"You can't drink at all?" Honoria said.

"I could but I choose not to," I replied, and felt instantly stupid at my own rhetoric.

"I thought if you went through the Twelve Steps, you were cured. It must be awful to know that about yourself."

"To know what?"

"That you're afraid of your own metabolism."

There was a black shine in both her hair and eyes, and she wore a white cotton dress with eyelets in the bodice that exposed the deep tan in her skin. When she ordered her third vodka collins I made a show of noticing the clock above the bar and told her I should be going. But you didn't get off the hook that easily with Honoria Chalons. She gave the waiter a credit card to pay the check before I could, then asked him to put her drink in a Styrofoam cup. "Do me a favor?" she said to me.

I waited for her to go on.

"My car won't start. I think it'll have to be towed. Can you give me a lift?" she said.

We walked back down East Main to my house and got in my pickup truck. She tripped once on a pitch in the sidewalk and I felt her body come hard against me. "I still haven't eaten dinner. Want to stop somewhere?" she said.

"I have work to do," I said.

"It's a grand evening. I don't want to waste it at home. The House of Chalons is a dark place. Few people know how dark it really is," she said.

I looked at her profile in the shadowy light of a streetlamp, and wondered if she was being deliberately grandiose. But she was not. Her eyes were fixed on the rooftops of the Victorian and antebellum homes along the street and the birds circling over the chimneys, as though they held the answer to a question she had never resolved.

"Why are you staring at me?" she said.

"I wonder why you live at home."

"To care for my father. He's quite ill. I don't think he'll live long."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.

"He'll handle it. He always does. God, I need a bath. Every time I come back to Louisiana, I can't seem to scrub the dirt and humidity out of my skin."

In the shadows her cheeks were pooled with color, her eyes glazed with an alcoholic shine. She looked up into my face, almost like a little girl, perhaps faintly embarrassed at the visceral nature of her language. "Take me home?" she said.

We drove down Old Spanish Trail and on through Jeanerette. The moon was low on the horizon, veiled with brown dust from the sugar cane fields, her house lit inside the massive live oaks that surrounded it. I drove through the gate and stopped in front of the porch. My truck windows were down and for a moment I thought I smelled cigar smoke.

The decorum of the era in which Honoria and I were raised would have required me to walk her to the door, or at least offer to do so. But I had already decided Honoria needed to get on with her life, and she didn't need me to help her with it. I was about to say good night, without getting out of the truck, when she placed her hand on my cheek, then tilted her head sideways and pressed her mouth to mine, using her tongue, threading her fingers tightly through the back of my hair.

I could taste vodka and sweet syrup and orange slices and the tartness of crushed cherries in her mouth. I could even taste the coldness of the ice that had been poured from her collins glass into the Styrofoam cup. She took a breath and got up on her knees, then bent down to kiss me again.

"Whoa, kiddo," I said.

"Kiddo yourself," she said. She got out of the truck and walked inside, her back stiff, the porch light bright on her white dress.

I turned the truck around and started back toward the gate. Not more than three feet from my window, I saw the red glow of a cigar among a tangle of persimmon trees. I slowed the truck, the tires creaking on the gravel, and looked into the spectral face of Honoria's father, Raphael Chalons.

"My daughter is a vulnerable woman, sir. Be advised I do not abide the man who would take advantage of that fact," he said.

Good evening to you, too, sir, I thought, and drove on without replying. I also decided that on some occasions good deeds and the obligations of charity should be heaved over the gunnels.

The next morning Jimmie was up before me, fixing breakfast for us, feeding Tripod and Snuggs, whistling a song.

"You must have had a pretty good night," I said.

"This friend of mine, the professor at UL, he's got this huge collection of country and bluegrass music. Remember we used to always say Ida sang just like Kitty Wells? That's because Kitty Wells sang in B flat. See, my friend has put his whole record library in his computer and he came up with all these recordings that have somebody on them singing like Kitty Wells."

Jimmie had been cutting toast on the breadboard while he spoke. He turned around, his starched white shirt crinkling, his hair wet and combed, his face shiny with aftershave. "You know the best part? On a couple of those records somebody's playing a mandolin just the way Ida did," he said.

I looked away so he could not see my eyes. "That's good, Jimmie," I said.

"Yeah, Ida was smart. I always thought she got away from those guys. Why would they want to kill her, anyway? She was just a piney-woods country girl."

Because they're sonsofbitches and they make examples of piney-woods girls, I thought.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," I replied. "I'd better get to the office."

"Hey, we're going to find ole Ida. You'll see," he said.

"You bet," I said, knowing that Jimmie, like all brave people, would continue to believe in the world, regardless of what it did to him.

A little after nine, Wally, our overweight dispatcher and self-appointed departmental comic, buzzed my phone. "There's a newsman down here wants to see you. Should I send him up?" he said.

"Which newsman?"

"The one on TV looks like an icicle."

"Valentine Chalons?"

"That's the one."

"Why don't you just say so?"

" 'Cause he looks like an icicle. Or I could call him the TV guy wit' a broom up his ass trying to give me a bad time. By the way, that nun left a note for you."

I couldn't begin to follow his words. "Wally -" I began.

"That nun, the one who builds homes for poor people, she was here to see you. I buzzed your phone but you wasn't at your desk. So she left a note. It's in your mailbox. She went out when the TV guy was coming in. You want to see the TV guy or not?"

Three minutes later Valentine Chalons opened my office door without knocking and closed it behind him., his eyes locked on mine. "I'll make this simple. My sister is a grown woman and can associate with whomever she pleases. But I'll be damned if you'll use her to get at my father," he said.

"Sorry to see you interpret things that way, Val," I said.

"My father is a heart patient. He probably doesn't have long to live. What are you trying to do to him?"

"Your sister had a problem with her car. I gave her a ride home."

"You're looking me in the face, telling me you have no issue with my father?"

"If I do, it doesn't involve your sister."

"How about Sister Molly? It's just coincidence I saw her leaving here this morning?"

"I don't know what it is, because I didn't see or talk with her."

"Our handyman told me he saw you at her office yesterday."

"Yeah, I did see her yesterday. But that's none of your business."

"Let me set you straight about that hypocritical bitch. She's a closet Marxist who uses the Church to stir up class hatred in ignorant and gullible people. Except she's not a real nun. She's got some kind of half-ass status that doesn't require her to take vows. So she hides behind the veil and gets to have it both ways."

"What's she got on you, partner?"