He caught the blow on his forearm, but she swung again, this time hitting him squarely across the back of the head.

"Come on, Zerelda, that hurts," Clete said.

"You tub of whale sperm, you thought you could just dump me and get it on with some pisspot at the D.A.'s office?" she said.

"Remember strolling off to the ice cream parlor with dick brain out there? I took that as a signal to get lost. So I got lost," Clete said.

"Well, lose this, you fat fuck," she said, and hit him again.

"What's going on?" No Duh Dolowitz said. "Hey, Nig, we got some people getting hurt out here!"

Nig Rosewater came out of the back office. His porcine neck was as wide as his head inside his starched collar, so his head looked like the crown of a white fireplug mounted on his shoulders. Nig took one look at Zerelda and went back inside his office and closed and bolted the door.

"All right, I'll talk to him! Calm down!" Clete said, and rose from his chair.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Zerelda said.

"That guy is a bullshitter, Zee," Clete said.

She took a step toward him, but he raised his hand in a placating gesture. "All right, we've got no problem here," he said, and went outside in the dusk, into the noise of the street, the smells of stagnant water and over-ripe produce and flowers blooming on the overhanging balconies, the air crisscrossed with birds.

Clete took a deep breath and looked down at Marvin. "If I falsely accused you of something you didn't do, I apologize," Clete said. "But that also means you keep that stupid face out of my life and you don't get anywhere near certain friends of mine. This is as much slack as you get, Jack. We clear on this?"

"The twelve disciples are my road signs. I ain't afraid of no bullies. There ain't no detours in heaven, either," Marvin said.

"What?" Clete said.

"I dint do nothing wrong. I think you was trying to seduce Miss Barbara and somebody messed it up for you. So you put it on me 'cause I give her a Bible."

"You listen, shit-for-brains-"

Marvin got out of the car and lifted his suitcase from the backseat, wrapping the pull strap around his wrist, blade-faced under the brim of his hat, a hot bead of anger buried in his eye.

"Come back, Marvin," Zerelda said from the doorway of the bail bond office.

But Marvin pulled his suitcase down the street between the rows of dilapidated cottages toward Basin, his rumpled pale blue sports coat and coned straw hat and cowboy boots almost lost in the mauve-colored thickness of the evening. Then he crossed Basin amid a blowing of horns and a screeching of tires and tugged his suitcase on its roller skate over the curb and into the bowels of the Iberville Project.

"You're mean through and through, Clete. I don't know what I ever saw in you," Zerelda said.

But Clete wasn't listening. No Duh was staring into me distance, into the glow of sodium lamps that rose in a dusty haze above the project.

"You know him?" Clete asked.

"Yeah, I definitely seen that guy before," No Duh said.

"You sure?" Clete said.

"No doubt about it. I don't forget a face. Particularly not no nutcase."

"Where did you see him, No Duh?" Clete asked, his exasperation growing.

"He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the coloreds for Fat Sammy Figorelli. It was a scam to get them to sign loans at twenty percent. What, you thought he was somebody else?" No Duh said.

He tilted his head curiously at Clete, his mustache like the extended wings of a tiny bird.

What did Marvin Oates mean by 'There ain't no detours in heaven'?" Clete asked the next day as he walked with me from the office to Victor's Cafeteria.

"Who knows? I think it's a line from a bluegrass song," I replied.

"Zerelda Calucci says I'm butt crust."

"How you doing with Barbara?" I said, trying to change the subject.

"Marvin dimed me with her, too. You think the Peeping Tom was Legion Guidry?"

"Yeah, I do," I said.

Clete chewed on a hangnail and spit it off his tongue. We were walking past the crumbling, whitewashed crypts of St. Peter's Cemetery now.

"I put flowers on my old man's grave when I was in New Orleans. It was a funny feeling, out there in the cemetery, just me and him," he said.

"Yeah?" I said.

"That's all. He had a crummy life. It wasn't a big deal," he said. He took off his porkpie hat and refitted it on his head, turning his face away so I could not see the expression in his eyes.

That afternoon Perry LaSalle asked me to stop by his office. When I got there, he was just locking the doors. The gallery and lawn and flower beds were deep in shadow, and his face had a melancholy cast in the failing light.

"Oh, hello, Dave," he said. He sat down on the top step of the gallery and waited for me to join him. Through the window behind him I could see the glass-framed Confederate battle flag of the 8th Louisiana Vols that one of his ancestors had carried in northern Virginia, and I wondered if indeed Perry was one of those souls who belonged in another time, or if he was a deluded creature of his own manufacture, playing the role of a tragic scion who had to expiate the sins of his ancestors, when in fact he was simply the beneficiary of wealth that had been made on the backs of others.

"Fine evening," I said, looking across the street at the Shadows plantation house and the bamboo moving in the wind and the magnificent, lichen-encrusted, moss-hung canopy of the live oaks.

"I've got to cut you loose," Perry said.

"You're resigning as my lawyer?"

"Legion Guidry is my client, too. You've got him up on assault charges. I can't represent both of you."

I nodded and put a stick of gum in my mouth and didn't respond.

"No hard feelings?" he said.

"Nope."

"I'm glad you see it that way."

"What's this guy have on you?" I asked.

He rose from the steps and buttoned his coat, removed his sunglasses from their case, and blew dust off the lenses. He started to speak, then simply walked to his car and drove away into the sunlight that still filled the streets of the business district.

I parked my truck in the backyard and went into the kitchen, where Bootsie was fixing supper. I sat down at the table with a glass of iced tea.

"You're disappointed in Perry?" she said.

"He helped organize migrant farm workers in the Southwest. He was a volunteer worker at a Dorothy Day mission in the Bowery. Now he's the apologist for a man like Legion Guidry. His behavior is hard to respect."

She turned from the stove and set a bowl of etouffee on the table with a hot pad and blotted her face on her sleeve. I thought she was going to argue.

"You're better off without him," she said.

"How?"

"Perry might have taken a vacation from the realities of his life in his youth, but he's a LaSalle first, last, and always."

"Pretty hard-nosed, Boots."

"You just learning that?"

She stood behind me and mussed my hair and pressed her stomach against my back. Then I felt her hands slip down my chest and her breasts against my head.

"We can put dinner in the oven," I said.

I felt her straighten up, her hands relax on my shoulders, then I realized she was looking through the hallway, out into the front yard.

"You have a visitor," she said.