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“Who want to know?” he asked.
I opened my badge holder in my palm.
“I used to be. A long time ago,” he said.
“You rape a black woman by the name of Ladice Hulin?” I asked.
He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it and exhaled the smoke across the tops of his cupped fingers. Then he removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue and looked at it.
“That bitch still spreadin’ them rumor, huh?” he said.
“Let me run something else by you, Legion. That’s the name you go by, right? Legion? No first name, no last name?” I said.
“I know you?” he asked.
“Yeah, you do. My brother and I walked up on you and some other white trash while y’all were copulating in an automobile. You opened a knife on me. I was twelve years old.”
His eyes shifted on mine and stayed there. “You’re a goddamn liar,” he said.
“I see,” I said. I looked at my feet and thought about the mindless animus in his stare, the arrogance and stupidity and insult in his words, the ignorance that he and his kind used like a weapon against their adversaries. I heard Helen shift her weight on the gravel. “What I wanted to run by you, Legion, is the fact there’s no statute of limitations on a homicide. Nor on complicity in a homicide. You getting my drift on this?”
“No.”
“Julian LaSalle’s wife was locked in her room the night she burned to death. That’s called negligent homicide. You removed the key from the deadbolt and inserted it on the inside of the door in order to protect Mr. Julian. Then you blackmailed him.”
He stood up from the picnic table and put his pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap.
“You t’ink I care what some nigger done tole you?” He cleared his throat and spat a glob of phlegm two inches from my shoe. A trace of splatter, like strands of cobweb, clung to the cuff of my trouser leg.
“How old are you, sir?” I asked.
“Seventy-four.”
“I’m going to stick it to you. For all the black women you molested and raped, for all the defenseless people you humiliated and degraded. That’s a promise, partner.”
He lifted his chin and rubbed the whiskers on his throat, the cast in his green eyes as ancient and devoid of moral light as those in a prehistoric, scale-covered creature breaking from the egg.
A week passed. Clete Purcel went back to New Orleans, then returned to New Iberia to hunt down more of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine’s bail skips. On Monday Clete and I went to Victor’s, a cafeteria located on Main Street in a refurbished nineteenth-century building with a high, stamped ceiling, where cops and businesspeople and attorneys often ate lunch. “Check out the pair by the cashier,” Clete said.
I turned around and saw Zerelda Calucci and Perry LaSalle at a small table, their heads bent toward each other, a solitary rose in a small vase between them.
But Clete and I were not the only ones who had taken notice of them. Barbara Shanahan was eating at another table, her muted anger growing in her face.
When Clete and I walked outside, Zerelda and Perry were across the street in the parking lot. Perry opened the passenger door of his Gazelle for Zerelda to get inside. Barbara Shanahan stood on the sidewalk in a white suit, staring at them, her eyes smoldering.
“What’s the deal with Zerelda Calucci and Perry?” I asked.
“Ask him, ” she replied.
“I’m asking you.”
“She was always one of his on-again, off-again groupies. Perry likes to think of himself as the great benefactor of the underclass. It’s part of his mystical persona.”
“She’s Joe Zeroski’s niece. Zeroski thinks Tee Bobby Hulin killed both the Bou
dreau girl and his daughter. Why’s Zerelda hanging with Tee Bobby’s defense attorney?”
“Duh, I don’t know, Dave. Why don’t you research the LaSalle family-history? Are you sure you’re in the right line of work?” Barbara said.
