"Listen, Lieutenant, I heard the other guys say something. Lot of times they're just blowing gas. It don't necessarily mean anything. I didn't hear it from Mr. Segura. You understand that? It didn't come from Mr. Segura. It's just street talk, a bunch of guys' bulls.h.i.t."

"You're talking about the Colombian?"

"He's from Nicaragua."

"Goon."

He wiped his lips with his fingers, then pulled at the flap of skin under his chin.

"It's got something to do with a n.i.g.g.e.r girl. I think she used to be a street wh.o.r.e. Didn't you pull a n.i.g.g.e.r out of the bayou in Cataouatche Parish?"

"You just keep telling me what you know, Wes."

"Jesus Christ, Lieutenant, what d'you think I am? I'm just a theater manager. Maybe once a month Mr. Segura has a bunch of guys out to his place on the lake. A buffet, a lot of booze, some broads in the pool. He shakes everybody's hand, maybe has a collins with us or plays cards a few minutes under the beach umbrella, then disappears inside."

"What's the girl have to do with Julio Segura?"

"You're not understanding me, Lieutenant. He don't tell me things like that. He don't talk to me about anything, in fact. Look, this is a heavy-metal cat. I think he's wired into big people. Why mess with him? The feds deal with guys like this."

I continued to stare silently at him. His hands flicked on the desk blotter as though wires were attached to them.

"They say you're making noise about a n.i.g.g.e.r girl you found in another parish," he said. "That ain't your territory, so they wonder why the interest. For some reason they think you're after them. Don't ask me why. I don't even like to be around that kind of talk. I walk away from it. That's the G.o.d's truth."

"You really bother me, Wes. I have great concern about your sincerity. I also have the feeling you think you're omniscient."

"Wha-"

"Tell me if I'm wrong. You think you can intuit exactly what I'll accept. You're going to jerk me around and tell me bedtime stories, then snort a line or two after I'm gone to calm your nerves, and your day will be back intact again. That indicates a serious problem with vanity and pride. What do you think?"

"Look-" he began, his mouth smiling, his eyes cast down self-deprecatingly.

"No, no, it's time for Wes to listen and me to talk. You see, when you shoot off your mouth about the murder of a police officer, you invite some dangerous complications into your life. Number one, foreknowledge can make an accomplice out of you, Wes. Then, on a more basic level, there are several men I work with who would simply cool you out. Are we communicating here?"

"Yes," he said weakly.

"There's no confusion?"

"No."

"All right, Wes. We'll talk again later. You understand that, don't you?"

"Yes."

I stood up from his desk and walked toward the door. I could hear him expel his breath.

Then: "Lieutenant?"

I turned and looked at him. His face was small and pale.

"Will this get back to Mr. Segura?" he said. "A couple of the Latin guys that work for him... cruel guys... they were cops or national guardsmen or something in Nicaragua... I don't like to think about the stuff they do."

"No guarantees. You sniff something bad in the wind, come to us and we'll get you out of town."

The sun was blazing outside. Across the street, three black kids were tap dancing for the tourists in the shade of the scrolled iron colonnade. The huge taps they wore sounded like drumsticks clicking on metal. Cletus stood out of the sunlight's glare, watching, with his seersucker coat over one arm. "What'd you get from old Pottsie?"

"It was the black girl I found in Bayou Lafourche. It's got the smell of dope and the Barataria pirates. Did you ever run up against Julio Segura when you were on vice?"

"You better believe it. He's your genuine, certified greaseball. The guy's got Vitalis oozing out of every pore."

"I thought he was a Colombian."

"He's hooked in with them, but he's from Managua. I heard he owned a hundred wh.o.r.ehouses down there. They say the Sandinistas shot holes all over his plane just as it cleared the field. The guy's a survivor. We tried to get him two or three times. I think he's got a lot of high-up juice going for him."

We walked in the warm shade back toward Royal Street, where we had left the car parked in front of the oyster bar. I went into a small, dark grocery store cooled by a wooden-bladed overhead fan, and bought a Times-Picayune. The interior of the store smelled of bananas, coffee, blocks of cheese, and big wooden bins filled with grapes and plums. I opened the Picayune to the sports page as we walked along.

"Y'all want to go to the races tonight?" I said.

"Forget the races. Let's front the spick. We tell the captain about it first, then we go out to his house and flip his necktie in his face."

"Nope. Too soon."

"Bulls.h.i.t. The only way to handle these guys is jump up and down on their nuts. In this case we want the guy to know it's personal. We deliver the Candygram right in his living room."

"I appreciate it, Clete, but I'll let you know when it's time to toggle out there. Don't worry. You won't miss out on the party."

"You're too laid back. I'm telling you, this guy is subhuman. He makes an animal like Didi Gee look like the archbishop by comparison."

"d.a.m.n," I said.

"What's wrong?"

"Next time, we take your car to lunch."

"What for?"

"That's my car on the back of that tow truck."

