IF YOU HAVE stacked a little time in the can, or beat your way across the country bucking bales and picking melons, or worked out of a Manpower Inc. day-labor office on skid row, you probably already know that human beings are infinitely complex and not subject to easy categorization. I’m always amazed at how the greatest complexity as well as personal courage is usually found in our most nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the personal histories of classical Greeks. I sometimes think that every person’s experience, if translated into flame, would be enough to melt the flesh from his bones. I guess the word I’m looking for is “Empathy.” We find it in people who have none of the apparent characteristics of light-bearers.

I had gone directly home from the levee in St. Mary Parish, primarily because I feared what Ronald Bledsoe would do next. The lead detective at the crime scene would lift all the prints he could from the shotgun shells and the tarpaper shack, but I doubted if his investigation would come up with anything of value. In my opinion, Bledsoe had been the shooter and Bledsoe wasn’t about to get nailed by a detective who had to pay for a copy of an examination in order to pass a criminal justice course.

At 4:41 p.m. Sidney and Eunice Kovick pulled into my driveway, Sidney behind the wheel, both of them looking like people who had just discovered the enormity of their own miscalculations. Sidney got out of his vehicle and rested one hand on the roof. “I heard two guys got it in the Atchafalaya,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Who were they?”

“They didn’t have any ID on them. I suspect by tonight or tomorrow the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department will have some definite information.”

“I heard about it on the radio. I went by your office. Nobody would tell me anything. They said you were over here.”

“I’ve told you what I know, Sidney,” I said.

“Dave,” Eunice said softly. She was still belted in the passenger seat, her face turned up toward mine.

“These guys were driving a rental Avalon,” I said.

“You saw the bodies?” Sidney said.

“The shooter used a twelve-gauge shotgun. The features were hard to recognize. But the victims looked like Charlie and Marco,” I said.

Sidney clenched his fist on top of the roof. “Where’s Ronald Bledsoe?”

“I’m supposed to know that? You’ve been jerking me around from the jump, Sidney. Maybe it’s time you develop a little clarity in your life.”

“You don’t understand, Dave. You’ve never understood what’s going on,” Eunice said.

“How can I? You don’t share information. Sidney believes the function of cops is to return property to him that he stole from somebody else.”

“Here’s your news bulletin of the day. I didn’t steal anything from anybody. I made a deal to bring certain goods into the country. I paid for them. Then I found out these goods were being handled by some guys who wipe their ass on their bare hand. So I blew the deal out of the water and confiscated my goods and maybe left a couple of guys with some bad memories to take back to Crap-a-stan.”

“Bo Wiggins was your partner in this?”

“Bo who?” he said.

“We’re done here, Sidney. You want to make your bullshit a matter of record, come into the office tomorrow.”

“You listen to me, Dave. Marco took a shank in the arm for me when we were kids in the project. Charlie Weiss’s daddy fought on five-buck-a-pop fight cards with my old man during the Depression. Charlie did thirty-eight months on Camp J rather than give me up.”

“Why were they following Bledsoe into the Atchafalaya Basin?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They were following him all over. We wanted to find the black kid who looted my house. We figured Bledsoe had a lead on him. I feel to blame.”

Sidney ’s face was covered with shadow, and leaves were drifting out of the trees onto the waxed surface of his car, further obscuring his expression. I believe his eyes were actually glistening.

THAT NIGHT I sat in the kitchen and tried to figure out combinations of letters that would give meaning to the illegible remnant of Bertrand Melancon’s statement of amends to the Baylor family. In reality, I didn’t care if anyone ever found the blood diamonds or not. My only interest in them at this point was to find out who had hired Ronald Bledsoe. I still believed he may have worked for Sidney. But if Sidney wasn’t lying, that left only Bo Diddley Wiggins.

“What are you doing?” Alafair asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Probably wasting time,” I replied.

“Is this part of the note you said was in the Baylors’ yard?”

“That’s right.”

She picked up the yellow legal pad on which I had printed the disconnected letters. “Let me try a few combinations on the computer.”

“How’s that going to help?”

“If the words had been typed rather than hand-printed, it would be fairly easy. The problem with a hand-printed version is the absence of uniform spacing. So you have to be imaginative in order to compensate.”

“Really?” I said.

“Lose the sardonic attitude,” she said.

I walked down the slope of the yard to the bayou. The air was damp, the evening sky lit by the fire stacks at the sugar mill. I was more tired than I had ever been. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could almost feel a great weight oppressing the land, a darkness stealing across its surface, a theft of light that seemed to have no origin. Was this just more of the world destruction fantasy that had invaded my childhood dreams and followed me to Vietnam and into bars all over the Orient? Or was William Blake’s tiger much larger than we ever guessed, its time finally come round?

I called Clete on his cell phone. “Where are you?” I said.

“At the motor court.”

“Any sign of Bledsoe?”

“No.”

“Look, I don’t want to leave the house. Come on over.”

“What for?”

“Nothing. That’s it. Nothing is up. And I’m powerless to do anything about any of it.”

“Any of what?”

“I don’t know. That’s it, I don’t know. Sunday, I blew a plug out of a guy’s chest the size of a quarter. I enjoyed it. I had a fantasy about the guy going to Hell.”

“So what?”

“We’ve got blood splatter all over us, Clete.”

“The only time that’s a problem is when it’s ours and not theirs.”

“Wrong,” I said.

“Dangle loose. I’m going to motor on over.”

I had advised Sidney Kovick to develop some clarity in his life. What a joke.

WEDNESDAY MORNING I experienced one of those instances when middle-class people walk into a law enforcement agency and in the next few minutes trustingly consign their lives to a bureaucratic system that operates with all the compassion of dice clattering out of a leather cup.

I happened to glance out the window just as Melanie and Otis and Thelma Baylor entered the building. I believed I knew the nature of their visit and I didn’t want to be part of it. Contrary to popular belief, the lion’s share of police work is administrative or clerical in nature. Occasionally we get to slam the door on people whose convictions represent only a small fraction of their crimes and you take a pleasure in separating them from the rest of us. But sometimes you are forced to sit down with offenders who are little different from yourself. They cannot believe the damage they have done to their lives. Even worse, they cannot deal with the institutional consequences that await them. I had come to believe the Baylors fell into this category and I did not want to aid them in their own dismemberment.

Sure enough, Wally buzzed me on my extension and told me the Baylors wanted to see me.

“Keep them down there,” I said.

“I t’ought you liked Mr. Baylor. I already sent them up.”