"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?"