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“You hate the LaSalles, Barbara. I think you asked for this case,” I said.
“I don’t have any feeling about the LaSalle family one way or another.”
“Your grandfather went to prison for old man Julian. That’s how he got his job as a security guard on LaSalle’s bridge.”
“Have the paperwork in my office by close of business. In the meantime, if you ever impugn my motives as a prosecutor again, I’ll take you into civil court and fry your sorry ass for slander.”
She threw the door open and marched down the corridor toward the sheriff’s office. A uniformed cop watched her sideways while he drank from the water fountain, his eyes glued on her posterior. He grinned sheepishly when he saw me looking at him.
. . .
It was Friday afternoon and I didn’t want to think anymore about Barbara Shanahan or a young girl who had probably been forced to stare into the barrel of a shotgun and wait helplessly while her executioner decided whether or not to pull the trigger. I drove south of town, down a dusty road, along a tree-lined waterway, to the house built by my father during the Depression. The sunlight looked like yellow smoke in the canopy of the live oaks, and up ahead I saw the dock and bait shop that I operated as a part-time business and a lavender Cadillac convertible parked by the boat ramp, which meant that my old Homicide partner, the bane of NOPD, the good-natured, totally irresponsible, fiercely loyal Clete Purcel, was back in New Iberia.
He had dumped his cooler on a bait table at the end of the dock and was gutting a stringer of ice-flecked sac-a-lait and bream and bigmouth bass with a long, razor-edged knife that had no guard on the handle. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts and flip-flops and a Marine Corps utility cap. His whole body was oily with lotion and baked with sunburn, his body hair matted in gold curlicues on his massive arms and shoulders.
I parked my pickup truck in the driveway to the house and walked across the road and down the dock, where Clete was now scaling his fish with a tablespoon and washing them under a faucet and placing them on a clean layer of ice in his cooler.
“It looks like you had a pretty good day,” I said.
“If I can use your shower, I’ll take you and Bootsie and Alafair to Bon Creole.” He picked up a salted can of beer off the dock rail and watched me over the bottom of it while he drank. His hair was bleached by the sun, his green eyes happy, one eyebrow cut by a scar that ran across the bridge of his nose.
“You just here for a fishing trip?” I asked.
“I got a shitload of bail skips to pick up for Nig and Willie. Plus Nig may have written a bond on a serial killer.”
I was tired and didn’t want to hear about Clete’s ongoing grief as a bounty hunter for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine. I tried to look attentive, but my gaze started to wander toward the house, the baskets of impatiens swaying under the eaves of the gallery, my wife, Bootsie, weeding the hydrangea bed in the shade.
“You listening?” Clete said.
“Sure,” I replied.
“So this is how we heard about the serial sex predator or killer or whatever the hell he is. No Duh Dolowitz got nailed trying to creep Fat Sammy Figorelli’s skin parlor, but this time Nig says he’s had it with No Duh and his half-baked capers, like putting dog shit in the sandwiches at a Teamsters convention or impersonating a chauffeur and driving away with the Calucci family’s limo.
“So No Duh calls up from central lockup and says Nig and Wee Willie are hypocrites because they wrote the bond on some dude who killed a couple of hookers in Seattle and Portland.
“Nig asks No Duh how he knows this and No Duh goes, ‘ ’Cause one year ago I was sitting in a cell next to this perverted fuck while he was pissing and moaning about how he dumped these broads along riverbanks on the West Coast. This same pervert was also talking about two dumb New Orleans Jews who bought his alias and were writing his bond without running his sheet.’
“But Nig’s got scruples and doesn’t like the idea he might have put a predator back on the street. So he has me start going over every dirtbag he’s written paper on for the last two years. So far I’ve checked out one hundred twenty or one hundred thirty names and I can’t come up with anyone who fits the profile.”
“Why believe anything Dolowitz says? One of the Giacanos put dents in his head with a ball peen hammer years ago,” I said.
“That’s the point. He’s got something wrong with his brain. No Duh is a thief who never lies. That’s why he’s always doing time.”
“You’re going to take us to Bon Creole?” I asked.
“I said I was, didn’t I?”
“I’d really enjoy that,” I said.
But I would not be able to free myself that evening from the murder of Amanda Boudreau. I had just showered and changed clothes and was waiting on the gallery for Clete and Bootsie and Alafair to join me when Perry LaSalle’s cream-yellow Gazelle, a replica of a 1929 Mercedes, turned off the road into our driveway. Before he could get out of his automobile, I walked down through the trees to meet him. The top was down on his automobile, and his sun-browned skin looked dark in the shade, his brownish-black hair tousled by the wind, his eyes bright blue, his cheeks pooled with color.
He had given
up his studies at a Jesuit seminary when he was twenty-one, for no reason he was ever willing to provide. He had lived among street people in the Bowery and wandered the West, working lettuce and beet fields, riding on freight cars with derelicts and fruit tramps, then had returned like the prodigal son to his family and studied law at Tulane.
I liked Perry and the dignified manner and generosity of spirit with which he always conducted himself. He was a big man, at least six feet two, but he was never grandiose or assuming and was always kind to those less fortunate than he. But like many of us I felt Perry’s story was infinitely more complex than his benign demeanor would indicate.
“Out for a drive?” I said, knowing better.
