Julie Balboni looked just like his father, who had owned most of the slot and racehorse machines in Iberia Parish during the 1940s and, with an Assyrian family, had run the gambling and prostitution in the Underpass area of Lafayette. Julie was already huge, six and a half feet tall, when he was in the eleventh grade, thick across the hips and tapered at both ends like a fat banana, with tiny ankles and size-seven feet and a head as big as a buffalo's. A year later he filled out in serious proportions. That was also the year he was arrested for burglarizing a liquor store. His father walked him out into the woods at gunpoint and whipped the skin off his back with the nozzle end of a garden hose.
His hair grew on his head like black snakes, and because a physician had injured a nerve in his face when he was delivered, the corner of his mouth would sometimes droop involuntarily and give him a lewd or leering expression that repelled most girls. He farted in class, belched during the pledge of allegiance, combed his dandruff out on top of the desk, and addressed anyone he didn't like by gathering up his scrotum and telling them to bite. We walked around him in the halls and the locker room. His teachers were secretly relieved when his mother and father did not show up on parents' night.
His other nickname was Julie the Bone, although it wasn't used to his face, because he went regularly to Mabel White's Negro brothel in Crowley and the Negro cribs on Hopkins Avenue in New Iberia.
But Julie had two uncontested talents. He was both a great kick boxer and a great baseball catcher. His ankles twisted too easily for him to play football; he was too fat to run track; but with one flick of a thick thigh he could leave a kick-box opponent heaving blood, and behind the plate he could steal the ball out of the batter's swing or vacuum a wild pitch out of the dust and zip the ball to third base like a BB.
In my last time out as a high school pitcher, I was going into the bottom of the ninth against Abbeville with a shutout almost in my pocket. It was a soft, pink evening, with the smell of flowers and freshly cut grass in the air. Graduation was only three weeks away, and we all felt that we were painted with magic and that the spring season had been created as a song especially for us. Innocence, a lock on the future, the surge of victory in the loins, the confirmation of a girl's kiss among the dusky oak trees, like a strawberry bursting against the roof of the mouth, were all most assuredly our due.
We even felt an acceptance and camaraderie toward Baby Feet. Imminent graduation and the laurels of a winning season seemed to have melted away the differences in our backgrounds and experience.
Then their pitcher, a beanballer who used his elbows, knees, and spikes in a slide, hit a double and stole third base. Baby Feet called time and jogged out to the mound, sweat leaking out of his inverted cap. He rubbed up a new ball for me.
"Put it in the dirt. I'm gonna let that cocksucker have his chance," he said.
"I don't know if that's smart, Feet," I said.
"I've called a shutout for you so far, haven't I? Do what I tell you."
On the next pitch I glanced at the runner, then fired low and outside, into the dirt. Baby Feet vacuumed it up, then spun around, throwing dust in the air like an elephant, and raced toward the backstop as though the ball had gotten past him.
The runner charged from third. Suddenly Baby Feet reappeared at the plate, the ball never having left his hand, his mask still on his face. The runner realized that he had stepped into it and he tried to bust up Baby Feet in the slide by throwing one spiked shoe up in Feet's face. Baby Feet caught the runner's spikes in his mask, tagged him across the head with the ball, then, when it was completely unnecessary at that point, razored his own spikes into the boy's ankle and twisted.
The players on the field, the coaches, the people in the stands, stared numbly at home plate. Baby Feet calmly scraped his spikes clean in the sand, then knelt and tightened the strap on a shin guard, his face cool and detached as he squinted up at the flag snapping on a metal pole behind the backstop.
It wasn't hard to find him at the Holiday Inn. He and his entourage were the only people in and around the swimming pool. Their tanned bodies glistened as though they had rubbed them with melted butter. They wore wraparound sunglasses that were as black as a blind man's, reclined luxuriously on deck chairs, their genitalia sculpted against their bikinis, or floated on rubber mattresses, tropical drinks in holders at their sides, a glaze of suntan oil emanating from the points of their fingers and toes.
