“Great.”

“Well, let’s see. Byron’s family lived over to Berwick in a trailer park called Meadowlands. Kind of a dog-assed place, although chez Boudreaux was neat as a pin. I know that because at the time of Claude’s murder I was filling in for the photographer at the time and I took a bunch of pictures over there. Marie, Byron’s mother – she was a fine woman, to all accounts. Claude – he was a good man, too, is what I hear, a hard worker. Worked for Anadarko out on the rigs. Imagine being poisoned by your own son! That boy was just plain rotten through and through. Most folks didn’t believe that crap about Claude abusing the boy, that was a boatload of bullshit.”

“Like the Menendez brothers.”

“Just like that. Really – word was Claude was a stand-up guy. Let’s see – if I was y’all, I’d head over to Meadowlands. Good chance there’s still folk around knew the family. In the meantime, I’ll set someone here to pulling up the old papers covering the case.”

“Where do we find Meadowlands?” Pinky asks.

“Where are you?”

“Morgan City Holiday Inn.”

“You get on across the bridge to Berwick, go along about… hmmm… maybe half a mile. Meadowlands, it’s off… hmmm… Tupelo, maybe. Or Live Oak. One of the tree streets. You won’t have any trouble finding it.”

We hear a bunch of shouting in the background. Maldonado covers the receiver, but we hear him talking. Then he’s back. “Okay.”

“Does Boudreaux still have family there?” I ask. My voice sounds shaky. The emotion in it comes across so clearly that Pinky raises his sunglasses and shoots me a look from across the room.

“I don’t think so,” Maldonado says. “No family left I know of. Daddy died from the poisoning, mom died a few years beforehand. And – hang on.”

He’s interrupted again.

“Sounds like you gotta go,” Pinky says.

“I can meet you later tonight if you like – after we get this baby to bed.”

“Buy you dinner,” Pinky suggests.

“Deal,” Maldonado says.

We cross the expanse of the Atchafalya River (“’Chafalaya,” Pinky tells me) on the Huey P. Long Bridge, and find Meadowlands within ten minutes. Despite the bucolic name, there’s nothing resembling a meadow in sight. The complex consists of two dozen trailers, most of which have obviously been there for decades. Some are fenced in by stretches of chain link; most are patched together with slabs of plywood. A few stand out from the rest, with shutters and fresh siding, picket fencing, and plantings of flowers.

A sign shows a logo of children hand in hand and posts a speed limit of five miles per hour. The sign is bullet-pocked, with the concentration of hits within the silhouetted children. Brown plastic Dumpsters, most too full to allow their tops to close, sit out in front of many of the trailers. Ragged front yards hold plastic chairs, more seating in the form of inverted white buckets, kids’ bicycles, toys of all sorts, plastic wading pools, boat trailers, discarded tires. Every trailer seems to have a vehicle or two parked in front – most of them pickups.

Pinky rolls down the road and pulls up in front of number 14, a siding-covered trailer with an awkward bay window clapped onto the front. The BMW gleams on the rutted dirt like an alien spaceship.

I rap on the door. A gray-haired woman with her hair in pink foam curlers (I’ve never seen this before, except on old TV shows) calls over from the porch of the trailer next door. “They ain’t home. Help you with somethin’?”

“We’re looking-,” I start, but Pinky takes over.

“How’re you doing today, ma’am?” he says.

“You selling something, sugar? ’Cause I don’t have a dime; I might as well tell you that right off. I got time, though, so y’all can practice on me if you want.”

“We’re not selling anything,” Pinky says. “We’re-”

“Pardon me but are you a albino?”

I start to say something, offended on Pinky’s behalf, but Pinky just laughs.

“Yes, I am,” he says in a booming voice. “I’m a genetic oddity standing right here in your front yard, ma’am. I know it can throw people off their normal manners at first, just like someone with an unfortunate deformity. In a funny kind of way, I think it’s a form of racism. Now, who would believe that here in Louisiana there’d be such a thing as being too white?” He smiles.

“Let me ask you something,” the woman says. “You get sunburnt easy?”

“It’s a big problem,” Pinky admits.

“I’m really fair myself, plus I have the rosacea and I burn right up. Lord, I put sunscreen on with a spoon. Why don’t you and your friend come on up here out of the sun, and tell me what brings you to Meadowlands.”

Up here is a rickety deck made out of plywood and elevated by cinder block columns. Metal folding chairs and an ancient wicker coffee table comprise the deck furniture. On the table is an ashtray and a plastic caddy of manicure supplies. The woman has given herself a pedicure, her feet in some kind of device, her gleaming red toes separated from each other by nubs of foam.

“I’m Pinky Streiber,” Pinky says. “And this is Alex Callahan.” Pinky extends his hand.

“Sorry, honey,” the woman says, holding her hands out, fingers splayed so we can see the fresh polish on them. “I’m not near dry yet. I’m Dora Garrity,” she adds, then turns toward me. “I seen you on TV,” she says, “right?” And then, the light really dawns. “Ohmygod, you the daddy of them two little tykes. Oh. My. Sweet. Jesus.”

“We think Byron Boudreaux might be the one took those boys,” Pinky says.

Dora’s hand flies up and covers her mouth, the perfect red nails like blood against snow. “Oh, Lord.” I’m familiar with the emotion that pinches her lips and seems to make her face shrink. It’s fear. “That boy,” she says, after lighting a cigarette, and exhaling a long stream of smoke. “That boy was born bad. Bad to the bone.”

“Do you know where he is? Where any of his family is?”

She shakes her head. “Sorry, sugar. I can’t help you there. I haven’t seen that boy since they took him away. His folks’re dead, of course. I didn’t even know he was out of the asylum. When did that happen?”

“Ninety-six.”

“Well, I’m right glad he didn’t come home.”

“What about the people who live there now? Are they related to Boudreaux?”

“No. Claude and Marie, they didn’t own the home. It’s a rental, you understand. So there’s been a whole string of folk in there.”

“I just had a thought,” Pinky says to me. “There ought to be records. Claude must have left some kind of estate. We can check on that. Remind me.”

“Way I heard it, everything went to Byron,” Dora says. “Which royally pissed off Claude’s brother, Lonnie. Not that there was much of anything left by the time Claude got buried and all. Course, Lonnie was in a real temper over Byron getting anything, but there wasn’t nothin’ for it. The way it came out, with the insanity plea and all, legally Byron didn’t actually commit no crime.”

“Lonnie live nearby?”

“Lonnie passed,” Dora says.

“What about friends?” I ask. “Did Byron have friends here?”

“That boy had no friends. No friends at all. Time he killed Claude, he was spending most of his time over in niggertown, hangin’ with some witch doctor.”

“Witch doctor?”

“What I heard.” She seems to bristle at my skepticism. “They got ’em, you know. Three hundred years here and they still ain’t left the jungle.”

I know I should keep my mouth shut, but it’s hard. “You know, that’s-”

Pinky interrupts: “You know this witch doctor? Know his name?”

Dora looks offended. “Nossir, I do not. How would I know something like that?”

“But you did know Byron?” I manage.

“Honey, he lived right next door. Your home is a trailer, you spend a lot of time outdoors. I been living here for more than thirty years. And believe it or not, that’s not even the record.” A smoker’s laugh, half cough. “Old Ralph Guidry been here even longer.”