James Burke: Jolie Blon’s Bounce

"You might as well plead out," I said.

"What you talking about?" he said.

"Attempted suicide in custody reads just like a confession. You just shafted yourself."

"I'll finish it next time."

"Your grandmother's outside. So is your sister."

"What you up to, Robicheaux?"

"Not much. Outside of Perry LaSalle, I'm probably the only guy on the planet who wants to save you from the injection table."

"My sister don't have nothing to do wit' this. You leave her alone. She cain't take no kind of stress."

"I'm letting go of you, Tee Bobby. I hope Perry gets you some slack. I think Barbara Shanahan is going to put a freight train up your ass."

He raised himself up on one elbow, the handcuffs clanking tight against the bed rail. His breath was bilious.

"I hear you, boss man. Nigger boy got to swim in his own shit now," he said.

"Run the Step 'n' Fetch It routine on somebody else, kid," I said.

I passed Ladice and Rosebud in the waiting room. Rosebud had a cheap drawing tablet open on her thighs and was coloring in it with crayons, her face bent down almost to the paper.

At noon the sheriff buzzed my extension. "You know that black juke joint by the Olivia Bridge?"

"The one with the garbage piled outside?" I said.

"I want Clete Purcel out of there."

"What's the problem?"

"Not much. He's probably setting civil rights back thirty years."

I drove down Bayou Teche and crossed the drawbridge into the little black settlement of Olivia and parked by a ramshackle bar named the Boom Boom Room, owned by a mulatto ex-boxer named Jimmy Dean Styles, who was also known as Jimmy Style or just Jimmy Sty.

Clete sat in his lavender Cadillac, the top down, listening to his radio, drinking from a long-necked bottle of beer.

"What's the haps, Streak?" he said.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Checking on a dude named Styles. Nig and Willie wrote a bond on him about the time No Duh was in central lockup."

"No Duh said the serial killer was using an alias."

"Styles used just his first and middle names-Jimmy Dean."

Clete drank out of the beer bottle and squinted up at me in the sunlight. There was an alcoholic shine in his eyes, a bloom in his cheeks.

"Styles is a music promoter. He's also the business manager for a kid named Tee Bobby Hulin, who's in custody right now for rape and murder. I think maybe you should leave Styles alone until we've finished our investigation."

Clete peeled a stick of gum and slipped it into his mouth. "No problem," he said.

"Did you have trouble inside?"

"Not me. Everything's copacetic, big mon." Clete's eyes smiled at me while he snapped his gum wetly in his jaw.

A black Lexus pulled into the lot and Jimmy Dean Styles pulled the keys from the ignition and got out and looked at us, flipping the keys back and forth over his knuckles. He had close-set eyes and a nose like a sheep's and the flat chest and trim physique of the middleweight boxer he'd been in Angola, where he'd busted up all comers in the improvised ring out on the yard.

"You're looking good, Jimmy," I said.

"Yeah, we all be lookin' good these days," he replied.

"Saw your picture in People magazine. A guy from the Teche doesn't make it in rap every day," I said.

"I'd like to talk wit' y'all, but I got a call from my bartender. Some big fat cracker was inside, being obnoxious, rollin' the gold on my customers like he was a real cop 'stead of maybe a P.I. does scut work for a bondsman. I better check to see he took his fat ass somewhere else."

"Hey, that's no kidding? You're a rapper? You've been in People magazine?" Clete said, turning around in the car seat to get a better look at Styles, his mouth grinning.

"You right on top of it, Marse Charlie," Styles said.

Clete opened the Cadillac's door and put one loafered foot out on the dirt, then rose to his full height, like an elephant standing up after sunning itself on a riverbank, his grin still in place, the skin on the back of his neck peeling like fish scales. A slapjack protruded from the side pocket of his slacks.

"Being in entertainment, you must get out on the Coast a lot," Clete said.

I gave Clete a hard look, but he didn't let it register.

"See, I travel to promote a couple of groups. That's the way the bidness work. But right now I got to hep my man inside. So I'm cutting this short and telling you I ain't shook nobody's tree. That means they don't be needing to shake mine." Styles placed the flat of his hand on his chest to show his sincerity, then went inside.

"I'm going to join the Klan," Clete said.

I followed Styles inside. The interior was dark, lit only by a jukebox and a neon beer sign over the bar. A woman sat slumped over at the bar, her head on her arms, her eyes closed, her open mouth filled with gold teeth.

She wore pink stretch pants and her black underwear was bunched out over the elastic waistband. Styles pinched her on the rump, hard, his thumb and forefinger catching a thick fold of skin on one buttock.

"This ain't Motel 6, mama. You done fried your tab, too," he said.

"Oh, hi, Jimmy. What's happenin'?" she said lazily, as though waking from a delirium to a friendly face.

"Let's go, baby," he replied, and took her under one arm and walked her to the back door and pushed her out into the whiteness of the day and slammed and latched the door behind her.

He turned around and saw me.

"Sorry about my friend Clete Purcel out there," I said. "But a word of caution. Don't mess with him again. He'll rip your wiring out."

Styles took a bottle of carbonated water from the cooler and cracked off the cap and dropped it between the duckboards and drank from the bottle.

"What you want wit' me, man?" he asked.

"Tee Bobby may go down on a bad beef. He could use some help."

"I cut Tee Bobby loose. Zydeco and blues ain't my gig no more."

"You cut loose a talent like Tee Bobby Hulin?"

"Big shit in South Lou'sana don't make you big shit in L.A. I got to piss. You want anything else?"

"Yeah, I'm going to ask you not to manhandle a woman like that again, at least not when I'm around."

"She puked all over the toilet seat. You want to take care of her? Hep me clean it up. I'll drop her by your crib," he replied.

Two weeks later Perry LaSalle went bail for Tee Bobby Hulin. Virtually everyone in town agreed that Perry LaSalle was a charitable and good man, although some were beginning to complain about a suspected rapist and murderer being set free, perhaps to repeat his crimes. With time, their sentiments would grow.

That same day a white woman named Linda Zeroski had a shouting argument with her pimp, a black man, on her pickup corner in New Iberia's old brothel district. On the corner was an ancient general store shaded by an enormous oak. In a happier time the store's owner had sold sno'balls to children on their way home from school. Now the apron of dirt yard around the store was occupied each afternoon and evening and all day Saturday and Sunday by young black men with jailhouse art on their arms and inverted ball caps on their heads. If you slowed the car by the corner, they would turn up their palms and raise their eyebrows, which was their way of asking you what you wanted, simultaneously indicating they could supply it-rock, weed, tar, China white, leapers, downers, almost any street drug except crystal meth, which was just starting its odyssey from Arizona to the rural South.

Linda Zeroski did not have to pay for the crack she smoked daily or the tar she injected into her veins. Or the fines she paid in city court or the bonds she posted for the incremental privilege of dismantling her own life. Her financial affairs were all handled by her pimp, a pragmatic, emotionless man by the name of Washington Trahan, who viewed women as he would bars of soap. Except for Linda Zeroski, who knew how to put slivers of bamboo under his fingernails and ridicule and demean him in public. Washington would have loved to slap her cross-eyed, to drag her by her hair into a car and dump her naked and stoned on a highway, but Linda's background was different from that of his other whores.