The portico and brick parking area were deep in shadow now, the gold and scarlet four-o'clock flowers in full bloom. Helen walked toward the portico with her arm around Lila's shoulders, then watched her go in the house and close the door. Helen continued to look at the door, working the gum in her jaw, the flat of one hand pushed down in the back of her gunbelt.

She opened the passenger door and got in.

"I'd say leapers and vodka," I said.

"No odor, fried terminals. Yeah, that sounds right. Great combo for a coronary," she replied.

I turned around in front of the house and drove toward the service road and the bridge over the bayou. Helen kept looking over the seat through the rear window.

"I wanted to kick her old man's ass. With a baton, broken teeth and bones, a real job," she said. "Not good, huh, bwana?"

"He's one of those guys who inspire thoughts like that. I wouldn't worry about it."

"I had him made for a child molester. I was wrong. That woman's been raped, Dave."

THE NEXT MORNING I CALLED Clete Purcel in New Orleans, signed out of the office for the day, and drove across the elevated highway that spanned the chain of bays in the Atchafalaya Basin, across the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge, then down through pasture country and the long green corridor through impassable woods that tapered into palmettos and flooded cypress on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. Then I was at the French Quarter exit, with the sudden and real urban concern of having to park anywhere near the Iberville Welfare Project.

I left my truck off Decatur, two blocks from the Cafe du Monde, and crossed Jackson Square into the shade of Pirates Alley between the lichen-stained garden of the Cathedral and the tiny bookstore that had once been the home of William Faulkner. Then I walked on down St. Ann, in sunlight again, to a tan stucco building with an arched entrance and a courtyard and a grilled balcony upstairs that dripped bougainvillea, where Clete Purcel kept his private investigative agency and sometimes lived.

"You want to take down Jimmy Fig? How hard?" he said.

"We don't have to bounce him off the furniture, if that's what you mean."

Clete wore a pressed seersucker suit with a tie, and his hair had just been barbered and parted on the side and combed straight down on his head so that it looked like a little boy's.

"Jimmy Figorelli is a low-rent sleaze. Why waste time on a shit bag?" he said.

"It's been a slow week."

He looked at me with the flat, clear-eyed pause that always indicated his unbelief in what I was saying. Through the heavy bubbled yellow glass in his doors, I saw Megan Flynn walk down the stairs in blue jeans and a T-shirt and carry a box through the breezeway to a U-Haul trailer on the street.

"She's helping me move," Clete said.

"Move where?"

"A little cottage between New Iberia and Jeanerette. I'm going to head security at that movie set."

"Are you crazy? That director or producer or whatever he is, Billy Holtzner, is the residue you pour out of spittoons."

"I ran security for Sally Dio at Lake Tahoe. I think I can handle it."

"Wait till you meet Holtzner's daughter and boyfriend. They're hypes, or at least she is. Come on, Clete. You were the best cop I ever knew."

Clete turned his ring on his finger. It was made of gold and silver and embossed with the globe and anchor of the U.S. Marine Corps.

"Yeah, 'was' the best cop. I got to change and help Megan. Then we'll check out Jimmy Fig. I think we're firing in the well, though," he said.

After he had gone upstairs I looked out the back window at the courtyard, the dry wishing well that was cracked and never retained water, the clusters of untrimmed banana trees, Clete's rust-powdered barbells that he religiously pumped and curled, usually half full of booze, every afternoon. I didn't hear Megan open the door to the breezeway behind me.

"What'd you say to get him upset?" she asked. She was perspiring from her work and her T-shirt was damp and shaped against her breasts. She stood in front of the air-conditioning unit and lifted the hair off the back of her neck.

"I think you're sticking tacks in his head," I said.

"Where the hell you get off talking to me like that?"

"Your brother's friends are scum."

"Two-thirds of the world is. Grow up."

"Boxleiter and I had a talk. The death photo of the black guy in the drainpipe was a setup."

"You're full of shit, Dave."

We stared at each other in the refrigerated coolness of the room, almost slit-eyed with antagonism. Her eyes had a reddish-brown cast in them like fire inside amber glass.

"I think I'll wait outside," I said.

"You know what homoeroticism is? Guys who aren't quite gay but who've got a yen they never deal with?" she said.

"You'd better not hurt him."

"Oh, yeah?" she said, and stepped toward me, her hands shoved in her back pockets like a baseball manager getting in an umpire's face. Her neck was sweaty and ringed with dirt and her upper lip was beaded with moisture. "I'm not going to take your bullshit, Dave. You go fuck yourself." Then her face, which was heart-shaped and tender to look at and burning with anger at the same time, seemed to go out of focus. "Hurt him? My father was nailed alive to a board wall. You lecture me on hurting people? Don't you feel just a little bit embarrassed, you self-righteous sonofabitch?"

I walked outside into the sunshine. Sweat was running out of my hair; the backdraft of a passing sanitation truck enveloped me with dust and the smell of decaying food. I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and was repelled by my own odor.

CLETE AND I DROVE out of the Quarter, crossed Canal, and headed up Magazine in his convertible. He had left the top down while the car had been parked on the street and the seats and metal surfaces were like the touch of a clothes iron. He drove with his left hand, his right clenched around a can of beer wrapped in a paper sack.

"You want to forget it?" I asked.

"No, you want to see the guy, we see the guy."

"I heard Jimmy Fig wasn't a bad kid before he was at Khe Sanh."

"Yeah, I heard that story. He got wounded and hooked on morphine. Makes great street talk. I'll tell you another story. He was the wheelman on a jewelry store job in Memphis. It should have been an easy in-and-out, smash-and-grab deal, except the guys with him decided they didn't want witnesses, so they executed an eighty-year-old Jew who had survived Bergen-Belsen."

"I apologize to you and Megan for what I said back there."

"I've got hypertension, chronic obesity, and my own rap sheet at NOPD. What do guys like us care about stuff like that?"

He pressed his aviator glasses against his nose, hiding his eyes. Sweat leaked out of his porkpie hat and glistened on his flexed jaw.

JIMMY FIGORELLI RAN A sandwich shop and cab stand on Magazine just below Audubon Park. He was a tall, kinetic, wired man, with luminous black eyes and black hair that grew in layers on his body.

He was chopping green onions in an apron and never missed a beat when we entered the front door and stood under the bladed ceiling fan that turned overhead.

"You want to know who put a hit on Cool Breeze Broussard? You come to my place of business and ask me a question like that, like you need the weather report or something?" He laughed to himself and raked the chopped onions off the chopping board onto a sheet of wax paper and started slicing a boned roast into strips.

"The guy doesn't deserve what's coming down on him, Jimmy. Maybe you can help set it right," I said.

"The guys you're interested in don't fax me their day-to-day operations," he replied.