I opened and closed my mouth, as though my ears were popping from cabin pressure in an airplane, and continued to read. The details in the last paragraph gave another dimension to the sweaty, hoarse voices that I had heard over the telephone.

The sheriff stood in my doorway with a coffee cup in his hand.

'You think that's our phony nun?' he said.

'Yeah, I do.'

'You believe that stuff at the end of the page?'

'They're perverse people. Why should anything they do be a surprise?'

'Did you know Ma Barker and one of her sons were incestuous? They committed suicide by machine-gunning each other. They were even buried together in the same casket, to keep the tradition intact. That's a fact.'

'Interesting stuff,' I said.

'You've got to have some fun with it or you go crazy. I got to tell you that?'

'No, you're right.'

He walked over and squeezed me on the shoulder. I could smell his leather gunbelt and pipe tobacco in his clothes.

'You sleeping all right at night?' he said.

'You bet.'

He grunted under his breath.

'That's funny, I don't. Well, maybe we'll drop that pair in their own box. Who knows?' he said.

He walked his fingernails across my desk and went back out the door.

The best lead on Buchalter, the only one, really, was still music.

Brother Oswald Flat, I thought.

I got his telephone number from long-distance information.

'Didn't you say you played with Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys?' I asked.

'What about hit?'

'Did you ever have any connection with jazz or blues musicians?'

'Son, I like you. I really do. But a conversation with you is like trying to teach someone the recipe for ice water.'

'I'm afraid I'm not following you.'

'That's the point. You never do.'

'I'll try to listen carefully, sir, if you can be patient with me.'

'Music's one club. Hit's like belonging to the church. Hit don't matter which room you're in, long as you're in the building. You with me?'

'You know some jazz musicians?'

'I'll have a go at hit from a different angle,' he said. 'I used to record gospel at Sam Phillip's studio in Memphis. You know who else recorded in that same studio? Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Lee Swaggert. You want me to go on?'

'I think Will Buchalter has some kind of involvement with historical jazz or blues. But I don't know what it is.'

The phone was silent.

'Reverend?'

'Why didn't you spit hit out?'

This time I didn't answer. His voice had changed when he spoke again.

'I won't interrupt you or insult you again,' he said.

I recounted the most recent late-night phone call, with Beiderbecke's 'In a Mist' playing in the background; Buchalter's knowledge of early Benny Goodman and the proper way to handle old seventy-eights; the Bunk Johnson record that someone had left playing on my phonograph.

'You impress me, son. You know,' Oswald Flat said.

Again, I was silent.

'An evil man cain't love music,' he said. 'He's interested in hit for some other reason.'

'I think you're right.'

'There's a band plays on Royal Street. I mean, out in the street, when the cops put the barricades up and close off the traffic. They got a piano on a truck, a Chinese kid playing harmonica, some horns, a colored, I mean a black, man on slide guitar. The black man comes to my church sometimes. But he don't live in New Orleans. He's in Morgan City.'

'Yes?'

'If I call and see if he's home, can you meet me there in a couple of hours?'

'I think you'd better clarify yourself.'

'That's all you get. Holler till your face looks like an eggplant.'

'This is part of a police investigation, Reverend. You don't write the rules.'

'He's been in the penitentiary. He won't talk to you unless I'm there. You want my he'p or not?'

The black man's name was Jesse Viator, and he lived in a dented green trailer set up on concrete blocks thirty feet from the bayou's edge. He had only three teeth in his mouth, and they protruded from his gums like the hooked teeth in the mouth of a barracuda. We sat on old movie theater seats that he had propped up on railroad ties in his small, tidy backyard. A shrimp boat passed with its lights on, and near the far bank swallows were swooping above an oil barge that had rusted into a flooded shell.

Jesse Viator was not comfortable in the presence of a police officer.

'You remember that man you told me about, the one wanted you to record, the fellow you said bothered you the way he looked at you?' Brother Oswald said.

'Yeah, dude was up to no good,' he said.

'Why did you think that?' I asked. I smiled.

'Some people got their sign hanging out,' he answered. He pulled at the soft flesh under his chin and looked out at the bayou.

'Why was he up to no good, Jesse?' I said.

'Dude didn't say nothing mean. He was polite. But it was like there was heat in his face,' Viator said. 'Like a dry pan been setting on the gas burner.'

I showed him the composite drawing of Buchalter. He held it in the light from his trailer and studied it. His grizzled pate shone like tan wax.

'You do them composites with a machine, right? So a lot of them look alike,' he said.

'Who's the worst guy you ever met inside?' I said.

'They only get so bad. Then they all about the same. They end up in Camp J.'

'The guy I'm looking for is worse than anybody in Camp J. Do you believe me when I say that?'

He took the drawing back from my hand and tilted it to catch the light from the trailer. He tapped on the edges of the face. 'What's that?' he said.

'You tell me,' I said.

'Dude had dirt in his skin, what d' you call 'em, blackheads or something, made him look like he was wearing a mask around his eyes. Look, it was t'ree, four mont's back. I stopped thinking about it.'

'Tell him the rest of hit, Jesse,' Oswald Flat said.

'There ain't no rest,' he said. 'Dude say he give me a hundred dollars to record. I tole him I ain't interested. That's it. I don't want to talk about it no more.'

'Are you scared of this man?' I said, and kept my eyes on his.

He took a breath that was between anger and exasperation.

'You know the feeling that dude give me? It was like when a guy get made a slave up at Angola. When somebody turn out a kid, rape him, then tell him, Haul your lil ass down the Walk. In a half hour come back with ten dollars. In another half hour, I want ten dollars more, then I want ten dollars more after that, or the next thing go in your mouth got a sharp point on it and it don't come out. That's what that dude's eyes made me think of.'

He became morose and sullen and would say little more. The moon was up, and road dust and a sheen of diesel oil floated on the dead current close under the willows. The air was cool and humid and smelled of bait shrimp someone had left in a bucket. I asked the reverend to wait for me out front.

'What'd you fall for, Jesse?' I said.

'Guy tried to joog me at a dance. I didn't want to, but I put him down. Lawyer tole me to plea to manslaughter.'

'You have a family?'

'My wife's at the Charity. She got heart trouble. Our two daughters is growed up and married, in California.'

'The man I want molested my wife. I'll show you what he does when he gets his hands on people.' I stood up from my chair.

'What you doing, man? Hey, you taking off your-'

'Buchalter used an electrical generator on me, Jesse. That's where he attached the terminals. It's quite an experience.'

He propped his hands on his thighs, twisted in his chair, and focused his eyes on a cane pole that was stuck deep in the roots of a cypress tree.

'Man, I'm serious, I don't want no more to do with this,' he said.