"I carry ear plugs and use a gun that makes an exit hole like a half-dollar. See?"

Joe screwed a rubber plug into his ear, then removed it and put it back in his coat pocket.

"There's a building with a steeple on it across the bayou. You keep looking at it and don't turn around till sunrise. If you want your brains running out your nose, turn around while I'm still here. Remember my name. Joe Zeroski. You want to make yourself some cash, come see me with the name of the man killed my daughter. You want to lose your life, fuck with me just once."

Minutes later the moving van and the two cars drove away.

At dawn the pastor of a ramshackle fundamentalist church, with a wood cross and a facsimile of a bell tower nailed on the roof, walked down the sloping green lawn of his rectory to take his wash off the clothesline. He stopped in the mist drifting off the bayou and stared openmouthed at a row of black men kneeling on the opposite bank, their hands clasped on the crowns of their skulls like prisoners of war in a grainy black-and-white news film.

CHAPTER 11

The sheriff was surprisingly calm and reflective as he sat down in my office Monday morning.

"For years I've been trying to put these pimps and drug dealers out of business. Then the goddamn Mafia comes in and does it in one night," he said.

"They'll be back," I said.

"What do you know about this guy Zeroski?"

"He's an old-time mechanic. Supposedly, he hung it up after he accidentally shot a child by the St. Thomas Project."

"Eventually we've got to run him out of town. You know that, huh?"

"Easier said than done," I replied.

The sheriff got up from his chair and gazed out the window at the old crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery. "Who beat you up, Dave?" he said.

At noon I signed out of the office to interview a woman in St. Mary Parish, down the bayou, who claimed to have awakened in the middle of the night to find a man standing over her. She said the man had worn leather gloves and a rubber mask made in the image of Alfred E. Neuman, the grinning idiot on the cover of Mad magazine. The man had tried to suffocate her by pressing his hands down on her mouth and nose, then had fled when the woman's dog attacked him.

Unfortunately for her, she was uneducated and poor, a cleaning woman at a motel behind a truck stop, and had filed reports of attempted rape twice in the past. The city police had blown off her claims, and I was about to do the same when she said, "He smelled sweet inside his mask, like there was mint on his breath. He was trembling all over." Then her work-worn face creased with shame. "He touched me in private places."

It wasn't the kind of detail that people imagined or manufactured. But if the intruder at her home had any connection to the death of either Linda Zeroski or Amanda Boudreau, I couldn't find it. I handed her my business card.

"You coming back to hep me?" she said, looking up at me from a kitchen chair.

"I work in Iberia Parish. I don't have any authority here," I said.

"Then why you got me to tell you all them personal t'ings?" she asked.

I had no answer. I left my card on her kitchen table.

An hour later I asked a cop at the entrance of the casino on the Indian reservation where I could find the man named Legion, then walked inside, into the smell of refrigerated cigarette smoke and rug cleaner, through banks of slot and video-poker machines, past crap and blackjack tables and a fast-food bar and an artificial pond with a painted backdrop that was meant to look like a cypress swamp, a stone alligator half submerged in the water, its mouth yawning open among the coins that had been thrown at it.

The man named Legion was at the bar in a darkened cocktail lounge, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror that was trimmed with red and purple neon. His eyes looked at me indifferently in the mirror when I sat down on the stool next to him and hung my cane from the edge of the bar. A waitress in a short black skirt and fishnet stockings set a napkin down in front of me and smiled.

"What will you have?" she asked.

"A Dr Pepper on ice with some cherries in it. Mr. Legion here knows me. He comes around to my house sometimes. Put it on his tab," I said.

At first she thought she was listening to a private joke between Legion and me, then she glanced at his face and her smile went away and she made my drink without looking up from the drainboard.

I hooked my coat behind the butt of the.45 automatic I carried in a clip-on holster.

"T'es un pederaste, Legion?" I asked.

His eyes locked on mine in the mirror. Then he brought his cigarette up to his mouth and exhaled smoke through his nose and tipped the ash into his coffee saucer, his eyes following the woman behind the bar now.

"You don't talk French?" I said.

"Not wit' just anybody."

"I'll ask you in English. You a homosexual, Legion?"

"I know what you doin'. It ain't gonna work, no," he replied.

"Because that's the impression you left me with. Maybe raping those black women convinced you there's not a girl buried down inside you."

He rotated the burning tip of his cigarette in his coffee saucer until the fire was dead. Then he fastened a button on his shirt pocket and straightened his tie and looked at his reflection in the mirror.

"Go back to the kitchen and see if they got my dinner ready," he said to the barmaid.

I turned on my stool so I was looking at his profile.

"I'm a superstitious man, so I went to see a traiture about you," I lied. "My traiture friend says you got a gris-gris on you. Those women you forced yourself on, Mr. Julian, his poor wife who burned up in the fire, a man you murdered outside a bar in Morgan City? Their spirits all follow you around, Legion, everywhere you go."

The skin wrinkled under his right eye. He turned his head slowly and stared into my face.

"What man in Morgan City?"

"He was a writer. From somewhere up North. You shot him outside a bar."

"You found that in an old newspaper. It don't mean anyt'ing."

"You shot him twice. His coat caught fire from the muzzle flash. The second time you shot him on the ground."

His mouth parted and his eyes narrowed and stayed fixed on mine.

From my shirt pocket I removed a dime I had drilled a hole through early that morning, then strung on a piece of looped red string. I pushed the dime across the bar toward his coffee cup.

"The traiture said you should carry this on your ankle, Legion."

"Like a nigger woman, huh?" he said, and pitched the dime into the bottles behind the bar.

The barmaid came out of the kitchen with a tray. She took a plate of rice and gravy and stewed chicken and string beans off the tray and set it in front of Legion with a napkin and knife and fork.

"Anything wrong here, Legion?" she asked.

"Not wit' me," he replied, and tucked his napkin into his shirt and picked up his silverware.

"Why would you kill a writer from up North?" I said.

He leaned over his plate and opened his mouth to shovel in a fork piled with food. His face suddenly slanted sideways.

Then I would have sworn his voice and accent actually changed, that it seemed to rumble and echo out of a cavern that was far larger in circumference and depth than his size.

"You'd better leave me the fuck alone," it said.

I felt my scalp recede against my skull. I got up from my stool, my face suddenly cold and moist in the air-conditioning.

I wiped my forehead on my coat sleeve and picked up my cane. When I did, the man called Legion looked ordinary again, a workingman bent over his dinner, his lips smacking his food.