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We parked the car in front of the
parish jail and listened to
the
rain beat on the roof. The sky was black, the windows fogged with
humidity, and white veins of lightning pulsated in the bank of
thunderheads out on the Gulf.
“Tante Lemon’s going to be waiting for you,” Lester Benoit,
the
driver, said. He was, like me, a plainclothes detective with the
sheriff’s department. He wore sideburns and a mustache, and had his
hair curled and styled in Lafayette. Each year he arranged to take his
vacation during the winter in Miami Beach so that he would have a
year-round tan, and each year he bought whatever clothes people were
wearing there. Even though he had spent his whole life in New Iberia,
except for time in the service, he always looked as if he had just
stepped off a plane from somewhere else.
“You don’t want to see her, do you?” he said, and grinned.
“We can go in the side door and bring them down the back
elevator. She won’t even know we’ve been there.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“It’s not me that’s got the problem. If you don’t feel good
about
it, you should have asked off the assignment. What’s the big deal,
anyway?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Then blow her off. She’s an old nigger.”
“She says Tee Beau didn’t do it. She says he was at her house,
helping her shell crawfish, the night that guy got killed.”
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