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“Go soak your head,” he said, and hung up.
I told Wally, our dispatcher, to have Marvin Oates picked up at the motor court.
Later, I walked downtown to eat lunch. When I came back to the department, Wally stopped me in the corridor. He was holding three pink message slips that he was about to put in my mailbox.
“This woman keeps calling and axing for you. How about getting her off my neck?” he said.
He put the message slips in my hand. The telephone number was in St. Mary Parish, the caller’s name one I didn’t immediately recognize.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Hillary Clinton, in coonass disguise. How do I know, Dave? By the way, Marvin Oates wasn’t at the motor court when the cruiser got there,” he answered.
The woman’s name was Marie Guilbeau. I returned her call from my office phone. When she picked up, I suddenly remembered the face of the cleaning woman who had claimed a man in a rubber mask, wearing leather gloves, had invaded her house and molested her.
“The priest tole me I got to tell you somet’ing,” she said.
“What’s that, Ms. Guilbeau?” I asked.
There was no response.
“I’m a little busy right now, but if you
like, I can drive out to your house again,” I said.
“I clean at the motel out on the fo’-lane,” she said. “They was a nice-looking fellow staying there. I kind of flirted wit’ him. Maybe I give him the wrong idea,” she said.
“Was he a white or black man?” I asked.
“He was white. I t’ink he t’ought I was a prostitute from the truck stop. I tole him to get away from me. I was ashamed to tell you about that when you come out to my house.”
“You think the man in the rubber mask was the guy from the motel?”
“I don’t know, suh. I don’t want to talk about this no more,” she replied. The line went dead.
What do you say to sexual assault victims? Answer: You’re going to catch the guys who hurt them and bury them in a maximum-security prison from which they will never be paroled, and with good luck they’ll cell with predators who are twice their size and ten times more vicious.
Except it’s usually a lie on every level. More often than not the victims get torn apart on the stand by defense attorneys and ultimately exit the process disbelieved, discredited, and accused of being either delusional or opportunistic.
I once heard an elderly recidivist say, “Jailing ain’t the same no more. Folks just ain’t rearing criminals like they used to.” Any old-time lawman, if he’s honest, will probably tell you he’s sickened by the class of contemporary criminals he’s forced to deal with. As bad as the criminals of the Great Depression were, many of them possessed the virtues Americans admire. Most of them came from midwestern farm families and were not sexual predators or serial killers. Usually their crimes were against banks and the government, and at least in their own minds they were not out to harm individuals. Even their most vehement antagonists, usually Texas Rangers and FBI agents, granted that they were brave and died game and asked for no quarter and pleaded no excuse for their misdeeds.
Clyde Barrow was beaten unmercifully with the black Betty in Eastham State Prison and made to run two miles to work in the cotton fields and two miles back to the lockup every workday of his sentence. He swore that one day he would not only get even for the brutality he suffered and witnessed there, but he would return to Eastham a free man and break out every inmate he could. Sure enough, after he was paroled, he and Bonnie Parker shot their way into the prison, then shot their way back out with five convicts in tow, whom they packed into a stolen car and successfully escaped with.
Doc Barker and four others got over the wall at Alcatraz Island and were almost home free, a rubber boat waiting for them in the shoals, when one man sprained his ankle on the rocks. The other four went back for him, got caught in the searchlights, and were blown apart by automatic-weapons fire. Oddly, the prison authorities named the stretch of rocky sand where they died Barker Beach.
Lester Gillis, also known as Baby Face Nelson, declared war on the FBI and hunted federal agents as though he was the offended party, not they, carrying their photos and names and license tag numbers in his automobile, on the last day of his life actually making a U-turn and pursuing two of them down a road, forcing them into a ditch and a firefight that lasted over an hour and left Gillis with seventeen bullet holes in his body.
He managed to drive away and receive the church’s last rites.
Helen opened the door of my office without knocking and came inside. “Lost in thought?” she said.
“What’s up?”
“The bartender at the Boom Boom Room says Marvin Oates is stoking up the neighborhood. The skipper wants a net over him,” she said.
“Send a uniform,” I said.
“Marvin got into it with Jimmy Dean Styles.”
