WE STOPPED AT A filling station for gas down the road. The owner had turned on the outside lights and the oak tree that grew next to the building was filled with black-green shadows against the sky. Clete walked across the street and bought a sno'ball from a small wooden stand and ate it while I put in the gas.

"What was that plantation story about?" he asked.

"I had the same problem with it as Boxleiter. Except it's been bothering me because it reminded me of the story Cool Breeze told me about his wife's suicide."

"You lost me, big mon," Clete said.

"She was found in freezing water with an anchor chain wrapped around her. When they want to leave a lot of guilt behind, they use shotguns or go off rooftops."

"I'd leave it alone, Dave."

"Breeze has lived for twenty years with her death on his conscience."

"There's another script, too. Maybe he did her," Clete said. He bit into his sno'ball and held his eyes on mine.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Batist telephoned the house from the dock.

"There's a man down here want to see you, Dave," he said.

"What's he look like?"

"Like somebody stuck his jaws in a vise and busted all the bones. That ain't the half of it. While I'm mopping off the tables, he walks round on his hands."

I finished my coffee and walked down the slope through the trees. The air was cool and gray with the mist off the water, and molded pecan husks broke under my shoes.

"What's up, Swede?" I said.

He sat at a spool table, eating a chili dog with a fork from a paper plate.

"You asked about this guy Harpo Scruggs. He's an old fart, works out of New Mexico and Trinidad, Colorado. He freelances, but if he's doing a job around here, the juice is coming out of New Orleans."

"Yeah?"

"Something else. If Scruggs tried to clip a guy and blew it but he's still hanging around, it means he's working for Ricky the Mouse."

"Ricky Scarlotti?"

"There's two things you don't do with Ricky. You don't blow hits and you don't ever call him the Mouse. You know the story about the horn player?"

"Yes."

"That's his style."

"Would he have a priest killed?"

"That don't sound right."

"You ever have your IQ tested, Swede?"

"No, people who bone you five days a week don't give IQ tests."

"You're quite a guy anyway. You shank Anthony Pollock?"

"I was playing chess with Cisco. Check it out, my man. And don't send any more cops to my place. Believe it or not, I don't like some polyester geek getting his hand on my crank."

He rolled up his dirty paper plate and napkin, dropped them in a trash barrel, and walked down the dock to his car, snapping his fingers as though he were listening to a private radio broadcast.

RICKY SCARLOTTI WASN'T HARD to find. I went to the office, called NOPD, then the flower shop he owned at Carrollton and St. Charles.

"You want to chat up Ricky the Mouse with me?" I asked Helen.

"I don't think I'd go near that guy without a full-body condom on," she replied.

"Suit yourself. I'll be back this afternoon."

"Hang on. Let me get my purse."

We signed out an unmarked car and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin and crossed the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and turned south for New Orleans.

"So you're just gonna drop this Harpo Scruggs stuff in his lap?" Helen said.

"You bet. If Ricky thinks someone snitched him off, we'll know about it in a hurry."

"That story about the jazz musician true?" she said.

"I think it is. He just didn't get tagged with it."

The name of the musician is forgotten now, except among those in the 1950s who had believed his talent was the greatest since Bix Beiderbecke's. The melancholy sound of his horn hypnotized audiences at open-air concerts on West Venice beach. His dark hair and eyes and pale skin, the fatal beauty that lived in his face, that was like a white rose opening to black light, made women turn and stare at him on the street. His rendition of "My Funny Valentine" took you into a consideration about mutability and death that left you numb.

But he was a junky and jammed up with LAPD, and when he gave up the names of his suppliers, he had no idea that he was about to deal with Ricky Scarlotti.

Ricky had run a casino in Las Vegas, then a race track in Tijuana, before the Chicago Commission moved him to Los Angeles. Ricky didn't believe in simply killing people. He created living object lessons. He sent two black men to the musician's apartment in Malibu, where they pulled his teeth with pliers and mutilated his mouth. Later, the musician became a pharmaceutical derelict, went to prison in Germany, and died a suicide.

Helen and I drove through the Garden District, past the columned nineteenth-century homes shadowed by oaks whose root systems humped under sidewalks and cracked them upward like baked clay, past the iron green-painted streetcars with red-bordered windows clanging on the neutral ground, past Loyola University and Audubon Park, then to the levee where St. Charles ended and Ricky kept the restaurant, bookstore, and flower shop that supposedly brought him his income.

His second-story office was carpeted with a snow-white rug and filled with glass artworks and polished steel-and-glass furniture. A huge picture window gave onto the river and an enormous palm tree that brushed with the wind against the side of the building.

Ricky's beige pinstripe suit coat hung on the back of his chair. He wore a soft white shirt with a plum-colored tie and suspenders, and even though he was nearing sixty, his large frame still had the powerful muscle structure of a much younger man.

But it was the shape of his head and the appearance of his face that drew your attention. His ears were too large, cupped outward, the face unnaturally rotund, the eyes pouched with permanent dark bags, the eyebrows half-mooned, the black hair like a carefully scissored pelt glued to the skull.

"It's been a long time, Robicheaux. You still off the bottle?" he said.

"We're hearing some stuff that's probably all gas, Ricky. You know a mechanic, a freelancer, by the name of Harpo Scruggs?" I said.

"A guy fixes cars?" he said, and grinned.

"He's supposed to be a serious button man out of New Mexico," I said.

"Who's she? I've seen you around New Orleans someplace, right?" He was looking at Helen now.

"I was a patrolwoman here years ago. I still go to the Jazz and Heritage Festival in the spring. You like jazz?" Helen said.

"No."

"You ought to check it out. Wynton Marsalis is there. Great horn man. You don't like cornet?" she said.

"What is this, Robicheaux?"

"I told you, Ricky. Harpo Scruggs. He tried to kill Willie Broussard, then a priest. My boss is seriously pissed off."

"Tell him that makes two of us, 'cause I don't like out-of-town cops 'fronting me in my own office. I particularly don't like no bride of Frankenstein making an implication about a rumor that was put to rest a long time ago."

"Nobody has shown you any personal disrespect here, Ricky. You need to show the same courtesy to others," I said.

"That's all right. I'll wait outside," Helen said, then paused by the door. She let her eyes drift onto Ricky Scarlotti's face. "Say, come on over to New Iberia sometime. I've got a calico cat that just won't believe you."

She winked, then closed the door behind her.

"I don't provoke no more, Robicheaux. Look, I know about you and Purcel visiting Jimmy Figorelli. What kind of behavior is that? Purcel smashes the guy in the mouth for no reason. Now you're laying off some hillbilly cafone on me."

"I didn't say he was a hillbilly."

"I've heard of him. But I don't put out contracts on priests. What d'you think I am?"

"A vicious, sadistic piece of shit, Ricky."