The literary antecedents of this novel lie in two earlier works of mine. The unsolved murders in Jefferson Davis Parish formed the backdrop for the Dave Robicheaux novel titled The Glass Rainbow, published by Simon & Schuster in 2010. These homicides are often referred to in the media as the Jeff Davis Eight.

The bombing of the Indian village in Latin America happened in 1956. I wrote about this incident in the short story titled “The Wild Side of Life,” published in the winter issue of The Southern Review in 2017.

Like an early nineteenth-century poet, when I have melancholy moments and feel the world is too much for us and that late and soon we lay waste to our powers in getting and spending, I’m forced to pause and reflect upon my experiences with the dead and the hold they exert on our lives.

This may seem a macabre perspective on one’s life, but at a certain point it seems to be the only one we have. Mortality is not kind, and do not let anyone tell you it is. If there is such a thing as wisdom, and I have serious doubts about its presence in my own life, it lies in the acceptance of the human condition and perhaps the knowledge that those who have passed on are still with us, out there in the mist, showing us the way, sometimes uttering a word of caution from the shadows, sometimes visiting us in our sleep, as bright as a candle burning inside a basement that has no windows.

On a winter morning, among white clouds of fog out at Spanish Lake, I would see the boys in butternut splashing their way through the flooded cypress, their muskets held above their heads, their equipment tied with rags so it wouldn’t rattle. I was standing no more than ten feet from them, although they took no notice of me, as though they knew I had not been born yet, and their travail and sacrifice were not mine to bear.

Their faces were lean from privation, as pale as wax, their hair uncut, the rents in their uniforms stitched clumsily with string. Their mouths were pinched, their eyes luminous with caution. The youngest soldier, a drummer boy, could not have been older than twelve. On one occasion I stepped into the water to join them. Even then, none acknowledged my presence. The drummer boy stumbled and couldn’t right himself, struggling with the leather strap around his neck and the weight of his drum. I reached out to help him and felt my hand and arm sink through his shoulder. A shaft of sunlight pierced the canopy, turning the fog into white silk; in less than a second the column was gone.

Long ago, I ceased trying to explain events such as these to either myself or others. Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next. Those may seem cynical sentiments, but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, that they are still with us and we are still with them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.

Why should an old man thrice widowed dwell on things that are not demonstrable and have nothing to do with a reasonable view of the world? Because only yesterday, on a broken sidewalk in a shabby neighborhood at the bottom of St. Claude Avenue, in the Lower Ninth Ward of St. Bernard Parish, under a colonnade that was still twisted out of shape by Katrina, across from a liquor store with barred windows that stood under a live oak probably two hundred years old, I saw a platoon of Confederate infantry march out of a field to the tune of “Darling Nelly Gray” and disappear through the wall of a gutted building and not exit on the other side.

I parked my pickup on Decatur and walked across Jackson Square, past Pirate’s Alley and St. Louis Cathedral and a marimba band playing in the shade by the bookstore that used to be William Faulkner’s apartment. The day was bright and windy, cool even for March, the flowerpots on the balconies bursting with color, the kind of day in Louisiana that lifts the heart and tells you perhaps spring is forever, that the long rainy weeks of winter were nothing more than a passing aberration, that even death can be stilled by the season if you’ll only believe.

Clete’s apartment and PI office were located in a grand old building on St. Ann Street, the plaster painted a pale yellow, the ironwork on the balcony dripping with bougainvillea and bugle vine, a dry wishing well in the courtyard. Other than the vintage Cadillacs he drove, the only material possession he ever loved was his building, which may have been owned in the nineteenth century by the same woman who ran the House of the Rising Sun.

When I rounded the corner, I saw not only the building but a moving van at the curb and half of Clete’s furniture and office equipment on the sidewalk. Clete was on the sidewalk, arguing with a notorious New Orleans character named Whitey Zeroski, known as the dumbest white person in the city. When he was an independent taxi driver, he thought he’d widen his horizons and run for city council. He outfitted a pickup truck with loudspeakers and a huge sign on the roof and on Saturday night drove into a black neighborhood, blaring to the crowds on the sidewalks, “Vote for Whitey! Whitey is your friend! Don’t forget Whitey on Tuesday! Whitey will never let you down!”

He was stunned by the cascade of rocks, bricks, bottles, and beer cans that crashed on top of his vehicle.

I hadn’t seen Clete in weeks, and I missed him, as I always did when we were separated for very long. Oddly, in the last couple of years, Clete had imposed a degree of order upon his life. The scars he carried from an abusive home in the old Irish Channel and Vietnam and the romances that began passionately but always ended badly no longer seemed to be his burden. He didn’t drink before noon, laid off the weed and cigarettes, ate one po’boy sandwich for lunch instead of two, and clanked iron in a baggy pair of Everlasts in his courtyard and sometimes jogged from one end of the Quarter to the other. When he’d head down Bourbon, one of the black kids who tap-danced for the tourists would sometimes say, “Here come the pink elephant. Hope he don’t crack the cement.”

None of this stopped me from worrying about Clete and his swollen liver and his blood pressure, and the violence he inflicted upon others as surrogates for himself and for the father who had beaten him unmercifully with a razor strop. I loved Clete Purcel, and I didn’t care who knew it or what others might think of us. We started off our careers walking a beat on Canal and in the Quarter, fresh back from Indochina, the evening sky robin’s-egg blue, the clouds as pink as cotton candy and ribbed like piano keys arching over the city. We thought we’d hit the perfecta. The Quarter was alive with music and full of beautiful women and the smell of burgundy and tap beer and bruised mint in a glass of shaved ice and Jack Daniel’s. Could the world offer any finer gifts?

Since the death of my wife Molly, I wanted to see more and more of Clete, particularly in those moments when I felt as though the defining moments of my life had little application in the present, that somewhere down a deserted street a bus was throbbing at the curb, the passengers hollow-eyed and mute, unable to assimilate the journey that awaited them. Then the driver popped open the doors with a sucking sound, and I knew with a sinking of the heart that the bus was for me and I wouldn’t be returning to the city or the state I loved.

When I have those moments, I say the names of Clete and my daughter, Alafair, over and over. I have done it even in public, indifferent to the stares of others, a napkin held to my mouth or with my chin pointed down at my chest. And that’s why I resented Whitey Zeroski and his hired help or anyone else who tried to hurt the noblest man I ever knew.

“How’s tricks, Whitey?” I said.

He always looked surprised, as though someone had just stepped on his foot. He also had a habit of jerking his entire head when something caught his attention, like a meth addict or a chicken pecking in a barnyard or a man with a fused neck. He wore coveralls zipped up to his neck, the sleeves cut off at the armpits, his arms covered with hair.

“What it is, Robicheaux?” he said.

“Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing?”

“I work for the bank now. They gave me the key to Purcel’s building and the paperwork to move his belongings out on the sidewalk. He’s got another point of view on that.”

“This idiot creeped my house, Streak,” Clete said.

“What happened to your cab business?” I said to Whitey.

“Heard of Katrina?” he said.

“Don’t do this, Whitey,” I said.

“Off my back, Robicheaux. This is a legal action, here.”

“Whitey, I try to be kind to dumb Polacks, but I’m about to stuff you in the storm sewer,” Clete said.

“How about laying off the ethnic slurs?” Whitey said.

Clete looked at me and opened his hands. A pale red scar ran diagonally through his left eyebrow where he’d been hit with a pipe when he was a kid. “This is like beating up on somebody who was born brain-dead. Whitey, I apologize for calling you a dumb Polack. That’s an insult to dumb Polacks.”

Whitey’s face contorted as he tried to figure out what Clete had just said.

“Let me see the paperwork,” I said.

“It’s a reverse mortgage,” Clete said, his face coloring.

I looked at him blankly. “You didn’t?”

“I was jammed up,” he said. He had a little-boy haircut and a dimpled chin and green eyes that never faltered unless he was hiding something from me.

“We’ll get the furniture off the sidewalk,” I said. “We’ll work it out.”

“Oh, you will?” Whitey said. He had a New Orleans working-class accent, like someone whose voice box had been injected with Novocain. “What, I got nothing else to do but walk behind dick-brain here with a dustpan and a broom?”

“Shoot your mouth off one more time, Whitey, and see what happens,” Clete said.

I placed my arm across Whitey’s shoulders. “Take a walk with me.”

“What for?”

“Your helpers don’t seem to speak English. You don’t have an inspection sticker on your windshield. Your license plate isn’t current. You’re parked in a no-loading zone. You don’t have flashers. What should we do about that?”

“Give me a break here, Robicheaux.”

I took out my wallet, removed all the bills from it, and put them in his hand. “That’s about sixty dollars. Tell your boys to put everything back in the building, and buy them a round. I’ll call the bank and get this straightened out.”

“We’re supposed to live on a beer and a shot while you get me fired by the bank? I can’t wait to tell my boys this.”

“Clete never did anything to you, Whitey, but you’re making money off an unrighteous situation that’s not Clete’s fault.”

“I’ll make you a counteroffer. Wipe your ass with your sixty dollars. I’ll buy the round for the boys, and you and Purcel can haul everything back in the building. Then pour a shitload of Vaseline on it and cram it up your ass. I hope both of you get rich twice and go broke three times. I hope both of you inherit a house with fifty rooms in it and drop dead in every one of them.”

I had to hand it to him: Whitey was stand-up. I had tried to use my power wrongly to help a friend, and in so doing, I had probably put an unskilled and poor man at the mercy of an unscrupulous mortgage holder.

Clete and I spent the next two hours dragging furniture back into the building or wrestling it up the stairs into the apartment. It was four o’clock when I sat down heavily on the couch, my head swimming. Clete was in the kitchen, pouring four inches of Scotch into a glass packed with cracked ice. It was not a good moment. My defenses were down, the smoky smell of the Scotch like an irresistible thread from an erotic dream you can’t let go of at first light.

“You want a Dr Pepper?” he said, his back to me.

“No, thanks.”

“I got some cherries and limes.”

“I don’t want one.”

“Suit yourself.”

“I think I pulled something in my back.” I got up and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I took out a Dr Pepper and opened it.

“I thought you didn’t want one.”

“I changed my mind. Why didn’t you tell me you needed money?”

“It was eighty grand.”

“How much?”

“What I said.”

“You got it from a shylock?”

“I started gambling. I did pretty good at first.”

“Here?”

“Everywhere. I had a credit line in Vegas. Google has ruined private investigation. Anyway, I started losing, and I didn’t stop until I was broke and borrowing on the property.”

He took a long drink from the glass, his eyes on mine, the ice and mint and Scotch sliding down his throat. I felt a twitch in my face. “So the bank owns your place now?”

“It’s not a bank, it’s a mortgage company. They screw old people. Maybe they’re mobbed up.”

“Great choice.”

He set down the glass. The Scotch was drained from the ice. He dumped the ice into the sink. I felt myself swallow.

“Let’s go eat,” he said.

“There’s something you’re not telling me. Tony Nine Ball said you had trouble with Bobby Earl. What’s that about?”

“The problem wasn’t exactly with Bobby Earl. I almost feel sorry for the bastard. I heard the blacks were loading up on condoms his first night in Lewisburg.”

“Tony says you pissed in Earl’s car.”

“Yeah, years ago. At the Yacht Club.”

“Just recently.”

“Okay, I’m shooting craps at Harrah’s, and in come Bobby Earl and Jimmy Nightingale with this stripper who used to work on Bourbon. Except it was obvious Earl is carrying the stripper for Nightingale, or at least obvious to me, because Nightingale is a bucket of warm vomit who manipulates the subculture like it’s his private worm farm. But right now that’s not my business, and I’m simpatico at the table as long as these two assholes leave me alone. I’ve got twenty-six hundred dollars in chips in front of me, and a magic arm, and I’m rolling nothing but elevens and sevens. The broad hanging all over Earl is staring at me with this curious look, then a lightbulb goes off in her head and she says, ‘Hey, you’re the fat guy who came to my house.’ ”

Listening to a story told by Clete Purcel was like building the pyramids with your bare hands. I twirled my finger, trying to make him finish.

“Seconds earlier I felt like I owned Fort Knox,” he said. “Then I see it all draining away, like dirty water going down the lavatory. I pick up the dice and rattle them once and fling them down the felt. Snake eyes. She goes, ‘I’m right, aren’t I? You’re the guy who came around about that legal problem?’ ”

“Cletus, try to get to the point,” I said.

“Legal problem? She got busted for leaving her kid in a hot car while she was stoned and balling a couple of truck drivers in a motel room. She skipped on her court appearance and left the bondsman on the hook for ten grand. So I pass the dice, and slap Bobby Earl on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth, and say, ‘Hey, Bob, I hear you picked up another nail. If you’re on penicillin, you shouldn’t be drinking. Next time out, wear a hazmat suit or get some radioactive condoms for your flopper.’ ”

He was sitting at the breakfast table now. He yawned as though just waking up, and put two fingers into his shirt pocket for cigarettes that weren’t there. Then he blinked.

“What’s the rest of it?” I said.

“Nothing. I left. I saw Earl’s wheels. I used my slim-jim to pop his door and took a leak inside.”

“No, you’ve left something out.”

“Like what?”

“Why give Bobby Earl a hard time? Like you said, he’s pitiful.”

“He makes me ashamed I’m from New Orleans. He’s a disgrace to the city. He’s a disgrace to the planet.”

“Does Jimmy Nightingale figure in this?”

“I might have said one or two things I shouldn’t have.”

“Really?”

“He put his arm on my shoulders like we were old pals. Then he touched my cheek with the back of his wrist. Yuck. I called him a cunt and got escorted in cuffs out the front door. There were only about three or four hundred people watching.”

He cleared his throat softly, his eyes shiny.

“He’s lucky you didn’t drop him,” I said. “Those security guys, too.”

“Think so?”

“I’m proud of you, Clete.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me guiltily.

“What?” I said.

“Nightingale is part owner of the company I took the reverse mortgage from.”

After sunset, I drove to the rural two-lane highway where Molly’s car had been struck broadside on the driver’s door, knocking her unconscious, pinning her inside. I had revisited the site more than a dozen times, either at night or before sunrise, when there was little traffic. There was a Stop sign at the access road, then nothing but the long curving bend of the two-lane. By flashlight I had looked for the pickup’s skid marks, re-created every possibility about the speed of the pickup, and measured the exact distance from the bend to the Stop sign. The speed limit was forty-five miles an hour, the speed the pickup driver said he was traveling when Molly’s Toyota had suddenly come through the Stop sign and made a reckless left turn in front of him.

I used a stopwatch to compute the time it would take for the pickup driver to traverse the distance from the bend to the point of impact if he were driving the legal limit. The math led to only two possible conclusions: Either Molly ran the Stop sign, abandoning all reason; or she looked to the left, saw nothing coming, then looked to the right, saw the road was clear, and turned left without looking again and got crushed.

But Molly never ran stop signs. She would never willingly break a law of any kind. The skid marks, now washed away, were no longer than eighteen inches in length, indicating the pickup driver saw her car only seconds before the collision. Everything in me told me that Molly probably failed to double-check the two-lane before she started her turn, and the pickup driver lied and was coming much faster than forty-five miles an hour. The causes of the crash were shared ones.

Like many victims of violent crimes who never find justice, I became obsessed with speculations I could not prove. I told myself that Molly’s fate could have been worse, that the Toyota could have burst into flame while she was conscious and trapped inside, that she could have spent the rest of her life as a vegetable or disfigured beyond recognition or left a quadriplegic. I soon began to gaze into space at the office, in the middle of conversation, on a street corner, my hands balling, while others stared at me with pity and concern.

I had never confronted the driver or even spoken to him, because he was part of an official investigation, and my contacting him would have been improper. But the day after I talked with Fat Tony, I drove up the Teche to what were called the Quarters, outside the little town of Loreauville. The Quarters were composed of cabins and shotgun houses that went back to the corporate-plantation era of the nineteenth century. Most of them were painted a yellowish gray and aligned in rows on dirt streets with rain ditches and bare yards where whites and people of color lived in harmony and seemed to enjoy the lives they had. On weekends the residents barbecued and drank beer on their small galleries, washed their cars in the yard, and flew kites and played softball in the streets with their children. I don’t mean to romanticize poverty. The Loreauville Quarters were a window into my childhood, a time when few people in the community spoke English and few had traveled farther than two parishes from their place of birth. It wasn’t a half-bad world in which to grow up.

I found his name, T. J. Dartez, on a mailbox. I slipped my badge holder and my clip-on holster from my belt and put them under the seat, and stepped across the rain ditch into his yard. An old washing machine converted into a barbecue pit was smoking on the gallery, a chicken dripping in the coals. I heard children’s voices in back. I walked up the dirt driveway. A dented washed-out blue pickup was parked in a shed. An unshaved man in work pants and a clean strap undershirt was lobbing a Wiffle ball at two little girls armed with plastic baseball bats. His hair was black and greasy and curly on the back of his neck. He turned around, smiling. The stub of a filter-tipped cigar was clenched in his teeth. I had never seen him before.

“You looking for somebody?” he asked.

“Are you Mr. Dartez?”

“Yes, suh.”

I stared at him. I don’t know for how long. The little girls looked about six and eight. They had both gone silent. “I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

I glanced at the girls. “A serious matter.”

“Y’all go he’p your mama,” he said.

His house looked like a boxcar, a poorer version of mine, set up on cinder blocks. The girls went up the wooden steps and let the screen slam behind them.

“You’re from the agency?” he said.

“What agency?”

“The bill-collection one.”

“No, I’m not.”

He looked at nothing. “You’re him, ain’t you?”

“I don’t know who ‘him’ is.”

“The husband of the woman in the accident.”

“Yes, that’s who I am.”

“What you want wit’ me?”

“You know who Tony Nemo is?”

“Who?”

“You may not know him, but he knows you. He says you ran over a child in Alabama.”

“That’s a damn lie.”

“It didn’t happen?”

“I got a DWI for driving drunk in a school zone there. I didn’t hurt nobody. I don’t drink no more, either.”

“But you were driving faster than forty-five when you hit my wife, weren’t you?”

Through the screen, I could see his wife and children staring at us. These were people for whom bad luck was not an abstraction but a constant; a knock on the door, a puff of wind, and their lives could be up the spout.

“You always got your eye on the speedometer when you’re driving at night?” he said. “I think I was driving forty-five. I cain’t say for sure. She come out of the dark.”

“Her lights weren’t on?”

He tried to hold his eyes on mine. “I cain’t remember.”

“Your lawyer told you to say that?”

“Suh?”

“You heard me.”

