"When you talked to him, did he say anything about Jimmie Lee Boggs?"

"I ain't talked to Tee Beau."

"I bet you have," I said, and smiled.

"No suh, I ain't. Nobody know where Tee Beau at. Tante Lemon don't know. Ain't nobody know."

"I see. Look here, Dorothea, I'm going to give you a card. It has my phone number on it. When you talk to Tee Beau, you give him this number. You tell him I appreciate what he did for me, that I want to help him. He can call me collect from a pay phone. I won't know where he's living. All I want to do is find Jimmie Lee Boggs."

She took the card in her small hand. She looked out at the rain, her eyes quiet with thought.

"How you gonna he'p him?" she said.

"We can get his sentence commuted. That means he won't go to the electric chair. Maybe he can even get a new trial. The jury didn't hear everything they should have, did they?"

"What you mean?"

"About Hipolyte Broussard. Was he a pimp?"

"Yes suh."

"Did he try to make Tee Beau a pimp, too?"

"He make him drive the bus with the girls out to the camp."

"What else did Hipolyte do?"

"Suh?"

"Did Hipolyte do something to you?"

Again her eyes cut sideways, then looked straight ahead. I could see her nostrils quiver when she breathed.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," I said. "But maybe Tee Beau had a good reason to kill Hipolyte. Maybe other people might think so, too."

She squeezed her fingers and looked down at her lap.

"He say I got to get on the bus," she said.

"Who?"

"Hipolyte. He say I got to go out to the camp. Tee Beau say I ain't going, even if Hipolyte hit him and knock him down in the dirt. Hipolyte say I going or I ain't working here no more."

"So that's why he killed Hipolyte?"

"I ain't said that. I ain't said that at all. You ax me what Hipolyte done to me."

I looked out at the trailers behind the parking lot.

"Is somebody bothering you now, Dorothea?" I said. "Does anybody try to make you do something you don't want to?"

"Gros Mama's good to me."

"Does she make you do something you don't want to?"

"I wait the table, I pass the mop on the floor 'fore I go home. She don't let no mens bother me. She pass for me in the morning, carry me to work, tell me not be worrying all the time 'bout Tee Beau, he gonna be all right, he coming back one day. Gros Mama know."

"How does she know that?"

"She a traiteur. She got power. That's why Hipolyte scared of her. He got the gris-gris. That man you looking for, Jimmie Lee Boggs? You ain't got to worry about him, no. He got a gris-gris, too. He gonna die, that one."

"Wait a minute, Dorothea. You knew Boggs?"

"I seen him with Hipolyte, back yonder by that trailer. Right there. Gros Mama say they both got the gris-gris, they carry it in them just like a worm. Suh?"

"What?"

"Suh?"

"What is it? And you really don't need to call me sir."

"I wants to ax you something." She looked at me full in the face for the first time. Her lipstick was on crooked. "You ain't lying? You can really he'p Tee Beau?"

"I can try. If he'll let me. Do you know where he is, Dorothea?"

"Gros Mama want me back inside now. Friday a real busy day."

"If you talk to Tee Beau, tell him I said thank you."

"I got to be going now."

"Wait a minute. I have an umbrella," I said.

I popped it open in the rain and walked her to the entrance of the juke joint. Then she walked hurriedly past the men staring at her from the bar, toward her station by the dance floor.

I had promised to take Alafair to the open-air restaurant at Cypremort Point for bluepoint crabs, a weekly ritual whose aftermath made the waitresses cringe: Alafair, in a white bib with a big red crawfish on it, went about disassembling the crabs with wood mallet and nutcrackers and such clumsy intensity that the plank table had to be washed down later with a hose. I tried never to disappoint her, or see her hurt any more than she had already been hurt by the drowning of her real mother in the crashed plane, and the death of Annie, my second wife. But since I had been shot by Jimmie Lee Boggs, I had become an ineffectual caretaker in my own home rather than a parent, and I had no idea when I would put everything back in the proper box and see the worry and uncertainty go out of Alafair's eyes. And I knew absolutely that that moment would not come of its own accord.

So I drove down to a café on the blacktop, called the house, and asked Clarise, my mulatto housekeeper and baby-sitter, to give Alafair her supper and to stay with her until I got home. I talked with Alafair and told her I would take her out for ice cream later and we would go to Cypremort Point for crabs the next night. I sat at the counter and ate a plate of red beans, rice, and breaded pork chops, and drank coffee until over an hour had passed. Then I headed back to the juke joint.

It had stopped raining now, and the air was clear and cool, the sky dark except for a lighted band of purple clouds low on the western horizon. I drove through the parking lot to the back of the building, the flattened beer cans and wet oyster shells crunching under my tires, and through the big fan humming in the back wall I could hear the zydeco band pounding it out:

"Mo mange bien, mo bois bon vin,

Ça pas coute moi à rien.

Ma fille aime gumbo filé

Mo l'aime ma fille aussi."

I parked by one of the trailers and walked up on the wood steps. Back under a solitary spreading oak tree was the pickup truck I had seen earlier: only one man was in the cab now. The trailer was made out of tin and had been covered with thick layers of green paint. Curtains were pulled across the windows, but a light was on inside. The inner door was closed and the screen was latched. I tapped on the screen with my knuckles and looked back over my shoulder at the man in the truck. He looked away from me.

"Sheriff's department," I said, and tapped again.

There was no answer, but I heard movement inside.

"Open up," I said.

Still no answer. I grasped the handle to the screen door firmly and jerked the latch out of the jamb, then opened the inner door, which was unlocked, and stepped into the trailer.

The musky, thick odor of marijuana struck at my face like a fist. The woman whom I had seen at the trailer door earlier lay on a narrow bed in a pink bra and pink panties, her head reclining on a pillow, one arm propped casually behind her head, her free hand holding a joint over an ashtray on a small nightstand. She put the joint to her lips, looked me straight in the face, and took a long, deep hit, ventilating the edges of the paper, until the ash was a bright red coal in the gloom of the trailer.

But the dark-skinned man in denims and work boots, his straw hat clenched against his thigh, his belt buckle still hanging down over his fly, was obviously terrified. His eyes were riveted on the badge in my palm.

"It's not a bust, partner. Rest easy," I said.

He continued to stare wide-eyed at me. His hands were square with calluses, his fingernails half-mooned with dirt.

"Do you speak English?" I said. Then to the woman, "Does your friend speak English?"

"You do it the same way in Mexican or English, honey," she said.

"It's time for you to take off, partner," I said.

But he didn't understand. I folded up my badge and slipped it in my back pocket.

"You can go now. We don't need you for anything. There's no problem. No problema. Your friend is waiting for you," I said.

I took him gently by the arm and opened the door for him.

"Adiós," I said.

This time he realized what he was being offered and he was gone into the darkness like a shot. I closed the door behind him.