"A Mexican guy tried to take me out. Your man Mingo says it was a hit. Why do mobbed-up people in New Orleans care about a cop in Iberia Parish?"

Jerry Joe scratched the red tattoo of a parachute on his forearm.

"Number one, Mingo's not my man. Number two, times are changing, Dave. Dope's gonna be out one day. The smart money is looking for a new home… Listen, to that… ' La Jolie Blon'… Boy, I love that song. My mom taught me to dance to it."

"Where'd the hit come from?"

"I don't know. That's the honest-to-God truth. Just leave this civil rights garbage alone and watch yourself with Karyn LaRose."

"How did you-"

"You want to ask me where she's got a certain birthmark?" He pressed his hands flat on the tablecloth and looked at them. "Try a little humility, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but some broads ain't any different from men. They like to screw down and marry up. She ever talk about marriage to you?"

He raised his eyes and started to grin. Then his face became embarrassed and he grimaced and looked around the room. The coiled white scar at the corner of his eye was bunched in a knot.

"You want a breadstick?" he asked.

Our jailer, Kelso Andrepont, was a three-hundred-pound bisexual black man who pushed his way through life with the calm, inert certitude of a glacier sliding downhill. The furrows in his neck gave off an oily shine and were dotted with moles that looked like raisins pasted on his skin, and his glasses magnified his eyes into luminous orbs the size of oysters.

He stared up at me from his cluttered desk.

"So why are we holding the guy here if he's got a negligent homicide beef in St. Martin Parish?"

"We're treating the case as an abduction. The abduction happened inside Iberia Parish," I said. "We're working with St. Martin on the other charge."

"Yeah, shit rolls downhill, too. And I'm always downhill from you, Robicheaux."

"I'm sorry to hear you take that attitude."

"This guy was born for Camp J. He don't belong here. I got enough racial problems as it is."

"How about starting over, Kelso?"

"He complains he's being discriminated against, get this, because he's Jewish and we're making him eat pork. So he throws his tray in a trusty's face. Then he says he wants isolation because maybe there's a black guy coming in here to whack him out.

"I go, 'What black guy?'

"He goes, 'How the fuck should I know? Maybe the guy I just threw the food at.'

"I go, 'Your brain's been doing too many push-ups, Bloomberg. You ought to give it a rest.'

"He goes, 'I come in here on my own and a dyke blindsides me with a baton and charges me with assault. No wonder you got a jail ninety percent cannibal. No one else would live in a shithole like this.'"

"You've got him in isolation now?" I asked.

"A guy who uses words like cannibal to a black man? No, I got him out there in the yard, teaching aerobics to the brothers. This job would drive me to suicide if it wasn't for guys like you, Robicheaux."

Five minutes later I checked my weapon with a guard who sat inside a steel-mesh cage, and a second guard unlocked a cell at the end of a sunlit corridor that rang with all the sounds of a jailhouse- clanging doors and mop buckets, a dozen radios tuned to a half dozen stations, shouted voices echoing along the ceilings. Mingo Bloomberg sat in his boxer undershorts on a bunk that was suspended from the wall with chains. His body was pink, hairless, without either fat or definition, as though it had been synthetically manufactured. The stitches above his ear looked like a fine strand of black barbed wire embedded in his scalp.

"Kelso says you're being a pain in the ass," I said.

He let a towel dangle between his legs and bounced it idly on top of his bare toes.

"Did your lawyer tell you our witnesses are going to stand up?" I said.

I expected anger, another run at manipulation. Instead, he was morose, his attention fixed on the sounds out in the corridor, as though they held meaning that he had never quite understood before.

"Did you hear me?" I said.

"I talked to my cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There's a black guy, out of Miami, a freelance 'cause Miami 's an open city. He's supposed to look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he's the guy did this screenwriter in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy's got the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail."

"You're the hit?"

He stared at the floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.

"I never broke no rules. It feels funny," he said.

"Who's setting it up, Mingo?"

"How many guys could I put inside? You figure it out."

"You ever hear of a bugarron?" I asked.

"No… Don't ask me about crazy stuff I don't know anything about. I'm not up for it." His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. "You've read a lot, haven't you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?"

"Some."

"I read something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said… in your life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don't do you no good."

"Yes?"

"That never made sense to me before."

That night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete, then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the wall. He looked at Mingo's face and the rivulets of water running down it, dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from the cage.

IT was sunrise when I turned into Buford LaRose's house the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse droppings.

I didn't wait for him to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.

"You recognize this man?" I asked.

"No. Who is he, a convict?"

"Mingo Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe Plumb."

"Sorry. I don't know him."

I took a second photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.

"That was taken last night," I said. "We had him in lockup for his own protection. But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower."

"You really know how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look, Jerry Joe's connected to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes."

"It sure sounds innocent enough."

"I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your moral perspective… Don't go yet. I want to show you something."

He walked deeper into the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning, he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap. His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his early fall redfish-ing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited for me.