"Wow, the old giant killer never lets you down," he said.

That night I helped Batist in the bait shop, but I couldn't let go of Perry LaSalle's smug complacency. I picked up the phone and called him at his home on Poinciana Island.

"Just a footnote to our conversation this afternoon," I said. "Legion Guidry physically abused Barbara Shanahan in public. He called her a bitch and almost broke her hand. This is the woman you supposedly care about. In the meantime, you denigrate Clete Purcel for going after the guy who hurt her. In this case the guy is your client."

"I didn't know this."

My hand was squeezed tight around the phone receiver, another heated response already forming in my throat. But suddenly I was robbed of my anger.

"You didn't know?" I said.

"Legion did that to Barbara?" he said.

"Yes, he did."

He didn't reply and I thought the line had gone dead.

"Perry?"

"I apologize for saying what I did about Purcel. Is Barbara all right? I can't believe Legion did that. That rotten son of a bitch," he said.

On Saturday morning I called Clete's apartment, but there was no answer and his machine was turned off. I tried again Sunday morning, with the same result. That afternoon I hitched my outboard and trailer to the pickup and headed toward Bayou Benoit and stopped at Clete's apartment on the way. He was lying in a recliner by the pool like a beached whale, his body glowing with lotion and sunburn, a bottle of vodka and a tall glass filled with crushed ice and cherries by his elbow. "Where have you been?" I asked.

"Me? Just messing around. You know how it is," he said.

"You look very content. Relaxed. Free of tension."

"Must be the weather," he said, smiling behind his sunglasses.

"How's Zerelda?"

"She said to tell you hello," he said.

"I think you're about to run over a land mine."

"I had a feeling you might say that." He slipped his sunglasses up on his head and gazed at my truck and boat in the parking lot. "We going fishing?"

A half hour later I cut the engine on the outboard and we floated into a quiet stretch of cypress-dotted water on Bayou Benoit, our wake sliding through the tree trunks into the shore. There were stormheads in the south, but the sky was brassy overhead, the wind hot and smelling of salt and dead vegetation inside the trees. I clipped a rubber worm on my line and made a long, looping cast into a cove that was rimmed with floating algae.

On the ride out to the landing Clete had tried to sustain his insouciant facade, refusing to be serious, his eyes crinkling whenever I showed concern about his reckless and self-destructive behavior. But now, in the dappled light of the trees, the thunder banging in the south, I could see shadows steal across his eyes when he thought I wasn't looking.

"I'm right, you and Zerelda are an item again?" I said.

"Yeah, you could call it that."

"But you don't feel too good about it?"

"Everything's copacetic there. That kid, Marvin Oates, was around yesterday, but Zerelda told him to take a hike."

"What?" I said.

"She finally got tired of wet-nursing him. She spent a whole day looking for him in the Iberville Project, then he showed up at the motor court drunk So yesterday she told him he should spend more time on his criminal justice studies or find some friends more his age."

"You've got something on your mind, Cletus."

"This character Legion Guidry," he said. Unconsciously he wiped his palms on his pants when he said the name. "When I dragged him off that counter stool, I could smell an odor on him. It was awful. It was like shit and burnt matches. I had to wash it off my hands."

I reeled in my artificial worm and cast it against a hollow cypress trunk and let it sink through the algae to the bottom of the cove. He waited for me to say something, but I didn't.

"What, I sound like I've finally become a wetbrain?" he said.

I started to tell him about my experience breaking into Legion's house, but instead I opened the ice chest and took out two fried-oyster po'-boy sandwiches and handed one to him.

"This is guaranteed to help you lose weight and make you younger at the same time," I said.

"I smelled it, Dave. I swear. I wasn't drunk or hungover. This guy really bothers me," he said, his face conflicted with thoughts he couldn't resolve.

CHAPTER 26

Monday morning the sky was black, veined with lightning over the Gulf. Right after I checked into the department I went to see Barbara Shanahan in the prosecutor's office. She was dressed in a gray suit and white blouse, her face defensive and vaguely angry.

"If you're here to talk about something of a personal nature, I'd rather we do that after business hours," she said.

"I'm here about Amanda Boudreau."

"Oh," she said, her face coloring slightly.

"I want to pick up both Tee Bobby Hulin and Jimmy Dean Styles," I said.

"What for?" '

"I think we can find out once and for all what happened to Amanda. But we have to keep Perry LaSalle away from Tee Bobby."

She was standing behind her desk. She pushed a couple of pieces of paper around on her desk blotter with the ends of her fingers.

"This office won't be party to any form of procedural illegality," she said.

"You want the truth about what happened to that girl or not?" I asked.

"You heard what I said."

"Yeah, I did. It sounds a little self-serving, too." I saw the anger sharpen in her face and I changed my tone. "You need to be in the vicinity when Tee Bobby and Styles are interviewed."

"All right," she replied. She stared out the window. The wind was blowing hard, bending the trees along the railway tracks, bouncing garbage cans through the streets. "You pissed off at me about Clete?"

"He went to jail for you and you eighty-sixed him," I said.

"He was talking about 'clipping' Legion Guidry. You think I want to see him in Angola over me? Why don't you give me a little goddamn credit?" she said.

"Clete is hurt more easily and deeply than people think," I said.

"Actually, I like you, Dave. You probably don't believe that, but I do. Why are you so cruel?"

Her eyes were moist, the whites a light pink, as though they had been touched by iodine.

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

I went back to my office and called the number of the Boom Boom Room.

"Is Jimmy Sty there?" I said.

"He'll be here in a half hour. Who want to know?" a man's voice said.

"It's okay. Tell him I'll see him tonight," I said.

"Who see him tonight?" the voice asked.

"He'll know," I said, and hung up.

Then I called Ladice Hulin's number on Poinciana Island.

"It's Dave Robicheaux, Ladice. Is Tee Bobby home?" I said.

"He's still sleeping," she replied.

"I'll talk with him later. Don't worry about it," I said.

"Somet'ing going on?" she said.

"I'll get back to you," I said, and eased the receiver down.

I went down the corridor to the office of Kevin Dartez, the department plainclothes who worked Narcotics exclusively and bore a legendary grudge against pimps and dope dealers for the death of his sister.

When I opened his office door, he was tilted back in his chair, talking on the phone while he squeezed a hand exerciser in his palm.

"Maybe if you pulled your head out of your cheeks and did your job, we wouldn't be having this conversation," he said into the receiver, then quietly hung up. He had narrow bones in his face and jet-black hair that he oiled and combed straight back. His needle-nose cowboy boots and pencil-line mustache and wide red tie, a tiny pair of silver handcuffs pinned in the center, made me think of an early-twentieth-century lawman or perhaps a Los Vegas cardplayer of the kind you didn't cross.