"I say, 'Thanks for telling me that, Frankie.'

"Frankie goes, 'He was around three or four times looking for Zerelda. Joe don't want him here. You ain't got to worry about him kicking you out of the sack.'"

Clete blew air out his nose and picked up his coffee cup and stared out the window, as though he couldn't believe the implication that the success of his love life was dependent upon the Mafia's intercession.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Nothing. I moved out of the motor court. Why is stuff like this always happening to me?" he said.

Search me, I thought.

The next day I tried to concentrate on the investigation into the murder of Linda Zeroski. But the pimps and crack dealers and street whores who had been Linda's friends all stonewalled me and I got absolutely nowhere. I had another problem, too. I could not get the man named Legion off my mind. In the midst of a conversation or a meal, I would see his mouth leaning down to mine and smell the tobacco odor of his breath, the dried testosterone on his clothes, and I would have to break from whatever I was doing and walk away from the curious stares I received from others.

The first story I had heard about Legion had been told to me by Batist's sister. I remembered her describing Legion's arrival on Poinciana Island and the ex-convict who had taken one look at the new overseer and leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles into New Iberia, never to return, even for his pay.

I made a phone call to a retired Angola gun-bull by the name of Buttermilk Strunk, then signed out of the office and drove to a small pepper farm and tin-roofed white frame house not far from the entrance of the prison. Buttermilk was not a rotund, happy, doughlike creature, as his name might suggest. Instead, he was one of those for whom psychiatrists and theologians do not have an adequate category.

It is difficult to describe in a convincing way the kind of place Angola was in the Louisiana of my youth, primarily because no society wishes to believe itself capable of the kinds of abuse that occur when we allow our worst members, usually psychopaths themselves, to have sway over the powerless.

For the inmates on the Red Hat gang, which was assigned to the levee along the river, it was double time and hit-it-and-git-it from sunrise to sunset, or what the guards called "cain't-see to cain't-see." The guards on the Red Hat gang arbitrarily shot and killed and buried troublesome convicts without ever missing a beat in the work schedule. The bones of those inmates still rest, unmarked, under the buttercups and the long green roll of the Mississippi levee.

The sweatboxes were iron cauldrons of human pain set in concrete on Camp A, where Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Welch did their time. Convicts who passed out on work details were stretched on anthills. Trusty guards, mounted on horseback and armed with chopped-down double-barreled shotguns, had to serve the time of any inmate they let escape. There was a high attrition rate among convicts who tried to run.

I sat at the kitchen table with Buttermilk Strunk, the curtains puffing in the breeze. His face was like a pie plate, his skin almost hairless, his eyes baby-blue, so pure in color they seemed incapable of moral doubt. His breath wheezed inside his massive chest, and he smelled of soap and talcum powder and the whiskey he drank from a jelly glass. His shirt was scissored off below his nipples, and the place where his liver was located looked as if a football had been sewn beneath the skin there. After he had retired from the prison, he had worked for five years for the state police. Whenever a convict ran, the state always called upon Buttermilk Strunk to bring him back. Buttermilk killed eight men and never returned a living convict to the prison system.

"Remember a guard named Legion, Cap? Maybe last name of Guidry?" I asked.

His eyes left mine uncertainly, then came back. "He worked at Camp I. That's when it was half female," he replied.

"Know much about him?"

"They run him off. Some of the colored girls said he was molesting them."

"That's all you recall about him?"

"Why you want to know?"

"I've had trouble with him."

He started to take a drink from his jelly glass, then set it down. He got up from the table and poured his glass in the sink and rinsed it under the faucet.

"Did I say something wrong?" I asked.

"You read much of Scripture?"

"A bit"

"Then you seen his name before. Don't you drag that man into my life and don't you tell nobody I was talking about him, either. You best be on your way, Mr. Robicheaux," he said, his mouth puckered, his eyes steadfastly avoiding mine.

The next day Barbara Shanahan showed me a side to her character that made me reconsider all my impressions about her.

CHAPTER 13

She had gone to bed early, then had been awakened near midnight by a dream of a hard-bodied bird thudding against her window glass. She sat up in bed and looked out the back window but saw only the tops of banana trees and the green slope of her yard that dead-ended against the rear wall of a nineteenth-century brick warehouse. Then she heard the sound again.

She put on a robe and looked out the front window on Bayou Teche and the dark cluster of oaks and the gray stone presence of the ancient convent across the water. She realized the sound came from below her feet, down in the garage, where she parked her car.

She pulled out the drawer to her desk and removed a.25-caliber automatic. In the kitchen she opened the door to the enclosed stairwell that led downstairs and switched on the light. The garage door was shut, locked electronically from the inside, and her tan Honda four-door gleamed softly under the overhead light, its surfaces waxed and immaculately clean. Her ten-speed bicycle, her snow skis and alpine rock-climbing equipment she took to Colorado and Montana on vacation were all placed neatly on hooks and wall shelves, her nylon backpacks and winter jackets glowing with all the colors of the rainbow.

But as she descended the stairs she could feel a presence that didn't belong there, a violation of the fresh white paint on the garage walls, the cement floor that did not have a drop of oil on it, the cleanliness and order that always seemed to define the environment Barbara chose to live in. She smelled an odor, like unwashed hair, bayou water, clothing that had started to rot. A window on the side wall had been pried open, the wall marked with black scuffs from someone's shoes or boots.

She moved around the front of her car and under the window saw a shape curled inside the tarp she used to cover her vegetable garden when there was frost.

She pulled back the slide on the.25 and released it, snicking the small round off the top of the magazine into the chamber.

"If you like, I can just shoot through the canvas. Tell us what your decision is," she said.

Tee Bobby Hulin uncovered his face and pushed himself up on his palms, his back against the wall. His eyes looked scalded; his hair was like dirty string. He wore a pullover, a moth-holed black sweater that emanated an eye-watering stench.

"What in the world do you think you're doing?" Barbara asked.

"I ain't got no place to go. You got to hep me, Miss Barbara," he said.

"Are you retarded? I'm the prosecutor in your case. I'm going to ask that you be sentenced to death."

He covered his head with his arms and pressed his face down on the tops of his knees. His left forearm was perforated with needle tracks that had become infected and looked like a tangle of knotted red wire under his skin.