Back in my office, Helen said, "What do you think?"

"Take his statement. Put it in the file," I answered.

"That's it?"

"Somebody snipped Jody's brain stem a long time ago."

"You don't believe him?"

"Yeah I do. But it won't stand up. Buford LaRose won't go down until he gets caught in bed with a dead underage male prostitute."

"Too much," she said, and walked out the door.

Saturday morning Clete Purcel drove in from New Orleans, fished for two hours in a light mist, then gave it up and drank beer in the bait shop while I added up my receipts and tried to figure my quarterly income tax payment. He spoke little, gazing out the window at the rain, as though he was concentrating on a conversation inside his head.

"Say it," I said.

"After I got to Vietnam, I wished I hadn't joined the Corps," he said.

"So?"

"You already rolled the dice, big mon. You can't just tell these cocksuckers you don't want to play anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because I keep seeing Jerry Joe's face in my dreams, that's why… That's his jukebox back there?"

"Yeah."

"What's on it?"

"Forties and fifties stuff. Every one of them is a Cadillac."

"Give me some quarters."

"I sliced the cord in half."

"That's a great way to deal with the problem, Streak."

A half hour later the phone rang. It was Buford LaRose. I walked with the phone into the back of the shop.

"Meet me at the Patio restaurant in Loreauville," he said.

"No, thanks," I said.

"Goddamn it, Dave, I want to get this mess behind us."

"Good. Resign your office."

"Crown's a killing machine," he said.

"If he is, you helped make him that way."

"You don't know, do you?"

"What?"

"About the guy who was just fished out of Henderson Swamp."

"That's St. Martin Parish. It's not my business. Good-bye, Buford." I hung up the phone.

"That was dickhead?" Clete said.

"Yep."

"What did he want?"

I told him.

"You're just going to let it slide down the bowl?"

"That about sums it up."

"Mistake. Stay in their faces, Streak. Don't let them blindside you. I'll back your play, mon."

He turned toward me on the counter stool, his scarred face as flat and round as a pie tin, his eyes a deep green under his combed, sandy hair.

"Listen to me for once," he said. "That was Mookie Zerrang you saw in the pirogue. You want the button man out of your life, you got to find his juice."

The bayou seemed to dance with yellow light in the rain. I wiped down the counter, carried out the trash, stocked the cooler in back, then finally quit a foolish dialogue inside myself and dialed Buford's answering service in Lafayette so I wouldn't have to call him at home.

"This is Dave Robicheaux. Tell Mr. LaRose I'll be in my office at eight Monday morning."

He was in at ten, with Ciro Tauzin from the state police at his side. The St. Martin Parish sheriff's report on a body recovered from Henderson Swamp lay on my desk.

"You starting to get a better picture of Aaron Crown now?" Buford said.

"Not really," I said.

"Not really? The victim's stomach was slit open and filled with rocks. What kind of human being would do something like that?" Buford said.

"I have a better question, Buford. What was a New Orleans gum-ball, a hit man for the Giacano family, doing at Henderson Swamp?" I said.

"He celled with Crown," Buford said.

"So why would Crown want to kill his cell partner?" I asked.

"Maybe he was gonna turn Aaron in. The guy had some weapons charges against him. Criminals ain't big on loyalty, no," Tauzin said, and smiled.

"I think he was there to whack Crown and lost. What's your opinion on that, Mr. Tauzin?" I asked.

The coat of his blue suit looked like it was buttoned crookedly on his body. There were flecks of dandruff inside the oil on his black hair. He rubbed the cleft in his chin with his thumb.

"Men like Crown will kill you for the shoes on your feet, the food in your plate. I don't believe they're a hard study, suh," he said.

"You get in touch with him through his daughter," Buford said. "If he'll surrender to me, I'll guarantee his safety and I promise he won't be tried for a capital offense…" He paused a moment, then raised his hands off the arms of the chair. "Maybe down the road, two or three years maximum, he can be released because of his age."

"Pretty generous," I said.

Buford and Ciro Tauzin both waited. I picked up a paper clip and dropped it on my blotter.

"Dave?" Buford said.

"He bears you great enmity," I answered.

"You've talked with him." He said it as a statement, not as a question. I could almost hear the analytical wheels turning in his head. I saw a thought come together in his eyes. There was no denying Buford's level of intelligence. "He wants a meet? He's told you he'll try to kill me?"

"Make peace with his daughter. Then he might listen to you."

Buford's eyes wrinkled at the corners as he tried to peel the meaning out of my words.

"A short high school romance? That's what you're talking about now?" he said.

But before I could speak, Ciro Tauzin said, "Here's the deal, Mr. Robicheaux. You can hep us if you want, or you can tell everybody else what their job is. But if Aaron Crown don't come in, I'm gonna blow his liver out. Is that clear enough, suh?"

I held his stare.

"Should I pass on your remarks, Mr. Tauzin?" I answered.

"I'd appreciate it if you would. It's quite an experience doing bid-ness with you, suh. Your reputation doesn't do you justice."

I made curlicues with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad until they had left the room.

Two minutes later, Buford came back alone and opened the door, his seersucker coat over his shoulder, his plaid shirt rolled on his veined forearms. His curly hair hung on his forehead, and his cheeks were as bright as apples.

"You'll never like me, Dave. Maybe I can't blame you. But I give you my solemn word, I'll protect Aaron Crown and I'll do everything I can to see him die a free man," he said.

For just a moment I saw the handsome, young L.S.U. quarterback of years ago who could be surrounded by tacklers, about to be destroyed, his bones crushed into the turf, his very vulnerability bringing the crowd to its feet, and then rocket an eighty-yard pass over his tacklers' heads and charm it into the fingers of a forgotten receiver racing across the goal line.

Some Saturday-afternoon heroes will never go gently into that good night. At least not this one, I thought.

Probably over 90 percent of criminal investigations are solved by accident or through informants. I didn't have an informant within Buford's circle, but I did have access to a genuine psychotic whose dials never failed to entertain if not to inform.

I called his restaurant in New Orleans and two of his construction offices and through all the innuendo and subterfuge concluded that Dock Green was at his camp on the Atchafalaya River.

The sky was gray and the wide expanse of the river dimpled with rain when I pulled onto the service road and headed toward the cattle guard at the front of his property. I could see Dock, in a straw hat and black slicker, burning what looked like a pile of dead trees by the side of the house. But that was not what caught my eye. Persephone Green had just gotten into her Chrysler and was roaring down the gravel drive toward me, dirt clods splintering like flint from under the tires. I had to pull onto the grass to avoid being hit.

A moment later, when I walked up to the trash fire, I saw the source of Persephone's discontent. Two stoned-out women, oblivious to the weather, floated on air mattresses in a tall, cylindrical plastic pool, fed by a garden hose, in the backyard.