"What are you saying, podna?"

"We know a guy named Johnny Dartez was on that plane. Johnny Dartez's name means one thing-narcotics. He was a transporter for Bubba Rocque. His specialty was throwing it out in big rubber balloons over water."

"And you figure maybe I was the pickup man."

"You tell me."

"I think you spend too much time folding paper airplanes."

"Oh, I should be out developing some better leads? Is that it? Some of us are hotdog ball handlers, some of us are meant for the bench. I got it."

"I remember now. Forward for LSU, fifteen years or so ago. Dr. Dunkenstein. You were All-American."

"Honorable Mention. Answer my question, Mr. Robicheaux. What are the odds of a guy like you being out on the salt when a plane goes down right by his boat? A guy who happened to have a scuba tank so he could be the first one down on the wreck?"

"Listen, the pilot was a priest. Use your head a minute."

"Yeah, a priest who did time in Danbury," he said.

"Danbury?"

"Yeah, that's right."

"What for?"

"Breaking and entering."

"I think I'm getting the abridged version here."

"He and some nuns and other priests broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised some missile components."

"And you think he was involved with drug smugglers?"

He wadded up the paper airplane on his desk and dropped it into the wastebasket.

"No, I don't," he said, his eyes focused on the clouds outside the window.

"What does Immigration tell you?"

He shrugged his shoulders and clicked his nails on the desk blotter. His fingers were so long and thin and his nails so pink and clean that his hands looked like those of a surgeon rather than of an ex-basketball player.

"According to them, there was no Johnny Dartez on that plane," I said.

"They have their areas of concern, we have ours."

"They're stonewalling you, aren't they?"

"Look, I'm not interested in Immigration's business. I want Bubba Rocque off the board. Johnny Dartez was a guy we spent a lot of money and time on, him and another dimwit from New Orleans named Victor Romero. Does that name mean anything to you?"

"No."

"They both disappeared from their usual haunts about two months ago, just before we were going to pick them up. Since Johnny has done the big gargle out at Southwest Pass, Victor's value has appreciated immensely."

"You won't get Bubba by squeezing his people."

He pushed his large shoe against the wall so that his chair spun around in a complete circle, like a child playing in the barber's chair.

"How is it that you have this omniscient knowledge?" he said.

"In high school he'd put on different kinds of shows for us. Sometimes he'd eat a lightbulb. Or he might open a bottle of RC Cola on his teeth or push thumbtacks into his kneecaps. It was always a memorable exhibition."

"Yeah, we see a lot of that kind of psychotic charisma these days. I think it's in fashion with the wiseguys. That's why we have a special lockdown section in Atlanta where they can yodel to each other."

"Good luck."

"You don't think we can put him away?"

"Who cares what I think? What's the National Transportation Safety Board say about the crash?"

"A fire in the hold. They're not sure. It was murky when their divers went down. The plane slipped down a trench of some kind and it's half covered in mud now."

"You believe it was just a fire?"

"It happens."

"You better send them down again. I dove that wreck twice. I think an explosion blew out the side."

He looked at me carefully.

"I think maybe I ought to caution you about involving yourself in a federal investigation," he said.

"I'm not one of your problems, Mr. Dautrieve. You've got another federal agency trespassing on your turf, maybe tainting your witnesses, maybe stealing bodies. Anyway, they're jerking you around and for some reason you're not doing anything about it. I'd appreciate it if you didn't try to lay off your situation on me."

I saw the bone flex against the clean line of his jaw. Then he began to play with a rubber band on his long fingers.

"You'll have to make allowances for us government employees who have to labor with bureaucratic manacles on," he said. "We've never been able to use the simple, direct methods you people have been so good at. You remember a few years back when a New Orleans cop got killed and some of his friends squared it on their own? I think they went into the guy's house, it was a black guy, of course, and blew him and his wife away in the bathtub. Then there were those black revolutionaries that stuck up an armored car in Boston and killed a guard and hid out in Louisiana and Mississippi. We worked two years preparing that case, then your people grabbed one of them and tortured a statement out of him and flushed everything we'd done right down the shithole. You guys sure knew how to let everybody know you were in town."

"I guess I'll go now. You want to ask me anything else?"

"Not a thing," he said, and fired a paper clip at a file cabinet across the room.

I stood up to leave. His attention was concentrated on finding another target for his rubber band and paper clip.

"Does a white Corvette with the letters ELK on the door bring any of your clientele to mind?" I said.

"Were these the guys out at your place?" His eyes still avoided me.

"Yes."

"How should I know? We're lucky to keep tabs on two or three of these assholes." He was looking straight at me now, his eyes flat, the skin of his face tight. "Maybe it's somebody you sold some bad fish to."

I walked outside in the sunshine and the wind blowing through the mimosa trees on the lawn. A Negro gardener was sprinkling the flower beds and the freshly cut grass with a hose, and I could smell the damp earth and the green clippings that were raked in piles under the trees. I looked back up at the office window of Minos P. Dautrieve. I opened and closed my hands and took a breath and felt the anger go out of my chest.

Well, you asked for it, I told myself. Why poke a stick at a man who's already in a cage? He probably gets one conviction out of ten arrests, spends half his time with his butt in a bureaucratic paper shredder, and on a good day negotiates a one-to-three possessions plea on a dealer who's probably robbed hundreds of people of their souls.

Just as I was pulling out into the traffic, I saw him come out of the building waving his arm at me. He was almost hit by a car crossing the street.

"Park it a minute. You want a snowcone? It's on me," he said.

"I have to get back to work."

"Park it," he said, and bought two snowcones from a Negro boy who operated a stand under an umbrella on the corner. He got in the passenger side of my truck, almost losing the door on a passing car whose horn reverberated down the street, and handed me one of the snowcones.

"Maybe the Corvette is Eddie Keats's," he said. "He used to run a nickel-and-dime book in Brooklyn. Now he's a Sunbelter, he likes our climate so much. He lives here part of the time, part of the time in New Orleans. He's got a couple of bars, a few whores working for him, and he thinks he's a big button man. Is there any reason for a guy like that to be hanging around your place?"

"You got me. I never heard of him."

"Try this-Eddie Keats likes to do favors for important people. He jobs out for Bubba Rocque sometimes, for free or whatever Bubba wants to give him. He's that kind of swell guy. We heard he set fire to one of Bubba's hookers in New Orleans."

He stopped and looked at me curiously.

"What's the matter? You never got a case like that in homicide?" he said. "You know how their pimps keep them down on the farm."

"I talked to a stripper in New Orleans about Johnny Dartez. She told me he worked for Bubba Rocque. I've got a bad feeling about her."