I plugged in Jerry Joe's jukebox and watched the colored lights drift through the plastic casing like smoke from marker grenades. There were two recordings of " La Jolie Blon " in the half-moon rack, one by Harry Choates and the other by Iry LeJeune. I had never thought about it before, but both men's lives seemed to be always associated with that haunting, beautiful song, one that was so pure in its sense of loss you didn't have to understand French to comprehend what the singer felt. " La Jolie Blon " wasn't about a lost love. It was about the end of an era.

Iry LeJeune was killed on the highway, changing a tire, and Harry Choates died in alcoholic madness in the Austin city jail, either after beating his head bloody against the bars or being beaten unmercifully by his jailers.

Maybe their tragic denouements had nothing to do with a song that had the power to break the heart. Maybe such a conclusion was a product of my own alcoholic mentality. But I had to grieve just a moment on their passing, just as I did for Jerry Joe, and maybe for all of us who tried to hold on to a time that was quickly passing away.

Jerry the Glide had believed in Wurlitzer jukeboxes and had secretly worshipped the man who had helped burn Dresden. What a surrogate, I thought, then wondered what mine was.

A car came down the road in the dusk, then slowed, as though the driver might want to stop, perhaps for a beer on the way home. I turned off the outside flood lamps, then the string of lights over the dock, then the lights inside the shop, and the car went past the boat ramp and down the road and around the curve. I leaned with my forearm against the jukebox's casing and started to punch a selection. But you can't recover the past with a recording that's forty years old, nor revise all the moments when you might have made life a little better for the dead.

I could feel the blood beating in my wrists. I jerked the plug from the wall, sliced the cord in half with my pocketknife, and wheeled the jukebox to the back and left it in a square of moonlight, face to the wall.

Early Sunday morning I parked my pickup in the alley behind Sabelle Crown's bar in Lafayette. The alley was littered with bottles and beer cans, and a man and woman were arguing on the landing above the back entrance to the bar. The woman wore an embroidered Japanese robe that exposed her thick calves, and her chestnut hair was unbrushed and her face without makeup. The man glanced down at me uncertainly, then turned back to the woman.

"You t'ink you wort' more, go check the mirror, you," he said. He walked down the wood stairs and on down the alley, stepping over a rain puddle, without looking at me. The woman went back inside.

I climbed the stairs to the third story, where Sabelle lived by herself at the end of a dark hallway that smelled of insecticide and mold.

"It's seven in the morning. You on a drunk or something?" she said when she opened the door. She wore only a T-shirt without a bra and a pair of blue jeans that barely buttoned under her navel.

"You still have working girls here, Sabelle?" I said.

"We're all working girls, honey. Y'all just haven't caught on." She left the door open for me and walked barefoot across the linoleum and took a coffee pot off her two-burner stove.

"I want you to put me with your father."

"Like meet with him, you're saying?"

"However you want to do it."

"So you can have him executed?"

"I believe Buford LaRose is setting him up to be killed."

She set the coffee pot back on the stove without pouring from it.

"How do you know this?" she said.

"I was out to his place. Those state troopers aren't planning to take prisoners."

She sucked in her bottom lip.

"What are you offering?" she asked.

"Maybe transfer to a federal facility."

"Daddy hates the federal government."

"That's a dumb attitude."

"Thanks for the remark. I'll think about it."

"There're only a few people who've stood in Buford's way, Sabelle. The scriptwriter and Lonnie Felton were two of them. Jerry Joe Plumb was another. He was killed yesterday morning. That leaves your dad."

"Jerry Joe?" she said. Her face was blank, like that of someone who has been caught unawares by a photographer's flash.

"He was methodically beaten to death. My guess is by the same black guy who killed Felton and his girlfriend and the scriptwriter."

She sat down at her small kitchen table and looked out the window across the rooftops.

"The black guy again?" she said.

"That means something to you?"

"What do I know about black guys? They pick up the trash. They don't drink in my bar."

"Get a hold of your old man, Sabelle."

"Say, you're wrong about one thing."

"Oh?"

"Daddy's not the only guy in Buford's way. Take it from a girl who's been there. When he decides to fuck somebody, he doesn't care if it's male or female. Keep your legs crossed, sweetie."

I looked at the glint in her eye, and at the anger and injury it represented, and I knew that her friendship with me had always been a presumption and vanity on my part and that in reality Sabelle Crown had long ago consigned me, unfairly or not, to that army of male violators and users who took and never gave.

Monday an overweight man in a navy blue suit with hair as black as patent leather tapped on my office glass. There was a deep dimple in his chin.

"Can I help you?" I said.

"Yeah, I just kind of walked myself back here. This is a nice building y'all got." His right hand was folded on a paper bag. I waited. "Oh, excuse me," he said. "I'm Ciro Tauzin, state police, Baton Rouge. You got a minute, suh?"

His thighs splayed on the chair when he sat down. His starched dress shirt was too small for him and the collar button had popped loose under the knot in his necktie.

"You know what I got here?" he asked, putting his hand in the paper bag. "An oar lock with a handerchief tied through it. That's a strange thing for somebody to find on their back lawn, ain't it?"

"Depends on who the person is."

"In this case, it was one of my men found it on Buford LaRose's place. So since an escaped convict is trying to assassinate the governor-elect, we didn't want to take nothing for granted and we took some prints off it and ran them through AFIS, you know, the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System. I tell you, podna, what a surprise when we found out who those prints belonged to. Somebody steal an oar lock off one of your boats, suh?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"You just out throwing your oar locks on people's lawn?"

"It was just an idle speculation on my part. About a body that might have been buried there."

"Is that right? I declare. Y'all do some fascinating investigative work in Iberia Parish."

"You're welcome to join us."

"Ms. LaRose says you got an obsession, that you're carrying out a vendetta of some kind. She thinks maybe you marked the back of the property for Aaron Crown."

"Karyn has a creative mind."

"Well, you know how people are, suh. They get inside their heads and think too much. But one of my troopers told me you were knocking around in the stables, where you didn't have no bidness. What you up to, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"I think Aaron's a dead man if he gets near your men."

"Really? Well, suh, I won't bother you any more today. Here's your oar lock back. You're not going to be throwing nothing else up in their yard, are you?"

"I'm not planning on it. Tell me something."

"Yes, suh?"

"Why would the LaRoses decide to put in a gazebo right where I thought there might be an unmarked burial?"

"You know, I thought about that myself. So I checked with the contractor. Mr. LaRose put in the order for that gazebo two months ago."