“Don’t do that, sir. I give you my word your daughter’s person will be treated with respect,” Helen said, stepping in his way, holding up her palms against the air.

He turned from us and began to weep, his back shaking. “She met this boy in town ’cause she was ’shamed of her house. One night she walked all the way home from the bowling alley, wit’ cars going by her at sixty miles an hour. I couldn’t find work, me. I farmed t’irty acres of cane for forty years, but now I cain’t find no work.”

Before we left, we spoke to the neighbor who had made the “shots fired” call. She was in her late-middle years and was a member of that ill-defined racial group sometimes called “Creoles” or sometimes “people of color.” The term “Creole” originally meant a second-generation colonial whose parentage was either French or Spanish or both. Today, the term indicates someone whose bloodline is probably French, Indian, and Afro-American. This lady’s name was Narcisse Ladrine and she insisted she had not witnessed the shooting or a car or person leaving the scene.

“But you heard a vehicle driving away?” I said.

“I ain’t sure,” she said. She wore a print dress that fit her like a potato sack and was so wash-faded you could see the outline of her undergarments through the fabric.

“Try to remember,” I said. “Was it a sound like a truck? Did it make a lot of noise? Maybe the muffler was rusted out?”

“When you hear a gunshot, you ain’t listening for other t’ings.”

She had a point. “Did you see anyone else on the street?” I asked.

“There was a black man on a bicycle picking up bottles and cans out of the ditch.” Then she thought about what she had just said. “Except that was a lot earlier. No, I ain’t seen nobody else out there.”

We went back up the road and checked with the security office at the sugar mill. No one there had seen any unusual activity near the mill or in the community of frame houses by the bayou. In fact, no one at the security office even knew a homicide had occurred there.