The light was soft on the lake as I dressed on the houseboat that evening. Up the sh.o.r.e I could see the palm and cypress trees blowing in the wind off the Gulf. The air smelled like rain again. I felt very alone and quiet inside, and I wondered if my feeling of confident solitude, my peculiar moment of serenity inside, was not a deceptive prelude to another turbulent time in my life. Maybe it was just a brief courtship with narcissism. My body was still hard and lean, my skin brown, the old scar from the dung-tipped pungi stick like a broken gray snake embossed on my stomach. My hair and brush mustache were still as black as ink, except for the white patch above one ear, and I convinced myself every morning that living alone was no more a mark of age and failure than it was of youth and success. The dark purple clouds piled on the Gulf's southern horizon trembled with heat lightning.

I sat alone in a box at the races that night and looked with the same quiet and tranquil fascination at the lighted track, the dampened and raked sod, the glistening clipped gra.s.s in the center field. It was the kind of vague, almost numb euphoria that I used to feel when I slid off the edge of a two-day binge into delirium tremens. I had become omniscient; my white tropical suit glowed from the arc light overhead; I cashed three place bets and two wins in a row. The peach-complexioned waitresses in the clubhouse brought me sh.e.l.led shrimp on ice, and lobster and steak, and brushed their hips unnecessarily against my arm when they took away my soiled napkin and blood-streaked plate.

Someone once told me that the gambler's greatest desire, knowledge of the future, would drive us insane. On that warm summer evening as I drove back home, with the moon denting the lake and the fireflies lighting in the palm and oak trees, I felt a thin tremolo inside me, like the faint tinkling of crystal or the almost silent vibration of sympathetic guitar strings, just a hint of Ca.s.sandra's tragic gift, and I tried to ascribe it to my old alcoholic fears that writhed in the unconscious as blind snakes would. But a winner at the track usually cares little for caution or moonlit nuances.

TWO.

Early the next morning I drove southwest of New Orleans, into the bayou country. It was the south Louisiana I had grown up in, around New Iberia. Oak, cypress, and willow trees lined the two-lane road; the mist still clung like torn cotton to the half-submerged dead tree trunks back in the marsh; the canebrakes were thick and green, shining in the light, and the lily pads cl.u.s.tered along the bayou's banks were bursting with flowers, audibly popping, their leaves covered with drops of quicksilver. The bream and ba.s.s were still feeding in the shadows close to the cypress roots; egrets were nesting in the sand where the sun had risen above the tree line, and occasionally a heron would lift from its feeding place on the edge of the cattails and glide on gilded wings down the long ribbon of brown water through a corridor of trees.

Now these same bayous, ca.n.a.ls, and marshlands where I had grown up were used by the Barataria pirates. But their namesakes, Jean Lafitte's collection of brigands and slavers, were romantic figures by comparison. The current group was made up of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin smugglers who would murder a whole family out on the Gulf simply for the one-time use of their boat, after which they'd open up the c.o.c.ks and sink it. Occasionally the Coast Guard would find one half-filled with water and beached on a sandbar, the gunwales painted with blood.

But why should this shock or revile? The same people sometimes killed infants by injection, embalmed the bodies, and filled the stomachs with balloons of heroin so women transporters could walk through customs as though they were carrying their sleeping children.

The Cataouatche Parish sheriff was not at the courthouse. He was at his horse farm outside of town, galoshes on his feet, feeding two Arabians in a side lot. His house had a fresh coat of white paint and a wide screen porch, and Was surrounded by azalea bushes and flaming hibiscus. The long white fence along the back horse pasture was entwined with climbing roses. The sheriff was around fifty, a man in control of his property and his political life. His blue uniform fitted tightly on his compact, hard body, and his round, freshly shaved face and direct eyes gave you the impression of a self-confident rural law officer who dealt easily with outside complexities.

Unfortunately for him, I proved to be the exception.

"She drowned," he said. "My deputies said a bucket of water came out of her when they flipped her off the gurney."

"She had tracks on her arms."

"So? Addicts drown too. You need an autopsy to tell you that?"

"Do you know if she was right-handed or left-handed?"

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" he said.

"She'd been shooting regularly into the left arm, but she had only one needle hole on the right. What's that tell you?"

"Not a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing."

"When a junkie flattens the vein in one arm, he starts on the other. I don't think she'd been shooting up that long. I think somebody gave her a hotshot."

"The parish coroner signed the death certificate. It says 'drowned.' You take it up with him if you want to pursue it. I'm late for work." He walked out of the horse lot, pulled off his muddy galoshes on the gra.s.s, and slipped on his polished, half-topped boots. His round face was turned away from me as he bent over, but I could hear the repressed anger in his breathing.

"Those are fine Arabians," I said. "I understand they can bring thirty thousand or so when they're trained."

"That wouldn't touch them, Lieutenant. Like I say, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm late. You want me to introduce you to the coroner?"

"I don't think so. Tell me, as a matter of speculation, how do you figure a healthy young woman, wearing all her clothes, would come to drown in a narrow bayou?"

"What's going to make you happy, Lieutenant? You want somebody to write down for you that she died of a hotshot? You want to take that back to New Orleans with you? All right, you have my permission. It's no skin off our a.s.s. But how about her family? She was raised up in the quarters on a sugar plantation about five miles south of here. Her mother is feeble-minded and her daddy is half-blind. You want to drive out there and tell them their daughter was a junkie?"

