"You doin' okay, Dave?" he asked.

"I want to flip Tee Bobby Hulin and I could use your help," I said.

"I'm a little jammed up right now," he replied.

"I skated on an assault beef against Jimmy Dean Styles in St. Martin Parish. I'd like you to bring him in and tell him you need some information for an Internal Affairs investigation. In other words, the department would still like to hang me out to dry."

"Jimmy Sty again, huh? He's not one of my fans. Maybe you ought to use somebody he trusts," Dartez said.

"You're straight up, Kev. Street people respect you."

"You wouldn't try to twist my dials, would you?"

"Not a chance." I opened a notebook to a page on which I had written down several tentative questions for Kevin Dartez to ask Styles and set the notebook on Dartez's desk. "It really doesn't matter what you specifically say to Styles. Just get him to talk about me and make sure it's on tape. Also bring up Helen Soileau."

"Why Helen?" Dartez asked.

"Styles called her a dyke to her face. I don't think he's quite forgotten the reaction he got," I said.

Dartez squeezed the hand exerciser in his palm. "When you want him in here?" he asked.

"How about as soon as possible?" I replied.

A few minutes later Helen Soileau and I got into a cruiser and drove toward Poinciana Island.

"A bad storm building," she said, looking over the steering wheel at the blackness in the sky, the cane thrashing in the fields. When I didn't reply, she looked across the seat at me. "You listening?"

"I took Tee Bobby's grandmother over the hurdles," I said.

"She raised him. Maybe she should sit in her own shit for a change."

"That's rough," I said.

"No, Amanda Boudreau staring into the barrel of a shotgun is rough. There's a big difference between vies and perps, Streak. The victim is the victim. I wouldn't get the two confused."

Helen always kept the lines simple.

We crossed the freshwater bay onto the island. Waves were capping in the bay and hitting hard against the pilings under the bridge, slapping the shoreline and sliding up into the elephant ears along the shore. We rolled down the windows in the cruiser, and the light was cool and green inside the tunnel of trees as we drove toward Ladice's house. A tree limb cracked like a rifle shot overhead and spun crazily into the road ahead of us. Helen swerved around it.

"I never liked this place," she said.

"Why not?" I asked.

Helen looked out the window at a black man trying to catch a horse that was running through a field of pepper plants while lightning forked the sky above the treeline.

"If the LaSalles' ancestors had won the Civil War, I think the rest of us would be picking cotton for a living," she said.

We parked in Ladice's yard and knocked on the door. Leaves were puffing out of the trees and blowing across the gallery and flattening against the screens. Inside, I could see Tee Bobby watching television in an overstuffed chair, his chest caved in, his mouth open, his chin peppered with stubble. His grandmother came out of the kitchen and stood in silhouette behind his chair.

"What you want?" she asked.

"Need to take Tee Bobby into town and clarify a few things," I said.

"What t'ings?" she asked.

"We're looking at somebody else in the murder of Amanda Boudreau. Maybe it's time Tee Bobby did himself a good deed and starting cooperating with us," I said.

Tee Bobby got up from his overstuffed chair and walked to the door, his long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned on his stomach, an unwashed odor wafting through the screen.

"You looking at who?" he said.

"This isn't a good place to talk. Call Mr. Perry and ask him what he wants you to do," I said, my face blank.

"I ain't got to ax permission from Perry LaSalle to do nothing. I'll be back in a li'l while, Gran'mama. Right? Y'all gonna drive me back?" Tee Bobby said.

"Right as rain," Helen said.

That's the way you do it sometimes. Then you try to forget your own capacity for deceit.

On the way back to the department Tee Bobby lazed against the backseat and watched the country go by, his eyes half shut. He woke with a start and looked around as though unsure of his whereabouts. Then he grinned for no reason and stared vacuously into space.

“You all right back there?" Helen said, looking into the rearview mirror.

"Sure," he said. "It was the lie detector test got y'all looking at somebody else?"

"Lots of things, Tee Bobby," she said.

" 'Cause I ain't raped or shot nobody," he said.

I turned in the seat and searched his face.

"Why you staring at me like that?" he asked.

"I get a little perplexed about your choice of words."

"What you talkin' 'bout, man? These are the only words I got." His brow furrowed, as though his own statement held a meaning he had not yet sorted through. "I need to stop and use the bat'room somewhere. I ought to wash up, too. Maybe get some candy bars."

"We'll get you some from the machine at the office," Helen said.

Tee Bobby stared silently out the window for the rest of the way into town, his face twitching as last night's dope and booze wore off and he realized the day waited for him like a hungry tiger.

We parked the cruiser and walked him straight into an interview room and closed the door behind us.

Around the corner, in the convivial atmosphere of his office, Kevin Dartez was talking to Jimmy Dean Styles. Styles was sitting in a chair, his knees slightly spread, squeezing his scrotum, enjoying his role as participant in the process. Dartez had started the tape recorder on his desk and was reviewing his notebook as Styles talked, nodding respectfully, sometimes making a small penciled notation.

"So without provocation, Dave Robicheaux, of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department, attacked you in your place of business, known as the Carousel?" Dartez said.

"You got it, man," Styles said. Through the Venetian blinds he watched a black woman in an orange jumpsuit being led in handcuffs down the corridor. He grinned and touched at some mucus in the corner of his mouth and pulled a Kleenex from a box on Dartez's desk and wiped his fingers.

"And you say Detective Helen Soileau hit you with a baton?"

"That's the way it went down. That bitch got shit in her blood."

"That's a serious allegation against Detective Soileau. You're sure that's the way it happened? You made an idle remark and she swung a baton in your face? This could do a lot of damage to her career, Jimmy. You want to be sure what you're telling me is correct."

"I ain't gonna say it again. Put it down in your report or leave it out. It don't matter to me. But you got an out-of-control bull dyke on your hands."

Dartez nodded agreeably and wrote in his notebook.

"Doesn't Tee Bobby Hulin play at the Carousel sometimes?" he asked.

"I try to throw him some work. But Tee Bobby hard to hep, know what I mean?" Styles said.

"Look, this is not related, but you know what nobody around here can understand?" Dartez said. "Why's a kid with so much talent get in all this trouble? How come he never made it in Los Angeles or New York? I don't know anything about music, but-"

"I don't want to speak bad of a guy that's on third base, okay? But Tee Bobby's a hype and a ragnose. Ain't nobody can talk to him. He got a thing for white cooze, too. Which mean he don't respect himself." Styles glanced at his watch. "Say, man, I ain't s'pposed to be gone from my bar too long. My bartender get a li'l generous pouring to the ladies, know what I'm sayin'?"

"Got you," Dartez said, dropping his eyes to his notebook again. "Okay, so you didn't in any way put your hand on the person of Detective Robicheaux? You committed no form of assault or what could be interpreted as such, no threatening gesture?"