The life that used to be yours comes to you only in glimpses, perhaps through a letter, a visitor who sees you out of obligation, or financial notices of foreclosure and repossession. The noise, the ennui, the lack of uncomfortable comparisons inside the jail now become a means of forgetting the sense of loss that eats daily at your heart.
If there was ever a viable benchmark to indicate a person's life is unraveling around him, I know of none better than the day a person discovers himself inside the gray-bar hotel chain.
I called Bootsie, but no one was at home. When Alafair's recorded message ended and the machine beeped, I started to speak, then realized the inadequacy as well as harmful potential of the message I would have to leave. I replaced the receiver in the cradle and called Clete's apartment, but there was no answer. A half hour went by and I asked the turnkey for another visit to the phone.
"Maybe you won't need it. You got a visitor," he said. Then he shouted at the other cells, "Female on the gate!"
"Female?" I said.
Barbara Shanahan walked down the corridor in a pink suit and white blouse and heels, her perfume as strange and incongruous inside the jail as a flower inside a machine shop. She stood at the cell door, a tinge of pity in her eyes that made me look away.
"Clete told the locals he saw the fight. He got them to go back to Styles's club and search the area where Styles was sitting. They found a switchblade knife under a table," she said.
"Switchblade knife, you say?" I said.
"Right." Her gaze wandered over my face. "Clete says he saw Styles pull it on you. But the arrest report makes no mention of a knife. I wonder why that is."
"I'm a little unsure of what happened, actually."
"I'm not going anywhere near this, but I made a couple of calls. A bondsman will be over here shortly. So will your lawyer."
"My lawyer? I don't have a lawyer."
"You do now. He's a prick, but he's the best at what he does."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"You're a good cop and don't deserve this bullshit. Most people think you're nuts. The sheriff has washed his hands of you. You're totally self-destructive. I wish you'd killed Jimmy Dean Styles. Take your choice."
"Who's the lawyer?"
She winked at me. "Put a piece of ice on that eye, handsome," she said.
She walked back down the corridor, her scent lingering in the air, smiling slightly at the remarks made to her through the bars of the adjoining cells.
Ten minutes later Perry LaSalle came down the corridor with the turnkey.
"You know a song by Lazy Lester titled 'Don't Ever Write Your Name on the Jailhouse Wall'? Man, I love that song. By the way, Jimmy Dean Styles swallowed his bridge and had to have his stomach pumped. How's it hangin', Dave?" he said.
Cops call it a "drop" or sometimes a "throw-down." It can be a tear-gas pen, a toy pistol, or perhaps the real article, the serial numbers burned off with acid or on an emery wheel.
Or it can be a switchblade knife.
When a shooting goes bad and the suspect is on the ground with his dead hand open and a set of car keys falls from his palm rather than the pocket-size automatic you thought you saw, either you can tell the truth at an Internal Affairs inquiry and be hung out to dry on a meat hook, perhaps even do serious time in a mainline joint with the same people you put there, or you can untape the drop from your ankle, wipe it with a handkerchief, throw it on the corpse, and ask God to look in the other direction.
"Barbara must like you a lot," Perry said as we drove through a long tunnel of oaks toward New Iberia, the top of his Gazelle down, the air warm, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade.
"Why's that?" I asked.
"She called me to get you out of the can. Normally she treats me like chewing gum on the bottom of a theater seat." He turned his head, his cheeks ruddy, his brownish-black hair blowing on his brow. "Purcel saw the fight but didn't try to stop it?"
"Better ask Clete about that."
"He wouldn't commit perjury for you, would he?"
"Clete?" I replied.
The next morning was Wednesday. I reported to work and walked down the corridor to my office as though nothing unusual had occurred the previous day. Wally the dispatcher gave me a thumbs-up and two uniformed deputies patted me on the shoulder as I passed. I didn't do as well with the sheriff.
"You're confined to desk duties until we clear up this mess in St. Martinville," he said, leaning in the door.
I nodded.
"Nothing to say?" he asked.
"Friends back their friends' play," I said.
"My department isn't going to be the O.K. Corral, either," he replied, and went back down the corridor, the heat rising in his face.
At noon I drove to Perry LaSalle's law office across from the Shadows, unaware I was about to have one of those experiences that teach you that your knowledge of human behavior will always be inadequate, that weakness and the capacity for self-abasement seem to reside in us all.
Perry asked me to write out what had happened in Jimmy Dean Styles's nightclub. While I wrote on a legal pad, he gazed down on the street, on the caladiums along his front walk, the live oaks under which Louisiana's boys in butternut retreated up the Teche in 1863, the columned homes on whose upstairs verandas people still served tea and highballs in the afternoon, regardless of the season or the historical events that might shake the rest of the world.
After I had finished a very short description of my attack on Jimmy Dean Styles, ending the account in the passive voice ("a switchblade knife was found under a nearby table by local officers"), I waited for Perry to detach himself from whatever he was watching down below.
"Sir?" I said.
"Oh, yes, sorry, Dave," he said, frowning as he read the legal pad.
"I didn't do a very good job?" I said.
"No, no, it's fine. There's someone here to see me." Before he had finished his sentence, Legion Guidry stood in the doorway. His khakis were freshly ironed, stiff with starch, his eyes hard to see under the brim of his straw hat. But I could smell the maleness of his odor, a hint of sweat, onions and hamburger, diesel fuel perhaps splashed on his boots, grains of cigarette tobacco that he picked off his tongue.
"What he doin' here?" he asked.
"A little legal work. That's what I do for a living," Perry said, trying to ignore the insult.
"This son of a bitch spit in my food," Legion said.
"Have a seat downstairs, Legion. I'll be right with you," Perry said.
"What y'all doin', you? What's on that tablet there?"
"It has nothing to do with you. I give you my word on that," Perry said.
"Gimme that," Legion said.
"Mr. Dave and I have private business to conduct here. Legion, don't do that. This is my office. You need to respect that," Perry said.
"You got the man in your office called me a queer. He ain't no 'mister' to me," Legion said, his hand crimped on the legal pad, the paper creasing from the pressure of his thumb. "What this say?"
"Dave, do you mind waiting downstairs?" Perry said, his face reddening with embarrassment.
"I have to go back to the office. I'll see you later," I said.
I walked out of the air-conditioning into the midday sounds of the city, the heat suddenly more oppressive, the gasoline fumes from the street more offensive. I heard Perry open the door behind me and come down the walk, trying to smile, to reclaim what dignity he could from the situation.
"He's old and uneducated. He's frightened by what he doesn't understand. It's our fault. We denied these people opportunity and access at every turn. Now we have to pay for it," he said.
Wrong, Perry. Not we, I thought.