Vachel Carmouche opened the front door and stepped out into the light. I could see the twins and the aunt peering out the door behind him.

"I think you're abusing those children," I said.

"You're an object of pity and ridicule, Mr. Robicheaux," he replied.

"Step out here in the yard."

His face was shadowed, his body haloed with humidity in the light behind him.

"I'm armed," he said when I approached him.

I struck his face with my open hand, his whiskers scraping like grit against my skin, his mouth streaking my palm with his saliva.

He touched his upper lip, which had broken against his overbite, and looked at the blood on his fingers.

"You come here with vomit on your breath and stink in your clothes and judge me?" he said. "You sit in the Red Hat House and watch while I put men to death, then condemn me because I try to care for orphan children? You're a hypocrite, Mr. Robicheaux. Be gone, sir."

He went inside and closed the door behind him and turned off the porch light. My face felt small and tight, like the skin on an apple, in the heated darkness.

I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of U.S. Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams.

I heard stories about the Labiche girls: their troubles with narcotics; the bikers and college boys and sexual adventurers who drifted in and out of their lives; their minor roles in a movie that was shot outside Lafayette; the R amp;B record Letty cut in prison that made the charts for two or three weeks.

When I bottomed out I often included the girls in my prayers and regretted deeply that I had been a drunk when perhaps I could have made a difference in their lives. Once I dreamed of them cowering in a bed, waiting for a man's footsteps outside their door and a hand that would quietly twist the knob in the jamb. But in daylight I convinced myself that my failure was only a small contributing factor in the tragedy of their lives, that my guilty feelings were simply another symptom of alcoholic grandiosity.

Vachel Carmouche's undoing came aborning from his long-suppressed desire for publicity and recognition. On a vacation in Australia he was interviewed by a television journalist about his vocation as a state executioner.

Carmouche sneered at his victims.

"They try to act macho when they come into the room. But I can see the sheen of fear in their eyes," he said.

He lamented the fact that electrocution was an inadequate punishment for the type of men he had put to death.

"It's too quick. They should suffer. Just like the people they killed," he said.

The journalist was too numb to ask a follow-up question.

The tape was picked up by the BBC, then aired in the United States. Vachel Carmouche lost his job. His sin lay not in his deeds but in his visibility.

He boarded up his house and disappeared for many years, where to, we never knew. Then he returned one spring evening eight years ago, pried the plywood off his windows, and hacked the weeds out of his yard with a sickle while the radio played on his gallery and a pork roast smoked on his barbecue pit. A black girl of about twelve sat on the edge of the gallery, her bare feet in the dust, idly turning the crank on an ice cream maker.

After sunset he went inside and ate dinner at his kitchen table, a bottle of refrigerated wine uncapped by his plate. A hand tapped on the back door, and he rose from his chair and pushed open the screen.

A moment later he was crawling across the linoleum while a mattock tore into his spine and rib cage, his neck and scalp, exposing vertebrae, piercing kidneys and lungs, blinding him in one eye.

Letty Labiche was arrested naked in her backyard, where she was burning a robe and work shoes in a trash barrel and washing Vachel Carmouche's blood off her body and out of her hair with a garden hose.

For the next eight years she would use every means possible to avoid the day she would be moved to the Death House at Angola Penitentiary and be strapped down on a table where a medical technician, perhaps even a physician, would inject her with drugs that sealed her eyes and congealed the muscles in her face and shut down her respiratory system, causing her to die inside her own skin with no sign of discomfort being transmitted to the spectators.

I had witnessed two electrocutions at Angola. They sickened and repelled me, even though I was involved in the arrest and prosecution of both men. But neither affected me the way Letty Labiche's fate would.

CLETE PURCEL STILL HAD his private investigator's office in the Quarter, down on St. Ann, and ate breakfast every morning in the Café du Monde across from Jackson Square. That's where I found him, the third Saturday in April, at a shady outdoor table, a cup of coffee and hot milk and pile of powdered beignets on a plate in front of him.

He wore a blue silk shirt with huge red flowers on it, a porkpie hat, and Roman sandals and beige slacks. His coat was folded over an empty chair, the handkerchief pocket torn loose from the stitching. He had sandy hair that he combed straight back and a round Irish face and green eyes that always had a beam in them. His arms had the girth and hardness of fire plugs, the skin dry and scaling from the sunburn that never quite turned into a tan.

At one time he was probably the best homicide investigator NOPD ever had. Now he ran down bail skips in the projects for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bim-stine.

"So I'm hooking up Little Face Dautrieve when her pimp comes out of the closet with a shank and almost cuts my nipple off," he said. "I paid three hundred bucks for that suit two weeks ago."

"Where's the pimp?" I asked.

"I'll let you know when I find him."

"Tell me again about Little Face."

"What's to tell? She's got clippings about Letty Labiche all over her living room. I ask her if she's morbid and she goes, 'No, I'm from New Iberia.' So I go, 'Being on death row makes people celebrities in New Iberia?' She says, 'Brush your teeth more often, Fat Man, and change your deodorant while you're at it.'"

He put a beignet in his mouth and looked at me while he chewed.

"What's she down on?" I asked.

"Prostitution and possession. She says the vice cop who busted her got her to lay him first, then he planted some rock in her purse. He says he'll make the possession charge go away if she'll provide regular boom-boom for him and a department liaison guy."

"I thought the department had been cleaned up."

"Right," Clete said. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and picked up his coat. "Come on, I'll drop this at the tailor's and take you out to the project."

"You said you hooked her up."

"I called Nig and got her some slack… Don't get the wrong idea, mon. Her pimp is Zipper Clum. Little Face stays on the street, he'll be back around."

We parked under a tree at the welfare project and walked across a dirt playground toward the two-story brick apartment building with green window trim and small green wood porches where Little Face Dautrieve lived. We passed a screen window and Clete fanned the air in front of his face. He stared through the screen, then banged on the frame with his fist.

"Lose the pipe and open the front door," he said.

"Anything for you, Fat Man. But don't get on my bat'room scale again. You done broke all the springs," a voice said from inside.

"My next job is going to be at the zoo. I can't take this anymore," Clete said when we were on the front porch.