His expression turned into a pout, like a child’s. “I ain’t got nothing else to say.”

“I hear you tried to pump State Farm.”

“I missed eight days of work. Who’s gonna pay for that? You?”

“My wife was a nun in Central America,” I said.

His mouth moved, but no sound came out.

“She was a former sister. She devoted her life to helping the poor.”

“She’s a farmer—?”

How do you get angry at a man who cannot understand or speak his own language?

“If you were me, what would you do, Mr. Dartez? What would you feel?”

There was a big thickly leafed shade tree by his garage. It was filled with wind, its leaves dark green against an orange sun. He stared at it as though he wanted to hide inside its branches. “This guy you call Tony? He’s a dago gangster you using to scare me?”

“How do you know he’s a gangster?”

“I know what goes on.”

“I’m telling you he took an interest in you. I’m not sure why. I told him to butt out. I’m telling you to learn who your friends are.”

“You’re my friend? A man who comes to my house and scares my wife and children?”

I stepped closer to him. I couldn’t help my feelings, the surge of bile in my stomach, the visceral disgust I felt for his ignorance, my desire to do things with my fists that were ultimately a confession of defeat. He stepped back. “My old lady is calling the cops.”

The wind shifted. I could smell his odor, the barbecue smoke on his skin, the grease in his hair. “You lied to the state trooper. Until you admit your part in the accident, you’ll never have peace.”

“I’m sorry your wife is dead. She come at me. I didn’t do nothing wrong. If you won’t accept that, go fuck yourself.”

“You had your warning,” I said.

“My family heard that. What’s the sheriff gonna say if I call him and tell him that? Answer me that. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Fuck you twice.”

I walked away, the sugarcane fields and the horizon tilting, my long-sleeve white shirt peppered with sweat, a war taking place in my chest that I knew I would never win.

Jimmy picked me up in a limo, and we drove up Loreauville Road and turned in to the long driveway of the Broussard home. The carriage lamps on the gallery were lit, the floor-to-ceiling windows glowing from the lighted chandelier in the hallway. The wind was up, and the trees were filled with shadows that seemed to battle one another. Three of his live oaks were registered with a national conservation society and named Mosby, Forrest, and Longstreet, perhaps indicating a tired and old and depressing Southern obsession with the illusion that war is grand. But I had a hard time thinking of Levon in that fashion.

He avoided crowds and formal social situations and conventional thinking, and he had a pathological aversion to people who asked questions about his work. He seldom spoke specifically of his family, but supposedly, they were related to Oliver Hazard Perry, John Mosby, Edmund Burke, and John Wilkes Booth. He said he’d grown up in Galveston, or Lake Charles, or Lafayette, or maybe all three, I’m not sure. He was one of those paradoxical individuals who became notorious for his obsession with privacy. He had lived in the tropics and had known leftists in Mexico and DEA agents in Colombia and CIA operatives who flew for an airline headquartered in Fort Lauderdale. Why he had been drawn into the edges of the New American Empire, no one knew. With his tall frame and genteel manners and kind face and egalitarian attitudes, he seemed to personify virtue. Strangely, although they looked nothing alike, he and Jimmy Nightingale made me think of bookends that belonged on the same shelf.

I sometimes saw Levon’s wife at Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette, in boxing trunks and a halter, sweaty and dedicated, slamming the body bag hard enough to rattle it on the chain. She was Australian and had dark hair and wide-set blue eyes that stared boldly into your face. She seldom spoke or smiled, and if she had any expression, it seemed to be one of puzzlement or wariness, as though the world were constantly deconstructing and reassembling itself before her eyes.

Before I could get out of the limo and ring the bell, Levon and Rowena came out the front door. Levon put his wife inside the limo, then leaned across the seat and shook Jimmy’s hand vigorously. “It’s very nice to meet you, sir. This is my wife, Rowena. Thank you for your kind invitation. How you doin’, Dave?”

That was Levon, the effusive gentleman no matter the occasion. But his cordiality had no influence on what was about to take place. Jimmy’s eyes were glued on Rowena’s. The connection was electric and naked to the degree that both of them were obviously embarrassed. She sat down heavily on the leather seat, her gaze never leaving Jimmy’s. “You’re a screenwriter?” she asked him.

“Not really. I try at it.”

“Does anyone have a drink?” she said.

“I started to ice some champagne, but I didn’t think we’d be long in getting to the restaurant,” Jimmy said.

“We’re fine,” Levon said.

“I’m starved and dry,” she said. “Can we get the bloody hell out of here?”

“Right-o,” Jimmy said. He tapped the glass behind the driver.

“Is this your vehicle?” Levon said.

“My vehicle? No, it belongs to the car service,” Jimmy replied clearly, not sure what was happening. “I’m not that uptown.”

“Hello, Miss Rowena. I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said. “I’ve seen you at Red’s health club in Lafayette.”

“You’re who?”

“We spoke on the phone.”

Her window was up. She stared at her reflection in the dark. Then she turned and looked at Jimmy again, as though seeing him for the first time. Levon leaned forward, interdicting her line of sight. “You keep company with Bobby Earl, Mr. Nightingale?”

“Call me Jimmy. I know Earl, but I wouldn’t call him a close friend.”

“A friend nonetheless?” Levon said.

“Judge not, lest you be judged,” Jimmy said.

“What’s to judge? His record is demonstrable, isn’t it?” Levon said. “If he had his way, the bunch of us would be soap.”

“I think he’s paid for his sins,” Jimmy said.

“His time in prison?” Levon said.

“Considering the ethnic makeup of the population, I suspect he found himself in the middle of a nightmare,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t think that’s much solace to the victims of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Oh, shove it along, you two,” Rowena said. She massaged the back of her neck and rotated her head, glancing sideways at Jimmy.

“Good advice,” Jimmy said, reaching for something on the floor.

Rowena rolled down her window, flooding the limo with the smell of night-blooming flowers and the sprinklers spinning on the St. Augustine grass in the dark. “Look at the stars. Did you ever see Night Has a Thousand Eyes? When the constellations are out, I always think of that movie. Look, each star is vaporous.”

“What do you have there?” Levon asked.

“A sword,” Jimmy said, lifting it into the light. “I think it belonged to your great-grandfather. I’d like you to have it.”

Levon looked at the name incised on the handle. “My God, where did you get this?”

“Did anybody hear me?” Rowena said. “Has anyone seen Night Has a Thousand Eyes?”

“I have,” Jimmy said. He pushed the sword away when Levon tried to return it. “It starred Edward G. Robinson and Gail Russell. Did you see her in Angel and the Badman or Wake of the Red Witch?”

“Yes,” Rowena said, her face thrust forward, her wide-set eyes filled with interest.

“How about rolling up the window, Rowena?” Levon said. “The air smells like insecticide.”

“If that’s what everyone wants,” she replied.

“Listen here,” Levon said. “I can’t accept this gift.”

“Maybe we can give it to a museum,” Jimmy said. “It needs to be somewhere other than in the hands of its previous owner.”

Levon waited for Jimmy to continue.

“I got it from Fat Tony Nemo. He bought it at a flea market,” Jimmy said.

“You know Nemo?” Levon said.

“He poured the concrete for a couple of my buildings.”

“I forgot. He does that when he’s not killing people,” Levon said.

“Tony was out of the rackets twenty years ago,” Jimmy said.

“Is that right, Dave?” Levon said. “This guy who used to break arms and legs with a baseball bat found salvation?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I replied, regretting the choices I had made to help Clete.

“Could you tell your driver to go a little faster?” Rowena said to Jimmy. “I’m about to faint.”

“No Down Under histrionics tonight,” Levon said.

“Oh, balls,” she said.

“I need to write you a check for this,” Levon said to Jimmy.

“Show me the secret to your novels instead.”

“Beg your pardon?” Levon said.

“I’m envious. They’re marvelous books. Your prose is magical. I want to know how you do it.”

Then Rowena said something I didn’t expect, considering the undisguised arousal Jimmy obviously caused in her: “We all have our private cubbyholes, love. Don’t be fucking with them.”

The chauffeur was a peroxided, crew-cut, steroid-pumped weight lifter with a concave-shaped face whose eyes looked like lumps of lead in the rearview mirror. I wanted to get in the front with him.

Clete called me at the office in the morning. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

“Forget it. I had my head on sideways,” I said.

“You didn’t go home and get wasted, did you?”

“Worry about yourself,” I said.

“I’ll see you for lunch.”

“I’ve got too much desk work.”

“I’ll come by tonight. It’s about that prick.”

“Which prick?”

“That prick Nightingale, who else? I’ve got to pick up a bail skip in Jennings. I’ll see you about nine.”

At five-fifteen P.M., I threw my tackle box and rod and reel into the back of my truck, hooked up my boat and trailer, and drove to the Henderson levee, outside Breaux Bridge. Henderson Swamp is part of the vast network of bayous and bays and rivers that constitute the Atchafalaya Basin, the flooded woods a golden green at sunset and so swollen with silence that you wonder if this piece of primordial creation was saved by a divine hand to remind us of what the earth was like when our ancestors grew feet and crawled out of the sea.

The cypress trees were in early leaf, as delicate as green lace, ruffling in the breeze, the water high and black and undisturbed, chained with lily pads, the bream and goggle-eye perch rolling under the pads like pillows of air floating to the surface.

I cut my outboard and let my boat glide silently into a cove lit by a molten red sun, then flipped my plug in an arching loop just beyond a clutch of flooded willows. The western sky was streaked with clouds as pink as flamingo wings. In the distance I heard the Southern Pacific blowing down the line.

But if I had come here for solace, my journey was in vain. The loss of my wife, my inability to accept the suddenness of the accident, the words of a paramedic telling me she was gone and they had done everything they could, his mouth moving like that of someone in a film with no sound track, I carried all these things wherever I went, my blood and mind fouled, the ground shifting, the realization at sunrise that her death was not a dream and she was gone forever, unfairly taken, her dignity and courage and spiritual resolve extinguished by a fool rounding a curve in a pickup truck, the accelerator mashed to the floor.

These thoughts robbed the light from my eyes, the birdsong from the trees, the sound of children playing in a park. Instead of the glory of the sunset, I saw beer cans and Styrofoam cups undulating in the shallows, a rubber tire submerged among the willows, a blanket of debris caught in the cattails, as viscous as dried paint skimmed off the top of a paint bucket.

I retrieved my lure and started the engine and drove back to the levee, the bow scraping on the concrete ramp like fingernails on a blackboard. I stopped into a bait shop and ate a sandwich on the gallery and watched the last of the sun slip beyond the trees. Several men were drinking beer at a spool table next to me. I believed I knew one of them, but I couldn’t say for sure. They invited me to join them. I could not get my mind off Molly, her warmth and steadfastness as a companion, her ability to deal with the sorrow and suffering of the world and not be undone by it.

“Everything cool, buddy?” a man said.

“Sure. I look like my gyroscope is busted?” I replied.

“Have a brew.”

“I have to be on my way.”

“I should, too,” he said. “My old lady is going to throw my supper in the backyard. Is yours like that?”

Recovering alcoholics have ways of setting themselves up. Some get the toxins out of their system and stop attending meetings. Maybe they hang with the old crowd. They drop by a saloon to watch a football game on a Saturday afternoon. They convince themselves their problems had to do with excess rather than compulsion and metabolic addiction and a deep-seated neurosis armor-plated in the unconscious. Or they nurse resentment and fuel their anger on a daily basis, like a primitive fur-clad creature methodically dropping sticks into a fire.

Or maybe they want to cancel their whole ticket but are afraid to lose their soul. If they’re in this category, they’ll commit suicide in an incremental fashion, one glass or bottle at a time. And if the process isn’t fast enough, they will put themselves in dangerous situations involving guns and knives and people who belong in steel cages.

I went to a meeting at the Episcopalian cottage on Center Street, across from old New Iberia High. When the moderator asked if anyone was attending A.A. for the first time, or if anyone was returning from a slip and wanted a twenty-four-hour sobriety chip, I let my face go empty and stared at the floor in the semidarkness. At the end of the meeting, I said little or nothing to friends with whom I had been in the program for years, and drove to my house in a heavy white fog that had moved in from the Gulf, and parked my truck in the porte cochere and went inside and sat in the living room in the dark, the television off, the silence as loud as a scream.

The operative acronym for every A.A. member is HALT, which means don’t get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. I was all of those. I called Clete’s cell phone, which went immediately to voicemail. I didn’t want the food in my icebox. I woke lifeless and exhausted with every sunrise. My hands opened and closed at my sides for no reason. I deliberately revisited memories of a human face dissolving in a bloody mist when I squeezed off round after round from my army-issue 1911-model .45.

I’m not proud of any of these things. I hated them then; I hate them now. But they live in me like a snake that slowly swallows its prey, compressing it into a canister of despair and pain.

I went into the kitchen and filled a large glass with tap water and drank it to the bottom. In the darkness I heard the claws of an animal scratching at the screen. I set the glass quietly in the sink and went through the mudroom and opened the screen door. A raccoon that must have weighted twenty-five pounds jumped from the windowsill and thumped on the ground, then scampered through the leaves past Tripod’s old hutch and disappeared inside the fog.

I walked down the slope, looking for him. The air was cold, the fog hanging in huge clouds on the bayou and in the trees. I heard a splash, like a gator slapping its tail. I took a penlight from my pocket and shone it on the ground. The tracks of a raccoon and probably a possum or an armadillo were stenciled along the mudflat. The tracks disappeared into the cattails. Farther down, inside clouds of fog that rose four feet above the water, I heard a soft knocking sound, like a friend at the door in the early hours. I shined the light ahead of me. The tide was coming in, and an unmoored pirogue had floated up the bayou and lodged against a decayed and collapsed dock at the foot of my property.

I picked up a fallen tree branch and hooked it on the pirogue’s bow and scraped it onto the bank. There was a paddle inside, an empty rucksack, a minnow bucket, a newspaper that was two weeks old, and a fish stringer. My earliest memories of my father were fishing with him in a pirogue. There is no more emblematic symbol of life on Bayou Teche than the humble pirogue.

I stepped into the pirogue and steadied my weight, then eased down on the wood seat. The fog was so thick that the lights in the houses along the bayou, even the floodlamps in the backyard of the Shadows and the warning lights on the drawbridge at Burke Street, were hardly more than smudges. I shone the penlight on the rucksack again. A pint bottle of brandy lay in a half inch of rainwater. I touched it with the penlight beam and watched its color flare on my hand and wrist. I pushed with the paddle until the pirogue swung into the current and began to drift toward the bridge and one of the places that had been waiting for me since I was a child, when, in my innocence, I believed the paradisiacal world into which I had been born would always be there for me.

I didn’t go to a noon meeting. I went to the bank and applied for a loan against my house. My house was a humble one, built of cypress in the late nineteenth century, but the one-acre lot was located on one of the most scenic streets in the American South. I suspected the total value was around six hundred thousand dollars.

“How much you need, Dave?” the banker asked.

“Around a quarter of a million.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll send the appraiser out. You’re not headed to Vegas, are you?”

“In a roundabout way.”

He looked a bit quizzical, then said, “Have a good one.”

I ate a ham-and-onion sandwich at home and brushed my teeth, then headed back to my office, not looking forward to the rest of the day. Helen followed me inside. “You’re off the case.”

“What?” I said.

“I’m giving the investigation to Labiche.”

I sat down behind my desk. “What’s going on?”

“Labiche interviewed Ms. Dartez. She says you called her husband last night and arranged to meet him at the convenience store and bait shop by Bayou Benoit.”

I stared at her, my scalp shrinking, a pain like a sliver of glass sliding through my bowels.

“You don’t remember?” she said.

“No.”

“Give me your cell phone.”

I handed it to her. She opened it and began clicking through my calls with her thumb. She stared into my face and folded the phone. My heart was in my throat.

“It’s clean,” she said.

I swallowed.

“You could have deleted the call,” she said.

“I didn’t.”

“How can you say what you did? Did you call the Dartez house on your landline?”

“I don’t remember doing that. I remember I was going to St. Martinville to sit on the bench under the Evangeline Oak.”

“Do you know how silly that sounds?”

“It’s the way I felt at the time.”

She picked up my right hand and looked at my knuckles. I pulled my hand away.

“I’m on your side,” she said. “Even if you killed that man, I’m on your side. But don’t lie to me.”

“I don’t know what I did, Helen. That’s the truth. Does Ms. Dartez have a cell phone or a landline?”

“A cell.”

“Did Labiche check it?”

She looked away from me. “Not yet.”

“Don’t leave him on the case.”

“Maybe he’s a little hinky, but he came to us with a clean jacket.”

“Two black women filed complaints against him.”

“The same women have filed complaints against bill collectors and their estranged husbands.”

“They’re probably telling the truth.”

“Get used to seeing him around.”

“Thanks for the hand up,” I said.

“Piss off, Dave.”

She closed the door quietly behind her, sealing me in an airless vacuum, my sweat cold inside my shirt.

Maybe Penny was sleeping one off. It’s hard to say. I knotted a bandana around my face and set fire to the shed with the dirt bike in it, and tapped on the door and waited by the rear of the trailer. There was no reaction inside. A raincloud burst directly overhead, and the fire went out. I smashed on the door with my fist and was standing directly in front of it when Penny jerked it open.

“What’s the haps?” I said, swinging the pool cue at a forty-five-degree angle across his face.

He stumbled backward, a hand pressed against one eye and the other eye bulging, so his face looked like it had been sawed down the middle. “Who the—”

I stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and caught him with the weighted end of the cue on the ear. He crashed on the breakfast table, his mouth wide with either pain or surprise. I swung the cue on his neck and back and spine as though I were chopping wood. When he tried to stand, I shoved him onto the floor of the toilet cubicle. He was wearing only his socks and Jockey shorts. Blood was leaking from his ear. “Why you doing this? Who the fuck are you, man?”

I kicked him in the face and dropped a full roll of toilet paper in the bowl and drove his head into the water and kept it there. I could feel him struggling, his forehead wedging the roll into the bottom of the commode, the water rising to his shoulders. I pushed down the handle to refill the bowl. Water was sloshing over the sides. My arm and shoulder were trembling with the pressure it took to keep him down.

I began to count the seconds under my breath. One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi. I stepped on his calf so he couldn’t get purchase on the linoleum. Four-Mississippi, five-Mississippi, six-Mississippi. I shoved harder and saw bubbles the size and color of small oranges rise to the surface with a gurgling sound. Thirteen-Mississippi, fourteen-Mississippi, fifteen-Mississippi. His arms had turned as flaccid as noodles and were flipping impotently at his sides.

