"You know what I mean."

My eyes burned and filmed in the haze. I saw the three oaks in the vacant lot go out of focus, as though I were looking at them inside a drop of water.

"Everyone thinks I killed an unarmed woman. What do you think I feel?" I said. I had to swallow when I said it.

"It was a setup, Dave. We both know it."

"If it was, what happened to the gun? Why aren't there any holes in the bar?"

"Because the guy behind this is one smart perp. He got a woman, probably a chippy, to make calls to your dispatcher to give the impression your fly was open, then he got you out of your jurisdiction and involved you in another hooker's death. I think this guy's probably a master at control."

"Somehow that doesn't make me feel a lot better, Rosie."

I looked at the stain on the Buick's carpet. The heat was rising from the ground now and I thought I could smell a salty odor like dead fish. I closed the passenger door.

"I really walked into it, didn't I?" I said.

"Don't worry, we're going to bust the guy behind this and lose the key on him." Her eyes smiled, then she winked at me.

I had brought a garden rake from home. I took it out of Rosie's car and combed a pile of mud and soggy weeds from the bottom of the ditch next to the Buick. Then Rosie said, "Dave, come over here and look at this."

She stood next to the vegetable patch that was located on the edge of the vacant lot. She pointed at the ground.

"Look at the footprints," she said. "Somebody ran through the garden. He broke down the tomato stakes."

The footprints were deep and wide-spaced in the soft earth. The person had been moving away from the street toward the three oak trees in the center of the lot. Some of the tomato and eggplant bushes were crushed down flat in the rows.

A wrecker came around the corner with two men in it and stopped behind the Buick. The driver got out and began hooking up the rear end of the Buick. A middle-aged plain-clothes detective in short sleeves with his badge on his belt got out with him. His name was Doobie Patout, a wizened and xenophobic man, with faded blue tattoos on his forearms; some people believed he'd once been the official executioner at Angola.

He didn't speak. He simply stared through the heat at me and Rosie.

"What's happening, Doobie?" I said.

"What y'all doin' out here?" he said.

"Looking for a murder weapon," I said.

"I heard you were suspended."

"Word gets around."

"You're not supposed to be messin' 'round the crime scene."

"I'm really just an observer."

"Who's she?" He raised one finger in Rosie's direction.

"Special Agent Gomez," Rosie said. "This is part of an FBI investigation. Do you have a problem with that?"

"You got to coordinate with the city," he said.

"No, I don't," she said.

The driver of the wrecker began winching the Buick's weight off its back wheels.

"I wouldn't hang around here if I was you," Doobie said to me.

"Why not?" Rosie said.

"Because he don't have legal authority here. Because he made a mistake and nobody here'll probably hold it against him. Why piss people off, Robicheaux?"

"What are you saying, Doobie?"

"So you got to go up against Internal Affairs in your own department. That don't mean you're gonna get indicted in Lafayette Parish. Why put dog shit on a stick and hold it under somebody's nose?"

Behind us, an elderly fat mulatto woman in a print dress came out on her porch and began gesturing at us. Doobie Patout glanced at her, then opened the passenger door to the wrecker and paused before getting in.

"Y'all can rake spinach out of that ditch all you want," he said. "I ran a metal detector over it last night. There's no gun in it. So don't go back to New Iberia and be tellin' people you got a bad shake over here."

"Y'all gonna do somet'ing 'bout my garden, you?" the woman shouted off the porch.

The wrecker drove off with the Buick wobbling on the winch cable behind it. At the corner the wrecker turned and a hubcap popped off the Buick and bounced on its own course down the empty dirt road.

"My, what a nasty little man," Rosie said.

I looked back at the footprints in the vegetable patch. They exited in the Johnson grass and disappeared completely. We walked into the shade of the oaks and looked back at the road, the bits of broken glass that glinted in the dirt, the brilliant glare of sunlight on the white shell parking lot. I felt a weariness that I couldn't find words for.

"Let's talk to some of the neighbors, then pack it in," I said.

We didn't have to go far. The elderly woman whom we had been ignoring labored down her porch steps with a cane and came toward us like a determined crab. Her legs were bowed and popping with varicose veins, her body ringed with fat, her skin gold and hairless, her turquoise eyes alive with indignation.

"Where that other one gone?" she said.

"Which one?" I said.

"That policeman you was talkin' to."

"He went back to his office."

"Who gonna pay for my li'l garden?" she asked. "What I gone do wit' them smush tomato? What I gone do wit' them smush eggplant, me?"

"Did you see something last night, auntie?" I said.

"You ax me what I seen? Go look my li'l garden. You got eyes, you?"

"No, I mean did you see the shooting last night?"

"I was in the bat'room, me."

"You didn't see anything?" Rosie said.

The woman jabbed at a ruined eggplant with her cane.

"I seen that. That look like a duck egg to you? They don't talk English where y'all come from?"

"Did you see a woman in a white car outside your house?" I said.

"I seen her. They put her in an ambulance. She was dead."

"I see," I said.

"What you gone do 'bout my garden?"

"I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said.

"He can put his big feet all over my plants and I cain't do nothin' 'bout it?"

"Who?" I said.

"The man that run past my bat'room. I just tole you. You hard of hearin' just like you hard of seein'? I got up to go to the bat'room."

My head was swimming.

"Listen, auntie, this is very important," I said. "You're telling me you saw a man run past your window?"

"That's right. I seen him smush my li'l plants, break down my tomato pole, keep on runnin' right out yonder t'rough them tree, right on 'cross the tracks till he was gone. I seen the light on that li'l gun in his hand, too."

Rosie and I looked at each other.

"Can you describe this fellow, auntie?" I said.

"Yeah, he's a white man who don't care where he put his big muddy feet."

"Did the gun look like this one?" Rosie said, opened her purse, and lifted out her.357 magnum.

"No, it mo' li'l than that."

"Why didn't you tell this to the police last night?" I asked.

"I tole them. I be talkin' and they be carryin' on with each other like I ain't here, like I some old woman just in they way. It ain't changed, no."

"What hasn't?" I said.

"When the last time white people 'round here ax us what we t'ink about anyt'ing? Ain't nobody ax me if I want that juke 'cross from my li'l house, no. Ain't nobody worried 'bout my li'l garden. Black folk still black folk, livin' out here without no pave, with dust blowin' off the road t'rough my screens. Don't be pretendin' like it ain't so."

"You've helped us a great deal, auntie," I said.

She leaned over on her cane, wrapped a tangle of destroyed tomato vines around her hand, and flung them out into the grass. Then she began walking back toward her porch, the folds of skin in her neck and shoulders creasing like soft tallow.

"Would you mind if we came to see you again?" I asked

"Waste mo' of my day, play like you care what happen down here on the dirt road? Why you ax me? You comin' when you want, anyway, ain't you?"