He removed a paper napkin from the dispenser and folded it and blotted the perspiration on his brow. He grinned at her.
'There's days I don't think the likes of me is meant to sell sno'balls in Hades. Is there people up at that house?' he said.
'What are you selling?' she asked.
'Encyclopedias, Bibles, family-type magazines. But Bibles is what I like to sell most of. I aim to go into the ministry or law enforcement. I been taking criminal justice courses over at the university. Could I have one of them fried pies?'
She reached up on the shelf again, and this time his gaze wandered over her body, lingering on the backs of her thighs. When I stepped out of the storage room, his head jerked toward me, the skin tightening around his eyes.
'You want to rent a boat?' I asked.
'No, sir. I was just taking a little rest break on my route. My name's Marvin Oates. Actually I'm from here- bouts,' he said.
'I know who are you. I'm a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department.'
'Well, I reckon that cuts through it,' he said.
My memory of him was hazy, an arrest four or five years back on a bad check charge, a P.O.'s recommendation for leniency, Barbara Shanahan acting with the charity that she was occasionally capable of, allowing him to plead out on time served.
'We'll be seeing you,' I said.
'Yes, sir, you got it,' he replied, cutting his head.
He tipped his hat to Alafair and hefted up his suitcase and labored out the door as though he were carrying a load of bricks.
'Why do you have to be so hard, Dave?' Alafair said.
I started to reply, then thought better of it and went outside and began laying out split chickens on the grill.
Marvin Oates paused at the end of the dock, set his suitcase down, and walked back toward me. He gazed reflectively at an outboard plowing a foamy yellow trough down the bayou.
'Is that your daughter, sir?' he asked.
'Yep.'
He nodded. 'You saw me looking at her figure when her back was turned. But she's good-looking and the way of the flesh is weak, at least it is with me. You're her father and I offended you. I apologize for that.'
He waited for me to speak. When I continued to stare into his face, he cut his head again and walked back to his suitcase and hefted it up and crossed the dirt road and started up my driveway.
'Wrong house, partner,' I called.
He lifted his hat in salute and changed direction and headed toward my neighbor's.
Monday morning I called before I drove out to the LaSalles' island to see Tee Bobby's grandmother. When she let me in, she was wearing a beige dress and white shoes that had been recently polished and her hair was brushed and fastened in back with a comb. Her living room had throw rugs on the floor and a wood-bladed fan that turned overhead, and the slipcovers on the upholstery were printed with flowery designs. The wind was blowing off the bay, and the red bloom of mimosa and poinciana trees flattened softly against the screens. From the couch Ladice looked at me and waited, her face cautionary, her chest rising and falling.
'Tee Bobby doesn't have an alibi. Or at least not one he'll give me,' I said.
'What if I say he was here when that girl died?' she said.
'Your neighbors say he wasn't.'
'Then why you bother me, Mr. Dave?'
'People around here are in a bad mood about that girl's death. Tee Bobby is a perfect dartboard for their anger.'
'This all started way befo' he was born. Ain't none of this that boy's fault.'
'You're going to have to explain that to me.'
I heard the back screen door open and saw a young woman walk across the kitchen. She wore pink tennis shoes and an oversize blue dress that hung on her like a sack. She took a soda pop that was already opened from the icebox, a paper straw floating in the bottle's neck. She stood in the doorway, sucking on the straw, her face the twin of Tee Bobby's, her expression vacuous, her eyes tangled with thoughts that probably no one could ever guess at.
'We going to the doctor in a li'l bit, Rosebud. Wait on the back porch and don't be coming back in till I tell you,' Ladice said.
The young woman's eyes held on mine a moment, then she pulled the drinking straw off her lips and turned and went out the back screen door and let it slam behind her.
'You look like you got somet'ing to say,' Ladice said. 'What happened to Tee Bobby and Rosebud's mother?'
'Run off wit' a white man when she was sixteen. Left them two in a crib wit'out no food.'
'That's what you meant when you said none of this was Tee Bobby's fault?'
'No. That ain't what I meant at all.'
'I see.' I stood up to leave. 'Some people say old man Julian was the father of your daughter.'
'You come into the house of a white lady and ax a question like that? Like you was talking to livestock?' she said.
'Your grandson may end up in the Death House, Ladice. The only friend he seems to have is Perry LaSalle. Maybe that's good. Maybe it isn't. Thanks for your time.'
I walked outside, into the yard and the smell of flowers and the sun-heated salty hint of rain out on the Gulf. Across the road I could see peacocks on the lawn of the scorched three-story stucco ruins that had been Julian LaSalle's home. I heard Ladice open the screen door behind me.
'What you mean, it ain't good Perry LaSalle's the only friend Tee Bobby got?' she said.
'A man who's driven by guilt eventually turns on those who make him feel guilty. That's just one guy's observation,' I said.
The breeze blew a strand of her hair down on her forehead. She brushed it back into place and stared at me for a long time, then went back into her house and latched the screen door behind her.
At sunset an elderly black man named Batist helped me close up the bait shop and chain- lock our rental boats to the pilings under the dock. Heat lightning flickered over the Gulf and I could hear the distant rumble of thunder, but the air was dry, the trees along the road coated with dust, and a column of acrid smoke blew from a neighbor's trash fire and flattened in a gray haze on the bayou.
This was the third year of the worst drought in Louisiana's history.
I pressure-hosed the dried fish blood and scales off the cleaning boards, then folded the Cinzano umbrellas that protruded from the spool tables on the dock and went inside the shop.
A few years ago a friend had given me a replica of the classic Wurlitzer jukebox, one whose domed plastic casing swirled with color, like liquid candy that had not been poured into the mold. He had stocked it with 45 rpm records from the 1950s, and I had never replaced them. I dropped in a quarter painted with red nail polish and played Guitar Slim's 'The Things That I Used to Do.'
I had never heard a voice filled with as much sorrow as his. There was no self-pity in the song, only acceptance of the terrible conclusion that what he loved most in the world, his wife, had become profligate and had not only rejected his love but had given herself to an evil man.
Guitar Slim was thirty-two when he died of his alcoholism.
'That's old-time blues there, ain't it?' Batist said.
Batist was well into his seventies now, his attitudes intractable, his hair the color of smoke, the backs of his broad hands flecked with pink scars from a lifetime of working on fishing boats and shucking oysters at one of the LaSalle canneries. But he was still a powerful, large man who was confident in himself and took pride in his skill as
