“Dave, either we have a random killing, one done by a maniac who didn’t know the vic, or somebody who knew Bello’s daily routine and literally tried to eviscerate him. I hope to get you some prints off the pick handle, but-”

“But what?”

“I think the perp spent some time on this. I don’t think he threw down the weapon so we could find his prints all over it. I think the guy who did this is methodical and intelligent. Does that bring anyone to mind?”

“Yeah, Whitey Bruxal.”

“My thoughts shouldn’t stray too far past the lab, but when they kill like this-I mean, when they try to tear out somebody’s insides-the motivation is usually sexual or racial. Sometimes both.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure myself. Does Mrs. Lujan strike you as a charitable and forgiving spouse?”

“Thanks for your help, Mack. Give me a call from the lab, will you?”

“My pleasure,” he replied. “Hey, Dave, you going to talk to Yvonne Darbonne’s father? I mean, to exclude him?”

“Why?”

“No reason. He’s a good man. His daughter was the same age as one of mine. I don’t know if I could live with that kind of grief. I still have a hard time accepting the kinds of shit kids get into today. Drugs, abortion, hepatitis B, AIDS, herpes. They’re just kids, for God’s sakes. Before they’re twenty, they’re screwed up for life.”

You’re right again, Mack, I thought. But what was the solution? An authoritarian government? I feared how many people would answer in the affirmative.

I drove back onto the state road, then crossed a bridge over a coulee and parked in the turnrow by the sugarcane field where the killer probably entered the pasture on his way to Bello ’s stable. But the turnrow was churned with tractor, harvester, truck, and cane-wagon tracks, and littered with beer cans, snuff containers, and used rubbers as well, and I doubted that we would recover any helpful forensic evidence from the scene.

I watched the paramedics drive away with Bello ’s body, then I questioned the black man who had found Bello in the stall. The black man was not wearing tennis shoes and he did not believe any of Bello ’s other employees wore them, either. In fact, he said Bello insisted his employees wear sturdy work boots in order to prevent injuries and to keep his insurance premiums down. That sounded like classic Bello.

The black man also said he had never seen the pick before.

Then I rang the chimes on the front door of the Lujan home and was let inside by the maid.

I have either visited or investigated homicide scenes for over thirty-five years. Clete Purcel and I cut down a corpse that had been hanging in a warehouse for four months. We dug one dancing with maggots out of a wall. We scraped a twentieth-floor jumper off the steel stairs of a fire escape. We had to use tweezers to pick the remnants of one out of a compacted automobile. Twenty-five years ago I saw the interior of a house after rogue members of NOPD had put a hit on a whole family. Murder is an up-close and personal business, and rarely does a journalistic account do it justice. You want a capital sentence in a homicide prosecution? Make sure the jury gets the opportunity to study some color photographs before they go into deliberation.

But the worst part of any homicide investigation usually involves notification and questioning of family members. They want to know if their loved ones suffered, if they died in a brave or cowardly fashion, if the body was degraded. Often their eyes beg, but not for the truth. They want you to lie. And often that is exactly what you do.

Mrs. Lujan did not fall into the category I just described. In fact, when I was escorted by the maid onto the sunporch, I was stunned by what I saw. Mrs. Lujan was standing up with the aid of a walker, dressed in a pink skirt and white blouse, her face bright with purpose, her hair brushed and tied with a ribbon in back. She extended her hand and smiled wanly.

“How are you, Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.

“I’m sorry to bother you at a time like this. I can come back later if you like,” I said.

“Call me Valerie. You’re only carrying out the obligations of your office,” she said. “Do me a favor, though. Would you open the jalousies and let the mist in? I love the cool smell of the morning. When I was a child in New Orleans, I loved the coolness of the mist blowing in from Lake Pontchartrain. My father often took me to the amusement park by the water’s edge. Do you remember the amusement park on the lake?”

Her detachment from Bello ’s murder might have been written off as the effects of shock or perhaps even a thespian attempt to deal with tragedy in a dignified fashion. But I believed that in the mind of Valerie Lujan all the grief the world could expect of her had already been extracted by the death of her son, and she felt no shame in refusing to mourn a husband whose sexual appetites had taken him far from his wife’s bed.

“Did Bello give you any indication that Whitey Bruxal might have wanted him dead?” I said.

“Why would Mr. Bruxal want to harm Bello? Tony was friends with Slim, but Bello didn’t associate with Mr. Bruxal.”

“They were business partners.”

“They may have invested in the same enterprises, but they were hardly partners.” She eased herself down on the couch and sighed pleasantly. “My, it feels good to stand up. I’m volunteering at the university to teach a noncredit drama course. I haven’t done anything so uplifting in years.”

“I see.”

“You don’t think well of me, do you?”

I dropped my eyes. “I think you’ve carried a heavy load much of your life, ma’am.”

“I spoke by telephone this morning with my spiritual adviser, Reverend Alridge. His insight has helped me enormously. My husband was a racist, pure and simple. He sexually exploited Negro women and consequently inflamed their men. That may have contributed to Monarch Little’s murdering my son. Now it may have cost Bello his life as well.”

“You’re saying Monarch Little killed your husband?”

“If I understand correctly, Bello was killed with a maddox or a pick of some kind. You’re a realist and I don’t think given to political correctness, Mr. Robicheaux. Who else except a depraved Negro criminal would kill like that?”

I looked away from the glare in her eyes. In my mind’s eye I saw Monarch Little in his baggy pants and weight lifter’s shirt, with an oversize ball cap askew on his head. I also saw the two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes, with gas cushions in the soles, that he wore as part of his cartoon-character persona.

Wrong fashion choice, Monarch.

“Come visit me again, Mr. Robicheaux. Somehow something good will come out of all of this. I have faith for the first time in years. I hope you find it, too,” Mrs. Lujan said.

Her unevenly recessed eyes were liquid with the warmth of her own sentiment. I had the feeling Mrs. Lujan had just taken up serious residence in the kingdom of the self-deluded and would be a long time in freeing herself from it.

I DROVE TO the rural slum on the bayou, just outside the city limits, where Monarch lived. A junker car was parked in the drive, but no one answered the door. His neighbor, an elderly black woman picking up trash from a drainage ditch, told me Monarch was in town.

“He’s working?” I said.

“His mother died. I ain’t sure what he’s doin’.”

“Died? I thought his mother was coming home from the hospital.”

“She had a heart attack two days ago. Monarch gone off wit’ his friends. They t’rowed all their beer cans in my li’l yard. Tell Monarch he ought to be ashamed of hisself, his mother not yet in the ground.”

“Ashamed why?”

She picked up a crushed beer can, threw it hard in her gunnysack, and didn’t reply.

I drove back to New Iberia and crossed the Teche on the drawbridge at Burke Street. The water was high on the green slope of the banks, the surface dimpled with rain, and black people were fishing with cane poles and cut bait from under the bridge. Then I turned down Railroad Avenue into New Iberia’s old brothel district, the one place in our town’s history where indeed the past had never become the past.