I not only admired Helen, I loved her. She was honest and loyal and never afraid. Anyone who showed disrespect regarding her sexuality did so only once.
A couple of years back, a New Iberia lowlife by the name of Jimmy Dean Styles, who ran a dump called the Boom Boom Room and who would eventually rape and murder a sixteen-year-old girl with a shotgun, was drinking from a bottle of chocolate milk behind his bar while he casually told Helen that even though he had overheard her male fellow officers ridiculing her at the McDonald’s on East Main, he personally considered her “a dyke who’s straight-up and don’t take shit from nobody.”
Then he upended his bottle of chocolate milk, his eyes smiling at the barb he had inserted under her skin.
Helen slipped her baton so quickly from the ring on her belt, he didn’t even have time to flinch before glass and chocolate milk and blood exploded all over his face. Then Helen dropped her business card on the bar and said, “Have a nice day. Call me again if I can be of any more assistance.” That was Helen Soileau.
I tapped on her office door, then opened it. “Wally says we have a homicide by the mill?” I said.
“The nine-one-one came in about fifteen minutes ago. The coroner should be there now. Where were you?”
“A couple of bills with dye on them showed up at the new truck stop. Who’s the victim?”
She glanced down at a notepad. “Yvonne Darbonne. She waited tables at Victor’s. You know her?”
“Yeah, I think I do. Her daddy used to cane-farm and run a bar up the bayou?”
“Bring the cruiser around and let’s find out,” she replied.
We drove through downtown and crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at Burke Street, then crossed the bayou again and headed up a broken two-lane road that led past an enormous sugar mill that almost blocked out the sky. At night, during the grinding season, the fires and electric lights and the giant white clouds of steam that rose from the stacks could be seen from miles away, not unlike a medieval painting depicting Dante’s vision of the next world.