I pulled him dripping from the bowl and threw him onto the floor. He gasped and made a sound like a sheet of tin being ripped out of a roof. He gagged and cupped his mouth.

“When your son comes home, you’ll act like a decent father. If you hurt him in any way, I’ll be back.”

I stomped on his stomach. His mouth opened, and I shoved a bar of soap into it and mashed it down his throat with my shoe.

I got into my rental and drove away. In the rearview mirror, I could see white smoke rising from the shed, as though the fire I had started wanted to have another go at it.

By six A.M., I was teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. By seven they’d passed and I was sound asleep in my skivvies, facedown on the sheets, as though I had gone through a painless evisceration. Strangely, I felt at peace. I had no explanation. I went to Mass that evening in Lafayette and caught a meeting before returning to New Iberia.

At 10:41 A.M., Helen came into my office and looked out the window on the bayou. She had a manila folder clamped under her arm. “Rowena and Levon Broussard just left,” she said.

“Were they here for what I think?”

“I took her statement. He says he talked with you late yesterday.”

“That’s right.”

“What’s your opinion?” she asked.

“I didn’t get many details. Alcohol seemed to be involved. No medical report. What’d they tell you?”

“She and Nightingale went to a lounge. They had four rounds of Manhattans. Then he wanted to show her his boat down at Cypremort Point. That’s where he did it.”

“What time of day?”

“About ten P.M.”

When I didn’t answer, she said, “Not good, huh?”

“I wonder if it’s going to be prosecutable. She’s married. It sounds like a tryst.”

“I pushed her on that. She said she and her husband had a fight and she used bad judgment.”

“Where was her car?”

“At the supermarket.”

“How’d she get back to it?”

“Nightingale drove her. Don’t make that face.”

“The defense will put a scarlet letter on her brow,” I said.

“We won’t let that happen, though,” Helen said. “Will we?”

“We?”

She put the folder on my desk.

“No,” I said.

“I’ve got the video in my office. Let’s get started.”

“I’m not right for this,” I said.

“How about you go on leave without pay instead?”

“I know all the involved parties, Helen.”

“Like everybody in this building doesn’t?”

I flipped open the folder and flipped it closed again. “What’s her emotional state?”

“Like a vase somebody dropped on a concrete floor,” she said.

“I never heard of Jimmy Nightingale abusing women.”

“His casinos clean out the pockets of pensioners and poor people. He hangs with Bobby Earl. He’s business partners with Tony the Nose. Remember when Tony and Didoni Giacano used to stick people’s hands in an aquarium full of piranhas?”

“Those were the good old days,” I said.

“Time to kick butt and take names, Streak.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In the life, Clete was known as con-wise, even though he had never been a convict. The term in the criminal subculture is laudatory and indicates a level of knowledge and experience that cannot be acquired in a library. You also have to pay dues. A “solid” or stand-up con stacks his own time, does it straight up without early release, work furloughs, conjugal privileges, or snitching off fellow inmates for favorable treatment. It’s not easy. Ask anyone who’s stood on the oil barrel in Huntsville or chopped cotton inside the system in Arkansas or been thrown into a lockdown unit full of wolves.

Clete went his own way, didn’t impose it on others, and asked the same respect. He would not only lay down his life for a friend; he would paint the walls with his friend’s enemies. He grew up in the old Irish Channel and palled around with guys like Tony Cardo, who was probably the most intelligent and dangerous and successful old-school gangster New Orleans ever produced. When they were kids, Clete and Tony found a box of human arms outside the incinerator by the Tulane medical school, and hung them from the straps of the St. Claude streetcar just as all the employees from the cigar factory were boarding; one passenger leaped from the window and crashed on top of a sno’ball cart. Except for Tony, Clete’s old-time buds went to the can or the chair, and Clete went to Vietnam and came back with the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and two Hearts, and cruised right back into the Big Sleazy without giving any of it a second thought.

I drove to his cottage at the motor court Thursday afternoon. He was standing amid the trees grilling a two-inch-thick steak, flipping it with a fork. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and a porkpie hat tilted on his brow and a pair of dark blue rayon workout pants that covered his shoelaces. “Big mon. I was just fixing to ask you and Alafair over.”

“How you doin’?” I said.

“Not bad.”

When Clete was equivocal, you tended to glance at the sky for thunderclouds, dust rising out of the fields, a splinter of lightning on the horizon.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Have a seat.”

I sat down at a picnic table made of green planks and covered with bird droppings and needles from a slash pine.

“I’m worried about Kevin Penny,” he said. “I think he’s got you on the brain.”

“He’s not coming after me, Clete. If he does, we’ll punch his ticket. He knows that.”

“You don’t get it. He’s an obvious habitual, but he’s not on parole, he has no outstanding warrants, and he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender, even though he was up on sexual assault charges a couple of times. I don’t know how he got out of Raiford, either. They should have welded the door on him and poured concrete on top of it.”

“What was he in for?”

“Distribution of cocaine and assault with a deadly weapon. But they couldn’t get him for the bigger charge: He and two other guys tortured a dealer in Little Havana for his stash. They hung him from a hoist on a wrecker and put a propane torch on him.”

“You’re saying Penny is protected?”

“He has to be. Pukes in the projects do life for three street busts involving amounts of money you could steal from bubble-gum machines.”

“Who’s his protector?”

“I know you don’t like this, but I think Jimmy Nightingale is a player in this.”

“A player in what?”

“Setting you up.”

“Maybe I wasn’t set up. Maybe I killed T. J. Dartez.”

“This is what Penny just told me—”

“Wait a minute. You just saw Penny?”

“This morning. I saw the social worker who’ll be looking after his kid, too. I told Penny I’d be visiting him, kind of like an old friend. Penny says Nightingale is a geek. He says he’s AC/DC and humps his sister or half sister or whatever she is.”

“This guy has no credibility, Clete.”

“Penny says Nightingale is eaten up with guilt. Maybe he killed somebody.”

I didn’t reply.

“You don’t buy it?”

“I don’t know. Rowena Broussard says he raped her. He claims he never touched her. When I interviewed him, he almost had me convinced.”

“Go on.”

“I felt like he wanted to confess. But not to rape. Something else. Maybe Penny is right.”

He forked the steak off the flames and laid it on a plate. “Is that what you came by to tell me?”

“No, I got the loan on my house. You’re a quarter of a mil richer than you were this morning.”

“You actually did that?”

“Why not?”

His eyes were shiny. He wiped them on his forearm. “I’ve got to get out of this smoke.”

“Pay off those bums and get them out of your life.”

“You’re truly a noble mon, noble mon. I’ll brown us some bread.”

My home group of Alcoholics Anonymous met in a small frame house on Center Street right across from old New Iberia High. Most of the regulars were provincial and decent and middle-income people who simply wanted to live better lives, free of alcohol and alcoholism. Their histories were seldom dramatic. Few had been arrested for driving while intoxicated or causing a disturbance in public. Sometimes their sensibilities were tender.

At the meeting, I owned up to slipping, or what we call “going out.” The room was dimly lit, the street empty of traffic, a freight train creaking slowly through town on Railroad Avenue. As I told the group how I had found the pirogue wedged against the dock at the foot of my property, and how I had drifted up the bayou and under the drawbridge to the bar-and-grill, I felt the oxygen leave the room. I had years of sobriety. I went regularly to meetings and worked the steps and sponsored other alcoholics, and yet I’d chosen to get drunk again and destroy not only my own life but also the faith and trust of my fellows.

Previously, I had told Alafair that I’d gone out because I’d wanted to. It wasn’t quite that simple. I’ve always believed that alcoholism and depression are first cousins. This isn’t an excuse. It’s part of the menu. No one who has not experienced clinical or agitated depression, coupled with psychoneurotic anxiety, can appreciate a syndrome that, in an earlier time, was treated with a lobotomy. It’s a motherfucker, no matter what you call it or how you cut it. There’s blood in your sweat; your head feels like a basketball wrapped with barbed wire; you’d eat a razor blade for a half cup of Jack or a handful of reds or a touch of China white. There’s another alternative: the Big Exit, with both barrels propped under the chin, the way Hemingway did it.

For me, the presences that the early Celts tried to keep inside the trunks of trees by knocking on wood always came out in the evenings, particularly in spring and summer, when the crepe myrtle and the pale green of a weeping willow seemed at odds with each other. In the croaking of the frogs, the dying of the light, the tide rising along the banks of the Teche, I felt a sensation like spiritual malaria imprisoning my soul. In an instant the sky would turn to carbon. I think that’s why I sometimes went out to Spanish Lake at sunset. I would see the boys in butternut sloshing through the flooded stands of cypress and willows, and somehow their loss became mine, allowing me to join the dead and escape the spiritual death I couldn’t describe to others.

I didn’t try to explain these things to my friends at the Solomon House meeting in New Iberia, Louisiana. As I spoke, their eyes were downcast, their hands folded in their laps. Their embarrassment and pain were palpable. I did not tell them of the blackout, because I had burdened them enough. After the meeting, they shook hands with me and patted me on the back. I didn’t deserve to be in their presence, or at least that was how I felt. I also wondered what they would think if I told them they may have been sitting next to a murderer.

When I got home, there were two messages on the machine from Babette Latiolais. I played the first one: “Mr. Dave, I got to talk wit’ you. Call me back.”

She didn’t leave her number. I copied it from the caller ID. The second message was recorded forty-five minutes later: “Mr. Dave, where you at? I t’ink maybe I seen that guy last night. Please call me. Don’t come to the bar-and-grill, no. My boss seen us talking and axed if I was in trouble. I cain’t lose my job.” I called her number and went immediately to voicemail. I tried again that evening, with the same result.

Clete Purcel returned from two days of fishing, sunburned and flecked with fish blood and smelling of beer and sunblock and weed. He told me about his conversation with Kevin Penny.

“You think he’s going to treat his boy all right?” I said.

“Probably not. It was like having a conversation with a septic tank.”

“You did your best.”

“There’s only one solution for a guy like Penny.”

I saw the look in his eyes. “Negative on that, Cletus.”

“If he hurts that boy, I’m going to bust a cap on him.”

“And stack his time. How smart is that?”

“If either one of us was smart, we wouldn’t be who we are. Maybe we’d be wiseguys. Or stockbrokers. You got to be careful what you wish for.”

I had learned long ago to stay out of Clete’s head. If you let him alone, his moods usually passed. If they didn’t, you got out of his way.

He showered and put on fresh clothes at his motor court, and he and Alafair and I went to a movie. In the morning I called Babette again. There was no answer. I gave up and this time left no message.

Monday night, just after I had drifted off to sleep, the phone rang in the kitchen. I looked at the caller ID and picked it up in the dark. The moon was up, and a light rain was clicking on the roof and the trees. “Babette?”

“I’m sorry I ain’t got back to you,” she said. “I moved my little girl to my mama’s house in Breaux Bridge.”

“Has somebody bothered you?”

“No, suh, but like I said on the machine, I t’ink I seen the man again, the one who was taking to Mr. Spade.”

“Where?”

“At the Walmart. He didn’t have a basket or nothing. He was maybe t’irty feet away, looking at me. He said, ‘Hi, you pretty thing. Come have a hot dog.’ ”

“You’re sure it was the same man?”

“He looked a little different, but I’m pretty sure it was the man in the picture you showed me, the one who was outside the bar-and-grill.”

“He was different how?” I asked.

“Like he’d been in a fight.”

“Say that again?”

“His face was swole up. I called to tell you everything is all right and you don’t need to worry no more. I got ahold of Mr. Spade.”

“Back up, Babette.”

“He ain’t in the phone book, but a waitress I know had his number. So I told him about me talking to you and me seeing the guy again and how I don’t want no trouble or to be saying anything bad about nobody.”

I could feel the floor shifting under my feet. “Listen to me, Babette. Don’t talk any more with Spade Labiche. Stay away from him. He’s not a good guy.”

“I ain’t supposed to talk to the police?”

“The man with the swollen face is a dangerous and violent career criminal. I don’t know why he was with Labiche, but I’m going to find out. What happened after you saw the man at Walmart?”

“Nothing. He just walked away.”

“What did Labiche tell you?”

“He said not to worry. He said the guy was just axing him directions and he didn’t know nothing about him. That ain’t true?”

“It could be,” I said.

“It could be? Oh, Mr. Dave, what I’m gonna do?”

“If you feel threatened, you can stay with my daughter and me.”

“That don’t sound right. I cain’t live off other people.”

I didn’t know what to say. Who is usually the victim of a criminal? The most innocent of the innocent, and usually those who can least afford the attrition.

“Are you there, Mr. Dave?”

“I’m going to talk to my friend Clete Purcel. He’s a private investigator. If you’re with him, no one will ever hurt you. Give me your address.”

Maximo and Juju went to the hospital, and Clete went to the can. I called Helen and told her I’d be late getting back to New Iberia.

“What happened?” she asked.

I told her. In detail.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “Have you lost your mind?”

“New Orleans does that to you.”

She hung up.

In the morning I went to Iberia General to visit Rowena Broussard, less out of concern for her than the fact that she had blamed her attempted suicide on Helen and me.

She was out of intensive care and propped up on the bed in a sunny room that gave onto Bayou Teche and live oaks strung with Spanish moss. Her lips were gray, her face pale, her wrists heavily bandaged. A glass of ice water sat on the table next to her. Water had been spilled on the table.

“Levon just left,” she said.

“I came to see you,” I said.

“I forgot. It’s a felony to commit suicide in Louisiana.”

“How about losing the victim routine?”

“You’re a hard-nosed wanker, aren’t you.”

I sat in a chair next to her bed and picked up her water glass. I held the straw to her mouth. She drank from it and laid her head back on the pillow.

“What’s a wanker?” I said.

“A fucking Seppo who doesn’t know where to plant his bishop.”

I thought it better not to pursue any more Australian definitions.

“I heard you put your suicide attempt on Sheriff Soileau and me,” I said.

“You’re right. That’s probably not fair. There was nothing good on the telly, so I thought I’d shuffle off to the crematorium.”

“Were you ever treated for depression?”

“Leave the psychoanalysis at the door, if you would.”

“I’ve had a long relationship with depression, Rowena. It eats at you in ways you can’t describe to others.”

“That’s why you’re a juicer?”

“I’m a juicer because I chose to be one.”

Her eyes held on mine, perhaps with curiosity. Or disdain. I had no idea who she was. I went to the window and gazed down at the bayou. “A Union flotilla came down the Teche in 1863. Twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched right past the site of this hospital. They raped slave women and set fire to plantation homes up and down the bayou. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ ”

“Tell me there’s a drop of sense in that, because it sounds like drivel.”

“I think Jefferson was saying that justice eventually comes about but often in an imperfect way. I’m saying I don’t know if you’ll get the justice you deserve.”

“You’re going to let him get away with this?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe there’re others he’s attacked.”

“That’s not his reputation.”

Wrong words.

“I’m the exception? Just out of nowhere he turns into a rapist?”

“At least that we know about.”

“That’s a grand explanation. You’re not responsible for information you’re too lazy to find out about. Lovely.”

“Jimmy Nightingale has no history of abusing women. His problem is ambition and besting his father.”

“Who, I understand, was a walking penis. This gets better all the time. Would you please get the fuck out?”

I left without saying good-bye. I couldn’t blame her for her anger, but I wasn’t sympathetic with it, either. She seemed to nurse it as a friend at the expense of others. I believed Rowena Broussard might take up residence in a black box for the rest of her life.

Out in the corridor, I heard the elevator door open, then found myself looking at the last person I expected to see at Iberia General that particular day. He looked fresh and radiant, as though he had just wakened from a good night’s sleep and was ready to start a new day. A bouquet of flowers in an electric-blue vase was cradled in his arms.

“Are you going where I think you’re going?” I said.

“I couldn’t find anybody to bring the flowers up, so I brought them myself,” Jimmy Nightingale said. “Will you take them the rest of the way?”

“I just got eighty-sixed. I wouldn’t advise going in there.”

“That bad, huh?”

“What do you expect?” I said.

“She knows what happened or, rather, what didn’t happen. I think she’s a bit of a thespian. Is Levon here?”

“No!”

“I’ll toggle in and toggle back out.”

“Leave her alone, Jimmy.”

“Sorry.” He started to walk around me.

“I’m speaking to you as an officer of the law. You’re not going into that room.”

“You’re showing poor form, Dave.”

“If you go in there, you’re going to be under arrest.”

“Then you’d better get your handcuffs out.”

The elevator door opened again. Levon Broussard stepped into the corridor. He remained motionless, staring at us, his lanky frame backlit by a window. His face was as empty as a bread pan. He walked toward us, his eyes never leaving my face, completely ignoring Nightingale. “Why is this lizard standing in front of my wife’s hospital room?”

That night, Alafair played tennis with friends at Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club in Lafayette. The night was black, the lights over the courts iridescent with humidity, the whocking sounds of tennis balls and the huffing and shouts of the players a celebration of spring and rebirth. When Alafair’s friends quit for the evening, she wiped herself off with a towel and began hitting on the backboard. A woman in a pleated tennis skirt and a white sweater cut off at the armpits, with black hair pulled back as tightly as wire, walked up behind her, spinning the shaft of a racquet in her left palm. “Like to have another go at it?”

“Pardon?” Alafair said.

“You’re Alafair Robicheaux. I recognized you from the photo on your book jacket.”

“Yes,” Alafair said.

“I’m Emmeline Nightingale.”

“Are you—”

“Jimmy Nightingale’s cousin and bookkeeper. My partner didn’t show. I was hoping to hit a few.”

“I was about to head back to New Iberia.”

“Maybe another time, then. Your last book was marvelous.”

“Thank you.”

“I read you graduated at the top of Stanford Law. Look, I didn’t mean to do anything inappropriate. I know who your father is, and I know he’s talking to Jimmy about some legal matters.”

“No, that has nothing to do with my situation,” Alafair said.

“Well, anyway, I wanted to introduce myself and tell you how much I admire your writing. Damn it, I wanted to play tonight.”

“If you like, we can volley a bit.”

Emmeline went to the far end of a nearby court and began dancing on the balls of her feet. Alafair went to the baseline and bounced the ball once, then hit it leisurely across the net. Emmeline returned it in the same way, smiling, showing no sense of competitiveness, making sure the return always went to Alafair’s forehand. Then, for no apparent reason, she swung the racquet hard, rolling it with her wrist and top-speeding the ball so it scotched the surface of the court and flew past Alafair’s reach.

“Good shot,” Alafair said, ignoring the breach of protocol.

“Sorry, I was still thinking about my partner not showing up,” Emmeline said.

