I asked the nurse to come back in. She was in her fifties and had bluish gray hair and a figure like a pigeon's. I asked her if anyone had entered Sitwell's room while Expidee was away from the door.

'I wouldn't know,' she said.

'Did you see anyone?'

'You gentlemen have such an interesting attitude about accountability,' she said. 'Let me see, what exact moment did you have in mind? Do you mean while Expidee was asleep in his chair or wandering the halls?'

'I see. Thank you for your time,' I said.

She flipped the sheet over Chuck Sitwell's face as though she were closing a fly trap, released the blinds, and dropped the room into darkness.

I went to the office and began opening my mail behind my desk. Through the window I could see the fronds on the palm trees by the sidewalk lifting and clattering in the breeze; across the street a black man who sold barbecue lunches was building a fire in an open pit, and the smoke from the green wood spun in the cones of sunlight shining through the oak branches overhead. It wasn't quite yet fall, but the grass was already turning a paler green, the sky a harder, deeper blue, like porcelain, with only a few white clouds on the horizon.

But I couldn't concentrate on either my mail or the beautiful day outside. Regardless whether the autopsy showed that Charles Sitwell had died of complications from gunshot wounds or a hypodermic needle thrust into his throat, Will Buchalter was out there somewhere, with no conduit to him, outside the computer, running free, full-bore, supercharged by his own sexual cruelty.

What was there to go on, I asked myself.

Virtually nothing.

No, music.

He knew something about historical jazz. He even knew how to hold rare seventy-eights and to place them in the record rack with the opening in their dustcovers turned toward the wall.

Could a sadist love music that had its origins in Island hymns and the three-hundred-year spiritual struggle of a race to survive legal and economic servitude?

I doubted it. Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.

Buchalter was one of those whose life was invested in the imposition of control and power over others. Like the self-serving academic who enjoys the possession of an esoteric knowledge for the feeling of superiority it gives him over others, or the pseudojournalist who is drawn to the profession because it allows him access to a world of power and wealth that he secretly envies and fears, the collector such as Buchalter reduces the beauty of butterflies to pinned insects on a mounting board, a daily reminder that creation is always subject to his murderous hand.

The phone on my desk rang.

'Detective Robicheaux?' a woman said.

'Yes?'

'This is Marie Guilbeaux. I hope I'm not bothering you.'

'I'm sorry, who?'

'The nun you met at the hospital. Outside Mr. Sitwell's room.'

'Oh yes, how are you, Sister?'

'I wanted to apologize.'

'What for?'

'I heard about Mr. Sitwell's death this morning, and I remembered how judgmental I must have sounded the other day. That wasn't my intention, but I wanted to apologize to you anyway.'

'There's no need to. It's good of you to call, though.'

I could hear a hum in the telephone, as though the call was long-distance.

'You've been very nice,' she said.

'Not at all… Is there something else on your mind, Sister?'

'No, not really. I think I take myself too seriously sometimes.'

'Well, thanks for calling.'

'I hope to see you again sometime.'

'Me too. Good-bye, Sister.'

'Good-bye.'

The musical community in southern Louisiana is a large and old one. Where do you begin if you want to find a person who's interested in or collects historical jazz?

There was certainly nothing picturesque about the geographic origins of the form. If it was born in one spot, it was Storyville at the turn of the century, a thirty-eight-block red-light district in New Orleans, named for an alderman who wanted to contain all the city's prostitution inside a single neighborhood. Jazz meant to fornicate; songs like 'Easy Rider' and 'House of the Rising Sun' were literal dirges about the morphine addiction and suicidal despair of the prostitutes who lived out their lives in the brothels of Perdido Street.

When I walked down Bourbon that evening, not far from Basin, one of the old borders of Storyville, the air was filled with a purple haze, lit with neon, warmly redolent of the smell of beer and whiskey in paper cups, the sky overhead intersected by a solitary pink cloud of Lake Pontchartrain. The street, which was closed to automobile traffic, was congested with people, their faces happy and flushed in the din of rockabilly and Dixieland bands. Spielers in straw boaters and candy-striped vests were working the trade in front of the strip joints; black kids danced and clattered their clip-on steel taps on the concrete for the tourists; an all-black street band, with tambourines ringing and horns blaring, belted out 'Millersburg' on the corner at Conti; and a half block farther up, in a less hedonistic mood, a group of religious fanatics, with signs containing apocalyptical warnings, tried to buttonhole anyone who would listen to their desperate message.

I talked to an elderly black clarinetist at Preservation Hall, a sax man at the Famous Door who used to work for Marcia Ball, a three-hundred-pound white woman with flaming hair and a sequined dress that sparkled like ice water, who played blues piano in a hole-in-the-wall on Dumaine. None of them knew of a Will Buchalter or a jazz enthusiast or collector who fit his description.

I walked over on Ursulines to a dilapidated book and record store run by two men named Jimmie Ryan and Count Carbonna, who was also known sometimes as Baron Belladonna. Jimmie was a florid, rotund man with a red mustache who looked like a nineteenth-century bartender. But the insides of both his forearms were laced with the flattened veins and gray scar tissue of an old-time addict. Before he had gotten off the needle, he had been known as Jimmie the Dime, because with a phone call he could connect you with any kind of illegal activity in New Orleans.

His business partner, the Count, was another matter. He had blitzed his brain years ago with purple acid, wore a black vampire's cape and slouch hat, and maintained that the soul of Olivia Newton-John lived under the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. His angular body could have been fashioned from wire; his long, narrow head and pinched face looked like they had been slammed in a door. Periodically he shaved off his eyebrows so his brain could absorb more oxygen.

'How do you like being out of the life, Jimmie?' I asked.

As always, my conversation with Jim would prove to be a rare linguistic experience.

'The book business ain't bad stuff to be in these days,' he said. He wore suspenders and a purple-striped long-sleeve shirt with sweat rings under the arms. 'There's a lot of special kinds of readers out there, if you understand what I'm saying, Streak. New Orleans is being overrun by crazoids and people who was probably cloned from dog turds, and the government won't do anything about it. But it's a crazy world out there, and am I my brother's keeper, that's what I'm asking, a buck's a buck, and who am I to judge? So I've got a bin here for your vampire literature, I got your books on ectoplasm, your books on ufology and teleportation, I got your studies on tarot cards and Eckankar, you want to read about your Venusian cannibals living among us, I got your book on that, too.'

'I'm looking for a guy named Will Buchalter, Jimmie. He might be a collector of old jazz records.'

His mustache tilted and the corners of his eyes wrinkled quizzically.