Sabelle was mopping out her tiny office in back.

"I need Lonnie Felton's address," I said.

She stuck her mop in the pail and took a business card out of her desk drawer.

"He rented a condo over the river. Good life, huh?" she said. She resumed her work, her back to me, the exposed muscles in her waist rolling with each motion of her arms.

"Aaron was here, wasn't he?" I said.

"What makes you think that?" she answered, her voice flat.

"He was carrying the thirty-two I saw in that shoebox full of medals you keep behind the bar."

She stopped mopping and straightened up. Her head was tilted to one side.

"You didn't know that?" I said.

She went out to the bar and returned with the shoebox, slipped the rubber band off the top, and poured the collection of rings and watches and pocketknives and military decorations onto the desk.

Her gaze was turned inward, as though she were reviewing a film-strip. I could hear her breathing through her nose in the silence. Her fingernails were curled into the heels of her hands.

"I guess I majored in being anybody's fuck," she said.

"You don't have to be."

She took a roll of breath mints out of her blue jeans and put one in her mouth with her thumb. "Lonnie was here. In the middle of the night," she said. "He interviewed Daddy right out there at the bar. I went out to get food. When I came back, only Lonnie was here."

"Felton knew your father had the gun?"

"You tell me," she said. The skin of her face was shiny and tight against the bone, her eyes swimming with an old knowledge about the nature of susceptibility and betrayal.

I found Lonnie Felton by the swimming pool, in the courtyard of the white brick condominium he had rented above the Vermilion River. The surface of the water was glazed with a slick of suntan lotion and the sunlight that filtered through the moss in the trees overhead. Lonnie Felton lay on a bright yellow double-size plastic lounge chair, with a redheaded girl of eighteen or nineteen beside him. They both wore dark glasses and wet swimsuits, and their bodies looked hard and brown and prickled with cold. Lonnie Felton took a sip from a collins glass and smiled at me, his eyes hidden behind his glasses, his lips spreading back from his teeth. His girlfriend snuggled closer to his side, her knees and elbows drawn up tightly against him.

"You know what aiding and abetting is?" I asked.

"You bet."

"I can hang it on you."

He smiled again. His lips were flat and thin against his teeth, his sex sculpted against his swimsuit. "The Napoleonic Code supersedes the First Amendment?" he said.

"I think Mookie Zerrang was at my bait shop yesterday. He wanted to know where you lived."

"Who?"

"The black guy who murdered your scriptwriter."

"Oh yeah. Well, keep me informed, will you?"

"It's cold, Lonnie. I want to go inside," the girl next to him said. She teased the elastic band on his trunks with the tips of her fingers.

"I've got to admire your Kool-Aid. I'd be worried if a guy like that was looking for me," I said.

"Let me lay it out for you. Dwayne Parsons, that's the great writer we're talking about here, was an over-the-hill degenerate who factored himself into the deal because he filmed some friends doing some nasty things between the sheets. What I'm saying here is, he had a sick karma and it caught up with him. Look, if this black guy comes here to do me, you know what I'm going to tell him? 'Thanks for not coming sooner. Thanks for letting me have the life I've lived.' I don't argue with my fate, Jack. It's that simple."

"I have a feeling he won't be listening."

A cascade of tiny yellow and scarlet leaves tumbled out of the trees into the swimming pool. The redheaded girl rubbed her face against Lonnie Felton's chest and lay her forearm across his loins.

"You don't like us very much, do you?" he said.

"Us?"

"What you probably call movie people."

"Have a good day, Mr. Felton. Don't let them get behind you."

"What?"

"Go to more movies. Watch a rerun of Platoon sometime."

I drove along the river and caught the four-lane into Broussard, then took the old highway toward Cade and Spanish Lake into New Iberia. The highway was littered with crushed stalks of sugarcane that had fallen off the wagons on their way to the mill, and dust devils spun out of the bare and harrowed fields and in the distance I could see egrets rise like a scattering of white rose petals above a windbreak of poplar trees.

I had lied to Lonnie Felton. It was doubtful that I could make an aiding and abetting charge against him stick. But that might turn out to be the best luck he could have ever had, I thought.

I turned on the radio and listened to the L.S.U. – Georgia Tech game the rest of the way home.

Bootsie was washing dishes when I walked into the kitchen. She wore a pair of straw sandals and white slacks and a purple shirt with green and red flowers printed on it. The tips of her hair were gold in the light through the screen.

"What's going on, boss man?" she said, without turning around.

I put my hand on her back.

"There's an all-you-can-eat crawfish buffet in Lafayette for six-ninety-five," I said.

"I already started something."

"I used all the wrong words the last couple of days," I said.

She rinsed a plate and set it in the rack. She gazed at a solitary mockingbird that stood on the redwood table.

"There're some things a woman has a hard time accepting. It doesn't matter what caused them to happen," she said.

She picked up another plate and rinsed it. I felt her weight lean forward, away from the touch of my hand.

"You want to go to afternoon Mass?" I said.

"I don't think I have time to change," she answered.

That night I took Alafair and a friend of hers to a movie in New Iberia and for ice cream afterward. Later, I found things to do in the bait shop, even though the fishing season was almost over and few customers would be there in the morning. Through the black silhouette of trees up the slope, I could see the lighted gallery of our house, the darkened living room, Bootsie's shadow moving on the drawn shades in our bedroom.

I called my A.A. sponsor, an ex-roughneck and barroom owner named Tee Neg, who'd had seven years sobriety when he walked into a bait and liquor store owned by a black man and had asked for a bucketful of shiners, then on an impulse, with no forethought other than his ongoing resentment over the fingers he'd pinched off on a drill pipe, had changed his order to a quart of whiskey and stayed drunk for the next five years. His next A.A. meeting was at Angola Prison.

I told him about what had happened between me and Bootsie. I knew what was coming.

"You took a drink over it?" he said.

"No."

"Hey, you ever get drunk while you was asleep?"

"No."

"Then go to bed. I'll talk to you in the morning, you." He hung up.

After all the lights in the house went out, I walked up the slope and went inside and lay down on the living room couch in the dark.

Wally, the dispatcher, called at one in the morning.

"The St. Martin Parish sheriff's office is interviewing some hysterical kids at Henderson Swamp. I can't make sense out of it. You want to go up there?" he said.

"Not really."

"It sounds like Aaron Crown. That's where you think he's hid out at, right?"

"What sounds like Aaron Crown?"

"The one tore up these two people. They say the walls of the houseboat is painted with blood. The guy held the girl while he done the man, then he done it to the girl."

"You're not making sense, Wally."

"That's what I said. The deputy called it in didn't make no sense. So how about hauling your ass up there?"