'What's this guy look like?' he asked.

I told him while he rolled a matchstick in his mouth. The Count was cleaning bookshelves with a feather duster, his eyes as intense as obsidian chips in his white face.

'He's got blackheads fanning back from his eyes like cat's whiskers?' Jimmie said.

'Something like that,' I said.

'Maybe I can give him a job here. Hey, is this guy mixed up with this Nazi submarine stuff?'

'How do you know about the sub, Jimmie?'

'The whole fucking town knows about it. I tell you, though, Streak, I wouldn't mess with nobody that was connected with these tin shirts or whatever they used to call these World War II commonists.'

'Wait a minute, Jim. Not everybody knows about the Silver Shirts.'

'I'm Irish, right, so I don't talk about my own people, there's enough others to do that, like you ever hear this one, you put four Irish Catholics together and you always got a fifth, but I got to say you cross a mick with a squarehead, you come up with a pretty unnatural combo, if you're getting my drift, mainly that wearing a star-spangled jockstrap outside your slacks ain't proof you're one-hunnerd-percent American.'

'You've truly lost me, Jimmie.'

'I lived right down the street from his family.'

'Who?'

'Tommy Bobalouba. Sometimes you're hard to get things across to, Streak. I mean, like, we got jet planes going by overhead or something?'

'Tommy Lonighan's family was mixed up with Nazis?'

'His mother was from Germany. She was in the, what-do-you-call-'em, the metal shirts. That's why Tommy was always fighting with people. Nobody in the Channel wanted anything to do with his family… Hey, Count, we got a customer named Will Buchalter?'

Count Carbonna began humming to himself in a loud, flat, nasal drone.

'Hey, Count, I'm talking here,' Jimmie said. 'Hey, you got stock in the Excedrin company… Count, knock off the noise!'

But it was no use. The Count was on a roll, suddenly dusting the records with a manic energy, filling the store with his incessant, grinding drone.

Jimmie looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

'Listen, Jim, this guy Buchalter is bad news,' I said. 'If he should come in your store, don't let on that you know me, don't try to detain him or drop the dime on him while he's here. Just get ahold of me or Clete Purcel after he leaves.'

'What's this guy done?'

I told him.

'I'm not showing offense here,' he said, 'but I'm a little shocked, you understand what I'm saying, you think a geek like that would be coming into my store. We're talking about the kind of guy hangs in skin shops, beats up on hookers, gets a bone-on hurting people, this ain't Jimmie Ryan just blowing you a lot of gas, Streak, this kind of guy don't like music, he likes to hear somebody scream.'

He leaned on his arms and bit down on his matchstick so that it arched upward into his mustache.

But my conversation with Jimmie was not quite over. A half hour later he called Clete Purcel's apartment, just before I was about to head back to New Iberia.

'I'm glad I got you,' he said. 'Something's wrong here.'

'What's happened?'

'It's the Count. After we close the shop, he always goes upstairs to his room and eats a can of potted meat and watches Pat Robertson on TV. Except tonight he kept droning and humming and walking in circles and cleaning the shelves till the place looked like a dust storm, then for no reason he goes crashing up the stairs and throws everything in a suitcase and flies out the back door with his cape flapping in the breeze.'

'You're saying Buchalter was in your store? Maybe when the Count was by himself?'

'You tell me. Hey, when a guy who talks to Olivia Newton-John through the hole in the lavatory is scared out of town by sickos, I'm wondering maybe I should move to Iraq or one of them places where all you got to worry about is your nose falling off from the BO.'

In the morning I got the autopsy report on Charles Sitwell. He didn't die of an air bubble being injected into his bloodstream. The syringe had been loaded with a mixture of water and roach paste.

It was time to talk to Tommy Lonighan about his knowledge of German U-boats and Silver Shirts, preferably in an official situation, in custody, outside of his own environment. I called Ben Motley and asked about the chances of rousting him from his house or gym and bringing him down to an interrogation room.

'On what basis?' he said.

'He's lying about the reasons for his interest in this U-boat.'

'So he didn't want to tell you his mother was a Nazi. It's not the kind of stuff anybody likes to hang on the family tree.'

'It's too much for coincidence, Motley. He's connected with Buchalter. He's got to be.'

'You want me to get a warrant on a guy, in a homicide investigation, because of something his mother did fifty years ago?'

'We just bring him in for questioning. Tommy likes to think of himself as respectable these days. So we step on his cookie bag.'

'I wonder why the words civil suit keep floating in front of my eyes. It probably has something to do with my lens prescription.'

'Don't give this guy a free pass. He's dirty, Motley. You know it.'

'Give me a call if you come up with something more. Until then, I don't think it helps to be flogging our rods over the wastebasket.'

'Listen to me, Ben-'

'Get real, Robicheaux. NOPD doesn't roust people, not even Tommy Blue Eyes, when they live on lakefront property. Keep it in your pants, my man.'

I worked late that evening on two other cases, one involving a stabbing in a black nightclub, the other, the possible suffocation of an infant by his foster parents.

The sky was the color of scorched pewter when I drove along the dirt road by the bayou toward my house. The wind was dry blowing across the marsh, and the willows were coated with dust and filled with the red tracings of fireflies. The deputy on guard at the house started his car engine, waved at me as he passed, and disappeared down the long corridor of oak trees.

Bootsie was washing dishes at the sink when I came in. She wore a pair of grass-stained white dungarees and a rumpled yellow blouse that was too small for her and exposed her midsection.

'Where's Alafair?' I said, and kissed her on the cheek. I could smell cigarette smoke in her clothes and hair.

'In the living room. Doing her homework,' she said. She kept her face turned toward the open window when she spoke.

'Where'd you go today?' I said.

'What does it matter?'

'Beg your pardon?'

'What does it matter where we go?'

'I don't understand, Boots.'

'It doesn't matter where we go. He's going to be there.'

'You mean Buchalter?'

'He called.'

'Here? When?'

'This afternoon.'

'Why didn't you call me at the office?'

'And tell you what?'

I put my hands lightly on her shoulders and turned her toward me. She breathed through her nose and kept her face at an angle to me.

'What did he say, Boots?'

'Nothing. I could hear music, like the kind you hear in a supermarket or an elevator. And then a man breathing. His breath going in and out, like he was waiting for something.'

'Maybe it was somebody else, maybe just a crank.'

'He did something else. He scratched a fingernail back and forth on the receiver. The way a cat paws at the door.'

Her mouth parted, and she looked up into my face. Her breath smelled like bourbon-scented orange slices.

'We'll get an unlisted number in the morning,' I said.

'It was Buchalter, wasn't it?'

'Maybe. But what we have to remember, Boots, is that when these guys try to scare people with telephone calls, they're running on the rims. They don't have anything else going.'