“Shut up,” I said. I pushed him into the shade of the trees. He began to struggle, and I shoved him against a tree trunk and held him there. “I’m going to uncuff you now. The conversation we have out here is between you and me. You’re being treated like an intelligent man. Try to act like one.”

I unlocked the cuffs, pulled them free of his wrists, and turned him around. His face was gray, his breath rife with funk.

“Your old man didn’t kill the homeless man, did he?”

“No, sir.”

“Did your mother?”

“She has bad night vision. She doesn’t even have a license. You can check.”

“So that leaves you.”

He was shaking his head even before I finished the sentence. “If I’d killed a homeless guy, it would have been an accident. Why would I want to hide it?”

“But it’s obvious you know when and how it happened.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“You said your mother has bad night vision. How do you know the homeless guy was struck at night?”

He closed then opened his eyes, like a man who has just stepped on the trapdoor of a hangman’s scaffold. “You got to let me see a lawyer. It’s in the Constitution, isn’t it? I’m guaranteed at least a phone call, right?”

“Listen to me. A man with no name was killed by an automobile your family owns and drives. The dead man was probably a wino, a guy with few if any friends, no family, and no known origins. He was the kind of guy who gets bagged and tagged and dropped in a hole in ground, case closed. Except that’s not going to happen here. That guy had a right to live, just like you and I do. Whoever ran over him is going to be indicted and sent to trial. I give you my absolute word on that, Tony. You believe me when I say that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re a young man and young people make mistakes. Usually the cause is a lack of judgment. People get scared, they can’t think straight, they make bad decisions. They want to run from the deed they’ve committed because it’s almost as though it didn’t happen, it’s not them, it’s like someone else did it. If they could only go home, this terrible moment in their lives would be erased. That’s what happened, didn’t it, Tony? You just didn’t think straight. It’s only human in a situation like that. Tell us your version of events before somebody else does. Don’t take a fall you don’t deserve. That’s not stand-up, it’s dumb. Just tell the truth and trust the people trying to help you.”

He watched me carefully while I spoke, his face turned slightly aside, as though he didn’t want the full measure of my words to undo his defenses. But I had not convinced him. I took another run at ip.

“You ever read Stephen Crane?” I said.

“The writer?”

“Yeah, the writer.”

“No,” he said.

“Crane said few of us are nouns. Most of us are adverbs. No tragedy is orchestrated by one individual. An event we blame ourselves for may have been years in the making and may have much more to do with others than ourselves. Without recognition of that fact, we never acquire any wisdom about anything. Our case name for the homeless guy is Crustacean Man. Help us give back this guy his name. You can start correcting things, turning them around, right now, as we speak. It’s that easy.”

His eyes were locked on mine, his eyelids stitched to his brows. His bottom lip was white on the corner where he was biting down on it, to the point I thought the skin would break. I could almost hear words forming in his throat. Then his gaze broke and the moment was lost. “I want to talk to my father. What have you done with him?” he said.

“Your old man can take care of himself,” I replied.

“He might actually go to prison?”

“It’s a good possibility.”

He started to cry. It was the first time I had seen Tony Lujan show any concern for anyone but himself. I took out a clean, folded handkerchief and handed it to him. “We’re done here. I’m not going to question you any more. Other people will talk to you later,” I said.

He cleared his throat and spit. He looked at the clouds scudding across the sky and the gray outline of the parish stockade. “I need to confess something,” he said.

I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. “What is it?” I said.

“I’m holding.”

“You’re dealing?”

“No,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and removed a small plastic bag rolled around three joints. “I smoke one or two a day, that’s all. I know if I’m arrested at the jail, I’ll be searched and then charged for holding.”

I took the bag from him, shook the joints out, and ground them under my heel. “So you’re not holding now,” I said, and stuffed the bag back in his pocket.

I started walking toward the cruiser, with Tony perhaps ten feet behind me. I heard him quicken his step to catch up with me.

“That was a pretty decent thing to do, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“Don’t deceive yourself, kid. What I told you back there in the trees wasn’t a ruse. You had your chance and you blew it. The people I work with are going to twist your head off and spit in it,” I replied.

I HAD NOT SEEN Clete Purcel since Saturday evening, when he had driven away from the boat landing at Henderson Swamp with Trish Klein, his face and hers glowing like those of youthful lovers in the sunset. I left three messages on his cell phone, and also went by his office, only to find it closed. Friday I went by his office again, and this time his part-time secretary, Hulga Volkmann, was behind the desk. She was a big, rosy-complected, cheerful, and scatterbrained woman who wore flower-print dresses and perfume that would numb the olfactory senses of an elephant.

“He went to New Orleans for a day or so, then called from Cancún. He’ll be back tonight,” she said.

“Clete’s in Mexico?” I said.

“Or was it Bimini?” she said.

Clete Purcel’s romantic problems did not occur as a result of his having love affairs with biker girls and neurotic artists and strippers. Instead, they usually began when he got involved with any woman who was halfway normal, in other words, the type of person he didn’t believe he deserved. Any attempt to convince him that he was attractive to women other than pipeheads and narcissistic meltdowns was futile. In Clete’s mind, he was still the son of a milkman in the Irish Channel, with skinned knuckles from fights on the school ground and welts across his butt from his father’s razor strop. Nice girls didn’t hang with a guy who had a scar like a pink inner-tube patch through one eyebrow, put there by a black warlord from the Gird Town Deuces. Nice girls didn’t hang with a former jarhead who still heard the downdraft of helicopter blades in his sleep.

“Is Clete with a lady by the name of Trish Klein?” I asked the secretary.

“He was with someone. I heard a lot of noise in the background. I think he was in a casino,” Hulga said.

Clete lived down the bayou in a Depression-era motor court, one that still did not have telephones in the cottages and was covered by the shade of oaks hundreds of years old. At ten Saturday morning, I knocked on his door. He answered it in his skivvies and an undershirt, smiling sleepily. “How you doin’, big mon?” he said. A square bandage was taped high up on his left shoulder.

“Why don’t you tell your friends where you are once in a while?”

“Oh, Trish and I drove over to the Big Sleazy for the day, then one thing led to another. You know how it goes. You want coffee?”

“I don’t want to hear Darwin ’s history of the planet. Did you let her hustle you?”

“Lighten up on the terminology,” he replied, filling a metal coffeepot at the sink.

“What happened to your shoulder?”

“Nothing. A scratch. I had to get a tetanus shot.”

“I think Trish Klein is playing you, Cletus,” I said, instantly regretting my words.

“Hell, yes. Why would a great-looking broad be interested in an over-the-hill P.I. who’s got a worse jacket than most perps?”