A woman came out the sliding door of a room with her two children, walked them to the wading pool, then obviously realized the nature of the company she was keeping; she looked around distractedly, as though she heard invisible birds cawing at her, and returned quickly to her room with her children's hands firmly in hers.
Julie the Bone hadn't changed a great deal since I had last seen him seven years ago in New Orleans. His eyes, which were like black marbles, were set a little more deeply in his face; his wild tangle of hair was flecked in places with gray; but his barrel chest and his washtub of a stomach still seemed to have the tone and texture of whale hide. When you looked at the ridges of scar tissue under the hair on his shoulders and back where his father had beaten him, at the nests of tendons and veins in his neck, and the white protrusion of knuckles in his huge hands, you had the feeling that nothing short of a wrecking ball, swung by a cable from a great height, could adequately deal with this man if he should choose to destroy everything in his immediate environment.
He raised himself on one elbow from his reclining chair, pushed his sunglasses up on his hair, and squinted through the haze at me as I approached him. Two of his men sat next to him at a glass table under an umbrella, playing cards with a woman with bleached hair and skin that was so tan it looked like folds of soft leather. Both men put down their cards and got to their feet, and one of them, who looked as though he were hammered together from boilerplate, stepped directly into my path. His hair was orange and gray, flattened in damp curls on his head, and there were pachuco crosses tattooed on the backs of his hands. I opened my seersucker coat so he could see the badge clipped to my belt. But recognition was already working in his face.
"What's happening, Cholo?" I said.
"Hey, lieutenant, how you doin'?" he said, then turned to Baby Feet. "Hey, Julie, it's Lieutenant Robicheaux. From the First District in New Orleans. You remember him when-"
"Yeah, I know who it is, Cholo," Baby Feet said, smiling and nodding at me. "What you up to, Dave? Somebody knock a pop fly over the swimming-pool wall?"
"I was just in the neighborhood. I heard you were back in town for a short visit."
"No kidding?"
"That's a fact."
"You were probably in the barbershop and somebody said, 'The Bone's in town,' and you thought, 'Boy, that's great news. I'll just go say hello to ole Feet.' "
"You're a famous man, Julie. Word gets around."
"And I'm just here for a short visit, right?"
"Yeah, that's the word."
His eyes moved up and down my body. He smiled to himself and took a sip from a tall glass wrapped in a napkin, with shaved ice, fruit, and a tiny paper umbrella in it.
"You're a sheriff's detective now, I hear."
"On and off."
He pushed a chair at me with his foot, then picked it up and set it in a shady area across from him. I took off my seersucker coat, folded it on my arm, and sat down.
"Y'all worried about me, Dave?"
"Some people in New Iberia think you're a hard act to follow. How many guys would burn down their own father's nightclub?"
He laughed.
"Yeah, the old man lost his interest in garden hoses after that," he said.
"Everybody likes to come back to his hometown once in a while. That's a perfectly natural thing to do. No one's worried about that, Julie." I looked at his eyes. Under his sweaty brows, they were as shiny and full of light as obsidian.
He shook a cigarette out of a package on the cement and lit it. He blew smoke out into the sunlight and looked around the swimming-pool area.
"Except I've only got a visa, right?" he said. "I'm supposed to spread a little money around, stay on the back streets, tell my crew not to spit on the sidewalks or blow their noses on their napkins in the restaurants. Does that kind of cover it for you, Dave?"
"It's a small town with small-town problems."
"Fuck." He took a deep breath, then twisted his neck as though there were a crick in it. "Margot-" he said to the woman playing cards under the umbrella. She got up from her chair and stood behind him, her narrow face expressionless behind her sunglasses, and began kneading his neck with her fingers. He filled his mouth with ice, orange slices, and cherries from his glass and studied my face while he chewed.
