“I’ll get him out of here,” I said.
“No, he’ll know I told you.”
“Where’s Perry?” I asked.
“At Victor’s Cafeteria. With Barbara Shanahan.” Then her eyes went past me and widened with apprehension.
Legion stood in the kitchen doorway, listening.
“You tell Robicheaux where Perry LaSalle’s at, but not me?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You sorry, all right,” he said, then walked back in the waiting area and stood in the middle of the room, biting a hangnail on his thumb.
He picked up his hat and put it on his head, then slipped his raincoat over his shoulders. Miss Eula poured her coffee down the sink and began rinsing her cup and saucer under the faucet, her face burning. I heard glass breaking in the waiting area.
Legion had picked up a globular paperweight, one with a winter landscape and drifting snow inside it, and smashed the glass case on the wall and removed the Confederate battle flag that had been carried by Perry’s ancestor at Manassas Junction and Gettysburg and Antietam.
Legion bunched up the sun-faded and bullet-rent cloth in his hand and blew his nose in it, then wiped his nostrils and upper lip carefully and threw the flag to the floor. When he left, he closed the door behind him and lit a cigarette on the gallery before running through the rain for his truck.
I got in the cruiser and drove up the street to Victor’s and went inside. Perry LaSalle and Barbara Shanahan were having coffee and pie at a table against the side wall. A half-dozen city cops, both male and female, were drinking coffee a short distance away. Perry set down his fork and looked up at me.
“I’m not interested in whatever it is you have to say,” he said.
“Try this. I just talked to William O’Reilly’s sister in New York. Legion Guidry murdered her brother in 1966. O’Reilly was writing a book about your family. Legion’s not too smart, but he knew a book that revealed the LaSalles’ family secrets would end his career as a blackmailer. So he killed this poor fellow from New York outside a Morgan City bar.”
“You have an obsession, Dave. It seems to be an obvious one to everyone except yourself,” Perry said.
“Why don’t you join us and give this a rest for a while?” Barbara said, and placed her hand on the back of an empty chair.
“You knew Legion murdered this man, Perry. And you knew why, too,” I said.
“You’re mistaken,” Perry said.
“After you left the Jesuit seminary, you were a volunteer at a Catholic Worker mission in the Bowery. It’s the same mission William O’Reilly used to work in. I think you were trying to do penance for your family’s sins. Why not just own up to it? It’s not the worst admission in the world.”
Perry rose to his feet. “You want it in here or out in the street?” he said.
“I’m the least of your problems. I just left your law office. Legion Guidry not only terrified your secretary, he literally blew his nose on your Confederate battle flag.”
I turned and started to walk away from him. He grabbed my arm and whirled me around, swinging his fist at the same time. I caught the blow on my forearm and felt it graze the side of my head. I could have walked away, but I didn’t. Instead, I let the old enemy have its way and I hooked him in the jaw and knocked him through the chairs onto the floor.
The entire cafeteria was suddenly quiet. Barbara Shanahan knelt beside Perry, who was trying to push himself up on one elbow, his eyes glazed.
“I know where Clete gets it now. You’re unbelievable. You belong in front of a cave with a club in your hand,” Barbara said to me.
“Don’t listen to her! Way to go, Robicheaux!” one of the city cops yelled. Then the other cops applauded.
I went back to the department and soaked my hand in cold water, then ate two aspirin at my desk and pressed my fists against my temples, my face still burning with embarrassment, wondering when I would ever learn not to push people into corners, particularly a tormented man like Perry LaSalle, who had every characteristic of an untreated sexaholic, psychologically incapable of either personal honesty or emotional intimacy with another human being. Three deputies in a row opened my door and gave me a thumbs-up for decking Perry. I nodded appreciatively and ate another aspirin and tried to bury myself in my work.
I pulled out my file drawer and began going through some of the open cases I had been neglecting since the murders of Amanda Boudreau and Linda Zeroski. Many of these cases involved crimes committed by what I call members of the Pool, that army of petty miscreants whom nothing s
hort of frontal lobotomies or massive electroshock will ever change. Some of the cases were a delight.
For six months the department had been looking for a burglar we named the Easter Bunny, because witnesses who had seen him said he was an albino with pink eyes and silver hair. But it was not only his appearance that was unusual. His attitude and methods of operation were so outrageous we had no precedent for dealing with him.
In one home he left a handwritten note on the refrigerator door that read: