Whenever someone asked Sidney ’s advice about a problem of any kind, his admonition was always the same: “Don’t never let people know what you’re thinking.”

He owned a flower shop, loved movies, and always wore a carnation in his lapel. His favorite quote was a paraphrase of a line spoken by Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind: “Great fortunes are made during the rise and fall of nations.” Sidney was invited to the governor’s inauguration ball, rode on the floats during Mardi Gras, and performed once on the wing of a biplane at an aerial show over Lake Pontchartrain. Longtime cops looked upon him as a refreshing change from the street detritus they normally dealt with. The only problem with romanticizing Sidney Kovick was the fact he could snuff your wick and sip a glass of burgundy while he did it.

Workmen were going in and out of his front door. I stepped inside without knocking. The interior looked like an army of Norsemen had marched through it. Sidney stood in his dining room, looking up at a chandelier that someone had shredded into tangled strips with an iron garden rake.

“They hit you pretty hard, huh?” I said.

He stared at me as though he were sorting through faces on a rolodex wheel. “Yeah, the puke population is definitely out of control. I think we need a massive airdrop of birth-control devices on two thirds of the city. What are you doing here, Dave?”

“Investigating the shooting of the guys who creeped your house.”

“House creeps don’t piss in your oven and refrigerator.”

“You’re right,” I said, plaster crunching under my shoes. “Looks like they tore out all your walls and part of your ceilings. Think they were after anything in particular?”

“Yeah, the secrets to the Da Vinci Code. You still off the sauce?”

“I’m still in AA, if that’s what you mean.”

“Get your nose out of the stratosphere. I was going to offer you a couple of fingers of Beam, because that’s all I’ve got. But I didn’t want to offend you. I hear one of those black guys was turned into an earth slug.”

“That’s the word. I haven’t interviewed him yet.”

“Yeah?”

I wasn’t sure if he was listening or if he was asking me to repeat what I had just said. He told a workman to get a ladder and pull down the wrecked chandelier. Then he touched the ruined surface of his dining table and brushed off his fingers. “Which hospital is the human slug in?” he said.

“Why do you ask?”

“I feel sorry for him. Anybody who could do this to people’s homes must have a mother who was inseminated by leakage from a colostomy bag.”

“You always knew how to say it, Sidney.”

“Hey, I was born in New Orleans. This used to be a fine city. Remember the music and the amusement park out at Lake Pontchartrain? How about the sno’ball carts on the street corners and families sitting on their porches? When’s the last time you walked down a street at night in New Orleans and felt safe?”

When I didn’t answer, he cocked a finger at me. “Got you,” he said.

On my way out I saw Sidney ’s wife in the yard. She came from a fishing hamlet down in Plaquemines Parish, a geological aberration that extends like an umbilical cord into the Gulf of Mexico. She was as tall as her husband and had a lantern face, cavernous eyes, and shoulders like a man. For decades her family had been the political allies of a notorious racist judge who had run Plaquemines Parish as a personal fiefdom, even padlocking a Catholic church when the bishop appointed a black priest to serve as its pastor.

But she appeared to have little in common with her family, at least that I could see. In fact, Eunice Kovick’s father once said of his daughter, “The poor girl’s face would make a train turn on a dirt road, but she’s got a decent heart and feeds every stray dog and nigra in the parish.”

Why she had married Sidney Kovick was beyond me.

“How you doing, Eunice?” I said.

“Just fine. How are you, Dave?”

“Sorry about your house. Y’all have pretty good insurance?”

“We’ll find out.”

“Do you have any idea why those guys would rip your walls and ceilings out?”

“What did Sidney say?”

“He didn’t speculate.”

“No kidding?”

She had one of the sweetest smiles I ever saw on a woman’s face.

“See you, Eunice,” I said.

“Anytime,” she said.

MY LAST STOP was at the hospital where Bertrand Melancon had dropped his gun-shot brother.

BUT I DISCOVERED that Eddy Melancon had been moved to a hospital in Baton Rouge. I headed up I-10 into heavy traffic, the cruiser’s emergency bar flashing. By the time I reached the Baton Rouge city limits, the streets were jammed with automobiles, trucks, buses, and utility repair vehicles. Even with the priority status my cruiser allowed me, I didn’t arrive at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital until midafternoon.

I almost wished I hadn’t. I suspected that Eddy Melancon had probably caused irreparable injury to many people in his brief lifespan, but if such a thing as karma exists, it had landed on him with the impact of a spiked wrecking ball.

He looked weightless in the bed, raccoon-eyed, as though the skin around the sockets had been rubbed with coal dust. His body was strung with wires and tubes, his arms dead at his sides. I opened my badge holder and told him who I was. “Do you know who popped you?” I asked.

He focused his gaze on my face but didn’t respond.

“Can you talk, Eddy?”

He pursed his lips but didn’t speak.

“Did the shot come from in front of you?” I said.

His voice made a wet click and a sound that was like air leaking from the ruptured bladder inside a football. “Yeah,” he whispered.

“You saw the muzzle flash?”

“No.”

“You heard the shot but you saw no flash?”

“Yeah. Ain’t seen it.”

“Are you aware you guys ripped off Sidney Kovick’s house?”

“Ain’t been in no house.”

“Right,” I said. I pulled my chair closer to his bed. “Listen to me, Eddy. If people you don’t know come to see you, make sure they’re cops. Don’t let anybody you don’t recognize check you out of this hospital.”

His eyes looked at me quizzically.

“If you made a big score at Sidney ’s, he’s going to take it back from you,” I said. “He’ll use whatever method that works.”

Eddy tried to speak, then choked on his saliva. I leaned over him, my ear close to his mouth. His breath smelled like the grave, his words breaking damply against my cheek.

“Say that again.”

“We took a boat. That’s all,” he said.

“From Sidney Kovick?”

“In the Lower Nine. We just wanted to stay alive. Ain’t been in no house uptown.”

I placed my business card on his chest. “Good luck to you, partner. I think you’ll need it,” I said.

When I got back home that night, I slept like the dead.

AT SUNRISE I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and drank coffee and hot milk on the back steps. The mist was gray in the live oaks and pecan trees, and both Tripod, our three-legged raccoon, and Snuggs, our cat, ate sardines out of a can by my foot. Molly opened the screen door and sat down beside me. She was still wearing her house robe. She ticked her nails on the back of my neck. “Alafair spent the night at the Munsons’,” she said.

“Really?” I said.

She gazed down the slope at the bayou. The gold and red four-o’clocks were still open in the shadows at the base of the tree trunks. Out in the mist I could hear a heavy fish flopping in the lily pads. “Got time to go inside?” I asked.

AT 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. “How’d you make out yesterday?” she said.

“I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There’s a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don’t think this one has legs on it.”