I opened my badge holder and hung it out the window. “My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department. I thought she might have some information that could be helpful to us,” I said.

The black man wore old slacks and tennis shoes, but his shirt was pressed, his back erect. The distrust in his eyes was unmistakable. “She’s nine years old. What information she gonna have?”

“It concerns evidence she and two other children may have found at a crime scene,” I said.

“You talking about the Lujan farm?”

“I need to talk to your granddaughter, sir.”

“Maybe I need to call my lawyer, too.”

I pulled my truck in his driveway and cut the engine. I opened the door and stepped out on the grass. “She and her friends were playing in a plywood fort by Bello Lujan’s back fence. Mr. Lujan was murdered. Where’s your granddaughter?”

“She don’t know nothing about no murder.”

I could feel my patience draining and my old nemesis, anger, blooming like an infection in my chest. Like most southern white people, I did not like paying the price for what my antecedents may have done.

“The man who killed Bello Lujan is still out there. You want him prowling around your neighborhood? You want him looking for your granddaughter, sir?” I said.

He spiked his clippers into the lawn and blotted his neck with a folded handkerchief. “Come wit’ me. They in the backyard,” he said.

I followed him around the side of the house. The three children I had seen flying a kite behind Bello ’s property were playing croquet in the shade of oak trees. “You guys remember me?” I said.

They looked at one another, then at Chereen’s grandfather. “Tell him what he want to know,” he said.

I squatted down so I was eye level with the children. “When y’all were having your picnic at your fort, you opened a can of tuna fish, didn’t you?” I said.

All three of them nodded, but their eyes didn’t meet mine. I pointed to the little boy who had opened the can. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Freddy.”

“What did you use to open the can, Freddy?”

“Can opener,” he replied.

“Was it an unusual can opener?” I said, smiling at him now.

“A little bit, maybe,” he said.

“Where’d you get it?” I said.

“I found it,” Chereen said, before her friend could answer. “In the field behind the horse barn.”

“Do you still have it?”

“It’s at the fort. Wit’ the crucifix and the broke chain it was on,” she said.

“A crucifix and a chain? Those things and the can opener were all together?” I said.

“Yes, suh, lying in the weeds. Not far from the fence,” Freddy said.

“I’m glad you guys found and saved those things for me. But you should have told me this yesterday. A man was killed and his killer is still out there, maybe preparing to hurt someone else. When I asked y’all if you had been inside the tape, you told me you hadn’t. So I had to figure all this out on my own. By keeping silent about the things you had found, you were telling me a lie. Indirectly, you were helping a very bad man get away with a terrible crime.”

“They got the point,” the grandfather said.

When I stood up, I could hear my knees pop. “How old are you, sir?” I asked.

“Sixty-one,” he replied.

I wanted to ask him how much value he set on pride. Was it worth the innocent lives of others in danger? I wanted to ask him if he thought he could negotiate with the kind of evil that dwells in a man who could tear a fellow human being apart with a steel pick. I wanted to tell him I was not the source of his discontent and enmity and that as a child of poor and illiterate Cajuns I shared his background and had done nothing to warrant his irritability.

I had all these vituperative thoughts, but I expressed none of them. Instead, I shook his hand without his having offered it. He stared at me blankly.

“Will you accompany me and the children to their fort, sir?” I said.

He brushed some garden cuttings off his shirt with the backs of his fingers. “Yeah, I could use a break. I’ll get some Popsicles out of the icebox to take along. Appreciate the job you doing even though I don’t probably show it,” he said.

AFTER I DROVE WITH THE CHILDREN and their grandfather to the plywood fort, I returned to the office and logged the neck chain, crucifix, and the small P-38 army-issue can opener into an evidence locker. Then I called Helen Soileau at home.

“Bello Lujan’s killer is a guy from the Islands. He’s a friend of Lefty Raguza,” I said.

“How do you know?” she said.

“Some kids playing on Bello Lujan’s property found a chain and crucifix and G.I. can opener by Bello ’s back fence. I saw this guy wearing this stuff the night I had a run-in with Lefty at that zebra club in Lafayette.”

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“There’s no question about it. I figure Bello broke the chain from the guy’s neck and it fell down inside his shirt. It didn’t fall onto the ground until he was almost to the fence.”

“That doesn’t put the guy at the murder scene. Whitey Bruxal was Bello ’s business partner. It’s not improbable his hired help hung around Bello ’s stable. But if we can put the neck chain and whatever with the scrapings from under Bello ’s nails, we might have something. Find out where the gumball is and bring him in.”

I called Betsy Mossbacher on her cell phone. She picked up on the second ring.

“I need to find the guy from the Islands who works for Whitey Bruxal. His hair looks like a braided mop somebody dipped in a grease bucket. Know who I’m talking about?” I said.

“He’s an illegal by the name of Juan Bolachi. He’s got the smarts of a used Q-tip. What do you want him for?”

“He may have been involved in the murder of Bello Lujan.”

“Our surveillance indicates he already blew town. Good luck finding him. He mucks out stables anywhere between Hialeah and Belmont Park and a couple of quarter-horse tracks in the Southwest. You’re sure this is the guy?”

I called Helen again at her house, even though it was Saturday and I knew my obsessiveness was beginning to test her patience. “The guy from the Islands already split. I’ve got an address for him in Lafayette. Maybe we can match DNA from some items in his residence with the scrapings from-”

“Ease up, bwana. It’s starting to get away from you.”

“I’ll work on it this weekend. On my own time.”

“The evidence you’ve found is one nail in the coffin. But we’re going to need six more like it. Now cool your jets, Streak.”

In terms of the evidentiary aspects of the case, she was right and it was pointless to argue with her. But Helen believed in the viability of the legal process much more than I did. If the building that you wish to see demolished already has a crack in it, why wait on time and decay to finish the job? I tried another tack before she could hang up.

“I think I know how Crustacean Man died,” I said. “Monday morning I want to get a search warrant on the Lujan and Bruxal homes and Slim Bruxal’s fraternity house.”

I heard her sigh. “What do you have?”

“Monarch Little says Slim and Tony and their friends used baseball bats in a beef with some soldiers behind a nightclub. I think they used one on Crustacean Man as well. Koko will back us up on the warrant.”

“Why would college kids deliberately murder a derelict?”

“Why did they gangbang Yvonne Darbonne when she was stoned and drunk and already traumatized by rape? Because they’re sociopaths. Because their parents should have used better rubbers,” I replied.

“Get the warrants,” she said.