They stroked the ball back and forth, then Alafair hit to Emmeline’s left side and advanced on the net, intending to create a routine pepper game. Emmeline returned the ball with a two-arm backhand that slashed the ball like a BB into Alafair’s face.

Alafair lowered her racquet and pressed her wrist to her mouth. Emmeline ran to the net. “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

“I’m fine,” Alafair replied. “You didn’t know I was coming to the net. It’s my fault.”

“Here, let me see,” Emmeline said. “Your lip is cut. Let’s go inside. I’ll get some ice.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Let’s have a cold drink. Please. I feel awful.”

“Really, I’m okay.”

“Please,” Emmeline said.

Alafair slipped the cover onto her racquet and zipped it up. She looked at her automobile in the lot. Emmeline touched a Kleenex to Alafair’s chin and showed it to her. “Come on, we have to take care of that.”

Saturday morning, I put out another can of sardines for our raccoon friend, whom I named Mon Tee Coon. I had not heard Alafair come in from Red’s health club the night before. She walked up behind me, a mug of coffee in her hand. She was wearing white shorts and a long-sleeve denim shirt with the tails hanging out. She told me about her encounter with Emmeline Nightingale. “She’s a little otherworldly.”

“A human icicle?” I said.

“She has dirty eyes.”

“You think she hit the ball in your face deliberately?”

“That’s what I felt like after I talked with her. She’s a controller. She also seems to have an obsession with oil companies. What’s the story on that?”

“Jimmy has a degree in geology. He worked in South America awhile. The Nightingales have their fingers in lots of pies.”

She sat down in a white-painted wooden chair near Tripod’s hutch. The sky was blue and as shiny as silk. Leaves from the live oaks were tumbling on her hair and skin. I couldn’t believe she was the little girl I’d pulled from the cabin of a submerged plane.

“She left me with a disturbing sensation,” Alafair said. “One I couldn’t shake driving home.”

“Like what?”

“Evil.”

“You think she’s going to call you?”

“Probably. She seems interested in the treatment I’m doing on Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel.”

“Maybe that’s a project you should drop, Alf.”

“Because of her?”

“Because it’s going to drag you into contact with Levon and his wife. I think Rowena Broussard is a sick person.”

“You don’t believe she was raped?”

“She’s an unhappy person who has a tendency to work out her problems on the backs of other people.”

“That’s two thirds of Hollywood,” she said.

“Did you talk to Levon about the treatment?”

“On the phone. He said it was fine with him, but he thought it was a waste of time.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s really good. The battle scenes at Shiloh, the Yankee occupation, the story of the slave girl and her white father who founded Angola Prison.”

“Why hasn’t someone adapted it?”

“Confederates are the new Nazis. Have you seen the raccoon again?”

“Not yet. He’ll be back,” I said.

“Are you okay, Dave?”

“You bet.”

“Shit,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Don’t use that kind of language, Alf.”

She put down her coffee mug and stood up and hugged me and pressed her face into my shoulder. I felt the wetness in her eyes.

“What’s this about?” I said.

She wiped her eyes on my shirt.

“Answer me, Alafair.”

“I hate what they’re doing to you,” she said. “I’d like to shoot every motherfucking one of them.”

“Don’t use that language in our home.”

She hit me, again and again, her fists bouncing on my chest.

That evening Alafair told me of her conversation with Emmeline Nightingale. “What’s she after?” she asked.

“Money or power or both. Maybe sex is involved,” I said. “But that comes automatically with the other two.”

“She and her cousin are rich and powerful already.”

“They may be brother and sister.”

“Then why don’t they tell people that?”

“Kevin Penny says they’re very close.” I let it sink in.

“They’re getting it on?”

“The royalty are insular in St. Mary Parish.”

“Yuck,” she said.

“Tony Nemo wants to produce Levon’s book. Jimmy Nightingale not only wants to adapt it but is envious of Levon. If I were a prosecutor, I’d use that as motivation for the rape. He couldn’t be Levon, so he’d take second best.”

“That’s really crude.”

“So is rape.”

Alafair walked to the kitchen window and bit a fingernail. A tugboat was headed up the bayou, its gunwales hung with tires, the wake sliding into the cypress trees.

“Dave, I know how to make this script work. It could be a great film. The story of the drummer boy at Shiloh could be a film in itself.”

“Tell all this to Levon.”

“He’s an angry man.”

“About his wife?”

“I don’t think he believes his portrayal of his ancestors is honest.”

“In his novels?”

“In everything.”

“That could be a problem,” I said.

I drove up Loreauville Road to the Broussard home and rang the door chimes. Tiny black strings of ash were floating down on the lawn and driveway and the steps and camellia bushes. I thought they were from the sugar mill.

Levon came around the side of the house, a leaf rake in his hand. “Back here.”

I followed him into the backyard, where he was burning huge piles of blackened leaves in three perforated oil drums. The curds of smoke were drifting into his neighbor’s windows and hanging like dirty cotton on the bayou.

“When’s the last time you burned your leaves?” I said.

“A couple of years ago. Why?”

“No reason. Emmeline Nightingale has been bugging Alafair.”

He hefted a giant sheaf of compressed leaves and dropped them into the flames, his face swelling in the heat. “What does that have to do with us?”

“Maybe nothing. Except Tony Nemo is on Clete Purcel’s back and also in my face, directly or indirectly because of a sword your great-grandfather carried. At least that’s where all this started.”

“So you’ve come out here to tell me my great-grandfather’s sword is the origin of your problems?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then why are you upset?” he asked.

“I’m not upset.”

“You could fool me,” he said.

“Have you ever been knocked down in your own backyard?”

He began packing more leaves in the barrels, his armpits looped with sweat, ash raining down on his head and bare forearms.

“Levon?”

“Go home.”

“I’m an officer of the law. This isn’t a courtesy call.”

I waited for him to respond. He jabbed the leaves into the flames with the butt of the rake.

“Sir, don’t you turn your back to me,” I said.

“I’ll do what I damn please.”

“No, you will not.” I put my hand on his arm and turned him around. “This case isn’t about just you and your wife. It concerns Tony Nine Ball, and something Jimmy Nightingale did in South America, and a lowlife named Kevin Penny, and something you’re not telling me about your wife.”

“That’s a goddamn lie.”

“What is?”

“All your bullshit, Dave. I don’t have anything to do with gangsters or lowlifes or friends of yours. Rowena was raped. End of fucking story.”

“It’s just the beginning.”

“If it wasn’t for your age, I’d pop you one.”

“Really? Then you have my dispensation. Forget I’m a cop, too.”

He looked away, his hands balling. “Come inside.”

“What for?”

“I’ve got a pitcher of lemonade in my office. Keep it quiet, though. Rowena is asleep.”

He unlocked the French doors on the patio and waited for me to walk ahead of him. A pitcher and a glass sat on a folding table by his desk. He filled the glass and wrapped it with a paper napkin and handed it to me, then went to the kitchen and got a glass for himself. For the first time, behind the door, I saw a sun-faded Confederate battle flag mounted on the wall in a glass case. He came back into the room.

“A fourteen-year-old boy carried that up the slope on Beauregard’s left flank at Shiloh,” Levon said. “They were supposed to be supported by the founder of Angola Penitentiary, but he didn’t show up. Forty percent were casualties in fifteen minutes.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I disliked people who thought war was a glorious endeavor, and I disliked those who enjoyed talking about it. I despised those who had not seen war yet espoused it and lived vicariously through the suffering of others and never gave a thought to the civilians and children who died in burn wards or were buried under collapsed buildings.

Levon was not one of these. He had gone unarmed and with a leftist reputation into El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua when bodies were dumped off trucks with the morning garbage. Yet here we stood in reverence before an iconic flag that retained the pink stain of a farm boy’s blood, and whether anybody would admit it or not, the cause it represented was the protection and furtherance of human bondage.

“You have nothing to say about it?” he asked.

“Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. The statement doesn’t make the poor man any less honorable or brave.”

“You don’t give an inch, do you.”

“No.”

“That’s not a compliment,” he said.

“I didn’t think it was. How’s your wife?”

“On painkillers.”

He sat down in a swivel chair behind his desk and opened a bottom drawer and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and let it drop on top of the desk. “You on or off the grog?”

“No, thanks.”

He poured three inches into his glass. I watched the lemonade change color, the ice rise frosty and thick. He took a long pull, watching me, then wiped his mouth. “Nightingale and his sister or whatever she is have one agenda. They want to kill the rape story in the bud. They’re using you to do it.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Nightingale is a master manipulator, Dave. He fleeces uneducated and compulsive people in his casinos, pretending to be their friend, when in reality he wouldn’t take time to piss in their mouths if they were dying of thirst. This guy might be our next United States senator. He might even end up in the White House. Think about that for a minute.”

“What is it you’re not telling me about your wife?”

“What makes you think I’m hiding something?”

“Because you’re a smart man who allowed his wife to destroy the forensic evidence that would have made the case against Nightingale.”

His eyes went away from me. “My wife is bipolar. She’s also barren. Occasionally, she does things that are irrational. But none of that alters the fact that she was assaulted by that son of a bitch over in St. Mary Parish.”

I was sitting on the couch a few feet from him. “I might be indicted in the death of the man who killed my wife.”

“Why are you telling me that now?”

“I know what it feels like to be disbelieved.”

“You didn’t do it?”

“That’s the irony. I don’t know. The last person I can trust or believe is me.”

He leaned back in his chair. “You should have told me.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes I feel like a fraud. That’s something no one can ever accuse you of.” He drank his glass to the bottom and looked out the window at the three live oaks he had named for Confederate officers. “What a pile of shit.”

Then, without saying another word, he left me in his office and went outside and resumed stuffing mounds of leaves in the waste barrels, throwing a jelly glass full of gasoline onto the fire, indifferent to the whoosh of heat that must have singed his eyebrows.

Sunday morning, I asked Alafair for the names of the ten worst, most mean-spirited, corrupt movie producers or directors in the industry.

“What are you doing, Dave?”

“Stirring up things. Know a few guys out there who are off the wall?”

“Enough to fill the Hollywood Bowl.”

“Could you type them up, please?”

After she went on her jog, I called Tony Nemo’s office. The office was closed because it was Sunday, but I knew he monitored his voicemail day and night. Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas might be days of rest or gratitude or celebration for some, but Tony’s deity had a dollar sign for a face and gave no days off to his adherents. “Tony, this is Dave Robicheaux,” I said. “I think I might have a breakthrough in your movie situation. I need your fax number.” I poured a cup of coffee and hot milk, sat at the kitchen table, and outlined the general story of Levon Broussard’s Civil War novel. The phone rang seventeen minutes later.

“What’s this crap about?” Tony said.

“I knew you were interested in getting together with Levon Broussard, so I thought I’d pass on some info.”

“You’re a movie agent now?”

“I know a few people out there, Tony. I’ve heard talk. Your name came up.”

“Take the shit out of your mouth.”

“I know you’re frustrated about not putting a deal together with Levon. But there’s a way around that.”

“What’s the trade-off?”

“Trade-off?”

“Yeah, what are you getting out of it?”

“I want you to give Clete Purcel some slack and quit this bullshit about buying his markers. I paid off those markers, Tony. When you jam him, you’re jamming me. I also don’t like you sending those two shitheads after him.”

“Too fucking bad.”

“You want to hear what I have to say or should I bugger off?”

“Should you what?”

“Yes or no?”

There was a pause. “So what breakthrough are we talking about?”

I looked at my outline. “You don’t have to pay for the rights to the story line in Levon’s novel. The story is based on a real account. His ancestor came home from Shiloh shot to pieces in mind and body, and taught a slave girl how to read and write. The slave girl was the illegitimate daughter of the man who founded Angola Prison. In the meantime, the Confederate soldier fell in love with an abolitionist who nursed him back to health and restored his humanity.”

“So I don’t got to pay for any of this?”

“Nobody can copyright history.”

“Just go make the picture?”

“I’ve got a list of the names. These are big guys. If you do the pitch yourself, they’ll listen.”

“Why?”

“You scare the shit out of them.”

I could hear him take a hit from his oxygen tank. “They know my name? My work?”

“You bet.”

“I’m gonna give you my fax number. You better not be taking me over the hurdles.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Stomp ass and take names, big guy.”

The list included a producer who washed heroin money; another who hung prostitutes from ropes and beat them with his fists; and one who put LSD in the food of his Puerto Rican maid and videoed her stumbling around his Beverly Hills home and showed the video to his employees. These were the kind who would be terrified of Tony the Squid and too afraid to ignore his call or put down the receiver once they were on the line. I hoped all of them enjoyed the ride.

The rain came down hard on the house and trees and yard through the night, and in the morning the bayou was running yellow and fast and high on the banks, the eddies frothy and filled with twigs and leaves. I raked a can of tuna for Mon Tee Coon on top of Tripod’s old hutch and washed my hands and made breakfast for Alafair and me. I told her about Emmeline Nightingale’s visit.

“Jimmy Nightingale’s lawyers will make Rowena Broussard look like a meltdown or a slut,” she said. “She’ll have to convince the jury not only of Nightingale’s guilt but also of the guilt of the two black guys in Wichita. That’s the place where BTK killed people under the cops’ noses for years.”

“What do you know about Jimmy Nightingale’s activities in Latin America?”

“He inherited his father’s company and worked down there awhile, then sold the company.”

“Why’d he sell it?”

“I don’t know. He likes casinos and attractive women and working people who think he’s one of their own.” She looked into space. “I remember something a woman said at a party once, like, ‘Jimmy would be the perfect man if he hadn’t tried to be like his father. He shouldn’t have done that to those poor people.’ ”

“Poor like sad or economic?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Don’t be fooled, Dave. He’s a chameleon.”

“Can you check out some of this stuff?” I said. “If you’re not doing anything else.”

“I don’t mind. Why don’t you copyedit my new book while I do that?”

I went to Helen’s office and told her what I had seen at Kevin Penny’s trailer. I didn’t mention the gold lighter. She leaned back in her chair. “You know what this means, don’t you?”

“We lost the one guy who could cut me loose on Dartez’s murder.”

“Who would have that kind of motivation?” she said.

“Take your choice.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“The person who did it is a psychopath. Penny was tortured for reasons of information or revenge. That leaves lots of possibilities.”

“How about Tony Nemo’s nematodes?” she said.

“I think Maximo Soza might be a candidate,” I said.

“How about JuJu?”

“He does what he’s told.”

She rubbed her forehead. “I wanted Penny for the Dartez killing. We’re going to have trouble with the DA. This stinks.”

“There was a gold cigarette lighter on the floor of Penny’s trailer.”

It took her a second. “Why didn’t you say that?”

“I’m not objective about certain individuals.”

“Have you seen Labiche?”

“In the coffee room.”

“Tell him to get his ass in here.”

She didn’t tell me about her encounter with Tony until that evening.

“Why didn’t you say anything earlier, Alf?” I said.

“You were at work. He’s a pitiful man. I think we should feel sorry for him.”

“Don’t tell Clete Purcel that.”

“You should have seen him.”

“Tony Nemo should have been sent to a rendering plant a long time ago.”

“Pretty callous, Dave.”

“I’ll feel as bad about that as I can.”

But you can’t get mad at your daughter because she’s compassionate, even if you think her feelings are misdirected. I called Levon’s house. Rowena answered.

“Could I speak to Levon, please?” I said.

“What for?”

“It’s of a personal nature.”

“How’s this for personal: Why don’t you do your job and leave us alone?”

“Where is he, Ms. Broussard?”

“He just went out the door. With his favorite shotgun. Maybe you can catch him.”

When I got to the Broussard home, I heard the popping sounds of gunfire from behind the house. It was twilight, the yard deep in shadow, the sky marbled with purple and red clouds. I skirted the house and came out in the backyard. Levon was firing with a twelve-gauge at clay pigeons he launched from an automatic trap thrower, bursting them above Bayou Teche, regardless of the neighbors on the far side of the water.

He took the plugs out of his ears. He was wearing a sleeveless shooting jacket stuffed with shells. His face seemed thinner, his eyes receded, the color of buckshot. “Slumming?” he asked.

“I need a lesson or two about film rights and such. Tony Nemo is on Alafair’s case.”

“About what?”

“He wants her to write a screenplay or adaptation or whatever you call it based on your novel.”

“I’ve heard from my agent and a couple of producers this character has been pestering. Evidently, you stoked him up.”

“I told him he could create a historical piece that wasn’t dependent on your novel.”

“Thanks a lot for doing that,” Levon said.

“He says these guys in Hollywood actually want to go into business with him.”

“They probably do. Nemo is wired in to the entirety of the casino culture. He knows how to get around the unions. He launders money. Hollywood is Babylon by the Sea. He’s a perfect fit.”

“According to Alafair, period pieces are dead on arrival.”

“Now they are.”

“But someday?”

“What do I know? I don’t care, either.”

“What writer wouldn’t want to see his work on the screen?” I said.

“J. D. Salinger.”

“Salinger didn’t like to see people, either. That’s why he put his name on his mailbox, out on the road.”

“You want to shoot?” he asked.

“No.”

He ejected the spent shell from the chamber and began thumbing five fresh rounds into the magazine.

“You don’t keep a sportsman plug in the magazine?” I said.

“I don’t have to. I don’t hunt. I shoot only clay targets.” He rested the shotgun in the crook of his arm.

“You don’t look the same,” I said.

“What?”

“Everything copacetic?”

“I’m not the issue. Rowena is.”

“I’m sorry all this has happened to you, Levon.”

“Actually, I’m surprised you’re here. You must not have seen the local news this evening,” he said. “You were the lead story. I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.”

The man who got on the flight from Miami to New Orleans and took a seat next to a huge black woman whose rolls of fat seemed to drip into the aisle wore Bermuda shorts, red tennis shoes, a canary-yellow T-shirt with Mickey Mouse’s face on it, and big, round sunglasses that were as black as welders’ goggles. His skin was the color of powdered milk, his hair like wisps of corn silk on a doll’s head, his smile a slice of watermelon.

He stepped on the black woman’s foot, tumbled across her body with his drawstring beach bag, and smashed his head on the window. “Owie,” he said.

“Are you hurt?” the black woman said.

“Not much,” he said, pressing his hand against the red knot on his forehead. He gathered up his sunglasses. “I hope I didn’t hurt your foot too bad.”

“I been reading my thought-of-the-day book. I don’t let nothing bother me.”

“My name is Chester Wimple. What’s yours?”

“Birdie.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Birdie.” He took two unpeeled peaches from his beach bag and gave one to her and began sucking on the other, like a child finding a teat. “Sometimes people call me Smiley. I can speak Spanish.”

