"Then you'll have their DNA," she said. Her eyes were black and hard now and fixed on mine.

Helen and I let ourselves out and crossed the yard to the cruiser. The wind, even full of dust, seemed cool after the long hot day and smelled of salt off the Gulf. Then I heard Mr. Boudreau behind me. He was a heavy man and he walked as though he had gout in one foot. A wing on his shirt collar was bent at an upward angle, like a spear point touching his throat.

"What kind of weapon did they use?" he asked.

"A shotgun," I said.

His eyes bunked behind his glasses. "Did they shoot my little girl in the face?" he asked.

"No, sir," I replied.

" 'Cause those sons of bitches just better not have hurt her face," he said, and began to weep in his front yard.

By the next morning the fingerprints lifted from the beer can thrown out of the automobile window at the crime scene gave us the name of Tee Bobby Hulin, a twenty-five-year-old black hustler and full-time smartass whose diminutive size saved him on many occasions from being bodily torn apart. His case file was four inches thick and included arrests for shoplifting at age nine, auto theft at thirteen, dealing reefer in the halls of his high school, and driving off from the back of the local Wal-Mart with a truckload of toilet paper.

For years Tee Bobby had skated on the edge of the system, shining people on, getting by on rebop and charm and convincing others he was more trickster than miscreant. Also, Tee Bobby possessed another, more serious gift, one he seemed totally undeserving of, as though the finger of God had pointed at him arbitrarily one day and bestowed on him a musical talent that was like none since the sad, lyrical beauty in the recordings of Guitar Slim.

When Helen and I walked up to Tee Bobby's gas-guzzler that evening at a drive-in restaurant not far from City Park, his accordion was propped up in the backseat, its surfaces like ivory and the speckled insides of a pomegranate.

"Hey, Dave, what it is?" he said.

"Don't call your betters by their first name," Helen said.

"I gots you, Miss Helen. I ain't done nothing wrong, huh?" he said, his eyebrows climbing.

"You tell us," I said.

He feigned a serious concentration. "Nope. I'm a blank. Y'all want part of my crab burger?" he said.

His skin had the dull gold hue of worn saddle leather, his eyes blue-green, his hair lightly oiled and curly and cut short and boxed behind the neck. He continued to look at us with an idiot's grin on his mouth.

"Put your car keys under the seat and get in the cruiser," Helen said.

"This don't sound too good. I think I better call my lawyer," he said.

"I didn't say you were under arrest. We'd just like a little information from you. Is that a problem?" Helen said.

"I gots it again. White folks is just axing for hep. Don't need to read no Miranda rights to nobody. Sho' now, I wants to hep out the po-lice," he said.

"You're a walking charm school, Tee Bobby," Helen said.

Twenty minutes later Tee Bobby sat alone in an interview room at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department while Helen and I talked in my office. Outside, the sky was ribbed with maroon strips of cloud and the train crossing guards were lowered on the railway tracks and a freight was wobbling down the rails between clumps of trees and shacks where black people lived.

"What's your feeling?" I asked.

"I have a hard time making this clown for a shotgun murder," she said.

"He was there."

"This case has a smell to it, Streak. Amanda's boyfriend just doesn't ring right," she said.

"Neither does Tee Bobby. He's too disconnected about it."

"Give me a minute before you come in," she said.

She went into the interview room and left the door slightly ajar so I could hear her words to Tee Bobby. She leaned on the table, one of her muscular arms slightly touching his, her mouth lowered toward his ear. A rolled-up magazine protruded from the back pocket of her jeans.

"We've got you at the crime scene. That won't go away. I'd meet this head-on," she said.

"Good. Bring me a lawyer. Then I bees meeting it head-on."

"You want us to get your grandmother down here?"

"Miss Helen gonna make me feel guilty now. 'Cause you a big family friend. 'Cause my gran'mama used to wash your daddy's clothes when he wasn't trying to put his hands up her dress."

Helen pulled the rolled-up paper cylinder from her back pocket. "How would you like it if I just slapped the shit out of you?" she said.

"I bees likin' that."

She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then touched him lightly on the forehead with the cusp of the magazine.

His eyelids fluttered mockingly, like butterflies.

Helen walked out the door past me. "I hope the D.A, buries that little prick," she said.

I went into the interview room and closed the door.

"Right now your car is being torn apart and two detectives are on their way to your house with a search warrant," I said. "If they find a ski mask, a shotgun that's been fired in the last two days, any physical evidence from that girl on your clothes, even a strand of hair, you're going to be injected. The way I see it, you've got about a ten-minute window of opportunity to tell your side of things."

Tee Bobby removed a comb from his back pocket and ran it up and down the hair on his arm and looked into space. Then he put his head down on his folded arms and tapped his feet rhythmically, as though he were keeping time with a tune inside his head.

"You're just going to act the fool?" I said.

"I ain't raped nobody. Leave me be."

I sat down across from him and watched the way his eyes glanced innocuously around the walls, his boredom with my presence, the beginnings of a grin on his mouth as he looked at the growing anger in my face.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"She was sixteen. She had holes in her chest and side you could put your fist into. You get that silly-ass look off your face," I said.

"I got a right to look like I want. You bring me a lawyer or you kick me loose. You ain't got no evidence or you would have already printed me and had me in lockup."

"I'm a half-inch from knocking you across this room, Tee Bobby."

"Yassir, I knows that. This nigger's bones is shakin', Cap'n," he replied.

I locked him in the interview room and went down to my office. A half hour later a phone call came in from the detectives who had been sent to Tee Bobby's home on Poinciana Island.

"Nothing so far," one of them said.

"What do you mean 'so far'?" I asked.

"It's night. We'll start over again in the morning. Feel free to join us. I just sorted through a garbage can loaded with week-old shrimp," he replied.

At dawn Helen and I drove across the wooden bridge that spanned the freshwater bay on the north side of Poinciana Island. The early sun was red on the horizon, promising another scorching day, but the water in the bay was black and smelled of spawning fish, and the elephant ears and the cypress and flowering trees on the banks riffled coolly in the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico.

I showed my badge to the security guard in the wooden booth on the bridge, and we drove through the settlement of tree-shaded frame houses where the employees of the LaSalle family lived, then followed a paved road that wound among hillocks and clumps of live oaks and pine and gum trees and red-dirt acreage, where black men were hoeing out the rows in lines that moved across the field as precisely as military formations.

The log-and-brick slave cabins from the original LaSalle plantation were still standing, except they had been reconstructed and modernized by Perry LaSalle and were now used by either the family's guests or lifetime employees whom the LaSalles took care of until the day of their deaths.