"It's a personal interest. Look, Motley, we cooperate with you guys. How about being a little reciprocal?"

"What is it you think I know? I told you she was just another brainless wh.o.r.e. They all come out of the same cookie cutter. I lost contact with her, anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"We busted the ma.s.sage parlor a couple of times and she wasn't working there anymore. One of the other broads said Julio Segura moved her out to his place. That don't mean anything, though. He does that all the time, then he gets tired of them, gives them a few balloons of Mexican brown, and has that dwarf chauffeur of his drive them to the bus stop or back to the crib."

"You're unbelievable."

"You think a guy like him is interested in snuffing wh.o.r.es? Write it off, Robicheaux. You're wasting your time."

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Guidry walked into the office I shared with Clete. He was fifty and lived with his mother and belonged to the Knights of Columbus. But recently he had been dating a widow in the city water department, and we knew it was serious when the captain began to undergo a hair transplant. His gleaming bald scalp was now inlaid with tiny round divots of transplanted hair, so that his head looked like a rock with weeds starting to grow on it. But he was a good administrator, a straight arrow, and he often took the heat for us when he didn't have to.

"Triple-A called and said they towed in your car," he said.

"That's good," I said.

"No. They also said somebody must have broken all the windows out with a hammer or a baseball bat. What went on over there with the sheriff's department, Dave?"

I told him while he stared at me blankly. I also told him about Julio Segura. Cletus kept his face buried in our file drawer.

"You didn't make this up? You actually cuffed two sheriff's deputies to their own car?" the captain said.

"I wasn't holding a very good hand, Captain."

"Well, you probably had them figured right, because they haven't pursued it, except for remodeling your windows. You want to turn the screws on them a little? I can call the state attorney general's office and probably shake them up a bit."

"Clete and I want to go out to Segura's place."

"Vice considers that their territory," Captain Guidry said.

"They're talking about killing a cop. It's our territory now," I said.

"All right, but no cowboy stuff," he said. "Right now we don't have legal cause to be out there."

"Okay."

"You just talk, let him know we're hearing things we don't like."

"Okay, Captain."

He rubbed his fingernail over one of the crusted implants in his head.

"Dave?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Forget what I said. He's threatening a New Orleans police officer and we're not going to tolerate it. Put his head in the toilet. Tell him it came from me, too."

Oleander, azalea, and myrtle trees were planted thickly behind the scrolled iron fence that surrounded Segura's enormous blue-green lawn. Gardeners were clipping the hedges, watering the geranium and rose beds, cutting away the dead brown leaves from the stands of banana trees. Back toward the lake I could see the white stucco two-story house, its red tile roof gleaming in the sun, the royal palms waving by the swimming pool. Someone sprang loudly off a diving board.

A muscular Latin man in slacks and a golf shirt came out the front gate and leaned down to Clete's window. There were faded tattoos under the black hair on his forearms. He also wore large rings on both hands.

"Can I help you, sir?" he said.

"We're police officers. We want to talk to Segura," Clete said.

"Do you have an appointment with him?"

"Just tell him we're here, partner," Clete said.

"He's got guests right now."

"You got a hearing problem?" Clete said.

"I got a clipboard with some names on it. If your name's on it, you come in. If it ain't, you stay out."

"Listen, you f.u.c.king greaseball..." Without finishing his sentence, Clete got out of the car and hit the man murderously in the stomach with his fist. The man doubled over, his mouth dropped open as though he had been struck with a sledgehammer, and his eyes looked like he was drowning.

"Got indigestion troubles? Try Tums," Clete said.

"What's the matter with you?" I said to him.

"Nothing now," he said, and pushed back the iron gate so we could drive through. The Latin man held on to the fence with one hand and labored to get his breath back. We drove up the driveway toward the stucco house. I continued to look at Clete.

"You never worked vice. You don't know what kind of sc.u.m these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are," he said. "When a greaseball like that gets in your face, you step all over him. It defines the equations for him."

