But even at that age I had already started my long commitment to sour mash straight up with a sweating Jax on the side. Bootsie and I would go separate ways, far from Bayou Teche and the provincial Cajun world in which we had grow up. I would make the journey to Vietnam as one of our new colonials and return with a junkyard in my hip and thigh and nocturnal memories that neither whiskey nor army hospital dope could kill. She would marry an oil-field pilot who would later tip a guy wire on an offshore rig and crash his helicopter right on top of the quarter-boat; then she would discover that her second husband, an accounting graduate from Tulane, was a bookkeeper for the Mafia, although his career with them became short-lived when they shotgunned him and his mistress to death in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack.

She had lupus disease that we had knocked into remission with medication, but it still lived in her blood like a sleeping parasite that waited for its moment to attack her kidneys and sever her connective tissue. She was supposed to avoid hard sunlight, but again and again I came home from work and found her working in the yard in shorts and a halter, her hot skin filmed with sweat and grains of dirt.

"Did something happen at work?" she said.

"I had some trouble at Del's."

"What?"

"I busted up one of Baby Feet Balboni's lowlifes."

"In the restaurant?"

"Yeah, that's where I did it."

"What did he do?"

"He put his hand on me." I set down my soda can and propped my forearms on my thighs. I looked out at the sun's reflection in the brown water.

"Have you been back to the office?" she said.

"Not yet. I'll probably go in later."

She was quiet a moment.

"Have you talked to the sheriff?" she asked.

"There's not really much to talk about. The guy could make a beef but he won't. They don't like to get messed up in legal action against cops."

She uncrossed her legs and brushed idly at her knee with her fingertips.

"Dave, is something else going on, something you're not telling me about?"

"The guy put his hand on my shoulder and I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I would have done it if this guy named Manelli hadn't stepped in front of me."

I saw her breasts rise and fall under her shirt. Far down the bayou Batist was towing a second boat behind his outboard and the waves were slapping the floating hyacinths against the banks. She got up from her chair and stood behind me. She worked her fingers into my shoulders. I could feel her thigh touch my back.

"New Iberia is never going to be the same place we grew up in. That's just the way things are," she said.

"It doesn't mean I have to like it."

"The Balboni family was here a long time. We survived, didn't we? They'll make their movie and go away."

"There're too many people willing to sell it down the drain."

"Sell what?"

"Whatever makes a dollar for them. Redfish and sac-a-lait to restaurants, alligators to the Japanese. They let oil companies pollute the oyster beds and cut canals through the marsh so salt water can eat up thousands of square miles of wetlands. They take it on their knees from anybody who's got a checkbook."

"Let it go, Dave."

"I think a three-day open season on people would solve a lot of our problems."

"Tell the sheriff what happened. Don't let it just hang there."

"He's worried about some guys at the Chamber of Commerce, Bootsie. He's a good guy most of the time, but these are the people he's spent most of his life around."

"I think you should talk to him."

"All right, I'm going to take a shower, then I'll call him."

"You're not going to the office?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe later."

Batist cut the engine on his boat and floated on the swell into the dock and bumped against the strips of rubber tire we had nailed to the pilings. His shirt was piled on the board seat beside him, and his black shoulders and chest were beaded with sweat. His head looked like a cannon-ball. He grinned with an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.

I was glad for the distraction.

"I was up at the fo'-corners," he said. "A man there said you mopped up the restaurant flo' with one of them dagos."

Thanks, Batist, I thought.

I SHOWERED IN WATER THAT WAS SO COLD IT LEFT ME breathless, changed clothes, and drove to the bottling works down by the Vermilion River in Lafayette. The two-story building was an old one, made of yellow brick, and surrounded by huge live-oak trees. In back was a parking lot, which was filled with delivery trucks, and a loading dock, where a dozen black men were rattling crates of soda pop out of the building's dark interior and stacking them inside the waiting trucks. Their physical strength was incredible. Some of them would pick up a half-dozen full cases at a time and lift them easily to eye level. Their muscles looked like water-streaked black stone.

I asked one of them where I could find Twinky Hebert Lemoyne.

"Mr. Twinky in yonder, in the office. Better catch him quick, though. He fixin' to go out on the route," he said.

"He goes out on the route?"

"Mr. Twinky do everyt'ing, suh."

I walked inside the warehouse to a cluttered, windowed office whose door was already open. The walls and cork boards were papered with invoices, old church calendars, unframed photographs of employees and fishermen with thick-bellied large-mouth bass draped across their hands. Lemoyne's face was pink and well-shaped, his eyebrows sandy, his gray hair still streaked in places with gold. He sat erect in his chair, his eyes behind his rimless glasses concentrated on the papers in his hands. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a loose burnt-orange tie (a seersucker coat hung on the back of the chair) and a plastic pen holder in his pocket; his brown shoes were shined; his fingernails were trimmed and clean. But he had the large shoulders and hands of a workingman, and he radiated the kind of quiet, hard-earned physical power that in some men neither age nor extra weight seems to diminish.

There was no air conditioning in his office, and he had weighted all the papers on his desk to keep them from blowing away in the breeze from the oscillating fan.

After I had introduced myself, he gazed out at the loading dock a moment, then lifted his hands from the desk blotter and put them down again as though somehow we had already reached a point in our conversation where there was nothing left to be said.

"Can I sit down?" I said.

"Go ahead. But I think you're wasting your time here."

"It's been a slow day." I smiled at him.

"Mr. Robicheaux, I don't have any idea in the world why either you or that Mexican woman is interested in me. Could you be a little bit more forthcoming?"

"Actually, until yesterday I don't believe I ever heard your name."

"What should I make of that?"

"The problem is you and a few others tried to stick a couple of thumbtacks in my boss's head." I smiled again.

"Listen, that woman came into my office yesterday and accused me of working with the Mafia."

"Why would she do that?"

"You tell me, please."

"You own half of a security service with Murphy Doucet?"

"That's right, I surely do. Can you tell me what y'all are looking for, why y'all are in my place of business?"

"When you do business with a man like Julie Balboni, you create a certain degree of curiosity about yourself."

"I don't do business with this man, and I don't know anything about him. I bought stock in this motion picture they're making. A lot of business people around here have. I've never met Julie Balboni and I don't plan to. Are we clear on this, sir?"

"My boss says you're a respected man. It looks like you have a good business, too. I'd be careful who I messed with, Mr. Lemoyne."