"Have you ever heard of him?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, and tried to keep my eyes veiled.

"He told me he had a degree in accounting and owned half of a vending machine company. He didn't have a degree, but he did own part of a company," she said.

I tried to look pleasant and show no recognition.

"I found out some of the other things he was involved in after we were married," she said. "Last year somebody killed him and his girlfriend in the parking lot of the Hialeah racetrack. Poor Ralph. He always said the Colombians wouldn't bother him, he was just a small-business man."

"I'm sorry, Bootsie."

"Don't be. I spent two years feeling sorry for Ralph while he mortgaged this house, which was mine from my first marriage, and spent the money in Miami and Las Vegas. So now I own his half of the vending machine business. You know who owns the other half?"

"The Giacanos were always a tight family."

"I guess I can't surprise you with very much."

"Ralph's uncle was a guy named Didi Gee. He's dead now, but three years ago he hired a contract killer to shoot my brother. Jimmie's doing okay now, but for a while I thought I was going to lose him."

"I didn't know."

"Maybe it's time to get away from your in-laws."

"When you sell to the Giacanos, it's twenty cents on the dollar, Dave. Nobody else is lining up to buy into their business, either."

"Get away from them, Bootsie."

Her eyes glanced into mine. There was a curious bead of light in them.

"I don't understand this," she said.

"What?"

"You're telling me to get away from them. Then I'm hearing this strange story about you."

I looked away from her.

"You hear a lot of bullshit in the streets," I said.

"This is from my in-laws, Dave. They work for Tony Cardo."

I didn't answer and tried to grin good-naturedly. Her eyes peeled the skin off my face.

"They say you're dirty. Don't they have a wonderful vocabulary?" she said.

I pushed at a piece of piecrust on my plate with my fork.

"They say you want to deal," she said.

"You have to make up your own mind about people."

"I know you, Dave Robicheaux. I don't care what you've done in your life, this stuff isn't you."

"Then ignore what they say, Bootsie, and stay out of it."

"I'm worried about you. I work with these people. You can't believe how they think, what they're capable of doing."

"Oh yes I can."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Be my friend on this. Don't mix in it, and don't worry too much about what you hear."

Her face was lighted with the late sun's glow over the garden wall. She raised her chin slightly, the way she always did when she was angry.

"Dave, you left me. Do you think you should be telling me what to do now?"

"I guess not."

"I survive among these animals because I have to. It isn't fun. I'm on my own, and that isn't fun, either. But I handle it."

"I guess you do."

"Why didn't you marry me?" she said. Her eyes were hot and bright.

"You'd have married a drunk. It wouldn't have been a good life, believe me."

"You don't know that. You don't know that at all."

"Yes, I do. I became a full-blown lush. I tried to kill my first wife's lover at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain."

"Maybe that's what he deserved."

"I tried to kill him because I had become morally insane."

"I don't care what you did later in your life. Why'd you close me out, Dave?"

I let my hands hang between my knees.

"Because I was dumb," I said.

"It's that simple?"

"No, it's not. But how about suffice it to say that I made a terrible mistake, that I've had regret about it all these years."

Her legs were crossed, her arms motionless on the sides of the cushioned iron chair, her face composed now in the tea-colored light. The top of her terry cloth robe was loose, and I could see her breasts rise and fall quietly with her breathing.

"I do have to go," I said.

"Are you coming back?"

"If you'd like to see me again, I'd surely like to see you."

"I'm not moving out of town, cher." Then her face became soft and she said, "But, Dave, I've learned one thing with middle age. I don't try to correct yesterday's mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once."

"No one could ever say they were unsure where you stood on an issue, Boots."

She smiled without answering, then walked me to the front door, put her palms on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek. It was an appropriate and kind gesture and would not have meant much in itself, but then she looked into my face and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as though she were saying goodbye to someone forever, and I felt my loins thicken and my heart turn to water.

It was almost dark when I got off the streetcar at the corner of St. Charles and Canal and went into the Pearl and had a poor-boy sandwich filled with oysters, shrimp, sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and sauce piquante. Then I walked to my apartment and paused momentarily outside my door while I found my key. The people upstairs were partying out on the balcony, and one of them accidentally kicked a coffee can of geraniums into the courtyard. But in spite of the noise I thought I heard someone inside my apartment. I put my hand on the.25-caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, unlocked the door, and let it swing all the way back against the wall on its hinges.

Lionel Comeaux, the man I'd found working under his car on the creeper, was in the kitchen, pulling the pots and pans out of the cabinet and placing them on the table. The jolly fat man who called himself Uncle Ray Fontenot and said he used to play trombone at Sharky's Dream Room had emptied the drawers in the bedroom and had laid all my hangered clothes across the bed. My.45 lay on top of a neatly folded shirt. Both of them looked at me with flat, empty expressions, as though I were the intruder.

The fat man, Fontenot, wore a beige suit and a cream turtleneck shirt. I saw his eyes study my face and my right hand; then he smiled and opened his palms in front of him.

"It's just business, Mr. Robicheaux," he said. "Don't take it personal. We've treated your things with respect."

"How'd you get in?"

"It's a simple lock," he said.

"You've got some damn nerve," I said.

"Close the door. There's people out there," Lionel, the man in the kitchen, said. He wore Adidas running shoes, blue jeans with no belt, a gold pullover sweater with the sleeves pushed up over his thick, sun-browned arms.

I could hear my own breathing in the silence.

"Lionel's right," Fontenot said. "We don't need an audience here, do we? Getting mad isn't going to make us any money, either, is it?"

I took my hand out of my coat pocket and opened and closed it at my side.

"Come in, come in," Fontenot said. "Look, we're putting your things back. There's no harm done."

"You toss my place and call it no harm?" I said. I pushed the door shut behind me.

"You knew somebody would check you out. Don't make it a big deal," the younger man said in the kitchen. He lit a dead cigar in his mouth and squatted down and started replacing the pots and pans in the cabinets next to the stove.

"I don't like people smoking in my apartment," I said.

He turned his head at me and paused in his work. The red Navy tattoo on his flexed bicep was ringed with blue stars. He was balanced on the ball of one foot, the cigar between his fingers, a tooth working on a bloodless spot on his lower lip. Fontenot walked out of the other room.

"Put out the smoke, Lionel," he said quietly, His eyes crinkled at the corners. "Go on, put it out. We're in the man's home."

"I don't think it's smart dealing with him. I said it then, I'll say it in front of him," Lionel said. He wet the cigar under the tap and dropped it in a garbage bag.