Jolie Blon's Bounce (Dave Robicheaux 12)

“You’re resigning as my lawyer?”

“Legion Guidry is my client, too. You’ve got him up on assault charges. I can’t represent both of you.”

I nodded and put a stick of gum in my mouth and didn’t respond.

“No hard feelings?” he said.

“Nope.”

“I’m glad you see it that way.”

“What’s this guy have on you?” I asked.

He rose from the steps and buttoned his coat, removed his sunglasses from their case, and blew dust off the lenses. He started to speak, then simply walked to his car and drove away into the sunlight that still filled the streets of the business district.

I parked my truck in the backyard and went into the kitchen, where Bootsie was fixing supper. I sat down at the table with a glass of iced tea. “You’re disappointed in Perry?” she said.

“He helped organize migrant farm workers in the Southwest. He was a volunteer worker at a Dorothy Day mission in the Bowery. Now he’s the apologist for a man like Legion Guidry. His behavior is hard to respect.”

She turned from the stove and set a bowl of étouffée on the table with a hot pad and blotted her face on her sleeve. I thought she was going to argue.

“You’re better off without him,” she said.

“How?”

“Perry might have taken a vacation from the realities of his life in his youth, but he’s a LaSalle first, last, and always.”

“Pretty hard-nosed, Boots.”

“You just learning that?”

She stood behind me and mussed my hair and pressed her stomach against my back. Then I felt her hands slip down my chest and her breasts against my head.

“We can put dinner in the oven,” I said.

I felt her straighten up, her hands relax on my shoulders, then I realized she was looking through the hallway, out into the front yard.

“You have a visitor,” she said.

CHAPTER 21

Tee Bobby Hulin had parked his gas-guzzler by the cement boat ramp and had walked up into the gloom of the trees. His autistic sister, Rosebud, sat in the passenger’s seat, a safety belt locked across her chest, staring at an empty pirogue floating aimlessly on the bayou. The evening was warm, the string of lightbulbs above my dock glowing with humidity, but Tee Bobby wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned at the wrists. His armpits were damp with sweat, his lips dry and caked at the edges. “I just cut a CD. It’s got ‘Jolie Blon’s Bounce’ on it. Nobody else seem to like it too much. Anyway, see what you think,” he said.

“I appreciate it, Tee Bobby. You kind of warm in that shirt?” I said.

“You know how it is,” he replied.

“I can get you into a treatment program.”

He shook his head and kicked gingerly at a tree root.

“Your sister okay?” I asked.

“Ain’t nothing okay.”

“We’re getting ready to eat dinner right now. Maybe we can talk later,” I said.

“I just dropped by, that’s all.”