Desmond Cormier’s success story was an improbable one, even among the many self-congratulatory rags-to-riches tales we tell ourselves in the ongoing saga of our green republic, one that is forever changing yet forever the same, a saga that also includes the graves of Shiloh and cinders from aboriginal villages. That is not meant to be a cynical statement. Desmond’s story was a piece of Americana, assuring us that wealth and a magical kingdom are available to the least of us, provided we do not awaken our own penchant for breaking our heroes on a medieval wheel and revising them later, safely downwind from history.

Desmond was not only born to privation, in the sleeper of a semi in which his mother tied off the umbilical cord and said goodbye forever; he was nurtured by his impoverished grandparents on the Chitimacha Indian Reservation in the back room of a general store that was hardly more than an airless shack. It stood on a dirt road amid treeless farmland where shade and a cold soda pop on the store gallery were considered luxuries, before the casino operators from Jersey arrived and, with the help of the state of Louisiana, convinced large numbers of people that a vice is a virtue.

Like his grandparents, he belonged to that group of mixed-blood Indians unkindly called redbones. His hair was cinnamon-colored, more a characteristic of Cajun women than of men. His skin was as smooth as clay, almost hairless, his eyes a washed-out blue and set too wide, like those of someone with fetal alcohol syndrome. He was self-conscious about his racial background, as most of his people were, and smiled rarely, but when he did, he could light a room. I always had the sense that Desmond was trying to shrink inside his clothes, as though both fear and a great sadness lived inside him. Like Proteus blowing his wreathed horn, Desmond constantly created and re-created himself, perhaps never knowing who he was.

No matter. Even as a little boy, he was not one to accept the world as it was, no more than he would accept the hand he’d been dealt. By the time he was twelve, he seemed destined to remain skinny and frail and a carrier of intestinal worms and head lice. One morning, behind his grandparents’ general store, bare-chested under a white sun, his little body running with sweat, he roped a cinder block to each end of a broom handle and lifted. And kept lifting. And squeezing a rubber ball silently on the school bus while the bigger boys laughed at him and often pushed him down on the gravel. By the time he was fourteen, he had the body and the latent animus of a man, and the boys who had bullied him now tried to ingratiate themselves with a weak, self-deprecating smile. He responded with the benign attention of someone watching a stranger blow soap bubbles, until they bowed their heads and went silent, lest they provoke him.

After high school, he waited tables in the French Quarter and became an apprentice to a sidewalk artist in Jackson Square, and discovered that he was better than his teacher. Sometimes I would see him in the early a.m., disheveled, paint on his shirt and in his hair, eating beignets out of a paper bag and drinking café au lait from a Styrofoam cup. On a particularly cold and gray January morning, I saw him hunched on an iron bench inside the fog by St. Louis Cathedral, like an unevolved creature from an earlier time. He was not wearing a coat and his sleeves were rolled high up on his arms, as though in defiance of the weather. He seemed melancholy, his insouciance a pretense for his loneliness, and I sat down beside him without being invited. The air smelled of the river, dead beetles in a storm sewer, the wine and beer cups in the gutters, damp soil and night-blooming flowers and lichen on stone. It was a smell like a Caribbean city rather than America. He told me he was going to Hollywood so he could become a film director.

“Don’t you have to study to do that?” I said.

“I already have,” he replied.

“Where?”

He pointed a finger to his head. “In here.”

I grinned good-naturedly but didn’t speak.

“Don’t believe me, huh?” he said.

“What do I know?”

“You still go to Mass?” he said.

“Sure.”

“That means you believe in the things that are on the other side of the physical world. That’s what painting is. That’s what making movies is. You enter a magical world others have no knowledge of.”

I got up from the bench. I felt old. My war wounds ached. The hardness of the bench was printed on my buttocks. I heard the Angelus ringing in the cathedral’s tower, perhaps as a reminder of our mutability and ultimate fate.

“Good luck,” I said. “Kick some butt in California.”

There was a smear of powdered sugar on his cheek. For just a moment I thought of a pauper child who might have ferreted his way into a bakery. He was smiling when he looked up at me.

“What’s the joke?” I asked.

“Anything you get with luck isn’t worth owning, Dave. I thought you knew that.”

We reached the body and the cross with a department rescue boat at 10:34 p.m. In the glare of searchlights, two divers jumped off the bow, freed the cross from a submerged tree, and glided it onto a sandspit, the waves rippling over the dead woman’s face. She was tied to the beams with clothesline. Her eyes were open; they were the same pale blue as Desmond’s.

Our sheriff was Helen Soileau. She had worked her way up from meter maid to detective grade at NOPD and later became my homicide partner at the New Iberia Police Department. After the city department merged with the parish, she was elected our first female sheriff.

Helen and a paramedic and Sean and I waded through the shallows onto the sand. Helen shone her flashlight on the body. “Jesus.”

I’d been wrong in my earlier description. The dead woman was not just fastened to the cross with clothesline. Her ankles were nailed sideways to the wood, which twisted her knees out of alignment with her hips. Helen stooped down and straightened the dead woman’s dress and untied her wrists. A paramedic unzipped a body bag. I squatted down beside the cross. “How long do you think she was in the water?”

Helen held her flashlight beam on the dead woman’s face. “She wasn’t submerged. Hard to say. Maybe eight or nine hours.”

“That doesn’t compute with the 911 calls about a scream early this morning,” I said.

“Maybe this isn’t the same woman,” Helen said.

“We picked up a tennis shoe from the beach,” I said. “A size seven.”

“That’s about the right size,” she said. “No wounds I can see except on the ankles. No ligature marks or bruising on the neck. Who the hell would do this?”

We were both wearing latex gloves. I touched one of the nails that had been driven through the woman’s ankles. “Whoever did it knew something about Roman crucifixions. The nails went through the ankles rather than the tops of the feet. The bones in the feet would have torn loose from the nails.”

Helen looked down at the body, her face empty. “Poor girl. She can’t be more than twenty-five.”

I remained on my haunches and took the flashlight from Helen’s hand and shone it on the ankle wounds. They were clean, as though they had not bled. There was a cheap metal chain around one ankle. A tiny piece of silver wire barely clung to one of the links.

In South Louisiana, religion is a complex matter. Not all of it originated in Jerusalem or Rome. Some of it has origins in the Caribbean Islands or western Africa. For many poor whites and people of color, the gris-gris — bad fortune or an evil spell — can be avoided only by wearing a perforated dime on a string around a person’s ankle. I knew a white couple, Cajuns who couldn’t read or write, who tied a string around their infant child’s throat to prevent the croup from getting into her chest. The child strangled to death in her crib.

“See something?” Helen said.

I stood up, my knees popping. “If she was wearing a charm, it didn’t do her much good.”

“I don’t know about that,” Helen said.

A ball of yellow heat lightning rolled through a cluster of storm clouds and disappeared without making a sound. “I didn’t catch that.”

“There’s not a scratch on her,” Helen said. “You know what the crabs do to any kind of carcass?”

I looked across the bay at Cypremort Point. All the lights were on in Desmond’s house. I wondered if he or his friend was watching us through the telescope. I wondered if I had ever really known Desmond Cormier.

“Let’s get out of here,” Helen said. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

Clete called me at the department late the same afternoon and asked me to come to his office. It was located on Main Street in a century-old brick building half a block from the Shadows. The receptionist was gone, and the folding metal chairs were empty except for one where a man with long hair as slick and shiny as black plastic was cleaning his nails with a penknife. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and gum wrappers and an apple core and a banana peel. Clete sat behind his desk in the back room, the door ajar. He waved me in. “Close the door,” he said.

There were printouts and two folders and a legal pad on his desk. Through the window I could see his spool table and umbrella on the concrete pad behind the building, and the drawbridge at Burke Street and the old convent across the bayou.

“What’s up?” I said.

“I made several calls about Hugo Tillinger. It’s a complex case. It also stinks.”

“I talked with Helen about him, Clete. Let us take it from here.”

“Is everything okay? I mean with me not reporting Tillinger right away?”

I avoided his eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Did you ID the body of the girl on the cross?”

“She’s the daughter of a Baptist minister in Cade. Her name is Lucinda Arceneaux. She was a volunteer for the Innocence Project.”

He flinched.

“That doesn’t mean she knew Hugo Tillinger,” I said.

“Stop it.”

He got up from his desk and opened the door. “Come in here, Travis.”

The man with black hair greased straight back folded his knife and dropped it in his slacks. He had the beginnings of a paunch and cheeks that looked like they had been rubbed with chimney soot. He wore his slacks below the belly button; hair protruded from the top of his belt.

“This is Travis Lebeau,” Clete said. “Tell Dave what you know about Hugo Tillinger.”

“While he was being held for trial, I’d bring ice to his cell,” Travis said.

“Ice?” I said.

“That’s what I did in this particular jail. I brought ice from the kitchen and got paid in smokes or whatever.”

Three teardrop tats dripped from his left eye. Two blue stars the size of cigar burns were tattooed on the back of his neck.

“Travis was in the AB,” Clete said. “Now he’s trying to do a few solids to make up for the past.”

“I thought the AB was for life,” I said.

“They sold me to the niggers. The BGF,” he replied. “They claimed I snitched on a guy. I never snitched on anybody in my life.”

“Go ahead about Tillinger,” Clete said.

“We played checkers on the floor, between the bars,” Travis said. “He knew he was gonna get the needle. He said the jury and the judge and cops and his lawyer were working for Satan. I told him they don’t need Satan, they’re working for themselves, that’s bad enough. Can I sit down? I feel like a fireplug that’s about to get pissed on.”

“Sure,” Clete said.

“He went on and on, like all these reborn people, you know, they cain’t shut up talking about it,” Travis said. “He told me he was a drunk, a rage-a-holic or whatever, then he got saved by the Pentecostals at a tent rival. He was a pain in the ass to listen to.”

“You’re going a little fast for me, Travis,” I said.

“I’m saying Tillinger wasn’t a criminal or the kind of guy who burns up his family. He ripped all the posters off his daughter’s walls when he was drunk, and yelled and hollered in the yard, but that was it. I believed him. So did the colored girl who showed up.”

“Which colored girl?” I asked.

“Her name was Lucinda. She started visiting him right after he got sentenced. She said the people at the Innocence Project were taking his case. She said she knew people in the movie business, maybe some of the people who got Hurricane Carter out of prison. It gave him hope. But I thought he was gonna ride the needle from the jump.”

“Why?” I said.

“The governor was running for president. Guys who want to be president don’t get elected by being kind to guys charged with murdering their family.”

“What was the black woman’s last name?” I said.

“He called her Miss Lucinda. That’s all.”

“A rage-a-holic wouldn’t set fire to his house?” I said.

“Maybe a guy like me would. Tillinger didn’t belong in the system. Everybody knew it. You know what con-wise is, right?”

I didn’t reply.

“I did double nickels back to back. I did them straight up and went out max time. I burnt up my brother-in-law in his car and did a guy inside. In the chow line. For one of these teardrops on my face. I didn’t mean to kill my brother-in-law, but that’s the way it worked out. I deserved what I got. Tillinger is what we call a virgin. He never got his cherry busted. That means he was never in the life. He belongs in the PTA and shit like that.”

“We don’t need all that information,” I said.

“About the hit in the chow line?” he said. “You don’t like that? You think I give a shit if anybody knows?”

I didn’t answer.

“Look at me, man,” he said. “You got any idea of what those fucking black animals did to me? My best friends sold me for two cartons of smokes. They said, ‘Rip his feathers off.’ I got to live with what they did every night of my life. Fuck you, asshole.”

His eyes were brimming.

During the next three days I talked with Lucinda Arceneaux’s employer and fellow employees at the catering service in Los Angeles, and her former roommate, and a boy in Westwood who used to go to the public library with her. They all spoke of her good character and gentle disposition. None had an explanation for her disappearance.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice referred me to three correctional officers who had known Hugo Tillinger. Two had no opinion of him; the third, an old-time gunbull, said, “Tillinger? Yeah, I knew that lying son of a bitch. Turn your back on him and he’d gut you from your belly button to your chin. Anything else you want to know?”

On Friday I went into Helen’s office and told her what I had.

“What are your feelings about Tillinger?” she said.

“I don’t see him as a viable suspect in the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux. An escaped convict in a prison uniform would have more on his mind than committing a ritualistic homicide with a cross and a hypodermic needle.”

Helen looked at a legal pad on her desk. “There were break-ins at three fish camps not far from Cypremort Point. A white shirt with blue tabs on it was found half buried by a boathouse. He’s here. The question is why.”

“He jumped on the first freight he could find going out of Texas.”

“What if he had a partner?” she said.

“We’re looking at the wrong guy, Helen.”

“He burned his wife and daughter to death. Don’t tell me he’s the wrong guy.”

“I want to talk to Desmond Cormier and Antoine Butterworth again.”

“You’ve got a bias, Streak. You don’t like Hollywood people.”

“That isn’t true. I don’t like anyone who thinks he’s entitled.”

She twiddled her ballpoint on her desk blotter. “Okay. By the way, you have a new partner.”

“Pardon?”

“Her name is Bailey Ribbons.”

“Who is Bailey Ribbons?”

“I hired her two days ago. She’s twenty-eight years old. She was a middle school teacher in New Orleans and has a graduate degree in psychology. She was a dispatcher with NOPD for eighteen months.”

“That’s her entire experience?”

“What she doesn’t know, you’ll teach her.”

“Is this an affirmative-action situation?” I said.

“I hired her because of her intelligence. I’m going to get a lot of criticism for that. I don’t need it from you. Stay here.”

She left the office and returned three minutes later with a woman who seemed to have walked out of a motion picture that had little connection to the present. She had dark brown hair and clear skin and eyes like light trapped in sherry, and she wore black shoes and a white blouse with a frilly collar buttoned at the throat and a skirt that hung well below the knees. What struck me most were her warm smile and her erect posture. I felt strange, even awkward and boyish, when I took her hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Detective Robicheaux,” she said.

“You, too, Miss Bailey,” I said. “Call me Dave.”

“Hi, Dave.”

I started to speak but couldn’t remember what I’d wanted to say.

“Bring Bailey up to date on the Arceneaux investigation,” Helen said.

“Sure,” I said. “Helen?”

“What?”

Again my head went blank. Bailey Ribbons was too young, too inexperienced, too likely to be resented by older members of the department.

“I’ll check out a cruiser,” I said. “If Bailey is free, we can head down to Cypremort Point.”

“She’s free,” Helen said. “Bye, Dave.”

I walked downstairs and out the door with Bailey Ribbons. She smelled like flowers. I felt my palms tingling and a fish bone in my throat.

“Did I say something inappropriate?” she asked.

“No, ma’am, it’s a pleasure to have you aboard.”

“I appreciate your courtesy. I realize some might think I don’t have the qualifications for the job, but I’ll give it my best.”

I looked at her profile, the radiance in her face, and felt my heart beating.

God, don’t let me be an old fool, I prayed.

The duck camp was an old one, a desiccated shack abandoned in a swampy area southwest of Avery Island, the gum and cypress and persimmon trees strung with dead vines. We parked the cruiser and waded through a bog that was iridescent with oil and gasoline. The paramedics, three uniformed deputies, and Helen and Cormac Watts were already there. Helen and Cormac were wearing rubber boots and latex gloves. A swamp maple that was dying of saline intrusion, its limbs scaled with lichen, stood on the far side of the shack, a huge teardrop-shaped object suspended from one of the thickest limbs. The droning sound in the air was as loud as a beehive.

The 911 had been called in by a fisherman who had run out of gas and pulled up onto the hummock, dumbfounded and sickened by what he saw.

The wind changed, and a smell like a bucket full of dead rats washed over us. I heard Bailey gag. I cleared my throat and spat and handed her a clean handkerchief. “Put it over your nose.”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“That’s a smell no one gets used to. Just do it, Miss Bailey.”

“Don’t call me ‘miss’ anymore, Dave.”

“You got it.”

A deputy was stringing crime-scene tape through the trees. Helen was standing on a high place by the front of the shack. The shack had no door and no glass in the windows. The floor was caked with dirt and the shells of dead beetles. Helen was breathing through her mouth, her chest rising and falling slowly.

“Before we get to that mess in the tree, I want you to see this,” she said. “It may be the only forensics we take out of here.”

Heavy boot prints led into the shack and out through a hole broken in the boards on the far side, still jagged and unweathered, as though recently splintered. There were drag marks across the floor and stains that red ants were feeding on.

The stench was overwhelming now. I tried to envision the man who wore the boots. They were probably steel-toed, the strings laced through brass eyelets, the leather stiff, even gnarled, from wear in a swamp or on the floor of an offshore drilling rig. Or maybe they were the boots of a man with dark jowls and swirls of body hair who deliberately did not wash or shave and wore his odor like a weapon. I could almost hear his feet on the floor as he dragged his victim outside, the stride measured, his hand hooked in the victim’s shirt, his weight coming down with a sound like a wooden clock striking the hour.

Our departmental photographer was clicking away, a scarf wrapped across the bottom half of his face. Then he vomited inside the scarf.

We walked on dry ground to the other side of the shack. The body of a slight man dressed in khaki work clothes hung upside down inside a fish net. His arms were bound behind him. One ankle was roped to his wrists so the calf was pulled tight against the inside of the knee. His facial features were in an advanced state of decomposition and had the squinted look of a newly born infant. Flies crawled over almost every inch of his skin. A knotted walking stick with a sharpened tip had been shoved through the chest and out the back.

“You ever see him before?” Helen said.

“It’s hard to say,” I replied.

“Why is his leg tied like that?” she said.

The image was familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen it. I shook my head.

“It’s from the tarot,” Bailey said.

“The fortune-telling deck?” Helen said.

“It’s a compilation of medieval and Egyptian iconography,” Bailey said. “The gypsies carried it through the ancient world into modern times.”

“So?” Helen said.

“The victim is positioned to look like the Hanged Man,” Bailey said.

“What’s the Hanged Man?” Helen said.

“Some say Judas, others say Peter,” Bailey said. “Others say Sebastian, the Roman soldier martyred for his faith. In death he makes the sign of the cross. In the deck he’s generally associated with self-sacrifice.”

Helen stepped away from the tree and stared at the ground, her hands on her hips. “What’s your opinion, Dave?” she asked. “You still don’t think Hugo Tillinger is our guy?”

