Then Max stopped talking to a woman with lacquered blond hair next to him and flicked his eyes up at Oswald Flat.

'What?' he said. When Flat made no reply, Max said it again. 'What?'

Then Bobo was looking at the preacher, too.

'Hey, he's talking to you. You got a problem?' he said.

The people at nearby tables had stopped talking now.

'Hey, what's with you? You can't find the men's room or something?' Max said.

The blond woman next to him started to laugh, then looked at Oswald Flat's face and dropped her eyes.

'Y'all think you're different from them colored dope dealers? Y'all think hit cain't happen to you?' the preacher said.

'What? What can happen?' Max said.

'Your skin's white but your heart's black, just like them that's had hit cut out of their chests.'

The restaurant was almost completely silent now. In the kitchen someone stopped scraping a dish into a garbage can.

'Listen, you four-eyed fuck, if Purcel and that cop sent you over here-' Max began.

Oswald flipped the purple rose into Max Calucci's face.

'You're a lost, stupid man,' he said. 'If I was you, I'd drink all the ice water I could while I had opportunity. Hell's hot and it's got damn little shade.'

The Reverend Oswald Flat picked up his guitar case, fitted his cork sun helmet on his head, and walked out the front door into a vortex of rain.

As I crossed the wide, brown sweep of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge and headed across the Atchafalaya Basin toward home, I thought about Oswald Flat's speculation on the elusiveness of Will Buchalter.

It seemed the stuff of an Appalachian tent revival where the reborn dipped their arms into boxes filled with poisonous snakes.

But the preacher's conclusion that we were dealing with a demonic incarnation was neither eccentric nor very original and, as with some other cases I've worked, was as good an explanation about aberrant human behavior as any.

Ten years ago, when Clete and I worked Homicide at NOPD, we investigated a case that even today no one can satisfactorily explain.

A thirty-five-year-old small contractor was hired to build a sun-porch on a home in an old residential neighborhood off Canal. He was well thought of, nice-looking, married only once, attended church weekly with his wife and son, and had never been in trouble of any kind. At least that we knew of.

The family who had contracted him to build the addition on their house were Rumanian gypsies who had grown wealthy as slum-lords in the black districts off Magazine. Their late-Victorian home had polished oak floors, ceiling-high windows, small balconies dripping with orange passion vine, a pool, and a game room with a sunken hot tub.

They thought well enough of the contractor to leave him alone with their fifteen- and twelve-year-old daughters.

The father should have been gone for the day, checking out his rental property miles away. Instead, he came home unexpectedly for lunch. Someone waited for him behind the living room door, then fired a.22 Magnum round into his ear. The bullet exited his opposite cheek and embedded in the far wall.

No one heard the shot. Around one in the afternoon neighbors saw the contractor drive away in the father's Buick. Three hours later the mother returned from shopping and found both her daughters drowned in the hot tub. They were bound ankle and wrist with electrician's tape; both had been raped.

The contractor pawned his tools, his watch, and his wedding ring at three different stops between New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida, where he was arrested after a call he made to his wife was traced to a motel there. Clete Purcel and I transported him back to New Orleans from the Pensacola city jail.

He was likable; there was nothing of the con artist about him; he was well-mannered and didn't use profanity; he never complained about riding handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat.

At his trial he maintained that he'd had a blackout, that he had no memory of the events that took place in the house off Canal, but a sense of terror, with no apparent source, had caused him to flee across I-10 to the Florida panhandle.

Prosecution lawyers, state psychologists, and news reporters came up with every script possible to explain the contractor's behavior: He was a clandestine user of LSD; he had been a marine door gunner in Vietnam; he was badly in debt and teetering on a nervous breakdown. Or, more disturbingly, he had once been seen at a shopping mall with a high school girl from his neighborhood whose strangled and decomposed body was found nude in a swamp north of Lake Pontchartrain. On her ankle was a tattoo of a pentagram.

All the evidence against him was circumstantial. None of his fingerprints were in the game room where the girls died, nor on the electrician's tape that was used to bind them. Also the tape was not the same brand that he always bought from a wholesale outlet. There were no skin particles under the dead girls' fingernails.

He probably would have walked if he could have afforded a better lawyer. But the jury convicted him of second-degree murder, perhaps less out of certainty of his guilt than fear that he was guilty and would kill or rape again if set free.

His friends and family were numb with disbelief. The pastor from his church raised money to begin an appeal of the verdict. His parishioners put together twenty thousand dollars for the conviction of the real killer. Two attorneys from the ACLU took over the contractor's case.

Clete and I went back over the crime scene a dozen times. We must have interviewed a hundred people. We decided that if we couldn't prove this man conclusively guilty, then we would prove him innocent.

We did neither. All we ever determined was that there was a two-year gap in the contractor's younger life during which he had left behind no paperwork or record of any kind, as though he had eased sideways into another dimension. We also concluded, with a reasonable degree of certainty, at least to ourselves, that no else entered or left that house, besides the father, from the time the contractor showed up to work and the time he fled the crime scene in the Buick.

It became the kind of case that eventually you close the file on and hope the right man is in jail. Clete and I were both glad when we heard that the lower court's decision had been overturned and that a new trial date was to be set soon. Maybe someone else could prove or disprove what we could not.

Three days later, a psychotic inmate at Angola, a big stripe, attacked the contractor with a cane knife and severed his spinal cord with one blow across the back of the neck. The body was lying in state at a funeral home in Metairie when the mother and aunts of the murdered girls burst into the room, screaming hysterically like Shakespearean hags, and flung bags of urine on the corpse.

For a long time I had a recurrent dream about the contractor. He awoke in the blackness of his coffin, then realized that tons of earth had been bulldozed and packed down on top of him. He couldn't move his shoulders or twist his body against the hard, sculpted silk contours of the coffin; his screams went no farther than the coffin's lid, which hovered an inch from his mouth.

As time passed and his nails and eyebrows and hair grew long and filled the air cavity around him, and he realized that his death was to be prolonged in ways that no mortal thought imaginable, he began to plan ways that he could burn himself even more deeply, more painfully, into our memory.

He would reveal to the rest of us a secret about his soul that would forever make us think differently about our common origins. With nails that were yellow and sharp as talons he cut his confession into the silk liner above him, his mouth red with gloat as he wounded us once more with a dark knowledge about ourselves.