I tried W. B. Kuhn, William Coon, Will Kuntz, Bill Koontz, then a dozen other combinations, making use of the same first and last names, in the same way that you would wheel pari-mutuel numbers in trying to hit a quiniela or a perfecta at the racetrack.

But more than a name it was a literary allusion written by the dead Canadian detective on the barroom napkin that gave me a brooding sense I almost did not want to confirm.

I began writing out the word Schwert with the combinations of first names and initials that I had already listed. The sheriff walked into my office with a cup of coffee in his hand and looked over my shoulder.

'That looks like alphabet soup,' he said. 'You going to run that through the NCIC?'

'Yeah, I want to go through the feds in New Orleans, too.'

'It can't hurt.' He gazed through the window at a black trusty in jailhouse issue sawing a yellowed palm frond from the tree trunk.

'You don't sound enthusiastic,' I said.

'I've got bad news. The tail we put on your girlfriend… She went through the front door of a supermarket in Lafayette, then out the back and poof… Gone.'

'Who was the tail?'

'Expidee Chatlin.'

I pressed my fingers into my temples.

'I didn't have anybody else available,' the sheriff said. 'I don't think it would have come out any different, anyway, Dave. Your gal's mighty slick.'

'I'd really appreciate your not calling her my gal or girlfriend.'

'Any way you cut it, she's one smart broad and she took us over the hurdles. That's just the way it plays out sometimes.'

'Too often.'

'Sir?'

I tried to concentrate on my legal pad.

'You and Bootsie have had a bad time. I don't think you should blame others for it, though,' he said.

'That wasn't my intention, Sheriff.' I could hear his leather gunbelt creak. I wrote the words William B. Schwert on the pad. He started to walk out of the room, then stopped.

'What've you got there, exactly?' he said.

'A Toronto cop wrote something on a napkin before he was found hanging by his ankles with a nine-millimeter round through his eye.' I glanced back at my notes. '"I know he's out there now, flying in the howling storm."'

'So?'

'It's from a poem by William Blake. It's about evil. As I remember it, it goes "O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That flies in the night

In the howling storm.

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy."'

'No, you misunderstood me, Dave. I was looking at the name you just wrote down there… Schwert. You never took any German at school?'

'No.'

'It means "sword," podna.'

He drank from his coffee cup and tapped me lightly on the shoulder with the flat of his fist.

But before I would get anything back from the FBI or the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., Clete Purcel would write history of the New Orleans mob Purcel.

a new chapter in the and outdo even Clete Purcel.

Clete had been eating breakfast in Igor's on St. Charles, his porkpie hat tipped down over one eye, when two of Max Calucci's bodyguards came in and sat at the table next to him. They were in a good mood, expansive, joking with the waitress, relaxed in Clete's presence. One of them accidentally knocked his chair into Clete's.

'Sorry, Purcel. Don't be getting the wrong signal. It ain't that kind of day,' he said.

Clete chewed his food and looked back at the men silently.

'I'm saying we got the word, okay?' the man said. He grinned.

Clete wiped his mouth with his napkin.

'There's some kind of comedy act here I don't know about?' he said.

'Cool your ovaries down. You want to join us? Your breakfast is on me.'

'I'll eat at that table after it gets scrubbed down with peroxide.'

'Suit yourself. It's a beautiful day. Why fuck a beautiful day?'

'Yeah, it was.'

The two men laughed and looked at their menus. Clete set his knife and fork down on his plate and put a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.

'Are we working on new rules here?' he said.

'Give it a break, Clete. You want some tickets to the LSU-Ole Miss game? Look, we're glad to hear it's over, that's all,' the second man said.

Clete removed the matchstick from his mouth and studied it.

'Who gave you permission to call me by my first name, and what's this stuff about something being over?' he said.

'Sorry we bothered you, Purcel,' the first man said. 'Robicheaux don't want to tell you he did a sit-down, that's between you and him. Hey, somebody got my fat ass out of the skillet, I'd count my blessings.'

The following is my best re-creation of the events, as described by Ben Motley and Lucinda Bergeron, that happened later out by Lake Pontchartrain.

Clete parked his convertible two blocks from Max Calucci's home, then took a cab to a construction site one mile away, on Robert E. Lee Boulevard, where the Caluccis supplied all the heavy equipment to the builder. He leaned against the trunk of a palm tree across the street, sucking on a think stick of peppermint candy, enjoying the morning, inhaling the breeze off the lake.

Then he casually strolled across the boulevard, the peppermint stick pointed upward like an erection, and hot-wired an enormous earthmover. It was outfitted with a steel blade that could strip baked hardpan down to bedrock, a great, saw-toothed bucket that could break and scoop up asphalt highway like peanut brittle, and huge balloon tires with studded welts for scouring trenches through piles of crushed stone and angle iron.

Before anyone realized what was happening, Clete had wheeled around the corner into the midday traffic and was hammering full throttle down the boulevard toward Max's house, diesel smoke flattening in a dirty plume from the stack.

The gateman at Max's was the first to see, or hear, the earthmover thundering down the quiet, oak-shaded residential street. Then, inside the steel-mesh protective cage, he recognized the powder blue porkpie hat, the round, pink face with the gray scar through one eyebrow like a strip of inner tube patch, and the massive shoulders that seemed about to split the seams on the Hawaiian shirt.

By this time the gateman was grabbing at the telephone box inset in the brick pillar by the edge of the driveway. But it was too late; Clete lowered the saw-toothed bucket, swung the earthmover into the drive, and blew the gates off their hinges.

No one at the house-the Vietnamese gardeners, three of Max's hired gumballs, a couple of coked-out dancers suntanning topless by the pool-could believe what was happening. Clete, bent low, like an ape, over the controls, headed across the lawn, grinding through flower beds, the patio furniture by the pool, crashing through a corner of the gazebo, splintering a birdbath into ceramic shards, raking off sprinkler heads, shredding garden hoses into chopped rubber bands.

He made a wide circle of lawn destruction and came to a halt twenty yards from the columned portico at the front of the house, the cap on the stack bubbling quietly. He lowered the bucket to clear his field of vision, sighted on the front entrance, raised the bucket into position again, shifted down, and gave it the gas.

The bucket exploded a hole the size of a garage door through the front wall. Then Clete backed off, gunning the engine, crunching over the crushed cinder blocks and plaster, got a good running start, and plunged into the house's interior.

He made U-turns, shifted from reverse to first, backed through walls and wet bars and bathrooms, ripped water pipes and drain lines out of the floors, and ground washing machines, television sets, and microwaves into sparking piles of electrical junk. He seemed to pause for a moment, perhaps to get his bearings, then he crashed through Max's mirror-walled bedroom, dropped the grader blade into position, and raked the eighteenth-century tester and oak floors through the French doors onto a domed sunporch, where he swung the bucket in a wide arc and sent cascades of glass onto the lawn.