She pulled the velvet curtains on the front windows.

"It's a little dark, isn't it?" I said. I stood by the mantel, next to a bright window that gave onto a cleared cane field and a stricken oak tree that stood against the sky like a clutch of broken fingers.

"There's a horrid glare off the road this time of day," she said. She put ice and soda in two glasses at a small bar inset in one wall and uncorked a bottle of Scotch with a thick, red wax seal embossed on it.

"I don't care for anything, thanks," I said.

"There's no whiskey in yours."

"I said I don't want anything."

The phone rang in another room.

"Goddamn it," she said, set down her glass, and went into a bedroom.

I looked at my watch. I had already been there ten minutes and had accomplished nothing. On the mantel piece was a photograph of a U.S. Army Air Corps aviator who was sitting inside the splintered Plexiglas nose of a Flying Fortress. The photo must have been taken at high altitude, because the fur collar on his jacket was frozen with his sweat, like a huge glass necklace. His face was exhausted, and except for the area around his eyes where his goggles had been, his skin was black with the smoke of ack-ack bursts.

I could hear Karyn's voice rising in the next room: "I won't sit still for this again. You rent a car if you have to… I'm not listening to that same lie… You're not going to ruin this, Buford… You listen… No… No… No, you listen…"

Then she pushed the door shut.

When she came out of the room her eyes were electric with anger, the tops of her breasts rising against her sundress. She went to the bar and drank off her Scotch and soda and poured another one. I looked away from her face.

"Admiring the photo of Buford's father?" she said. "He was one of the bombardiers who incinerated Dresden. You see the dead oak tree out by the field? Some of Buford's other family members, gentlemen in the Knights of the White Camellia, hanged a Negro and a white carpetbagger there in 1867. If you live with Buford, you get to hear about this sort of thing every day of your life."

She drank three fingers of Scotch on ice, her throat swallowing methodically, her mouth wet and cold-looking on the edge of the glass.

"I'd better get going, Karyn. I shouldn't have bothered you," I said.

"Don't be disingenuous. I brought you here, Dave. Sometimes I wonder how I ever got mixed up with you."

"You're not mixed up with me."

"Your memory is selective."

"I'm sorry it happened, Karyn. I've tried to indicate that to you. It's you and your husband who keep trying to resurrect the past or bring me into your lives."

"You say 'it.' What do you mean by 'it'?"

"That night by the bayou. I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say."

"You don't remember coming to my house two weeks later?"

"No."

"Dave?" Her eyes clouded, then looked into mine, as though she were searching for a lie. "You have no memory of that afternoon, or the next?"

I felt myself swallow. "No, I don't. I don't think I saw you again for a year," I said.

She shook her head, sat in a deep leather chair that looked out onto the dead tree.

"That's hard to believe. I never blamed you for the worry and anxiety and pain I had to go through later, because I didn't make you take precautions. But when you tell me-"

Unconsciously I touched my brow.

"I had blackouts back then, Karyn. I lost whole days. If you say something happened, then-"

"Blackouts?"

"I'd get loaded at night on Beam and try to sober up in the morning with vodka."

"How lovely. What if I told you I had an abortion?"

The skin of my face flexed against the bone. I could feel a weakness, a sinking in my chest, as though weevil worms were feeding at my heart.

"I didn't. I was just late. But no thanks to you, you bastard… Don't just look at me," she said.

"I'm going now."

"Oh no, you're not." She rose from the chair and stood in front of me. "My husband has some peculiar flaws, but he's still the best chance this state has and I'm not letting you destroy it."

"Somebody tried to open me up with a machete. I think it had to do with Aaron Crown. I think I don't want to ever see you again, Karyn."

"Is that right?" she said. The tops of her breasts were swollen and hard, veined with blue lines. I could smell whiskey on her breath, perfume from behind her ears, the heat she seemed to excrete from her sun-browned skin. She struck me full across the face with the flat of her hand.

I touched my cheek, felt a smear of blood where her fingernail had torn the skin.

"I apologize again for having come to your home," I said.

I walked stiffly through the house, through the kitchen to the backyard and my parked pickup truck. When I turned the ignition, I looked through the windshield and saw her watching me through the back screen, biting the corner of her lip as though her next option was just now presenting itself.

It rained all that night. At false dawn a white ground fog rolled out of the swamp, and the cypress trees on the far bank of the bayou looked as black and hard as carved stone. Deep inside the fog you could hear bass flopping back in the bays. When the sun broke above the horizon, like a red diamond splintering apart between the tree trunks, Batist and I were still bailing out the rental boats with coffee cans. Then we heard a car on the road, and when we looked up we saw a purple Lincoln Continental, with Sabelle Crown in the passenger's seat, stop and back up by our concrete boat ramp.

It wasn't hard to figure out which American industry the driver served. He seemed to consciously dress and look the part-elk hide halftop boots, pleated khakis, a baggy cotton shirt that was probably tailored on Rodeo Drive, tinted rimless glasses, his brown hair tied in a pony tail.

As he walked down the ramp toward me, the wind-burned face, the cleft chin, the Roman profile, become more familiar, like images rising from the pages of People or Newsweek magazine or any number of television programs that featured film celebrities.

His forearms and wrists were thick and corded with veins, the handshake disarmingly gentle.

"My name's Lonnie Felton, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.

"You're a movie director."

"That's right."

"How you do, sir?"

"I wonder if we could go inside and talk a few minutes."

"I'm afraid I have another job to go to when I finish this one."

Sabelle stood by the fender of the Lincoln, brushing her hair, putting on makeup from her purse.

"Some people are giving Aaron Crown a rough time up at the pen," he said.

"It's a bad place. It was designed as one."

"You know what the BGLA is?"

"The Black Guerrilla Liberation Army?"

"Crown's an innocent man. I think Ely Dixon was assassinated by a couple of Mississippi Klansmen. Maybe one of them was a Mississippi highway patrolman."

"You ought to tell this to the FBI."

"I got this from the FBI. I have testimony from two ex-field-agents."

"It seems the big word in this kind of instance is always 'ex,' Mr. Felton," I said.

He coughed out a laugh. "You're a hard-nose sonofabitch, aren't you?" he said.

I stood erect in the boat where I'd been bailing, poured the water out of the can into the bayou, idly flicked the last drops onto the boat's bow.

"I don't particularly care what you think of me, sir, but I'd appreciate your not using profanity around my home," I said.

He looked off into the distance, suppressing a smile, watching a blue heron lift from an inlet and disappear into the fog.

"We had a writer murdered in the Quarter," he said. "The guy was a little weird, but he didn't deserve to get killed. That's not an unreasonable position for me to take, is it?"