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"Then why ain't you looking right now? How come it takes all day to get y'all out here?" she said.
"Tell me what the man looked like one more time," I said.
"Got a brand-new Lincoln car. Got a pink face shaped like an egg. Got hair that ain't blond or red, somewhere in between, and he comb it straight back."
"Why did she go off with him?" I asked.
'"Cause she's seventeen years old and don't listen. 'Cause she got this on her hands, just like me, and reg'lar mens don't pay her no mind. That answer your question?"
Helen drove us back down the dirt road through the fields to the state highway. The night was humid, layered with smoke from stubble fires, and the stars looked blurred with mist in the sky. We passed the LaRose company store, then the plantation itself. All three floors of the house were lighted, the columned porch decorated with pumpkins and scarecrows fashioned from cane stalks and straw hats. In a back pasture, behind a railed fence, horses were running in the moonlight, as though spooked by an impending storm or the rattle of dry poppy husks in the wind.
"What's on your mind?" Helen asked.
"The description of the white man sounds like Mingo Bloomberg."
"I thought he was in City Prison in New Orleans."
"He is. Or at least he was."
"What would he be doing back around here?"
"Who knows why these guys do anything, Helen? I'll get on it in the morning."
I looked back over my shoulder at the LaRose house, the glitter of a chandelier through velvet curtains, a flood-lighted gazebo hooded with Confederate jasmine and orange trumpet vine.
"Forget those people. They wouldn't spit on either one of us unless we had something they wanted. Hey, you listening to me, Streak?" Helen said, and hit me hard on the arm with the back of her hand.
I got up early the next morning, left a message on Clete Purcel's answering machine, then drove back to the grandmother's house by the nightclub. The girl, whose name was Barbara Lavey, had still not returned home. I sat in my truck by the front of the grandmother's house and looked at the notes in my notebook. For some reason I drew a circle around the girl's name. I had a feeling I would see it on a case file for a long time.
The grandmother had gone back inside and I had forgotten her. Suddenly she was at the passenger door window. Her glasses fell down on her nose when she leaned inside.
"I'm sorry I was unpolite yestiday. I know you working on it. Here's somet'ing for you and the lady," she said. She placed a brown paper bag swollen with pecans in my hand.
The sun was still low in the eastern sky when I approached the LaRose plantation. I saw Buford, naked to the waist, in a railed lot by the barn, with a half dozen dark-skinned men who were dressed in straw hats coned on the brims and neckerchiefs and cowboy boots and jeans molded to their buttocks and thighs.
I knew I should keep going, not put my hand again into whatever it was that drove Karyn and Buford's ambitions, not fuel their anger, not give them a handle on an Internal Affairs investigation, but I was never good at taking my own counsel and I could feel the lie she had told turning in my chest like a worm.
I turned into the drive, passed a row of blue-green poplars on the side of the house, and parked by the back lot. A balmy wind, smelling of rain, was blowing hard across the cane acreage, and a dozen roan horses with brands burned deep into the hair were running in the lot, turning against one another, rattling against the railed fence, their manes twisted with fire in the red sunrise.
When I stepped out of the truck, Buford was smiling at me. His skin-tight white polo pants were flecked with mud and tucked inside his polished riding boots. His eyes looked serene, his face pleasant and cool with the freshness of the morning.
I almost extended my hand.
He looked at the sunrise over my shoulder.
'"Red sky at dawn, sailor be forewarned,'" he said. But he was smiling when he said it.
"I shouldn't be here, but I needed to tell you to your face the charges your wife made are fabricated. That's as kind as I can say it."
"Oh, that stuff. She's dropping it, Dave. Let's put that behind us."
"Excuse me?"
"It's over. Come take a look at my horses."
I looked at him incredulously.
"She slandered someone's name," I said.
