Jolie Blon's Bounce (Dave Robicheaux 12)

“You want us to get your grandmother down here?”

“Miss Helen gonna make me feel guilty now. ’Cause you a big family friend. ’Cause my gran’mama used to wash your daddy’s clothes when he wasn’t trying to put his hands up her dress.”

Helen pulled the rolled-up paper cylinder from her back pocket. “How would you like it if I just slapped the shit out of you?” she said.

“I bees likin’ that.”

She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then touched him lightly on the forehead with the cusp of the magazine.

His eyelids fluttered mockingly, like butterflies.

Helen walked out the door past me. “I hope the D.A. buries that little prick,” she said.

I went into the interview room and closed the door.

“Right now your car is being torn apart and two detectives are on their way to your house with a search warrant,” I said. “If they find a ski mask, a shotgun that’s been fired in the last two days, any physical evidence from that girl on your clothes, even a strand of hair, you’re going to be injected. The way I see it, you’ve got about a ten-minute window of opportunity to tell your side of things.”

Tee Bobby removed a comb from his back pocket and ran it up and down the hair on his arm and looked into space. Then he put his head down on his folded arms and tapped his feet rhythmically, as though he were keeping time with a tune inside his head.

“You’re just going to act the fool?” I said.

“I ain’t raped nobody. Leave me be.”

I sat down across from him and watched the way his eyes glanced innocuously around the walls, his boredom with my presence, the beginnings of a grin on his mouth as he looked at the growing anger in my face.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“She was sixteen. She had holes in her chest and side you could put your fist into. You get that silly-ass look off your face,” I said.

“I got a right to look like I want. You bring me a lawyer or you kick me loose. You ain’t got no evidence or you would have already printed me and had me in lockup.”

“I’m a half-inch from knocking you across this room, Tee Bobby.”

“Yassir, I knows that. This nigger’s bones is shakin’, Cap’n,” he replied.

I locked him in the interview room and went down to my office. A half hour later a phone call came in from the detectives who had been sent to Tee Bobby’s home on Poinciana Island.

“Nothing so far,” one of them said.

“What do you mean ‘so far’?” I asked.

“It’s night. We’ll start over again in the morning. Feel free to join us. I just sorted through a garbage can loaded with week-old shrimp,” he replied.

At dawn Helen and I drove across the wooden bridge that spanned the freshwater bay on the north side of Poinciana Island. The early sun was red on the horizon, promising another scorching day, but the water in the bay was black and smelled of spawning fish, and the elephant ears and the cypress and flowering trees on the banks riffled coolly in the breeze off the Gulf of Mexico. I showed my badge to the security guard in the wooden booth on the bridge, and we drove through the settlement of tree-shaded frame houses where the employees of the LaSalle family lived, then followed a paved road that wound among hillocks and clumps of live oaks and pine and gum trees and red-dirt acreage, where black men were hoeing out the rows in lines that moved across the field a

s precisely as military formations.

The log-and-brick slave cabins from the original LaSalle plantation were still standing, except they had been reconstructed and modernized by Perry LaSalle and were now used by either the family’s guests or lifetime employees whom the LaSalles took care of until the day of their deaths.

Ladice Hulin, Tee Bobby’s grandmother, sat in a wicker chair on her gallery, her thick gray hair hanging below her shoulders, her hands folded on the crook of a walking cane.

I got out of the cruiser and walked into the yard. Three uniformed deputies and a plainclothes detective were in back, raking garbage out of an old trash pit. As a young woman, Ladice had been absolutely beautiful, and even though age had robbed her in many ways, it had not diminished her femininity, and her skin still had the smoothness and luster of chocolate. She didn’t ask me onto the gallery.

“They tear up your house, Miss Ladice?” I said.

She continued to look at me without speaking. Her eyes had the clarity, the deepness, the unblinking fixed stare of a deer’s.

“Is your grandson inside?” I asked.