"Why you stopping?" I asked.

"I'm tired of you deciding what I should know and not know. Or in this case when I should know it."

"He put his tongue in my mouth. He's an old man who took me apart in front of my own house. It's not a story many people would believe."

"We tell rape victims they have to meet it head-on if they ever want any peace. What makes you different?"

"Nothing," I said.

A swath of rainwater and leaves blew out of the tree across the windshield.

"You going to tell the old man?" she asked.

"Maybe."

She shook her head and shifted the transmission into drive.

"I always thought you got a bum deal when you were thrown off the force in New Orleans," she said.

"Finish your thought," I said.

"I guess there're two sides to every story," she said.

We parked by Hattie Fontenot's old bar and Helen got out first and slipped her baton into the ring on her gun belt. We went inside and saw Legion sitting at a back table, playing solitaire, his attention concentrated on his game. The bar stools were all empty; our footsteps were loud on the wood floors that had been scrubbed gray with bleach. The barmaid sat on a stool, hiding behind the cigarette she smoked, her shoulders rounded, her lipsticked mouth as bright as a rose inside the wreaths of smoke and the dyed blond hair that framed her face.

"Where's the man Legion assaulted?" I asked.

She inhaled on her cigarette and tipped her ashes into a beer cap and watched a bottle fly crawl up the wall, her eyelids fluttering. Helen and I walked toward Legion's table, dividing as we approached him, Helen slipping her baton from its ring.

"Stand up," she said.

"A black boy call y'all?" he said, rising from his chair, his hat brim tilting up now, exposing the long, vertical creases in his face.

"That's a gun in your belt?" Helen said.

"Ain't nothing wrong with that. State man give me a permit," Legion said. His hand drifted toward the checkered grips on a chrome-plated.25.

Her baton whipped through the air and cracked across his wrist. The blow was of a bone-bruising kind, one that usually swelled into a plum-colored, blood-filled knot. But Legion showed no reaction other than a flinch in his face, a quiver along the jawline.

"You got me now, bitch. But wait till down the road," he said.

She shoved him into the wall and kicked his legs apart, pulled the.25 automatic from his belt, and tossed it to me. He started to turn-around and she whacked him behind the knee with the baton, a blow that should have crumpled him to the floor. Instead he twisted his neck so she could look into his eyes and read the malevolence in them, his breath reaching out and touching her cheek. But Helen was all business. She hooked him up, crimping the cuffs hard into his wrists.

"You're under arrest for threatening a police officer," she said.

"I give a shit, me," he said. He jerked his head at me. "Pick up my hat, you."

"You want your hat? Here," Helen said, and stepped on the crown, then shoved it down on his ears. "I hear you like to put your tongue in men's mouths. We just ran a couple of black cross-dressers in. I'll see what I can arrange."

After we put Legion in the back of the cruiser and closed the door on him, I touched Helen on the arm.

"What?" she said, her eyes flashing.

"Don't let this bum put a letter in your jacket," I said.

Her brow was cut with furrows. She rubbed her palms on her jeans. "I feel like I touched something obscene," she said.

At the lockup Helen placed Legion in a cell occupied by two heavily perfumed transvestites in spiked heels, sequined blouses, shorts sewn with lace fringe, layers of makeup, auburn wigs, false eyelashes, and Dracula nail polish. They both leaned against the bars, a cant to one hip, flirtation and fuck-you pouts dancing on their faces.

I waited at the cell door until Helen was gone.

"You going to be all right in here, Legion?" I asked.

"Sho he is. We gonna take good care of li'l dookie-wookie here," one of the transvestites said. She pinched a fold of Legion's cheek between her thumb and forefinger and shook it gingerly, her lips pursed.

At sunrise the night jailer walked down to Legion's cell to inform him that his lawyer, Perry LaSalle, had just arranged his bail. The transvestites sat close together on a bench in a corner, holding hands, their faces downcast.

"What's wrong with them?" the jailer said.

"How the hell I know? Where my t'ings at?" Legion said.

Later in the morning the jailer called me at the bait shop.

"Sherenda the drag queen wants to see you," he said.

"It's Saturday."

"That's what I told her. She pissed her panties and dropped them out in the corridor for me to pick up. Is it okay if she comes out to your house when she makes bail?" he said.

I asked Batist to watch the shop and drove to the lockup. Sherenda, whose male name was Claude Walker, was washing her underarms in the tin sink attached to the top of the commode. She blotted her face with a lavender handkerchief and stuck it down in her bra. She folded her hands around the bars, her pointed red nails clicking against the hardness of the steel.

"Legion give you a bad time?" I asked.

She buckled her knees and perched out her rump and started to grin, then gave up the act.

"Man talk shit all night. Couldn't understand none of it. Ever hear a cat hissing inside a sewer pipe? Scare po' Cheyenne to det'. Why Miss Helen and you done that to us?"

"He's a Cajun. He was probably talking French," I said.

"Darlin', I know French when I hear it. I could have done 'French' for that boy on any level. But that ain't what we talking 'bout," Sherenda said.

Sherenda's friend, whose female name was Cheyenne Prejean, took a deep breath in the back of the cell and lifted up her head. Her eyes were puffy with sleeplessness, red along the rims, her lipstick smeared like a broken flower on her mouth.

"My mother was a preacher. That man was calling out names from Scripture. He was talking to demons, Mr. Dave," she said.

She stared into space, like a creature who heard sounds others did not.

CHAPTER 16

The sheriff lived in a rambling pale yellow house with steel-gray trim and a wide gallery up on Bayou Teche. The sky was rain-washed and blue when I pulled into his drive and he was raking leaves out of his coulee, stacking them in a black pile for burning.

"The cross-dressers told you Legion Guidry talks to demons?" he said, his palms propped on the upended handle of his rake.

"Yeah, I guess that sums it up," I replied.

"You drove out here on a Saturday to tell me this?"

"It's not an everyday event."

"Dave, you're a toe-curlin' delight. I never know when you're going to drop one on me a sane person couldn't think up in a lifetime. Let me call my mother-in-law out here. She's in Eckankar. She teleports herself to Venus through a third eye in her head to check the records on her former lives. I'm not making this up." His eyes were starting to brim with water. "Where you going?"

A moment of contrasts.

That same afternoon a gumbo cook-off was in progress at City Park. The manicured and sloping lawns along the bayou were dark green in the shade, scattered with azalea bloom, the sky strung with strips of pink cloud. Three shrimp boats festooned with flags blew their horns near the drawbridge. The shouts of children and the twang of a diving board resonated from the park's swimming pool like a collective announcement that this was indeed the first day of a verdant and joyous summer.

In the midst of the live oaks, the gaiety of the crowd, the smell of boudin and boiling shrimp and okra and pecan pie and keg beer swilled from paper cups, Tee Bobby Hulin mounted a knocked-together stage with his band, plugged the jack of his electric guitar into the sound system, and went into a re-created version of "Jolie Blon" I had never heard before.