"Not quite."

"The blood settles out in the lowest areas of where the body is lying. The pictures show the woman curled up on her side on the floor of the Buick. Her head was higher than her knees. But the autopsy indicates that she was lying full length on her back at the time of death. She also had high levels of alcohol and cocaine in her blood. I suspect she may have been passed out when she died."

"She was shot somewhere else and moved?"

"Unless the dead are walking around on their own these days."

"You've really been a friend, Sollie."

"Do you ever carry anything but a.45? A nine-millimeter or a.357 sometimes?"

"No, I've always carried the same Colt.45 auto I brought back from Vietnam."

"How many people know that?"

"Not many. Mostly cops, I guess."

"That thought would trouble me. So long, Robicheaux."

But the moment was not one for brooding. I walked back to the hot-dog stand and bought snowballs for a half-dozen kids. When a baseball bounced my way from the diamond, I scooped it up in my palms, rubbed the roughness of the horse hide, fitted my fingers on the stitches, and whipped a side-arm slider into the catcher's glove like I was nineteen years old and could blow a hole through the backstop.

That night I called Lou Girard at his home in Lafayette, told him about my conversations with the coroner and the mulatto woman across from the bar, and asked him if anyone had vacuumed the inside of the Buick.

"Dave, I'm afraid this case isn't the first thing on everybody's mind around here," he said.

"Why's that?"

"The detective assigned to it thinks you're a pain in the ass and you should have stayed in your own territory."

"When's the last time anyone saw Amber Martinez?"

"Three or four days ago. She was a bender drinker and user. She was supposed to be getting out of the life, but I think she'd work up a real bad Jones and find a candy man to pick up her tab until she ended up in a tank or a detox center somewhere."

"Who was her pimp?"

"Her husband. But he's been in jail the last three weeks on a check-writing charge. Whoever killed her probably got her out of a bar someplace."

"Yeah, but he knew her before. He used another woman to keep leaving Amber's name on messages at my office."

"If I can get the Buick vacuumed, what are we looking for?"

"I know I saw gun flashes inside the car. But there weren't any holes in the front of the bar. See what you come up with."

"Like what?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't you forget the forensic bullshit and concentrate on what your nose tells you?"

"What's that?"

"This isn't the work of some lone fuckhead running around. It has the smell of the greaseballs all over it. One smart greaseball in particular."

"You think this is Julie's style?"

"I worked two years on a task force that tried to get an indictment on the Bone. When he gets rid of a personal enemy, he puts a meat hook up the guy's rectum. If he wants a cop or a judge or a labor official out of the way, he does it long distance, with a whole collection of lowlifes between him and the target."

"That sounds like our man, all right."

"Can I give you some advice?"

"Go ahead."

"If Balboni is behind this, don't waste your time trying to make a case against him. It doesn't work. The guy's been oiling jurors and judges and scaring the shit out of witnesses for twenty years. You wait for the right moment, the right situation, and you smoke him."

"I'll see you, Lou. Thanks for your help."

"All right, excuse me. Who wants to talk about popping a cap on a guy like Balboni? Amber Martinez probably did herself. Take it easy, Dave."

At six the next morning I took a cup of coffee and the newspaper out on the gallery and sat down on the steps. The air was cool and blue with shadow under the trees and the air smelled of blooming four o'clocks and the pecan husks that had moldered into the damp earth.

While I read the paper I could hear boats leaving my dock and fishermen's voices out on the water. Then I heard someone walking up the incline through the leaves, and I lowered the newspaper and saw Mikey Goldman striding toward me like a man in pursuit of an argument.

He wore shined black loafers with tassels on them, a pink polo shirt that hung out of his gray slacks, and a thick gold watch that gleamed like soft butter on his wrist. His mouth was a tight seam, down-turned at the corners, his jaw hooked forward, his strange, pale, bulging eyes flicking back and forth across the front of my house.

"I want a word with you," he said.

"How are you today, Mr. Goldman," I said.

"It's 6 a.m., I'm at your house instead of at work; I got four hours' sleep last night. Guess."

"Do I have something to do with your problem?"

"Yeah, you do. You keep showing up in the middle of my problem. Why is that, Mr. Robicheaux?"

"I don't have any idea."

"I do. It's because Elrod had got some kind of hard-on for you and it's about to fuck my picture in a major way."

"I'd appreciate it if you didn't use that kind of language around my home."

"You got a problem with language? That's the kind of stuff that's on your mind? What's wrong with you people down here? The mosquitoes pass around clap of the brain or something?"

"What is it you want, sir?"

"He asks me what I want?" he said, looking around in the shadows as though there were other listeners there. "Elrod doesn't like to see you get taken over the hurdles. Frankly I don't either. Maybe for other reasons. Namely nobody carries my load, nobody takes heat for me, you understand what I'm saying?"

"No."

He cleared something from a nostril with his thumb and forefinger.

"What is it with you, you put your head in a bucket of wet cement every morning?" he asked.

"Can I be frank, too, Mr. Goldman?"

"Be my guest."

"A conversation with you is a head-numbing experience. I don't think any ordinary person is ready for it."

"Let me try to put it in simple words that you can understand," he said. "You may not know it, but I try to be a fair man. That means I don't like somebody else getting a board kicked up his ass on my account. I'm talking about you. Your own people are dumping on you because they think you're going to chase some big money out of town. I leave places or I stay in places because I want to. Somebody gets in my face, I deal with it, personal. You ask anybody in the industry. I don't rat-fuck people behind their back."

I set down my coffee cup, folded the newspaper on the step, and walked out into the trees toward his parked automobile. I waited for him to follow me.

"Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?" I said.

"No, of course not. I'm just out here to give you my personal profile. Listen to me, I'm going to finish this picture, then I'm never coming back to this state. In fact, I'm not even going to fly over it. But in the meantime no more of my people are going to the hospital."

"What?"

"Good, the flashbulb went off."

"What happened?" I said.

"Last night we'd wrapped it up and everybody had headed home. Except Elrod and this kid who does some stunt work got loaded and Elrod decides he's going to 'front Julie Balboni. He picks up a Coke bottle and starts banging on Julie's trailer with it. Julie opens the door in his jockey undershorts, and there's a twenty-year-old local broad trying to put on her clothes behind him. So Elrod calls him a coward and a dago bucket of shit and tells him he can fix him up in L.A. with Charlie Manson's chippies, like they got hair under their arms and none on their heads and they're more Julie's speed. Then El tells him that Julie had better not cause his buddy Robicheaux any more grief or El's going to punch his ticket for him, and if he finds out Julie murdered Kelly he's going to do it anyway, big time, with a shotgun right up Balboni's cheeks.