“Then you’ll have their DNA,” she said. Her eyes were black and hard now and fixed on mine.
Helen and I let ourselves out and crossed the yard to the cruiser. The wind, even full of dust, seemed cool after the long hot day and smelled of salt off the Gulf. Then I heard Mr. Boudreau behind me. He was a heavy man and he walked as though he had gout in one foot. A wing on his shirt collar was bent at an upward angle, like a spear point touching his throat.
“What kind of weapon did they use?” he asked.
“A shotgun,” I said.
His eyes blinked behind his glasses. “Did they shoot my little girl in the face?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I replied.
“’Cause those sons of bitches just better not have hurt her face,” he said, and began to weep in his front yard.
By the next morning the fingerprints lifted from the beer can thrown out of the automobile window at the crime scene gave us the name of Tee Bobby Hulin, a twenty-five-year-old black hustler and full-time smart-ass whose diminutive size saved him on many occasions from being bodily torn apart. His case file was four inches thick and included arrests for shoplifting at age nine, auto theft at thirteen, dealing reefer in the halls of his high school, and driving off from the back of the local Wal-Mart with a truckload of toilet paper. For years Tee Bobby had skated on the edge of the system, shining people on, getting by on rebop and charm and convincing others he was more trickster than miscreant. Also, Tee Bobby possessed another, more serious gift, one he seemed totally undeserving of, as though the finger of God had pointed at him arbitrarily one day and bestowed on him a musical talent that was like none since the sad, lyrical beauty in the recordings of Guitar Slim.
When Helen and I walked up to Tee Bobby’s gas-guzzler that evening at a drive-in restaurant not far from City Park, his accordion was propped up in the backseat, its surfaces like ivory and the speckled insides of a pomegranate.
“Hey, Dave, what it is?” he said.
“Don’t call your betters by their first name,” Helen said.
“I gots you, Miss Helen. I ain’t done nothing wrong, huh?” he said, his eyebrows climbing.
“You tell us,” I said.
He feigned a serious concentration. “Nope. I’m a blank. Y’all want part of my crab burger?” he said.
His skin had the dull gold hue of worn saddle leather, his eyes blue-green, his hair lightly oiled and curly and cut short and boxed behind the neck. He continued to look at us with an idiot’s grin on his mouth.
“Put your car keys under the seat and get in the cruiser,” Helen said.
“This don’t sound too good. I think I better call my lawyer,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were under arrest. We’d just like a little information from you. Is that a problem?” Helen said.
“I gots it again. White folks is just axing for hep. Don’t need to read no Miranda rights to nobody. Sho’ now, I wants to hep out the po-lice,” he said.
“You’re a walking charm school, Tee Bobby,” Helen said.
Twenty minutes later Tee Bobby sat alone in an interview room at the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department while Helen and I talked in my office. Outside, the sky was ribbed with maroon strips of cloud and the train crossing guards were lowered on the railway tracks and a freight was wobbling down the rails between clumps of trees and shacks where black people lived.
“What’s your feeling?” I asked.
“I have a hard time making this clown for a shotgun murder,” she said.
“He was there.”
“This case has a smell to it, Streak. Amanda’s boyfriend just doesn’t ring right,” she said.
“Neither does Tee Bobby. He’s too disconnected about it.”
“Give me a minute before you come in,” she said.
She went into the interview room and left the door slightly ajar so I could hear her words to Tee Bobby. She leaned on the table, one of her muscular arms slightly touching his, her mouth lowered toward his ear. A rolled-up magazine protruded from the back pocket of her jeans.
“We’ve got you at the crime scene. That won’t go away. I’d meet this head-on,” she said.
“Good. Bring me a lawyer. Then I bees meeting it head-on.”