"Did you get drunk last night?"

"Yeah, but I don't need an excuse to bash one of these f.u.c.kers."

"No more of it, Clete."

"We're in, aren't we? We're the surprise in Julio's afternoon box of Cracker Jacks. Look at that bunch by the pool. I bet we could run them and connect them with every dope deal in Orleans and Jefferson parishes."

About a dozen people were in or around the clover-shaped pool. They floated on rubber rafts in the turquoise water, played cards on a mosaic stone table and benches that were anch.o.r.ed in the shallow end, or sat in lawn chairs by the slender gray trunks of the palms while a family of dwarf servants brought them tall tropical drinks filled with fruit and ice.

Clete walked directly across the clipped gra.s.s to an umbrella-shaded table where a middle-aged man in cream-colored slacks and a yellow shirt covered with blue parrots sat with two other men who were as dark as Indians and built like fire hydrants. The man in the print shirt was one of the most peculiar-looking human beings I had ever seen. His face was triangular-shaped, with a small mouth and very small ears, and his eyes were absolutely black. Three deep creases ran across his forehead, and inside the creases you could see tiny b.a.l.l.s of skin. On his wrist was a gold watch with a black digital dial, and he smoked a Bisonte with a cigarette holder. The two dark men started to get up protectively as we approached the table, but the man in the yellow and blue shirt gestured for them to remain seated. His eyes kept narrowing as though Clete's face were floating toward him out of a memory.

"What's happening, Julio?" Clete said. "There's a guy out front puking his lunch all over the gra.s.s. It really looks nasty for the neighborhood. You ought to hire a higher-cla.s.s gate man."

"Purcel, right?" Segura said, the recognition clicking into his eyes.

"That's good," Clete said. "Now connect the dots and figure out who this guy with me is."

One of the dark men said something to Segura in Spanish.

"Shut up, greaseball," Clete said.

"What do you think you're doing, Purcel?" Segura asked.

"That all depends on you, Julio. We hear you're putting out a very serious shuck about my partner," Clete said.

"Is this him?" Segura asked.

I didn't answer. I stared straight into his eyes. He puffed on his cigarette holder and looked back at me without blinking, as though he were looking at an object rather than a man.

"I heard you been knocking the furniture around," he said finally. "But I don't know you. I never heard of you, either."

"I think you're a liar," I said.

"That's your right. What else you want to tell me today?"

"Your people killed a nineteen-year-old girl named Lovelace Deshotels."

"Let me tell you something, what's-your-name," he said. "I'm an American citizen. I'm a citizen because a United States senator introduced a bill to bring me here. I got a son in West Point. I don't kill people. I don't mind Purcel and his people bothering me sometimes. You got la mordida here just like in Nicaragua. But you don't come out here and tell me I kill somebody." He nodded to one of the dark men, who got up and walked to the house. "I tell you something else, too. You know why Purcel is out here? It's because he's got a guilty conscience and he blames other people for it. He took a girl out of a ma.s.sage parlor in the French Quarter and seduced her in the back of his car. That's the kind of people you got telling me what morality is."

"How'd you like your teeth kicked down your throat?" Clete asked.

"I got my attorneys coming out right now. You want to make threats, you want to hit people, you'll make them rich. They love you."

"You're a pretty slick guy, Julio," I said.

"Yeah? Maybe you're a cute guy, like your partner," he answered.

"Slick as Vaseline, not a b.u.mp or a handle on you," I said. "But let me tell you a story of my own. My daddy was a trapper on Marsh Island. He used to tell me, 'If it's not moving, don't poke it. But when it starts snapping at your kneecaps, wait till it opens up real wide, then spit in its mouth.' What do you think of that story?"

"You're a mature man. Why you want to be a fool? I didn't do nothing to you. For some reason you're finding this trouble for yourself."

"What's the worst thing you've ever seen happen to somebody, Julio?" I asked.

