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“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 herebouts,” 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 he
ld 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?”
