Part 4 (1/2)

”Don't say no more, man. It won't do no good. You messed everything up.”

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, blew out his breath, and pointed the pistol downward at my chest.

Baby Feet had on only a bathrobe, his jockey underwear, and a pair of loafers without socks when he appeared in the brick walkway behind the black man.

”What the f.u.c.k do you think you're doing here?” he said.

The black man stepped back, the revolver drifting to his thigh.

”Mr. Julie?” he said.

”Yeah. What the f.u.c.k you doing? You creeping an apartment in my building?”

”I didn't know you was living here, Mr. Julie.”

Baby Feet took the revolver out of the black man's hand and eased down the hammer.

”Walter, if I want to, I can make you p.i.s.s blood for six months,” he said.

”Yes, suh, I knows that.”

”I'm glad you've taken that att.i.tude. Now, you get your sorry a.s.s out of here.” He pushed the black man toward the entrance. ”Go on.” He kept nudging the black man along the bricks, then he kicked him hard, as fast as a snake striking, between the b.u.t.tocks. ”I said go on, now.” He kicked him again, his small pointed shoe biting deep into the man'scrotch. Tears welled up in the man's eyes as he looked back over his shoulder. ”Move it, Walter, unless you want b.a.l.l.s the size of coconuts.”

The black man limped down the Dumaine. Baby Feet stood in front of the sprung gate, dumped the sh.e.l.ls from the .38 on the sidewalk, and flung the .38 into the darkness after the black man.

”Come on upstairs and I'll put your hand in some ice,” he said.

I had found my hat and revolver.

”I'm going after that guy,” I said.

”Pick him up in the morning. He s.h.i.+nes shoes in a barbershop on Calliope and St. Charles. You sure you want to stay in this line of work, Dave?”

He laughed, lit a purple-and-gold cigarette, and put his round, thick arm over my shoulders.

The sheriff was right: Baby Feet might be a movie producer, but he could never be dismissed as a thespian.

CHAPTER 4.

My brief visit with Julie Balboni should have been a forgettable and minor interlude in my morning. Instead, my conversation with him in the truck had added a disturbing question mark in the murder of Cherry LeBlanc. He said he had heard nothing about it, nor had he read about it in the local newspaper. This was ten minutes after Cholo Manelli had told me that he and Baby Feet had been talking about the girl's death earlier.

Was Baby Feet lying or was he simply not interested in talking about something that wasn't connected with his well-being? Or had the electroshock therapists in Mandeville overheated Cholo's brain pan?

My experience with members of the Mafia and sociopaths in general has been that they lie as a matter of course. They are convincing because they often lie when there is no need to. To apply some form of forensic psychology in attempting to understand how they think is as productive as placing your head inside a microwave oven in order to study the nature of electricity.

I spent the rest of the day retracing the geography of Cherry LeBlanc's last hours and trying to recreate the marginal world in which she had lived. At three that afternoon I parked my truck in the shade by the old wood-frame church in St. Martinville and looked at a color photograph of her that had been given to me by the grandparents. Her hair wasblack, with a mahogany tint in it, her mouth bright red with too much lipstick, her face soft, slightly plump with baby fat; her dark eyes were bright and masked no hidden thought; she was smiling.

Busted at sixteen for prost.i.tution, dead at nineteen, I thought. And that's what we knew about. G.o.d only knew what else had befallen her in her life. But she wasn't born a prost.i.tute or the kind of girl who would be pa.s.sed from hand to hand until someone opened a car door for her and drove her deep into a woods, where he revealed to her the instruments of her denouement, perhaps even convinced her that this moment was one she had elected for herself.

Others had helped her get there. My first vote would be for the father, the child molester, in Mamou. But our legal system looks at nouns, seldom at adverbs.

I gazed at the spreading oaks in the church's graveyard, where Evangeline and her lover Gabriel were buried. The tombstones were stained with lichen and looked cool and gray in the shade. Beyond the trees, the sun reflected off Bayou Teche like a yellow flame.

Where was the boyfriend in this? I thought. A girl that pretty either has a beau or there is somebody in her life who would like to be one. She hadn't gone far in school, but necessity must have given her a survivor's instinct about people, about men in particular, certainly about the variety who drifted in and out of a south Louisiana jukejoint.

She had to know her killer. I was convinced of that.

I walked to the bar, a ramshackle nineteenth-century wooden building with scaling paint and a sagging upstairs gallery. The inside was dark and cool and almost deserted. A fat black woman was scrubbing the front windows with a brush and a bucket of soap and water. I walked the length of the bar to the small office in back where I had found the owner before. Along the counter in front of the bar's mirror were rows upon rows of bottles-dark green and slender, stoppered with wet corks; obsidian black with arterial-redwax seals; frosted-white, like ice sawed out of a lake; whiskey-brown, singing with heat and light.

The smell of the green sawdust on the floor, the wood-handled beer taps dripping through an aluminum grate, the Collins mix and the bowls of cherries and sliced limes and oranges, they were only the stuff of memory, I told myself, swallowing. They belong to your Higher Power now. Just like an old girlfriend who winks at you on the street one day, I thought. You already gave her up. You just walk on by. It's that easy.

But you don't think about it, you don't think about it, you don't think about it.

The owner was a preoccupied man who combed his black hair straight back on his narrow head and kept his comb clipped inside his s.h.i.+rt pocket. The receipts and whiskey invoices on his desk were a magnet for his eyes. My questions couldn't compete. He kept running his tongue behind his teeth while I talked.

”So you didn't know anything about her friends?” I said.

”No, sir. She was here three weeks. They come and they go. That's the way it is. I don't know what else to tell you.”

”Do you know anything about your bartenders?”

His eyes focused on a spot inside his cigarette smoke.

”I'm not understanding you,” he said.

”Do you hire a bartender who hangs around with ex-cons or who's in a lot of debt? I suspect you probably don't. Those are the kind of guys who set up their friends with free doubles or make change out of an open drawer without ringing up the sale, aren't they?”

”What's your point?”

”Did you know she had been arrested for prost.i.tution?”

”I didn't know that.”

”You hired her because you thought she was an honor student at USL?”

The corner of his mouth wrinkled slightly with the beginnings of a smile. He stirred the ashes in the ashtray with the tip of his cigarette.

”I'll leave you my card and a thought, Mr. Trajan. One way or another we're going to nail the guy who killed her. In the meantime, if he kills somebody else and I find out that you held back information on me, I'll be back with a warrant for your arrest.”

”I don't care for the way you're talking to me.”

I left his office without replying and walked back down the length of the bar. The black woman was now outside, was.h.i.+ng the front window. She put down her scrub brush, flung the whole bucket of soapy water on the gla.s.s, then began rinsing it off with a hose. Her skin was the color of burnt brick, her eyes turquoise, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sagging like water-filled balloons inside her cotton-print dress. I opened my badge in my palm.

”Did you know the white girl Cherry LeBlanc?” I asked.

”She worked here, ain't she?” She squinted her eyes against the water spray bouncing off the gla.s.s.