"What're you talking about?" he said. His brow was furrowed, and the tiny b.a.l.l.s of skin in the creases looked like strings of purple BBs.

"I hear you have some cruel guys working for you. Probably some of Somoza's old national guardsmen, experts in garroting journalists and murdering Catholic priests."

"You don't make no sense."

"Sure I do," I said. "You probably got to visit the bas.e.m.e.nt in some of Somoza's police stations. You saw them hung up by their arms, with a cloth bag soaked in insecticide tied over their heads. They screamed and went blind and suffocated to death, and even a piece of s.h.i.t like yourself had a few nightmares about it. You also knew about that volcano where the army used to drop the Sandinistas from a helicopter into the burning crater. It's pretty awful stuff to think about, Julio."

"They really sent us a pair today. A vice cop with puta in his head and another one that talks like a Marxist," he said. Some of the people around the pool laughed.

"You're not following my drift," I said. "You see, to you a bad fate is what you've seen your own kind do to other people. But once you got away from the horror show down there in Managua, you figured you were safe. So did Somoza. He got out of Dodge with all his millions, then one day his chauffeur was driving him across Asuncion in his limo, with a motorcycle escort in front and back, and somebody parked a three-point-five bazooka rocket in his lap. It blew him into instant lasagna. Are you following me, Julio?"

"You going to come after me, big man?" he asked.

"You still don't get it. Look, it's almost biblical. Eventually somebody eats your lunch, and it always comes from a place you didn't expect it. Maybe a redneck cop puts a thumbbuster forty-five behind your ear and lets off a hollow-point that unfastens your whole face. Or maybe they strap you down in the Red Hat House at Angola and turn your brains into fried grits."

"You ought to get a job writing comic books," he said.

"Then maybe you're sitting by your pool, secure, with your prost.i.tutes and these trained monkeys around you, and something happens out of sequence," I said, and picked up his tropical drink full of ice and fruit and poured it into his lap.

He roared back from the table, raking ice off his cream-colored slacks, his face full of outrage and disbelief. The squat, dark man seated across from him started from his chair. Clete slammed him back down.

"Start it and we finish it, Paco," he said.

The dark man remained seated and gripped the wrought-iron arms of his chair, staring at Clete with a face that was as flat and latently brutal as a frying pan.

"There, that's a good fellow," Clete said.

"You get out of here!" Segura said.

"This is just for openers. The homicide people are a creative bunch," I said.

"You're spit on the sidewalk," he said.

"We've got a whole grab bag of door prizes for you, Julio. But in the end I'm going to send you back to the tomato patch," I said.

"I got guys that can cut a piece out of you every day of your life," Segura said.

"That sounds like a threat against a police officer," Clete said.

"I don't play your game, maricon," Segura said. "You're amateurs, losers. Look behind you. You want to shove people around now?"

Two men had parked their canary-yellow Continental at the end of the drive and were walking across the gra.s.s toward us. Both of them looked like upgraded bail bondsmen.

"Whiplash Wineburger, up from the depths," Clete said.

"I thought he'd been disbarred for fixing a juror," I said.

"That was his brother. Whiplash is too slick for that," Clete said. "His specialty is insurance fraud and ripping off his own clients."

"Who's the oilcan with him?"

"Some dago legislator that's been peddling his a.s.s around here for years."

"I heard you were wired into some heavy connections. These guys need lead in their shoes on a windy day," I said to Segura.

"Me cago en la puta de tu madre, " he replied.

"You hotdogs got two minutes to get out of here," the lawyer said. He was lean and tan, like an aging professional tennis player, and he wore a beige sports jacket, a yellow open-necked shirt, and brown-tinted gla.s.ses.

"We were just on our way. It looks like the neighborhood is going to h.e.l.l in a hurry," Clete said.

"By the way, Wineburger," I said, "bone up on your tax law. I hear the IRS is about to toss Segura's tax records."

"Yeah? You got a line to the White House?" he said.

"It's all over the Federal Building. You haven't been doing your homework," I said.