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I picked some papers off my desk and read them until he was gone.
But later my own sardonic remark began to bother me. Perhaps “adverb” was too soft a term, I thought. Perry was a master at convincing others he was a victim, never the perpetrator. I got out the case file I had assembled on Legion Guidry and looked back at the notes I had made concerning the 1966 shooting by Legion of a New York freelance writer named William O’Reilly. The Morgan City newspaper had said that O’Reilly had drawn a pistol in a bar and been shot when Legion tried to disarm him. However, Ladice Hulin claimed a black man in the kitchen saw Legion take the gun from under the bar and literally execute O’Reilly in the parking lot, the gun muzzle so close that flame rose from O’Reilly’s coat. I called the reference librarian at the Iberia Parish Library on Main and asked if she could find any bibliographic or biographical information on William O’Reilly. A half hour later she called
me back.
“I couldn’t find much you don’t already know. He published two pulp-fiction novels. You want their titles?” she said.
“Yeah, that’d be fine. Do you have the publisher’s name?”
“Pocket Books,” she said.
“Anything else?” I said.
“The obituary gives the names of some of the survivors.”
“You found the obituary? You mean in the Morgan City paper?” I said.
“No, in Brooklyn. That’s where he was originally from. You want me to fax it over to you?” she said.
God bless all reference librarians everywhere, I thought.
The fax came through our machine a few minutes later. Listed among the family survivors of William O’Reilly was the name of a sister, Mrs. Harriet Stetson. I dialed Brooklyn information and was prepared to hang up when the automatic response gave me a phone number. I called the number and left two messages on the machine, then went to lunch. When I came back to the office, the phone on my desk was ringing.
“I’m Harriet Stetson. You wanted to talk about my brother?” an elderly voice said.
I didn’t know where to begin. I repeated who I was and told her I did not believe her brother had drawn a weapon in a Morgan City bar. I told her I thought that he had been followed outside and murdered in the parking lot and that the witnesses to his death had lied.
She was silent a long time.
“I can’t tell you how much this call means to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said. “My brother had his problems with alcohol, but he was a gentle man. He was a volunteer at the Catholic Worker mission in the Bowery. He would never carry a firearm.”
“The Dorothy Day mission?” I asked.
“It was founded by Dorothy Day. But it’s called the St. Joseph House, on East First Street. How did you know?”
My head was pounding now.
“Why was your brother down here? What was he working on?” I asked.
“A book about a famous family there. They lived on an island. They owned canneries, I think. Why?” she replied.
I signed out a cruiser and went looking for Perry LaSalle. I ran up the walk to his office on Main Street, a newspaper over my head, and closed the door hurriedly against the rain. When I wiped the water out of my eyes, I saw the secretary sitting very stiffly behind her typewriter, an angry bead in her eyes, her face averted from the man in khaki clothes who sat on a divan, his hat next to him, crown down, the smoke from an unfiltered cigarette curling through his fingers. Legion Guidry’s gaze shifted from the secretary to me. I looked away from him.
“Is Perry here, Miss Eula?” I asked.
Her full name was Eula Landry. Her hair was dyed almost blue, and her robin-breasted posture and Millsaps College manner were almost like part of the decor in Perry’s office. Except it was obvious that her glacial detachment from the ebb and flow of the world was being sorely tested.
“No, he’s not,” she replied.
“Can I ask where he is?”
“I don’t know,” she said irritably.
She got up from her chair and walked primly into a small kitchen in back and poured herself a cup of coffee. I followed her inside. Her back was to me, but I could see her cup trembling on the saucer.
“What’s going on, Miss Eula?” I asked.
“I’m not supposed to tell that man out there where Mr. Perry is. His name is Legion. He frightens me.”