“Maybe Tillinger killed his family or maybe he didn’t,” I said. “But I doubt he’s a student of Western symbolism.”

“Who the hell is?” Helen said. “I don’t think this is about tarot cards. I think this is about a guy who likes to kill people and wants to scare the shit out of the entire community.”

I looked at Bailey. She was obviously struggling to hide her discomfort about the odor of the victim; also, I suspected she was wondering if her education and knowledge were about to make her a lonely and isolated member of our department.

“Nobody saw anything except the fisherman who found the body?” I said to Helen.

“No,” she said. “This place will be washed away in another year or so. Cormac says the body has probably been here a week.”

We went back to the other side of the shack. The sun was shining through the trees, the leaves moving in the wind. I could hear a buoy clanging on the bay.

“Maybe the way the leg is tied is coincidence,” I said. “But the walking stick through the chest doubles the coincidence.”

“I don’t understand,” Helen said.

“Our own deck of playing cards comes from the tarot,” I said. “The suit of clubs come from the Suit of Wands. The Suit of Wands upside down is associated with failure and dependency.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Helen said.

“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.

“Both of you are sure about this?” she said.

“As sure as you can get when you put yourself inside the mind of a lunatic,” I replied.

One deputy lifted another deputy so he could cut the rope that bound the net to the tree limb. Neither of them could avoid touching the body nor escape its full odor. The body thudded on the ground in a rush of flies, the jaw springing open, a carrion beetle popping from the mouth.

The helicopter, a vintage Huey that had no external armament — what we called a “slick” in Vietnam — came in low over the water, yawing, smoke twisting from the airframe, the Plexiglas pocked from automatic-weapons fire, a bloody bandage taped over one eye of the kid on the joystick.

An actor dressed like a third-world peasant clung to one of the skids. The helicopter roared over our heads, flattening the sawgrass around the levee where we stood. The moment sent me back to the sights and sounds and collective madness of an Eden-like Asian country gone wrong, a place I had consigned to my dreams and hoped I’d never see again.

In the dreams I heard the metallic klatch on the night trail but not the explosion. Instead I was painted with light, my body auraed with cascading leaves and air vines and dirt that had a fecund odor, like that of a freshly dug grave. I watched my steel pot roll silently down the trail. To no avail, I opened and closed my mouth to force the deafness out of my ears. Inside the great green darkness of the trail, I could see the silhouettes of my patrol against the muzzle flashes of their weapons and also the weapons of the tiny men in pajamas who lived on one rice ball a day and wore sandals made from rubber tires and drank mosquito-infested water hand-cupped from a stream. The flashes resembled electricity leaping inside a cloud of dust and smoke that blotted out the stars.

A black medic from Jersey City, whom we called Spaceman because he was the bravest kid in the unit and also a Section Eight in the making, was suddenly sitting on top of me, pasting a cellophane cigarette wrapper over the hole in my chest, thumping my chest with his fist. There was a rush of air into my lungs, and my hearing came back, and I heard him say, “Breathe, Loot. Chuck got to breathe. One, two. One, two. My main man goin’ back alive in ’65. Motherfucker got it made.”

My patrol rigged a stretcher with web gear and carried me all night while shells from an offshore battery arced overhead and exploded with a whump in the jungle. At first light we could see the LZ in the distance, flames climbing inside the elephant grass on the hillside, men in black picking over the dead. I heard someone say “We’re fucked.”

Then the slick came out of a molten sun, already loaded with wounded grunts, a Vietnamese civilian dangling from one of the skids. He let go and fell sixty feet into the jungle, grinding his legs like a man on a bicycle. The pilot was a nineteen-year-old warrant officer from Galveston. A compress was tied on one side of his face, his cheek streaked with blood. When he landed, I saw a decal of a death’s head on his helmet. Under the image were the words “I am the giver of death.”

I became one of many on the floor of the slick. The others had an M for morphine painted on their foreheads. I never had a chance to thank the pilot. I heard later that he did not survive the war.

I was not fond of talking about the war or even remembering it. And grand as the intention might be, I hated ceremonies that took me back to it. I had laid down my sword and shield a long time ago, down by the riverside, and did not want to pick them up again.

“You okay?” I heard Bailey say.

“Sure,” I said.

We had just arrived and hadn’t spoken to anyone on the set. The helicopter landed on the levee, descending slowly enough to let the stuntman drop safely to the ground. He limped away, holding his back.

“Good job, but we got to shoot it again,” Desmond said. “A cloud went across the sun. We need the silhouette of the impaled man against a red sun.”

“I’m done, Des,” the stuntman said. “I think I tore my sciatica.”

“Give me your clothes.”

“Here?”

“Where else?” Desmond said.

The stuntman went behind the helicopter to undress. Desmond wasn’t so shy. He worked off his golf shirt, stuffed it into a pants pocket, and stripped down to his jockstrap, balancing on one foot.

“You want a codpiece, Des?” someone called out.

“I left it in your mother’s bedroom,” he replied.

He dressed in the clothes of the peasant and turned around. He had not seen us arrive. His face was bright red, and not from sunburn. “Don’t tell me you just watched this.”

I shrugged. Bailey’s gaze wandered over the set. Desmond closed and opened his eyes like a man who had stepped into an elevator shaft. “I’ve got to reshoot this scene, then I’m at your disposal.”

“Go right ahead,” Bailey said. “That’s okay, isn’t it, Dave?”

“Sure,” I said. “I should have called.”

Desmond pulled on a pair of leather gloves and stood under the helicopter blades as they began rotating. When the helicopter lifted, he sat on a skid as casually as someone taking a funicular ride. A safety belt was attached to one of the stanchions, but he didn’t use it. The helicopter rose higher, then tilted away over the water while Desmond sat with one hand on the skid and the other on the stanchion. After the pilot made his turn and headed back in, Desmond swung under the skid. His body looked twisted and tortured, his legs silhouetted against the sun, kicking as though somehow Desmond had stolen from my dreams and re-created the desperate man I had seen fall into the jungle decades ago.

The helicopter descended far enough for him to drop to the ground. He stooped under the blades and walked toward us smiling while everyone on the set applauded.

“We have champagne and soft drinks and cold cuts and potato salad over on the table,” he said. “Let’s put something in the tank, shall we?”

“Maybe we should talk business first,” Bailey said.

“Whatever I can do to help,” he said.

“It’s about Lucinda Arceneaux,” she said.

The light went out of his face.

“We’re pretty sure she knew people among your group,” I said. That was a lie, but that’s the way it works. You stretch the spider web across the doorway and hope the right person will walk through it.

“Like who in our group?” he said, looking around.

“She was young, idealistic, and naive,” I said. “A country girl full of dreams about Hollywood. Think any of these guys would latch on to a girl like that?”

“You’re tarring everybody with the same brush, Dave,” he said. “You put me in mind of those guys back in the fifties. Joe McCarthy and Nixon and the like.”

“Nothing so grandiose,” I said. “There’s a Texas convict on the ground here. His name is Tillinger. He’s a convicted killer. He believed Lucinda Arceneaux knew movie people who could help him get off death row. He headed here, to the place where she lived and where you’re making a film.”

“This is over my head,” Desmond said.

In the background I saw Antoine Butterworth and Lou Wexler arguing. Wexler was wearing white slacks. He had flattened his hands and stuck both of them into his back pockets, like a baseball manager giving it to an umpire. He stepped away from Butterworth and came toward us, flicking his fingers as though looking for a towel. “You’ve got to get that bloody sod off my back before I shove his head in one of these crawfish holes,” he said to Desmond.

“No more of this, Lou,” Desmond said.

“Very sorry to bring a problem to you,” Wexler said. “I thought you were the director.”

“What’s the issue?” Desmond said.

“I told him you wanted to pick it up at oh-six-hundred tomorrow,” Wexler said. “The weather forecast is perfect. We’ll have clouds across a pink sky, the shadows on the salt grass. The tide will be out, the sand slick, and driftwood sticking up like bones. The bastard doesn’t get it. He says the union will complain.”

“I’ll talk to him. We shoot at oh-six,” Desmond said. “No more spit fights.”

“I knew him in Africa, Des,” Wexler said. “He was afraid of the wogs and afraid of his own shadow. You ever meet a coward who wasn’t a backstabbing shit?”

“We don’t have that language on the set,” Desmond said.

Wexler looked at Bailey and me as though seeing us for the first time. “Sorry, all.”

“Forget it,” Desmond said. He put his arms over both Bailey’s shoulders and mine. “Let’s have something to eat.”

“We’ll pass on the food,” I said. “What’s that stuff about the wogs?”

“Lou likes to throw around mercenary references,” Desmond said. “Actually, he and Antoine made their money in video games.”

“What kind of video games?” I said.

“Urban guerrilla themes. Blowing things apart. A bit like Grand Theft Auto,” he replied.

“Themes?” I said.

“Come on, Dave,” he said. “Be a sport and enjoy life. Have some fun on the set. It’s like Burt Reynolds once told me: ‘Why grow up when you can make movies?’ ”

“Is that why you make them?” I said.

The sun was like a giant ruby nestled in a clump of purple clouds on the tip of the wetlands. He looked at me, his eyes full of thoughts I couldn’t read. “No, that’s not why I make them. Not at all.”

“So tell us why,” Bailey said.

“They allow you to place your hand inside eternity. It’s the one experience we share with the Creator. That’s what making films is about.”

I was sure at that moment that Desmond Cormier lived in a place few of us would have the courage — or perhaps the temerity — to enter.

Clete didn’t tell me about it until Monday, in my office.

“Did Travis file charges?” I said.

“For what?” he said.

“Axel Devereaux putting a baton up his colon.”

“A guy with a sheet like his thinks he’s going to get justice?” he said.

“I need to tell Helen about this.”

“I just saw Axel Devereaux outside. He looked right through me.”

“Get away from these guys, Clete.”

“It wasn’t me who started it.”

He had a point. Cops like Devereaux were part of the system. We created and nurtured and protected them, always to our detriment and never learning from the experience. “Where’s Travis?”

“I went his bail.”

“So you think we’ve got a deputy who’s a part-time pimp?”

“Who knows? We got black kids selling dope in front of their houses at three-thirty in the afternoon.”

“What’s the name of the hooker?”

“I never asked. I bought her a few drinks.”

He was wearing a loose suit and a crisp sport shirt without a tie. His eyes were smoky green, impossible to read, his face free of alcohol.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “Clean those thoughts out of your head.”

“Which thoughts?”

“Squaring things with Devereaux on your own.”

“I shouldn’t have told you what Devereaux said about Bailey Ribbons,” he said.

“I’ll take care of that through the proper procedure.”

“Proper procedure? Lovely. Do you know what my greatest fear is?”

“No clue,” I said.

“That one day you’ll find out who you really are and shoot yourself.”

The most surreal aspect of the scene was the juxtaposition of the antebellum plantation homes on the road, the carriage lamps glowing like candles on a wedding cake, and the drag on the asphalt. It began by the LSU experimental farm and continued in a wet serpentine line almost to the drawbridge, a journey of about half a mile. That was where the vehicle stopped and someone cut the rope that had been cinched around the victim’s neck.

He lay in the weeds on his side, his eyes open, clotted with blood. Most of his face and hair had been sanded off. His teeth and shoes were gone, his jaw broken. His legs looked like bloody sticks clothed in rags.

Emergency vehicles, their flashers rippling, lined the road. “There’s no ID on him,” Helen said.

“His name is Travis Lebeau,” I said.

“Clete’s snitch?”

“Just a bumbling, hapless guy.”

She shined her light on a green teardrop that still remained on the skin. “He was in the AB?”

“Until they sold him to the Black Guerilla Family.”

“I can’t believe we’ve got these guys here,” she said. “Wasn’t it the AB that dragged a black man in Texas about twenty years back?”

“They had white-supremacist tats. Maybe they were AB, maybe not. This isn’t racial.”

“Yeah, but it’s them.”

I walked with a flashlight down the trail of blood and skin. The moon had come from behind the clouds and lit the bayou and the cattails and canebrakes in the shallows. There was blood at the base of two oak trees that grew by the road. I hoped Lebeau had been knocked unconscious when he struck them. I clicked off my flashlight and walked back to where Helen was standing.

“You don’t look good,” she said.

“Not enough sleep.”

“Right.”

“Lebeau tried to sell me information so he could score or get out of town,” I said. “I blew him off.”

“You didn’t trust his information?”

“No.”

“So what were you supposed to do? Give him the money anyway? Put the cork in it, Pops.”

I clicked on my light again and shone it in Lebeau’s mouth. “I don’t think his teeth were broken on the road.”

She stared at me.

“The roots are gone,” I said. “I think his teeth were pulled before he was dragged.”

I ached for a drink. I think Helen did, too. Wonder why cops bring the job home or to a bar? It’s no mystery.

“You eating tonight, Dave?” the waiter asked.

“What do you have that’s cold?” I said.

“Iced tea?”

“What else have you got?”

“Whatever you want,” he replied.

“You have French vanilla ice cream?”

“Sure. Want anything on it?”

I gazed out the window, a fleeting tic in my eye. “What do you have?”

“Crème de menthe, brandy and chocolate, plain chocolate, butterscotch.”

There was an oak tree wrapped with tiny white lights in the backyard. The sky was purple, a sliver of moon hanging by the evening star.

“I don’t want anything,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just sit here a minute.”

“You got it, Dave,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything.”

After the waiter was gone, I went to the restroom, then out the door. I kept walking through town, past the Shadows and across the drawbridge at Burke Street, and on up Loreauville Road to an Acadian-style cottage that sat on a one-acre green lot on the bayou. All the lights were on. I twisted the bell.

“Why, Dave. Come in,” Bailey said when she answered. She was dressed in sandals and stonewashed jeans and a shirt printed with faded flowers.

I stepped inside.

“Where’s your truck?” she said.

“I was out for a walk.”

“On Loreauville Road?”

The living room was immaculate. I could smell food on a stove. “I’m sorry if I caught you at supper.”

“No, join me.”

“I’ve already eaten. I’ll take just a few minutes.”

“Come in the kitchen. Is something wrong?”

“I was talking with my daughter this evening.”

She pointed at a chair by the table. The kitchen was bright and clean, every surface wiped down. Through the window I could see the long green sweep on the yard and the shadows of the trees on the grass and the reflection of lights on the bayou. My body felt strange, my skin dead, my ears humming. I did not know why I was there. My legs were turning to rubber. I sat down.

“Yes?” she said.

“Desmond Cormier wants to cast you in his film, even though he knows you’re investigating a homicide that might involve people he works with.”

“He hasn’t said anything to me about it.”

“I’m sorry for breaking in on you like this.”

She put a sandwich and two scoops of potato salad on her plate, then set a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the table. “Will you please tell me what’s bothering you?”

“There are two or three bad guys in the department,” I replied. “One of them is Axel Devereaux.”

“What about him?”

“He’s a misogynist.”

“You think I care about a man like that?”

“He may have poisoned Sean McClain’s animals.”

“Ugh,” she said. “Is somebody going to do something about that?”

“There’s no proof.”

“Every thought in that man’s brain is on his face. What’s he doing in the department, anyway?”

“From what I gather, you grew up in a traditional neighborhood in New Orleans, Bailey,” I said.

“I’m not making the connection.”

“In Vietnam we used to say ‘It’s Nam.’ Same thing here. This is Louisiana. That means we’re everybody’s punch. Wars of enormous consequence are fought in places nobody cares about.”

“You don’t have to protect me, Dave. Or patronize me.”

“I believe you. I’d better be going.”

She looked at her food. She hadn’t touched it. “How long has your wife been gone?”

“Three years.”

“A car accident?”

“I’d call it a homicide. Why do you ask?”

“My husband died when he was only twenty-five,” she said. “He was in Iraq, but he had to come home to get killed. I know what it’s like to lose someone and be alone.”

“I’m not alone.”

“Don’t pretend,” she said.

“Desmond is right. You look like the actress who played Clementine in the Henry Fonda movie.”

“I guess I’ll have to see it sometime.”

“Stay away from those guys, Bailey. They’re sons of bitches.”

“I’ll try to watch out for myself.”

I didn’t know if she was being ironic or trying to be polite. I half-filled my glass with tea and drank it down. “I’ll see you Monday morning.”

“Come by anytime. Can I drive you home?”

“No.”

I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to be decades younger. I wanted to be everything except what I was. Unfortunately, at a certain age, wanting something you can’t be or wanting what you can’t have can become a way of life.

I slept late on Saturday morning and woke to birdsong and sunshine in the trees. Alafair was gone and had not left a note. Snuggs was sitting on the back steps, his white coat smudged with mud, a cut like a three-inch piece of red string threaded through his fur. I wiped him off with paper towels and dressed his wound and took him inside and fed him on the floor. The cut was jagged, as if he’d hooked himself going over a chain-link fence.

“You okay, old fella?” I said, stroking his head.

I went outside and looked for Mon Tee Coon. There was no sign of him. I called Clete and told him of my conversation with Bella Delahoussaye the previous night and my worries about my animals.

“Axel Devereaux is shaking down local hookers?” he said.

“On one level or another. Maybe they’re just hauling his ashes.”

“You think he hurt your coon?”

“He probably killed Sean McClain’s pets.”

“Everyone thinks that?”

“That’s right.”

“And he’d do the same to yours when he’d be the first guy people would suspect?”

“He’s a sociopath and a sadist,” I said. “He can’t change what he is. If he’s not cruel to an animal, he’ll be cruel to a person.”

“How about if I break his wheels?”

“That’s out.”

“You called me, Dave.”

“Sorry I did.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” he said.

“I’m like you. I want to do it the old-time way. But we can’t.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said. He hung up.

I called him back. “I apologize.”

“Quit tormenting yourself, big mon. We handle the action. They deal the play, we scramble their eggs.”

Wish it worked that way, I thought. But I didn’t try to argue.

I parked my pickup under the oaks by Burke-Hawthorne Hall and walked to the library. The advantage of having a little knowledge about the classical world is that few other people do. The second advantage is your awareness that every problem facing us today has already occurred many times previously, and the behavior of the players is always predictable and the consequences are always the same. It’s a bit like going to the track with the names of the winners and losers in your pocket.

