Lonnie pinched his eyes and pretended to suppress a yawn. “I hear you. Glad you dropped by. Let me get the door for you,” he said, rising from his chair.

Then I witnessed one of those rare moments, in a male-dominated environment, when a woman can wrap herself in her own integrity and create an impregnable shield around herself. Lonnie had pulled open the door and was waiting for Betsy Mossbacher to leave, but she didn’t. Instead, she stood silently, five feet from the door’s threshold, waiting for his pantomime to end, her eyes focused into the hallway. He tried to wait her out, then realized he had been trapped into making a fool of himself.

He eased the door closed. “I beg your pardon, Agent Mossbacher,” he said, and returned to his desk.

“No problem,” she said. Then she opened the door for herself and closed it behind her.

I saw a tug at the corner of Helen Soileau’s mouth.

Lonnie cleared his throat and fiddled with a ballpoint pen on his desk. “I want to say something for the record. I believe Monarch did Bello Lujan’s boy. But I’m going to leave that determination up to y’all. That said, there’s obviously a much larger story at work here. Those federal agents wouldn’t take the time to spit on us if we were burning to death. They want Whitey Bruxal in a cage and maybe Bello Lujan, too. I suspect the Mossbacher woman is a closet liberal who wants to bring down this televangelical lobbyist Colin Alridge. It’s my position we don’t need the goddamn federal government to do any of the aforementioned. Bruxal has tried to bribe two or three people to get his video poker machines into Iberia Parish. That puts him in our jurisdiction. Y’all with me on this?”

“I haven’t thought it all through, Lonnie,” I said.

“Glad to see such a positive attitude. How about you, Helen?”

“To tell the truth, I think I should have been reading Mack’s report and the post on Tony Lujan rather than attending this meeting,” she said. “I’ll get back to you ASAP.”

It wasn’t the best of days for Lonnie Marceaux.

A few minutes later, as I was checking out a cruiser to go to Lafayette, I saw Helen make a point of speaking to Betsy Mossbacher at the entrance to the courthouse. Helen saw me watching her, just before she headed back to her office.

“Don’t say a word,” she said.

“My mind was totally blank,” I said.

Then a laugh coughed out of her throat. “That Calamity Jane is something else, isn’t she?”

LATER, I INTERVIEWED the Catholic priest at St. John’s who threw baseballs through church windows. I also interviewed a collection of fraternity kids who until the previous day had believed inclusion in a whites-only non-Jewish social organization could protect them from death. I still couldn’t find Slim Bruxal. The only light moment in the afternoon came when I was leaving the interview with the priest. He asked me if I would like to catch a few grounders with him. And I said why not.

I WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY the next morning to the sound of mockingbirds in the trees and a boat with a deep draft working its way downstream from the drawbridge at Burke Street. Our home was a wonderful place to wake on an early summer morning. Sometimes ground fog hung on the bayou, and inside it I would hear a gator slap its tail in the lily pads or a nutria or a muskrat roll off a cypress knee into the water. Sometimes I imagined I saw Confederate longboats, sharpshooters humped low inside, the oars muffled, floating silently with the current toward the Yankees’ skirmish line at Nelson’s Canal.

It didn’t matter what the weather was like. Morning with Molly and Snuggs and Tripod was always a grand time, and the arrival of the day had little to do with clocks. Just before first light I would hear the milkman crossing the lawn, fat bottles of cream clinking in his wire basket, then a solid thump on the ceiling when Snuggs dropped from an oak limb onto the roof, right above our bedroom. Molly would stir in her sleep, her hip rounded by the sheet, her hot rump brushing against me. I would put my fingers in her hair, trace them down her shoulders and back, and along the deep curve in her waist. I’d kiss her baby fat and the two red sun moles below her navel. I’d kiss her breasts and stomach and mouth and eyes, then slip her close against me, burying my face in the thick smell of her hair.

When she made love, she did it without stint or reservation or buried resentment because of a cross word or imagined slight. Molly’s charity and smile followed her into bed, and in the morning her skin gave off a warm fragrance just like flowers in a garden. In the blueness of the dawn I would hear the steady rhythm of her breath in my ear while Miss Ellen Deschamps called to her cats from her back porch, and I would start the day with the absolute knowledge that no evil could hold sway in our lives.

When I got to the office, the investigation into the murder of Tony Lujan awaited me in a way I didn’t expect. Wally had written a name and a cell number on a pink message slip and had put it in my mailbox. At the bottom of the slip he had penciled the notation: “Call him between 9:15 and 10.”

“Who’s J. J. Castille?” I said.

“Some colletch kid.”

“Which college kid?”

“He says you was at his fraternity house yesterday.”

“Wally, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t present information in teaspoons.”

His shirt pocket was fat with cellophane-wrapped cigars, which he rolled around in his mouth but never lighted because of his high blood pressure. “The kid, J. J. Castille, says he’s in class till nine-fifteen. He says you saw him at his fraternity house yesterday but you didn’t talk to him. He says he wants to talk wit’ you now. That’s how come he called the office.”

“Thank you.”

“He also said not to call him at the fraternity house. He said use the cell. That’s why I wrote down the cell number on the note. Anyt’ing else I can interpret for you?”

“No, that’s just fine.”

“You sure?”

In the army or prison, you learn not to make enemies with anyone in records or the kitchen. In law enforcement, you don’t admonish your dispatcher.

As I walked to my office, I couldn’t put a face with the name on the message slip. But I did remember a thin-chested kid at Tony’s fraternity house who had hung in the background, his expression full of conflict. At 9:20 a.m. I punched J. J. Castille’s cell number into my desk phone.

“Hello?” a voice said. In the background I could hear music and many voices talking and the clatter of dishes.

“This is Detective Dave Robicheaux with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I’m returning a call made by J. J. Castille. Are you Mr. Castille?”

“Yes, sir. I need to talk with you.”

“Is this about Tony Lujan?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It’s about him and Slim Bruxal. It’s about something they were saying at the house. Maybe it’s not important.” The pitch of his voice dropped when he mentioned Bruxal’s name.

“It’s important,” I said.

“I can’t talk here.”

“Do you have a car?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ll come over there. Where do you want to meet?”

He didn’t reply immediately. “I just thought I should pass it on.”

“I understand that. You’re doing the right thing, partner. Just tell me where you want to meet.”

“You know the UL campus?”

“I went to school there.”

“I’ll be between Cypress Lake and the music building.”

I checked out an unmarked car, clamped a magnetized flasher on the roof, and was at the campus in under thirty minutes. I pulled into a driveway between a cypress-dotted lake and the old brick music building known as Burke Hall. I saw a kid squatted down on the bank, tossing crumbs from a hot dog bun to a school of perch that popped and roiled the surface when they took the bread. His brown hair grew on his neck and hung in his eyes, and he wore a T-shirt that was washed so thin it looked like cheesecloth hanging on his shoulders.