She couldn’t quite put the two statements together. “Smiley is a very nice name.”

“I have a lisp. People think it’s because I’m from New Or-yuns. It’s because I had a cleft palate that had to be operated on when I was little.”

“Don’t let nobody be telling you your voice ain’t nice. It’s nice.”

He flipped down the table on the back of the seat in front of him. “Do you like checkers?”

“Our church group plays checkers and Monopoly at the old people’s home every Sunday night.”

“I love Monopoly,” he said. He pushed back in the seat with the thrust of the plane, his face filled with delight, then felt the plane level off and catch hold of the clouds. He could see the city disappearing behind him in the twilight, the condos and palm trees and waves on Miami Beach miniaturizing, the way every stage of his life seemed to shrink and diminish into nothingness whenever he decided to move on to his next adventure. He did not understand why people had trouble with life. Every so often you got on a plane and flew away and let whatever was wrong with that place correct itself. Even the Everglades were shrinking into a tiny pattern of green islands and brown canals and bays that looked like a map rather than a watershed. Distance allowed you to sort things out. Otherwise, there was too much confusion, too many voices bouncing around in your head, too many people who needed correcting.

He opened his folding checkerboard and set out the checkers for his new friend and himself. “You’re a lady, so you go first.”

At one time St. Mary Parish was a fiefdom ruled by an oligarchical family who owned everything and everyone in the parish, bar none. In the 1970s, when a group of activist Catholic nuns tried to organize the cane workers, they found themselves at mortal risk in an area that was more than ninety percent Catholic. Enforcement of the law was situational. Every public servant knew which ring to kiss. The people at the bottom of the pile were not necessarily abused, but they weren’t necessarily protected from abuse, either.

Sexual exploitation is not a subject most police departments like to deal with. But it’s often there. A cop picks up a hippie runaway hitchhiking. Maybe she’s holding, maybe she’s got a warrant on her, maybe she’s sixteen and her teeth are chattering. It’s twilight. She’s in the backseat, wrists cuffed behind her, trying to see where they’re going as the cop swings around on the shoulder and heads down a two-lane away from town. The cop has already dropped his badge inside his pocket so she won’t get his number.

His name was Jude McVane. Before he was a deputy sheriff, he was a chaser in a navy brig, a hack in a women’s prison, and a collector for a loan company. He had big hands and smelled of manly odors and was good at his paperwork because he did as little of it as possible. There were never any complaints about him. But his colleagues did not hang out with him after work hours, particularly those who were protective of their wives’ sensibilities.

At sunrise Thursday, he was driving his cruiser on a two-lane back road that followed the curves along Bayou Teche. The primroses were blooming on the edge of the cane fields, the sun spangling inside the tunnel of live oaks. He passed two antebellum homes built in the early nineteenth century, then crossed the drawbridge and turned in to a trailer village that belonged in Bangladesh. He stopped in front of a trailer occupied by a young black single mother. Without speaking, she exited the trailer, locked the door behind her, and got into the back of the cruiser.

“Good morning, sunshine,” McVane said.

She looked wanly out the window. He drove out of the trailer park and back across the drawbridge and past a closed sugar refinery. Then he hooked back in to the confines of the refinery on a dirt road and parked in the shade of a rusted-out tin shed.

“Nobody does it like you,” he said, getting in back.

When she was finished, she walked away from the cruiser and cleared her mouth and spat.

“I always heard it tastes like watermelon rind,” he said.

She refused to speak. He drove her back to her home and watched her get out and go inside. He shifted into gear and drove out of the trailer park and back over the Teche and headed toward Franklin. A solitary figure was walking around the edge of the road, dragging a wheeled case behind him, a beach bag hanging from his shoulder. McVane pulled alongside and rolled down the passenger window. “Where you going, partner?”

The man wore red tennis shoes and khakis that probably came from Target and a green T-shirt with Bugs Bunny eating a carrot on the front. “I’m touring the countryside. I got off the bus at the wrong place.”

“Where are you from?”

“New Or-yuns, originally. My name is Chester. Sometimes people call me Smiley.”

“Chester what?”

“Wimple. What’s yours?”

“Get in.”

“Why?”

“I’ll take you where you’re going.”

Chester leaned his head in the window and sniffed. “There’s been a woman in here.”

“Get in the cruiser, please.”

“I like walking.”

“I guess it’s going to be one of those days,” McVane said.

“All right. If you want to act like that. I don’t want to make anybody mad.” The man got inside and inhaled. “Icky.”

“What is?”

“Like somebody has been doing something he shouldn’t.”

“Buckle up,” McVane said. He drove down the road until he reached an oak grove. He turned inside it and cut the engine. “I have a feeling you got loose from an institution, Chester.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Let’s see your identification.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re being impolite and talking to me in a hurtful way.”

“I think you’re from Crazy Town, Chester. Crazy Town people have to be housed and fed and medicated. They also create shit piles of paperwork. Now get rid of the baby talk and show me your fucking ID.”

“I knew people like you in the orphanage. They were bullies and loudmouths and had no manners.”

“You’re really starting to piss me off. Smart-mouth me again and I’ll slap you upside the head, boy.”

“I’m going to walk. You need to clean out this car. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“That’s it, you little geek. You’re under arrest.”

“For what?”

“Deliberately creating a dangerous situation on a state highway.”

“That’s silly.”

McVane got out and came around the front of the cruiser and ripped open the passenger door. Chester was putting on a pair of cotton gloves.

“What are you doing with those gloves?” McVane said.

“I don’t want to touch anything in your nasty car.”

McVane reached for him. Then, for the first time, he saw the absence of light in Chester’s eyes. He’d seen it before, once in a lockdown unit at Miramar in the eyes of a female prisoner who had murdered her children; and once in the eyes of a woman he’d sodomized in the back of a liquor store. The revolver was a .357 Magnum, the bullets in the cylinder fat and round and hollow-pointed. The words he wanted to say were trapped inside a gaseous and foul bubble in his throat, the release of his sphincter like wet newspaper tearing apart, his fear so intense he pulled his weapon crookedly from the holster and fumbled it onto the grass.

He tried to smile at his ineptitude, giving up all pretense at manliness, hoping for mercy. The slug hit him in the upper lip like a sledgehammer, and the back of his skull exploded in a gush of bone and brain matter, similar to a grapefruit bursting.

Chester walked around to the driver’s side and picked up McVane’s hat from the dashboard and put it on, then straightened it in the side mirror. The engine was still running. He climbed in and drove away, remembering the ten-two position on the steering wheel that he had learned in driving school.

My, what a fine morning it was. He hit the whoop-whoop button a couple of times and wondered if he shouldn’t apply for the police force somewhere. He’d probably be pretty good at it, he thought. It was time someone did something about the number of criminals and no-goods overrunning the countryside.

I looked at the array of notes, file folders, and photos on my desk. I had cases that had been open fifteen years. Most of them would never be solved. I knew inmates who were innocent of the crimes they were in for but guilty of far more serious ones, including homicides. I knew scores of politicians who sold out their constituencies on a daily basis and were lauded for it. Every cop has a private ulcer about a particular child molester who skates, a victim of sexual assault who’s hung out to dry by a misogynistic judge, a greaseball who plays the role of a family man while he extorts and ruins small businessmen, or a racist cop whose behavior puts shooters on rooftops.

How do you handle it when your anger brims over the edge of the pot? You use the shortened version of the Serenity Prayer, which is “Fuck it.” Like Voltaire’s Candide tending his own garden or the British infantry going up the Khyber Pass one bloody foot at a time, you do your job, and you grin and walk through the cannon smoke, and you just keep saying fuck it. You also have faith in your own convictions and never let the naysayers and those who are masters at inculcating self-doubt hold sway in your life. “Fuck it” is not profanity. “Fuck it” is a sonnet.

In this instance, that meant I had to trust my own perceptions about several open cases I believed were connected. At the bottom of the pyramid were the Jeff Davis Eight. The cultural background was prostitution and narcotics and white slavery. Kevin Penny was a player. He had ties with the Nightingale family, of what kind I wasn’t sure. A witness put Penny at the site of the Dartez murder. Why was he there? Had he been sent to follow me and do me harm? Probably, although I had gone to his trailer later and he had seemed unsure of my identity, which meant he had never gotten a good look at me the night Dartez was killed.

Then there was Spade Labiche. Labiche had been seen with Penny right before the Dartez killing. His prints were also in Penny’s trailer, though he claimed he had been there to interview Penny and for no other reason.

In the mix were Tony Nine Ball, Jimmy and Emmeline Nightingale, and Levon and Rowena Broussard, and finally, the attack upon Rowena by Jimmy.

Strangely enough, I believed the key lay in the torture death of Penny and the rape of Rowena. The question marks in both cases seemed endless. Who would put Penny through such an ordeal? My guess was Tony Nine Ball. Sherry Picard had said Penny was a federal informant. In his younger years, Tony’s logo was a bloody baseball bat. But Tony’s victims were either left alive or disappeared altogether. They weren’t left at a crime scene with toggle bolts drilled through their limbs.

Another issue was Levon’s apparent lack of interest in prosecuting Jimmy Nightingale, the same man whose face he’d spat into. Levon was the kind of idealist you admired but also feared. He seemed to have the inclinations of a pacifist but owned a large number of firearms. He despised dictators and demagogues but revered his ancestors in gray who were authoritarian in their own fashion. He had been a leftist in Latin America, then traveled to Cuba and been picked up by the secret police and confined for a month in a hellish place filled with cockroaches and lice and feces. In my opinion, Levon and Jimmy Nightingale were opposite sides of the same coin. Neither understood himself. And without knowing it, both of them probably served an agenda created for them by someone else, perhaps long dead.

From a professional perspective, my investigation into the rape of Rowena Broussard was over. But I couldn’t let it go. Something was wrong. Why the continued coldness or hostility from both her and her husband? Wouldn’t they conclude that the wheels of justice were going forward? Jimmy had been charged and indicted and held up in the public eye as a rapist. Maybe his political career would be destroyed. Rowena would probably be a devastating witness at the trial. What more did they want?

I drove to their house on Loreauville Road.

At sunrise, a man wearing a Jolly Jack vendor’s uniform pulled up to the pumps in the same truck that had been stolen at the same filling station two days previous. He turned off the engine and went inside without buying any gas. He used the restroom, bought a bag of Ding Dongs, and munched them while he read the newspaper in the convenience store. Then he paid for the newspaper and went outside and did something in the back of the truck.

A minute later, the clerk saw him activate the gas pump with what turned out to be a stolen credit card. The clerk had never seen him before and knew nothing of the truck’s history. The driver was on the other side of the truck, so the clerk assumed he was gassing up. Someone entered the store and said smoke was rising from the back of the truck. The digital counters were racing on the gas pump. The hose and nozzle had been draped over the driver’s window and were sloshing gasoline across the seats and the floor. A flame flickered inside the glass in the rear doors. The driver had disappeared.

The explosion seemed to lift the truck off its wheels, then the fire roared with such intensity that it wilted the roof into carbon paper. One of the customers said he heard the muffled cries of a person inside the flames.

It took me only ten minutes to reach the site. The firemen had finished hosing down the truck, and one of them was prizing open the back doors with a crowbar. Helen was standing by her cruiser, talking into her mic. I waited for her to finish.

“What’s that smell?” I said.

“I hate to think,” she replied. “A car was reported stolen up the road. That’s probably how our man made his getaway.”

“What’s on the surveillance cameras?”

“The top of a head wearing a cap. It looks like he had gloves on.”

“What’s the clerk say?”

“The guy talked baby talk, like Elmer Fudd, and has lips that were ‘red like licorice.’ Fudd ate a bag of Ding Dongs and read the paper before he set the truck on fire.”

“This is the same truck that was stolen from here?”

“You got it.”

“How do you figure that one?”

“Our guy’s a nutcase?” she said.

The fireman was now inside the truck. He used the head of the crowbar to snap loose the handle on the freeze locker and pulled back the door on its hinges. He jumped down from the bumper, the ends of his mustache bouncing. He coughed wetly in his chest. “Y’all better take a look.”

The man inside the locker was bound hand and foot with ligatures, a strip of heat-baked tape hanging from his mouth. His eyes were wide, like those of someone holding his breath underwater. His forehead and bare feet were crusted with black blood, his hair and eyebrows singed, his clothes covered with burn holes. His skin had turned to orange marmalade. I hoped he had died of asphyxiation or a heart attack rather than from the burning gasoline that had curled around the bottom of the freeze locker.

“Recognize him?” Helen said.

“It’s Maximo Soza.”

“That’s him? I remember him being larger.”

“He was a small man inside and out.”

“Who’s the guy in the Jolly Jack suit?”

“I think the same guy who shot McVane.”

“How do you arrive at that?”

“He commits crimes no one would suspect him of. He does it for reasons that make sense to him but no one else. He builds the gallows and drops the trapdoor before anyone realizes he’s not a carpenter.”

“Who would want to pop one of Tony Squid’s guys?”

“Somebody who wants information about Tony or somebody who plans on popping Tony.”

“Mob guys don’t get popped without permission,” she said.

“That was in the old days. Whoever did this plans to leave a big footprint.”

The sunset was like pools of fire inside clouds that were turning into rain. The crowd at the bar-and-grill up the bayou was a happy one. Before going inside, I stood at the deck railing and gazed at the live oaks on the lawn of the old convent, the people of color who were pole-fishing on the bank, the raindrops chaining the bayou’s surface. Then I went inside. People who knew me glanced away, either out of embarrassment or in fear.

Babette, the young Cajun woman who had told me she’d seen Labiche with Kevin Penny, was working behind the bar. She was serving a highball to Spade Labiche. In the shadows at the end of the bar, Clete Purcel was eating a bowl of étouffée and drinking from a mug of beer caked with ice. He looked straight into my eyes but didn’t stop eating.

“Hi, Miss Babette,” I said.

“Hello, Mr. Dave,” she replied. “You want to order some food, suh? If that’s what you’re having, I mean.”

“Not right now. Just a diet drink. Any kind is fine.”

“You here to talk to me, Robicheaux?” Labiche said. “If you are, that’s a mistake.”

“Why is that?”

“You got a beef, do it by the numbers, at the office. That’s what offices are for.”

I took a glass of iced Diet Coke and lime slices and cherries from Babette’s hand. I had not asked for the lime and the cherries, but she had put them in just the same. I sat down next to Clete.

“Care to tell me why you’re in here?” he said.

“Thought you might be here,” I lied.

He looked at Labiche but spoke to me. “You want to eat?”

“Nope.”

“You just like slop chutes? Like memories of past boom-boom?”

I glanced up at the TV screen. “I want to watch the ball game.”

“Yeah? Who’s playing?”

I placed my hand on his shoulder. It felt like concrete. “Think we’re too old for this?”

“Old for what?”

“All this crap.”

“Don’t buy in to that. Most people are dead inside at forty.” He snapped his fingers. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you.”

“You’re looking at Labiche. What gives?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you trying to have another slip? Because if you are, I’m leaving.”

“You worry too much. Miss Babette, can I have another one of these, please?” I handed her my empty glass.

But I could not say liquor wasn’t on my mind. I could not only smell it, I was drawn to it the way a bee is drawn to flowers. The bottles on the back counter rang with light. I could almost taste the foam and brassy bead of the beer splashing from the spigot into a big ice-crusted mug, the whiskey brimming on the edges of a shot glass, the Collins mix and shaved ice and mint leaves in tropical drinks made with vodka and rum and gin. I could not explain the metabolic craving that had brought me nothing but sickness and misery, not to mention a murderous rage that was often the surrogate for the booze I couldn’t get enough of.

I looked at Labiche’s profile and the way he positioned himself at the bar, one foot on the brass rail, shoulders back, half a head taller than those around him. He could see everyone coming in or leaving; he could see down a woman’s blouse, particularly the women behind the bar. He could see a tryst beginning in the parking lot. He could eyeball a parolee who wasn’t allowed to keep company with other ex-felons or enter establishments where alcohol was sold. He was Polonius eavesdropping on the rest of the world.

I saw Babette bend over to pick up a napkin from the duckboards. I saw Labiche’s eyes follow her breasts down.

“Where you going?” Clete said.

“To tell Spade whom he reminds me of.”

“Whom?”

I stood behind Labiche but couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I remember seeing Babette look at me, her brow furrowed. I remember Labiche turning around as though he heard the bell at a rail crossing.

“Want something?” he asked.

“Repeat what you said to my daughter earlier today.”

“I didn’t say anything to her. ‘Top of the morning’ or something like that. You drunk?”

“Think carefully. You asked her if she saw a guy in red tennis shoes. Then you said something else.”

“You’re a sick man, Robicheaux. Everybody knows it except you. In regard to your daughter, I wouldn’t wipe my ass with her.”

A quietness settled on the bar.

“Did you hear me?” he said.

I nodded. I picked at my nails.

“You just going to stand there?” he said.

“You’re not hard to read, Spade.”

“Have a drink. I’ll put it on my tab. I’ll drive you home. You and your daughter quit your bullshit.”

“You didn’t make your case on the Dartez homicide. So you thought you’d go all in.”

“I can’t take this,” he said to no one. He slipped a credit card from his wallet and dropped it onto the bar. “I’m heading out, hon,” he said to Babette. “I’ll pick you up at closing time.”

Babette picked up the card, her face coloring.

“Look at me, Spade,” I said.

“Jeez, what does it take?” he said, turning toward me.

I caught him with my right, putting my shoulder and hip into it, driving my fist straight into his mouth, snapping his face sideways as though he had been dropped from a hangman’s rope. I saw blood fly against the back mirror and heard a stifled cry rise from his throat. I hooked him twice with my left hand and caught him again with my right, knocking his head against the bar as he went down.

I should have pulled the plug. But I knew I wasn’t going to. The simian that had lived in me since I was a child was back in town. A cloud that was red and black and without shape seemed to explode inside my head and destroy my vision, although I was able to see my deeds from somewhere outside my body. Labiche was on the floor and I was stomping his face, hanging on to the bar for purchase, his blood stippling my loafers. The image reminded me of the blood on the grass where T. J. Dartez had been beaten to death. A woman was screaming. Someone was on a cell phone. Labiche’s eyes were filled with terror. I kicked at his face and lost my balance. I felt the desire to kill him slip away from me, like ash dying on a dead fire.

Clete Purcel came out of nowhere and clenched me from behind and locked his hands on my chest and wrestled me out the door. We were out on the deck, the stars bright, the drawbridge at Burke Street lifting into the air. I pushed him away.