Every literary plot is either in the Bible, Greek mythology, or Elizabethan theater. Hemingway said it was all right for an author to steal as long as he improved the material. I felt the same way about a homicide investigation. The externals were cosmetic. The motivations were not a mystery. Avarice, fear, sexual passion, revenge, a desire for power, rage that produced a chemical assault on the brain, this was the detritus floating in the gene pool. Read Charles Dickens’s journalistic account of a public execution in London. It will make you want to flee humanity.

I put my notebook and a yellow legal pad on a big table in the archive reading room and tried to give a degree of coherence to the events that had occurred since I first saw the body of Lucinda Arceneaux bobbing in Weeks Bay. The apparent ritualistic hanging of Joe Molinari’s fly-infested corpse in a shrimp net, a walking cane plunged through his chest, made no sense unless you linked his death to Arceneaux’s. In the meantime, Hugo Tillinger had become a serious presence in our midst. He now had weapons and money courtesy of Axel Devereaux, and a cause to go with them, one involving prostitution.

Hilary Bienville had tied a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle with a piece of red twine, then claimed — facetiously, I’m sure — that she had gotten it from a bubblegum machine. When I’d pressed her about it, she had said, “Mine to know,” in a prideful fashion. In the library I found seven books that dealt specifically with Crusader knights. The Maltese cross was supposedly the sign of a late-sixteenth-century group, although it may have had earlier origins. No matter. It symbolized the ethos of the knight errant who, with body armor and chainmail and spiked mace and broadsword, managed to synthesize the noblest aspects of Christianity with bloodlust.

I stayed in the library until closing time, my eyes burning. At a certain time in your life, you accept the fact that lunacy comes in many forms. Is there a more disturbing sound than hobnailed boots striking a cobblestoned street in unison? Or our penchant for using ritual and procedure to give plausibility to the unthinkable? Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps. If we get scared enough we can convince ourselves that snake and nape are selective, and that a scarlet cross painted on a shield can make acceptable the beheadings of Saracens on a scaffold in Jerusalem.

I thanked the reference librarian for her help and walked back to my pickup. The campus was dark, the sky sprinkled with stars. When I reached my truck, I saw that a sheet of spiral notebook paper had been placed under my windshield wiper. The message was printed in ballpoint, each letter a composite of slashes:

I folded the note and placed it in my shirt pocket. I had a feeling Tillinger was watching me, but I gave him no indication. The moon was up, the shadows of flooded trees moving on the water of Cypress Lake by the old student center. I slipped my snub-nose .38 special from my snap-on belt holster and held it behind my hip. I walked down to the edge of the water. “You out there, Hugo?”

There was no response.

“You shouldn’t be bird-dogging me, partner,” I said.

I heard a splash. It could have been either a frog or someone throwing a dirt clod into the lake.

“Maybe we’ve got the same goal,” I said. “Nobody is worried about you creeping Axel Devereaux’s house. The firearms are another matter. Maybe you’ll beat death row in Texas. Don’t blow it by getting into an assault beef in Louisiana.”

I thought I saw a silhouette merge with the corner of the student center, but I couldn’t be sure. No sound came from the lakeside or the walkways. I got into my truck and started the engine. Then the words from the Book of Psalms came back to me, and I squeezed my eyes shut at their implication.

On Sunday, Alafair called me from the airport in Dallas. She had taken a commercial flight and was on her way back home.

“You quit?” I said.

“No, Desmond and Lou had to take care of some union trouble in Los Angeles and New Orleans. I wasn’t getting anything done, so I decided to work from home.”

“Was that all right with them?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

I picked her up in Lafayette. We had slipped into Indian summer without being aware of it. The sky was as hard and blue as porcelain, the oak leaves red and gold and clicking like crickets when they rolled across the lawn in the wind. I knew somehow that better days lay ahead.

I fixed dinner for us when we got home, and later, we fed Snuggs on the kitchen floor and Mon Tee Coon and his girlfriend on top of Tripod’s hutch. That night we slept with the windows open, and I could smell the camellias and the dense lemony fragrance of our late-blooming magnolia in the side yard. As I drifted off to sleep, I resolved to capture and protect each spoonful of sunshine allotted me for the rest of my life, and not go with the season or lend myself to doomed causes.

I woke at six-fifteen to the sounds of rain and the phone ringing. I picked up the phone and went into the kitchen so as not to awake Alafair. It was Sean McClain. “I’m in front of Axel Devereaux’s place by the drawbridge on Loreauville Road. I need a witness here.”

“What for?”

“There’s something wrong in that house. People know I don’t get along with Devereaux or his buddies. I don’t want to be busting in on my own.”

“What happened?”

“I was passing his house a half hour ago. All the lights were on and the shades down. A black SUV was in the yard. I saw a woman come running out the back door and thought I heard glass breaking.”

“Go on.”

“I slowed down but didn’t stop.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to mix in his personal business.”

He had already made two mistakes: He had ignored a battery situation in progress, and he hadn’t called it in. I didn’t want to think about what was coming next.

“What made you change your mind?” I said.

“I go off at oh-seven-hundred. I thought I’d make one more pass. The SUV was bagging down the road. I didn’t get a tag. The lights were off in the house, and a front window was broken and the shade and screen hanging outside. Devereaux’s truck was in the shed. This time I knocked on the door. No answer.”

“Where are you now?”

“In the front yard.”

“Try again.”

“I pert’ near shook it off the blocks already.”

“You tried the back?”

“Yes, sir. I hit on the bedroom wall.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and took a small bottle of orange juice and a cinnamon roll out of the icebox and headed up Loreauville Road. The rain had quit and the sky was an ink wash, as though the sun had refused to rise. A blanket of white fog was rolling off the bayou when I turned onto Axel Devereaux’s property. Sean was waiting on the gallery. An empty whiskey bottle wet with dew glittered in the yard. I walked up the steps.

“You know Axel’s a juicer, don’t you?” I said.

“If that’s the problem, he must have tied on a whammeroo.”

I pounded with the flat of my fist on the door. “It’s Dave Robicheaux and Sean McClain! Open up, Devereaux!”

I took out a handkerchief and twisted the knob. It was locked tight. I stepped back and balanced myself with the screen and kicked the wood door with the bottom of my shoe. The second time it splintered off the jamb. Axel seemed to have cleaned up the damage done to his living room by Hugo Tillinger. Through the hallway I could barely make out a figure sitting motionlessly at the breakfast table, his back to us. Then I realized he was wearing a peaked hat, dripping with bells like ornaments on a small Christmas tree.

I walked through the hallway with Sean behind me. He looked over my shoulder. “Oh, man.”

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Get Bailey and Helen on the horn. Don’t let a photographer get near this.”

“They say they got a right.”

“Devereaux wasn’t worth the spit on the sidewalk. But we don’t punish the family.”

I called my friend the captain of the West Hollywood Station of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and asked more specifically about Butterworth’s record. Butterworth’s reputation for deviancy was ubiquitous. But legend and legal reality don’t always coincide. Prostitutes told outrageous stories about him. One claimed he hung her from a hook and beat her bloody, but she had been in Camarillo twice and hadn’t filed charges. As gross as his behavior was, most of it seemed thespian, more adolescent and obscene than criminal.

“He’s never had to register as a sex offender?” I asked.

“Twelve years ago he got nailed on a statutory,” my friend said. “She was sixteen, although she looked twenty-five. The DA was going to put him away, but the girl got a big role in a South American film and left town.”

“Butterworth got her the role?”

“That’s how it usually works.”

“What’s the status on the charge now?”

“It doesn’t have one. The case died in the file drawer.”

“That’s all I need,” I said. “Thanks for the help.”

“I don’t see how I helped.”

“This is Louisiana, Cap. The language in our sex offender registry laws would give you an aneurism.”

By noon the next day I had a warrant for Butterworth’s arrest and a warrant to search Desmond’s house. I dialed Desmond’s unlisted number, hoping he would be there. Unfortunately, Butterworth answered.

“Is Desmond there?” I said. “This is Dave Robicheaux.”

“Oh, my favorite detective,” he replied.

“I need to speak to him, please.”

“He’s taking a break today and sailing. The light is all wrong for the scene we’re shooting, anyway. Could I be of assistance?”

“I have to take some photos from your deck. I’m putting together a report on the discovery of the Arceneaux body.”

“This isn’t about the telescope again, is it?”

“No, it has to do with tidal drift. Will you be there for the next hour?”

“I’ll make a point of it,” he said. “Ta-ta, cute boy.”

Bailey and I checked out a cruiser and headed for Cypremort Point, with me driving and Sean McClain following in a second vehicle. There was a heavy chop on the bay, the moss straightening in the trees and boats rocking in their slips like beer cans in a wave.

“I’m not sure what we’re doing, Dave,” Bailey said.

“We’re on shaky ground, but Butterworth doesn’t know it.”

She looked straight ahead, thoughtful. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this.”

“You ever hear of a rich man going to the chair or gas chamber or the injection room?” I said.

“I guess that doesn’t happen often.”

“It doesn’t happen at all.”

I waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. “We cut the bad guys off at the knees, Bailey.”

“What we do is punish the people who are available,” she said.

I looked at her profile. She was one of those people whose composure and self-assurance gave no hint of arrogance or elitism. But I couldn’t forget that Ambrose Bierce, a war veteran, once defined a pacifist as a dead Quaker, and that Bailey was young for the job and I was old for it, and old for her, and on top of it I wondered if she didn’t belong in the public defender’s office.

“You’re a good fellow, Dave.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m a good judge of people.”

All my thought processes went down the drain.

As we neared the tip of the peninsula, I saw a solitary figure on the deck of Desmond’s house, the wind flattening his slacks and Hawaiian shirt against his body. He was playing his saxophone, obviously indifferent to the sounds of the surf and the wind and seagulls, the gold bell of the sax as bright as a heliograph in the sunlight.

“Why does that guy remind me of an upended lizard?” I said.

“Because he looks like one,” she replied.

We booked Butterworth and transferred him to the parish prison. That evening Desmond turned in to my driveway in a new Cherokee. He seemed to wear his contradictions as you would a suit of clothes. I had a bell, but he tapped lightly on the door. I had a sidewalk, but he walked on the lawn, even though it was damp from the sprinkler. The lightness of his touch on the door was not in sync with the intensity in his face and the corded veins in his forearms.

I looked at him through the screen. “If this is about Butterworth, I’ll talk to you at the department during office hours.”

“Antoine is my friend,” he said. “So are you. I’d like to speak with you in that spirit.”

I stepped out on the gallery. The light had pooled high in the sky, like an inverted golden bowl; the oaks in the yard were deep in shadow, the trunks surrounded by red and yellow four-o’clocks that bloomed only in the shade.

Desmond’s wide-set pale blue eyes were unblinking and yet simultaneously veiled; they had the vacuity you see in the eyes of sociopaths.

“Let Butterworth take his own fall,” I said.

“He hasn’t done anything.”

“Have you seen the photos in his scrapbook?”

“Maybe he does a different kind of penance than the rest of us. Hollywood is a place of second chances. More important, it’s a place where there are no victims. Everyone there knows the rules and the odds. Why beat up on Antoine?”

“On the phone you said we’d strip-mine the Garden of Eden if the price was right. You grew up in Eden?”

“What are you saying, Dave?”

“You lived on a piece of reservation hardpan that was given to the Indians only because the whites didn’t want it.”

“Better put, they wouldn’t spit on it,” he said. “What’s your point?”

“The casino made life a little better for some of your people. You think that was a bad idea? Why don’t you cut the rest of us some slack? Most of us do the best we can.”

“I thought I could reason with you,” he said. “That was a mistake. I’d better go before I say something I’ll regret.”

“Say it anyway.”

“I see the way you look at Bailey Ribbons. I don’t blame you. For me, she’s Clementine Carter. She takes us into the past, into our first love, into America before the railroad guys and the industrialists got their hands on it. When you’re with her, every day is spring, and death holds no dominion in your life.”

How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets? “I talked with Bella Delahoussaye this afternoon.”

“Who?”

“She’s Butterworth’s alibi. He told the truth about lending her his Subaru. There’s a problem, though.”

“What?”

“She said he also drives a dark-colored SUV. An SUV fled the Devereaux murder scene.”

“I already explained that,” Desmond said. “We have several in the car pool. For God’s sake, get away from this obsession with Hollywood. You’re all alike. You can’t stand success. You can’t stand art or reason or anything that isn’t like your putrid way of life. All of you are searching for a house with no mirrors.”

“Good try,” I said.

He looked at the sweep of leaves on the street, the electric lamps burning inside the oak boughs, the dreamlike shade that was stealing across the lawns of homes that Jefferson Davis’s widow once visited. “I apologize. This is my birthplace, too. You have more claim on it, though. I’ve done wrong by all of you. I wish I could change that. But I probably never will.”

There was nothing grandiose or thespian or saccharine in his voice or expression. He walked to his car, his physicality barely restrained by his thin slacks and wash-faded shirt.

I was convinced that, like Helen Soileau, many people lived inside Desmond’s skin, male and female, child and adult. He had never married, nor was he ever long in the company of one woman. For certain he was an egalitarian, an aesthete, an actor, and a painter. He had the flame of a mad artist, the voice of a singer, and the indifference to criticism that all great artists possess without being aware of it. I said earlier that he could light a room with his smile. It had been a long time since I had seen him do that. Were Clementine Carter and Bailey Ribbons his keys to resurrection, the rolling away of a rock that blocked out the sun and stole the air from his lungs?

The next morning Antoine Butterworth bailed out of jail. There was no DNA of any kind on the hypodermic needle. His lawyer had our trumped-up charges dropped.

Clete was at my back screen early on Saturday, freshly showered, his hair wet-combed, his clothes pressed. But his ebullience and his attempt to blend with the coolness of the morning and the dew-drenched fragrance of the flower beds were a poor disguise for the guilt he always wore like a child would, at least when he thought he had wronged me, which he had never intentionally done.

Alafair was still asleep. I fixed biscuits and coffee and waited for Clete to get to whatever was bothering him. It took a while. Clete had a way of talking about every subject in the world until he casually mentioned a minor incident such as smashing an earth grader through the home of a mafioso on Lake Pontchartrain, blowing a greaseball with a fire hose into a urinal at the casino, or pouring sand into the fuel tank of a plane loaded with more greaseballs, all of whom ended up petroglyphs on a mountainside in western Montana.

“You let Hugo Tillinger slide because he saved the little girl?” I said.

“He’s not a killer.”

We were seated at the breakfast table. The window was open, the wind sweet through the screen, Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon sitting on Tripod’s hutch.

“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked.

“This conversation didn’t happen. We bury it right here. Got it?”

“You’re not upset?”

“I probably would have done the same thing. The guy got a bad deal in Texas.”

“You don’t think he could have done the baton job on Devereaux?”

“These murders are about money, Clete.”

“You lost me, big mon.”

“The tarot and the floating cross have private meaning to the killer, but the motivation is much larger. It’s not sex, it’s not power or control. That leaves money.”

“I think you’re taking too much for granted,” Clete said.

“The killer injected Arceneaux with a fatal dose of heroin. The others went out hard. Why would he make distinctions in the way he killed his victims? It’s because he’s created a grand scheme. Think about it. A serial killer wants to paint the walls and enjoy every minute of it. He’s driven by compulsion. Unless his motivation is misogynistic, his targets are random. Our guy has a plan. Tillinger is a simpleton who wants to be a celebrity. He’s not our guy.”

Clete had a biscuit in his jaw. He looked at me for a long moment, then drank from his cup, his eyes not leaving mine. “Why only in our area?”

“That’s the big one,” I said. “He’s sending us a message.”

“Lucky us,” Clete said.

On private land just inside the Utah border, Desmond had constructed an environment meant to replicate nineteenth-century Indian territory and a stretch of the Cimarron River just north of the Texas Panhandle. He had diverted a stream and brought in water tanks and lined a gulley with vinyl and layered it with gravel, then placed a solitary horseman five hundred yards from the improvised riverbank.

Wexler was standing next to me. “This scene is going to cost the boys in Jersey over fifty grand. I hope they enjoy it.”

“Pardon?” I said.

“It’s the last scene in the picture, although we’re only a third into the story. The guy who wrote the book says it’s the best scene he ever wrote, and the last line in the scene is the best line he ever wrote. I bet our Jersey friends would love that.”

“Who are your Jersey friends?”

“Not the Four Seasons,” he answered.

The rider was a tall and lanky boy who looked no older than fifteen. His horse was a chestnut, sixteen hands, with a blond tail and mane. Desmond was talking to the camera personnel; then he flapped a yellow flag above his head. Through a pair of binoculars, I saw the boy lean forward and pour it on, bent low over the withers, his legs straight out, whipping the horse with the reins, his hat flying on a cord. The sun was low and red in the sky, the boy riding straight out of it like a blackened cipher escaping a molten planet. Two leather mail pouches were strung from his back, arrows embedded in them up to the shaft.

“The scene is about the Pony Express?” I said.

“On one level,” Wexler said. “But actually, it’s about the search for the Grail.”

I looked at him.

“Don’t worry if you’re confused,” he said. “Probably no one else will get it, either. Particularly that lovely bunch of gangsters on the Jersey Shore.”

“It’s an allegory?”

“Nothing is an allegory for Desmond. He hears the horns blowing along the road to Roncesvalles. Worse than I.”

The rider went hell for breakfast across the stream, the horse laboring, its neck dark with sweat, water splashing and gravel clacking.

“Cut!” Desmond said. “Wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!”

After the boy dismounted, Desmond hugged him in a full-body press. I felt embarrassed for the boy. “Where’d you learn to ride?” Desmond said.

“Here’bouts,” the boy said, his face visibly burning.

“Well, you’re awfully fine,” Des said. “Get yourself a cold drink. I want to talk with you later. With your parents. You’re going somewhere, kid.”

That was Desmond’s great gift. He made people feel good about themselves, and he didn’t do it out of pride or compulsion or weakness or defensiveness or a desire to feel powerful and in control of others. He used his own success to validate what was best in the people around him. But there is a caveat implied in the last statement. The people who surrounded him were not simply employees, they were acolytes, and I suspected Bailey was about to become one of them. For that reason alone, I felt a growing resentment, one that was petty and demeaning.

“What’d you think, Dave?” Desmond said.

“That young fellow is impressive,” I replied.

