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flamingo’s wing, the air heavy and damp and clean-smelling. Water dripped from the trees onto the bayou’s surface, creating a chain of rings that floated away in the current. But the mildness of the evening and the dripping sound of rainwater onto the bayou could not free me from the image of Yvonne Darbonne curled in the dirt, the red hair that had fallen over her wound tousled by the wind.
    Suicides fall into categories. Some victims probably manufacture an internal psychodrama as a way of asking for help, then drift too far across the line. The clinically depressed do it in closed garages or with pills and booze while they listen to Boléro or “Clair de lune.” Jumpers find audiences and sail out among the stars. Some fantasize a script in which they transcend their own deaths. In their imagination they watch from above while others find their bodies in horror and are trapped inside a legacy of guilt and grief for the rest of their lives.
    But the ones who do it with high-powered firearms in the mouth or razors high up on the forearms, not on the wrists, are often filled with unrelieved rage at themselves. Female suicides are seldom if ever found in the last category.
    Was Cesaire Darbonne’s information correct about his daughter? Did she not drink or smoke? Had she always been happy? What could cause someone that young and beautiful and full of promise to fire a bullet into the center of her forehead? Or had someone else been at the scene also?
     
    T HE NEXT DAY our coroner, Koko Hebert, lumbered into my office. Koko was one of the saddest-looking human beings I had ever known. His body was shaped like a soft-sided pyramid. His breath wheezed in his chest. He stank of nicotine and beer sweat, and sometimes trailed an odor that was worse, one that made me think of a mortuary in Vietnam after the power had failed.
    Koko’s cynicism and anger were palpable. But his son had been killed in Iraq, and I had come to believe that his daily assault on the sensibilities of others was his own strange way of asking for help.
    The grass was green and the sun was shining outside my window, but when Koko spread his buttocks on a chair in front of my desk, the sun might just as well have gone into eclipse. He took a huge drag off his cigarette, his brow furrowing as though his inhalation of cancer-causing chemicals were a moment of metaphysical importance.
    “Would you not smoke in here?” I said.
    He took a coffee cup off my desk and ground out his cigarette in it. “You want the post on the Darbonne girl or you want to tell me you don’t have bad habits?” he asked.
    “I’m happy you came by.”
    “Right. The lab call you yet?”
    “Nope.”
    “We swabbed both her hands. She was the shooter. It’s down as a suicide.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “You don’t have confidence in the atomic absorption test?”
    “Let’s get something straight on this one, Koko. I appreciate the work you do. But I want the abrasive rhetoric out of my face.”
    I could hear the hum of the air conditioner in the silence. “There is no false positive here. She had powder residue on both hands. She inverted the pistol and fired it straight into her forehead. It’s a suicide, plain and simple.”
    “Her father said she didn’t drink or use. She was planning to start college. Why does a kid like that want to blow herself away? How did she end up in her own yard with a revolver her father never saw before?”
    “Maybe I was looking at the wrong tox screen. The one that had Yvonne Darbonne’s name on it showed she was loaded on alcohol, weed, and Ecstasy. When I opened her up, I thought I’d put my hand in a punch bowl, burgundy and fruit, to be exact. She had also engaged in recent sexual intercourse, with multiple partners. In my opinion, there was not forced penetration, either. There was one bruise on the thigh, but considering the number of partners she had, that’s not unusual. I suspect she got stoned and loaded and was pumping