“He played you, big mon,” Clete said. “Why’d you let him do it?”

I felt like I was coming off a drunk or getting off a ship without my sea legs. “What happened?”

“Who cares? It’s done. Get in the Caddy.”

“Where are we going?”

“How about another galaxy?” he said.

We walked into the parking lot and got into the car. He started the engine. “You got it together?”

“Tell me what happened.”

He exhaled loudly. “You don’t know?”

“He put his hand on me?”

“No, he didn’t do anything. You laid him out.”

We drove down the street and over the steel grid on the drawbridge.

“I didn’t kill Dartez,” I said.

He looked at me oddly, but I didn’t try to explain.

The sun was low in the west, flooding the crime scene with a red glow, when I arrived. Helen arrived minutes later. Someone had pulled a polyethylene tarp over the two bodies that sat slumped at the picnic table. An ambulance, three cruisers, and a fire truck had pulled onto the grass. The crime scene tape was already up. Cars were slowing at the intersection, people gawking from the windows. Spade Labiche was waiting for us. “Better take a look,” he said.

I lifted up a corner of the tarp, high enough to see both victims without exposing their state to people on the other side of the tape.

“Jesus,” Helen said.

I lowered the tarp. “The entry wounds are in the front.”

“There’s splatter on the flatbed behind them,” Labiche said. “One guy says he thought he heard a backfire. A woman says she heard firecrackers.”

“From where?” I said.

“Across the road,” he said.

The sugarcane field was empty, the sky lavender and full of birds. A dust devil spun across the rows, wobbling, then broke apart.

I walked over to the trailer where a black kid had been stacking or unloading melons. Three melons were cored or broken. There was no bullet hole in the trailer that I could see. Farther down the street were houses and small businesses. I talked with the black kid, who was still shaken by what he had witnessed. “One guy was wiping melon out of his hair, then his whole head blowed off. Man, I ain’t up for dis.”

“Did you see anyone out there in the field?” I asked.

“No, suh. Wait. I seen a truck.”

“Did you see the truck go somewhere?”

“No, suh, I ain’t.”

“You see anything else? Think about it.”

“Maybe a flash behind the truck.”

“You see a man?”

“I cain’t remember.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Let’s talk again later.” I gave him my card and joined Helen.

“Want me to start knocking on doors?” Labiche said.

“Yeah, while we have daylight,” Helen said. “Good job.”

“We’ll get this guy,” he said. “Right, Dave?”

I didn’t answer. He shrugged and walked off.

“Good job?” I said to Helen.

“Give the devil his due,” she said.

“Remind me to keep my own counsel.”

A Jeff Davis Parish sheriff’s cruiser, its flasher rippling, pulled onto the grass and stopped at the tape. Sherry Picard got out, her badge on her belt. “Mind if I get in on this?”

“What’s this got to do with Jeff Davis?” Helen said.

“This is probably connected to the hit on Kevin Penny,” she said. “Penny is my case.”

“Help yourself,” Helen said.

“Who’s the vic?” Sherry said.

“Vics,” Helen said. “Pookie Domingue and JuJu Ladrine.”

“Can I?” she said, holding the corner of the tarp.

Helen nodded.

Sherry pulled up the tarp, her face impassive. She lowered it again and looked over her shoulder at the field. “The shots came from out there?” she said.

“That’s the way it looks,” I said.

“It was probably done with a fifty-caliber. I’m thinking an M107 sniper rifle.”

“Where’d you come up with that?” Helen said.

“I used one,” Sherry said.

“Pardon?” Helen said.

“In Afghanistan.”

“Let’s take a walk,” I said to both of them.

We crossed the road and walked several hundred yards to a spot where a heavy vehicle had parked and then backed in a semicircle and driven away on its own tire marks. The ground was soft and moist, the impressions sharply stenciled. There were shoeprints by the tire tracks.

Helen got on her radio. “We need some tape in the field.”

“This is my guess,” Sherry said. “The shooter set up a bipod on his vehicle and fired through a space in the traffic. That means he’s very good. The first shot was high. The second and third were on the mark. The M107 is a semi-auto. Unless he fired from inside the truck, the brass must have hit the ground.”

But there was no brass on the ground. If the shooter used a semi-auto outside the truck, he had picked up his spent cartridges, which only cops and professional hitters do.

“You got any idea who this guy is?” Helen said to Sherry.

“Somebody who doesn’t care if he drills a hole in a house one mile away and kills a child in a high chair,” Sherry answered.

Two months passed. The man in red tennis shoes seemed to have disappeared. The days were long and hot, the palm fronds and banana plants rattling dryly when the wind blew. Years ago, during the summer, rain showers fell throughout southern Louisiana at almost exactly three o’clock every afternoon. Now the gumbo soil in the sugarcane field was baked as hard as ceramic and cracked just as easily.

Most people believe that law enforcement and the solving of crimes and the apprehension and prosecution of criminals proceed in a systematic, linear fashion. The opposite is true. A successful outcome is usually produced by informants and dumb luck. The waiting, the missed opportunities, the bureaucracy, the tainted or lost evidence, the witnesses who change their accounts are endless. Lassitude, frustration, and anger become a way of life.

Mrs. Dartez continued to tell anyone who would listen that I was the murderer of her husband. The prosecution of Levon Broussard for the murder of Kevin Penny crept forward in Jefferson Davis Parish. Location scouts and line producers working for Levon and Tony Nine Ball began arriving in town, with all the attendant excitement. Homer was taken away from Clete and placed in a foster home, but he ran away and crawled through a window in Clete’s cottage and hid there for two days until Clete returned from his office in New Orleans. So far, the social welfare agency had not tried to take him back. Alafair finished her initial adaptation of Levon’s book, then consented to do the polish and to stay on the set after production began. Levon was drunk a lot. I went to meetings. Spade Labiche stayed in the background and said little, although I still believed that every day was his Ides of March. And no one talked anymore about the Jeff Davis Eight.

But while the rest of us were absorbed with our minutiae, Jimmy Nightingale was on the move. He appeared on network morning shows. He was the emissary of the New South, urbane and humble and jocular, a self-deprecating glint of the rogue in his eye. The host or hostess threw him softball questions about his casinos, his oligarchical history, his association with scum like Tony the Squid. He was the aviator who flew biplanes under bridges, an oilman who warned about global warming, an advocate for rural blacks whose neighborhoods were dumping ponds for petroleum waste. One host compared him to the young Bill Clinton, another to the young John F. Kennedy. When Jimmy got finished with an interview, the audience had one reaction: thunderous heartfelt applause.

On a dark night, the clouds crackling with dry lightning, Clete Purcel was knocking back shots in an end-of-the-line mixed-race joint in North Lafayette, the kind that had a pine-plank bar and red bulbs above the mirrors and where the clientele copulated in their cars without embarrassment. It was set back from the highway in a black neighborhood where some of the streets were still unpaved and desiccated privies still stood in backyards. Clete had a shot glass and a small pitcher of beer in front of him, and he stood rather than sat at the bar so he could watch the door. The air was thick was smoke, the restroom door open and stinking of urine and ammonia and weed. He could only guess at the race of the people around him.

A woman in jeans and boots and a western shirt came through the front door, her black hair tied up with a bandana. He had to rub his eyes with the backs of his wrist to make sure his vision wasn’t failing him. She stood next to him and looked around. “This is where you hang out?”

“I’m supposed to meet a skip,” he replied.

“What’d he skip on?”

“Felony assault, a fifty-grand bond. Were you looking for me?”

“I went by the motor court. Homer was alone. He said you were here.”

He felt his face burn. “I check on him every thirty minutes.”

“He’s a nice kid.”

“I know that, Miss Sherry. You want a drink?”

“Just a glass.” She tinked a fingernail against the pitcher. “Let’s go over in the corner. God, what a dump.”

They sat at a table by a painted-over window, a wood-bladed fan turning overhead. She had carried a clean glass from the bar. He poured it full, the foam running over the edge. He kept his eyes on the door, waiting for a skip who was probably a no-show.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about the Penny investigation,” she said.

“Levon Broussard is going down for it, right?”

“Too many people think Penny got what he deserved. Tony Nine Ball’s influences aren’t to be taken lightly, either.”

“Tony got to somebody?” Clete said.

“That’s why squids have tentacles.”

“Dave Robicheaux thought the guy in red tennis shoes was going to clip Tony.”

“Why?” she said.

“The guy’s a cleaner.”

“Somebody bigger than Tony Nemo is pulling the strings?”

“Or the agenda is bigger than Nemo’s,” he said. “Do you know who was the only guy to deal successfully with the Mafia?”

“No,” she said.

“Mussolini. I grew up in the Irish Channel with those guys. I worked for some of them. In Vegas and Reno and Montana.”

Her eyes searched his. “Yeah?”

“They broke my hand with a car door. Later, some of them went off-line,” he said.

“You’re a funny guy. I don’t mean like strange. You’re just a different kind of guy.”

Once again Clete felt his old enemy come back. As a boy, he’d hated delivering milk off his father’s truck to the back doors of the rich in the Garden District. He’d hated the welfare store where the clothes he was given were generic and ill-fitting; he’d hated the cops who’d hauled his parents out of the house when they were drunk and fighting; he’d hated his father for beating him with a razor strop and making him kneel all night on grains of rice; he’d hated a nun who’d told him he was unwashed, and a priest who’d shut the confessional window in his face when he was twelve years old. These moments should have disappeared long ago, but every time Clete looked into the eyes of a normal person, the dead coals he had carried for decades burst alight, giving life to every dark memory in his unconscious, telling him once again he was worthless in the sight of God and man.

“I don’t like to talk much about myself,” he said. “Not because I’m humble. On my best day, I never got more than a C-minus. That includes time in the Crotch.”

“I checked you out. You have the Navy Cross.”

“I got it while I was running in the wrong direction. How about we ditch yesterday’s box score?”

He tilted the pitcher to fill her glass, but she covered it with her hand.

“Sometimes I get the blues,” she said. “That’s when I know I shouldn’t drink too much. If I do, I really get the blues. I like Emmylou Harris’s line: ‘I got the rhythm, and I don’t need the blues.’ ”

“You’re talking about your husband?”

“He was a West Point graduate. He could have been an academic, but he went to Ranger school. He loved the army. He was killed by friendly fire.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stole a look at her eyes. She was looking at the bar. A man was telling a dirty joke to two women, both of them disheveled, grinning. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?” she asked.

“I’m not too smart about these things. I’m old, too.”

“So is the earth. Is your guy going to show?”

Clete glanced at his watch, the same one he’d owned since the Corps. The hands had a soft green luminosity. “Probably not.”

“I’ll buy you a fish sandwich and a cup of coffee at McDonald’s,” she said.

“I don’t want to leave Homer alone too long.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Another thing. I was involved with this lady. I’m not now, but it wasn’t long ago, and she’s a nice lady.”

“The social worker?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She nodded.

“You’re beautiful, Miss Sherry. You got guts, too. I mean, working with some of those assholes in your department.”

“I got you. Lay off the personal inventory.”

“I don’t want to walk out of here feeling bad,” he said. Had he just said that? Why did he never have the words that accurately described his feelings? “I didn’t mean—”

“I’ve got to pee,” she said.

When she returned from the women’s room, she filled her glass with beer and drank it. “I’d better get going.”

“How about that fish sandwich?” he said.

She followed him to McDonald’s in her car. They ate in a booth. Heat lightning flared in the clouds and died somewhere over the Gulf. She said little. He wondered about the images she had seen through the telescopic sight on a sniper’s rifle, images she had created with the slow squeeze of a trigger.

“You go somewhere in your own head sometimes?” she said.

“On occasion.”

“You know what they say.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Don’t go into a bad neighborhood by yourself.”

“It’s the only neighborhood I have,” he replied.

She finished her sandwich and wiped her mouth. There was lipstick on the paper napkin when she crumpled it in her hand.

“There’s a lady who stays over with Homer when I go out of town,” he said.

“It’s your call,” she said.

He cupped his cell phone. “I’ll be outside.”

The motel was halfway to Opelousas on the four-lane. There was a piney woods behind it and a fountain in front that glittered with pink and blue lights. She followed him there and went into the lobby by his side.

Helen came into my office on Tuesday morning. She had just gotten back from the sheriff’s department in St. Mary Parish. She told me of the shooting.

“None of the boys were hit?” I said.

“That’s what’s peculiar,” she said. “The shooter clustered five rounds below the rear window and put one in the gas tank. Why didn’t he riddle the whole vehicle if he was out to do maximum damage?”

“How far away was he?”

“Far enough that the boys never saw him. By the way, ‘boys’ isn’t a good term for these guys. They’re walking promotions for Planned Parenthood.”

“No brass?”

“Just tire tracks,” she said. “They may belong to a stolen car that was found in Des Allemands.”

“You think this is our guy?” I asked.

“He was obviously using a high-powered military rifle and probably firing armor-piercing rounds.”

“The kids don’t have any idea who was shooting at them or why?”

“They say a weirdo guy was yelling at them at the DQ.”

“About what?”

“Their radio was playing rap. That was a couple of hours before the shooting. I don’t think they were just playing rap, either.”

“They wised off?”

“Who knows? They’d drown in their own shit if they ever left St. Mary Parish,” she said.

“What kind of car was the guy at the DQ driving?”

“They just remembered it was green. Like the stolen one in Des Allemands.”

“Any latents?”

“The owner’s,” she said. “You think the shooter just wanted to scare the hell out of them?”

“He parked one in the tank.”

“Maybe he didn’t want them coming after him,” she said.

“Or he wanted to burn them alive,” I said.

“No, I think our boy lost control and went outside his parameters. Like somebody rolling the dice and shutting his eyes. Charlie Manson claims he never killed anyone. That’s because he got somebody else to do it.”

I said earlier that Clete Purcel was the best investigative detective I ever knew — but Helen Soileau was a close second.

“What did the guy at the DQ look like?” I asked.

“Chubby buttocks. A lisp. The kind of guy who hangs around playgrounds.”

“I think these kids have sexual problems of their own,” I said.

“Before they got into it, they said the guy was smiling at everybody in the DQ, particularly at children.”

“The kind of guy somebody might call Smiley?”

“I think this baby is back in town and ready to rock,” she replied.

Few people understood Clete. As simple-minded people are wont to do, they put him into categories. He was a compulsive gambler, a disgraced cop who’d flushed his career with weed and booze, a mercenary who should be considered a traitor, a lover of women who belonged in straitjackets, a human wrecking ball, a child in a man’s body, a rum-dum living on yesterday’s box score, a former leg-breaker for the Mob, and most realistically, a dangerous, war-damaged man whose unpredictable moods could lay waste to half a city.

But as with all simple-minded and dismissive people, they were wrong. And not only were his detractors wrong, none of them could shine his shoes. Clete was one of the most intelligent people I ever knew, and one of the most humble, less out of virtue than his inability to understand his own goodness. He was so brave that he didn’t know how to be afraid. In the same fashion, he was generous because he cared little about money or social status or ownership, except for his Caddy convertibles. His physical appetites were enormous. So was his capacity for self-destruction. His father the milkman had taught Clete to hate himself, and Clete had spent a lifetime trying to unlearn the lesson.

The people who understood him best were usually in the life. Grifters, hookers, money washers at the track, street dips, Murphy artists, and shylocks respected him. So did uptown house creeps and old-time petemen. Button men avoided him. So did strong-arm robbers and child molesters; men who abused women or animals were terrified of him. When Clete’s anger was unleashed, he transformed into someone larger than himself. His fists seemed as big as cantaloupes, his pocked neck as hard as a fire hydrant; his arms and shoulders would split his clothes. He dropped a New Jersey hit man off a roof through the top of a greenhouse. He hooked his hand into a Teamster official’s mouth and slung him from a balcony into a dry swimming pool. He almost drowned a NOPD vice cop in a toilet bowl. He burned down a plantation home on Bayou Teche, fire-hosed a gangster across the restroom floor in a casino, pushed a sadist off the rim of a canyon in Montana, filled a mobbed-up politician’s antique convertible with concrete, went berserk in a St. Martinville pool hall and piled five unconscious outlaw bikers in a corner and would have doubled the number with a baseball bat if Helen Soileau hadn’t talked him into cuffing himself.

He was the trickster from folk mythology who flung scat at respectability. But he was a far more complicated man, in essence a Greek tragedy, a Promethean figure no one recognized as such, a member of the just men in Jewish legend who suffered for the rest of us. If there are angels among us, as St. Paul suggests, I believed Clete was one of them, his wings auraed with smoke, his cloak rolled in blood, his sword broken in battle but unsurrendered and unsheathed, a protector whose genus went back to Thermopylae and Masada.

He pulled to the curb as I was walking home from work. He was eating a spearmint sno’ball, the top of the Caddy down. “I had a talk with Emmeline Nightingale in the park today.”

“Not interested,” I said.

“Is Alafair home?”

“Probably.”

“Ms. Nightingale’s chauffeur would like a part in her picture.”

“What are you up to, Clete?”

“I thought that would get your attention. Get in.”

That’s how it worked. Clete would roll the dice, and I would get stuck with the math. I opened the door and sat back in the seat. He was wearing aviator shades and a Hawaiian shirt with hula girls on it. The sunlight through the trees was as red as a ruby on his skin. He pulled away from the curb, driving with the heel of his hand, like a 1950s lowrider.

“What’s this about the chauffeur?” I said.

“I just wanted to get you in the car. Ms. Nightingale wants to hire me.”

“Hire you?”

“She says it’s to keep Levon Broussard off her back.”

“That’s not it?”

“I think she knows I might be in a relationship with Sherry Picard.”

We bounced into my driveway. “A relationship?” I said.

“Yeah, we got it on. I’m seeing her tonight.”

“Leave out the particulars. What in God’s name are you doing?”

“There you go again.”

“I just asked a question. You can’t take care of yourself.”

“That’s it. No matter what I say, you’re on my case. I’m too old. I should put my stiff one-eye in a safe-deposit box. I drink too much. I eat the wrong food. How about respecting my space for a change?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re the best guy I’ve ever known. I worry about you.”

“Remember how you used to bounce your stick on the curb in the Quarter? Everyone thought you were signaling me about a crime in progress. You were telling me to meet you at the Acme for a dozen on the half shell.”

“We’ll do it again, too,” I said.

He swallowed the rest of his sno’ball, a green ribbon running from the corner of his mouth when he smiled. “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”

“You really offered to help the Nightingale chauffeur with Alafair?”

“He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, although I got the feeling he’s porking Ms. N., the way they look at each other and all.”

