The disheveled man stood up and began waving his arms at them. "That streetcar didn't go out to Desire," he yelled. "It went out to Elysian Fields. It was the last car that still run out to Elysian Fields. All these streets here was Storyville. It was full of colored whorehouses and women who killed themselves with morphine. Hey, don't you go in them crypts! The kids from the Iberville Project climb over the wall and bust people like you in the head. Are you listening to me? This ain't New Orleans. You're standing in the city of the dead. You just don't know it yet."
The tourists walked quickly up the street toward Canal, their faces ashen.
A minute later Clete Purcel's Cadillac came around the corner, oil smoke leaking from under the frame, a hubcap rolling loose across the asphalt, like a paean to the disorder in his life. He pushed open the passenger door.
"Want to go back to New Iberia?" he said.
"Why not?" I said, and got inside. I looked through the back window at the silhouette of the disheveled man receding behind us.
"Sorry I got on your case. But I think Fat Sammy has been putting the slide on you," Clete said.
"Maybe he has."
"No maybe about it, Streak. Every ounce of meth going into the projects has Sammy's greasy prints all over it. He makes me think of a giant snail trailing slime all over the city."
"You're one in a million, Cletus."
He looked at me uncertainly, a pocket of air in one cheek, then roared up the ramp onto I-10. We poured it on all the way back to New Iberia, like two over-the-hill low riders who no longer look at calendars or watch the faces of clocks.
On Monday morning Mack Bertrand called me from the lab and said the shoes we had removed from Dr. Parks's house were not the source of the leather scrapings found under the fingernails of the dead daiquiri vendor, Leon Hebert. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and I told her of the lab's findings.
"So where does that leave us?" she said.
"A revenge killing of some kind. The daiquiri cup stuffed down the victim's throat indicates a high level of rage. Dr. Parks had motivation."
"You don't sound convinced," she said.
"Parks has so much anger I doubt he'd deny killing the man if he did it."
"How about this guy Guillot?"
"He's a poster child for obnoxiousness. But why would he shoot someone and throw the weapon, registered in his name, on the side of the road?"
"We're talking about middle-class people, Streak. Career perps are predictable. Dagwood and Blondie aren't."
Beautiful.
But I believed there were other factors at work in this case that were more complex than a simple act of vengeance. It was too much for coincidence that Castille Lejeune's corporation owned the daiquiri store where Leon Hebert had been murdered and that the murder weapon belonged to Will Guillot, one of his employees.
But Helen was right. We were dealing with middle-class people who didn't have the proclivities and personal associations of career criminals, most of whom were basket cases who left a paper trail through the system from birth to the grave.
Why had Theodosha Flannigan been afraid to climb through the fence surrounding the fish pond on her father's property? Why did Castille Lejeune say he had no memory of using his influence to get Junior Crudup off the levee gang at Angola? People denied evil deeds, not good ones.
And how about the suicide of Theodosha's psychiatrist? If she was his regular patient, why wasn't her case file in his records?
I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative.
So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?
After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.
She looked thoughtfully into space. She had a round face and wore glasses with pink frames and parted her hair down the middle. "I have a history of blues and swamp pop here. That might be helpful," she said.
"I've already used that. This guy disappeared from Angola about 1951. There's no record anywhere of what happened to him."
"Wait here a minute," she said.
I watched her moving around in the stacks, sliding a book off a shelf here and there, then clicking on a computer keyboard. A few minutes later she waved for me to join her at a back table, where she had spread open several books that contained mention of Junior Crudup.
"I looked at those already, I'm afraid," I said.
"Well, there's a photographic collection in Washington, D.C." that might be worth looking at," she said.
"Pardon?"
"In the forties and fifties a photographer who once worked with Walker Evans photographed convicts all over the South. He had a penchant for black musicians. He tracked some of their careers for decades. There are hundreds of photographs in his collection."
"Is he still alive?"
"No, he died twenty years or so ago."
"How do we get a hold of the collection?"
"All the ones he took of Crudup or of Louisiana prisons are downloading and printing right now. You need anything else?"
The photographs were stunning, shot with grainy black-and-white film in Jim Crow jails and work camps, when the convicts still wore stripes and the hacks carried lead-weighted walking canes and made no attempt to hide the spiritual cancer that lived in their faces. Nor was there any attempt to hide the level of severity and privation that characterized the lives of the prisoners in the photographs. In each photo the camera caught an image or a detail that left no doubt in the viewer's mind about what he was seeing: a wheeled cage tiered with bunks parked inside a swamp; a convict sitting in the bottom of a wood sweatbox, a forced grin on his face, a waste bucket by his foot; a work gang assembled at morning-bell count, while in the background two men tried to balance themselves barefoot atop a case of empty pop bottles; a mounted gun bull in a cowboy hat framed against a boiling sun, his arm pointed, yelling a command at a convict pulling a fourteen-foot cotton sack behind him.
It was called stacking time on the hard road.
But in each of the photographs the reference librarian had downloaded, Junior Crudup was obviously the odd piece in the puzzle box, regardless of his surroundings. In a ditch with a dozen other convicts, he was the only light-skinned man, the only one with an etched mustache, and the only one to look directly into the camera. His eyes were clear, his face marked by neither resentment nor grandiosity. I suspected he was one of those for whom the gun bulls did not have a category, which would not have been good news for Junior Crudup.
But some of the photographs were taken outside of prison. One showed him with Leadbelly, the two of them laughing at a joke in front of what appeared to be a practice session of Cab Calloway's orchestra. Another showed him at a crowded table in a supper club, a beautiful black woman in a pillbox hat and polka-dot organdy dress, with an orchid pinned to her shoulder, seated next to him. Everyone in the picture was grinning at the camera, except Junior Crudup. He was dressed in a tuxedo, his tie pulled loose, a cigarette trailing a line of smoke from between two fingers. There was a half grin on his mouth, his eyes focused on a neutral spot, as though he were not entirely connected to the environment around him.