"What do you mean?"

"We busted the massage parlor a couple of times and she wasn't working there anymore. One of the other broads said Julio Segura moved her out to his place. That don't mean anything, though. He does that all the time, then he gets tired of them, gives them a few balloons of Mexican brown, and has that dwarf chauffeur of his drive them to the bus stop or back to the crib."

"You're unbelievable."

"You think a guy like him is interested in snuffing whores? Write it off, Robicheaux. You're wasting your time."

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Guidry walked into the office I shared with Clete. He was fifty and lived with his mother and belonged to the Knights of Columbus. But recently he had been dating a widow in the city water department, and we knew it was serious when the captain began to undergo a hair transplant. His gleaming bald scalp was now inlaid with tiny round divots of transplanted hair, so that his head looked like a rock with weeds starting to grow on it. But he was a good administrator, a straight arrow, and he often took the heat for us when he didn't have to.

"Triple-A called and said they towed in your car," he said.

"That's good," I said.

"No. They also said somebody must have broken all the windows out with a hammer or a baseball bat. What went on over there with the sheriff's department, Dave?"

I told him while he stared at me blankly. I also told him about Julio Segura. Cletus kept his face buried in our file drawer.

"You didn't make this up? You actually cuffed two sheriff's deputies to their own car?" the captain said.

"I wasn't holding a very good hand, Captain."

"Well, you probably had them figured right, because they haven't pursued it, except for remodeling your windows. You want to turn the screws on them a little? I can call the state attorney general's office and probably shake them up a bit."

"Clete and I want to go out to Segura's place."

"Vice considers that their territory," Captain Guidry said.

"They're talking about killing a cop. It's our territory now," I said.

"All right, but no cowboy stuff," he said. "Right now we don't have legal cause to be out there."

"Okay."

"You just talk, let him know we're hearing things we don't like."

"Okay, Captain."

He rubbed his fingernail over one of the crusted implants in his head.

"Dave?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Forget what I said. He's threatening a New Orleans police officer and we're not going to tolerate it. Put his head in the toilet. Tell him it came from me, too."

Oleander, azalea, and myrtle trees were planted thickly behind the scrolled iron fence that surrounded Segura's enormous blue-green lawn. Gardeners were clipping the hedges, watering the geranium and rose beds, cutting away the dead brown leaves from the stands of banana trees. Back toward the lake I could see the white stucco two-story house, its red tile roof gleaming in the sun, the royal palms waving by the swimming pool. Someone sprang loudly off a diving board.

A muscular Latin man in slacks and a golf shirt came out the front gate and leaned down to Clete's window. There were faded tattoos under the black hair on his forearms. He also wore large rings on both hands.

"Can I help you, sir?" he said.

"We're police officers. We want to talk to Segura," Clete said.

"Do you have an appointment with him?"

"Just tell him we're here, partner," Clete said.

"He's got guests right now."

"You got a hearing problem?" Clete said.

"I got a clipboard with some names on it. If your name's on it, you come in. If it ain't, you stay out."

"Listen, you fucking greaseball…" Without finishing his sentence, Clete got out of the car and hit the man murderously in the stomach with his fist. The man doubled over, his mouth dropped open as though he had been struck with a sledgehammer, and his eyes looked like he was drowning.

"Got indigestion troubles? Try Tums," Clete said.

"What's the matter with you?" I said to him.

"Nothing now," he said, and pushed back the iron gate so we could drive through. The Latin man held on to the fence with one hand and labored to get his breath back. We drove up the driveway toward the stucco house. I continued to look at Clete.

"You never worked vice. You don't know what kind of scum these bastards are," he said. "When a greaseball like that gets in your face, you step all over him. It defines the equations for him."

"Did you get drunk last night?"

"Yeah, but I don't need an excuse to bash one of these fuckers."

"No more of it, Clete."

"We're in, aren't we? We're the surprise in Julio's afternoon box of Cracker Jacks. Look at that bunch by the pool. I bet we could run them and connect them with every dope deal in Orleans and Jefferson parishes."

About a dozen people were in or around the clover-shaped pool. They floated on rubber rafts in the turquoise water, played cards on a mosaic stone table and benches that were anchored in the shallow end, or sat in lawn chairs by the slender gray trunks of the palms while a family of dwarf servants brought them tall tropical drinks filled with fruit and ice.

Clete walked directly across the clipped grass to an umbrella-shaded table where a middle-aged man in cream-colored slacks and a yellow shirt covered with blue parrots sat with two other men who were as dark as Indians and built like fire hydrants. The man in the print shirt was one of the most peculiar-looking human beings I had ever seen. His face was triangular-shaped, with a small mouth and very small ears, and his eyes were absolutely black. Three deep creases ran across his forehead, and inside the creases you could see tiny balls of skin. On his wrist was a gold watch with a black digital dial, and he smoked a Bisonte with a cigarette holder. The two dark men started to get up protectively as we approached the table, but the man in the yellow and blue shirt gestured for them to remain seated. His eyes kept narrowing as though Clete's face were floating toward him out of a memory.

"What's happening, Julio?" Clete said. "There's a guy out front puking his lunch all over the grass. It really looks nasty for the neighborhood. You ought to hire a higher-class gate man."

"Purcel, right?" Segura said, the recognition clicking into his eyes.

"That's good," Clete said. "Now connect the dots and figure out who this guy with me is."

One of the dark men said something to Segura in Spanish.

"Shut up, greaseball," Clete said.

"What do you think you're doing, Purcel?" Segura asked.

"That all depends on you, Julio. We hear you're putting out a very serious shuck about my partner," Clete said.

"Is this him?" Segura asked.

I didn't answer. I stared straight into his eyes. He puffed on his cigarette holder and looked back at me without blinking, as though he were looking at an object rather than a man.

"I heard you been knocking the furniture around," he said finally. "But I don't know you. I never heard of you, either."

"I think you're a liar," I said.

"That's your right. What else you want to tell me today?"

"Your people killed a nineteen-year-old girl named Lovelace Deshotels."

"Let me tell you something, what's-your-name," he said. "I'm an American citizen. I'm a citizen because a United States senator introduced a bill to bring me here. I got a son in West Point. I don't kill people. I don't mind Purcel and his people bothering me sometimes. You got la mordida here just like in Nicaragua. But you don't come out here and tell me I kill somebody." He nodded to one of the dark men, who got up and walked to the house. "I tell you something else, too. You know why Purcel is out here? It's because he's got a guilty conscience and he blames other people for it. He took a girl out of a massage parlor in the French Quarter and seduced her in the back of his car. That's the kind of people you got telling me what morality is."