Her jawbone flexed along one cheek.

"Why'd Mookie let you slide?" I asked.

"He said he liked me. He said I could have China white, all the rock, all the tar I want, all I gotta do is ax. He was smoking rock in his car. He got a look in his face that makes me real scared. Suh, I gotta get out of Lou'sana or he's gonna find me again."

"You've got to give me more information, Brandy," I said.

"You the po-liceman from New Iberia?"

"That's right."

"He know all about you. He know about this one wit' you, too."

Clete had started to light a cigarette. He took it out of his mouth and looked at her.

"He was saying, now this is what he say, this ain't my words, 'If the fat one come around again where he ain't suppose to be, I got permission to burn his kite.'"

"When was this?" I said.

"A week ago. Maybe two weeks ago. I don't remember."

"Is there a way I can get a message to this guy?" Clete asked.

"I don't know no more. I ain't axed for none of this. Y'all gonna give me train fare for me and my li'l boy?"

I pulled an envelope from my back pocket and handed it to her.

"This ain't but two hundred dollars," she said.

"My piggy bank's tapped out," I said.

"That means it's out of the man's pocket," Clete said.

"It don't seem very much for what I tole y'all."

"I think I'll take a walk, throw some rocks at the garfish. Blow the horn when you're ready to boogie. Don't you love being around the life?" Clete said.

The night before the election I lay in the dark and tried to think my way through the case. Why had the gargantuan black man with the conked hair hung around New Orleans after the hit on the screenwriter? Unless it was to take out Mingo Bloomberg? Or even Clete?

But why expect reasonable behavior of a sociopath?

The bigger question was who did he work for? Brandy Grissum had said the black man had made a threat on Clete one or two weeks ago, which was before we visited Dock Green. But Dock had probably already heard we'd been bumping the furniture around, so the time frame was irrelevant.

Also, I was assuming that Brandy Grissum was not lying. The truth is, most people who talk with cops-perps, lowlifes of any stripe, traffic violators, crime victims, witnesses to crime, relatives of crime victims, or irritable cranks who despise their neighbors' dogs-feel at some point they have to lie, either to protect themselves, somebody else, or to ensure that someone is punished. The fact that they treat you as a credulous moron seems to elude them.

I was still convinced the center of the case lay on the LaRose plantation. The three avenues into it led through Jimmy Ray Dixon, Dock Green, and Jerry Joe Plumb. The motivation that characterized all the players was greed.

It wasn't a new scenario.

But the presence of power and celebrity gave it a glittering mask. The LaRoses were what other people wanted to be, and their sins seemed hardly worthy of recognition.

Except to one man, whose ankles were marbled with bruises from leg chains and whose thoughts flared without respite like dry boards being fed into a furnace.

BUFORD WON.

The northern portion of the state was split by a third-party racist candidate, while the southern parishes voted as a bloc for one of their own, a Catholic bon vivant football hero who descended from Confederate cavalry officers but whose two Ph.D.'s and identification with the New South would never allow his constituency to be embarrassed.

The celebration that night in Baton Rouge received the kind of network coverage that one associates with Mardi Gras.

Wednesday night the celebration moved to the LaRose plantation in New Iberia. The moist air smelled of flowers and meat fires, and as if the season had wanted to cooperate with Buford's political ascendancy, a full yellow moon had risen above the bayou and the cleared fields and the thoroughbreds in the pasture, all that seemed to define the LaRose family's historical continuity. First a Dixieland, then a zydeco band played on top of a flatbed truck in the backyard. Hundreds of guests ate okra and sausage gumbo and barbecued chicken wings off of paper plates and lined up at the crystal bowls filled with whiskey-sour punches. They behaved with the cheerful abandon of people who knew their time had come; the crushed flowerbeds, the paper cups strewn on the grass, the red-faced momentary coarseness, were just part of the tribute they paid to their own validation.

Helen Soileau and I walked the treeline along the back fields, talked to two state policemen who carried cut-down pump shotguns, shined our flashlights in storage sheds and the barn and the stables, and then walked back down the drive toward our cruiser in front. It was going to be a long night.

Clay Mason was smoking a cheroot cigar between two parked automobiles, one booted foot propped on a bumper, looking wistfully at the cleared fields and the yellow moon that had filled the branches of a moss-hung oak.

"Ah, Mr. Robicheaux, how are you?" he asked.

"Are you visiting, sir?" I said.

"Just long enough to extend congratulations. By God, what an event! I'm surprised Buford's father didn't get up out of the grave for it."

"I hear he was quite a guy."

"If that's how you spell 'sonofabitch,' he was."

"How'd you know his father?"

"They owned the ranch next to my family's, out west of the Pecos."

"I see."

"My father used to say it takes sonsofbitches to build great countries. What do you think about a statement like that?" He puffed on his cigar.

"I wouldn't know." I saw Helen get in the cruiser and close the door in the dark.

"Son, there's nothing more odious than an intelligent man pretending to be obtuse."

"I'd better say good night, Dr. Mason."

"Stop acting like a nincompoop. Let's go over here and get a drink."

"No, thanks."

He seemed to study the silhouette of the oak branches against the moon.

"I understand y'all matched the fingerprints of that Klansman, Crown, is that his name, to some tin cans or cigarette papers you found in the woods," he said.

"That's right.

He flipped his cigar sparking into a rosebed. "You catch that racist bastard, Mr. Robicheaux."

"I don't think Aaron Crown's a racist."

He placed his hand, which had the contours of a claw, on my arm. An incisor tooth glinted in his mouth when he grinned.

"A Ku Klux Klansman? Don't deceive yourself. A man like that will rip your throat out and eat it like a pomegranate," he said.

The breeze blew his fine, white cornsilk hair against his scalp.

Fifteen minutes later I had to use the rest room.

"Go inside," Helen said.

"I'd like to avoid it."

"You want to take the cruiser down the road?"

"Bad form."

"I guess you get to go inside," she said.

I walked through the crowds of revelers in the yard, past the zydeco musicians on the flatbed truck, who were belting out " La Valse Negress " with accordion and fiddle and electric guitars, and with one man raking thimbles up and down a replicated aluminum washboard that was molded like soft body armor to his chest. The inside of the house was filled with people, too, and I had to go up the winding stairs to the second floor to find an empty bathroom.

Or one that was almost empty.

The door was ajar. I saw a bare male thigh, the trousers dropped below the knee, a gold watch on a hairy wrist. Decency should have caused me to step back and wait by the top of the stairs. But I had seen something else too-the glassy cylindrical shape between two fingers, the thumb resting on the plunger, the bright squirt of fluid at the tip of the needle.