He beat at the air with both hands. "I'm gonna call the Mosquito Control down here and bomb this whole place," he said. "Lord God Almighty, I thought liquor and women's thighs were an addiction. Son, they don't hold a candle to ambition."

The next morning a young black woman walked through the front door of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and down the hall to my office and tapped on the glass with one ringed finger. She wore a lavender shirt and white blouse and lavender pumps, and carried a baby in diapers on her shoulder.

"Little Face?" I said when I opened the door.

"I'm moving back here. Out at my auntie's place in the quarters at Loreauville. I got to tell you something," she said, and walked past me and sat down before I could reply.

"What's up?" I said.

"Zipper Clum is what's up. He say he gonna do you and Fat Man both."

"Clete Purcel is 'Fat Man'?"

"Fat Man shamed him, slapped his face up on that roof, throwed his pimp friends crashing down through a tree. I ax Zipper why he want to hurt you. He say you tole some people Zipper was snitching them off."

"Which people?"

She rolled her eyes. "Zipper's gonna tell me that? He's scared. Somebody done tole him he better clean up his own mess or Zipper ain't gonna be working his street corners no more. Anybody who can scare Zipper Clum is people I wouldn't want on my case."

She shifted her baby to her other shoulder.

"You're an intelligent lady, Little Face."

"That's why I'm on welfare and living with my auntie in the quarters."

"The day Vachel Carmouche was killed a black girl of about twelve was turning an ice cream crank on his gallery. That was eight years ago. You're twenty, aren't you?"

"You been thinking too much. You ought to go jogging with Fat Man, hep him lose weight, find something useful for you to do so you don't tire out your brain all the time."

"What happened inside Vachel Carmouche's house that night? Why won't you tell me?"

"He wanted to live real bad, that's what happened. But he didn't find no mercy 'cause he didn't deserve none. You ax me, a man like that don't find no mercy in the next world, either."

"You saw him killed, didn't you?"

"Mine to know."

"Did he molest you? Is that why Letty came to Carmouche's back door that night?"

Her small face seemed to cloud with thought.

"I got to come up wit' a name for you. Maybe an Indian one, something like 'Man Who's Always Axing Questions and Don't Listen.' That's probably too long, though, huh? I'll work on it."

"That's real wit," I said.

"It ain't your grief, Sad Man. Stay out of it before you do real damage to somebody. About Zipper? Some snakes rattle before they bite. Zipper don't. He's left-handed. So he's gonna be doing something wit' his right hand, waving it around in the air, taking things in and out of his pockets. You gonna be watching that hand while he's grinning and talking. Then his left hand gonna come at you just like a snake's head. Pow, pow, pow. I ain't lyin', Sad Man. "

"If Vachel Carmouche molested you, we'd have corroborating evidence that he molested Letty and Passion," I said.

"I got to feed my baby now. Tell Fat Man what I said. It won't be no fun if he ain't around no more," she said.

She rose from her chair and hefted her baby higher on her shoulder and walked back out the door, her face oblivious to the cops in the hall whose eyes cut sideways at her figure.

Connie Deshotel was the attorney general of Louisiana. Newspaper accounts about her career always mentioned her blue-collar background and the fact she had attended night school at the University of New Orleans while working days as a patrolwoman. She graduated in the upper five percent of her law class at LSU. She never married, and instead became one of those for whom civil service is an endless ladder into higher and higher levels of success.

I had met her only once, but when I called her office in Baton Rouge Wednesday afternoon she agreed to see me the next day. Like her boss, Belmont Pugh, Connie Deshotel was known as an egalitarian. Or at least that was the image she worked hard to convey.

Olive-skinned, with metallic-colored hair that had been burned blond on the ends by the sun, she was dressed in a gray suit with a silver angel pinned on her lapel. When I entered her office, her legs were crossed and her hand was poised with a pen above a document on her desk, like a figure in a painting who emanates a sense of control, repose, and activity at the same time.

But unlike Belmont Pugh, the sharecropper populist who was so untraveled and naive he believed the national party would put a bumbling peckerwood on its ticket, Connie Deshotel's eyes took your inventory, openly, with no apology for the invasion of your person and the fact you were being considered as a possible adversary.

"We met once, years ago, during Mardi Gras," she said.

My gaze shifted off hers. "Yeah, I was still with NOPD. You were in the city administration," I said.

She touched a mole at the corner of her mouth with a fingertip.

"I was drunk. I was escorted out of a meeting you were chairing," I said.

She smiled faintly, but her eyes hazed over, as though I were already disappearing as a serious event in her day.

"What can I do for you, Detective Robicheaux? That's your grade, detective, right?" she asked.

"Yeah. An informant told me two cops on a pad for the Giacanos killed a woman in Lafourche Parish in 1966 or '67. Her maiden name was Mae Guillory."

"Which department were they with?"

"He didn't know."

"Did you find a record of the crime?"

"None."

"How about the body?"

"To my knowledge, none was ever found."

"Missing person reports?"

"There's no paperwork on this at all, Ms. Deshotel."

She put down her pen and sat forward in her swivel chair. She looked into space.

"I'll call the authorities in Lafourche Parish. It sounds like a blind alley, though. Who's the informant?"

"A pimp in New Orleans."

"Why's he coming forward now?"

"A friend of mine was going to throw him off a roof."

"Ah, it's becoming a little more clear now. Is this friend Clete Purcel?"

"You know Clete?"

"Oh, yes. You might say there's a real groundswell for revocation of his P.I. license. In fact, I have his file right here." She opened a desk drawer and removed a manila folder filled with police reports, a thickly folded printout from the National Crime Information Center, and what looked like letters of complaint from all over the state. "Let's see, he shot and killed a government witness, stole a concrete mixer and filled a man's convertible with cement, and destroyed a half-million-dollar home on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth grader. He also slim-jimmed Bobby Earl's car at the Southern Yacht Club and urinated on the seats and dashboard. You say he's been throwing people off of roofs recently?"

"Maybe I misspoke on that," I said.

She glanced at her watch.

"I'm sorry. I'm late for a luncheon. Give me your card and I'll call you with any information I can find," she said.

"That's good of you," I said.

"What was the victim's name again?"

"Mae Guillory was her maiden name. Her married name was Robicheaux."

"Are you related?"

"She was my mother. So I'll be hanging around on this one, Ms. Deshotel."

The inquisitory beam came back in her eyes, as though the earlier judgment she had passed on me had suddenly been set in abeyance.