"Everything in this case stinks of homicide, Sheriff."

"I've only got two more things to say to you, podna, and it's important you understand this. I trust what my deputies told me, and if you got a complaint, you take it to the coroner's office. And number two, this conversation is over."

Then he looked away at his horses in a distant field, as though I were not there, slipped on his pilot's sungla.s.ses, got into his Cadillac, and drove down his pea-gravel lane to the blacktop. I felt like a post standing in the ground.

The dead girl's name had been Lovelace Deshotels. Her parents lived in one of the weathered, paintless shacks along a dirt road on the back of a corporate sugar plantation. All the shacks were identical, their small front porches so evenly aligned that you could fire an arrow through the receding rectangle of posts, roofs, and bannisters for the entire length of the quarters without striking wood. The thick green fields of cane stretched away for miles, broken only by an occasional oak tree and the distant outline of the sugar mill, whose smokestacks in the winter would cover these same shacks with a sickening sweet odor that made the eyes water.

The shack was like thousands of others that I had seen all my life throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. There was no gla.s.s in the windows, only hinged board flaps that were propped open on sticks. The walls had been insulated with pages from the Sears catalog, then covered with wallpaper that was now separated and streaked brown with rainwater. The outhouse, which was set next to a small hog lot, had a rusted R.C. Cola sign for a roof.

But there were other things there that leaped at your eye when you walked through the door: a color television set, an imitation Bavarian clock above the woodburning stove, plastic flowers set in jelly gla.s.ses, a bright yellow Formica breakfast table next to an ancient brick fireplace filled with trash.

The parents would tell me little. The mother stared vacantly at a game show on television, her huge body stuffed in a pair of lime-green stretch pants and a man's army shirt cut off at the armpits. The father was gray and old and walked with a cane as though his back were disjointed. He smelled of the cob pipe in his shirt pocket. His eyes were scaled over and frosted with cataracts.

"She gone off to New Orleans. I tolt her a colored girl from the country dint have no business there, her," he said, sitting on the couch, his hand curved along the top of his cane. "She only a country girl. What she gonna do with them kind of people they got in New Orleans? I tell her that, me."

"Who did she work for, Mr. Deshotels?"

"What I know about New Orleans? I ain't got no truck there, me." He smiled at me, and I saw his toothless blue gums.

"Do you believe she drowned?"

He paused and the smile went out of his face. His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time.

"You think they care what some old n.i.g.g.e.r say?" he said.

"I do."

He didn't answer. He put his dead pipe in his mouth, made a wet sound with his tongue, and stared blankly at the television screen.

"I'll be going now," I said, standing up. "I'm sorry about what happened to your daughter. I really am."

His face turned back toward me.

"We had eleven, us," he said. "She the baby. I call her t.i.te cush-chush cause she always love cush-cush when she a little girl. He'p me walk out front, you."

I put my hand under his arm and we stepped out into the bright sunlight on the porch. The wind was ruffling the green fields of sugarcane on the opposite side of the road. The old man's arm was webbed with veins. He limped along with me to my automobile before he spoke.

"They kilt her, them, dint they?" he asked.

"I think they did."

"She just a little colored jellyroll for white mens, then they throw her away," he said. His eyes became wet. "I tolt her 'Jellyroll, jellyroll, rollin' in the cane, lookin' for a woman ain't got no man.' She say 'Look the television and the clock and the table I give Mama.' She say that, her. Little girl that don't know how to read can buy a five-hundred-dollar television set for her mama. What you gonna do when they nineteen? Ain't no listenin', not when she got white men's money, drive a big car down here from New Orleans, tellin' me she gonna move us up North, her. Little girl that still eat cush-cush gonna outsmart the white mens, her, move her old n.i.g.g.e.r daddy up to New York. What she done they got to kill her for?"

I didn't have an answer for him.

I was on an empty stretch of road bordered on one side by a flat, shimmering lake and on the other by a flooded woods, when I saw the blue and white patrol car in my rearview mirror. The driver already had on his bubblegum light, and when he drew close to my b.u.mper he gave me a short blast with his siren. I started to pull to the shoulder, but there were shards of beer-bottle gla.s.s like amber teeth shining in the weeds and gravel. I tried to drive on to a clear spot before I stopped, and the patrol car leaped abreast of me, the engine roaring, and the deputy in the pa.s.senger's seat pointed to the side of the road with an angry finger. I heard my tires crunch over the beer gla.s.s.

Both deputies got out of the car, and I knew it was going to be serious. They were big men, probably Cajuns like myself, but their powerful and sinewy bodies, their tight-fitting, powder-blue uniforms, polished gunbelts and holsters, glinting bullets and revolver b.u.t.ts made you think of backwoods Mississippi and north Louisiana, as though they'd had to go away to learn redneck cruelty.

Neither one of them had a citation book in his hand or pocket.

"The siren means pull over. It don't mean slow down, Lieutenant," the driver said. He smiled back at me and took off his sungla.s.ses. He was older than the other deputy. "Step out of the car, please."