a hint of sweat, onions and hamburger, diesel fuel perhaps splashed on his boots, grains of cigarette tobacco that he picked off his tongue.
“What he doin’ here?” he asked.
“A little legal work. That’s what I do for a living,” Perry said, trying to ignore the insult.
“This son of a bitch spit in my food,” Legion said.
“Have a seat downstairs, Legion. I’ll be right with you,” Perry said.
“What y’all doin’, you? What’s on that tablet there?”
“It has nothing to do with you. I give you my word on that,” Perry said.
“Gimme that,” Legion said.
“Mr. Dave and I have private business to conduct here. Legion, don’t do that. This is my office. You need to respect that,” Perry said.
“You got the man in your office called me a queer. He ain’t no ‘mister’ to me,” Legion said, his hand crimped on the legal pad, the paper creasing from the pressure of his thumb. “What this say?”
“Dave, do you mind waiting downstairs?” Perry said, his face reddening with embarrassment.
“I have to go back to the office. I’ll see you later,” I said.