The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“If this guy is dirty on a homicide, he’s not going to use our parish as a sanctuary. Talk to his wife and daughter.”

“I’d rather drop this one.”

“I’d rather not be present at my own death. Get out of here.”

Baylor’s home was a dark green nineteenth-century one-story house with tall windows and high ceilings and a peaked tin roof streaked with rust that had a purple cast in the shadows, not unlike my own. It had a wide screened-in gallery and was set back from Bayou Teche under pecan and palm trees and a solitary live oak dripping with Spanish moss. A glider hung on chains from one of the oak limbs, and a tan Honda was parked in the shale driveway, its paint spotted with bird droppings. A girl of about nineteen answered the door.

“I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the sheriff’s department,” I said, opening my badge. “Is Mr. Baylor here?”

“He’s at work,” she said.

She wore black sweatpants and a white T-shirt that was flecked with tiny pieces of leaves. “I was cleaning up the backyard when you rang the bell.”

“Are you Otis Baylor’s daughter?”

“I’m Thelma Baylor.”

“Is your mother here?”

“My stepmother is at the grocery store.”

“Could I talk with you? I’m investigating the shooting of the looters in front of your home in New Orleans. We have a lead or two, but I still can’t quite picture where these guys were when they were shot.”

“What does it matter? They were shot.”

“That’s true, isn’t it? Could I come in?”

“You can watch me rake leaves if you want.”

I followed her through the kitchen into the backyard. On both sides of her simple house were antebellum plantation homes of the kind one normally sees only on postcards. One hundred yards farther down the bayou, across the drawbridge, was a trailer slum where every form of social decay imaginable was a way of life. “You like New Iberia?” I asked.

“Are there always traffic jams at the Wal-Mart, or is that just because of the storm?” she said, drawing a bamboo rake through leaves that were black with mold.

I figured this one was going to be a long haul. I sat down on the back steps. “Did you hear the shots?”

Her eyes looked into neutral space, her rake missing a beat. “I heard a shot. It woke me up.”

“Just one shot?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you sleeping?”

Her face looked pale and round in the shade, devoid of expression, her lipstick glossy and unnatural, her bangs as precise as a nun’s wimple. “In my room.”

“Upstairs?”

“Yes, my room is upstairs. Do you want to talk to my father? I don’t see how any of this is helpful.”

“Do you think your next-door neighbor, Tom Claggart, is capable of popping a couple of looters?”

“Mr. Claggart is an upended penis with arms and legs and a face drawn on it. I don’t know what he’s capable of.”

Time to take a chance, I told myself. “I know about the attack on your person two years ago, Miss Thelma. I have a daughter a little older than you. If I thought she was in danger, particularly from the kind of men who hurt you, I’d take them off at the neck.”

Her rake slowed in the leaves, her chest rising and falling.

“I lost my mother and a wife to violent men,” I continued. “I think men who abuse women are invariably physical and moral cowards. I think a man who rapes a woman should be first in line at the injection table.”