"Barbara took LaSalle home and cleaned up his cuts and fed him soup and, guess what, they end up doing the horizontal bop.

"Guess what again? LaSalle comes around a few more times for some more boom-boom, then turns her off like she doesn't exist."

"This means he has thumbtacks in his head?" I asked.

"A guy who dumps a woman like Barbara Shanahan? Either he's got shit for brains or he's a closet bone-smoker."

"You called her a woman instead of a broad," I said. Clete raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, I guess I did," he said.

The phone rang. When I got finished with the call, Clete was gone. I caught him at his car, out by the boat ramp.

"The other day the sheriff told me somebody slashed Legion Guidry's truck tires. You were seen in the neighborhood," I said.

"That's a heartbreaking story," he said.

"Stay out of it, Cletus."

"The show is just getting started, big mon," he replied, and drove away.

The following Monday I drove down East Main, past the antebellum and gingerbread homes along the Teche and the shady lawns scattered with the bloom of azalea bushes. I parked by the Shadows, where a tourist bus was unloading, and crossed the street and entered a two-story Victorian house that had been remodeled into the law offices of Perry LaSalle. It was like entering a monument to the past.

Three secretaries sat behind computers in the front office, phones ringing, a fax machine pumping laser-printed correspondence into a basket, but these concessions to modern times were clearly overwhelmed in significance by an enormous glass-encased, sun-faded Confederate battle flag that had been carried by members of the 8th Louisiana Volunteers, its cloth rent by grapeshot or minnie balls, the names Manassas Junction, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Cross Keys, Malvern Hill, Chantilly, and Gettysburg inked into brown patches that were hand-stitched along the flag's border. Oil paintings of LaSalles hung over the fireplace and between the high windows. A Brown Bess musket used by one of them at the Battle of New Orleans was propped on the mantelpiece, a framed letter of gratitude written to Perry's ancestor by Andrew Jackson resting on the flintlock mechanism.

But it was not the LaSalles' historical memorabilia that captured my attention. Through the window I saw a tall man backing a fire-engine-red pickup truck out the driveway. He wore a flower-print shirt and a straw hat, with the brim slanted over his forehead, but I could see the vertical furrows in his face, like those on a prune.

The secretary told me I could go upstairs to Perry's office.

"You look a little battered. What happened?" Perry said from behind his desk.

"Bad day on the job. You know how it is. Who was that backing his truck out your driveway?"

Perry gazed out the window at the traffic passing on the street. "Oh, that fellow?" he said casually. "That's Legion, the guy you were asking about once before."

"He's your client?"

"I didn't say that."

"Then what's he doing here?"

"None of your business."

I sat down without being asked.

"You know the name William O'Reilly?" I asked.

"No."

"He was a writer from New York. Legion shot him to death outside a bar in Morgan City."

Perry picked up a pen and rotated it in his fingers, men dropped it back on his desk. His office shelves were filled with law and historical books and leather-bound biographies of the classical world. A photograph of the legendary Cajun musician Iry Lejeune hung on the wall. An old canvas golf bag stuffed with mahogany drivers stood in the corner like a reminder of an earlier, more leisurely time.

"Legion's a leftover from a bygone era. I can't change what he is or what he's done," Perry said. "Sometimes he needs money. I give it to him."

"I had a recent encounter with this man. I think he's evil. I don't mean bad. I mean evil, in the strictest theological sense."

Perry shook his head. His brownish-black hair was untrimmed and curly at the back of his neck, his eyes deeply blue inside his tanned face. "I thought I'd heard it all," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Here's an old man, an illiterate Cajun, who is as much victim as he is victimizer, and you make him out to be the acolyte of Satan."

"Why is it I always have the sense you glow with blue fire, while the rest of us bumble our way through the moral wilderness?" I said.

"You really know how to go for the throat, Dave."

"Next time you see Legion, ask him why a police officer would spit in his food," I said, and got up to go.

"Somebody spit in his food? You?" Perry put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars. He laughed to himself. "You're a heck of a guy, Dave. By the way, Tee Bobby Hulin passed a he detector test. He didn't rape or shoot Amanda Boudreau."

That afternoon I met Clete Parcel for coffee at McDonald's on East Main.

"So what?" he said. "You get the right polygraph expert, you get the right answers. No Duh Dolowitz always said he could throw the machine off by scrunching his toes."

"Maybe I've helped set up an innocent man."

"If they're not guilty for one caper, they're guilty for another. Innocent people don't leave their DNA on the person of a murder victim. That kid probably should have been poured out with the afterbirth, anyway."

I finished my coffee and watched a group of black kids dribbling a basketball down the sidewalk under an oak tree. Clete began to relate another detailed account of his ongoing problems with Zerelda Calucci. He caught the look on my face.

"What, you got to be someplace?" he asked.

"To tell you the truth-"

"I'll make it fast. Last night I'm grilling a steak with her on the little patio by her cottage, trying to find the right words to use, you know, so I can kind of ease on out of what I've gotten myself into without getting hit with a flowerpot. But she keeps brushing against me, pulling the meat fork out of my hand and flipping the steak like I'm a big kid who doesn't know what he's doing, smoothing my shirt on my shoulders, humming a little tune under her breath.

"Then for no reason she puts her arms around my neck and pushes her stomach up against me and plants one on my mouth, and suddenly I'm sort of in an awkward manly state again and I'm thinking maybe there's no need to toss our situation over the gunnels all at once.

"Just when I'm about to suggest we move our operation indoors I hear somebody behind us and I turn around and there's that hillbilly Bible salesman again, dressed in a white sports coat with a red carnation and his hat in his hand. He goes, 'I dint know if you found the Bible and the rose I left for you.'

"Zerelda goes, 'Oh, that was so sweet.'

"So of course I step in my own shit and say, 'Yeah, thanks for coming around. We'd invite you to have supper with us, but you've probably already eaten, so why don't you come back another time?'

"Zerelda goes, 'Clete, I don't believe your rudeness.'

"I say, 'Sorry. Stay and eat. Maybe if I roast some potatoes there'll be enough for three.'

"She says, 'Well, just eat by yourself, Clete Purcel.' And the two of them walk on down the street to the ice cream parlor. I've gotten blown out of the water twice by a meltdown who pulls a suitcase full of magazines and Bibles around town on a roller skate. My self-esteem is on a level with spit on the sidewalk."

"It sounds like you're off the hook with Zerelda. Count your blessings," I said.

He rubbed his face against his hand. I could hear his whiskers against his skin.

"After Zerelda and Gomer are gone, Frankie Dogs comes up to me and says, 'I seen that guy before.'

"I ask him where, like at that point I really care.

"Frankie Dogs says, 'He used to sell vacuum cleaners to the niggers up Tchoupitoulas. The vacuum cleaners cost four hundred dollars, but they were Korean junk. He'd talk the niggers into signing a loan they'd never get out of.'