“You doin’ okay, Dave?” he asked.
“I want to flip Tee Bobby Hulin and I could use your help,” I said.
“I’m a little jammed up right now,” he replied.
“I skated on an assault beef against Jimmy Dean Styles in St. Martin Parish. I’d like you to bring him in and tell him you need some information for an Internal Affairs investigation. In other words, the department would still like to hang me out to dry.”
“Jimmy Sty again, huh? He’s not one of my fans. Maybe you ought to use somebody he trusts,” Dartez said.
“You’re straight up, Kev. Street people respect you.”
“You wouldn’t try to twist my dials, would you?”
“Not a chance.” I opened a notebook to a page on which I had written down several tentative questions for Kevin Dartez
to ask Styles and set the notebook on Dartez’s desk. “It really doesn’t matter what you specifically say to Styles. Just get him to talk about me and make sure it’s on tape. Also bring up Helen Soileau.”
“Why Helen?” Dartez asked.
“Styles called her a dyke to her face. I don’t think he’s quite forgotten the reaction he got,” I said.
Dartez squeezed the hand exerciser in his palm. “When you want him in here?” he asked.
“How about as soon as possible?” I replied.
A few minutes later Helen Soileau and I got into a cruiser and drove toward Poinciana Island. “A bad storm building,” she said, looking over the steering wheel at the blackness in the sky, the cane thrashing in the fields. When I didn’t reply, she looked across the seat at me. “You listening?”
“I took Tee Bobby’s grandmother over the hurdles,” I said.
“She raised him. Maybe she should sit in her own shit for a change.”
“That’s rough,” I said.
“No, Amanda Boudreau staring into the barrel of a shotgun is rough. There’s a big difference between vics and perps, Streak. The victim is the victim. I wouldn’t get the two confused.”
Helen always kept the lines simple.
We crossed the freshwater bay onto the island. Waves were capping in the bay and hitting hard against the pilings under the bridge, slapping the shoreline and sliding up into the elephant ears along the shore. We rolled down the windows in the cruiser, and the light was cool and green inside the tunnel of trees as we drove toward Ladice’s house. A tree limb cracked like a rifle shot overhead and spun crazily into the road ahead of us. Helen swerved around it.
“I never liked this place,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked.
Helen looked out the window at a black man trying to catch a horse that was running through a field of pepper plants while lightning forked the sky above the treeline.
“If the LaSalles’ ancestors had won the Civil War, I think the rest of us would be picking cotton for a living,” she said.
We parked in Ladice’s yard and knocked on the door. Leaves were puffing out of the trees and blowing across the gallery and flattening against the screens. Inside, I could see Tee Bobby watching television in an overstuffed chair, his chest caved in, his mouth open, his chin peppered with stubble. His grandmother came out of the kitchen and stood in silhouette behind his chair.
“What you want?” she asked.
“Need to take Tee Bobby into town and clarify a few things,” I said.
“What t’ings?” she asked.
“We’re looking at somebody else in the murder of Amanda Boudreau. Maybe it’s time Tee Bobby did himself a good deed and starting cooperating with us,” I said.
Tee Bobby got up from his overstuffed chair and walked to the door, his long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned on his stomach, an unwashed odor wafting through the screen.