"The sheriff would appreciate her coming to his office to talk about her conversation with Father James Mulcahy."

"Y'all do business in an extraordinary fashion. Her discussions with a minister are the subject of a legal inquiry?"

"This man was almost killed because he's too honorable to divulge something your daughter told him."

"Good day, Mr. Robicheaux," Terrebonne said, and closed the door in my face.

I drove back through the corridor of trees, my face tight with anger. I started to turn out onto the service road, then stopped the truck and walked out to the movie set.

"How's it hangin', Swede?" I said.

He fired the nail gun through the tin roof into a joist and pursed his mouth into an inquisitive cone.

"Where's Clete Purcel?" I asked.

"Gone for the day. You look like somebody pissed in your underwear."

"You know the layout of this property?"

"I run power cables all over it."

"Where's the family cemetery?"

"Back in those trees."

He pointed at an oak grove and a group of whitewashed brick crypts with an iron fence around it. The grass within the fence was freshly mowed and clipped at the base of the bricks.

"You know of another burial area?" I asked.

"Way in back, a spot full of briars and palmettos. Holtzner says that's where the slaves were planted. Got to watch out for it so the local blacks don't get their ovaries fired up. What's the gig, man? Let me in on it."

I walked to the iron fence around the Terrebonne cemetery. The marble tablet that sealed the opening to the patriarch's crypt was cracked across the face from settlement of the bricks into the softness of the soil, but I could still make out the eroded, moss-stained calligraphy scrolled by a stone mason's chisel: Elijah Boethius Terrebonne, 1831-1878, soldier for Jefferson Davis, loving father and husband, now brother to the Lord.

Next to Elijah's crypt was a much smaller one in which his twin girls were entombed. A clutch of wild-flowers, tied at the stems with a rubber band, was propped against its face. There were no other flowers in the cemetery.

I walked toward the back of the Terrebonne estate, along the edge of a coulee that marked the property line, beyond the movie set and trailers and sky-blue swimming pool and guest cottages and tennis courts to a woods that was deep in shade, layered with leaves, the tree branches wrapped with morning glory vines and cobweb.

The woods sloped toward a stagnant pond. Among the palmettos were faint depressions, leaf-strewn, sometimes dotted with mushrooms. Was the slave woman Lavonia, who had poisoned Elijah's daughters, buried here? Was the pool of black water, dimpled by dragon-flies, part of the swamp she had tried to hide in before she was lynched by her own people?

Why did the story of the exploited and murdered slave woman hang in my mind like a dream that hovers on the edge of sleep?

I heard a footstep in the leaves behind me.

"I didn't mean to give you a start," Lila said.

"Oh, hi, Lila. I bet you put the wildflowers on the graves of the children."

"How did you know?"

"Did your father tell you why I was here?"

"No… He… We don't always communicate very well."

"A guy named Harpo Scruggs tried to kill Father Mulcahy."

The blood drained out of her face.

"We think it's because of something you told him," I said.

When she tried to speak, her words were broken, as though she could not form a sentence without using one that had already been spoken by someone else. "I told the priest? That's what you're saying?"

"He's taking your weight. Scruggs was going to suffocate him with a plastic bag."

"Oh, Dave-" she said, her eyes watering. Then she ran toward the house, her palms raised in the air like a young girl.

WE HAD JUST RETURNED from Mass on Sunday morning when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was Clete.

"I'm at a restaurant in Lafayette with Holtzner and his daughter and her boyfriend," he said.

"What are you doing in Lafayette?"

"Holtzner's living here now. He's on the outs with Cisco. They want to come by," he said.

"What for?"

"To make some kind of rental offer on your dock."

"Not interested."

"Holtzner wants to make his pitch anyway. Dave, the guy's my meal ticket. How about it?"

An hour later Clete rolled up to the dock in his convertible, with Holtzner beside him and the daughter and boyfriend following in a Lincoln. The four of them strolled down the dock and sat at a spool table under a Cinzano umbrella.

"Ask the waiter to bring everybody a cold beer," Holtzner said.

"We don't have waiters. You need to get it yourself," I said, standing in the sunlight.

"I got it," Clete said, and went inside the shop.

"We'll pay you a month's lease but we'll be shooting for only two or three days," Anthony, the boyfriend, said. He wore black glasses, and when he smiled the gap in his front teeth gave his face the imbecilic look of a Halloween pumpkin.

"Thanks anyway," I said.

"Thanks? That's it?" Holtzner said.

"He thinks we're California nihilists here to do a culture fuck on the Garden of Eden," Geraldine, the daughter, said to no one.

"You got the perfect place here for this particular scene. Geri's right, you think we're some kind of disease?" Holtzner said.

"You might try up at Henderson Swamp," I said.

Clete came back out of the bait shop screen carrying a round tray with four sweating long-neck bottles on it. He set them one by one on the spool table, his expression meaningless.

"Talk to him," Holtzner said to him.

"I don't mess with Streak's head," Clete said.

"I hear you got Cisco's father on the brain," Holtzner said to me. "His father's death doesn't impress me. My grandfather organized the first garment workers' local on the Lower East Side. They stuck his hands in a stamp press. Irish cops broke up his wake with clubs, took the ice off his body and put it in their beer. They pissed in my grandmother's sink."

"You have to excuse me. I need to get back to work," I said, and walked toward the bait shop. I could hear the wind ruffling the umbrella in the silence, then Anthony was at my side, grinning, his clothes pungent with a smell like burning sage.

"Don't go off in a snit, nose out of joint, that sort of thing," he said.

"I think you have a problem," I said.

"We're talking about chemical dependencies now, are we?"

"No, you're hard of hearing. No offense meant," I said, and went inside the shop and busied myself in back until all of them were gone except Clete, who remained at the table, sipping from his beer bottle.

"Why's Holtzner want to get close to you?" he asked.

"You got me."

"I remembered where I'd seen him. He was promoting USO shows in Nam. Except he was also mixed up with some PX guys who were selling stuff on the black market. It was a big scandal. Holtzner was kicked out of Nam. That's like being kicked out of Hell… You just going to sit there and not say anything?"

"Yeah, don't get caught driving with beer on your breath."

Clete pushed his glasses up on his head and drank from his bottle, one eye squinted shut.

THAT NIGHT, IN A Lafayette apartment building on a tree-and-fern-covered embankment that overlooked the river, the accountant named Anthony mounted the staircase to the second-story landing and walked through a brick passageway toward his door. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and blue strings of smoke from barbecue grills floated through the palm and banana fronds that shadowed the terrace. Anthony carried a grocery sack filled with items from a delicatessen, probably obscuring his vision, as evidently he never saw the figure that waited for him behind a potted orange tree.