“Come on, you’re a smart man. What do you think of us, tattered bunch that we are, talking trash about Crusader knights and trying to sell it to an audience that wants a fucking video game?”

“What do I know?”

Bailey Ribbons was standing thirty feet away, dressed like a fashionable pioneer woman. I had not spoken to her yet.

“What do you think of that scene, Bailey?” Wexler asked.

“I think it’s all grand,” she said. She walked toward us. Her hem went to the tops of her feet. Her frilly white blouse was buttoned at the throat, her hair piled on her head. “Aren’t you going to say hello, Dave?”

“You have to forgive me. I was hesitant to speak on the set.”

“You’re surprised to see me here?” she asked.

“If I’d known you were coming, I wouldn’t have asked Helen for some vacation days. She’s shorthanded now.”

“It wasn’t my intention to inconvenience anyone,” she said.

I looked at my watch. “I’d better get back to the hotel. I have to make some calls.”

“Will you have lunch with us?” she said.

“Let me see what Clete is doing.”

“Clete Purcel is here?” she said.

“He gets around,” I said.

“Well, I’m happy he was able to come out,” she said.

I didn’t know what else to say. I felt disappointed in Bailey and in myself. “Thanks for having me here, Des. I’ll see you later.”

I walked away, feeling foolish and inadequate, as though I were starting to lose part of myself.

“Don’t you want a lift?” Wexler said.

I had forgotten I’d ridden to the set with him and Alafair. “I’ll hitch a ride,” I said.

Three miles down the road, a man driving a chicken truck with glassless windows picked me up, and we drove across the state line into Arizona and a dust storm that turned the sun to grit.

I flew home in the morning on a commercial flight, although I could sorely afford the cost. The next day I called Helen and the head of Internal Affairs and left messages saying I was at their disposal. Then I sat in the silence of the kitchen and stared at the leaves dropping from the oaks in the backyard. It felt strange to be home alone in the middle of the workday, separated from my profession and all the symbols of my identity: my badge, the cruiser that was always available for me, the deference and respect that came from years of earning the trust of others. I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered whom I was about to become.

That afternoon I walked downtown and across the drawbridge and into the park and sat by myself at a picnic table next to the softball diamond. The park was empty, the grass blown with tiny pieces of leaves chopped up by the mower, a plastic tarp stretched across the swimming pool. At dusk I walked back home and passed people on the bridge whom I did not know and who did not respond to my greeting. Clete would not return from Arizona until the next day, and Alafair was staying on with Desmond until the weekend. I fed Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon, then showered and shaved and dressed in a pair of pressed slacks and a Hawaiian shirt I let hang over my belt. Rain was falling out of the sky, which seemed turned upside down, like a barrel of dark water with stars inside it. I put on a rain hat and drove to the club on the bayou where the blues weren’t just music but a way of life.

Clete and Alafair were both back from Arizona, but I told neither of them about my troubles with Frenchie Lautrec. Clete came to my house Monday night. “I saw Bella Delahoussaye at the Winn-Dixie. She said this creep Lautrec smeared you with some photographs on the Internet. The message was supposed to be racial.”

“That sounds right,” I replied.

“What happened?”

“I dropped by his house.”

“And did what?”

“Maybe he swallowed some camera parts. A couple of teeth, too.”

“He didn’t dime you?”

“I heard he took sick leave. He’s a dirty cop. He can’t afford to dime anybody.”

“He photographed you getting it on with Bella?”

“Her son was being gang-raped at Angola. I tried to comfort her.”

“Horizontally?” he said.

We were in the kitchen. It was dark outside. I could see the stars above the park; the trees resembled black cutouts. “Why is your elevator always stuck in the basement, Clete?”

“Answer the question. Are you getting it on?”

“No. Lautrec wanted to do some payback for Axel Devereaux. Or maybe he wanted to get me fired so I’d hook up with him.”

“Pimping?”

“Who knows? Get this. He says Devereaux knew something about Arab money and uranium. He learned about it through the movie people.”

“This is from outer space, Dave.”

“That’s what I told him. He said the Jersey guys might be mixed up in it. Nicky Scarfo’s crowd.”

“Little Nicky is dead,” Clete said.

“I know. So forget it.”

It was quiet in the room. I could hear the tree frogs down on the bayou.

“You kicked Lautrec’s ass pretty bad?” Clete said.

“You could say that.”

“But it wasn’t about the pictures on the Internet, was it?” he said.

“Nope.”

“Bailey Ribbons let you down?”

“I had higher expectations of her.”

“Cut her some slack, for Christ’s sake. How about the women I’ve dated? I’m lucky I haven’t woken up with my throat slit.” He waited for me to reply. “Come in, Earth.”

“She was smoking dope. With sycophants and frauds.”

“That’s not the equivalent of original sin,” he said.

“What say we talk about something else?”

“Helen’s not going to drop the IA referral?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You’re planning to square all this on your own?”

“It had crossed my mind.”

“Can I have one of your diet Docs?”

“Help yourself.”

He went to the icebox and popped a can of Dr Pepper. “Mind if I tag along, do oversight, make sure things stay under control?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, Cletus.”

The sun came up like thunder, a yellowish bloodred in the smoke of a runaway stubble fire. I did not tell Alafair or Clete about my encounter with Smiley, in part because they would think me unhinged. Also I did not trust my own perceptions. For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.

I did make a call to a former CIA agent I knew from the program. His name was Walter Scanlon. For forty years he pickled his brain and liver with a fifth of vodka every night while he moved like a threadworm through the underside of the New American Empire. Now he chain-smoked and attended the “Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker” meeting in New Orleans, sitting silently in the back with a face that looked as old as papyrus and eyes that were the color of raw oysters. Few had any idea of the deeds stored in the basement of his soul.

“Yeah, Chester Wimple,” he said. “He goes by Smiley or something.”

“Was he ever one of yours?” I asked.

“We didn’t use guys like that.”

“But you’ve run across him? You know about him?”

“We thought he took out one of our informants in Mexico City. A child molester. No big loss. You didn’t talk to the FBI?”

“They don’t know much more than we do.”

“Let me ring a couple of people.”

He called back that evening. “When’s the last time you had contact with this guy?” he said.

“I thought I might have seen him earlier today.”

“Better visit your optometrist. Chester Wimple was blown all over a café with a fifty-cal in Venezuela eight months ago.”

“Must be a mistake.”

“The guys I got this from use DNA.”

“I appreciate your time,” I said, my mouth dry. “How you doing with the program?”

“I haven’t slept since the fall of Saigon,” he replied. “Thanks for bringing it up.”

Early the next morning I drove to the location outside Morgan City that Desmond had turned into a replica of an early 1950s prison farm. Mounted gunbulls in gray uniforms and shades, their skin as dark as saddle leather, were silhouetted against the sunrise atop the levee, while down below, men in prison stripes and straw hats that had been painted red were pulling stumps with mules and chains.

Part of the set included a two-story barracks with barred windows, constructed in the distance, and two upended cast-iron sweatboxes set in concrete. Alafair had left the house before I had and was sitting behind a camera with a clipboard on her knee. Desmond had interrupted a scene and was telling an actor to start over again. The actor was young and handsome and did not look like a convict who would have been on the Red Hat gang at Angola Farm many decades ago.

“You’re putting me to sleep, Zeb,” Desmond said. “This is a hara-kiri moment. When you get in the hack’s face, you know you’re headed for the sweatbox. We’re talking about hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, a shit bucket between your ankles, a hole the diameter of a cigar to breathe through, your butt and knees frying against hot metal. But you hate the captain so much you’ll accept all that pain in order to keep your self-respect. So far you’re not showing either me or the audience the brave man you’re supposed to be.”

“I’ll try to do better,” the actor said.

“ ‘Try’ is the wrong word,” Des said, his pale blue eyes widening.

“Yes, sir,” the actor said.

Desmond stepped behind the camera. “Start,” he said.

The captain sat astride a horse that must have been seventeen hands. He wore a long-sleeve crimson shirt and a Stetson and shades. Unlike the other personnel, he was not armed. A quirt was stuck in his boot. Farther down the levee, three women were picking buttercups and placing them in a straw basket. The captain’s shadow fell across the young actor named Zeb.

“Was you eyeballing them ladies?” the captain asked.

“No, sir,” Zeb said.

“I think you was. One of them is the warden’s wife, son.”

“I ain’t eyeballed no free people, boss,” Zeb said.

“Calling me a liar?”

Zeb shook his head.

“I didn’t hear you,” the captain said.

“No, sir, I ain’t said that.”

“Captain LeBlanc says you was talking during bell count.”

“Wasn’t me, Cap.”

“You’ve seen me make a Christian out of a nigger. I can do it to you, too.”

“Wasn’t eyeballing. Wasn’t talking at morning count. Wasn’t doing nothing but my fucking time, boss man.”

“Cut,” Desmond said.

Zeb waited expectantly.

“I could get more vitality out of an electrified corpse,” Desmond said. He walked to the captain’s horse. “Give me your quirt.”

The actor playing the captain slipped the quirt from his boot and handed it to Desmond. The handle was knurled; a leather tassel hung from the tip. Desmond stuck the quirt in Zeb’s hand. “Hit me.”

“Pardon?” Zeb replied, half smiling.

“Hit me! In the face! Hard!”

“I cain’t do that.”

Desmond clenched Zeb’s fingers into the handle of the quirt. “You think this is funny?”

“No, sir.”

Desmond released Zeb’s hand and popped him in the face. “Now hit me with the quirt.”

“No.”

Desmond popped him again. The crew and the other actors stared at the ground. “Either hit me or say your lines like you’re supposed to,” he said. “You’ve got booze on your breath, Zeb. Don’t show up wired again.”

There were tears in the actor’s eyes. Alafair laid her clipboard on her chair and walked past me, away from the set.

They recommenced the scene. It was powerful and real and visceral and painful to watch. Zeb virtually spat in the captain’s face, then the other gunbulls beat him senseless and carried him on his knees to the sweatbox and flung him inside and slammed the iron door as though they had just hung a hog in a smokehouse.

Desmond yelled, “Cut,” and everyone applauded. My stomach felt sick. I walked up behind Des and tapped him on the shoulder. He was grinning when he turned around.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“I’m a little busy right now,” he replied.

“Yeah, I saw you in action.”

“You think I’m too rough?”

“That was chickenshit.”

“I don’t see Zeb complaining.”

I looked away, as you do when you can’t hide your disgust for someone’s behavior. “I’d appreciate your walking over here with me.”

“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.

We went into the shade of a tarp stretched on four poles. The canvas was popping in the wind, the fall weather both cool and warm at the same time. The cast and crew were drinking coffee and eating beignets at the commissary window.

“We’ve got another homicide on our hands,” I said.

“I heard.”

“Her name was Hilary Bienville. She hung out in the same blues joint Butterworth does.”

“So talk to him.”

“Waste of time. He’s a pathological liar and a wiseass on top. I understand you have a Maltese cross on your ankle.”

“Would you like to see it?”

“I wondered if you were in the Knights Templar. Or the Nazi Party.”

“Maybe I rode with a biker group.”

“The Hells Angels?”

“I said maybe. Get off my back, Dave.”

“You’re lying, Des.”

“I don’t let people talk to me like that.”

“How about the way you just talked to that kid?”

“Titty babies don’t make it in the movie industry.”

“And bullies thrive?”

“Fuck you, Dave.”

“Next time you say that to me, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”

I walked to my truck. I saw Alafair watching me by the commissary trailer. She mouthed the Clete Purcel mantra Take names and stomp ass, big mon.

I woke on the couch at four in the morning. The rain was sluicing off the roof. Bella’s acoustic guitar was propped facedown on a stuffed chair. Her bedroom door was open. She was sleeping on her side, the covers half on the floor.

I had dried my clothes in front of a fan and put them back on. I barely remembered coming to her house and believed for a moment that I was losing my mind. I had heard about dry blackouts but had never experienced one. I closed her door and went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. Through the window I could see the first glimmer of light in the east, water pooling in the alley, raindrops sliding off a banana frond that was bumping against the glass.

“You ain’t leaving wit’out saying goodbye, are you?” she said.

I turned around. She was wearing a bathrobe. A thick strand of her hair hung across the scar on her throat. The Maltese cross given to her by Hilary Bienville was tied around her neck. Her lipstick was purple, the features of her face like carved ebony.

“Sorry for barging in on your life, Bella.”

“Nobody barges in on my life. They get invited.”

“You’re the best.”

“You wouldn’t let me do nothing for you. You hurt me a little bit.”

“It’s not because of you. I’m bad news.”

She stepped closer and fitted her hand around the back of my neck, sinking her nails into my hairline. She kissed me on the mouth, pushing her tongue inside. Then she stared into my eyes. “They gonna kill you, baby.”

“No, they’re not.”

“You don’t get it. It’s what you’re looking for.”

“That’s not true.”

“You won’t blow out your own wick because you’re a churchgoing man. You think Mr. Death don’t know what you’re doing?”

I stepped back from her, hitting the stove.

“Stay wit’ me,” she said.

“I have to work.”

“We’re alike. You know the world ain’t real. You know what most people believe ain’t real.”

“I think you’re right.”

She kneaded my throat with her thumbs, pressing on my windpipe, her eyes searching inside my head. “You don’t need to come back. You don’t need to feel guilty, neither.”

“Don’t say that. I mean about not coming back.”

“Take care of yourself. You’re stacking time on the hard road. You just ain’t heard that ball and chain clanking.”

The next morning I found Ennis Patout’s name in the Opelousas phone directory. I checked out a cruiser, and Bailey and I drove to St. Landry Parish. The morning was clear and cool, the grass in the neutral ground mowed and sparkling with dew. As we neared Opelousas, I looked across the seat at her and said, “A good night’s sleep is the cure for lots of things, isn’t it?”

She smiled and didn’t reply.

I turned off at the exit and drove to an old two-story soot-stained stucco building on the two-lane to Baton Rouge. It had been a car dealership during the Depression and was now a wrecker service and repair shop for diesel trucks. The gas pumps in front were out of order and rusted. I had called Patout before we left New Iberia; when I’d identified myself, he’d hung up. A black man in a filthy white jumpsuit was working on an engine in the shop.

“Is Mr. Patout here?” I said.

“Upstairs. What you want?”

I opened my badge holder. “I called earlier. Ask him to come down.”

“He ain’t gonna like it.”

“Why’s that?”

“Mr. Ennis don’t need a reason.” He went up a wooden staircase inside the shop and came back down. “He’ll be down in a minute. He’s got to take his heart medicine.”

A moment later, a towering man emerged from the doorway that led to the stairs. He had the same wide-set pale blue eyes as Desmond, and the same long upper lip and the same muscularity, but that was where the similarity ended. His face made me think of a broken pumpkin. The eyes were out of alignment, the blank stare like a slap. There was a repressed ferocity in his stance. His hands were grimed and hung at his sides. His jumpsuit was dirtier than the black man’s. From five feet away he had an odor like a barrel of old shrimp.

“I’m Detective Robicheaux,” I said. “This is Detective Ribbons. I called you from New Iberia.”

He didn’t look at Bailey. “I know who you are.” Even though he had a French name, he had a deep-throated Mississippi or North Louisiana accent.

“We’re looking for an escaped convict named Hugo Tillinger,” I said. “We have reason to believe he might try to contact you.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s heard of you,” Bailey said. “Your name and city of residence were in his notebook.”

“Tillinger, you say?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “He was convicted of burning his family to death.”

“What’s he want with me?”

There are many ruses police can use legally in interrogating a witness or suspect, and one of the most effective is to indicate you posses knowledge that in reality you don’t. “I think he wants to talk to you about your son, Desmond Cormier.”

“Who says I got a son?”

“It’s a matter of record,” I said. “You took the baby to Charity Hospital in Lafayette many years ago. You probably saved his life. You never see Desmond? He’s a famous man.”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “This is about her, ain’t it? She’s back telling lies.”

“Could be,” I said, with no clue about the reference. “Why not give us your perception of the situation and put it to rest?”

“She’s a drunk and a whore,” he said. “I was good to her when nobody else was. She slept with everything that wore pants. I caught her a bunch of times, but I never hit her.”

“We’re talking about Corina Cormier, right?” I said.

“Who’s it sound like?”

“Where can we find her?”

“I wouldn’t know.” He was looking at Bailey now. “If she’s alive, she’s probably a hag. The man that slept with her had to tie a board across his ass so he didn’t fall in, and that was forty years back.”

“You need to dial down the language, Mr. Patout,” I said.

“Don’t you lecture me, boy,” he said. “In fact, it’s time for you to git. I got work to do.”

“Git?” I said.

“This is St. Landry Parish. You got no authority here. Come back with a warrant or stay the hell away from me. That means you drag your sorry asses out of here.”

There are times you hold your ground, and there are times you walk away. In this instance we were off our turf. There was another factor involved. Patout was not the kind you took down easily. He was the kind you sometimes ended up killing.

His hands still hung at his sides, curled like an ape’s, the nails half-mooned with dirt and grease. “Why you staring at me?”

I could feel my old enemy flickering to life like a flame working its way up a cornstalk in late summer. “See you down the road,” I said.

I winked at him. It was a poor mask for our defeat at the hands of an ignorant and obviously violent man. We got back into the cruiser and drove away.

I got the call from the sheriff in St. Mary Parish at four-fifteen a.m. “We got two guys fried outside a hot-pillow joint,” he said. “I think it’s your boy, that crazy pissant who was killing people about eighteen months back.”

“Wimple?”

“A security camera in the parking lot of a nightclub caught him. About five-three, propane tanks on his back, looks like he fell in a bag of flour? How many people match that description?”

“He had a flamethrower?”

“Come down if you want. I got to get on it. We cain’t find the night clerk.”

I called Bailey Ribbons and picked her up fifteen minutes later.

I went home that night and left at sunrise and drove down to Cypremort Point, where Desmond Cormier maintained his beautiful home on the tip of the peninsula, where all of this started with the body of Lucinda Arceneaux floating on a wood cross, the chop sliding across her sightless blue eyes.