"I get a little upset at these kind of attitudes, Dave. You got to forgive me," he said, and pointed into his breastbone with his fingertips. "But it don't seem to matter sometimes what a guy does now. It's always yesterday that's in people's minds. Like Cholo here. He made a mistake fifteen years ago and we're still hearing about it. What the fuck is that? You think that's fair?"
"He threw his brother-in-law off the roof of the Jax's brewery on top of a Mardi Gras float. That was a first even for New Orleans."
"Hey, lieutenant, there was a lot of other things involved there. The guy beat up my sister. He was a fucking animal."
"Look, Dave, you been gone from New Orleans for a long time," Baby Feet said. "The city ain't anything like it used to be. Black kids with shit for brains are provoking everybody in the fucking town. People get killed in Audubon Park, for God's sake. You try to get on the St. Charles streetcar and there's either niggers or Japs hanging out the doors and windows. We used to have understandings with the city. Everybody knew the rules, nobody got hurt. Take a walk past the Desire or St. Thomas project and see what happens."
"What's the point, Julie?"
"The point is who the fuck needs it? I own a recording studio, the same place Jimmy Clanton cut his first record. I'm in the entertainment business. I talk on the phone every day to people in California you read about in People magazine. I come home to this shithole, they ought to have 'Welcome Back Balboni Day.' Instead, I get told maybe I'm like a bad smell in the air. You understand what I'm saying, that hurts me."
I rubbed one palm against the other.
"I'm just a messenger," I said.
"That laundry man you work for send you?"
"He has his concerns."
He waved the woman away and sat up in his chair.
"Give me five minutes to get dressed. Then I want you to drive me somewhere," he said.
"I'm a little tied up on time right now."
"I'm asking fifteen minutes of you, max. You think you can give me that much of your day, Dave?" He got up and started past me to his room. There were tufts of black hair like pig bristles on his love handles. He cocked his index finger at me. "Be here when I get back. You won't regret it."
The woman with the bleached hair sat back down at the table. She took off her glasses, parted her legs a moment, and looked into my face, her eyes neither flirtatious nor hostile, simply dead. Cholo invited me to play gin rummy with them.
"Thanks, I never took it up," I said.
"You sure took it up with horses, lieutenant," he said.
"Yep, horses and Beam. They always made an interesting combination at the Fairgrounds."
"Hey, you remember that time you lent me twenty bucks to get home from Jefferson Downs? I always remember that, Loot. That was all right."
Cholo Manelli had been born of a Mexican washerwoman, who probably wished she had given birth to a bowling ball instead, and fathered by a brain-damaged Sicilian numbers runner, whose head had been caved in by a cop's baton in the Irish Channel. He was raised in the Iberville welfare project across from the old St. Louis cemeteries, and at age eleven was busted with his brothers for rolling and beating the winos who slept in the empty crypts. Their weapons of choice had been sand-filled socks.
He had the coarse, square hands of a bricklayer, the facial depth of a pie plate. I always suspected that if he was lobotomized you wouldn't know the difference. The psychiatrists at Mandeville diagnosed him as a sociopath and shot his head full of electricity. Evidently the treatment had as much effect as charging a car battery with three dead cells. On his first jolt at Angola he was put in with the big stripes, the violent and the incorrigible, back in the days when the state used trusty guards, mounted on horses and armed with double-barrel twelve-gauge shotguns, who had to serve the time of any inmate who escaped while under their supervision. Cholo went to the bushes and didn't come back fast enough for the trusty gunbull. The gunbull put four pieces of buckshot in Cholo's back. Two weeks later a Mason jar of prune-o was found in the gunbull's cell. A month after that, when he was back in the main population, somebody dropped the loaded bed of a dump truck on his head.
"Julie told me about the time that boon almost popped you with a.38," he said.
"What time was that?"
"When you were a patrolman. In the Quarter. Julie said he saved your life."
"He did, huh?"
