"Who are the three guys?"

"I've heard the name Jewel before. In New Orleans."

"In connection with what?"

"I flew for some people. Down in the tropics. A lot of different kinds of stuff goes in and out of there, you get my drift?" He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I never saw the guy. But you get in bad with the wrong people and guys like that get turned loose on you sometimes."

"Which people?"

One tooth made a white mark on the corner of his lip.

"I can't tell you any more, Dave. If you want to lock me up, that's the breaks. I'm living in a dark place, and I don't know if I'm ever going to get out of it."

His face looked as flat and empty as melted tallow.

That same afternoon I drove out to his sister Drew's place on East Main. East Main in New Iberia is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the Old South or perhaps in the whole country. It runs parallel with Bayou Teche and begins at the old brick post office and the Shadows, an 1831 plantation home that you often see on calendars and in motion pictures set in the antebellum South, and runs through a long corridor of spreading live oaks, whose trunks and root systems are so enormous that the city has long given up trying to contain them with cement and brick. The yards are filled with hibiscus and flaming azaleas, hydrangeas, bamboo, blooming myrtle trees, and trellises covered with roses and bugle vine and purple clumps of wisteria. In the twilight, smoke from crab boils and fish fries drifts across the lawns and through the trees, and across the bayou you can hear a band or kids playing baseball in the city park.

Like the other Sonnier children, Drew had never been one to live a predictable life. She had used her share of Weldon's oil strike on her father's farm to buy a rambling one-story white house, surrounded with screened-in gallerys, on a rolling, tree-shaded lot next to the old Burke home. She had been divorced twice, and any number of other men had drifted in and out of her life, usually to be cut loose unexpectedly and sent back to wherever they came from. She never did anything in moderation. Her love affairs were always public knowledge; she took indigent people of color into her home; she was inflexible in matters of principle and never gave an inch in an argument. She was robust and merry and big-shouldered, and sometimes I'd see her at the health club in Lafayette, clanking the weights up and down on the Nautilus machines, her shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face hot and bright with purpose, a red bandana tied in her wet black hair.

But she did surprise us once, at least until we thought about it. She gave up men for a while and became a lay missionary with the Maryknolls in Guatemala and El Salvador. Then she almost died of dysentery. When she returned home she formed the first chapter of Amnesty International in New Iberia.

I found her behind her house, trimming back the grapevines on the gazebo with two black children. She was barefoot and wore dirty pink shorts and a white T-shirt, and there were twigs and flecks of dead leaves in her hair.

She had a pair of hedge trimmers extended high up on the vine when she turned her head and saw me.

"Hi, Dave," she said.

"Hello, Drew. How've you been?"

"Pretty good. How's it with you?"

"I've been kind of busy of late."

"I guess you have."

I looked down at the two black children, both of whom were about five or six years old. I have a six-pack of Dr. Pepper on the seat of my truck. Why don't you guys go get it for us?" I said.

"They looked at Drew for approval.

"Y'all go ahead," she said.

"You know a sheriff's deputy was murdered last night at Weldon's house?" I said.

"Yes."

"Why would some people want to kill your brother, Drew?"

"Isn't he the one to ask?"

"He seems to think that being a standup, guy is the same thing as allowing someone to blow his head off. Except now an innocent man is dead."

She wiped the sweat out of her eyebrows with the back of her hand. The sun winked brightly off the bayou.

"Come inside and I'll give you some iced tea," she said, wiped both of her hands on her rump, and walked ahead of me into the shade at the rear of her house. She pulled her damp T-shirt off her breasts with her fingers and shook the cloth as she opened the screen door. There was something too cavalier about her attitude, and I had the feeling that she had anticipated my visit and had already made a private decision about the outcome of our conversation.

She took a pitcher of tea out of the icebox, picked up two glasses, and we walked through a dark, cool room that gave onto a side porch. On the wall above her desk were several framed photographs: Weldon in a navy aviator's uniform; Lyle with his zydeco band, the name CATHAHOULA RAMBLERS written in white letters at the bottom; and a cracked black and-white picture of two little boys and a little girl standing in front of a man and woman, with a Ferris wheel in the background. The little girl had a paper windmill in her hand, and the boys were smiling over the tops of their cotton candy. The woman was expressionless and thick-bodied, her shoulders slightly rounded, her straw purse the only ornament or bright thing on her person. The man was dark and had a narrow face and wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat at a slant on his head. He was looking at something outside the picture.

Drew had stopped in the doorway to the porch.

"I was just admiring your photographs. Are those your parents?"

She didn't answer.

I don't remember them very well," I said.

"What are you asking me, Dave?"

"Lyle says your father's alive."

"My father was a sonofabitch. I don't concern myself thinking about him."

"His picture's hanging here, Drew."

She set down the iced tea and the glasses on the porch and came back in the room.

"I keep it because my brothers and mother are in it," she said. "It's the only one I have of her. the day he drove her out of the house her car went through the railing on the Atchafalaya bridge. She drowned in fifty feet of water, down where it was so dark they had to use electric lights to find her."

"I don't think your father has any connection with this case. But I had to ask anyway. I'm sorry to bring up bad memories."

"It's the past. Who cares about it?"

"But if you thought your father had anything to do with it, you'd tell me, wouldn't you, Drew?" I looked her directly in the eyes. Her stare remained as intent as mine.

"You should discount most of what Lyle tells you, Dave."

"And if you knew, you'd also tell me why three guys would tear Weldon's house apart?"

She pushed her tongue into her cheek and let her eyes rove over my face. No matter what the situation, Drew always gave me the feeling that she was about to step two inches from my face.

"Come outside and sit down," she said.

I followed her out onto the porch, and after I had sat down in a canvas chair, she sat on the corner of a wroughtiron table, with her legs apart, and looked down at me. I looked away through the screening at some bluejays playing in the birdbath on the lawn.

"I'm going to ask you to accept something," she said. "I can't help you out about Weldon. If I try to, I may hurt him. That's something I'm not going to do."

"Maybe it's not yours to decide what degree of involvement you'll have with the law, Drew."

"You want to put that a little more clearly?"

I raised my eyes to hers.

"Earlier today I cuffed your brother to a D-ring in my office. It was for only a few minutes, but I hope the lesson wasn't lost on him."

"A what?"

"It's an iron ring, like a tethering ring, inset in the floor. Sometimes we handcuff people in custody to it until we can move them into a holding area."