Why dwell upon the image? Answer: Any homicide cop can deal with sadism or bestiality or wholesale murder when the victims are part of the culture that took their lives. But when the victims are female teenage hitchhikers on their way to New Orleans to see a concert, a young couple forced into the trunk of their own car that was set on fire by two Oklahoma psychopaths, a little boy who was anally raped before he was killed, a mother with her two daughters who trusted a boatman on vacation and were raped and tied to cinder blocks and dropped one at a time into the ocean with their mouths taped, each having to watch the fate of the other, when you see these things up close and personal, you never free yourself from them, and that’s why cops pop pills and spend a lot of time at the watercooler in the morning.

These things are not generic in nature or manufactured incidents found in lurid crime novels. They all happened, and they were all the work of evil men. You can drink, smoke weed, melt your brains with downers or whites on the half-shell, or transfer to vice and become a sex addict and flush your self-respect down the drain. None of it helps. You’re stuck unto the grave, in your sleep and during the waking day. And that’s when you start having thoughts about summary justice — more specifically, thoughts about loading up with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks and painting the walls.

The wind was blowing hard, straightening the palm fronds on the sides of the road, driving the waves against the blocks of broken concrete that had been dropped into the shallows to prevent the erosion of the bank. Up ahead I saw Antoine Butterworth jogging along the road in a sweatshirt and orange running shorts, his skin the metallic tone of a new penny. A cabin cruiser close in to the shore seemed to be pacing him. A man in shades and the blue coat and white trousers and white hat of a yachtsman was standing on the bow. He yelled something to Butterworth through his cupped hands, then waved goodbye.

The cabin cruiser motored away, twin exhaust pipes gurgling. I pulled abreast of Butterworth and rolled down the passenger window. “Want a lift?”

“I’m pretty sweaty,” he replied, not slowing.

“Suit yourself.”

I drove on to Desmond’s place and parked by his porte cochere and got out. My coat was whipping in the wind, sand and seaweed rilling in waves that burst against the shore and filled the air with spray and the smell of salt. Butterworth ran up the drive and picked up a towel that hung on an outdoor shower, then wiped his armpits and the insides of his thighs. “Where’s your lovely lass?”

“I didn’t get that,” I said. “Must be the wind.”

“I said ‘lass.’ Detective Ribbons.”

“I’ll tell her you asked about her.”

“I hope you’re not here for me.”

“Is Desmond home?”

“Fixing breakfast. Will you join us?”

“Who was the guy on the boat?”

“A tarpon fisherman out of Tampa. Why?”

“No reason. A fine-looking boat.”

“You’re always a man of mystery,” he said.

I wondered how he had lived as long as he had. I went up the wooden steps and knocked on the front door. Desmond answered shirtless and in a pair of cargo pants, staring expectantly over my shoulder. “Hi, Dave. Bailey’s not with you?”

The next day was Saturday. I woke in the blueness of the dawn to a sound that I thought came from a dream. In the dream, Negro convicts of years ago were laying track on a railroad line outside Angola Farm. They were wearing ankle chains and driving steel spikes through the rails into the railroad bed, their hammers ringing in three-four time.

I sat up and looked out the back window. Lou Wexler, stripped to the waist, his shirt hanging on a camellia bush, was tossing horseshoes at a steel spike he had obviously driven into the ground without asking. I put on my khakis and a sweatshirt and went outside. “Do you invite yourself into everyone’s backyard at six in the morning, or are we just lucky?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m supposed to pick up Alafair at six-fifteen and I arrived a little early. She didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“We’re having breakfast at Victor’s.”

“What does that have to do with waking up other people? I don’t want a horseshoe pit in my yard, either.”

“Felicitously noted, sir.”

“Felicitously?”

He turned his head sideways, grinning. “We’re filming a plane crash at Lake Martin later in the day. Exciting stuff. Why not come out?”

“Thank you. All booked up.”

“At heart I think you’re one of us.”

“Say again?”

He offered me a stick of gum. I shook my head. He stuck one into his mouth as though we had all the time in the world. He seemed to wear sensuality like a uniform. His body had the same smooth tone and flat stomach and small nipples as Desmond’s; his armpits were shaved, his upper arms swollen like those of a gymnast. Mon Tee Coon and Snuggs stared down at us from an oak limb overhead.

“You said I’m like one of you.”

“Oh,” he said. “You obviously love movies. The same with Mr. Purcel. We’re not a bad lot. Give us a chance. We’re making this area rich.”

“I don’t see that.”

“We blew the budget out the window. One hundred and twenty million dollars, and the meter is still running. Desmond is broke. By the way, on the subject of Des, you sure got to him.”

“In what way?” I said.

“Something to do with his background, I guess. Des is full of secrets. I don’t probe them.”

“Any discussion I had with him was about a series of homicides. Nothing else.”

“I’m sure that’s the case, Mr. Robicheaux. Sir, it’s not my intention to offend. The culture I live in is garish and abrasive by nature. We spend our time diddling each other to keep our minds off other things.”

“What would those others things be?”

“Growing old. Watching our looks dissolve. Pretending we can reclaim our youth. Is there any fool like an old fool, sir?” he said.

“Who are you talking about, podna?”

“Me. Who else?” He picked up a horseshoe and flipped it thirty feet onto the steel pin, his movements as fluid as water. “Bingo! Is Alafair up?”

The blues club on the bayou was packed, bodies pressed one against the other, people shouting in order to hold an ordinary conversation, the band blowing the joint down with Clifton Chenier’s “Ay-Te Te Fee.” I squeezed my way to the bar. Lloyd, the indignant black bartender with the small head, waited silently for me to order.

“Bella Delahoussaye!” I shouted.

“What?” he shouted back.

“Where’s Bella?”

He looked at the bandstand. “She ain’t here!”

“Where is she?”

“Running late! Like always!” he shouted. “What you want, man?”

“Half a barbecue chicken, double dirty rice, and a diet Dr Pepper!”

Ten minutes passed. Still no Bella. The bartender brought my food on a paper plate with a napkin and a plastic fork and knife. The noise was getting louder. My head was coming off.

“Where’s the Dr Pepper?” I shouted.

“I tole you, this ain’t a soda fountain!” the bartender replied. He walked away. A big man who looked familiar sat down next to me.

“Watch my food, will you?” I said.

I worked my way outside and checked the parking lot. I didn’t have Bella’s phone number and had no way to contact her except to call the city police in St. Martinville and ask the dispatcher to send a car to her cottage. I didn’t think Bella would appreciate the gesture. I went back inside and sat down. I could see Sean McClain sitting at a table below the bandstand. He was with several other young people and drinking a beer from a bottle.

“Find what you were looking for?” the man next to me said.

I looked at him. His face was as generic and uninteresting as a shingle. “I know you?”

“You came into my former place of employment in St. Martinville.”

I had to think. “Harvey?”

“You got a good memory.”

“You never heard of Evangeline. You called me ‘asshole’ and ‘fuckball.’ ”

“I was having an off night. You were acting weird on top of it. Sorry about the asshole and fuckball references. You come here often?”

“No,” I said. “I’m waiting on Bella Delahoussaye.”

“The black gal with the magical fingers?”

“Pardon?” I said.

“The way she plays guitar. She’s got magic.”

I started eating. I tried to catch the bartender’s eye.

“What’d you think I meant?” Harvey asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

He saw me trying to get the bartender’s attention. “What do you need?”

“My drink.”

“The bartender here’s got an attitude.” He tapped his knuckles on the bar.

“He’s all right,” I said. “Let him alone.”

The front door opened and a clutch of people came in. In the center was a slender ebony-skinned woman wearing an African head wrap and a sleeveless turquoise and gold dashiki, her body clicking with beads and chains and bracelets. I got up and clamped my hand onto Harvey’s shoulder. “You’re on guard duty again.”

The woman was not Bella. I stopped by Sean McClain’s table. He stood up to shake hands. His friends smiled. “I didn’t know you hung out here, Dave.”

“Not really. Just tonight,” I said.

“Everything okay?”

“Sure.”

“Want to join us?” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Nice seeing y’all.”

I went back to the bar. A soda cup filled to the brim had been placed next to my plate. “Where’d that come from?”

“I told him to get on it. He said he didn’t have Dr Pepper. I asked him if he had Coca-Cola. Between you and me, I think the guy’s got a racial problem. Better eat up.”

“You paid for the Coke?”

“Big deal.”

I looked at the doorway. No Bella. I could feel a sensation like a guitar string tightening around my head. I filled a fork with chicken and dirty rice. It was cold and tasted like confetti. I lifted the cup to my lips and tilted back my head. I felt the Coca-Cola and crushed ice slide over my tongue and down my throat. But something else was in the cup. What had I done? Did I not recognize the smell, the golden glow inside the barrel the whiskey was aged in, the cool fire that lit my loins and caused me to close my eyes with release and surrender, as though a treacherous lover had returned from long ago for another go-round between the sheets?

I set the cup down on the bar, harder than I should have, perhaps more in pretense than in alarm.

“You dig Jack, right?” Harvey said. “He didn’t have Dr Pepper. So I told the guy to give you Coke and Jack. What’s with you?”

“Everything.”

“Tell you what, I’m outta here. Keep a good thought. Buy yourself a condo in Crazy Town. I also take back my apology for calling you asshole and fuckball.”

He spun off the stool and walked away in the crowd. My left hand was on the cup. I felt its coldness seeping into my fingers. For a drunk, a moment like this produces the same sensation as coitus interruptus. I raised the cup, then put it down again. I had never wanted to drink so badly in my life, even when I was on the grog full-time and would wake with a thirst so great I would have committed a serious crime to quench it.

I got off the stool and worked my way through the crowd onto the porch and then into the parking lot. In the distance I could see the lights of the sugar mill, the smoke from the stacks an electrified white against a black sky. I wanted to be on a cane wagon in the year 1945, safe with my parents, far removed from the metabolic addiction that had been my undoing since I was sixteen. I heard someone walk on the gravel behind me.

“You have trouble with that guy, Dave?” Sean said.

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“You don’t look right.”

“I’m off my feed. I’m okay.”

“You want me to drive you home?”

“I think Bella Delahoussaye is in danger.”

“The lady in the band?”

“I think she may be a target of the guy who killed Lucinda Arceneaux.”

“Oh, man,” he said. “Bring your truck around. I’ll tell my friends.”

It’s funny how a simple kid like Sean McClain can make you proud to be an American.

At 10:17 on Monday morning, Helen came down to my office. “I just got off the phone with the authorities in Texas. Guess what?”

“They’re no longer in a hurry to get Tillinger back,” I said.

“How’d you know?”

“His medical care could run into millions.”

She pulled up a chair. “Go over everything again.”

I did as she said. Helen was a good cop, in my experience second only to Clete Purcel, and not someone you took over the hurdles. But I didn’t want Sean McClain hurt worse than he already was.

“You left a bar and went to Delahoussaye’s house because you had a feeling?” she said.

“That’s correct.”

“You know how that will sound to others?”

“That’s their problem.”

“Sean McClain had been drinking at the club?”

“He wasn’t impaired.”

“How about you?”

“I picked up a cup I shouldn’t have,” I said.

Her jaw tightened.

“Here’s the long and short of the shooting,” I said. “Tillinger pointed his weapon at us. Sean told him to drop it over and over.”

“Tillinger pointed his gun at you or in your direction?”

“That’s too fine a distinction,” I said.

“I think you’re holding back on me.”

She was right. Tillinger probably had thought I was in his corner. He was probably going to lower the weapon and place it on the asphalt. There may have even been a smile on his face. Then Sean had started firing. Maybe if he had waited two seconds more, the Luger would have been on the asphalt and Tillinger would have had his hands in the air.

“I wish I hadn’t taken Sean with me,” I said. “If it’s on anybody, it’s on me.”

“It’s an imperfect world, bwana. But we’re stuck with it.”

“Anything else?”

“St. Martin Parish thinks this is open and shut,” she said.

“Based on what?”

“Tillinger was at the scene with a gun in his hand. That might be a clue.”

“Were there prints on the chalice?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did Tillinger have gloves on his person?”

“Jody Dubisson says he’s still looking,” she said.

“This is a crock and you know it,” I said.

“Simple people like straight lines.”

“I think Tillinger was carrying the Luger to protect Bella, not to take her life.”

“How would Tillinger know the killer was headed to her place?”

“Maybe Tillinger was following him. He probably would have made a good cop. Helen, Tillinger is a human being. The guy we’re dealing with doesn’t have a category.”

My notebook was open on the desk blotter. She looked at the copy I had made of Tillinger’s attempt to identify the killer. “What do you make of that?”

“I think the Aryan Brotherhood is a player,” I said. “Maybe there’s a link between them and our jail scandal. Maybe ‘UNC’ means ‘University of North Carolina’ or ‘uncle.’ Maybe ‘PRO’ means ‘producer.’ You can go into meltdown thinking about all this.”

“Let’s go back to our jail scandal,” she said. “What’s the link between it and the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux?”

I shook my head, my eyes neutral.

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “I know you, Dave.”

“I don’t have any answers,” I said. “I wish I did.”

She waited a long time before she spoke again. “Any word from Iberia General?”

“The neurologist said the inside of Tillinger’s head is egg batter.”

She looked at the pad again. “I’d like to kick Sean McClain in the butt.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“But he messed up royally.” She paused. I knew she wanted to say more, all of it bad.

“I messed up, too,” I said.

She scratched her forearm, her face empty. Then she got up and stood behind my chair. I never knew what Helen would do when she was behind me. Sometimes her silence scared me. As I’ve said, several people lived inside her, some dangerous, some adventurous, some erotic and almost predatory. People talk about coming out of the closet. Helen had a warehouse the size of a city block to come out of. She gripped my shoulders, sinking her fingers into the tendons. I could smell the freshness in her clothes, almost feel the heat in her body.

“There are two people in this world who know every thought you have, Pops,” she said. “One of them is Clete Purcel. Guess who the other is?”

“No idea,” I replied.

“What’s Bailey think?”

“Our guy is a trophy killer in reverse. Or maybe he has boxes of panties and bras and wallets. He’ll keep doing it until we burn his kite.”

She drew a fingernail across my neck. “Go out on your own and I’ll have your head in a basket.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” I said.

That evening I went home in a funk. I felt powerless. We had no viable suspects in the series of murders that had begun with Lucinda Arceneaux; a deranged man like Smiley Wimple was making calls to me that I couldn’t trace; and outsiders and sybarites like Antoine Butterworth were wiping their feet on us.

Alafair had already fixed supper and was putting it on the table when I walked into the kitchen. She was wearing a white dress and makeup.

“Where are you going tonight?” I asked.

“Lou and I are seeing Kiss of Death with Richard Widmark at UL.”

“Wexler again?” I said.

“Give it a break, Dave.”

“I just think he’s too old for you.”

Talk about feeding one to the batter.

“Do you realize how absurd that sounds, coming from you?” she said.

Rain was pelting the trees in the yard, the sky running with ink. I opened the screen door and let Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon inside, mud and all. “I majored in being ridiculous.”

“I’m glad you’re going out with Bailey,” she said.

That was my daughter.

“You’re a good guy, Alf.”

“Lou thinks Kiss of Death is too strong for me,” she said.

“When Tommy Udo pushes the old woman in the wheelchair down the staircase?”

“Lou didn’t know I came from El Salvador. When I told him what happened in my village, he got upset. He’s very protective.”

“I might come in late tonight,” I said.

“You’re seeing Bailey?”

“No.”

She waited for me to go on. But I didn’t. Her face clouded.

“I’m putting in some overtime,” I said.

“Are you and Clete up to something?”

“This has nothing to do with Clete.”

“That’s like one side of the coin saying it has nothing to do with the other side.”

“Watch out for Tommy Udo,” I said.

Cormac Watts was the best coroner we ever had, more cop than pathologist. I always liked him. He was gay and imaginative and happy and, like many gay people, at peace with the world even though the world had often not been kind to him. If he had any professional fault, it was his tendency to extrapolate an encyclopedic amount of information from a fingernail paring, which sometimes did not help his credibility. He called me at the office on Wednesday afternoon. “Ready for the breakdown on Frenchie Lautrec?”

“I thought death by strangulation was death by strangulation,” I said.

“That’s the cause of death, all right. But we’ve got some issues.”

“I can’t tell you how much I hate that word, Cormac. I rank it with ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing.’ ”

“You want to hear what I’ve got or not?”

The truth was, I didn’t want to hear it. The sun was shining while the rain was falling, and there was a huge rainbow that dipped out of the clouds into the middle of City Park.

“Yes, please tell me about Lautrec’s corpse,” I said.

“I think he faked his own murder.”

“His wrists were taped behind him.”

“Think back,” Cormac said. “When you found him, the roll was barely wrapped around the left wrist. He could have gotten loose.”

“Not if he was unconscious.”

“His blood was clean. There are no injection marks on the body. No fresh bruises or abrasions from somebody lifting him up. He kicked the chair into the wall.”

“How do you know?”

“His right loafer was on the floor. Part of a toenail was inside the sock. He was right-handed. He kicked the chair with his right foot and chipped the nail.”

“That could have happened if someone else kicked it out from under him,” I said.

“Nope, the weight would have been going away from him. It’s unlikely the blow would have broken the nail.”

I rubbed my temples. “Lautrec had no feelings about anything or anyone except himself. I don’t see him as a suicide.”

“About ten days ago I saw him in my insurance agent’s office. He was there with his daughter.”

“I didn’t know he had one.”

“She lives in Biloxi. My agent said Lautrec bought a life insurance policy. My agent wanted to sell me one, too.”

“Can we stay on the subject, Cormac?”

“Lautrec could be a menacing presence. My agent was about to have a coronary. I don’t think he wanted to insure Lautrec.”

“Why not?”

“Because Lautrec got his way or he made other people miserable?”

“I’ll give your insurance agent a ring,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Lautrec had a Maltese cross tattooed inside his calf.”

“That bothers me,” I said.

“You think we’re dealing with a cult?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this.”

I called Cormac’s insurance agent. Lautrec had bought a three-hundred-thousand-dollar policy that did not cover suicide. His daughter was the beneficiary.

Thursday had been a long day for Clete. He had to pry a bail skip out of a chimney in Abbeville. The skip’s hysterical girlfriend tore Clete’s new sport coat with a butcher knife. A disbarred lawyer stuck him with a bad check for a two-month investigation, and his Caddy got towed from a yellow zone. That evening he ate downtown and took a walk onto the drawbridge by Burke Street. He leaned on the rail and looked down at the long bronze ribbon of Bayou Teche unspooling beneath his feet, its banks lined with live oaks and lily pads. It seemed to dip off the edge of the earth.