Cholo shrugged his shoulders.
"That's what the man said, lieutenant. What do I know?"
"Take the hint, Cholo. Our detective isn't a conversationalist," the woman said, without removing her eyes from her cards. She clacked her lacquered nails on the glass tabletop, and her lips made a dry, sucking sound when she puffed on her cigarette.
"You working on that murder case? The one about that girl?" he said.
"How'd you know about that?"
His eyes clicked sideways.
"It was in the newspaper," he said. "Julie and me was talking about it this morning. Something like that's disgusting. You got a fucking maniac on the loose around here. Somebody ought to take him to a hospital and kill him."
Baby Feet emerged resplendent from the sliding glass door of his room. He wore a white suit with gray pin stripes, a purple shirt scrolled with gray flowers, a half-dozen gold chains and medallions around his talcumed neck, tasseled loafers that seemed as small on his feet as ballet slippers.
"You look beautiful, Julie," Cholo said.
"Fucking A," Baby Feet said, lighting the cigarette in the corner of his mouth with a tiny gold lighter.
"Can I go with y'all?" Cholo asked.
"Keep an eye on things here for me."
"Hey, you told me last night I could go."
"I need you to take my calls."
"Margot don't know how to pick up a phone anymore?" Cholo said.
"My meter's running, Julie," I said.
"We're going out to dinner tonight with some interesting people," Baby Feet said to Cholo. "You'll enjoy it. Be patient."
"They're quite excited about the possibility of meeting you. They called and said that, Cholo," the woman said.
"Margot, why is it you got calluses on your back? Somebody been putting starch in your sheets or something?" Cholo said.
I started walking toward my truck. The sunlight off the cement by the poolside was blinding. Baby Feet caught up with me. One of his other women dove off the board and splashed water and the smell of chlorine and suntan oil across my back.
"Hey, I live in a fucking menagerie," Baby Feet said as we went out onto the street. "Don't go walking off from me with your nose bent out of joint. Did I ever treat you with a lack of respect?"
I got in the truck.
"Where we going, Feet?" I said.
"Out by Spanish Lake. Look, I want you to take a message back to the man you work for. I'm not the source of any problems you got around here. The coke you got in this parish has been stepped on so many times it's baby powder. If it was coming from some people I've been associated with in New Orleans, and I'm talking about past associations, you understand, it'd go from your nose to your brain like liquid Drano."
I headed out toward the old two-lane highway that led to the little settlement of Burke and the lake where Spanish colonists had tried to establish plantations in the eighteenth century and had given Iberia Parish its name.
"I don't work narcotics, Julie, and I'm not good at passing on bullshit, either. My main concern right now is the girl we found south of town."
"Oh, yeah? What girl's that?"
"The murdered girl, Cherry LeBlanc."
"I don't guess I heard about it."
I turned and looked at him. He gazed idly out the window at the passing oak trees on the edge of town and a roadside watermelon and strawberry stand.
"You don't read the local papers?" I said.
"I been busy. You saying I talk bullshit, Dave?"
"Put it this way, Feet. If you've got something to tell the sheriff, do it yourself."
He pinched his nose, then blew air through it.
"We used to be friends, Dave. I even maybe did you a little favor once. So I'm going to line it out for you and any of the locals who want to clean the wax out of their ears. The oil business is still in the toilet and your town's flat-ass broke. Frankly, in my opinion, it deserves anything that happens to it. But me and all those people you see back on that lake-" He pointed out the window. Through a pecan orchard, silhouetted against the light winking off the water, I could see cameras mounted on booms and actors in Confederate uniforms toiling through the shallows in retreat from imaginary federal troops. "We're going to leave around ten million dollars in Lafayette and Iberia Parish. They don't like the name Balboni around here, tell them we can move the whole fucking operation over to Mississippi. See how that floats with some of those coonass jackoffs in the Chamber of Commerce."
"You're telling me you're in the movie business?"
