"Drink two inches of it for me," I said.

She hit me on the arm with the flat of her fist and walked to her cruiser., her eyes sliding off the face of the coroner.

It was dark by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. A wind came up and blew the mosquitoes out of the trees, and I could see heat lightning in the clouds over the Gulf and smell distant rain. I thought about four inches of Jack on ice, with a sprig of mint bruised inside the glass. I rubbed my mouth and swallowed dryly. Then I said good night to the other personnel at the scene and got back in my truck.

Just in time to see a television news van rumble down the road and stop squarely in front of me, its headlights burning into my eyes. The first figure out of the van was none other than Valentine Chalons, the one certifiable celebrity in the Chalons family, the same people who owned cotton, sugar cane, oil, and timber interests all over Louisiana and East Texas, including the parish where my former college friend, Troy Bordelon, had lived.

Valentine could have descended from Vikings rather than the chivalric Norman French ancestry his family claimed for themselves. He was tall, athletic-looking, and blue-eyed, with a bladed face and hair that had turned silver on the tips in his late thirties. Unlike the rest of the Chalons family, his views were ostensibly populist or libertarian, although I sensed that inside his populism was the soul of a snob.

He had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, then had worked as a stringer and feature writer for the Associated Press before taking a news anchor position with a television station in New Orleans. But Valentine Chalons's stops on the ladder of success were always temporary, and nobody doubted that he considered ambition a virtue rather than a vice.

Before the 9/11 attacks, he actually interviewed Osama bin Laden high up in the mountains on the Pakistan border. After hiking three days through burning moonscape and razor-edged rocks, Valentine and an interpreter finally trudged up a path to a cave opening, where the man who would help orchestrate the murder of almost three thousand people stood waiting for him, his robes swirling in the wind. According to what had become a folk legend among newsmen, the first words out of Val's mouth were: "Why don't you build a decent driveway Jack?"

Now he owned a television station in Lafayette and one in Shreveport and was an editorial contributor on a national cable network. But regardless of his acquisitions, Val remained a hands-on journalist and took great pleasure in covering a story himself as well as immersing himself in the fray.

"You're too late, podna," I said.

"That's what you think. I got a shot inside the ambulance at the intersection," he replied. He motioned to his cameramen, who flooded the pond and the trees with light. One of them accidentally snapped the yellow crime scene tape that was wrapped around a pine trunk.

"You guys step back," I said.

"Sorry," the offending cameraman said.

But Val didn't miss a beat. He extended his microphone in front of my face. "Does the victim have a name yet?" he said.

"No," I replied.

But he slogged on, undeterred, and repeated the question, using the name of the missing DEQ official's wife.

"Cut the bullshit, Val. You want information, talk to the sheriff," I said.

He lowered the mike. "How you been?" he said.

"Great." I slipped my hands into my back pockets and took a step closer to him, maybe because his aggressive manner had given me license I wouldn't have had otherwise. "Did you know a guy by the name of Troy Bordelon?"

"No, I don't think so. Who is he?"

"A dead guy who worked for your family."

"A dead guy?"

"He gave me a deathbed statement about the disappearance of a prostitute named Ida Durbin. I think she was killed." I held my eyes on his.

"I'm listening," he said.

"A couple of rogue cops paid me a visit. Their names are J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts. These guys seemed worried about what Troy might have told me. Their names ring a bell?"

"Nope." He looked idly at one of his cameramen who was filming the pond and the drag marks where the paramedics had pulled the body out of the water.

"And you never heard of Troy Bordelon?" I said.

"I just told you."

"You're a knowledgeable man, so I thought I'd ask," I said.

He inserted a piece of gum into his mouth and chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "You kill me, Dave. Come out to the plantation. We've got a cook from France now. I want him to fix a dinner especially for you."

"I'm off butter and cream," I said.

He laughed to himself and shook his head. "It was worth every minute of the drive out here. Have a good one." He patted me on the shoulder and walked away, a self-amused grin on his face.

Let it go, I told myself. But I couldn't take his imperious, fraternity-boy manner. I caught up with him at the passenger window of his van. "Ida Durbin worked in a hot pillow joint on Post Office Street in Galveston in 1958. Would your old man know anything about those places?" I said.

"You're asking this about my father?" he said.

"Want me to repeat the question?" I said.

He touched at his nose and snapped his gum in his jaws. For a moment I thought he might step outside the vehicle. But he didn't. "Dave, I'd love to get you your own show. The ratings would go through the roof. Let me make a couple of calls to New York. I'm not putting you on. I could swing it," he said.

Then the van pulled away, bouncing through the dips in the road, the high beams spearing through the underbrush and trees.

You just blew it, bubba, I said under my breath.

I couldn't find Clete for three days. The owner of the motor court where he lived said Clete had thrown a suitcase in his Cadillac early Friday morning, driven away with a wave of the hand, and had not returned.

But at dawn the following Monday, Clete called the house on his cell phone.

"Where are you?" I said.

"Across the bayou. In City Park. I can see your backyard from here."

"Why the mystery?"

"My situation is a little warm right now. Anybody been around?"

"What have you done, Clete?"

"It's under control. Haul your butt over here, Streak. Over-and-out."

I drove down Main and across the drawbridge into the park. The sky was gray, the trees shrouded with mist, the surface of the bayou chained with rain rings. Clete was sitting on a table under a picnic shelter, his restored Cadillac parked back in the trees. But if he was trying to hide his Caddy from notice, he had taken on an impossible task. It was a beautiful automobile, with big fins, Frenched headlights, wire wheels and whitewalls, an immaculate cream-colored top, and a waxed finish that was the shade of a flamingo's wing – all of it the gift of a pornographic actor and drug mule by the name of Gunner Ardoin, who credited Clete with turning his life around.

I sat beside him under the shelter and unscrewed the cap on a thermos of coffee and hot milk I had brought from home.

"You went after Billy Joe Pitts, didn't you?" I said.

"I found out he hangs around the casino in Lake Charles on the weekends. But that's not all he does over there. He's part owner of a motel that operates as a cat-house for high rollers."

Clete sipped his coffee, the steam rising into his face. He wore a rumpled suit with a white shirt and no tie, and a yellow straw cowboy hat that was bright with dew. The back of his neck was thick and red and pocked with scars below his hairline. I waited for him to go on, but he didn't.

"What happened?" I said.

"He made me at the casino and got me busted. I spent Saturday night in the Calcasieu Parish Jail. I'd still be in there if Nig and Willie hadn't called in some IOUs for me. I was in a cell with a meth freak who tried to talk to his wife in the women's section by yelling into the toilet bowl."