'What?'

'Hang on, mon. I got a similar message from this character Reverend Oswald Flat. Isn't that the guy who was out at your bait shop? He's got a voice like somebody twanging on a bobby pin.'

'That's the guy.'

'Well, he called Bootsie and she told him to call here. NOPD picked up some wild man in the Garden District, can you dig this, a forty-year-old guy with tattoos on his head, wearing black leather in August. The autopsy showed he'd been shooting up with speed and paint thinner. How about that for a new combo?'

'What's the connection?'

'He had a silenced.22 Ruger automatic on him and Hippo Bimstine's address in his pocket. We'd better go talk to Motley and this guy with a mouthful of collard greens.'

'We?'

'Let's be serious a minute, Dave. I think you're fucking with some very bad guys. I don't know who they are, why they're interested in this submarine, or what the connections are between this citizens committee and dope dealers in the projects having their hearts cut out. But I'll bet my ass politics doesn't have diddle-shit to do with it.'

'I think this time it might.'

'Anyway, I'm backing your action, Jackson, whether you like it or not.' He leaned back in his swivel chair, grinned, and drummed on his stomach with his knuckles like a zoo creature at play.

I called Motley and told him that Clete and I would meet him at his office.

'You don't need to bring Purcel,' he said.

'Yeah, I do.'

'Suit yourself. I remember now, you always did drink down.'

'Thanks, Motley.'

Then I called the Reverend Oswald Flat and asked what I could do for him.

'Hit's about this man killed hisself in custody,' he said.

'Why would you call me?'

'Because you cain't seem to keep your tallywhacker out of the hay baler.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'You disturb me. I think there's people fixing to do you some harm, but you have a way of not hearing me. Is there a cinder block up there between your ears?'

'Reverend, I'd appreciate it if you'd-'

'All right, son, I'll try not to offend you anymore. Now, get your nose out of the air and listen to me a minute. I do counseling with prisoners. I bring ' em my Faith Made Easy tapes. I tried to counsel this crazy man they brought in there with tattoos on his head and a stink you'd have to carry on the end of a dung fork-' He stopped, as though his words had outpaced his thoughts.

'What is it?' I said.

'Hit wasn't a good moment. No, sir, hit surely wasn't. I looked into his eyes, and if that man had a soul, I believe demons had already claimed hit.'

'He was shooting up with speed and paint thinner, Reverend.'

'That may be. Your kind always got a scientific explanation. Anyway, I taped what he said. I want you to hear hit.'

I asked him to meet Clete and me down at Motley's office. He said he'd be there, but he didn't reply when I said good-bye and started to hang up.

'Is there something else?' I said.

'No, not really. Maybe like you say, he was just a man who filled his veins with chemicals. I just never had a fellow, not even the worst of them, claw at my eyes and spit in my face before.'

Oswald Flat was wearing a rain-spotted seersucker suit, a clip-on bow tie, white athletic socks with black shoes, and his cork sun helmet when he came through the squad room at district headquarters and sat on a wood bench next to me and Clete. He carried a small black plastic tape recorder in his hand. He blew out his breath and wiped his rimless glasses on his coat sleeve.

At the other end of the room we could see Motley through the glass of Nate Baxter's office. Motley was standing; he and Baxter were arguing.

'You want to hear hit?' Oswald Flat said, resting the recorder on his thigh. The side of his face wrinkled, as though he were reluctant to go ahead with his own purpose.

'That'd be fine, Reverend,' I said.

When he pushed the Play button I could hear all the noises that are endemic to jailhouses everywhere: steel doors clanging, radios blaring, a water bucket being scraped along a concrete floor, cacophonous and sometimes deranged voices echoing through long corridors. Then I heard the man's voice-like words being released from an emotional knot, the syntax incoherent, the rage and hateful obsession like a quivering, heated wire.

'You got mud people coming out of your sewer grates, you got-' he was saying when Motley came out of Baxter's office and Oswald Flat clicked off the recorder.

'Movie time,' Motley said, scratching at the side of his mustache.

'What's Nate Baxter on the rag about?' Clete said.

'What do you think, Purcel? He's just real glad to see you guys down here again,' Motley said.

'Get him transferred back to Vice. At least he could get laid once in a while,' Clete said. He looked at the expression on my face. 'You think I'm kidding? The transvestites in the Quarter really dug the guy.'

The four of us went inside Motley's office. He closed the door behind us and inserted a videocassette into a VCR unit.

'The guy's name was Jack Pelley,' Motley said. 'He had a dishonorable discharge from the Crotch for rolling queers in San Diego, priors in New Orleans for statutory rape and possession of child pornography. One federal beef for possession of stolen explosives. From what we can tell, he became an addict in the joint, muled tar for both the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia while he was inside, then jumped his parole about three years ago.'

'How'd he get picked up?' I said.

'He locked himself in a filling station rest room on Carrollton and wouldn't let anybody else in. When the owner opened the door, Pelley had his leathers down over his knees and was shooting into his thigh with a spike made out of an eyedropper. The Ruger was sitting on top of the toilet tank.'

'How far away was he from Hippo Bimstine's house?' I said.

'About two blocks,' Motley said. 'His pockets were full of rainbows, blues, purple hearts, leapers, you name it. I think somebody gave him the whole candy store to fuck up Bimstine's day.' He glanced at Oswald Flat. 'Sorry, Reverend.'

'Get on with hit,' Flat said.

Motley dropped the blinds on his office glass, turned off the overhead light, and started the VCR.

'The arresting officers put him in the tank,' Motley said. 'In five minutes half the guys in there were yelling through the bars at the booking room officer to move him to a holding cell. The guy had five-alarm gorilla armpit odor. Anyway, we messed up. We should have transferred him to a psychiatric unit.'

The film, made without sound by a security camera, was in black and white and of low grade, the images stark in their contrast, like those in booking room photography. But the tortured travail of a driven man, flailing above a self-created abyss, was clearly obvious. Like those of most speed addicts, his body was wasted, the skin of his face drawn back tightly over the bone, the eyes sunken into skeletal sockets. His head looked like it had been razor-shaved and the hair had grown out in a thin gray patina, the color of rat's fur, below a wide bald area. Beginning at the crown of his skull, right across the pate, was a tattoo of a sword, flanged by lightning bolts.

He paced about maniacally, urinated all over the toilet stool, banged with his fists on the bars, whipped at the walls with his leather jacket, then began slamming the iron bunk up and down on its suspension chains.

'This is where we blew it big-time,' Motley said. 'That cell should have been shook down when the last guy went out of it.'

The man in custody, Jack Pelley, raised the bunk one final time and crashed it down on its chains, then stared down at a piece of electrical cord that had fallen out on the concrete floor. He picked it up in both hands, stared at it, then began idly picking at the tape and wire coil that were wrapped on the end of it.