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pasture was entwined with climbing roses. The sheriff was around fifty, a man in control of his property and his political life. His blue uniform fitted tightly on his compact, hard body, and his round, freshly shaved face and direct eyes gave you the impression of a self-confident rural law officer who dealt easily with outside complexities.
    Unfortunately for him, I proved to be the exception.
    “She drowned,” he said. “My deputies said a bucket of water came out of her when they flipped her off the gurney.”
    “She had tracks on her arms.”
    “So? Addicts drown too. You need an autopsy to tell you that?”
    “Do you know if she was right-handed or left-handed?”
    “What the hell are you talking about?” he said.
    “She’d been shooting regularly into the left arm, but she had only one needle hole on the right. What’s that tell you?”
    “Not a goddamn thing.”
    “When a junkie flattens the vein in one arm, he starts on the other. I don’t think she’d been shooting up that long. I think somebody gave her a hotshot.”
    “The parish coroner signed the death certificate. It says ‘drowned.’ You take it up with him if you want to pursue it. I’m late for work.” He walked out of the horse lot, pulled off his muddy galoshes on the grass, and slipped on his polished, half-topped boots. His round face was turned away from me as he bent over, but I could hear the repressed anger in his breathing.
    “Those are fine Arabians,” I said. “I understand they can bring thirty thousand or so when they’re trained.”
    “That wouldn’t touch them, Lieutenant. Like I say, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m late. You want me to introduce you to the coroner?”
    “I don’t think so. Tell me, as a matter of speculation, how do you figure a healthy young woman, wearing all her clothes, would come to drown in a narrow bayou?”
    “What’s going to make you happy, Lieutenant? You want somebody to write down for you that she died of a hotshot? You want to take that back to New Orleans with you? All right, you have my permission. It’s no skin off our ass. But how about her family? She was raised up in the quarters on a sugar plantation about five miles south of here. Her mother is feeble-minded and her daddy is half-blind. You want to drive out there and tell them their daughter was a junkie?”
    “Everything in this case stinks of homicide, Sheriff.”
    “I’ve only got two more things to say to you, podna, and it’s important you understand this. I trust what my deputies told me, and if you got a complaint, you take it to the coroner’s office. And number two, this conversation is over.”
    Then he looked away at his horses in a distant field, as though I were not there, slipped on his pilot’s sunglasses, got into his Cadillac, and drove down his pea-gravel lane to the blacktop. I felt like a post standing in the ground.
     
    The dead girl’s name had been Lovelace Deshotels. Her parents lived in one of the weathered, paintless shacks along a dirt road on the back of a corporate sugar plantation. All the shacks were identical, their small front porches so evenly aligned that you could fire an arrow through the receding rectangle of posts, roofs, and bannisters for the entire length of the quarters without striking wood. The thick green fields of cane stretched away for miles, broken only by an occasional oak tree and the distant outline of the sugar mill, whose smokestacks in the winter would cover these same shacks with a sickening sweet odor that made the eyes water.
    The shack was like thousands of others that I had seen all my life throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. There was no glass in the windows, only hinged board flaps that were propped open on sticks. The walls had been insulated with pages from the Sears catalog, then covered with wallpaper that was now separated and streaked brown with rainwater. The outhouse, which was set next to a small hog lot, had a rusted R.C. Cola sign for