"The man's money is as good as the next person's," Fontenot said.

"You were a cop," Lionel said to me. "That's a problem for me. No insult meant."

"You creeped my apartment. That's a problem for me."

"Lionel had a bad experience a few years back," Fontenot said. "His name doesn't make campus bells ring for you?"

"No."

"Second-string quarterback for LSU," Fontenot said. "Until he sold some whites on the half shell to the wrong people. I think if Lionel had been first-string, he wouldn't have had to spend a year in Angola. It's made him distrustful."

"Get off of it, Ray."

"The man needs to understand," Fontenot said. "Look, Mr. Robicheaux, we're short on protocol, but we don't rip each other off. We establish some rules, some trust, then we all make money. Get his bank, Lionel."

Lionel opened a cabinet next to the stove, squatted down, and reached his hand deep inside. I heard the adhesive tape tear loose from the top of the cabinet behind the drawer. He threw the brown envelope, with tape hanging off each end, for me to catch.

"We want you to understand something else, too,"

Fontenot said. "We're not here because of some fifty-thou deal. That's toilet paper in this town. But the gentleman we work for is interested in you. You're a lucky man."

"Tony C. is interested?"

"Who?" He smiled.

"Five keys, ten thou a key, no laxative, no vitamin B twelve," I said.

"Twelve thou, my friend," Fontenot said.

"Bullshit. New Orleans is white with it."

"Ten thou is the discount price. You get that down the line," Fontenot said.

"Then go fuck yourself."

"Who do you think you are, man?" Lionel said.

"The guy whose place you just creeped."

"Let's split," he said.

I looked at Fontenot.

"What I can't seem to convey is that you guys are not the only market around. Ask Cardo who he wants running the action in Southwest Louisiana. Ask him who punched his wife in a bathroom stall in the Castaways in Miami."

"There're some people I wouldn't try to turn dials on, Mr. Robicheaux," Fontenot said.

"You're the one holding up the deal. Give me what I want and we're in business."

"You can come in at eleven thou," he said.

"It's got to be ten."

"Listen to this guy," Lionel said.

"The money's not mine. I've got to give an accounting to other people."

"I can relate to that. We'll call you," Fontenot said.

"When?"

"About this time tomorrow. Do you have a car?"

"I have a pickup truck."

He nodded reflectively; then his mouth split in a grin and I could see each of his teeth like worn, wide-set pearls in his gums.

"How big a grudge can a man like you carry?" he asked.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said, and shook all over when he laughed, his narrowed eyes twinkling with a liquid glee.

The next morning I was walking down Chartres toward the French Market for breakfast when a black man on a white pizza-delivery scooter went roaring past me. I didn't pay attention to him, but then he came roaring by again. He wore an oversized white uniform, splattered with pizza sauce, sunglasses that were as dark as a welder's, and a white paper hat mashed down to his ears. He turned his scooter at the end of the block and disappeared, and I headed through Jackson Square toward the Café du Monde. I waited for the green light at Decatur; then I heard the scooter come rattling and coughing around the corner. The driver braked to the curb and grinned at me, his thin body jiggling from the engine's vibration. "Tee Beau!" I said.

"Wait for me on the bench. I gotta park my machine, me."

He pulled out into the traffic again, drove past the line of horse-and-carriages in front of the square, and disappeared past the old Jax brewery. Five minutes later I saw him coming on foot back down Decatur, his hat hammered down to the level of his sunglasses. He sat beside me on a sunlit bench next to the pike fence that bordered the park area inside the square.

"You ain't gonna turn me in, are you, Mr. Dave?" he said.

"What are you doing?"

"Working at the pizza place. Looking out for Jimmie Lee Boggs, too. You ain't gonna turn me in, now, are you?"

"You're putting me in a rough spot, Tee Beau."

"I got your promise. Dorothea and Gran'maman done tole me, Mr. Dave."

"I didn't see you. Get out of New Orleans."

"Ain't got no place else to go. Except back to New Iberia. Except to the Red Hat. I got a lot to tell you 'bout Jimmie Lee Boggs. He here."

"In New Orleans?"

"He left but he come back. I seen him. Two nights ago. Right over yonder." He pointed diagonally across the square. "I been watching."

"Wait a minute. You saw him by the Pontabla Apartments?"

"Listen, this what happen, Mr. Dave. After he killed the po-liceman and that white boy, he drove us all the way to Algiers, with lightning jumping all over the sky. He made me sit in back, with chains on, like he a po-liceman and I his prisoner, in case anybody stop us. He had the radio on, and I was 'fraid he gonna find out I didn't shoot you, drive out in that marsh, kill me like he done them poor people in the filling station. All the time he was talking, telling me 'bout what he gonna do, how he got a place in the Glades in Florida, where he say-now this is what he say, I don't use them kinds of words-where he say the hoot owls fucks the jackrabbits, where he gonna hole up, then come back to New Orleans and make them dagos give him a lot of money.

"Just befo' we got to town he called somebody from a filling station. I could hear him talking, and he said something 'bout the Pontabla. I heard him say it. He don't be paying me no mind, no, 'cause he say I just a stupid nigger. That's the way he talk all the time I be chained up there in the backseat."

"Tee Beau, are you sure it was Boggs? It's hard to believe you found him when half the cops in Louisiana can't."

"I found you, ain't I? He don't look the same now, Mr. Dave. But it's him. His hair short and black now, he puts glasses, too. But it's Jimmie Lee Boggs. I followed him in my car to make sure."

"Where'd you get a car?"

"I borrowed it."

"You borrowed it?"

"Then I put it back."

"I see."

"I followed him out to the Airline Highway. To a boxing place. No, it ain't that. They put on gloves, but they kick with they feet, too. What they call that?"

"Full-contact karate."

"I looked inside, me. Phew, it stink in there. Jimmie Lee Boggs in long sweatpants kicking at some man in the ring. His skin white and hard, shining with sweat. I got to swallow when I look at him, Mr. Dave. That man make me that afraid."

"You did fine, Tee Beau. But I want to ask something of you. You leave Jimmie Lee Boggs for other people. Don't have anything more to do with this."

"You gonna get me a new trial?"

"I'll try. But we have to do it a step at a time, partner."

His hands were folded in his lap, and he was bent forward on the bench. His small face looked like a squirrel's with sunglasses on it. Wiry rings of hair grew across the back of his neck.

"I got bad dreams at night. 'Bout the Red Hat, 'bout they be strapping me down in that chair with that black hood on my face," he said.

"You killed Hipolyte Broussard, though, didn't you, Tee Beau?"

His breath clicked in his throat.

"I done part of it. But the part I done was an accident. I swear it, 'fore God, Mr. Dave. Hipolyte kept cussing me, tole me all the bad things he gonna do to me, do to Dorothea, tole me I got jelly in my ears, me, that I cain't do nothing right, that I better stomp on the brake when he say, take my foot off when he say. He under there clanking and banging and calling me mo' names, saying 'Stomp now, stomp now.'

"So that what I done. I close my eyes and hit on that brake, and I hit on it and hit on it and pretend it be Hipolyte's face, that I smashing it like a big eggshell, me. Then I feel the bus rock and that jack break like a stick, and I know Hipolyte under the wheel now, I hear him screaming and flopping around in the mud. But I scared, Mr. Dave, I be running, run past the shed, down the road past Hipolyte's house, down past the cane field. When I turn round he look like a turtle on its back, caught under that big iron wheel. But I keep on going, I run plumb back to Gran'maman's house, she be shucking crawfish, say, 'You go wash, Tee Beau, put on your clean clothes, you, sit down with your gran'maman and don't tell them policemens nothing, you.'"