I told the sheriff the story of Marie Guilbeau. He leaned back and tapped the heels of his hands on the arms of his chair. He was thinking about the case now and I could see his irritation with me slipping out of his eyes.

"I don't buy it. Oates is simpleminded. He doesn't have any history of violence," he said.

"None we know about. I want to get a warrant and take his place apart."

"Do it," the sheriff said. "Are you going to talk to Perry LaSalle?"

"What did Legion say exactly?" I asked.

"I never got it straight. LaSalle doesn't sound rational. He says this guy Guidry isn't human. What's he talking about?"

Helen Soileau went to work on the warrant while I called Perry at his office. Outside the window I could see a round blue place in the sky and birds trapped inside it. Perry's secretary said he had not come to the office yet. I called his number on Poinciana Island.

"Legion threatened Clete and Barbara?" I said.

"Yeah, on the phone, late last night. He threatened me, too. He thinks I'm writing a book about him," he replied. I could hear him breathing into the receiver.

"You told Barbara?"

"Yeah, she said she has a pistol and she's looking forward to parking one in his buckwheats."

"Did you warn Clete?" I asked.

"No."

"Why not?" I asked.

"I just didn't."

Because he's of no value to you, I thought.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"Nothing. You told the sheriff Legion wasn't human. What did you mean?"

His voice make an audible click in the phone.

"He can speak in what sounds like an ancient or dead language. He did it last night," he said.

"It's probably just bad French," I said, and quietly hung up.

I looked at the phone, my ears popping, and wondered how Perry enjoyed being lied to for a change, particularly when he was frightened to death.

I called Clete twice and got his answering machine. I left messages both times. By late that afternoon Helen and I had a warrant to search Marvin Oates's shotgun house on St. Peter Street. Marvin was not at home, but we called the landlord and got him to open the house. It had stopped raining and the sky overhead was blue and ribbed with pink clouds, but out over the Gulf another storm was building and the thunder reverberated dully through Marvin's tin roof as we dumped out all his drawers, pulled his clothes off hangers, flipped his mattress upside down, raked all the cookware out of his kitchen cabinets, and generally wreaked havoc on the inside of his house.

But we found nothing that was of any value to us.

Except five strips of pipe tape hanging loose from an empty niche in the back of the dresser, tape that was strong enough to hold a handgun in place against the wood.

"I bet that's where he hid the nine-millimeter he used to kill Frankie Dogs," I said.

"It's still hard for me to make that guy for anything except a meltdown, Dave," Helen said.

"I knew an old-time moonshiner who once told me the man who kills you will be at your throat before you ever know it," I said.

"Yeah? I don't get it," she said.

"What kind of guy could get close enough to cap Frankie Dogs?" I said.

Before I went home that evening I drove to Clete's apartment, but his blinds were closed and his car was gone. I slipped a note under his door, asking him to call me.

When I got home, the sky was maroon-colored, full of birds, the thunderheads over the Gulf banked in a long black line just above the horizon. One of Alafair's friends was spending the night and had blocked the driveway with her automobile, and I parked my truck by the boat ramp and walked up to the house. A few minutes later I looked through the front window and saw my friend, the ex-soldier, hosing down the truck, then scrubbing the camping shell in back with a long-handled push broom.

I walked back down the slope.

"There's another storm coming. Maybe you should wait on washing the truck," I said.

"That's okay. I just want to get the mud off. Then later I can just run the hose over it," he said.

"How you getting along?" I asked.

"I had a little trouble sleeping. The sound of your refrigeration equipment comes through the walls. When I put the pillow over my head, I don't hear it so much."

"You want to join us for supper?"

"That's all right, Loot. I went into town with Batist and bought some groceries," he said.

I turned to walk back to the house.

"There was an old guy here in a red pickup truck," he said. "He asked if somebody in a purple Cadillac convertible had been around. A guy named Purcel."

"What'd this guy look like?" I asked.

"Tall, with deep lines in his face. I told him I didn't know anybody named Purcel." The ex-soldier scratched his cheek and looked quizzically into space.

"What is it?" I said.

"He told me to go inside and ask the nigger. That's the word he used, just like everybody did. I told him he should watch what he called other people. He didn't like it."

"His name is Legion Guidry, Doc. He's one of those we don't let get behind us."

"Who is he?"

"I wish I knew, partner," I said.

After supper I walked out on the gallery and tried to read the newspaper, but I couldn't concentrate. The sky began to darken, and a flock of egrets rose out of the swamp and scattered like white rose petals over the top of my house, then the wind kicked up again and I heard rain clicking in the trees. I folded the newspaper and went back inside. Bootsie was reading a novel by Steve Yarbrough under a floor lamp. She closed her book, using her thumb to mark her place, her eyes veiled.

"Do you think your friend, the war vet out there, is a hundred percent?" she said.

"Probably not. But he's harmless," I replied.

"How do you know?"

"Good people don't change. Sometimes bad ones do. But good people don't."

"You're incurably romantic, Dave."

"Think so?"

She laughed loudly, then went back to her book. I walked into the kitchen, hoping she did not detect my real mood. Because the truth was my skin was crawling with anxiety, the same kind I'd experienced during my flirtation with amphetamines. But this time the cause wasn't the white worm; it was an abiding sense that my loyal friend Clete Purcel was skating on the edge of another calamity.

"Where you going?" Bootsie said.

"To Clete's. I'll be back in a few minutes," I said.

"You worried about him?"

"I've left him several messages. Clete always calls me as soon as he gets the message."

"Maybe he's in New Orleans."

"Legion Guidry was at the bait shop today. He wanted to know if Clete had been around."

Her book fell off her knee. Her reading glasses were full of light when she looked at me.

I drove to his apartment on the Loreauville Road. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and the apartment manager, an elderly Jewish man who had been a teenager in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was stacking the poolside furniture under a sheltered walkway.

"Have you seen Clete Purcel, Mr. Lemand?" I asked.

"Early this morning. He was putting his fishing things in the back of his car. A young woman was with him," he replied.

"Did he say when he might be back?"

"No, he didn't. I'm sorry," Mr. Lemand said. He was a bald, wizened man, with brown eyes and delicate hands. He always wore a tie and a starched shirt and was never seen at a dinner table without his coat on. "You're the second person who asked me about Mr. Purcel today."

"Oh?"

"A man in a red truck was here. He sat for a long time in the parking lot, under the trees, smoking cigarettes. Maybe because of your line of work you know this man," Mr. Lemand said.