He could see the fireflies in the trees and smell gas on the wind, and he felt a sense of mortality that was as cold and damp as the grave. The light was shrinking on the horizon, and an island of dead leaves was floating under the bridge, undulating with the current. He had a package of cigarettes in his pocket and wanted to light one up. He tore up the package and dropped the pieces down a sewer drain.

It was almost dark when he got back to the motor court. He parked the Caddy in the cul-de-sac and went inside his cottage and turned on the television, not caring which channel came on. He cracked a Budweiser and was tempted to pour a shot in it but instead sat down in his stuffed chair and tried to concentrate on the television and forget the morbid sensations that had flooded him on the drawbridge. Then he realized he was watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

He turned off the set, returned his unfinished beer to the refrigerator, chain-locked the door, showered, and put on his pajamas. The time was 9:17. The rest of the world might have its troubles, but Clete Purcel was going to bed early, safe and sound in his cottage that was always squared away and meticulously clean. If he was lucky, he would sleep through the night without dreaming and rise to a better day, one in which he did not feel the pull of the earth.

An hour later, deep inside his sleep, he felt a squeeze on his wrist. He opened his eyes in the blackness. His right hand jerked tight against a handcuff that was hooked to the bed frame. Four feet away, a diminutive man with the complexion and muscle tone of liquid soap was seated in a chair, illuminated by the glow of the bathroom night-light.

“Hi, hi,” the man said. “Guess who came to see you.”

Clete pinched his eyes and waited for them to adjust. “How’d you get in?”

“The cleaning lady left the door open,” the man said. “I’ve been under your bed since this afternoon. Your carpet is smelly.”

The man wore pink tennis shoes and tight shorts and a boxlike white hat with a starched brim and had a smile that made Clete think of red licorice. A small semi-automatic rested on his thigh.

“You hooked me up with my own cuffs,” Clete said. “Pretty impressive.”

“I could have done something else to you. I have the chemicals to do it.”

“Listen, Wimple—”

“No! No! No! It is rude to call people by their last names. Do. Not. Do. That.”

“Sorry,” Clete said. “Let me start over. Listen. Guy. Who. Burns. People. Alive. With. A. Flamethrower, what the fuck are you doing in my cottage?”

“The people I used to work for are after me.”

“Just because you lit up a couple of their guys? I’m shocked.”

“They violated me. With a tree branch.”

“How about unhooking me and we’ll talk about it? You want some ice cream? That’s a big favorite of yours, right?”

“Don’t try to trick me.”

“You know my daughter is Gretchen Horowitz, don’t you?”

“She kills for hire.”

“That’s what she did, past tense. She’s a documentary filmmaker now. But don’t get her pissed off, know what I mean?”

“You mean, don’t hurt you?”

“What I’m saying to you is don’t fuck with the wrong people, Smiley whatever-the-fuck-your-last-name-is.”

“I didn’t give you permission to call me Smiley.”

“Then shove it up your ass.”

“The deputy who shot my friend Hugo Tillinger is named Sean McClain.”

“Tillinger is your friend?”

“Why did the deputy kill him?”

“Tillinger pointed a Luger at McClain. At Dave Robicheaux, too. Dave’s on the square. You know that. I’m going to turn on my side, okay?”

“I took the gun from under your mattress.”

“I’m still going to turn on my side. Look, you got a rotten deal as a child. I can relate to that. But you’re coming down on the wrong people. Diggez-vous on that, noble mon?”

“Dig what?”

“Sean McClain is a good kid. He’s going through a bad time over what happened. Like you said, the Mob is your problem. They’re assholes, not interesting guys who look like Marlon Brando and James Caan. What do you know about the Jersey crowd?”

“They lent a lot of money to a movie company here.”

“You hear anything about Russians?”

“They’re building atomic reactors. They launder money in a place called Malta.”

“How do you know this shit?”

“I hear people in Miami and New Or-yuns talk.”

“Unhook me. I’ll give you a free pass. You got my word.”

“Do you want to be my friend?”

“I think you’re a righteous dude. Everybody has a few character defects.”

“You know what I’ll do if you lie, don’t you?”

“I got a sense of your potential when you poured Drano down Tony Nemo’s throat.”

Smiley got up and stuck the semi-auto into his pants pocket. His stomach was pouched over his waistband. He leaned down, pausing long enough to search Clete’s eyes. He popped the manacle with Clete’s key and stepped back.

Clete pushed himself up in bed, his hands in full view. “What’d you do with my piece?”

“Your thirty-eight?”

“Yeah, my thirty-eight.”

“You’ll find it when you go wee-wee.”

“You dropped my thirty-eight in the bowl?”

“I flushed first.”

“Can I dress?”

“No.”

“This is getting to be a drag. Will you tell me what you want and get out of my life?”

“I want to hire you to cover my back. I’ll be your friend.”

“I appreciate the compliment, but you’ve killed too many people. I think you enjoy it. That’s not a good sign.”

“The people I killed hurt children.”

“I don’t think that one will wash, Wimple. Sorry. Smiley.”

“If they didn’t hurt children, they protected people who did. Are you calling me a liar?”

“Look, you did me a solid once. You took out a former gunbull who was two seconds from snuffing my wick. But you started a gunfight that killed a female detective. She was my lady for a while. That one won’t go away.”

“It was an accident.”

“Tell her that.”

Smiley’s teeth looked like rows of tiny white pearls, the gums barely holding them in place. His nostrils were slits. “In or out?”

“Out,” Clete replied, his eyes flat. He waited, his mouth dry.

“You’re making me mad,” Smiley said.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Smiley stood up from the chair. “Sometimes I do bad things when I get mad.”

“Really?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I didn’t. You took on the Mob. Nobody has ever done that. You’ve probably got them dumping in their drawers. But don’t let them take you alive. You copy on that? Go out smoking.”

A gust of rain and wind swept across the roof; lightning that made no sound bloomed around the edges of the curtains.

“Will you try to follow me?” Smiley said.

“No.”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, you do not know what I’m thinking,” Clete said.

“We’re alike.”

“Time to beat feet, podjo.”

“We’re two of a kind. I like you. I want you to be my friend.”

“You’re getting weird on me, little mon. Are you hearing me? Hello, Mars.”

“Little mon?”

“Take it as a compliment.”

“I’ll be in touch. So will she.”

“Who is ‘she’?”

“Wonder Woman. She looks over me.”

Clete sat on the edge of the bed, his hands cupped on his knees. He stared at the floor. “I’ve really enjoyed this. But I’m going in the bathroom now.”

“You took care of an orphan boy.”

“You can’t win on the game you pitched last week,” Clete said.

Clete continued to gaze at the floor, his head bowed. He heard the door open and felt the rain rush inside, then heard the door close. He got up from the bed and looked through the curtains. The driveway was black and shiny and empty. He went into the bathroom and retrieved his snub-nose from the toilet bowl and washed it, then dried it and oiled it and put it into its holster and lay back down and stared at the ceiling and listened to rain pattering on the roof, his eyelids stitched to his forehead.

Saturday morning was perfect. The sunrise was striped with pink and purple clouds, the live oaks a deep green after the rain, the bayou high above the banks, the lily pads and elephant ears rolling with the current. It was a study in the mercurial nature of light and shadow and the way they form and re-create the external world second by second with no more guidance than a puff of wind. I believed it was akin to the obsession of Desmond Cormier with John Ford’s films and the Manichean dualism of light and darkness. I believed I was looking into the center of the Great Mystery right there in my backyard.

But my lighthearted mood did not last long. Later, as I was raking leaves in the front yard, I saw Antoine Butterworth’s Subaru coming up East Main, past the library and city hall and the grotto devoted to Jesus’ mother. I turned my back to the street, gathering up an armload of leaves to stuff in a barrel, hoping that Butterworth would drive on by.

I heard his wheels turn into my driveway and bounce with the dip. The top of his Subaru was down. He cut his engine and got out, dressed in pleated white slacks and a golf shirt and sandals, with a pale blue silk bandana tied around his neck, the way a rogue Errol Flynn might wear it. He held a manila envelope in one hand.

“Normally, I’d take this to your supervisor,” he said. “But since she’s not in on Saturday, I thought you wouldn’t mind my dropping by. What a snug little place you have here.”

“What is it, Butterworth?”

“Actually, I was made privy to this material by Lou Wexler, busy little shit that he is.”

“You’re not a Brit. Why do you try to talk like one?”

“You don’t think Lou is a little shit? Oh, I forgot, he’s dating your daughter.”

“She’s not dating him, bub.”

“That would be news to Lou.”

I began raking again, the tines biting into the dirt.

“He did some checking on your partner, Detective Ribbons,” Butterworth said. “Want to hear the results?”

My hands were tingling. I raked harder, a bead of sweat running down my nose.

“Not curious at all?” he said. “My, my.”

I stopped, the rake propped in my hand. “Say it.”

“Bailey was a bad little girl and was playing with matches.”

I held my eyes on his. How could either Wexler or Butterworth know about the arson deaths of the three rapists on an Indian reservation in western Montana? According to Bailey, she had never told anyone what she had done except me and the Indian woman with whom she lived.

“Cat got your tongue?” he said.

“I’m off the clock now,” I said. “I’m also on my own property.”

“Meaning?”

“You might be having your next meal through a glass straw.”

“I’ll leave this private investigator’s report for you to read at your leisure. Ta-ta.”

“Why would Wexler be interested in the background of Detective Ribbons?”

“It’s not Wexler. Outside of posing in front of a mirror, his chief interest in life is lessons in classical Latin, if you get my drift. Put it this way — he loves to shoot films in Thailand. Desmond told him to check out your partner.”

“Why her?”

“You and she are hurting Des financially. That said, by extension, you’re hurting Lou and me.”

“Get off my property.”

“Not interested in the tykes who got burned in a schoolhouse fire?”

Then I realized he wasn’t talking about the death of the rapists. My stomach felt sick, my face sweaty and cold in the wind. “Where’d this happen?”

“In Holy Cross, in the Lower Ninth Ward. None of the children died. But a certain little girl was in a lot of trouble for a while. The welfare worker said she was ‘disturbed.’ Broken home, alcoholic mother, poverty, all that Little Match Girl routine, no pun intended.”

I went back to raking, my hands dry and stiff on the rake handle, my eyes out of focus.

“No clever remarks?” he said.

“I think you’re full of it.”

“Just going to let it roll off your back?”

I didn’t look up. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

“Let’s see. Three things, actually. I took a couple of AK rounds that probably had feces on them. One of my wives gave me the clap. And spending time in this place.”

I took the manila envelope from his hands, walked him to his vehicle, and slammed him into the seat hard enough to jar his teeth. Then I tore his envelope into pieces and sprinkled them on his head.

“Keep being the great example you are,” I said. “We know you can do it.”

Then I got into my truck, drove around his Subaru — scraping the fender with my bumper — and headed up Loreauville Road to Bailey’s cottage, my heart the size and density of a cantaloupe.

That morning, I went to Mass at St. Edward’s, and that evening I attended an AA meeting at the Solomon House, across the street from old New Iberia High. When I left the meeting, the stars were bright against a black sky, and a warm breeze was blowing through the live oaks in front of the old school building. It was a fine evening, the kind that assures you a better day is coming.

Sean McClain was leaning against my pickup in uniform, his head on his chest, the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes.

“What’s happenin’?” I said.

“Didn’t mean to get in your face last night,” he replied.

“You didn’t.”

“I been studying on a few things. I don’t know if they’re he’pful or not.”

“You figured out who was in your barn?”

“Probably that little rodent nobody can catch.”

“Wimple?”

“Whatever,” he said.

“Let me set your mind at ease on that,” I said. “If that were Smiley Wimple, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I’d be dead?”

“Probably.”

“I been thinking about various clues on these murders,” he said.

“Clues?”

“There haven’t been many. Not from the day we seen that poor lady floating on the cross.”

“I’m not following you, Sean.”

“The clue we didn’t give much mind to is that green tennis shoe me and you found on the beach. Size seven.”

“It’s not much of a clue, Sean.”

“Y’all run a DNA on it, though, right?”

“Yeah, it belonged to Lucinda Arceneaux.”

“If she was wearing one, she was wearing two.”

“That’s right,” I said, my attention slipping away.

“One of the people who called in the 911 said there was a scream from a lighted cabin cruiser.”

“You got it.”

“Why not search every cabin cruiser on Cypremort Point?” he said.

“Search warrants aren’t that broad, Sean.”

He picked up a pebble from the curb and flung it at the street. “Well, I was just trying to come up with something. Sorry I ain’t much he’p.”

But Sean had opened a door in my head. A green tennis shoe with blue stripes. It didn’t go with the purple dress Lucinda Arceneaux had died in.

“Why you got that look on your face?” Sean said.

“Because I just realized how stupid I’ve been.”

I picked up Bailey at six o’clock. Or tried to pick her up. She came to the front door in a gingham dress. I was wearing a suede sport coat and freshly pressed slacks and a light blue shirt and a plum-colored necktie. “Ready?”

“Where are we going?” she said, as though surprised.

“Dinner and a movie.”

“I already fixed something.”

“Then a film?”

“Whatever you like. Are you turning into a monk?”

“If so, I’m not aware of it.”

“Come in, Dave. We need to talk.”

I didn’t want to come in or to talk. If someone had pointed a gun at me and asked me to state my honest feelings about Bailey, I wouldn’t have known what to say. My obsession with her was probably as great as Desmond’s. Maybe I was trying to reclaim my youth; maybe I wanted to be her protector. It was hard for me to separate her from the image of Cathy Downs standing by the road while Henry Fonda tells her that one day he may return to Tombstone, although he knows full well that his business with the Clantons is not over and he will never be back.

Yes, it was hard for me to separate Bailey from Clementine Carter, until I thought about the three men Bailey had set on fire.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. She had set the dining room table and lit a candelabra in the center. “You’re looking at me that way again. It makes me very uncomfortable,” she said.

“That’s a pretty dress. You look beautiful in it. You’re beautiful in anything, Bailey.”

“I wish I hadn’t told you about what I did in Montana. You think I should resign my job?”

“For what purpose?”

“Maybe I should report myself to the authorities in Montana.”

I could feel my heart thudding, my stomach churning. “This is the reality. The case was closed years ago. In the eyes of the law, three meth dealers blew themselves up. Probably all three had records as dealers and predators. Their deaths were marked off as good riddance. If you reopen the case, you will be involved with the courts for two or three years and then probably be given probation. Everybody involved with the case will secretly wish you stayed in Louisiana. In the meantime you will be financially destitute and ruined professionally. What good would come out of it?”

“I’d sleep again,” she said.

I had tried. But I couldn’t even convince myself. And I had not addressed the arson investigation at the school in Holy Cross, even though I had discussed it with Clete, for which I felt another layer of guilt.

“Desmond hired a PI to dig up dirt on you,” I said. “Or rather, he got Lou Wexler to hire the PI who dug up your past.”

“Pardon?”

“You were part of an arson investigation when you were thirteen. The fire was at a Girl Scout meeting in Holy Cross.”

“Yes, it was an accident.”

“I talked to a retired fire department superintendent,” I said. “He believed they cut you some slack because of the problems in your home.”

“You’re saying I’m a firebug?”

“No,” I said. But the word stuck in my throat.

“So what am I?”

“Someone who had a hard young life. Like a lot of us.”

“What do we do now? Make love? Eat dinner? Pretend nothing has happened?”

“I’m not sure.”

She went to the dining room table and pinched out the candles one at a time. “There. Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

I stared at her dumbly. She avoided my eyes. I think she was on the edge of crying. I went outside and got into my truck and drove home in the last of the sunset. I don’t think I ever felt more alone.

Smiley did not measure time in terms of clocks or calendars. Time was a series of sensations, like bubbles rising from a caldron, without meaning or predictability. A therapist had told him he’d been raised in an environment where cruelty was masked as love, and the consequence would remain with him like a stone bruise on the soul for the rest of his life.

He associated sleep with a brief respite from the world, followed by a wet bed in the morning and a belt across his buttocks. Breakfast was a bowl of porridge and a glass of cold milk unless he was assigned to the punishment chair. As a runaway, he learned that the streets of Mexico City were shady and cool in the day and cold at night, and the male and female prostitutes in front of the cantinas were not his friends. He also learned that the hands and lips and genitalia that moved over his body were a testimony to his status in the world — namely, that Smiley Wimple was food, and the scabs and rags and stench on his body and the lice nits in his hair would never be a deterrent to the class of men who preyed upon him.

Two nights ago he had boosted an ice cream truck from inside the corporate creamery in Lafayette, and yesterday he had driven it to a playground in the little town of Sunset and handed out boxes of Popsicles and Eskimo Pies and ice cream sandwiches to a throng of black children. He did the same in back-of-town Lake Charles and a poor neighborhood in Baton Rouge. He changed license plates twice, although there was apparently no need. A sheriff’s deputy in West Baton Rouge Parish bought a frozen sundae from him.

Early this morning he had driven to New Iberia to try to get rid of his growing obsession with Clete Purcel. Why did this man bother him? Smiley wasn’t sure. Smiley trusted children and some people of color but few white adults, including himself, the latter in large part because he had been taught he was worthless.

So he kept his contact with others minimal. When he had a problem, he did what addicts and alcoholics call a geographic: He went somewhere else. That was why he liked airplanes. An airplane was an armored womb that not only protected him but was detached from the earth and all its troubles.

Regarding his line of work, he had no illusions. The people he worked for paid well and gave him Disney World tickets but laughed at him behind his back, at least until someone told them of his capabilities. In fact, Smiley had made a mental note long ago to get to know some of them better after he retired and could afford to do a freebie or two.

Then why the obsession with the man named Purcel?

The answer lay in the man’s eyes. There was a calmness in them, a lack of either fear or hostility, a green glow that was unreadable but seemed to absorb everything and nothing. The pale smoothness around the sockets was like a baby’s. Most of the people Smiley knew had scales around their eyes.

Maybe he needed to prove himself wrong about Clete Purcel. The people he had trusted usually turned out to be traitors, which meant they had to be punished. This man was different. He was a violent man capable of great kindness, a protector not only of abused children and women but people who had no voice or power and were used and discarded. He could have been the male companion of Wonder Woman. The two of them could have married and been Smiley’s parents. That thought filled him with a sensation like sinking in a bathtub of warm water.