“Why do you think she’s interested in your relationship with Sherry Picard?” I said.

“Maybe she wants to make sure Broussard goes down for the Kevin Penny homicide.”

“You think she could have done Penny?” I said.

“Ever look into her eyes? Two inkwells, midnight blue. She has antifreeze for blood.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I think Jimmy Nightingale killed Penny or had it done.”

“I don’t think you’re entirely objective, Cletus.”

“You’re right. I’d love to bust a cap on that guy.”

“Why does he get to you?”

“He scares me. I can’t shake the feeling.”

This time, the shooter had left his brass, a pair of .223 casings that were probably from a scoped rifle modeled on the old M1 carbine. I picked them up with a pencil and put them into an empty candy box I found on the floor and turned them over to a Lafayette police detective. Clete described the man he had seen with the elongated cardboard carton, and that was the end of our official participation in the attempted assassination of Jimmy Nightingale.

Clete was silent most of the way to New Iberia. We were in the Caddy, the top up. He turned on the radio, then clicked it off and huffed air out his nose.

“What’s eating you?” I said.

“I don’t buy what we saw.”

I knew what he was going to say. But I didn’t want to taint his perceptions by speaking first.

“Sociopaths are all the same,” he said. “Every one of them is vain. They’ll go to the injection table rather than admit an imperfection.”

“Are you talking about the shooter or Nightingale?”

“Our .223 man put one round in a glass vase that was no more than five inches across. The second clipped the flagstaff dead center. He hit two small objects three seconds apart from seventy yards but couldn’t nail Nightingale? Who’s kidding who?”

“I think you’re right.”

“You think Lafayette PD or the state police will pick up on that?”

“People believe what they want to.”

“Nightingale is a hypocrite. He brought immigrants from Costa Rica to work in his casinos and hotels.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Cletus.”

“No, I’m not. You’re always making excuses for this guy.”

“Heroes are hard to find these days. That’s why we have the bargain-basement variety.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“How about Levon Broussard? I always respected him. Now he’s making a film with Tony Nine Ball, and Alafair is working with them.”

Clete took out his flask and chugged it to the bottom. “I don’t like to drink in front of you, Streak, but sometimes that’s the only way I can put up with this crap.”

Helen called at 3:16 Sunday morning. “I’m in Lafayette. We got a shots-fired at Spade Labiche’s house. Can you get over there?”

“Yeah,” I said. I was barefoot and in my skivvies in the kitchen. “Who called it in?”

“A guy walking across the bridge. He heard a pop and saw a flash through the upstairs window. A patrolman just kicked open the door. He says it’s a mess. We ROA there.”

“Labiche is dead?”

“His place is a fortress. I don’t know how anyone could get in. Maybe he ate his gun.”

I rubbed water on my face and brushed my teeth, put on a pair of khakis, and hung my badge around my neck and hooked my nine-millimeter on my belt.

“Where you going?” Alafair said from her bedroom door.

“It’s Spade Labiche.”

“Somebody caught up with him?”

“Maybe.”

I felt her studying my face. “I’ll lock you in,” I said. “Maybe this guy Smiley is back in town.”

“That’s not what’s on your mind. Labiche is the only guy who knows what happened the night T. J. Dartez died.”

“That sums it up.”

I drove down East Main and turned onto the side street that led to Labiche’s house. Someone had turned on the lights inside. A cruiser was parked in front. There had been a six-car pileup on the four-lane, and the paramedics had not arrived. I went through the broken door and up the stairs. A red-haired, barrel-chested patrolman nicknamed Top met me at the entrance to the bedroom. “I left everything alone. The pillowcase was half off his face when I got here.”

There was blood splatter on the headboard, the wall, and the window glass. There were three bullet holes in the headboard and a tear in a sheet with powder burns around it and a long bloody swath down the side of the mattress and the bed frame that dead-ended at the body on the floor.

Through the French doors, I saw the lights of emergency vehicles turning off Main. I knelt on one knee and lifted up the edge of the pillowcase with my ballpoint. There was an entry wound high up on Labiche’s left cheek, a graze that had taken off most of one ear, and another entry wound on his neck. His left eye had turned to milk. Half of his body was painted with blood. I let the pillowcase drop and looked around the floor, then shook out the sheets and a bedcover on the foot of the bed.

“You see a gun?” I said.

“No,” Top said.

“Casings?”

“Nope. You think he shot himself four times?”

“I was hoping our shooter dropped his weapon.”

The truth was, I hadn’t precluded the possibility of suicide. I’ve seen victims who had to take a run at it several times before they pulled it off, particularly when they were filled with rage at others and couldn’t let go of this world.

I looked under the bed and the nightstand. The recoil in a suicide can put a firearm in strange places. But there was no gun. I opened the drawer on the nightstand. There was a five-shot holstered titanium .38 Special inside, the Velcro strap in place. Then I realized the enormity of the presumption I had been operating on. Labiche’s left hand twitched, as though a tiny electric current had touched it. I knelt again and peeled the pillowcase off his head. The clotted hair in one nostril moved almost imperceptibly.

“Get the medics up here, Top.”

I wasn’t done. I went to Levon Broussard’s home on Loreauville Road. His wife’s car was in the garage, but his was not. I parked in front and waited. A few minutes later, his SUV turned off the road and came up the driveway. He got out and walked toward me, his engine still running. I could see Rowena watching from the gallery.

“You crazy fuck,” he said to me.

“Problem?”

“I saw it all. Approximately a hundred and fifty other people did, too.”

“My daughter took the screenwriting job because she respects you and your work. Her faith was repaid by Nemo’s insults and his attempt to degrade her. To my knowledge, you didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

“I didn’t know about it.”

“You do now.”

“I’m supposed to kick him off the set? He’s the goddamn producer.”

I could feel my anger returning, my palms tingling, a dryness in my mouth, a flame inching its way across the lining of my stomach. “What’s wrong with you, Levon? You’ve devoted your entire life to good causes. How could you hook up with a guy like Tony Nine Ball?”

“It’s what the situation demanded.”

“You want him to rig a jury for you? He’ll end up owning your soul.”

“I didn’t kill Kevin Penny. A lot of people believe I did. Some have even congratulated me.”

I stepped closer to him. I saw Rowena walk into the yard, a flowering tree in bloom behind her.

“Look me straight in the face and tell me you didn’t do it,” I said. “Your prints were on the drill only because you tried to save his life. Tell me that.”

“It’s as you say.” There was not a flutter of emotion in his face or his eyes.

“He raped your wife. He put his mouth all over her body. He put his seed in her.”

“You want me to knock you down?”

“You don’t like the imagery? What do you think your trial is going to be like?”

“Tell Alafair I’m sorry. Ask her to come back on the set.”

“Dream on.”

“What can I say?”

“The truth.”

“White Doves at Morning is one of my best books and one of the least read. I wanted to see it on the screen. Nemo obtained the funding. If I had gotten it myself, I would have ended up dealing with the same Hollywood people he deals with. When you get off the phone with them, you want to clean your ear with baby wipes.”

“Who killed Penny?”

“I didn’t.”

“There’s something you’re hiding. I don’t buy your story about the drill. It’s too coincidental that you show up just after someone turns him into Swiss cheese.”

“You never mention Jimmy Nightingale or his sister,” he said. “He’s headed for the Senate and maybe even bigger things. He’s a fascist who’s lying to all these poor people who think he’s going to make their lives better. But you’re worried about justice for the guy who raped my wife and maybe killed some of the Jeff Davis Eight.”

“Seen any good movies?” I said.

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

But it wasn’t over. Rowena walked across the grass to the edge of the driveway, wearing jeans and a beige T-shirt with paint on it and no bra. “Don’t talk to him like that, Levon. Come in, Mr. Robicheaux. Have some tea with us.”

She lived up to her name, right out of Sir Walter Scott. “You’re a grand lady, madam,” I said. “All the best to both of you.”

On the way home, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I flipped it open. The caller was Melvin LeBlanc, the physician.

“What’s the haps, Mel?” I said.

“I’m at Iberia General. The head nurse thinks you should get over here.”

“Regarding what?”

“Spade Labiche. She says he keeps repeating the word ‘Robo.’ Mean anything?”

The storm continued through the night, filling our rain gutters with pine needles and leaves, flooding the yard and most of East Main. The Teche was high and yellow at dawn, lapping into the canebrakes and cypress knees along the banks, the sun pink and the sky strung with white clouds and patches of blue. The trees were dripping audibly and throbbing with birds. It was a grand way to start the day, in spite of all that had happened.

Helen caught me at 8:06 A.M. in the corridor outside her office. “Inside, bwana.”

“Tony Nine Ball is upset?”

“No, half of St. Mary Parish is.”

I walked ahead of her. She slammed the door behind us. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“He told Alafair she probably gave good head.”

Her face went dead. Her early days at NOPD were not easy. She was not only a woman, she was a bisexual woman. The cruelty and abuse by a detective named Nate Baxter set new standards. He ended up facedown in a plate of linguini in a family restaurant on Canal.

“I’d do it over if I had to,” I said. “Fire me if you want. Nemo is a bucket of shit who should have been poured down the honey hole a long time ago.”

She sat behind her desk and picked at a thumbnail.

“This isn’t about Nemo?” I said.

“Labiche died last night. The head nurse says you were there.”

“I was.”

“And you knew he died?”

“Yes, he died with his hand in mine.”

“And you didn’t bother to call in? Or say what you were doing there? Or what he might have said before he caught the bus?”

“What he told me won’t change anything,” I said. “I didn’t have my recorder.”

“What did he say?”

“Dartez was having an epileptic seizure, and I tried to save him. There was something in his throat. That’s about it.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s why you dragged him out the window,” she said. “He had the plastic filter of a cigar lodged in his throat.”

“That’s it. Then I think Penny came up behind me and hit me with a rock or a chunk of concrete.”

“Labiche mentioned Penny?”

“No.”

“Nothing to suggest who might have sent Penny after you?”

“I believe it was Nemo.”

“You’re probably right. This won’t get you off the hook, though, will it?”

“I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”

She opened her desk drawer and took out my medal and silver chain and set them on the corner of her desk. “A nurse brought this by about fifteen minutes ago. She said you must have left it in Labiche’s hand, because nobody else was in the room with him.”

I picked up the chain and put it around my neck and dropped the medal inside my shirt. “Thanks.”

“You’re a piece of work, Pops.”

He pulled in to my driveway at seven A.M., when I was feeding Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon on top of Tripod’s hutch. I fixed a pot of coffee and took it and two tin cups out to the redwood table in the backyard and filled our cups, waiting for him to explain why he had come to my door.

Clete’s face was a complex study, particularly during times of crisis or decision. The more intense the emotion, the more silent and withdrawn he became. The pattern never changed. He breathed evenly through his nose, his green eyes fixed on a hologram no one else saw. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes flattened and turned the color of papier-mâché, his forehead turning as cool as marble, the blood settling in his cheeks because it had nowhere else to go.

“Had an early visitor this morning,” he said. “In the middle of the storm.” He hooked a finger through the handle on the cup. The coffee was black and scalding hot, a wisp rising from it like a trail of cigarette smoke. He drank from the cup a sip at a time, then swilled half of it, swallowing with no discomfort.

“What happened?” I said.

“Somebody tried to put a bomb in my car.”

“You saw somebody around your car with a bomb?”

“I went outside before he could finish jimmying the window. He ran off.”

“How do you know he had a bomb?”

“I found a tilt switch in the grass next to the driver’s door.” He saw the confusion in my face. “It’s a glass tube that’s got mercury in it. It’s attached to the brake pedal or the accelerator. When the driver presses down on the pedal, the tube tilts and creates the electrical connection that detonates the charge.”

“You saw the guy?”

“He took off. If I hadn’t woken up, he probably would have killed me and Homer. We go down to McDonald’s in the morning for biscuits and eggs.”

“Do you have the tube?”

He nodded. “I think it’s this guy Smiley. I told him that.”

“We’ll get everything to the lab.”

“Waste of time. The guy’s a pro. One of two guys sent him.”

I knew where we were going. “You don’t know it was Smiley. Don’t start making connections.”

“He’s out-of-town talent. He’s working for Fat Tony or Jimmy Nightingale. They both have the same motivation.”

“Like what?”

“Tony thinks he’s hit the big time in Hollywood. Nightingale is about to become an international figure. They’re leaving their baggage in the depot.”

But I knew Clete’s thought processes had not reached their destination.

“It’s Nightingale,” he said. “His shit-prints are on all of this.”

“Okay, he’s the Antichrist of St. Mary Parish,” I said. “You made your point. But the evidence that he’s hired a killer isn’t there. Tony Nemo hires killers. Rich guys like Jimmy hire lawyers.”

“Jimmy?”

“Nightingale,” I said.

“Right.” Clete refilled his cup and wrapped his hand around it and lifted it to his lips, then set it down without drinking. “I didn’t come here to tell you about my suspicions. You’re my friend, and I got to be up front with you about something.”

I felt the moisture in my mouth dry up, even the taste of the coffee disappear.

“The guy who sent the bomber after me didn’t care if he killed Homer or not,” Clete said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Tony Nine Ball or that punk in St. Mary Parish, the guy behind this is going off the board.”

“I didn’t hear that. You didn’t say it. That thought never crossed your mind.”

“I’m going to cap him, Streak.”

I took the tin cup from his hand and threw the coffee on the ground. “We’re done.”

“What would you do if it was Alafair?” he said. “Think about it. What would you do?”

All day I was troubled by thoughts about Jimmy Nightingale. And Levon Broussard. And the way Kevin Penny and Tony Nine Ball and Spade Labiche had gone out. I have always believed there is no mystery to human behavior. We’re the sum total of our deeds. But that wasn’t the way things had been working out.

I was fairly certain Labiche had been on a pad for Tony and was told to set up a situation with T. J. Dartez that would put me either in prison or on the injection table. Other than that, I had no idea who’d killed Penny or who was pulling the strings on the surreal hit man known only as Smiley.

At the center of it all were Jimmy Nightingale and his foil, Levon Broussard. I suspected an analyst would say both of them had borderline personality disorder. Or maybe a dissociative personality disorder. Unfortunately, those terms would apply to most drunks, addicts, fiction writers, and actors.

Both men descended from prominent families in a state where Shintoism in its most totalitarian form was not only a given but most obvious in its sad influence on the poor and uneducated, who accepted their self-abasing roles with the humility of serfs. But there was an existential difference between the two families. For the Nightingales, manners and morality were interchangeable. For Levon Broussard and his ancestors, honor was a religion, more pagan than Christian in concept, the kind of mind-set associated with a Templar Knight or pilots in the Japanese air force.

For the Broussards, honor was a virtue that, once tarnished, could never be restored. They may have been aristocrats and slave owners who lived inside a fable, but they still heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux and accepted genteel poverty and isolation if necessary but would be no more capable of changing their vision of the world and themselves than Robert E. Lee could have become a used-car salesman.

That was why I had a hard time believing that Levon could have tortured and murdered Kevin Penny. I had even greater difficulty believing he would throw in his lot with Tony Nemo in order to weigh the balance in his upcoming trial in Jefferson Davis Parish.

On Monday morning, I got a call at my office from Sherry Picard. “I need your help,” she said.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, trying to suppress my feelings about Clete’s involvement with younger women in general and this one in particular.

“Catch you at the wrong time?”

“Not at all.”

“I still have prints from the Penny homicide scene that I believe are significant. The fast-food trash. Penny kept the area around his motorcycle clean. That means the person who left it there was on the property the day Penny died.”

“What does this have to do with me?” I said.

“I want to fingerprint the Nightingale employees. I’m not getting anywhere.”

“St. Mary Parish was teleported from the fourteenth century. Historians come from far away to study it.”

“Did I do something to offend you?”

“I can’t help you in St. Mary.”

“How about with Levon Broussard?”

“What about him?”

“I want to fingerprint his wife. I think she may have been an accomplice.”

“I’m not convinced Levon is guilty, much less his wife.” I could feel her resentment coming through the phone. I tried again. “What makes you suspicious about his wife?”

“Her general attitude. I think she needs a flashlight shined up her ass.”

How about that?

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“Absolutely.”

“Absolutely what?”

“That I heard you,” I said.

“What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Are you pissed off because of Clete and me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We called it off. That’s why you’ve got your tally whacker in the hay baler?”

“I’ll talk with Levon, Ms. Picard.”

“Detective Picard.”

I softly replaced the receiver in the cradle.

That was not all Levon did. After confessing to an ADA in the Jeff Davis courthouse, he went out the side door, drove to a low-bottom joint north of Four Corners in Lafayette, got plowed out of his head, and at sunset drove across his lawn to the gallery on the front of his house and announced to his wife, “Hi, honey, I’m home.”

Helen called me on my cell. “Get over to Levon Broussard’s place. It looks like he’s lost it.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Who knows? His wife called in the 911. He’s in the yard with a Confederate flag and a sword, ranting at the sky. He fired a flare pistol across the bayou and asked some people in a boat to come in for a drink. I think they’re still emptying out their shoes.”

I drove to his house. The sky was a red-and-black ink wash, the oaks he had named for Confederate officers chattering with birds. A patrol car was parked in the neighbor’s drive; another was parked by the tennis courts across the two-lane highway. I got out of my pickup and walked around the side of the house and through a line of camellia bushes into the backyard. He was sitting at a folding table under a huge oak by the bayou, the faded battle flag he had kept encased in glass hanging from an overhead branch. It looked like cheesecloth against the sunset. The dried blood of the drummer boy reminded me of the coppery stains on the Shroud of Turin.

Levon lifted a bottle of Cold Duck above his head. “Welcome to Chaucer’s blue-collar good knight. Or is it Everyman I see? Wrong evening for bromides, Davey.”

His face was oily and dissolute with booze. He had stabbed his great-grandfather’s sword into the sod by his foot. His teeth were stained with wine.

“Looks like you’ve had quite a day,” I said.

“How’s that, Davey?”

“Confessing to an ADA in Jennings. Scaring your friends in New Iberia.”

“Not so about scaring my friends.”

I nodded at the flag lifting in the breeze above us. “That should be in a controlled environment, shouldn’t? Protected from dust and humidity?”

“It survived Yankee artillery at Owl Creek. That’s where the Eighteenth Louisiana got torn to pieces. In fifteen minutes, forty percent were casualties.”

“You can’t win on yesterday’s box score. Why lose because of it?”

“That one zipped by me.”

“The past has no reality. The world belongs to the living.”

“You know better. You see them in the mists out at Spanish Lake.”

“See whom?”

