"I can't go today," I said.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Commitments at home."

"Yeah?" He was standing in the middle of my office, his porkpie hat slanted down on his head, his stomach hanging over his belt, an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth. He tossed the cigarette end over end into the wastebasket. "I refuse to light one of these things ever again. Why are you giving me this bullshit, Streak?"

"Come have dinner with us."

"No, I'm meeting this retired jigger an hour from now. You coming or not?"

"A bank jigger?"

"More serious. He was the lookout man for a couple of hit teams working out of Miami and New Orleans."

"Not interested."

"Where do you think we're supposed to get information from, the library?"

When I didn't reply, he said, "Dave, if you want me out of town, just say so."

"Let's talk about it tomorrow."

"You talk about it. I'm meeting the jigger. You don't want to hear what I find out, no problem."

After he closed the door behind him, his heat and anger remained like a visible presence in the room's silence.

That evening Alafair, Bootsie, and I were eating supper in the kitchen when we heard a heavy car on the gravel in the driveway. Alafair got up from the table and peered out the window. She was in high school now and seemed to have no memory anymore of the civil war in El Salvador that had brought her here as an illegal refugee, nor of the day I pulled her from the submerged wreckage of an airplane out on the salt. Her Indian-black hair was tied up on her head with a blue bandanna, and from the back, when she raised up on the balls of her feet to see better through the blinds, her body looked like that of a woman ten years her senior.

"It's somebody in a limousine, with a chauffeur. She's rolling down the window. It's an old woman, Dave," she said.

I went out the back door and walked around the side of the house to the limousine. It was white, with charcoal-tinted windows, and the chauffeur wore a black suit and cap and tie and white shirt. Oddly, his face was turned away, as though he did not want me to see it. Through the limousine's open back window I saw Jim Gable's wife, in a white dress and gloves, drinking sparkling burgundy from a crystal glass with a long stem. The late sun's glow through the trees gave her skin a rosy tone it did not naturally possess, and her mouth was soft, full of wrinkles, when she smiled at me. What was her name? Corrine? Colinda?

"Micah, open the door so Mr. Robicheaux can get in," she said to the chauffeur.

He stepped out of the driver's seat and opened the back, his face still averted. When I was inside, on the rolled leather seat, he walked down toward the dock just as a flight of snow egrets flew across the water, their wings pink in the sunset.

"How you do, Miss Cora?" I said.

"I couldn't stand staying another day alone while Jim's in the city. So I got Micah to drive me on a little tour of your lovely area. Join me in a glass of burgundy, Mr. Robicheaux," she said.

I realized, listening to her voice, that her Deep South accent came and went arbitrarily, even though her eyes, which were violet, never seemed to vary in their level of warmth and sincerity.

"No, thanks. Would you like to come in and have a bite to eat?" I replied.

"I'm afraid I've intruded. I do that sometimes. Lack of an audience, that sort of thing." She watched my face to see if I had inferred a second meaning. Obviously I had not.

"Audience?" I said, confused.

"It's a vanity of mine. I assume everyone on the planet spends time thinking about old movies." She opened a scrapbook and turned several pages that were thick and stiff with glued news articles and black-and-white photographs. She turned another page, and I looked down at a stunning color photograph of a woman with long blond hair in a black nightgown, reclining seductively on a divan with one arm behind her head. Her eyes were violet, her lipsticked mouth waiting to be kissed.

"You're Cora Perez. You were a movie star. I saw you in a film with Paul Muni," I said.

"That was at the end of Paul's career. He was such a wonderful man to work with. He knew how nervous and unsure I was, and he used to bring a flower to me each morning at the set," she said.

"It's an honor to know you, Miss Cora," I said, still unsure of the reason for her visit. My eyes drifted to the kitchen window, where Alafair's and Bootsie's silhouettes were visible at the table.

"I mustn't keep you," she said, and touched me lightly on the back of the hand. "Sometimes I just need someone to reassure me I'm not indeed of diminished capacity."

"Pardon?"

"I'm being declared as such by the court. It's not flattering, of course. But perhaps they're right. How does one accused of being mentally impaired prove she is not mentally impaired? It's like trying to prove a negative."

"I don't think you're impaired at all, Miss Cora. You strike me as a remarkable person."

"Why, you're obviously a man of great wisdom, Mr. Robicheaux."

I thought she would say more and explain her presence or whatever need it was that hovered around the edges of her sentences, but she didn't. I shook hands with her and got back out of the car, which the chauffeur took as his signal to walk back up from the dock. He fixed his cap down on his forehead and pretended he was studying the details of the dirt road and trees and canebrakes on either side of him as he approached the limousine.

"Try not to stare at Micah. He has a deformity of the face. Jim calls him 'Cyclops,' even though I don't allow him to do it in my presence," Miss Cora said.

Just as she finished speaking Micah tilted his chin into the light and I saw the nodulous skin growth that covered the right side of his face, like a strawberry-colored skein that had hardened and pinched the eye shut, tightening the cheek so that the teeth on the right side of the lip were exposed.

I pulled my eyes away and looked deliberately through the back window into Miss Cora's face.

"Good-bye, Miss Cora," I said.

"Come see me. Please do. You impress me greatly, sir," she replied.

I WENT back inside the house and sat down at the table with Alafair and Bootsie.

"Who was that?" Bootsie asked.

"Her stage name was Cora Perez. She was pretty big stuff in Hollywood back in the late forties and early fifties," I said.

"I remember her. Where'd you meet her?" Bootsie said.

"Clete and I had to run down some character by the name of Jim Gable. Clete says Gable married her for her money when he knew she had cancer."

Bootsie looked down at her plate and picked up her fork. Her hair was the color of honey and it moved in the breeze through the window.

"Did I say something wrong?" I asked.

"No, not at all," she replied. She put a very small piece of food in her mouth with the tip of her fork and kept her eyes on her plate.

That night, in bed, Bootsie rested her arm across her forehead and looked up at the ceiling. The moon was rising in the east and the revolving blades of the window fan marbled her body with shadows. I put my hand on her shoulder and she rolled toward me and rested her head under my chin. I raised her slip on her thigh and felt the tapered smoothness of her skin. But her hands were folded together and she didn't respond as she normally did.

"What's the problem, Boots?" I asked.

"This Jim Gable you were talking about? Was he a policeman in New Orleans at one time?" she said.

"He still is. A liaison wheel with the mayor's office."

"I used to know him," she said.

"Oh?"

"After my second husband was killed."

She didn't continue. She seldom spoke of her earlier marriages. Her first husband had been an oil field helicopter pilot who crashed offshore, but the second one had been Ralph Giacano, nephew of Didi Gee, a gangster who held his enemies' hands down in an aquarium filled with piranha and who some people believe was mixed up in the assassination of President Kennedy. The nephew, Ralph, was not only a degenerate gambler who bankrupted Bootsie, but he also tried to take the Colombians over the hurdles and was shotgunned to death, along with his mistress, in the parking lot of Hialeah racetrack.