I turned into the drive, passed a row of blue-green poplars on the side of the house, and parked by the back lot. A balmy wind, smelling of rain, was blowing hard across the cane acreage, and a dozen roan horses with brands burned deep into the hair were running in the lot, turning against one another, rattling against the railed fence, their manes twisted with fire in the red sunrise.

When I stepped out of the truck, Buford was smiling at me. His skin-tight white polo pants were flecked with mud and tucked inside his polished riding boots. His eyes looked serene, his face pleasant and cool with the freshness of the morning.

I almost extended my hand.

He looked at the sunrise over my shoulder.

'"Red sky at dawn, sailor be forewarned,'" he said. But he was smiling when he said it.

"I shouldn't be here, but I needed to tell you to your face the charges your wife made are fabricated. That's as kind as I can say it."

"Oh, that stuff. She's dropping it, Dave. Let's put that behind us."

"Excuse me?"

"It's over. Come take a look at my horses."

I looked at him incredulously.

"She slandered someone's name," I said.

He blew out his breath. "You and my wife were intimate. She probably still bears you a degree of resentment. The god Eros was never a rational influence, Dave. At the same time she doesn't want to see my campaign compromised because you've developed this crazy notion about Aaron Crown being railroaded. So she let both her imagination and her impetuosity cause her to do something foolish. We're sorry for whatever harm we've done you."

I cupped my hand on a fence rail, felt the hardness of the wood in my palm, tried to see my thoughts in my head before I spoke.

"I get the notion I'm in a therapy session," I said.

"If you were, you'd get a bill."

The back door of the house opened, and a slender, white-haired man with a pixie face, one wrinkled with the parchment lines of a chronic cigarette smoker, stepped out into the wind and waved at Buford. He wore a navy blue sports jacket with brass buttons and a champagne-colored silk scarf. I knew the face but I couldn't remember from where.

"I'll be just a minute, Clay," Buford called. Then to me, "Would you like to join us for breakfast?"

"No, thanks."

"How about a handshake, then?"

Two of the wranglers were yelling at each other in Spanish as the horses swirled around them in the lot. One had worked a hackamore over a mare's head and the other was trying to fling a blanket and saddle on her back.

"No? Stay and watch me get my butt thrown, then," Buford said.

"You were born for it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The political life. You've got ice water in your veins," I said.

"You see that dead oak yonder? Two men were lynched there by my ancestors. When I went after Aaron Crown, I hoped maybe I could atone a little for what happened under that tree."

"It makes a great story."

"You're a classic passive-aggressive, Dave, no offense meant. You feign the role of liberal and humanist, but Bubba and Joe Bob own your heart."

"So long, Buford," I said, and walked back to my truck. The wind splayed and flattened the poplar trees against Buford's house. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was mounted on the mare's back, one hand twisted in the mane, the hackamore sawed back in the other, his olive-tan torso anointed with the sun's cool light, sculpted with the promise of perfection that only Greek gods know.

Later, Clete Purcel returned my call and told me Mingo Bloomberg had been sprung from City Prison three days ago by attorneys who worked for Jerry Joe Plumb, also known as Short Boy Jerry, Jerry Ace, and Jerry the Glide.

But even as I held the receiver in my hand, I couldn't concentrate on Clete's words about Mingo's relationship to a peculiar player in the New Orleans underworld. The dispatcher had just walked through my open door and handed me a memo slip with the simple message written on it: Call the Cap up at the zoo re: Crown. He says urgent.

It took twenty minutes to get him on the phone.

"You was right. I should have listened to you. A bunch of the black boys caught him in the tool shack this morning," the captain said.

He'd had to walk from the field and he breathed hard into the telephone.

"Is he dead?" I asked.

"You got it turned around. He killed two of them sonsofbitches with his bare hands and liked to got a third with a cane knife. That old man's a real shitstorm, ain't he?"

bootsie alafair and I were eating supper in the kitchen that evening when the phone rang on the counter. Bootsie got up to answer it. Outside, the clouds in the west were purple and strung with curtains of rain.

Then I heard her say, "Before I give the phone to Dave, could you put Karyn on? I left her a couple of messages, but she probably didn't have time to call… I see… When will she be back?… Could you ask her to call me, Buford? I've really wanted to talk with her… Oh, you know, those things she said about Dave to the sheriff… Hang on now, here's Dave."

She handed me the phone.

"Buford?" I said.

"Yes." His voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around his throat.

"You all right?" I said.

"Yes, I'm fine, thanks… You heard about Crown?" he said.

"A guard at the prison told me."

"Does this give you some idea of his potential?"

"I hear they were cruising for it."

"He broke one guy's neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil," he said.

"I couldn't place your friend this morning. He's Clay Mason, isn't he? What are you doing with him, partner?"

"None of your business."

"That guy was the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture."

"As usual, your conclusions are as wrong as your information."

He hung up the phone. I sat back down at the table.

"You really called Karyn LaRose?" I asked.

"Why? Do you object?" she said.

"No."

She put a piece of chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.

"I wish I hadn't gone out to see her, Boots."

"He's mixed up with that guru from the sixties?" she said.

"Who knows? The real problem is one nobody cares about."

She waited.

"Aaron Crown had no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I'm more and more convinced the wrong man's in prison," I said.

"He was in the Klan, Dave."

"They kicked him out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist church."

But why, I thought.

It was a question that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.

His name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.

Like Aaron Crown, he was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A Confederate flag, almost black with dirt, was nailed among the yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he were staring through smoke.

"A fight in a church? I don't call it to mind," he said.