"Sorry to bother you, Leona, but Marvin has an appointment at the sheriff's department," I said.

At first her face jerked with surprise. Then she grinned and straightened her shoulders and pushed back her hair.

"Dave Robicheaux come to see me? I love you, darlin', and would run off wit' you in a minute, but I'm all tied up right now," she said.

"I realize that, Leona. But how about returning the money you were holding for Marvin so we can be on our way?" I said.

"He want me to have it. Tole me so wit' his hand on his heart," she said, rubbing the top of Marvin's head.

Helen came through the front of the house, whirled Leona against the table, and kicked her feet apart. She pulled a sheaf of bills from Leona's pocket. "You take anything else from him?" she said.

"No, ma'am," Leona said.

"Where'd you get the rock?" Helen said, holding up a two-inch plastic vial with a tiny cork in the top.

"Don't know where that come from," Leona said.

"Is that your baby in the other room?" Helen said.

"Yes, ma'am. He's eighteen months now," Leona said.

"Then go take care of him. I catch you turning tricks again, I'm going to roust Jimmy Sty and tell him you dimed him," Helen said.

"Can I have the rock back?" Leona said.

"Get out of here," Helen said. She picked up Marvin's shirt and draped it on his shoulders and put his hat on his head.

"Let's go, cowboy," she said, and pushed him ahead of her toward the front door.

It had started to rain. The trees were blowing on the bayou, and the air was cool and smelled like dust and fish spawning.

Marvin began putting on his shirt, drawing it over the network of scars on his back.

"Who did that to you, partner?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied. "Sometimes I almost remember. Then I go inside in my head and don't come out for a long time. It's like I ain't s'pposed to remember some things."

Helen looked at me. I picked up Marvin's suitcase and placed it in the trunk of the cruiser, then shut the hatch and opened the back door for him.

"Why'd you get drunk?" I asked.

"No reason. I got beat up in the Iberville Project. I looked all over for Miss Zerelda, but she was gone. I dint know where she went," he replied.

"Think you can stay out of this part of town for a while?" I asked.

"I ain't gonna drink no more. No, sir, you got my word on that," he said. He shook his head profoundly.

Helen and I got in front. She started the engine, then turned and looked back through the wire-mesh screen that separated us from Marvin Oates. Lightning splintered the sky on the other side of the pecan trees that lined the coulee.

"Marvin, have you ever noticed you never answer a question directly? Can you tell us why that is?" she said.

"The Bible is my road map. The children of Israel used it, too. They crossed the Red Sea of destruction and God done seen them safely through. That's all I can say," he replied.

"That's very illuminating. Thanks for sharing that," she said, and shifted the cruiser into gear.

Fifteen minutes later we dropped him in front of his house. He hefted his suitcase out of the trunk and ran through the rain, his straw hat clamped on his head, his hand-tooled cowboy boots splashing on the edge of the puddles in his tiny yard, his shirt flapping in the wind.

"You think those scars on his back are from hot cigarettes?" Helen asked.

"That'd be my guess."

"It's a great life, huh?" she said.

I'm sure I knew a glib reply to her remark, which she had obviously intended to hide her feelings, but the image of a child being systematically burned, probably by a parent or stepparent, was just too awful to talk about

Through the window I saw a man walk against the red light at the intersection, a heavy piece of rolled canvas draped over his shoulders, like a cross, his unlaced work boots sloshing through the water.

"Let's take that fellow to the shelter," I said.

"You know him?" Helen said.

"He was a medic in my outfit. I saw him in New Orleans. He must have hopped a freight back to New Iberia."

She turned in the seat and looked into my face. "Run that by me again."

"When I was hit, he carried me piggyback into the slick and kept me alive until we got to battalion aid," I said.

"I'm a little worried about you, Pops," she said.

CHAPTER 23

I rose before dawn the next morning and walked down to the dock to help Batist open up. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk and heated an egg sandwich and ate breakfast by an open window above the water and listened to the moisture dripping out of the trees in the swamp and the popping of bluegill that were feeding along the edge of the hyacinths. Then the stars went out of the sky and the wind dropped and the stands of flooded cypresses turned as gray as winter smoke. A moment later the sun broke above the rim of the earth, like someone firing a furnace on the far side of the swamp, and suddenly the tree trunks were brown and without mystery, streaked with night damp, their limbs ridged with fern and lichen, the water that had been layered with fog only moments ago now alive with insects, dissected by the V-shaped wakes of cottonmouths and young alligators.

I washed my dishes in the tin sink and was about to walk back up to the house when I heard a car with a blown muffler coming down the road. A moment later Clete Purcel came through the bait shop door, wearing new running shoes, elastic-waisted, neon-purple shorts that bagged to his knees, a tie-dye strap undershirt that looked like chemically stained cheesecloth on his massive torso, and his Marine Corps utility cap turned sideways on his head.

"What d'you got for eats?" he asked.

"Whatever you see," I replied.

He went behind the counter and began assembling what he considered a healthy breakfast: four jelly doughnuts, a quart of chocolate milk, a cold pork-chop sandwich he found in the icebox, and two links of microwave boudin. He glanced at his watch, then sat on a counter stool and began eating.

"I'm jogging three miles with Barbara this morning," he said.

"Three miles? Maybe you should pack another sandwich."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked.

"Nothing," I replied, my face blank.

"I've done some more checking on our playboy lawyer LaSalle. If I were you, I'd take a closer look at this guy."

"Would you?"

"Big Tit Judy Lavelle says he's got a half-dozen regular pumps in the Quarter alone. She says his flopper not only has eyes, it's got X-ray vision. A female walks by and it pokes its way out of his fly."

"So what?" I said.

"So he's hinky. Sex predators can have college degrees, too. He uses people, then throws them over the gunnel. He got it on with both Barbara and Zerelda, then treated them like yesterday's ice cream. His whole family made their money on other people's backs. You see a pattern here?"

"You're saying you don't like him?"

"Talk to Big Tit Judy. She used the term 'inexhaustible needs.' Gee, I wonder what she means by that."

"I'd better get to work. How are things going with you and Barbara?"

He crumpled up a paper napkin and dropped it on his plate. He started to speak, then shrugged his shoulders, his face chagrined.

"My feelings seem a little naked?" he said.

"I wouldn't say that."

"You're sure a bum liar."

I walked with him to his car, then watched him drive down the dirt road, his convertible top down, a Smiley Lewis tape blaring from his loudspeakers, determined not to let mortality and the exigencies of his own battered soul hold sway in his life.

I went to the office, but I couldn't quite shake a thought Clete had planted in my head. His thinking and behavior were eccentric, his physical appetites legendary, his periodic excursions into mayhem of epic proportions, but under it all Clete was still the most intelligent and perceptive police officer I had ever known. He not only understood criminals, he understood the society that produced them.