“I love you for your diction, if nothing else. The boys in butternut. You see them slogging through the cypresses.”

“Who told you that?”

“They did,” he replied.

I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.

“Why did you confess to a crime you didn’t commit?” I asked.

“You don’t believe me capable of killing the man who raped my wife?”

“You didn’t try to kill the black guys who raped her in Wichita.”

“I’m making up for lost time.”

“Not with toggle bolts and an electric drill.”

“I thought that was an inventive touch.”

“Quit lying, Levon.” I pulled the sword from the ground and stuck the brass guard in his face. “Look at the names on there: Cemetery Hill, Sharpsburg, Gaines’s Mill, Chancellorsville. Would the soldier who was at these places torture a man to death, even a piece of shit like Kevin Penny?”

“No, he would not. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”

“Good show. No cigar,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I placed my hand lightly on his upper arm. He shook his head and sucked in his cheeks. “Don’t underestimate the situation, Davey.”

“Call me Davey again, and I’ll break your jaw.”

He grinned up at me. “You’re a good guy. Butt out of this. Let others do their job.”

“You want one of our guys to cap you because you can’t do it yourself?”

“Maybe.”

“Get a card in the Screen Actors Guild. Come on. I’ll take you down to City Hall. Your lawyer will work out something. Helen isn’t going to let the guys in Jeff Davis cannibalize you.”

I heard the French doors open on the back porch, which was built of brick, high off the ground, and hung with ceiling fans. “Leave him alone,” Rowena said.

“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“He’s sick,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

I looked at her hands. They were empty. I walked toward her. “Don’t be a problem for me, Miss Rowena. Go back inside. We’ll take good care of him. You have my word.”

“He’s innocent.”

“I believe that.”

“So leave him here. Talk to him when he’s sober.”

“There’s a bigger question we need to deal with. Why is he confessing to a crime he’s not capable of committing?” There was a shine in his eyes. I looked at her a long time. “The question stands, Miss Rowena.”

“I’ll bring him to City Hall with our attorney in the morning.”

“You can bring yourself, but he’s going to jail. Right now.”

“Hold up there, Dave,” Levon said behind me. “No need for this.” He lifted the flag off the tree with the tip of his great-grandfather’s sword. “Let me put this away and we’ll be toggling off,” he said.

I looked back at Rowena. For the first time in the case involving the Jeff Davis Eight and Tony Nine Ball and Jimmy Nightingale and Levon Broussard and Kevin Penny, I knew what had happened.

Levon Broussard was transferred from custody in Iberia Parish to Jefferson Davis Parish. I did not believe he was guilty of the Kevin Penny homicide, but nonetheless I was glad he was gone, and I hoped that I would not be entangled with him and his wife for a while.

That wasn’t the way it worked out. Sherry Picard was in my office Thursday morning. I rose from my chair when she entered, but it was hard. “Good morning,” I said. “How are you? What brings you to town? Nice day.”

“You speak like you’re constipated,” she said.

“I have a tumor on my vocal cords,” I said. “It comes and goes. I’ve never understood it.”

“What’s with Levon Broussard? Why do you think he confessed?”

“Haven’t a clue,” I said, my face empty.

“Good try.”

“He’s in your jurisdiction, he’s your problem.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“Right now I’m worried about Clete Purcel. He has a terrible character defect. He’s a bad judge of people.”

I saw the color climb in her face. “I want to speak to Sheriff Soileau.”

“Bang on her door.”

“Listen—”

Then I saw her blink, the breath go out of her throat, a tremble in her chin.

I lowered my voice. “Look at me, Detective.”

“Look at you?” she said.

“Sometimes I get my head on sideways. I’m reactive. I don’t mean it.”

“I’m tired of getting fucked over,” she said.

I dropped my eyes. It was an unpleasant moment. Her need was obvious. There is no organizational injustice worse than putting a misogynistic cop or military officer in charge of female personnel. The abuse that follows is immediate, egregious, and cruel to the bone.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “I heard that you called one of your targets in Iraq or Afghanistan a sand nigger.”

“I was mad at Clete. He kept talking about the mamasan he killed by accident. I told him to let it go. I was deliberately crude about my own history. You think I’m a racist?”

“No.”

“You want to have lunch?” she said.

I opened the bottom drawer in my desk and lifted up a brown paper bag that was folded neatly across the top. Inside I kept a spare rain jacket and hood. “Brought my own.”

“I didn’t intend to hurt Clete. He’s a good guy.”

“So are you,” I said.

“Oh, yeah?” She touched at a mole on her chin and looked at the ball of her finger. “See you around, hotshot. Keep it in your pants.”

I watched her walk out the door. I had a feeling that Sherry Picard cast a large net. Maybe that was just my imagination.

When Helen and I arrived at the crime scene, the rain was driving hard on the bay, turning it into mist, sweeping in sheets across the roof of the house and deck. The 911 call came from a neighbor named Vidrine who said the daughter of his maid had told him about a man carrying a rifle. The neighbor had gone to the Nightingale camp and discovered the bodies. A fireman in a yellow raincoat with a hood met us at the door. He looked like a bewhiskered monk staring out of a cave. Behind us I could see the headlights and flashers of several emergency vehicles streaming through the rain.

“The dead guy is by the couch,” the fireman said. “One bullet wound through the back and out the chest. What looks like a double-edged puncture t’rew the throat.”

“Where’s the woman?” Helen said.

“In the kitchen,” the fireman said. “Nothing’s been touched or moved.”

“Good job,” she said. She went into the kitchen and came back out. “Emmeline Nightingale,” she said. “What a mess.”

“That’s the chauffeur on the floor,” I said. “His name is Swede Jensen. Clete got him a job as an extra in Levon’s movie.”

“Wrong place, wrong time?”

I nodded toward the bedroom. “Looks like they were getting it on.”

I went to the kitchen door. I had latex on; so did Helen. There was no brass on the floor or counters or table. It was impossible to count the number of wounds. Emmeline’s expression was one I had seen before: It was devoid of emotion. The eyes were fixed on nothing. The heart-bursting level of fear and pain, the violent theft of life and soul, the desperate plea that never left the throat would remain unrecorded, written on the wind, in the memory of no one except the killer.

Helen flipped open her phone and called the dispatcher. “Find Jimmy Nightingale and tell him to call me immediately. Tell his people nothing, and don’t take no from any of them. Out.” She looked at me. “I’ll take care of things here. Go up to the Vidrine place and talk to the little girl who saw the man with the rifle.”

“Got it,” I said.

“How do you figure this?”

“I don’t get it at all.”

“In what way?” she said.

“If the shooter is Smiley, I don’t see the motivation.”

“Sex,” she said. “When somebody does a number like that on a woman, it’s sex.”

I drove to the camp up the road where the little girl was waiting for me with her mother on a screened-in gallery. Their clothes were damp from the mist blowing through the screen.

“Can we go inside?” I said.

“Yes, suh, we just didn’t want to miss you,” the mother said. She was overweight and wore a dress and a man’s shirt with cutoff sleeves.

We went inside the small living room. The owners were gone.

“What happened to your employer?” I asked.

“Mr. Vidrine was upset,” the woman replied. “He said this ain’t suppose to be happening down here.”

I asked the little girl her name, then asked her to describe the man who carried a gun.

“His mouth was real red,” she said. “His name was Smiley.”

“What did his rifle look like?”

“It had a telescope on top and a can on the front.”

“What’d he say to you?”

“He told me the story of where flying fish come from. Sharks was always chasing and eating them, then a magic lady under the sea gave them wings so they could pop out of the waves and fly away.”

“That’s a pretty good story,” I said.

“It wasn’t him killed them people, huh?” she said.

“We’re not sure, Loretta. Did Smiley tell you where he was going or where he lives?”

“No, suh.”

“What kind of car did he have?”

“It was blue.”

I asked about the license and the model, but these were not the kinds of things a child her age would take note of.

“Maybe the man in the car that passed him might know,” she said.

“Which man? What car?”

“It was purple,” she said. “What do you call them kind? The top is like canvas.”

“A convertible.”

“I seen Smiley drive up the road in his li’l blue car. The convertible drove down to the point. Then the convertible come back up the road and I didn’t see it no more.”

“Think hard, Loretta. What did the man in the convertible look like?”

“I couldn’t see good. It was raining,” she replied. “He was big and had on a li’l hat.”

I stared at the mist and fog rolling off the bay, the bolts of lightning that flickered like snakes’ tongues in the clouds. What in God’s name are you doing, Clete? I thought.

“Can we go, suh?” the mother said. “I got to go home and fix supper.”

“Yes, y’all have been very helpful. Thank you,” I said.

The girl looked up at me. “I don’t t’ink Smiley would hurt anyone. Would he, suh?”

I didn’t answer and instead said good night and drove back to the crime scene. The paramedics were trundling the bodies on gurneys to an ambulance. Inside the house, Helen was talking on her cell phone to Jimmy Nightingale. Her face looked old when she hung up.

“Bad?” I said.

“He cried. I can never read that guy.”

“The little girl told me a big guy wearing a small hat and driving a purple convertible passed Smiley on the road. Smiley was headed north, the convertible was headed south.”

“Clete?” she said.

“Sounds like it.”

“You get his butt in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

Clete left the concourse and worked his way to the other side of the Dome, hoping to come up on the backside of the stage. If he could make it that far, he was going to walk onto the stage. It was undignified, self-abasing, and maybe the act of a public fool. What did it matter? He thought of the graves he had dug with an e-tool, the bodies hung in trees after the VC got finished with them, the people who had sat on scalding rooftops in the Lower Ninth Ward, waiting for the helicopters. This was the kind of world Clete believed Jimmy Nightingale would preside over. The man used people as he would a suppository. Clete wanted to print him on a wall.

But this was a fantasy, and he knew it. As a boy, Clete had never been a bully, although older and bigger boys had bullied him. He even forgave the kid from the Iberville Project who bashed him with the pipe that left the scar through his eyebrow. The kid had grown up no differently than Clete and later died at Khe Sanh. For Clete, the myth of Wyatt Earp was not a myth. You smoked them when they dealt the play but not before, even if you had to eat a bullet. And for that reason alone, Clete would always be at a disadvantage in dealing with a cunning man like Nightingale, who, minutes earlier, had incorporated the racism of Bobby Earl into his campaign while acting as the bestower of forgiveness.

Clete passed a restroom and a locked office, then found a door that opened onto a storage area under the stands. He opened a second door onto an entryway from which he could see the backside of Nightingale as he introduced a famous country singer wearing a thick-felt tall-crowned white cowboy hat and a pale blue western-cut suit stitched with flowers.

Clete also saw a beer vendor whose pants and shirt looked dipped in starch, the trousers stuffed inside rubber boots, a Nightingale baseball cap sitting on his eyebrows. He was a short, pudgy man with lips like red licorice.

Clete stared at the vendor but didn’t move. What was he waiting for? He started again toward the aisle, his gaze riveted on the vendor’s neck. Let it play out, a voice said.

His stomach was churning. Maybe he’s just an ordinary guy, he thought. What if you start something and security gets the wrong idea and the guy gets hurt just so Nightingale is safe?

But he knew the real reason for his unwillingness to act. The weight on his heart was the size of an anvil.

“What are you doing here, asshole?” a voice said.

Clete turned around. Once again he was looking into the face that was one of many he could never rid himself of. The faces were out of a subculture that fed on need and dysfunction and systemic cruelty, in this case the face of an old-time gunbull whose measure of self-worth was the degree to which he could inspire terror in others. He wore tight gray slacks with high pockets and a shirt the color of tin and a bolo tie and a salt-and-pepper mustache as stiff as wire and a belt equipped with Mace, handcuffs, a slapjack, and a blue-black semi-auto with checkered grips.

“Birl Wooster is the full name, isn’t it?” Clete said.

“When I woke up, it was. Answer my question.”

“I just saw a beer vendor who might be the guy called Smiley.”

“You’re talking about this guy out of Florida?”

“He’s down there.”

“Where?”

Clete turned around and looked down the aisle. “I don’t see him now.”

“Because he was never there.”

“A guy who fits his description was there.”

“And you’re a goddamn liar.”

Clete’s eyes searched the crowd again. “I think we blew an opportunity. But maybe not.”

“You know why I don’t like you, Purcel? One guy like you taints a whole department. It’s like trying to launder the stink out of shit.”

“You screwed the pooch, dickhead. By the way, that black kid you killed on the levee? He was nineteen.”

“Until he stopped being nineteen,” Wooster said. “I lost a lot of sleep over that.”

“How’s it feel?” Clete said.

“How’s what feel?”

Clete shook his head. “Don’t pay attention to me.”

Wooster removed a toothpick from his shirt pocket and put it into his mouth. “I’m going to dial you up one of these days, Purcel.”

The crowd began to drain from the Dome.

“I hear there’s a reception at the casino,” Clete said.

“Not for you, there isn’t.”

“See you around, Wooster. Don’t beat up on any handicapped people.”

Wooster elevated the toothpick with his teeth, his eyes veiled.

Sherry Picard and I moved deeper into the crowd at the casino. The carpets were the color of a freshly sliced pomegranate, the gaming tables covered with lavender felt. Giant bronze replicas of palm trees looked down on the tables. Each gambling machine was outfitted with a padded leather-backed chair that gave the patron a sense of comfort and security. The ceilings were high and spacious and created the impression of a separate universe but one that allowed no view of the outside world.

Jimmy Nightingale was at the beverage tables, surrounded by hundreds of well-wishers, his security people around him but having a hard time of it.

“There’s Clete,” Sherry said.

“Where?”

“By the door.”

I stood on my toes and tried to see over the heads of the crowd. “I don’t see him.”

“I’m almost sure it was him. He’s gone now.”

I pushed my way through the crowd. Many of them were drunk or on the edge of drunk. Over the heads I could see Bobby Earl with Nightingale. Somebody clamped me on the shoulder. “Robicheaux! You back on the hooch? Son of a bitch, I thought you were on the side of the tree huggers. You’re one of us, you old bastard.”

He was a big, sweaty, red-faced man whose skin oozed grease and whose rumpled suit smelled like a locker room. He threw a meaty arm over me, a well of stink rising from his armpit. I had no idea who he was. “Goddamn it, son, it’s good to see you. This November we’re gonna kick some ass. Who’s this lady with you?”

Sherry opened her badge in his face. “On the job. Beat feet, fatso.”

“What was that?” he said, releasing me. “What’d you call me?”

She pushed him in the chest. “You heard me.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. “You can’t push people around like that.”

I was still forty feet from Nightingale. I felt like I was sinking in wet concrete.

“Somebody call security!” the fat man said. “There’s a crazy woman here.”

I thought I saw Clete on the edge of the crowd. I changed direction and headed toward him. I popped out on the back edge of the crowd and saw the men’s room door open and smoke billow out. Clete was nowhere in sight. A short man in a panama hat and oversize white slacks and two-tone shoes and a dark blue shirt with bananas printed on it, worn outside the belt, was walking from the restroom through the banks of gambling machines and the throng that had come through a side entrance and was headed for the free booze and food.

“Smiley!” I shouted.

He did not turn around or change his stride. I went after him. A band up on a platform broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

It’s fall now, and the election is over, and Jimmy Nightingale is a member of the United States Senate, probably headed for an even grander career. The assassin nicknamed Smiley disappeared inside Mexico or the Caribbean Islands, depending on which law enforcement agency you talk to. For many legal reasons, neither Levon nor Rowena Broussard ever stood trial for the death of Kevin Penny. But the real reason was that nobody cared. In fact, Levon and Rowena adopted Homer. I knew the truth about Rowena’s culpability, but I joined ranks with those who looked the other way. Perhaps I’ve become a cynic. Or better said, I’ve learned to let the season have its way, to not fight against the pull of the earth and the tidal movements of the oceans and the admonitions that the race is not to the swift and that the earth abides forever.

Clete had saved the life of a man he hated and may have contributed to the ascendancy of a man who would write his name on the clouds in the worst possible way. In the meantime, a brave woman lost her life from a bullet that ballistics proved to have ricocheted from Clete’s snub-nose. Although exonerated, the boy who fired the round will probably live with guilt the rest of his life. Whenever Clete and I are in New Orleans, we ask him to dinner. He never accepts the invitation.

I visit Molly’s grave, and I try to financially help the widow of T. J. Dartez. I sleep little, welcome each dawn, and bring Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon into the house and feed them no matter how muddy they are. Through the summer, I watched the completion of Levon’s film, and in December, Alafair and I went to see its screening in Los Angeles. I had a strange experience in the theater; to this day, I cannot explain it.

The scene was on Beauregard’s left flank on a gray spring dawn outside the settlement know as Shiloh Church. The actors wore faded butternut, some with gold or blue piping, and were crouched among hemlock trees, looking up a hill where Yankee artillery was already in place, loaded with grape and chain and canister and exploding shells, the crews de-elevating in anticipation of the Confederate charge. There could be no doubt about the outcome. The commanding Confederate officer, a purple plume in his hat, rode his horse up and down a shallow creek with his sword drawn.

“No matter what happens, boys, form on me!” he said. “You’re men of the South! Be not afraid! God and our people are with you! Drummer, begin your beat!”

The entire regiment rose to its feet, and a boy not over twelve, the one I’d seen splashing his way through the shallows at Spanish Lake, began a ragged cadence that set the regiment in motion like stick figures lurching unsteadily into a wind, their faces white, their equipment banging, some of them barefoot. Halfway up the hill, the artillery crews at the top of the slope fired in sequence down the line like a string of giant firecrackers, then reloaded and fired at will. The slaughter was immediate. The slope was blanketed with fog, the air filled with the Rebel yell, a fox call that sounded like “Woo, woo, woo,” the green of the hillside and the wildflowers slick with gore.

The aggregate of smoke and dust and river mist seemed filled with bolts of lightning, as though a thunderstorm from heaven had lost its way and descended upon the earth. Inside the smoke, the battle flag of Granny Lee flipped back and forth on a staff, barely visible against a pale sun, its cloth rent with grapeshot. The commanding officer was still seated on his horse, his plumed hat on the point of his sword, shouting, “Don’t falter, boys! We’ve got them, by God! Just a little farther! Form on me!”

The drummer boy and most of the others died or were wounded in under ten minutes. Was this magnificent and tragic ordeal, one that could compare to Golgotha, the manufacture of evil men who wanted to keep our brothers and sisters enslaved? I will never believe that. I think of each dawn as a gift, and I try to remember that the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux save us from ourselves and the curse of mediocrity. But maybe that’s just another way of saying fuck it. You’ve got me. I never figured out anything.