"Coproducer with Michael Goldman. What do you think of that?"
I turned into the dirt road that led through the pecan trees to the lake.
"I'm sure everyone wishes you success, Julie."
"I'm going to make a baseball movie next. You want a part in it?" He smiled at me.
"I don't think I'd be up to it."
"Hey, Dave, don't get me wrong." He was grinning broadly now. "But my main actor sees dead people out in the mist, his punch is usually ripped by nine a.m. on weed or whites, and Mikey's got peptic ulcers and some kind of obsession with the Holocaust. Dave, I ain't shitting you, I mean this sincerely, with no offense, with your record, you could fit right in."
I stopped the truck by a small wood-frame security office. A wiry man in a khaki uniform and a bill cap, with a white scar like a chicken's foot on his throat, approached my window.
"We'll see you, Feet," I said.
"You don't want to look around?"
"Adios, partner," I said, waited for him to close the door, then turned around in the weeds and drove back through the pecan trees to the highway, the sun's reflection bouncing on my hood like a yellow balloon.
It happened my second year on the New Orleans police force, when I was a patrolman in the French Quarter and somebody called in a prowler report at an address on Dumaine. The lock on the iron gate was rusted and had been bent out of the jamb with a bar and sprung back on the hinges. Down the narrow brick walkway I could see bits of broken glass, like tiny rat's teeth, where someone had broken out the overhead light bulb. But the courtyard ahead was lighted, filled with the waving shadows of banana trees and palm fronds, and I could hear a baseball game playing on a radio or television set.
I slipped my revolver out of its holster and moved along the coolness of the bricks, through a ticking pool of water, to the entrance of the courtyard, where a second scrolled-iron gate yawned back on its hinges. I could smell the damp earth in the flower beds, spearmint growing against a stucco wall, the thick clumps of purple wisteria that hung from a tile roof.
Then I smelled him, even before I saw him, an odor that was at once like snuff, synthetic wine, rotting teeth, and stomach bile. He was a huge black man, dressed in a Donald Duck T-shirt, filthy tennis shoes, and a pair of purple slacks that were bursting on his thighs. In his left hand was a drawstring bag filled with goods from the apartment he'd just creeped. He swung the gate with all his weight into my hand, snapped something in it like a Popsicle stick breaking, and sent my revolver skidding across the flagstones.
I tried to get my baton loose, but it was his show now. He came out of his back pocket with a worn one-inch.38, the grips wrapped with black electrician's tape, and screwed the barrel into my ear. There was a dark clot of blood in his right eye, and his breath slid across the side of my face like an unwashed hand.
"Get back in the walkway, motherfucker," he whispered.
We stumbled backward into the gloom. I could hear revelers out on the street, a beer can tinkling along the cement.
"Don't be a dumb guy," I said.
"Shut up," he said. Then, almost as an angry afterthought, he drove my head into the bricks. I fell to my knees in the water, my baton twisted uselessly in my belt.
His eyes were dilated, his hair haloed with sweat, his pulse leaping in his neck. He was a cop's worst possible adversary in that situation-strung-out, frightened, and stupid enough to carry a weapon on a simple B amp; E.
"Why'd you have to come along, man? Why'd you have to do that?" he said.
His thumb curled around the spur of the pistol's hammer and I heard the cylinder rotate and the chamber lock into place.
"There're cops on both ends of the street," I said. "You won't get out of the Quarter."
"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 fuck 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 fuck 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 piss blood for six months," he said.
"Yes, suh, I knows that."
"I'm glad you've taken that attitude. Now, you get your sorry ass 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 buttocks. "I said go on, now." He kicked him again, his small pointed shoe biting deep into the man's crotch. Tears welled up in the man's eyes as he looked back over his shoulder. "Move it, Walter, unless you want balls the size of coconuts."
The black man limped down the Dumaine. Baby Feet stood in front of the sprung gate, dumped the shells 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 shines 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.