"Pitts's beef with you is personal. Why would you put it on Raphael Chalons?"

"You're not hearing anything I say. You were right about Pitts. He works for the Chalonses. The old man is a regular with Pitts's chippies. 'Personal' is when guys like Chalons look the other way while the hired help splatter your grits. So I went out to his house and told him that. As well as a couple of other things."

"Like what other things?"

"That if he kept his stiff red-eye in his pants, he'd probably have a lot fewer problems. By the way, the guy is supposed to have a schlong on him like a fifteen-inch chunk of flex pipe. Stop looking like that. He needed a heart-to-heart. He probably appreciated it."

Clete tried to make light of his encounter with Raphael Chalons, but he and I had reached an age when cynicism and humor become poor surrogates for the rage we feel when our lives are treated with disregard. I bought him lunch at Victor's Cafeteria, then drove up the bayou to the home of Raphael Chalons.

I had always wanted to dismiss him as a vestigial reminder of the old oligarchy – imperious, pragmatic, amoral when necessity demanded it, casual if not cavalier regarding the hardship imposed by his society on the backs of blacks and poor whites. He may have been partially all those things but I also believed he was a far more complex man.

He was a strict traditionalist, even to the point of refusing to air-condition his home. But during the Civil Rights era, when a group of black men entered the clubhouse at the public golf course and were ignored by the waiters, who were also black and feared for their jobs, Chalons sat at their table and told the manager to put their drinks on his tab. After that one seminal incident, black golfers never had trouble at our public links or clubhouse again.

He became the legal guardian of orphaned children and paid for their education. I suspected he would not use profane language or be personally abusive at gunpoint. In his own mind the estate he had inherited was a votive trust, and those who would impose their way upon it risked his wrath. Sometimes I wondered if Raphael Chalons heard the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.

The rumors that he did business with the Giacanos were I'm sure true. To what degree was up for debate. In the state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state's culture, mind-set, religious attitudes, and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation. The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana. Chalons was an enigma, a protean creation bound more to the past than the present, and in some ways a mirror of us all. But the best description I ever heard of Chalons came from his own attorney, who once told me, "Raphael hates lawyers, keeps all his records in his own head, and is a ruthless sonofabitch. But by God he always keeps his word."

I parked my cruiser in the spangled shade of a live oak and was told by a yardman that Raphael Chalons was in the back, down by the bayou, walking his dog. I went around the side of the building, past slave quarters that were used to store baled hay and a cistern that had caved into sticks on its brick foundation. Down the slope, in the sunlight, I saw Raphael Chalons throwing a stick for his pet Rottweiler to fetch. As I approached him, he snapped his fingers at the dog and clipped a leash onto its collar, then stepped on the end of the leash with one foot.

He was a tall, ascetic-looking man, with shiny black hair and a scrolled and waxed mustache, like the one worn by the legendary Confederate naval officer Raphael Sims. His hands had the long, tapered quality of a surgeon's, deeply tanned on the backs, corded with blue veins.

I told him I had been sent by the sheriff to investigate his complaint regarding Clete Purcel. "Did he bother or threaten you in some way, sir?" I asked.

"You're not patronizing me, are you, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"Sheriff Soileau doesn't want someone from our parish threatening people, if in fact that was the case," I replied.

I saw the veiled challenge to his veracity register in his eyes. "If he had threatened me, I would have run him off with a shotgun. Did he offend me? Yes, he did. He made an insinuation an employee of mine put a contract on his life. But I have the feeling you know this man."

"I do."

"So there's a personal agenda at work here?"

"No," I replied, my eyes shifting off his.

"My son thinks you're trying to extract information from my daughter about our family. Is that your purpose, Mr. Robicheaux, besides looking out for your friend's interests?"

His tone had become pointed, slightly heated, and I saw the dog raise its head, a string of slobber hanging from the side of its mouth. The dog was heavily muscled, its hair coarse, the same black, shiny color as Chalons's, with tan markings around its rump and ears. Chalons snapped his fingers and the dog got down flat on the ground and rested its head on its paws.

"There's a hit man in New Orleans by the name of Jericho Johnny Wineburger," I said. "His specialty is one in the mouth, one in the forehead, and one in the ear. He once told me, 'When I pop 'em, I shut all their motors down. Forget life support. They're cold meat when they bounce off the pavement.' That's the guy a cop by the name of Billy Joe Pitts was trying to sic on my friend Clete Purcel."

I could see the offensive nature of my language and its implication climb into his face. He studied the bayou and a powerboat splitting a long yellow trough down its center. Then he bent over and unsnapped the leash from the dog's collar.

Involuntarily I stepped back and rested my palm on the butt of my holstered.45, my heart beating. But Chalons only patted his dog on its head and said, "Go to the house, Heidi."

I watched the dog bound up the grassy slope, then I looked back at Chalons's face. There were long vertical lines in it, the mouth downturned at the corners, as though he had never learned to smile. I took my hand from my weapon, feeling strangely disappointed that he had not forced the moment. I could not begin to guess at the thoughts that went on behind the black light in his eyes.

Then, as though he had read my mind, he said, "Please leave my family alone, Mr. Robicheaux. We've done you no harm."

I went directly from work to New Orleans, driving the four-lane through Morgan City and Des Allemands. I hit rain on the bridge over the Mississippi River, then a full-blown electrical storm as I turned off Interstate 10 and headed up St. Charles Avenue toward the old Irish Channel.

Jericho Johnny Wineburger owned a saloon on a side street between Magazine and Tchoupitoulas, and claimed to have been out of the life for a least a decade. But he had at least a thirty-year history of killing people, and supposedly, with another button man, had taken out Bugsy Siegel's cousin with a shotgun on a train roaring through West Palm Beach. Clete believed Jericho Johnny had turned down the contract on Clete's life either out of fear of Clete or respect for the fact they both grew up in the Irish Channel.

I doubted either possibility. Jericho Johnny had ice water in his veins and I suspect was capable of killing his victim and eating a sandwich while he did it.

The air was cold and smelled of ozone. The streets were flooded, and thunder was booming over the Gulf when I parked in front of his saloon and ran for the colonnade. The only customers in the saloon were some kids shooting pool in back and a white woman in a house robe who slept with her face on her hands at a table. Jericho Johnny stood behind the bar drying glasses while he watched a professional wrestling match on TV. He looked at me and slid a toothpick into the corner of his mouth. "This about Purcel?" he asked.