“You got me.”

“I went to the Lafayette Oil Center this afternoon to check out this Bo Diddley Wiggins character. He told me to get lost. He also told me he gave you all the information he had on Bobby Mack Rydel.”

“That’s right.”

Clete began unwrapping the foil from a stick of gum. “So you’re factoring me out of the investigation?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

He fed the stick of gum into his mouth and chewed it. I heard a bird thump into my window glass. “Bobby Mack Rydel checked out of the hospital today. I made a couple of calls to Morgan City. He’s not at his home or office.”

There was nothing for it. Clete was either going to work alongside me or work by himself. If the latter was the case, it would not be good for anyone, particularly Clete. “Want to have a bite to eat with us, then take a drive up to Loreauville?” I asked.

“What’s cooking?”

“My guess is Bertrand Melancon, in a big iron pot,” I replied.

IT RAINED right at sunset, then the sky cleared and the air was fresh and smelled of fish spawning and water dripping out of the trees. Alafair was going on a date and Molly was going to a meeting of Pax christi at Grand Coteau. I opened all the windows to let in the wind and the cool autumnal fragrance of night-blooming flowers in our yard. Through the trees the clouds were purple- and rose-stippled in the west. Down at the foot of the slope, a blue heron stood among the lily pads, pecking at insects on its wing, its slender lines like a haiku inside feathers.

I didn’t want to chase down Bertrand Melancon or leave this perfect moment inside our simple house on Bayou Teche. I didn’t want to return to the world of violence and avarice that seems to define the era in which we live. As a police officer I was not supposed to hate. But in reality I despised those who manipulate and exploit our society, and I’m not talking about the pathetic collection of miscreants we spend most of our time and money locking up. But maybe the world has always been the way it is today. I can’t say. Like Voltaire’s protagonist Candide, I just wanted to retreat to a private garden and not deal with it anymore.

Unhappily, that’s not the way it works.

Clete and I got into his convertible and, like a pair of 1950s low-riders, headed up the bayou to the Loreauville Quarters and the home of Elizabeth Crochet.

DECADES AGO, during the 1960s, a black minister in oakland, California, addressed an open letter to the founders of the Black Panthers, young men he had known since childhood. His thesis was simple, namely, that the foundations of the black community had always rested in the church and the family. The family was matriarchal and the church was usually Southern Baptist.

The minister added that his young friends did not understand the atavistic nature of loyalty within the black family. Unlike whites who would call the man on their own children, the matriarch would open her veins before she would dime a grandchild with Officer chuck. Because the Panthers did not respect either the church or the traditional ethos of the family, their constituency would prove to be evanescent at best and their movement little more than a historical asterisk.

Elizabeth Crochet wore her gray hair in a bun and walked with a cane, her back terribly bent. When she pushed open the screen for us to enter, she could barely lift her head sufficiently to see our faces. Clete removed his porkpie hat, and I showed my badge and photo ID. Her living room was neat, the faded throw rugs broom-swept clean, the slipcover on the couch printed with a floral design. She sat in a hard chair and indicated the couch and the one stuffed chair were for us. Her blue eyes jittered when she tried to focus them on us.

“You say my lI’l car been in an accident?”

“Down by the Jeanerette drawbridge,” I said.

“News to me,” she said.

“Where is your car now, ms. Crochet?” I asked.

“It ain’t out front?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Then I guess it ain’t here, no.”

Clete suppressed a yawn and looked out the door, knowing the drill from many years.

“Ms. Crochet, we’ve already spoken to a couple of your neighbors,” I said. “I know your grandson is Bertrand Melancon. I know he’s staying with you. I don’t want to see him hurt. But some very bad men will do whatever it takes to get their hands on something they believe Bertrand has in his possession or at least has access to. I can’t stress enough how dangerous these men are.”

“He’s in trouble again, huh?”

“Yes, he is.”

“It started with their mama,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Their mama always liked a downtown man. She went off to New Orleans, wasn’t gonna live in the Quarters like a field hand, she said. Eddy and Bertrand never had no real daddy.”

For just a moment I thought our trip was not in vain. “Where’s Bertrand right now, ms. Crochet?”

“Don’t know.”

“Has a man named Otis Baylor tried to contact you?”

“Who’s he?”

I wrote my home phone on the back of my business card and put the card on her coffee table. “Ask Bertrand to call me.”

“I got the feeling I ain’t gonna see him again, Mr. Robicheaux.”

I was surprised she had remembered my name and I realized that her mind and intelligence were far less influenced by her age than her body was. “Why is that?”

“’Cause I always knowed he was gonna die young. He didn’t talk till he was fo’ years old. Know why? He was always scared. A li’l boy scared every day of his life. He always been that same li’l boy, trying to prove he ain’t scared of nobody.”

“Bertrand told me he had an auntie in the Lower Nine. Think he might be with her?” I smiled when I said it.

“From what I hear, ain’t nobody left in the Lower Nine, lessen you count dead people.”

I got up to go.

“Suh?” she said.

“Yes?”

“What’s Bertrand done? He ain’t killed nobody? He ain’t done somet’ing like that, no?”

She made me think of a small bird looking up from the bottom of a nest.

CLETE AND I got back in his convertible and drove up the lane, to the end of the Quarters, on the outside chance Bertrand was at a neighbor’s house. I could tell Clete was exasperated by the way the interview had gone. “Why didn’t you tell her her grandson probably killed a Catholic priest?” he said.

“Because it wouldn’t do any good. Because she’s too old to handle that kind of weight.”

“You didn’t press her about the aunt, either.”

“I can’t chase him all over the state, Clete. I don’t have the time or the resources. How about lightening up?”

The right-front tire hit a chuckhole and the frame slammed down on the spring, splashing water on the windshield.

“It’s your case, but he’s still my bail skip,” Clete said. “And he’s still the guy who ran me down with his automobile.”

“That’s right, it’s my case. I’m glad we have that straight.”

Clete clicked on the radio, then clicked it back off, the color climbing in his neck.

“Say it,” I said.

“It’s your case, handle it the way you want. But I think you cut these bastards too much slack.”

I looked out the window and decided this time not to reply.

Clete turned onto another lane and drove slowly back toward the state road. The sky had darkened and lights were going on in the shotgun houses on either side of us. The boarded-up windows, the junker cars, the wash lines, and the open drainage ditches full of trash were like photos taken by Walker evans during the Great Depression, as though seven decades had not passed. Who was responsible? I have trouble with the notion of collective guilt. But if I had to lay it at anyone’s feet, I’d start with the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Saturday-night nigger-knockers, and all the people who did everything in their power to keep their fellow human beings poor and uneducated and at one another’s throats so they would remain a source of cheap labor.