"I'm afraid we're operating on two different wavelengths here," I said.

"Yeah? The guy next to you takes a round, and then maybe you start wondering if you aren't secretly glad it was him instead of you. Am I wrong?"

"What do you want?"

He rubbed the curly locks of salt-and-pepper hair on his neck and rolled his eyes around the room. The skin around his mouth was taut, his chin and jaw hooked in a peculiar martial way like a drill instructor's.

"Elrod's going to go crazy on me. I know it, I've seen him there before. He's a good kid, but he traded off some of his frontal lobes for magic mushrooms a long time ago. He likes you, he'll listen to you. Are you following me?"

"No."

"You keep him at your place, you stay out at his place, I don't care how you do it. I'm going to finish this picture."

"You're an incredible man, Mr. Goldman."

"What?" He began curling his fingers backward, as though he wanted to pull words from my chest. "You heard I got no feelings, I don't care about my actors, movie people are callous dipshits?"

"I never heard your name before you came to New Iberia. It seems to me, though, you have only one thing on your mind-getting what you want. Anyway, I'm not interested in taking care of Elrod Sykes."

"If I get my hands on the fuckhead who shot Kelly, you're going to have to wipe him off the wallpaper."

"Eventually we're going to get this guy, Mr. Goldman. But in the meantime, the vigilante histrionics don't float too well in a sheriff's department. Frankly, they're not too convincing, either."

"What?"

"Ask yourself a question: How many professional killers, and the guy who did this is a professional killer, could a rural parish like this have? Next question: Who comprises the one well-known group of professional criminals currently with us in New Iberia? Answer: Julie Balboni and his entourage of hired cretins. Next question: Who's in a movie partnership with these characters?"

He leaned back in his chair, bouncing his wrists lightly on the chair's arms, glancing about the room, his eyes mercurial, one moment almost amused, then suddenly focused on some festering inner concern.

"Mr. Goldman?" I said.

"Yeah? You got something else to say?"

"No, sir, not a thing."

"Good. That's good. You're not a bad guy. You've just got your head up your hole with your own problems. It's just human."

"I see. I'm going down the hall for a cup of coffee now," I said. "I suspect you'll be gone when I get back."

He rose to his feet and flexed a kink out of his back. He unwrapped a short length of peppermint candy and stuck it in his jaw.

"You want one?" he said.

"No, thanks."

"Don't pretend to be a Rotary man. I checked out your background before I asked you to babysit Elrod. You're as crazy as any of us. You're always just one step away from blowing up somebody's shit."

He cocked his finger, pointed it at me, and made a hollow popping sound with his mouth.

That night I dreamed that I was trying to save a woman from drowning way out on the Gulf of Mexico. We were sliding down a deep trough, the froth whipping across her blond curls and bloodless face, her eyes sealed against the cobalt sky. Our heads protruded from the water as though they had been severed and placed on a plate. Then her body turned to stone, heavier than a marble statue, and there was no way I could keep her afloat. She sank from my arms, plummeting downward into a vortex of spinning green light, down into a canyon hundreds of feet below, a gush of air bubbles rising from a pale wound in her throat.

ROSIE CAME THROUGH THE DOOR, CLUNKED HER PURSE LOUDLY on her desk, and began rummaging through the file cabinet. She had to stand on her toes to see down into the top drawer.

"You want to have lunch today?" she asked.

"What?"

"Lunch… do you want to have lunch? Come in, Earth."

"Thanks, I'll probably go home." Then as an afterthought I said, "You're welcome to join us."

"That's all right. Another time." She sat down behind her desk and began shifting papers around in a couple of file folders. But her eyes kept glancing up into my face.

"Have you got something on your mind?" I asked.

"Yeah, you."

"You must be having an uneventful day."

"I worked late last night. The dispatcher and I had a cup of coffee together. He asked me how I was getting along here, and I told him real good, no complaints. Then he asked me if I'd experienced any more smart-aleck behavior from some of the resident clowns in the department. I told him they'd been perfect gentlemen. I bet you can't guess what he said next."

"You got me."

She imitated a Cajun accent. " 'Them guys give you any mo' trouble, you just tell Dave, Miz Rosie. He done tole 'em what's gonna happen the next time they bother you.' "

"He was probably exaggerating a little bit."

"You didn't need to do that for me, Dave."

"I apologize."

"Don't be a wise-ass, either."

"Boy, you're a pistol."

"How should I take that?"

"I don't know. How about easing up?"

"Don't count on it."

She rested one small hand on top of the other. She had the same solid posture behind her desk that I remembered in the nuns at the elementary school I attended.

"You look tired," she said.

"I have bouts of insomnia."

"You want to talk about what happened out on the bayou?"

"No."

"Do you feel guilty about it?"

"What do you think I feel? I feel angry about it."

"Why?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"Do you feel angry because you couldn't control what happened? Do you think somehow you're to blame for her death?"

"What if I said 'yes to all the above'? What difference would it make? She's dead."

"I think beating up on yourself has about as much merit as masturbation."

"You're a friend, Rosie, but let it go."

I busied myself with my paperwork and did not look back up for almost a minute. When I did, her eyes were still fixed on me.

"I just got some interesting information from the Bureau about Julie Balboni," she said. She waited, then said, "Are you listening?"

"Yes."

"This year N.O.P.D. Vice has closed up a half-dozen of his dirty movie theaters and two of his escort services. His fishing fleet just went into bankruptcy, too." When I didn't respond, she continued. "That's where he laundered a lot of his drug money. He'd declare all kinds of legitimate profits to the IRS that never existed."

"That's how all the wiseguys do it, Rosie. In every city in the United States."

"Except the auditors at the IRS say he just made a big mistake. He came up with millions of dollars for this Civil War movie and he's going to have a hard time explaining where he got it."

"Don't count on it."

"The IRS nails their butts to the wall when nobody else can."

I sharpened a pencil over the wastebasket with my pocket knife.

"I have the feeling I'm boring you," she said.

"No, you're just reviving some of my earlier misgivings."

"What?"

"I think your agency wants Julie's ass in a sling. I think these murders have secondary status."

"That's what you think, is it?"

"That's the way it looks from here."

She rose from her chair, closed the office door, then stood by my desk. She wore a white silk blouse with a necklace of black wooden beads. Her fingers were hooked in front of her stomach like an opera singer's.

"Julie's been a longtime embarrassment to the feds," I continued. "He's connected to half the crime in New Orleans and so far he's never spent one day in the bag."

"When I was sixteen something happened to me that I thought I'd never get over." There was a flush of color in her throat. "Not just because of what two drunken crew leaders did to me in the back of a migrant farmworkers' bus, either. It was the way the cops treated it. In some ways that was even worse. Have I got your attention, sir?"