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“This is Barbara Shanahan. Here’s your chance to prove what a great guy you are,” she said into the receiver.
“It’s one in the morning,” I said.
“You want to pick up Tee Bobby at my apartment or would you like him to sweat out a four-balloon load in a jail cell?” she asked.
When I got to Barbara’s, Tee Bobby was sitting in the living room, dressed in oversize khakis and a gold and purple LSU T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He kept sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his wrist.
“They sent you ?” he said.
“Go down to my truck and wait there,” I said.
“Detox ain’t open. What you up to?” he said.
“I’m about to throw you down the stairs,” Barbara said.
After Tee Bobby was gone, she told me everything that had happened.
“Why didn’t you have the city cops pick him up?” I asked.
“This case has too many question marks in it,” she replied.
“You have doubts about his guilt?”
“I didn’t say that. Others were involved. That dead girl deserves better than what she’s getting.”
Her terry-cloth robe was cinched above her hips. Even in her slippers she was slightly taller than I. In the soft light her freckles looked like they had been feather-dusted on her skin. Her hair was dark red, and she lifted a lock of it off her brow and for just a moment reminded me of a high school girl caught unawares in a camera’s lens.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” she asked.
“No reason.”
“You taking Tee Bobby to his grandmother’s?”
“I thought I’d cuff him to a train track,” I said.
A grin started to break at the corner of her mouth. Tee Bobby was sitting in the passenger seat of my truck when I got downstairs. He had vomited on the gravel and the foulness and density of his breath filled the cab of the truck. His hands were pressed between his legs, his back shivering.
“Are your grandmother and sister in harm’s way, Tee Bobby?” I asked before starting the engine.
“I ain’t saying no more. I was sick up there. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight.”
“Even if you beat the charges, where do you think all this will end?”
“Gonna be back playing my gig.”
“You want me to drop you somewhere you can fix?”
We were on the drawbridge over the Teche. I could hear the tires on the steel grid in the silence.
“I ain’t got no money,” he answered.
“What if I gave you some?”
“You’d do that? I’d really appreciate that. I’ll pay you back, too. There’s a joint off Loreauville Road. I just need to flatten out the kinks, then maybe join some kind of program.”
“I don’t think there’s a lot of real hope for you, Tee Bobby.”
“Oh, man, what you doin’ to me?”
