'Alf, it's all right if you wanted to play the record,' I said in the kitchen. 'But it's important you tell me whether or not you did it.'

'I already told you, Dave.'

'You're sure?'

'You think I'm lying?'

'No, I didn't mean that. How long has it been playing?'

'I don't know. I was outside.'

'Did Bootsie put it on before she left?'

'Bootsie doesn't play your old records, Dave. Nobody does.'

'Bootsie hasn't been herself, Alf.'

She turned back to the counter and began spreading mustard on her sandwich bread, her face empty, the way it always became when she knew something was wrong in the house. Her pink tennis shoes were untied, and her elastic-waisted jeans were stained with grass at the knees from weeding in the garden.

I saw her hand with the butter knife slow, then stop, as a thought worked its way into her face.

'Dave, I heard the front screen slam about fifteen minutes ago. Was that you?'

'I was at the dock, Alf. Maybe it was Bootsie.'

'Bootsie left an hour ago.'

'Maybe she came back for something.'

'She would have said something. Was it that bad man, Dave?'

I picked her up and sat her on top of the drain board, like she was still a small child, and began tying her tennis shoes.

'Was it that bad man?' she said again.

'I don't know, Alf. I truly don't.' My fingers were like a tangle of sticks when I tried to tie the bow on her shoe.

That evening, at dusk, the clouds in the western sky were marbled with orange light, and fireflies spun their wispy red circles in the darkening trees. Bootsie had taken Alafair to the video-rental store in town, and the house was empty and creaking with the cooling of the day. I called Clete at his apartment in the French Quarter.

'Buchalter was here,' I repeated. 'No one else would have put that record on. The guy went in and out of my house in broad daylight and nobody saw him.'

'I don't like what I'm hearing you say, Streak.'

'I don't either.'

'I don't mean that. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide don't rattle.'

'The guy seems to float on the air, like smoke or something. What am I supposed to say?'

'That's what he wants you to think.'

'Then tell me how he got in and out of my house today?'

'That's part of how he operates. He wants you to feel like you've been molested, like he can reach out and touch you anytime he wants. It's like you don't own your life anymore.'

I could hear my own breath echoing off the receiver.

'My ex's first husband tried to do a mind fuck on her the same way,' he said. 'He hired a PI to take zoom-lens pictures of her on the toilet and mail them to her boss, then he got in her bedroom while she was asleep and slashed up all her underwear with a razor… Hey, lighten up, Dave. Buchalter is flesh and blood. He just hasn't moved across the right pair of iron sights yet.'

'Clete, I've got every cop in Iberia Parish looking for this guy. How-'

'You think he was there today. You didn't see him. Listen, big mon, we're going to turn it around on this guy. They all go down, it's just a matter of time… Are you listening?'

'Yes.'

'Your problem is you think too much.'

'Okay, Clete, I've got your drift.'

'I thought you were calling me about Nate Baxter.'

'Why would I call you about him,'

'Nate almost got deep-fried in his own grease early this morning. Evidently he gets it on in Algiers sometimes with this biker broad who used to be his snitch in the First District. But he wakes up this morning, the broad is gone, and the dump she lives in is burning down. Except she's got French doors that are locked across both handles with Nate's handcuffs. He wrapped his head in a wet sheet and curled up in the bathtub or he wouldn't have made it.'

'Where's he now?'

'At Southern Baptist, up on Napoleon. Why?'

'Is he pressing any charges?'

'Not according to the cop who told me about it. I guess getting set on fire just goes with the territory when Nate tries to get laid.'

'Who's the woman?'

'Pearly Blue Ridel, you remember her, she used to work in a couple of the Giacanos' massage parlors, then she got off the spike and hooked up with some born-again bikers or something. Too bad Baxter's still got her by the umbilical cord.'

'Pearly Blue's no killer, Clete. She starts every day with a nervous breakdown.'

'Tell that to Nate.'

'I think it's a hit. A heroin mule in Baton Rouge sheriff's custody told me and Lucinda Bergeron that the Calucci brothers were going to take somebody out, somebody they weren't supposed to touch. Then this morning Tommy Lonighan showed up at my dock and made a point of establishing his whereabouts from six to noon or so.'

'Let them whack each other out. Who cares? If Baxter had caught the bus, half of NOPD would be plastered right now.'

'Would you like Lonighan setting you up for his alibi?'

'Keep it simple, Streak. Buchalter's the target. These other guys are predictable. Your man is not.'

Your man? I thought, after he had hung up. For some reason the possessive pronoun brought back the same sense of visceral revulsion and personal shame and violation that I had felt when Mack, on that raw, late-fall afternoon in the barn, had extended the backs of his fingers to my face and made me an accomplice in the sexual degradation of my mother.

Why?

Because as, the object of someone else's perverse sexual obsession, you feel not only that you are alone, and I mean absolutely alone, but that there is something defective in you that either attracts or warrants the bent attentions of your persecutor.

Ask anybody who has ever been there. Even a cop.

I knew Pearly Blue Ridel on another level besides the one that Clete had mentioned over the telephone, but the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous prevented me from acknowledging to an outsider that she was a member of our fellowship.

Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to an early Mass at St. Peter's in New Iberia the next morning, then I dropped them off at my cousin Tutta's in town and headed back for New Orleans.

Pearly Blue's AA group was not a conventional one. It was made up of low-bottom drunks and outlaw bikers across the river in Algiers, and it was called the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group. Because most of the members rode chopped-down Harleys, often had shaved heads, were covered with outrageous tattoos, and were generally ferocious in their appearance, they couldn't rent a meeting hall anywhere except in a warehouse that adjoined a biker bar where many of them used to get drunk. I parked in the alley behind the warehouse and used the rest room in the back of the bar before I went into the noon meeting.

On the condom machine someone had written in felt pen, Gee, this gum tastes funny. Written in the same hand on the dispenser for toilet-seat covers were the words Puerto Rican Place Mats.

The AA meeting area in the warehouse was gray with cigarette smoke, dense with the smell of sweaty leather, engine grease rubbed into denim, expectorated snuff, and unwashed hair. I stood against the wall by the doorway until Pearly Blue would look at me. She wore Levi's that were too large for her narrow hips, no bra, and a tie-dyed shirt that showed the small bumps she had for breasts. Her hair was colorless, stuck together on the ends, and the circles under her eyes seemed to indicate as much about the hopelessness of her life as about her emotional and physical fatigue. You did not have to be around Pearly Blue long to realize that she was one of those haunted souls who waited with certainty at each dawn for an invisible hand to wrap a cobweb of fear and anxiety around her heart.

My stare was unrelenting, and finally she got up from the table and walked with me out into the alley. She leaned against my truck fender, put a cigarette in her mouth, and lit it with both hands, although there was no wind between the buildings. She huffed the smoke out at an upward angle, her chin pointed away from me.