paper was rolled up in her hands. She smiled awkwardly. 'What is it, Sister?' I said when we were alone.
'You know Rosebud Hulin?' she asked.
'Tee Bobby's twin sister?' I replied.
'She's an autistic savant. She can reproduce in exact detail a photograph or painting she's seen only once, maybe one she saw years ago. But she's never been able to create images out of her imagination. It's as though light goes from her eye through her arm onto the page.'
'I'm not following you.'
'This morning she drew this figure,' the art teacher said, unrolling the charcoal drawing for me to see.
I stared down at a reclining female nude, the wrists crossed above the head, a crown of thorns fastened on the brow. The woman's mouth was open in a silent scream, like the figure in the famous painting by Munch. The eyes were oversize, elongated, wrapped around the head, filled with despair.
Two skeletal trees stood in the foreground, with branches that looked like sharpened pikes.
'The eyes are a little like a Modigliani, but Rosebud didn't re-create this from any painting or picture I ever saw,' the art teacher said.
'Why are you bringing me this, Sister?'
She gazed at the smoke from cook fires drifting into the trees.
'I'm not sure. Or maybe I'm not sure I want to say. I had to take Rosebud into the rest room and wash her face. That gentle girl tried to hit me.'
'Did she tell you why she drew the picture?'
'She always says the pictures she draws are put in her head by God. I think maybe this one came from somewhere else,' the art teacher said. 'Can I keep this?' I asked.
On Monday I called Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked to speak to Tee Bobby.
'He's at work,' she said.
'Where?' I asked.
'The Carousel Club in St. Martinville.'
'That's Jimmy Dean Styles's place. Styles told me he wasn't going to let Tee Bobby play there again.'
'You ax where he work. I tole you. I said anyt'ing about music?'
I drove up the bayou to St. Martinville and parked in the lot behind the Carousel Club. The garbage piled against the back wall hummed with flies and reeked of dead shrimp. Tee Bobby was using a wide-bladed shovel to scoop up the rotted matter and slugs that oozed from a mound of split vinyl bags.
He was sweating profusely, his eyes like BBs when he looked at me.
'You're doing scut work for Jimmy Sty?' I said.
'Ain't no clubs want to hire me. Jimmy give me a job.'
He slung a shovel-load of garbage into the back of a pickup truck His eyes were filled with a peculiar light, the irises jittering.
'You looked like you cooked your head, podna,' I said.
'Cain't you leave me be, man?'
'I want to show you something.'
I started to unroll his sister's drawing, but he speared his shovel into a swollen bag of garbage and went through the side door of the club. I used a pay phone at the grocery down the street and called the St. Martin Parish Sheriffs Department to let them know I was on their turf, then went inside the club. The chairs were stacked on the tables and a fat black woman was mopping the floor. Tee Bobby sat at the bar, his face in his hands, the streamers from an air-conditioning unit blowing above his head.
I flattened the sketch of the reclining nude on the bar.
'Rosebud drew this. Look at the crossed wrists, the fear and despair in the woman's eyes, the scream that's about to come from her mouth. What's that make you think of, Tee Bobby?' I said.
He stared down at the drawing and took a breath and wet his lips. Then he blew his nose on a handkerchief to hide the expression on his face.
'Perry LaSalle say I ain't got to talk wit' you,' he said.
I clenched his wrist and flattened his hand on the paper.
'For just a second feel the pain and terror in that drawing, Tee Bobby. Look at me and tell me you don't know what we're talking about,' I said.
He pressed his head down on his fists. His T-shirt was gray with sweat; his pulse was leaping in his throat.
'Why don't you just put a bullet in me?' he said.
'You got a meth problem, Tee Bobby? Somebody giving you crystal to straighten out the kinks?' I said.
He started to speak, then he saw a silhouette out of the corner of his eye. I didn't think his face could look sicker than it did, but I was wrong.
Jimmy Dean Styles walked from his office and crossed the dance floor and went behind the bar. He wore a maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest and gray slacks that hung low on the smooth taper of his stomach. He opened a small refrigerator behind the bar and removed a container of coleslaw, then began eating it with a plastic fork, his eyes drifting casually to Rosebud's drawing. He tilted his head curiously.
'What you got, my man?' he asked.
'This is a police matter. I'd appreciate your not intruding,' I said.
Styles chewed his food thoughtfully, his eyes focused out the open front door.
'Tee Bobby ain't did you nothing. Let the cat have some peace,' he said.
'For a guy who busted him up on the oyster shells, you're a funny advocate,' I said.
'Maybe we got our disagreements, but he's still my friend. Look, the man's coming down wit' the flu. Ain't he got enough misery?' Styles said.
I rolled up Rosebud's drawing. 'I'll be around,' I said.
'Oh, yeah, I know. I got a broken toilet that's the same way. No matter what I do, it just keep running out on the flo',' Styles said.
When I got back to the department, I went into the office of a plainclothes detective who worked Narcotics, his name was Kevin Dartez and he wore long-sleeved white shirts and narrow, knit ties and a pencil-thin black mustache. His younger sister had been what is called a rock queen, or crack whore, and had died of her addiction. Dartez's ferocity toward black dealers who pimped for white girls was a legend in south Louisiana law enforcement.
'You seen any crystal meth around?' I asked.
'Out-of-towners bring it into the French Quarter, That's about it so far,' he replied, tilted back in his swivel chair, hands clasped behind his head.
'The Carousel Club in St. Martinville? I wonder if anyone's ever tossed that place. Who owns the Carousel, anyway?' I said.
'Say again?' Dartez said, sitting up straight in his:hair.
That afternoon Helen came into my office and sat on he corner of my desk and looked down at a yellow legal pad she had propped on her thigh.
'I've found three or four people who say they saw Tee Bobby with Amanda Boudreau. But it was always in a mblic place, like he'd see her and try to strike up a conversation,' she said.
'You think they had some kind of secret relationship?' I asked.
'None I could find. I get the sense Tee Bobby was just a routine pain in the ass Amanda tried to avoid.'
I dropped a paper clip I had been fiddling with on my desk blotter and rubbed my forehead.
'How do you think it's going to go?' I asked.
'The fact Tee Bobby and Amanda were seen together provides another explanation for Amanda's DNA being on Tee Bobby's watch cap. The right jury, he might skate.'
'I think we need to start over,' I said.
'Where?'
'Amanda's boyfriend,' I replied.
