A week passed. Clete Purcel went back to New Orleans, then returned to New Iberia to hunt down more of Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine's bail skips. On Monday Clete and I went to Victor's, a cafeteria located on Main Street in a refurbished nineteenth-century building with a high, stamped ceiling, where cops and businesspeople and attorneys often ate lunch.

"Check out the pair by the cashier," Clete said.

I turned around and saw Zerelda Calucci and Perry LaSalle at a small table, their heads bent toward each other, a solitary rose in a small vase between them.

But Clete and I were not the only ones who had taken notice of them. Barbara Shanahan was eating at another table, her muted anger growing in her face.

When Clete and I walked outside, Zerelda and Perry were across the street in the parking lot. Perry opened the passenger door of his Gazelle for Zerelda to get inside. Barbara Shanahan stood on the sidewalk in a white suit, staring at them, her eyes smoldering.

"What's the deal with Zerelda Calucci and Perry?" I asked.

"Ask him," she replied.

"I'm asking you."

"She was always one of his on-again, off-again groupies. Perry likes to think of himself as the great benefactor of the underclass. It's part of his mystical persona."

"She's Joe Zeroski's niece. Zeroski thinks Tee Bobby Hulin killed both the Boudreau girl and his daughter. Why's Zerelda hanging with Tee Bobby's defense attorney?"

"Duh, I don't know, Dave. Why don't you research the LaSalle family history? Are you sure you're in the right line of work?" Barbara said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.

"God, you're stupid," she replied.

She crossed the street and walked down to the bayou, where she lived by herself in a waterfront apartment surrounded by banana trees.

"That broad gives me a boner just watching her walk," Clete said.

"Clete, will you-" I began.

"How long ago was she LaSalle's punch?" he said.

"Why do you always have to ask questions that offer a presumption as a truth? Why don't you show a little humility about other people once in a while?"

"Right," he said, sticking a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his face thoughtful. "You think she might dig an older guy?"

That afternoon I was visited by the parents of Amanda Boudreau. They sat side by side in front of my desk, their faces impassive, their eyes never lingering on any particular object, as though they were sitting in a vacuum and addressing voices and concerns that were alien to all their prior experience. They wore their best clothes, probably purchased at a discount store in Lafayette, but they looked like people who might have recently drowned and not become aware of their fate.

"We don't know what's going on," the father said.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand," I said.

"A woman came to our house yesterday. She told us she was a detective," he said.

"Her name was Calucci. Zerelda Calucci," the mother said.

"She asked how long Amanda was seeing Tee Bobby Hulin," the father said.

"What?" I said.

"She said our daughter was seeing Bobby Hulin," the mother said.

"Why's she saying this about our daughter? Why you sending out people like this to our house?" the father said.

"Zerelda Calucci is not a police officer. She's a private investigator from New Orleans. I suspect she's now working for the defense," I said.

They were both silent for several moments, their faces pinched with the knowledge that they had been deceived, that again someone had stolen something from their lives.

"People are saying you don't believe Bobby Hulin killed Amanda," the mother said.

I tried to return her and her husband's stare, but I felt my eyes break.

"I guess I'm not sure what happened out there," I said.

"This morning we took flowers out to the spot where Amanda died. Her blood is still on the grass. You can come out there with me and look at our daughter's blood and maybe that'll hep you see what happened," the father said.

"Call me if the Calucci woman bothers you again," I said.

"What for?" the mother asked.

"Pardon?" I said.

"I said, 'What for?' I don't think you're on our side, Mr. Robicheaux. I saw the man who killed our daughter in the grocery store this morning, buying coffee and doughnuts and orange juice, laughing with the cashier. Now people are saying Amanda was his girlfriend, the man who tied her up with a jump rope and killed her with a shotgun. I think y'all ought to be ashamed, you most of all," she said.

I looked out the window of my office until she and her husband were gone.

That evening, after work, I drove south of town and crossed the freshwater bay onto Poinciana Island. As I followed the winding road through hillocks and cypress and gum trees and live oaks that were almost two centuries old, I could feel the attraction that had probably kept the LaSalles and their vision of themselves intact for so many generations. The island was as close to Eden as the earth got. The evening sky was ribbed with purple and red clouds. In the trees I could see deer and out on the bay flying fish that were bronze and scarlet in the sunset. The lichen on the oaks, the lacy canopy overhead, the pooled water and the mushrooms and layers of blackened leaves and pecan husks back in the shade, all created a sense of botanical insularity that had not been tainted by the clank of engines and the smells of gasoline and diesel or the heat that rose from city cement. In effect, Poinciana Island had successfully avoided the twentieth century.

If I owned this place, would I willingly give it up? If I had to deal in slaves to keep it, would I not be tempted to allow the Prince of Darkness to have his way with my business affairs once in a while?

These were thoughts I didn't care to dwell on.

Perry lived in a two-story house constructed of soft, variegated brick that had been recovered from torn-down antebellum homes in South Carolina. The royal palms that towered over the house had been transported by boat from Key West, their enormous root balls wrapped in canvas that was wet down constantly with buckets of fresh water. The one-acre pond in back, which had a dock with a pirogue moored to it (no motorized boats were allowed on the island), had been stocked years ago with fingerling bass, and now some of them had grown to fifteen pounds, their backs as dark green and thick across as moss-slick logs when they roiled the surface among the lily pads.

And that's where I saw Perry, on a scrolled-iron bench by the waterside, casting a lure in a long arc out over the dimpled stillness of the pond's surface.

But he was lost in his own thoughts, and they did not seem happy ones, when I walked up behind him.

"Having any luck?" I asked.

"Oh, Dave, how you doin'? No, it's slow tonight."

"Try a telephone crank. It works every time," I said.

He smiled at my joke.

"Amanda Boudreau's parents were in to see me today," I said. "It wasn't a good experience. Zerelda Calucci went to their house and gave them the impression she was a police officer."

"Maybe it was a misunderstanding," Perry said.

"She's working for you?"

"You could say that."

"What's Joe Zeroski have to say about that?"

"I don't know. He's back in New Orleans. Listen, Dave, Zee is a good P.I. She's found two people who say they saw Amanda Boudreau and Tee Bobby together. The Boudreau girl's DNA was on his watch cap, all right, but it didn't get there at the crime scene."

"Tee Bobby is almost fourteen years older than Amanda Boudreau was. She was a straight-A, traditional Catholic girl who didn't hang around juke joints or petty criminal wiseasses."