I flattened the sketch of the reclining nude on the bar.

"Rosebud drew this. Look at the crossed wrists, the fear and despair in the woman's eyes, the scream that's about to come from her mouth. What's that make you think of, Tee Bobby?" I said.

He stared down at the drawing and took a breath and wet his lips. Then he blew his nose on a handkerchief to hide the expression on his face.

"Perry LaSalle say I ain't got to talk wit' you," he said.

I clenched his wrist and flattened his hand on the paper.

"For just a second feel the pain and terror in that drawing, Tee Bobby. Look at me and tell me you don't know what we're talking about," I said.

He pressed his head down on his fists. His T-shirt was gray with sweat; his pulse was leaping in his throat.

"Why don't you just put a bullet in me?" he said.

"You got a meth problem, Tee Bobby? Somebody giving you crystal to straighten out the kinks?" I said.

He started to speak, then he saw a silhouette out of the corner of his eye. I didn't think his face could look sicker than it did, but I was wrong.

Jimmy Dean Styles walked from his office and crossed the dance floor and went behind the bar. He wore a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest and gray slacks that hung low on the smooth taper of his stomach. He opened a small refrigerator behind the bar and removed a container of coleslaw, then began eating it with a plastic fork, his eyes drifting casually to Rosebud's drawing. He tilted his head curiously.

"What you got, my man?" he asked.

"This is a police matter. I'd appreciate your not intruding," I said.

Styles chewed his food thoughtfully, his eyes focused out the open front door.

"Tee Bobby ain't did you nothing. Let the cat have some peace," he said.

"For a guy who busted him up on the oyster shells, you're a funny advocate," I said.

"Maybe we got our disagreements, but he's still my friend. Look, the man's coming down wit' the flu. Ain't he got enough misery?" Styles said.

I rolled up Rosebud's drawing. "I'll be around," I said.

"Oh, yeah, I know. I got a broken toilet that's the same way. No matter what I do, it just keep running out on the flo'," Styles said.

When I got back to the department, I went into the office of a plainclothes detective who worked Narcotics, his name was Kevin Dartez and he wore long-sleeved white shirts and narrow, knit ties and a pencil-thin black mustache. His younger sister had been what is called a rock queen, or crack whore, and had died of her addiction. Dartez's ferocity toward black dealers who pimped for white girls was a legend in south Louisiana law enforcement.

"You seen any crystal meth around?" I asked.

"Out-of-towners bring it into the French Quarter, That's about it so far," he replied, tilted back in his swivel chair, hands clasped behind his head.

"The Carousel Club in St. Martinville? I wonder if anyone's ever tossed that place. Who owns the Carousel, anyway?" I said.

"Say again?" Dartez said, sitting up straight in his:hair.

That afternoon Helen came into my office and sat on he corner of my desk and looked down at a yellow legal pad she had propped on her thigh.

"I've found three or four people who say they saw Tee Bobby with Amanda Boudreau. But it was always in a mblic place, like he'd see her and try to strike up a conversation," she said.

"You think they had some kind of secret relationship?" I asked.

"None I could find. I get the sense Tee Bobby was just a routine pain in the ass Amanda tried to avoid."

I dropped a paper clip I had been fiddling with on my desk blotter and rubbed my forehead.

"How do you think it's going to go?" I asked.

"The fact Tee Bobby and Amanda were seen together provides another explanation for Amanda's DNA being on Tee Bobby's watch cap. The right jury, he might skate."

"I think we need to start over," I said.

"Where?"

"Amanda's boyfriend," I replied.

After school hours we drove up the Teche to the little town of Loreauville. The pecan trees were in new leaf; a priest was watering his flowers in front of the Catholic church; kids were playing softball in a schoolyard. The moderate-size brick grocery that advertised itself as a supermarket, the saloon on the corner by the town's only traffic signal, the humped dark green shapes of the oaks along the bayou were out of a Norman Rockwell world of years ago. Down the main thoroughfare was an independently owned drive-in hamburger joint, the parking lot sprinkled with teenagers.

In their midst was Amanda's boyfriend, whose name was Roland Chatlin, in starched khakis and a green and white Tulane T-shirt, bouncing a golf ball off the side of the building. When Helen and I approached him, he was drinking a soda pop and talking to a friend and, amazingly, seemed not to recognize us. All the kids in the parking lot were white.

"Remember us?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, you," he said, chewing gum, his eyes lighting now.

"Step over here, please," I said.

"Sure," he replied, blowing out his breath, slipping his hands into his pockets.

"Your inability to help us is causing us all kinds of problems, Roland. You tell us two black guys in ski masks murdered Amanda, but that's as far as we get," I said.

"Sir?" he said.

"You've got no idea who they were. You can't tell us what their voices sounded like. You can't even tell us how tall they were. I've got the feeling maybe you don't want us to catch them," I said.

"Look at us, not at the ground," Helen said. "Your hands were tied with nothing but your shirt. You could have gotten loose if you'd wanted to, couldn't you? But you were too scared. Maybe you even begged. Maybe you told these guys their identity was safe. When people fear for their lives, they do all kinds of things they're ashamed of later, Roland. But it was pretty hard to just lie there and listen to them rape your girl, wasn't it?" I said.

"Maybe it's time to get it off your chest, kid," Helen said.

"Have you ever seen Tee Bobby Hulin play in a local club?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. I mean, I don't remember."

He had dark hair and light skin, arms without muscular definition, narrow hips, and a feminine mouth. Involuntarily he felt for a religious medal through the cloth of his shirt.

"Out at the crime scene you called them niggers. You don't care for black people, Roland?" I said.

"I was mad when I said that."

"I don't blame you. Which guy shot her?" I said.

"I don't know. I didn't think they were gonna-"

"They weren't gonna what?" I said.

"Nothing. You got me mixed up. That's why you're here. My daddy says I don't have to talk to y'all anymore."

Then his face darkened, as though the politeness toward adults that was mandatory in his world had been replaced by other instincts.

"They shove people around at school. They take the little kids' lunch money. They carry guns in their cars. Why don't you go after them?" he said vaguely, sweeping his hand at the air.

"Hear this, Roland," Helen said. "If you know who these guys are and you're lying to us, I'm going to find the shotgun that killed Amanda and jam it up your ass and pull the trigger myself. Tell that to your old man."

Two nights later the air was cool and dry, and the cypress trees in the swamp bloomed with heat lightning. Clete came into the bait shop as I was closing up. I smelled him before I saw him.

He helped himself to a water glass off a wall shelf and sat down heavily at the counter and unscrewed the cap from a pint bottle of bourbon wrapped in a brown-paper sack. A noxious fog, an odor of suntan lotion and cigarette smoke and beer sweat, begin to fill the shop like a living presence. Clete poured four fingers of whiskey in his glass and drank it slowly, watching me turn the electric fan on an overhead shelf in his direction. The lid of his left eye was swollen, a bruise like a small blue mouse in the crow's-feet at the corner.