The truck jerked and sputtered all the way to the entrance of the movie location at the lake. I pulled off the dirt road onto the grass by the security building where Murphy Doucet worked and opened the hood. He stepped out the door in his gray uniform and bifocals.

"What's wrong, Dave?" he asked. His glasses had half-moons of light in them. His blue eyes jittered back and forth when he looked at me.

"It looks like a loose wire on the voltage regulator." I felt at my pants pocket. "Do you have a knife I could use?"

"Yeah, I ought to have something."

I followed him inside his office. His work table was covered with the balsa-wood parts of an amphibian airplane. In the middle of the blueprints was a utility knife with a detachable blade inset in the aluminum handle. But his hand passed over it and opened a drawer and removed a black-handled switchblade knife. He pushed the release button and the blade leaped open in his hand.

"This should do it," he said. "A Mexican pulled this on me in Lake Charles."

"I didn't know you were a cop in Lake Charles."

"I wasn't. I was out on the highway with the State Police. That's what I retired from last year."

"Thanks for the loan of the knife."

I trimmed the insulation away from the end of the loose wire and reattached it to the voltage regulator, then returned the knife to Murphy Doucet and drove into the grove of oak trees by the lake. When I looked in the rearview mirror Doucet was watching me with an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

The cast and crew were just finishing lunch by the water's edge at picnic tables that were spread with checkered cloths and buckets of fried chicken, potato salad, dirty rice, cole slaw, and sweating plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Alafair sat on a wood bench in the shade, next to Elrod, the lake shimmering behind her. She was dressed like a nineteenth-century street urchin.

"What happened to your clothes?" I said.

"I'm in the movie, Dave!" she said. "In this scene with Hogman and Elrod. We're walking down the road with a plantation burning behind us and the Yankees are about to take over the town."

"I'm not kidding you, Dave," Elrod said. He wore a collarless gray shirt, officer's striped trousers, and black suspenders. "She's a natural. Mikey said the same thing. She looks good from any camera angle. We worked her right into the scene."

"What about Tripod?" I said.

"He's in it, too," Alafair said.

"You're kidding?"

"We're getting him a membership in the Screen Actors Guild," Elrod said.

Elrod poured a paper cup of iced tea for me. The wind blew leaves out of the trees and flapped the corners of the checkered table covers. For the first time that day I could smell salt in the air.

"This looks like the good life," I said.

"Don't be too quick to judge," Elrod said. "A healthy lifestyle in southern California means running three miles on the beach in the morning, eating bean sprouts all day, and shoving five hundred bucks' worth of coke up your nose at night."

The other actors began drifting away from the table to return to work. Tripod was on his chain, eating a drumstick by the trunk of a tree. On the grass next to him was a model of a German Messerschmitt, its wooden fuselage bright with silver paint, its red-edged iron crosses and Nazi swastikas as darkly beguiling as the light in a serpent's eye.

"I gave her that. I hope you didn't mind," Elrod said.

"Where'd you get it?"

"From Murph, up there at the security building. I'm afraid he thinks I can get him on making props for Mikey or something. I think he's kind of a lonely guy, isn't he?"

"I don't know much about him."

"Alafair, can you go find Hogman and tell him we need to do that scene again in about fifteen minutes?" Elrod said.

"Sure, El," she said, swung her legs over the bench, scooped Tripod over her shoulder, and ran off through the trees.

"Look, El, I appreciate your working Alafair into your movie, but frankly I don't want her out here as long as Julie Balboni's around."

"I thought you heard."

"What?"

"Mikey's filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. He's eighty-sixing the greaseballs out of the corporation. The last thing those guys want is the court examining their finances. He told off Balboni this morning in front of the whole crew."

"What do you mean he told him off?"

"He said Balboni was never going to put a hand on one of Mikey's people again. He told him to take his porno actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his ass back to New Orleans. I was really proud of Mikey… What's the matter?"

"What did Julie have to say?"

"He cleaned his fingernails with a toothpick, then walked out to the lake and started talking to somebody on his cellular phone and skipping rocks across the water at the ducks."

"Where is he now?"

"He drove off with his whole crew in his limo."

"I'd like to talk with Mr. Goldman."

"He's on the other side of the lake."

"Ask him to call me, will you? If he doesn't catch me at the office, he can call me at home tonight."

"He'll be back in a few minutes to shoot the scene with me and Hogman and Alafair."

"We're not going to be here for it."

"You won't let her be in the film?"

"Nobody humiliates Julie Balboni in front of other people, El. I don't know what he's going to do, but I don't want Alafair here when he does it."

The wind had turned out of the south and was blowing hotly through the trees when we walked back toward my truck. The air smelled like fish spawning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were massing in a long, low humped line on the southern horizon.

Later, after I had taken Alafair home and checked in at the office, I drove to Opelousas to talk once again with the old jailer Ben Hebert. A black man raking leaves in Hebert's yard told me where I could find him on a bayou just outside of town.

He sat on top of an inverted plastic bucket under a tree, his cane pole extended out into the sunlight, his red bobber drifting on the edge of the reeds. He wore a crushed straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a hand-rolled saliva-soaked cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth. The layers of white fat on his hips and stomach protruded between his shirt and khakis like lard curling over the edges of a washtub.

Ten feet down from him a middle-aged mulatto woman with a small round head, a perforated dime tied on her ankle, was also fishing as she sat on top of an inverted bucket. The ground around her was strewn with empty beer cans. She spit snuff to one side and jigged her line up and down through a torn hole in a lily pad.

Ben Hebert pitched his cigarette out onto the current, where it hissed and turned in a brown eddy.

"Why you keep bothering me?" he said. There was beer on his breath and an eye-watering smell in his clothes that was like both dried sweat and urine.

"I need to know what kind of work DeWitt Prejean did," I said.

"You what?" His lips were as purple as though they had been painted, his teeth small and yellow as pieces of corn.

"Just what I said."

"You leave me the hell alone."

I sat down on the grass by the edge of the slope.

"It's not my intention to bother you, Mr. Hebert," I said. "But you're refusing to cooperate with a police investigation and you're creating problems for both of us."

"He done… I don't know what he done. What difference does it make?" His eyes glanced sideways at the mulatto woman.

"You seem to have a good memory for detail. Why not about DeWitt Prejean?"

The woman rose from her seat on the bucket and walked farther down the bank, trailing her cork bobber in the water.

"He done nigger work," Hebert said. "He cut lawns, cleaned out grease traps, got dead rats out from under people's houses. What the fuck you think he did?"