A page one photograph showed them in fedoras and baggy suits, locked to a wrist chain, staring out at the camera with pale, rectangular faces and buckshot eyes. The cutline below said they had planned to blow up the Standard Oil refinery on the banks of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. The last article in the series dealt with the arrest of an American accomplice, a retired oil man in Grand Isle by the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter, who had been a founder of the American Silver Shirts.

I jumped the microfilm ahead to the year 1956 and found the name of Jon Matthew Buchalter once again. It was in a twenty-inch feature story in the regional section, written with the detached tone one might use in examining an anthropological curiosity, about the oil man who had betrayed his country, flashed a signal one night through the mist at a U-boat south of Grand Isle, and helped bring ashore four men who, had they succeeded in their mission, would have dried up the flow of fuel to American and English forces for at least two weeks.

At the bottom of the page was a 1935 wire-service photograph of Buchalter with Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. Buchalter was a barrel-chested, vigorous-looking man, resplendent in white riding breeches, silver shirt, polished Sam Browne belt, black tie, and red-and-black armband. His right hand clasped Hitler's; he was smiling with the confidence of a man who knew that he had stepped into history.

After he was arrested in Grand Isle, a drunken mob of shrimpers tried to break him out of jail. They fled when sheriff's deputies began firing shotguns in the air. They left behind a thirty-foot spool of chain and a five-gallon can of gasoline.

He did his fourteen years of federal time in isolation, despised by both his warders and his fellow prisoners, eating food delivered through a slit by a trusty who in all probability spat in it first.

His wife and children had long ago moved out of state; his property had been confiscated for taxes. He weighed eighty pounds when his liver finally failed and he died in a public ward at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. There was no marker placed on his grave in potter's field other than a stamped tin number pressed into the sod.

I wondered what importance he would give the fact that the old potter's field in Orleans Parish was not segregated, like other cemeteries during that historical period, and that he would sow his teeth and bones among those of Negroes and perhaps even Jews.

Later that afternoon I parked in front of Lucinda Bergeron's house off Magazine. Just as I was turning off the engine, an open Jeep with oversized tires and four black kids inside pulled to the curb in front of me. The rap music playing on the stereo was deafening, like an electronic assault on the sensibilities. Zoot got out of the Jeep and went inside his house, his eyes straight ahead, as though I were not there. The three other boys did leg stretches on the lawn while they waited for him. All three were dressed in an almost paramilitary fashion-baggy black trousers like paratroopers might wear, gold neck chains, Air Jordan tennis shoes, black T-shirts with scrolled white death's-heads on them. Their hair was shaved to the scalp on the sides, with only a coarse, squared pad on the crown of the skull. Zoot came back out the front door and gave each of them a can of Pepsi-Cola.

When they drove away, the rap music from their stereo echoed off housefronts all the way down the street.

'You get an eyeful?' Zoot said.

'You run the PX for these characters?'

'The what?'

'Sergeant Motley's worried about you.'

He looked at me, waiting to see what new kind of trap was being constructed around him.

'He thinks you're going to get cooled out one of these days,' I said.

'Cooled… what?'

'He thinks you're cruising for a big fall.'

'Why y'all on my case? I ain't done nothing.'

'Did you tell your mother about what happened this morning?'

His eyes flicked sideways toward the house. He sucked in his cheeks and tried not to swallow.

'I remember something a guy told me once,' I said. 'He said it's as dishonorable to let yourself be used as it is to use someone else.'

'What you mean?'

'Your friends impress me as shitheads.'

'I don't care what you say. We stand by each ot'er. They're my friends in all kinds of ways.'

'Zoot, I didn't see one of those guys say thank you when you handed him a soft drink. Who's kidding who, podna?'

I found his mother on her knees in the backyard, spading out a hole for a pot of chrysanthemums. The Saint Augustine grass was thick and spongy underfoot, and the beds along her weathered wood fences were bursting with azaleas, banana trees, elephant ears, flaming hibiscus, and pink and blue hydrangeas. She was barefoot and wore a pair of white shorts and a purple blouse with green flowers on it. Her hair was on her shoulders, and her face was hot with her work. For the first time I saw a prettiness in her. I sat on a wood box next to her and turned on the garden hose and let it sluice into the fresh hole while she fitted the plant in and troweled dirt over the roots.

'How'd you know I was home?' she said.

'Your office told me you're working nights now.'

'What were you talking to Zoot about out there?' she said, without looking up.

'Not too much… His friends.'

'You don't approve of them?'

'People sure know when they're around.'

'Well, I guess you're glad you don't have to be around them very long, aren't you?'

'A boy can gravitate to certain kids for a reason.'

'Oh?' she said, and rested her rump on her heels. As she looked at me she tilted her head in feigned deference.

'I don't know why you think it's funny. He's a good boy,' I said. 'Why don't you stop treating him like a douche bag?'

She made a sound like she had swallowed bile. 'I can't believe you just said that,' she said.

'Why don't you give the kid some credit? He's got a lot of courage. Did he tell you he went three rounds against a professional fighter who could have turned his brains into mush?'

'Where do you get off telling me how to raise my child?'

'That's it, Lucinda. He's not a child.'

Then she made the same sound again, as though she couldn't remove a vile taste from her throat. 'Please spare me this, would you?' she said. 'Go away somewhere, find a nice white neighborhood, find a white lady digging in her garden, and please give her your advice about the correct way to raise children. Can you do that for me, please?'

'We've got another dead dealer, a guy named Camel Benoit down on Terpsichore and Baronne.'

The heat went out of her eyes.

'Did you know him?' I said.

She brushed the dirt off her palms. 'He used to work some girls out of this neighborhood,' she said.

'Somebody drove an American flag through his heart.' I saw the question mark in her face. I told her about the man in gloves and a Halloween mask who had torn up the shooting gallery, about the body in the wall and the force that must have been required to drive the brass-winged staff through the heart cavity. All the while she continued to sit with her rump on her heels and look reflectively at the flower bed in front of her.

'Who's in charge of the investigation?' she said.

'Motley.'

'He'll do his best with it.'

'Somebody else won't?'

'The department has its problems.'

'Is Nate Baxter one of them?' I said.

She smoothed the wet dirt around the base of the chrysanthemum plant with her garden trowel.

'Is there another problem, too?' I asked. 'Like this citizens committee that doesn't seem too upset over a bunch of black lowlifes being canceled out?'

'You think the Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans is involved with murder?' But her tone did not quite reflect the outrageousness of the idea.