IT was raining hard and the traffic was heavy in New Orleans when I parked off St. Charles and ran for the colonnade in front of the Pearl. The window was steamed from the warmth inside, but I could see Clete Purcel at the counter, a basket of breadsticks and a whiskey glass and a schooner of beer in front of him, reading the front page of the Times-Picayune.

"Hey, big mon," he said, folding his paper, grinning broadly when I came through the door. His face was round and Irish, scarred across the nose and through one eyebrow. His seersucker suit and blue porkpie hat looked absurd on his massive body. Under his coat I could see his nylon shoulder holster and blue-black.38 revolver. "Mitch, give Dave a dozen," he said to the waiter behind the counter, then turned back to me. "Hang on a second." He knocked back the whiskey glass and chased it with beer, blew out his breath, and widened his eyes. He took off his hat and mopped his forehead on his coat sleeve.

"You must have had a rocky morning," I said.

"I helped repossess a car because the guy didn't pay the vig on his bond. His wife went nuts, said he wouldn't be able to get to work, his kids were crying in the front yard. It really gives you a sense of purpose. Tonight I got to pick up a skip in the Iberville Project. I've got another one hiding out in the Desire. You want to hear some more?"

The waiter set a round, metal tray of raw oysters in front of me. The shells were cold and slick with ice. I squeezed a lemon on each oyster and dotted it with Tabasco. Outside, the green-painted iron streetcar clanged on its tracks around the corner of Canal and headed up the avenue toward Lee Circle.

"Anyway, run all this Mingo Bloomberg stuff by me again," Clete said.

I told him the story from the beginning. At least most of it.

"What stake would Bloomberg have in a guy like Aaron Crown?" I said.

He scratched his cheek with four fingers. "I don't get it, either. Mingo's a made-guy. He's been mobbed-up since he went in the reformatory. The greaseballs don't have an interest in pecker-woods, and they think the blacks are cannibals. I don't know,

Streak."

"What's your take on the murdered scriptwriter?"

"Maybe wrong place, wrong time."

"Why'd the shooter let the girl slide?" I said.

"Maybe he didn't want to snuff a sister."

"Come on, Clete."

"He knew she couldn't turn tricks in the Quarter without permission of the Giacano family. Which means she producing a weekly minimum for guys you don't mess with."

"Which means the guy's a pro," I said.

He raised his eyebrows and lit a cigarette. "That might be, noble mon, but it all sounds like a pile of shit you don't need," he said. When I didn't answer, he said, "So why are you putting your hand in it?"

"I don't like being the subject of Mingo Bloomberg's conversation."

His green eyes wandered over my face.

"Buford LaRose made you mad by offering you a job?" he asked.

"I didn't say that."

"I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me. What was that about his wife?" His eyes continued to search my face, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Will you stop that?"

"I'm getting strange signals here, big mon. Are we talking about memories of past boom-boom?"

I put an oyster in my mouth and tried to keep my face empty. But it was no use. Even his worst detractors admitted that Clete Purcel was one of the best investigative cops NOPD ever had, until his career went sour with pills and booze and he had to flee to Central America on a homicide warrant.

"So now she's trying to work your crank?" he said.

"Do you have to put it that way?… Yeah, okay, maybe she is."

"What for?… Did you know your hair's sweating?"

"It's the Tabasco. Clete, would you ease up, please?"

"Look, Dave, this is the basic lesson here-don't get mixed up with rich people. One way or another, they'll hurt you. The same goes for this civil rights stuff. It's a dead issue, leave it alone."

"Do you want to go out and talk to Jimmy Ray Dixon or not?" I said.

"You've never met him?"

"No."

"Jimmy Ray is a special kind of guy. You meet him once and you never quite forget the experience."

I waited for him to finish but he didn't.

"What do I know?" he said, flipped his breadstick into the straw basket, and began putting on his raincoat. "There's nothing wrong with the guy a tube of roach paste couldn't cure."

We drove through the Garden District, past Tulane and Loyola universities and Audubon Park and rows of columned antebellum homes whose yards were filled with trees and flowers. The mist swirled out of the canopy of oak limbs above St. Charles, and the neon tubing scrolled on corner restaurants and the empty outdoor cafes looked like colored smoke in the rain.

"Was he in Vietnam?" I asked.

"Yeah. So were you and I. You ever see his sheet?" Clete said.

I shook my head.

"He was a pimp in Chicago. He went down for assault and battery and carrying a concealed weapon. He even brags on it. Now you hear him talking on the radio about how he got reborn. The guy's a shit-head, Dave."

Jimmy Ray Dixon owned a shopping center, named for his assassinated brother, out by Chalmette. He also owned apartment buildings, a nightclub in the Quarter, and a five-bedroom suburban home. But he did business in a small unpainted 1890s cottage hung with flower baskets in the Carrollton district, down by the Mississippi levee, at the end of St. Charles where the streetcar turned around. It was a neighborhood of palm trees and green neutral grounds, small restaurants, university students, art galleries and bookstores. It was a part of New Orleans unmarked by spray cans and broken glass in the gutters. In five minutes you had the sense Jimmy Ray had chosen the role of the thumb in your eye.

"You're here to ask me about the cracker that killed my brother?

You're kidding, right?"

He chewed and snapped his gum. He wore a long-sleeve blue-striped shirt, which hid the apparatus that attached the metal hook to the stump of his left wrist. His teeth were gold-filled, his head mahogany-colored, round and light-reflective as a waxed bowling ball. He never invited us to sit down, and seemed to make a point of swiveling his chair around to talk to his employees, all of whom were black, in the middle of a question.

"Some people think he might be an innocent man," I said.

"You one of them?" He grinned.

"Your humor's lost on me, sir."

"It took almost thirty years to put him in Angola. He should have got the needle. Now the white folks is worried about injustice."

"A kid in my platoon waited two days at a stream crossing to take out a VC who killed his friend. He used a blooker to do it. Splattered him all over the trees," I said.

"Something I ain't picking up on?"

"You have to dedicate yourself to hating somebody before you can lay in wait for him. I just never made Aaron Crown for that kind of guy," I said.

"Let me tell you what I think of Vietnam and memory lane, Jack.

I got this"-he tapped his hook on his desk blotter-"clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy six klicks out of Pinkville. You want to tell war stories, the DAV's downtown. You want to spring that cracker, that's your bidness. Just don't come around here to do it. You with me on this?"

Clete looked at me, then lit a cigarette.

"Hey, don't smoke in here, man," Jimmy Ray said.

"Adios" Clete said to me and went out the door and closed it behind him.

"Have any of these documentary movie people been to see you?" I asked.

"Yeah, I told them the right man's in jail. I told them that was his rifle lying out under the tree. I told them Crown was in the KKK. They turned the camera off while I was still talking." He glanced at the dial on his watch, which was turned around on the bottom of his wrist. "I don't mean you no rudeness, but I got a bidness to run."