He had followed the Caddy into East Texas and watched the graveyard service through the binoculars, then followed the Caddy back into Louisiana, even into the truck stop, where the man named Purcel had bought a thermos of coffee.

That was when Smiley, in his preoccupation with Purcel, got careless and picked up a tail of his own.

He recognized the vehicle from Miami’s Little Havana, a silver Camaro with oversize rear tires and a grille shaped like the mouth of a sea creature and mufflers that throbbed on the asphalt. The owner was Jaime O’Banion, a psychotic button man from New Orleans whom Tony Nemo used to call “half-spick, half-Mick, and half-anything-else-that-don’t-use-rubbers.”

Of course, Smiley had taken Tony Nemo off the board with a container of Drano and had always wanted to do the same for Jaime O’Banion. Word was Jaime had done a whole family with a bomb in Mexico City, children included. Jaime presented another problem. He was the only button man in the business who was so dangerous and good at his craft that he got away with hits inside Miami, which had been an open city since the days of Lansky and Trafficante. Worse, Jaime obviously knew Smiley was following Clete Purcel, and he may have seen Purcel check into the motel behind the truck stop.

Smiley had made a mess of things, as when he had messed in his underwear at the orphanage. He could almost hear the whistle of the belt. After sunset, he abandoned the ice cream truck and boosted a vintage pickup from behind a bar. He threw a backpack loaded with the tools of his trade onto the passenger seat and headed for the motel, wondering if his own time had come.

The security camera on the second floor of the motel showed a man wearing gloves and a mask getting on a chair and extending a spray can toward the lens. The mask was made of hard plastic, shiny purplish white, and cast to imitate a weeping spirit in a Greek tragedy. Nothing came out of the spray can. The man shook it and tried again. Still nothing. He looked over his shoulder. No one else was in the hallway. He dropped the spray can into a trash receptacle just as the elevator door opened and a couple who appeared drunk got out. A woman with a vacuum entered the hallway from the fire exit.

There were now four people inside the lens of the camera. The man who had disposed of the can did not take off his mask. The woman with the vacuum removed a small pistol from a pocket in her dress and let it hang from her hand. She was thick-bodied and muscular and had blond hair that hung like dirty string in her face. She hunched her shoulders as though asking a question. The man in the mask pointed at a room a few feet away.

The woman stared at the security camera. The man in the mask pointed again at the room, obviously agitated. The woman’s companion had a lean discolored face, and scar tissue in his eyebrows, and the lithe flat-chested physique of a prizefighter. He also seemed to be staring at the camera. He spoke in sign language to the man in the mask. The woman with the vacuum was short and plump and dark-skinned, perhaps Hispanic. She, too, looked at the camera, then went to the trash receptacle and retrieved the spray can. Her breasts were visibly rising and falling. None of the four people spoke. The man in the mask began to speak in sign language that, later, a police technician would translate as “I’ll shoot it when we leave.”

A plainclothes detective banged on Clete’s door with the flat of his fist. A uniformed deputy sheriff stood behind him. Clete opened the door in his skivvies. He looked at the paramedics bagging up the bodies on the floor. “Help you?”

“Yeah,” the detective said. He stared at Clete, recognition swimming into his eyes. “Are you Clete Purcel?”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? What the fuck are you doing here?”

The detective was big and wore a gray suit and spit-shined needle-nosed cowboy boots, a gold badge on his belt.

“I was sleeping,” Clete said. “Until you beat on the door.”

“What are you doing here, in this part of Louisiana?”

“Passing through to New Iberia. I’m a PI. I’m on a case.”

The detective raised his hand for the paramedics to stop their work. He unzipped two bags, already on the gurneys. “Step out here.”

“I’m not dressed.”

“Nobody is interested in your dick. You know any of these people?”

Clete stepped into the hallway. His gaze moved across the faces of the three gunshot victims, lingering for less than a second on the face of Jaime O’Banion.

“No, I don’t know any of these people,” he said.

“You’re a liar,” the detective said.

“I used to be a homicide cop at NOPD,” Clete said. “A dog-fuck on your own turf is no fun. But that’s your grief, not mine. So how about eighty-sixing the insults?”

“Get your clothes on.”

“Search my room. Check my piece. I’m not your guy. You know it.”

The detective put a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. “You’ll like our facilities. After two or three days, the baloney sandwiches start to grow on you.”

“Fuck you.”

“What did you say?”

“You’re queering your own investigation,” Clete said.

“The guy’s an asshole,” the deputy said. “How about we let it slide?”

“Hook him up,” the plainclothes said.

“In his shorts?”

“Throw a blanket over him. Take him down the back stairs. Maybe he won’t trip.”

Five minutes later, Bailey came through my door without knocking. “You just walk out? On the case? On you and me? On everything?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said.

“Oh, really?”

“I’m not right for you, Bailey. I was deceiving you and myself.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

I looked at the bayou again. The light was gold in the trees along the bank, the grass a pale green, the camellia bushes swelling in the wind. The surface of the water seemed to shrivel like old skin. When I turned around, she was six inches from my face. “I want to pound you with my fists,” she said.

“I don’t blame you.”

“Are you having a psychotic break?”

“You knew what I was talking about with Helen.”

“About the guy in the mask not being a noun?”

“Yes.”

“You’re saying he’s a symbol? Something we turned loose on ourselves? So what?”

“I know who he is. I just can’t prove it. I can almost see him in my mind.”

“I think you’re slipping your mooring,” she said.

“I’m a detail or two away.”

“If you knew who our guy was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I didn’t answer. She looked into my eyes. “Don’t you dare, Dave.”

“Clete feels the same way.”

“I don’t care what you feel. Neither one of you is an executioner.”

I left her standing there and walked out of my own office.

“You hear me?” she called down the hallway.

I kept walking, down the stairs, through the foyer, and out the rear exit and into the brightness and the cold of the day and the tannic odor of late autumn on the wind.

Clete had to pick up a bail skip in St. Martinville at nine a.m. I left him at the motor court and drove to Desmond’s home on Cypremort Point. My cut-down twelve-gauge was wrapped in a blanket behind the seat. I had no plan in mind. However, that statement is one I have always distrusted in other people, and I distrust it even more when I think it or say it myself. The unconscious always knows what the person is doing or planning. The agenda is to find the situation and the rationale that will allow the individual to commit deeds that are unconscionable.

No matter how you cut it, I was back to the short form of the Serenity Prayer, known in AA and other recovery groups as Fuck It. I cannot praise the nuances of Fuck It enough, but you already know the drill. I ached to get back on that old-time rock and roll, this time not with the flak juice but with double-aught bucks and pumpkin balls at point-blank range.

Don’t mistake this for a paean to the gun culture. It’s my admission of the madness that has defined most of my adult life.

No one was home. A gardener was raking the yard. He said Mr. Cormier was at a picnic in New Iberia.

“How about Mr. Butterworth?” I said.

“I don’t have no truck wit’ Mr. Butterworth’s goings or comings, suh,” he said, his eyes downcast.

I drove back home and left the shotgun behind the seat and went inside. I heard Alafair clicking on her keyboard in her bedroom. I stood in the doorway until she reached a stopping place. Snuggs was sleeping inside her manuscript basket, his thick tail hanging through the wire. I didn’t know where Mon Tee Coon was. Alafair’s hands were still for a long time, as though she were coming out of a trance.

“Hey, Squanto,” I said.

“Sorry, Dave. I didn’t see you there.”

“Is that your new book?”

“Yeah, it’s called The Wife.”

I looked through the window and across the bayou. “Is that the movie crew over there?”

“The whole city is invited.”

“You’re not going?”

“I took your advice. I’m getting loose from Des and his crowd. I’m not going to Arizona for the reshoot either. Des is leaving in the morning.”

“What changed your attitude?”

She rubbed her forehead and took a breath. “I love Hollywood, I don’t care what people say about it. But Des isn’t Hollywood, Dave. He’s Leonardo da Vinci working for Cesare Borgia, except he won’t admit it.”

“He’s laundering money?”

“Probably.”

“Where’s Wexler in all this?”

“We’re just friends.”

“No man is just a woman’s friend.”

She jiggled her fingers at me. “Bye, Dave.”

I went into the kitchen and fixed a sandwich and ate it, drinking simultaneously from the milk carton. I could not remember ever drinking from a milk carton or any container I shared with someone else. There was something loose in my head. Or, better said, like wet paper tearing or wires shorting out or images moving behind a curtain you know you’re not supposed to touch.

I opened the back door to let in Mon Tee Coon, muddy feet included, then walked out in the yard and gazed across the Teche at the celebrants in the park. I had a feeling in my chest that is hard to describe. It was similar to the recurrent nightmare I had as a child when my mother ran off with the man named Mack and my father stayed drunk and bloodied his fists on any man foolish enough to come within an arm’s reach. In the dream, the sky turned to a sheet of carbon paper, then the sun descended over the earth’s rim and time stopped forever, with no transition into a heavenly kingdom or purpose or meaning of any kind. Without knowing it, I had found the quintessence of death, with no ability to explain it to others.

I heard Alafair open the screen door behind me. “I forgot to tell you, the deputy at the evidence locker called,” she said.

“What about?” I asked.

“He just said call him.”

The deputy who oversaw our evidence storage was a kindly old man named Ben Theriot. No one was sure of his age, and his eyes were very bad and his memory not much better, but no one had the heart to force him into retirement.

“How you doin’, Mr. Ben?” I said when I got him on the line.

“Maybe not too good, Dave. ’Member that gym bag you brought in?”

“The one from Desmond Cormier’s place?”

“Yes, suh, that one. I was cleaning the top shelves and I knocked it off. A li’l mint-like t’ing fell out. It must have been wedged in the lining. I ain’t seen it at first and I stepped on it.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“A Nicorette.”

I remembered interviewing Antoine Butterworth in City Park and Butterworth putting a Nicorette on his tongue. “Put it in a Ziploc and we’ll see what the lab can do for us Monday.”

“Dave, I hate to tell you this, but I wasn’t t’inking too good. I just put some lotion on my hands ’cause I got dry skin, and I picked up the mint and dropped it back in the bag.”

I pinched my eyes with my fingers and tried not to react. “Don’t worry about it. The information you’ve given me is helpful on its own.”

“You ain’t just saying that?”

“Use some tweezers to put the mint in a Ziploc and we’ll be fine.”

“T’ank you,” he said.

Maybe we had just blown the first solid evidence we had in the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux, but what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough? Besides, I didn’t need any more evidence. I had come to believe that if you threw a rock at Desmond or Butterworth or anyone in their vicinity, you would probably hit a guilty man.

There was nothing lighthearted about my sentiment. I could feel a weight the size of a brick in my chest.

“Where you going, Dave?” Alafair said.

“Are Butterworth and Desmond in the park?”

“Everyone is.”

I nodded. “Nice day for it, huh?”

“For what?”

I smiled and shrugged, then went into the backyard and threw pecans at a tree trunk. When I heard her clicking on the keyboard again, I walked down the driveway, got into my truck, and headed up Loreauville Road for Bailey Ribbons’s cottage.

Two hours later, I was at Clete’s motor court. He sat silently in a chair by the window, his profile silhouetted against the window shade, while I told him everything that had happened in the park.

“I never believed Wimple would get capped by an amateur,” he said.

“He probably had a box of old ammunition and got careless after he was wounded at the motel.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” he said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t say it was. What’s the plan?”

“There’s an APB on Butterworth.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“We take him down and give him his alternatives. We stop screwing around. I don’t believe there’s just one guy anymore. Cormier could have stopped all this a long time ago.”

“I’ll take it a step further,” Clete said. “From what I know, or what you’ve told me, I think Cormier and the rest of them are on the spike and their heads glow in the dark. Maybe the bunch of them are into S and M. I hear Cormier has a pole you could fly the flag on.”

As always, I was awed by the images Clete picked out of the air. “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

More important, I didn’t want to believe that the shy redbone boy whom I had always admired was capable of allowing a murderer and a sadist to thrive in our midst. By the same token, I had no doubt there was a cruel element in his personality, one that was like a candle guttering and flaring alight again.

“I feel like we’ve passed over something,” Clete said.

“That’s the way every investigation goes,” I said.

“This is different. This ritual stuff, the tarot, posing the victims, yeah, that’s all real. But there’s something we missed, something real simple.” He waited for me to speak. “Come in, Houston,” he said.

“I saw some crushed flowers by Wimple’s body. There were no flowers anywhere around the crime scene. I picked them up in my hand and tried to show them to Helen and they turned into leaves.”

He lifted his shoulder holster from the back of a chair and slipped his arm through it. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”

“I interviewed three people at the picnic who said they saw a man answering Wimple’s description talking to two little girls who were wearing flowers in their hair and around their necks. No one knew who they were or where they came from.”

“Drop it.”

“It was you telling me we may be living in a necropolis. How cheerful a thought is that?”

“That’s why I never listen to myself,” he replied.

“I went by St. Edward’s this afternoon. I think I might be headed for the barn. You know the feeling. Don’t tell me you don’t.”

“If you go down, so do I. So fuck that.”

Clete removed his .38 snub from his holster, flicked out the cylinder from the frame, and dumped the rounds into the wastebasket. He took a fresh box of shells from the kitchen cabinet and began dropping them one at a time into the chambers, his eyes clear, his face untroubled. “Who do you think the little girls were?”

“A woman said she heard one of them say her name was Felicity and her friend’s was Perpetua.”

He nodded as though the names meant something to him, but I was sure they didn’t. They were the names of two women who died in a Roman arena in the early third century.

“Wimple looked at peace. I think—”

“Yeah?” he said.

“I hope Smiley is in a good place. Let’s take a ride.”

Ten minutes later, my cell phone vibrated and I answered the strangest phone call I have ever received.

We found Desmond Cormier in the late afternoon on the piece of hardscrabble land where his grandparents had run a general store; now the land was pocked with sinkholes and overgrown with persimmon trees and palmettos and swamp maples cobwebbed with air vines and storm trash blown out of the Atchafalaya Basin. Desmond was standing by a Humvee, staring at the shadows near an inlet that had turned red in the sunset. Behind us, I could see the glow of the casino in the distance.

I think the images he saw were not the ones I described. I believed he was looking into the past at the skinny twelve-year-old boy who roped cinder blocks to each end of a broomstick under a white sun and began creating a body that would put the fear of God into the bullies who tormented him on the school bus. I suspect he wondered about the fate of the bullies who taunted him and shoved him onto the gravel. Some were probably dead, some stacking time in Angola, some cleaning floors with mops and pails. If he ran into them, they probably would not connect him with the boy they had mocked. One thing I was sure of: If Desmond did meet them, he would treat them with kindness.

That’s why he angered me. He had the capacity to do enormous good in the world. But he handed out his gifts one coin at a time, and never with anonymity, unless you counted his payment for Lucinda Arceneaux’s crypt.

His talent had received global recognition, but his faith in his creativity was not enough to make him forswear the illegal money that powered his artistic enterprises. And enterprises they were. Without the sweaty multitudes and the satisfaction they demanded for the price of a theater ticket, Desmond probably would have been running an independent company filming lizards in the Texas Panhandle.

I parked on the faint outline of the dirt track that traversed the property, and asked Clete to stay in the truck.

“You got it,” he replied, and tilted his porkpie hat down on his eyes.

I walked up behind Desmond. He showed no awareness of my presence, even though I knew he heard me.

“What’s the haps?” I said.

He grinned in the same way he could light up a room when he was a kid. “How’s it going, Dave?”

“Hard to say, things have been moving so fast. It looks like Antoine Butterworth killed Smiley Wimple, then popped himself.”

“Whoa.”

“You haven’t heard?”

“What was that about Antoine popping himself?”

“He called me from your house, then parked one under his chin. That’s what it looks like.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“If it’s any consolation, he praised your name before he pulled the plug.”

Desmond was facing me now, his sleeves rolled, his forearms pumped and vascular. “Don’t be cynical, Dave. Antoine is my friend.”

“Your ‘friend’ may have arbitrarily murdered Smiley Wimple.”

“What do you mean, ‘arbitrarily’?”

“That’s what the only witness says. Wimple’s gun misfired, and Butterworth didn’t have to kill him, although a prosecutor would never be able to prove that.”

Desmond rubbed at his nose. “You’re not jerking me around? Antoine’s dead?”

“Unless he’s been resurrected.”

“Where is he?”

“Probably on a slab.”

“You’re a callous man.”

“He told me someday I would be able to read between the lines. Have any idea what he meant?”

“No.”

“Where does your money come from?” I asked.

“Half a dozen sources, all of them legitimate.”

“You might have a Maltese cross tattooed on your ankle, but you’ll never be Geoffrey Chaucer’s good knight,” I said. “I don’t care how many showers you take, you’ve still got shit on your nose.”

He turned his face to the wind, his hair lifting, his wide-set eyes devoid of light, his expression as meaningless as a cake pan, his torso a piece of sculpted stone inside his shirt. Had he swung on me, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“He suffered?” he said.

“Butterworth? Maybe. He was listening to a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert before he signed off.”

“That sounds like him. He loves Flip Phillips.”

“The man I talked to was sweating ball bearings.”

“He was an artist,” he said. “In his way, a dreamer.”

“When he wasn’t hanging up working girls on coat hooks. You’re going to Arizona tomorrow?”

“At sunrise.”

“Make all the pictures you want,” I said. “I’m going to get you.” I walked away.

“You think you can hurt me?” he called to my back. “After what’s happened here? That’s what you think?”

I got into the truck and started the engine. Clete had been drowsing. “Hey! What’s going on with Cormier?” he asked.

“He was shocked and indignant,” I replied.

We drove back to the two-lane and headed home, an orange sun dissolving into the wetlands, threaded with smoke from stubble fires.

I called Alafair’s cell phone again, and again it went straight to voicemail. I called Sean.

“Yo, Dave,” he said.

“What’s your twenty?”

“Just coming back from the airport. Couldn’t find anybody who knew anything positive. One guy said he thought he saw Cormier get on a private plane, but he wasn’t sure.”

“Lou Wexler rents a place in St. Martinville, but I don’t know where. He drives a cherry-red Lamborghini. Go to the St. Martin Sheriff’s Department and find out. We ROA there.”

