"Last week she's in the supermarket and who does she see? Ritter and his old lady. Ritter looks right through Janet and studies these cans of beans on the shelf like he's never seen one before. But what's Ritter supposed to do? she asks herself. Introduce her? Except she's in the next aisle now and she hears Ritter's old lady say, 'Did you see that? She's got jugs like gallon milk bottles. With tattoos yet. You didn't notice?'

"Ritter says, 'I was never attracted to Elsie the Cow types.' They both thought that was a real laugh.

"Janet decides it's payback time. She's got a bond on a soliciting charge with Nig and Wee Willie and she calls me up and asks if I can get the DA. to cut her loose on the soliciting beef if she gives up Ritter. I told her that was a possibility but the D.A. would probably make her take the weight on the money laundering deal and maybe there was a better way to spike Ritter's cannon.

"I got her to call up Ritter's old lady at midnight and tell her she was sorry Don didn't introduce the two of them at the supermarket because they probably have a lot in common. Then Janet goes into detail about Ritter's sex habits and says it's too bad Ritter uses the same old tired line with all his broads, namely that his wife is a drag at home and an embarrassment at departmental social functions and he's shit-canning her as soon as he can make sure all the bills and charge accounts are under her name.

"It took about ten minutes for Ritter to come tearing across the bridge to Janet's place on the West Bank. She dead-bolted the back door on him and he got a ball peen hammer out of his convertible and started smashing the glass out of the door and trying to get his hand on the lock. That's when I clocked him with the birdbath."

"You hit him with a cement birdbath?" I said.

"Hear me out, okay? Janet’s brother owns this car wash behind the apartment. Ritter's half out of it, so I put him in the passenger seat of his convertible and hooked him up to the door handle with his cuffs and drove him up to the car wash entrance.

"I go, 'Don, you're a dirty cop. Now's the time to rinse your sins, start over again, try keeping your flopper in your pants for a change. You set up that gig on the Atchafalaya and almost got my podjo, Dave, killed, didn't you?'

"He goes, 'No matter how this comes out, you're still a skell, Purcel.'

"So I drove his convertible onto the conveyor and pushed all the buttons for the super clean and hot wax job. The pressure hoses came on and those big brushes dipped down inside the car and were scouring Ritter into the seats. I shut it down and gave him another chance, but he started yelling and blowing the horn, so I turned everything back on and stalled the conveyor and left him there with the steam blowing out both ends of the building."

"You're telling me Ritter's still in there?" I said.

"Yes and no." His mouth was cone-shaped when he breathed through it. "I had my hands full. Janet was getting hysterical and breaking things and throwing her clothes in a suitcase. Then I heard two popping sounds, like firecrackers in the rain. I went back to the car wash but there wasn't anybody around. Except Ritter floating face-down in all that soap and wax. He'd taken one in the ear and one through the mouth."

I got up from the table and looked out at my neighbor's field and at the fog rising out of the coulee, my back turned to Clete so he couldn't see my face.

When I turned around again Clete's eyes were jittering with light, his lips moving uncertainly, like a drunk coming off a bender when he doesn't know whether he should laugh or not at what he has done.

Then his eyes fixed on mine and his expression went flat and he said, as though by explanation, "This one went south on me."

"Yeah, I guess it did, Clete."

"That's all you're going to say?"

"Come inside. I'll fix you something to eat," I said as I walked past him toward the house.

"Streak?… Damn it, don't give me that look."

But I went through the kitchen into the bath and brushed my teeth and put cold water on my face and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking or take my anger out on a friend who had put himself in harm's way on my account. But I believed Ritter'd had knowledge about my mother's death and now it was gone.

I dried my face and went back into the kitchen.

"You want me to boogie?" Clete said.

"Get the skillet out of the cabinet, then call Nig and Wee Willie and tell them you'll need a bond," I said as I took a carton of eggs and a slab of bacon from the icebox.

After we ate breakfast, Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass. When we got back, Clete was down at the dock, sitting at a spool table under an umbrella, reading the newspaper. From a distance he looked like a relaxed and content man enjoying the fine day, but I knew better. Clete had no doubt about the gravity of his actions. Once again his recklessness had empowered his enemies and he now hung by a spider's thread over the maw of the system.

Television programs treat the legal process as an intelligent and orderly series of events that eventually punishes the guilty and exonerates the innocent. The reality is otherwise. The day you get involved with the law is the day you lose all control over your life. What is dismissed by the uninitiated as "a night in jail" means sitting for an indeterminable amount of time in a holding cell, with a drain hole in the floor, looking at hand-soiled walls scrawled with pictures of genitalia, listening to other inmates yell incoherently down the corridors while cops yell back and clang their batons on the bars.

You ask permission to use a toilet. When you run out of cigarettes or matches, you beg them off a screw through the bars. Your persona, your identity, and all the social courtesy you take for granted are removed from your existence like the skin being pulled off a banana. When you look through a window onto the street, you realize you do not register on the periphery of what are called free people. Your best hope of getting back outside lies with a bondsman who secretes Vitalis through his pores or a twenty-four-hour Yellow Pages lawyer who wears zircon rings on his fingers and keeps a breath mint on his tongue. We're only talking about day one.

That afternoon I finally got Dana Magelli on the phone.

"Clete says the entry wounds look like they came from a.22 or.25," I said.

"Thank him for his feedback on that."

"He didn't do it, Dana. It was a professional hit. I think we're talking about Johnny Remeta."

"Except Purcel has a way of stringing elephant shit behind him everywhere he goes."

"You want me to bring him in?"

"Take a guess."

"We'll be there in three hours."

There was a long silence and I knew Magelli's basic decency was having its way with him.

"IAD has been looking at Ritter for a month. Tell Purcel to come in and give a statement. Then get him out of town," he said.

"Pardon?"

"Janet Gish confirms his story. We don't need zoo creatures muddying up the water right now. You hearing me?"

"You're looking at some other cops?"

He ignored my question. "I mean it about Purcel. He's not just a pain in the ass. In my view he's one cut above the clientele in Angola. He mixes in our business again, I'll turn the key on him myself," Magelli said.

I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle on top of the counter in the bait shop. Through the screen window I could see Clete at a spool table, watching an outboard pass on the bayou, his face divided by sunlight and shadow. I walked outside the bait shop and looked down at him.

"That was Dana Magelli. You're going to skate," I said.

He beamed at me, and I realized all the lessons he should have learned had just blown away in the breeze.