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“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.
After school hours we drove up the Teche to the little town of Loreauville. The pecan trees were in new leaf; a priest was watering his flowers in front of the Catholic church; kids were playing softball in a schoolyard. The moderate-size brick grocery that advertised itself as a supermarket, the saloon on the corner by the town’s only traffic signal, the humped dark green shapes of the oaks along the bayou were out of a Norman Rockwell world of years ago. Down the main thoroughfare was an independently owned drive-in hamburger joint, the parking lot sprinkled with teenagers. In their midst was Amanda’s boyfriend, whose name was Roland Chatlin, in starched khakis and a green and white Tulane T-shirt, bouncing a golf ball off the side of the building. When Helen and I approached him, he was drinking a soda pop and talking to a friend and, amazingly, seemed not to recognize us. All the kids in the parking lot were white.
“Remember us?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, you,” he said, chewing gum, his eyes lighting now.
“Step over here, please,” I said.
“Sure,” he replied, blowing out his breath, slipping his hands into his pockets.
“Your inability to help us is causing us all kinds of problems, Roland. You tell us two black guys in ski masks murdered Amanda, but that’s as far as we get,” I said.
“Sir?” he said.
“You’ve got no idea who they were. You can’t tell us what their voices sounded like. You can’t even tell us how tall they were. I’ve got the feeling maybe you don’t want us to catch them,” I said.
“Look at us, not at the ground,” Helen said.
“Your hands were tied with nothing but your shirt. You could have gotten loose if you’d wanted to, couldn’t you? But you were too scared. Maybe you even begged. Maybe you told these guys their identity was safe. When people fear for their lives, they do all kinds of things they’re ashamed of later, Roland. But it was pretty hard to just lie there and listen to them rape your girl, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Maybe it’s time to get it off your chest, kid,” Helen said.
“Have you ever seen Tee Bobby Hulin play in a local club?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. I mean, I don’t remember.”
He had dark hair and light skin, arms without muscular definition, narrow hips, and a feminine mouth. Involuntarily he felt for a religious medal through the cloth of his shirt.
“Out at the crime scene you called them niggers. You don’t care for black people, Roland?” I said.
“I was mad when I said that.”
“I don’t blame you. Which guy shot her?” I said.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think they were gonna—”
“They weren’t gonna what?” I said.
“Nothing. You got me mixed up. That’s why you’re here. My daddy says I don’t have to talk to y’all anymore.”
Then his face darkened, as though the politeness toward adults that was mandatory in his world had been replaced by other instincts.
“They shove people around at school. They take the little kids’ lunch money. They carry guns in their cars. Why don’t you go after them ?” he said vaguely, sweeping his hand at the air.
“Hear this, Roland,” Helen said. “If you know who these guys are and you’re lying to us, I’m going to find the shotgun that killed Amanda and jam it up your ass and pull the trigger myself. Tell that to your old man.”