“You can probably beat me there.”

“I’m picking up Clete Purcel.”

“What’s the deal on Wexler?”

“I don’t know. I missed something on him. Something Clete told me. Or maybe Alafair told me. I can’t remember.”

“Copy that,” he said. “Out.”

I got into my truck and drove past the Shadows, then swung over to St. Peter’s Street and headed for Clete’s motor court. On Sundays, Clete usually washed or waxed his convertible and barbecued a pork roast or a chicken on the grill under the oaks by the bayou. If the weather was warm, he wore his knee-length Everlast boxing trunks and LSU or Tulane or Raging Cajuns sweatshirt, his upper arms the circumference of a fully pressurized fire hose. With luck, his metabolism would be free of the toxins that had impaired much of his life.

This morning, however, none of the foresaid applied. He was walking up and down in front of his cottage, cell phone to his ear, wearing a Hawaiian shirt outside his slacks; his shoes were shined, his hair wet-combed. He looked thinner, twenty years younger, wired to the eyes. I stopped the truck and got out, the engine still running. “What’s going on?”

“I was just calling you. Where’s Alafair?”

“Maybe with Lou Wexler.”

He looked into space, then back at me. “Wexler?”

“Yes.”

“I thought maybe—”

“What?”

“I’m confused. I saw Cormier drive by early this morning.”

“Are you sure?”

“How many guys around here have an expression like a skillet and look carved out of rock? I thought maybe he went to your house.”

I rarely saw fear in the face of Clete Purcel. He pinched his mouth.

“What is it?” I said.

“I just got a call from Alafair.”

“You talked to her?”

“No. There was just a little hiccup of a voice, like she’d butt-dialed and was talking to somebody else and clicked off again. At least, that’s what I thought I was hearing.”

“You’re not making sense, Cletus.”

“I think maybe she was saying ‘Help.’ ”

I felt a hole open in the bottom of my stomach. “Was Desmond driving a Lamborghini?”

“No, he was in a Humvee, same one he was driving at the res.”

“The lady who lives in the old Burke home saw a cherry-red Lamborghini stop at my house.”

“It was Wexler?”

“There’s no other Lamborghini around here. Just a minute.” I called Helen at home. No one answered. I called Bailey Ribbons. “I think either Lou Wexler or Desmond Cormier has got his hands on Alafair,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “Des is probably in Arizona now.”

“He’s not. Clete saw him a short while ago.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“It’s not difficult. Desmond Cormier is a liar.”

“You don’t have to talk that way,” she said.

I hung up.

“What do you want to do?” Clete said.

“We’re supposed to ROA with Sean McClain in St. Martinville.”

“I need my piece.”

“Get it,” I said.

“What have you got in the truck?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“I’m glad I caught you,” he said.

My hand was trembling on the phone. “Where are you, Mr. Wexler?”

“Trying to find Alafair. Lose the formality. We’re on the same side.”

“Alafair is not with you?”

“Desmond has her. Stop listening to that man’s lies.”

“We’re at your house in St. Martinville. I saw the tarot. I saw your trophies in the attic.”

“What trophies?”

“The wallets and purses and shoes and bandanas.”

“Those are props from a film we made about a serial killer.” He gave me the title and named the actors and the directors. My head was throbbing. I couldn’t process his words.

“I don’t know anything about a tarot,” he went on. “If you found it in my house, Des put it there. He’s been salting the mineshaft. Isn’t that the term for it?”

“How do you account for the shooting in City Park?”

“You’ve got me on that one. My Lamborghini was in the shop, so I borrowed Antoine’s Subaru. I was having a go of it with a local lady when this nasty little sod walked up on me and tried to put out my wick. So I clicked off his switch. I shouldn’t have run. I was going to turn myself in today. I have an attorney. You can check out my story.”

“Tell me where you are.”

“I’m not quite sure about my safety at this point.”

“You think we’re going to kill you in custody?”

“I’ve seen the way you and your Falstaffian friend do business, sir. The other problem is I don’t think you have a bloody clue what’s been going on in your own life.”

“Repeat that?”

“I don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but your homicide partner is not what she seems. She set fire to a school as a child, and she fried some fellows at a fairgrounds up in Montana.”

“How do you know this?”

“I knew her in New Orleans. I was sticking it to her long before you did. Sorry to tell you, she’s not Clementine Carter, as Des is always saying. What a fucking joke. I’ll be back with you later. Or maybe not.”

He broke the connection. I folded the phone in my hand and tried to keep my face empty.

“That was Wexler?” Bailey said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“What did he say?”

“That except for shooting Wimple, he’s an innocent man.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Did you know him in New Orleans?”

“No.”

“Never saw him before you came to the Iberia Sheriff’s Department.”

“No. Is that what he told you?”

“We need to get a net over Desmond Cormier,” I said.

“Cormier has Alafair?”

“I’m not sure about anything.”

She looked at me in dismay. I walked toward my truck. I have long had problems with vertigo, the kind caused by a tightening of blood vessels in the brain. I could feel the ground caving under my feet. Then I felt Clete fitting his hand inside my upper arm. He opened the driver’s door and steadied me so I could step inside.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“What did that cocksucker say?”

“He knows things about Bailey that would be impossible for him to know, unless he’d had a relationship with her. He says the stuff from the attic are movie props. He knows nothing about a tarot deck.”

“What else?”

“Alafair may already be dead. Or maybe Cormier has her. I just don’t know.”

“Don’t say that about her being dead. You hear me, Streak? Don’t even think it. I’m going to get these guys. I promise you.”

He looked like he was drowning.

I went out the back door just as the headlights of the Humvee came on and shone directly into my eyes. I raised my hand against the glare and saw Lou Wexler by the side of the Humvee. He had a semi-automatic rifle aimed at the center of my face. Desmond Cormier lay on the ground, his hands wrapped with wire behind him and tied to his ankles, a blue rubber ball strapped in his mouth.

“Lay your piece aside or never see your daughter again,” Wexler said.

My eyes were watering in the headlights.

“I’ll pop both her and Des right now,” he said.

I let the AR-15 drop.

“Back away,” he said.

I did as he said. He reached down and picked up the AR-15 by the barrel and flung it into the darkness. “The whore gave me away, did she?”

“Which whore?” I asked.

“The one I had a romp with in City Park,” he said.

“Where’s Alafair?”

“Snug as a bug in a rug.”

“What do you get out of this, Wexler?”

“Tons of fun, and a bit of payback for what you and your ignorant kind did to my uncle in your parish prison.”

“Helen Soileau and our friends and I had no part in that.”

“Oh, yes, you did, laddie. You pretend to be the knight errant, but you’re an ill-bred wog, just like Cormier. I kept his little three-penny opera afloat for years, and bankrupted both myself and that poor sod Butterworth, while the Golden Globes and Academy nominations went to this pitiful puke on the ground.”

“Why did you kill Lucinda Arceneaux?”

“I saved her.”

“What?”

“She could have been my queen bee. She opted for a life of mediocrity. So I eased her into a role no one around here will ever forget. You have to admit, it’s been pretty good theater.”

I had no doubt he was mad. But that didn’t make his cruelty any the less. Desmond twitched on the ground. Wexler placed his foot on Desmond’s neck and squeezed. I could hear the waves starting to hit the cabin cruiser’s hull, a steady slap that threw salt spray higher and higher in the air.

“Alafair isn’t a player in this,” I said. “If you really believe in the ethos of the Templar knight, you have to let her go, Lou.”

“On a first-name basis, are we? Get on your knees.”

“Is she on the boat?”

“Could be. But let’s get back to our biblical lesson. You remember the biblical quotation, don’t you? ‘Before me every knee shall bow’?”

“Can’t do it.”

“Maybe this will help.”

He fired a round through the top of my foot. I felt a moment of intense pain, as though the bones between ankle and toes had been struck with a ballpeen hammer, then nothing, my shoe filling with blood. I wanted to say something brave or clever, but I could not. My best friend was down and maybe dead, and Alafair might have already suffered the same fate as Hilary Bienville. If she and Clete were gone, I was ready to go also.

“Put the next one between my eyes,” I said.

“What was that?”

“Now is your chance. I want you to do it.”

“Don’t tempt the devil.”

“The devil wouldn’t let you clean his chamber pot.”

He butt-stroked me with his rifle, knocking me to the ground. He pointed the muzzle into my face. “Kiss it.”

“Fuck you.”

I had to keep him talking. Once he was gone, Alafair would be gone also, probably forever. Where are you, Bailey? Where are you, Helen? I held my holy medal, my eyes shut. I was completely powerless and knew that whatever happened next was out of my hands.

I heard Wexler walk away. When I opened my eyes, I saw him step off a small dock onto a boarding plank that hung from the entry port of the cabin cruiser. The hull was dipping deeply into the waves, rocking and hitting the dock and the cypress knees along the bank. He clicked on the cabin light and pulled Alafair from the deck and held her so I could see her face. Blood was leaking from her hair.

I got up from the ground and began limping toward the dock as though half of me had melted. I thought I heard a helicopter droning over water, and I wondered if I had gone back in time to Southeast Asia and the sounds and images from which I had never freed myself. The thropping of the blades was unmistakable.

“You’re not going anywhere, bub,” I said.

“I’m honoring your war record,” he said. “Be humble enough to recognize and accept an act of clemency by a brother-in-arms.”

“You taped Bella Delahoussaye’s eyes because you couldn’t look her in the face while you killed her, you yellow-bellied, sorry sack of shit.”

He knotted Alafair’s hair in his fist. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. I was within fifteen feet of the cruiser now. The waves were bursting against the dock, drenching my hat and face. I saw lights coming in low over the surf in the distance.

“Hear that sound?” I said. “That’s the cavalry. They’re going to spike your cannon, Wexler. And after they do that, I’m going to kick it up your ass.”

“You won’t be here to see it. Neither will she.”

Alafair’s face was white with exhaustion or shock or blood loss; she looked like she had been beaten. Her bottom lip was cut and puffed, her hair matted with blood. I bet she had fought back. No, I knew she had fought back. And I was determined to be no less brave than she. Then, just to the south of the cabin cruiser, I saw a shadow moving through the trees, humped, off balance, leviathan, and unstoppable in its course and purpose.

“Pop me if you want,” I said. “I’m no big loss. But before I check out, tell me one thing, will you?”

“I’d be delighted,” he replied.

“How’d you get the information about Bailey Ribbons’s background?”

“I worked for three government intelligence agencies. But maybe I porked her a couple of times, too. Take your pick.”

I came closer and closer to him. He was standing just outside the cabin hatch, holding Alafair by the hair, his rifle butt propped on his hip, the waves swelling under the hull. The boarding plank was hooked to the stern, pulling loose from the bank, half underwater.

“Look at me,” I said.

“What for?”

“Sheriff Soileau is in that chopper. She doesn’t take prisoners. Make the smart choice. Give me back my daughter and beat feet.”

He pulled her to him and kissed the top of her hair. “I might do that. Not tonight. But some night. She’ll come around. You’ll see. The victors write the history books.”

He dropped her and pulled the anchor, sliding it covered with mud over the bow, dropping it hard on the deck. He went back into the cabin and started the engine, looking at me through the glass. My left leg was giving out, my foot squishing inside my shoe. I started toward the boarding plank, although I knew I would not make it. Then I saw Clete Purcel come lumbering out of the trees, the holes in his shoulders or chest draining down his shirt, my cut-down twelve-gauge pump in one hand.

Wexler either didn’t care about the boarding plank or had forgotten about it; he was concentrating on backing the cruiser at an angle that prevented the waves from smacking it into the dock or onto the cypress knees.

The aluminum plank bent under Clete’s weight, and his shoes clanked on the metal, and the waves sloshed over his ankles as he stumbled up the plank and through the entry port onto the stern.

Wexler turned, at first shocked, then smiling. “You still hanging around? How about another one in the brisket?”

I had seen the two bloody holes in Clete’s windbreaker, but I had not realized how badly he was hurt. His left arm hung from the socket like a twisted water-soaked towel. He was trying to lift the cut-down with his right, and having no luck, as though his gyroscope were broken, his mojo gone, his motors in full meltdown. But he kept coming, like a dedicated drunk careening toward the bar, seeking one final sip of his nemesis.

Wexler raised his rifle. “Good try, blimpo. I hope you find a shady place.”

Then something happened that was perhaps coincidental, perhaps not. A large bubble of light seemed to surround us all. A tremendous black swell dipped under the cruiser and raised it atop a wave that tilted it at least thirty degrees. Maybe someone in the helicopter had shone a searchlight on us. Maybe a tidal surge from the Gulf was about to strike the coast. Or maybe the ghost of the pilot who’d nailed that Nazi sub wanted to score one more for the good guys.

Wexler was thrown off balance, the wheel spinning as he tried to get his weapon in Clete’s face. Clete crashed into him with his full weight, pressing him against the instrument panel. Wexler had his finger inside the trigger guard and was trying to push the barrel down on Clete’s feet to get off a crippling shot. Clete shoved my cut-down inside Wexler’s trousers.

“This is for Smiley Wimple and Hilary Bienville, asshole,” he said. He pulled the trigger.

The number of rents in the cloth left no doubt that the shell in the chamber had been loaded with buckshot. Wexler seemed to be looking straight at me when he realized what had just happened to him. His mouth was puckered like a guppy’s, his face shrinking as though it had been miniaturized, his voice locked in his throat as if no sound could adequately express what he was experiencing.

The Plexiglas-like bubble disappeared, and the cruiser settled against the dock, and the waves that had rocked it so violently turned to foam and trailed away in the darkness.

It’s funny how your anger goes away when you see a man die, even one who was demonically evil. I adjusted the boarding plank and walked onto the stern and picked up Alafair. I held her against me, and the heat in her body radiated through her clothes. I smelled her hair and the salt on her skin and felt her heart beating when I pressed my hands against her back. Her face was buried in my chest. She didn’t speak. She was the same five-year-old Salvadoran girl I had pulled from a submerged plane many years ago. The years between then and now meant absolutely nothing, and I knew that she was my little girl and I was her father and that was the way it would always be, and that Clete Purcel would remain our guardian angel forever, and that we would never change the world, but by the same token, the world would never change us.

Nine months later, the three of us rented a house on stilts just above Bodega Bay, where each evening the waves pounded against the cliffs and coral formations, and the sun left its light under the ocean long after it had disappeared from the sky. Alafair had sold her first film rights to a production company and had contracted to do the adaptation. While she worked at her computer and tried to let go of the deceit and violence and theft of trust that had been visited upon her, Clete and I tooled up and down Highway 1 in his Caddy, our saltwater rods and reels propped in the back seat, the wind cool and warm at the same time, while jeans-and-leather low-riders blasted past us and their badass girls smiled back at us, hair whipping in their faces.

Our wounds healed; our memories did not. Lou Wexler had hurt us in many ways. Oh, yes, the incubus had its origins in the abuse at the jail, but the real cluster of thorns was the suspicion and acrimony we had allowed Wexler to inculcate in us. We had come to distrust one another and lost faith in our institutions and ourselves. I had come to suspect Sean McClain and to quarrel with Helen Soileau and to doubt Bailey Ribbons, who had allowed me to go back in time and believe I could undo age and mortality and, in so doing, erase the mistakes I had made as a young man.

I would always love Bailey, but in a silent and protective way. When she invited Alafair and me to her and Desmond Cormier’s wedding out in Arizona, with the vastness of Monument Valley as the backdrop, I made an excuse and decided never to think again about the life I might have had. But the temptation to dream stays with me on a daily basis, not unlike the shimmer inside a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red or the glitter of gin cascading on the rocks.

As far as Desmond was concerned, I believe his dualistic obsession with light and darkness was about the struggle between good and evil. It is not coincidence that in My Darling Clementine, the light of oil lamps burns only in the brothels and saloons, while the rest of the desert is governed by darkness. I believe Desmond shut his eyes to Wexler’s crimes, including the murder of his half sister, and that his omission, like Butterworth’s, would one day lead him to a fatal discovery about himself and a garden he did not want to enter.

The greatest oddity in all of this is that I believe Desmond passed on to me his obsession with light and shadow. I cannot watch the sun course through the heavens and settle into a molten ball without feeling a weakness in my heart, as though God does slay Himself with every leaf that flies and that indeed there is no greater theft than that of time.

But like Wyatt Earp and Henry Fonda, I love the name Clementine. And I love the name Bailey Ribbons. And I love the names Alafair Robicheaux and Clete Purcel. And with those names in my heart, why should I ever fear what tomorrow might bring?

Just the other day, Clete and Alafair and I were at a street dance in Santa Rosa, and I thought about ending this tale with a line about going up the country with Canned Heat, with the martial connotations the allusion implies. Instead I decided it was time to heed other lyrics from other songs. The green republic is still out there, the wheat fields waving, the dust clouds blowing, our mountains and diamond deserts and Gulf Stream waters a votive gift that belongs to us all. And the men who break in and steal by night, who spread self-doubt and fear and acrimony, will eventually fall by the wayside and be unremembered ciphers that disappear like scraps of newspaper in our rearview mirror.

With this thought in mind, Clete and Alafair and I went to a wild celebration among thousands of revelers in downtown Santa Rosa, surrounded by hills that glowed in the sunset with a purple aura under a starry sky, Martha & the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” blaring from the loudspeakers.

And that’s the way our Manichean tale ends, on a summer night in the land of the free and the home of the brave, trapped between vineyards and the sea and the souls of migrants who come with dust and go with the wind, all of us twirling among young people who wore flowers in their hair, a church bell clanging without stop in a Spanish mission.

Roll on forever, Woody.

I would like to thank my wife, Pearl, and my daughter Pamala for their encouragement and support and their suggestions with the manuscript. I would also like to express my appreciation to my publisher Jonathan Karp, my editor Ben Loehnen, my production editor Katie Rizzo, and my copyeditor E. Beth Thomas, whose diligence and commitment have been unflagging.

Thanks also to Jackie Seow and Alison Forner for the lovely jacket, and to Amar Deol and the many other people at Simon & Schuster who believed in my books and stood behind them. Last, thanks to all the gang at the Spitzer Agency: Anne-Lise, Philip and Mary, Lukas Ortiz, and Kim Lombardini. We’ve made quite a team, and a writer could not ask for more.