Diment takes another hit of rum and holds the bottle out toward me. I have another slug.

“That business with the dog,” Diment says, shaking his head. “We talk about that one, Byron and me. I tell him killing the dog is not so bad – not by itself. A dog is just a chicken with a tail.”

“What do you mean?”

Diment ignores my reaction. “What was bad was killing the animal just to watch it bleed. I tell him, ‘Byron, no one got anything out of that, least of all you.’ So the dog’s death was a waste. A waste of juju.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing,” Diment announces.

“I don’t get it.”

He gestures toward the altar. “The answer you seek is right here. It’s right in front of you.”

I stare at the altar, but all I see is a panorama of weird tchotchkes.

“But I can’t tell you any more,” Diment says.

“But you haven’t told me anything. Do you know where Byron is? How can I reach him?”

Diment looks sorry about it, but he shakes his head. “Something you don’t understand, my friend. Byron is part of the bizango. We’re a closed circle. I tell you more about him, I break the faith.”

Pinky starts to list reasons why Diment should help us, including money. I plead with the doctor. But Diment is resolute. He’ll say no more.

“My lip is sealed,” he jokes.

“There’s gotta be a way around this,” Pinky suggests. “There’s always a way.”

“One way, maybe,” Diment tells us. “If the man here wants to learn more, he’ll have to become a part of the bizango. Then, we have no secrets from each other.”

“Fine,” I say. “Where do I sign up?”

Diment laughs. “It’s not that easy. There’s a ceremony. Initiation.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Some people uncomfortable with it,” Diment tells me. “Because you have to have faith – in me, the bizango. Then you’ll be born again in vaudoo. And a part of us.”

“I have to ‘have faith’?”

“You don’t have to believe any particular thing,” Diment says. “It’s like getting on the airplane. You put yourself in the hands of the pilot and those who built the plane. You put yourself in their trust. You fasten your seat belt. You roll down the runway. You don’t understand what keeps the airplane up in the sky, you don’t know the people driving the machine, but still you get on, buckle up, and trust that you goin’ to end up where you want to go. It’s like that. You put your faith in the bizango. You go through the initiation. You trust us.” He stretches his hands out to his sides in a gesture of fairness and rationality.

“I don’t know,” Pinky says. “I’ve heard these things can be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Diment says. “Sure. Crossing the street is dangerous. With the loa, we call them up, we know them, but we can’t control them, no.”

“Is this the only way you’ll tell me more about Byron?”

“That is true,” Diment says, nodding.

“Then let’s go. Count me in.”

“You’re sure?” Diment asks me.

“Absolutely.”

“Then come back at midnight.”

“Tonight?”

Diment nods, and then he gets up and heads for the door. As we weave a path through the poor souls hunkered down in the heat and darkness, Diment asks a question that seems to come right out of left field. “What size you wear?”

“What size?”

“Yes!” He seems annoyed. “What size do you wear?”

“Forty-two regular,” I tell him.

“Ahhhh,” Diment says. “That’s perfect.” He pulls the beads aside. Pinky and I step through into the front yard, and the beads fall closed behind us with a kind of liquid rustle.

It’s like leaving a matinee. I’m blinded. An image from Diment’s altar seems to float before me in the sun haze: a painted icon showing two boys, each with a golden orb around his head, each holding a feather quill. Twins. I wonder what that means. I’ll have to ask Diment. Pinky’s car emits a little beep, and I hear the mechanical thunk as its door locks pop open.

“Whoa,” Pinky says, once we’re inside. “I’m not sure I’d be keeping any future appointments with Doctor D. there.”

“I don’t know. What was that question about my size?”

“I doubt he’s gonna kill you for your Gap khakis, but who knows?” Pinky says, turning the key and rolling down the windows. We lurch forward. “The guy looks like a death’s head! Don’t that worry you, pardner? And why’s he want to know what size you wear? And that stuff about ‘a puppy is just a chicken with a tail’? What’s he mean by that, huh? I’m thinking he means that anything alive is nothin’ but a life force, something that could be sacrificed. What if he’s feelin’ that way about you?”

“Yeah,” I say. But the truth is, it’s hard for me to work up any fear about Doctor Diment. Or worry about anything that might happen to me. I’m all played out on the fear front.

“You’re not really going there?”

I shrug. “I’m thinking about it.”

All the way back to the Holiday Inn, Pinky tries to talk me out of it. “It’s crazy! You don’t know this guy – or what crazy thing he might do. That lip, man. I can’t believe you, drinkin’ that rum! You see how skinny he was? Who knows what he’s got? His eyeballs looked yellow to me. You’re talking AIDS, hep C, who knows? And voodoo – it’s nothin’ you want to mess with. Not at all. It’s all blood and drugs and bullshit… I say let’s see what Maldonado says. Look, you can always go back to this guy if you have to.”

“Yeah, we’ll see,” I tell Pinky.

Pinky has a service called OnStar, which he calls his “traveling concierge.” He punches it on, secures Maldonado’s number, and then instructs the machine to call the reporter.

“Hey!” Maldonado’s voice booms from the dashboard. “Good news, Pink. I called up the doctor who admitted Claude when the ambulance brought him in. Sam Harami. If not for Sam, Byron would have got away with murder. The death probably would have gone down as ‘natural causes.’”

“You saying what, Max?”

“I’m saying this is the guy really figured out old Claude had been poisoned. He’s a friend of mine and he’s ready to join us for dinner if you’re buying.”

“My pleasure,” Pinky tells him.

While they go back and forth, figuring out where to meet for dinner, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get out to Chez Diment later tonight. Even though Pinky thinks it’s a bad idea to go, maybe he’ll lend me his car or give me a ride. If not, I guess I can take a taxi.

But I’m definitely going. I think of the dimes, the bowls of water, mementos left to me by Boudreaux. Somehow I know that if I’m going to find him, the man with the death’s head face will be the one to point the way.

We’re supposed to meet Max Maldonado at Prideaux’s Eat Place. It’s an upscale restaurant in the countryside outside New Iberia, a pretty town a few miles from Morgan City. We’re escorted to a table by the window, where a small gray-haired man bounces out of his seat at our approach. This is Maldonado, “seventy-five years young,” as he later puts it. The compression of age, familiar to me from the ongoing shrinkage of my father, seems only to have concentrated this man’s energy.

“Pinky!” he says, with an enthusiastic pump of the hand. “It’s been way too long, baby.”

Pinky introduces us.

“Pleased to meetcha, pleased to meetcha. And this quiet fella here” – he indicates a black-haired Asian man to his left – “this is Sam Harami.” Harami raises his glass in acknowledgment.

“Would you like a drink?” the waitress asks.

“Absolutely,” Pinky tells him. He orders a Jack on the rocks. I ask for a draft beer.

“So… Byron Boudreaux,” Maldonado says. “Remember when that son-of-a-bitch got out, Sam?”

Harami nods.

“We all took a deep breath when he got popped loose, I can tell you that. Checking our backs.”