"Clete, I don't think the word 'we' figures into the equation here."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You got a lot of help from the guys at the First, did you? You got a lot of backup when those three gumballs were trying to paint the furniture with your brains?"

We turned up Toulouse toward Bourbon. He stopped in front of a cigar and news stand. A black man was shining the shoes of a man who sat in an elevated chair. Clete touched me on the jacket lapel with his finger.

"I won't tell you what to do," he said. "But when they try to kill you, it gets personal. Then you play it only one way. You go into the lion's den and you spit in the lion's mouth."

"I don't have any authority here."

"That's right. So they won't be expecting us. Fuck, mon, let's give them a daytime nightmare." He stuck a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and grinned. "Come on, think about it. Is there anything so fine as making the lowlifes wish they were still a dirty thought in their parents' mind?"

He snapped his fingers and rhythmically clicked his fists and palms together. His green eyes were dancing with light and expectation.

If you grew up in the Deep South, you're probably fond, as I am, of recalling the summertime barbecues and fish fries, the smoke drifting in the oak trees, the high school dances under a pavilion that was strung with Japanese lanterns, the innocent lust we discovered in convertibles by shadowed lakes groaning with bullfrogs, and the sense that the season was eternal, that the world was a quiet and gentle place, that life was a party to be enjoyed with the same pleasure and certainty as the evening breeze that always carried with it the smell of lilac and magnolia and watermelons in a distant field.

But there is another memory, too: the boys who went nigger-knocking in the little black community of Sunset, who shot people of color with BB guns and marbles fired from slingshots, who threw M-80s onto the galleries of their pitiful homes. Usually these boys had burr haircuts, ugly ears, half-moons of dirt under their fingernails. They lived in an area of town with unpaved streets, garbage in the backyards, ditches full of mosquitoes and water moccasins from the coulee. Each morning they got up with their loss, their knowledge of who they were, and went to war with the rest of the world.

When we meet the adult bigot, the Klansman, the antiSemite, we assume that he was bred in that same wretched place. Sometimes that's a correct conclusion. Oftentimes it's not.

"Did this guy grow up in a shithole or something?" Clete said.

We were parked in my truck across from Bobby Earl's home out by Lake Pontchartrain.

"I heard his father owned a candy company in Baton Rouge," I said.

"Maybe he was an abused fetus." He blew cigarette smoke out the window and looked at the piked fence, the blue-green lawn and twirling sprinklers, the live oaks that made a canopy over the long white driveway. "There must be big bucks in sticking it to the coloreds these days. I bet you could park six cars on his porch." He looked at his watch. The sky was gray over the lake, and the waves were capping in the wind. "Let's give it another half hour, then I'll treat you to some rice and red beans at Fat Albert's."

"I'd better head back pretty soon, Clete."

He formed a pocket of air in one jaw.

"You always believed in prayer, Streak," he said.

"Yes?"

"Don't you AA guys call it 'turning it over'? Maybe it's time to do that. Worrying about Bootsie and what you can't change is putting boards in your head."

"It sure is."

"So?"

"What?"

"Why set yourself up for a lot of grief?" He was looking straight ahead now, his porkpie hat resting on his brow. "I know you, noble mon. I know the thoughts you're going to have before you have them. Turn the dials on yourself long enough, tamp them down till you got all the gears shearing off against each other, and pretty soon the old life looks pretty good again."

"That's not the way it is this time."

"Yeah, probably not. I shouldn't be handing out advice, anyway. When I started drinking my breakfast there for a while, I got sent by the captain to this shrink who was on lend-lease from the psychology department at Tulane. So I told him a few stories, stuff that I thought was pretty ordinary-race beefs when I was growing up in the Irish Channel, a hooker who dosed me while I was married, the time you and I smoked that greaseball dope dealer and his bodyguard in the back of their Cadillac-and I thought the guy was going to throw up in his wastebasket. I always heard these guys could take it. I felt like a freak. I ain't kidding you, the guy was trembling. I offered to buy him a drink and he got mad."

I couldn't help laughing.

"That's it, mon. Lighten up," he said. "Nothing rattles the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. And my, my, what do we have here?" He adjusted the outside mirror with his hand.

"Yes indeedy, it's the All-American peckerwood. You know this guy's got broads all over New Orleans? That's right, they really dig his rebop. I've got to learn his technique. Come on, fire it up, Streak."

I turned the ignition and followed the white, chauffeurdriven Chrysler toward the entrance.

"I'm out of my jurisdiction, Clete," I said. "No Wyatt Earp stuff. We don't bruise the fruit. Right? Agreed?"

"Sure. We're just out here to visit. Talk some trash, maybe drink some mash. Get some political tips. Step on it, mon." His arm was pressed flat against the side of the truck door, his face bright, like a man anticipating a carnival ride.

The Chrysler drove through the gate and on up the drive toward the white stucco, blue-tiled home with the sweeping porch and an adjacent swimming pool that was bordered with banana and lime trees and flaring gas torches. A man in pressed black pants and shined shoes, white shirt and black tie, with oiled red hair combed straight back on his head, swung the gate closed and walked away as though we were not there.

Clete got out of the truck and walked to the gate.

"Hey, bubba, does it look like we're from Fuller Brush?" he said.

"What?" the man said.

"We're here to see Bobby Earl. Open up."

"He's got dinner guests. Who are you?"

"Who am I?" Clete said, smiling, pointing at his chest with his thumb. "Good question, good question. You see this badge? Dave, do you know who we're talking to here?"

He folded his private investigator's badge and replaced it in his coat pocket when the man reached for it.

"I bet you didn't think I recognized you, did you?" Clete said. "Gomez, right? You were a middleweight. Lefty Felix Gomez. I saw you fight Irish Jerry Wallace over in Gretna. You knocked his mouthpiece into the third row."

The gateman nodded, his face unimpressed. "Mr. Earl don't want to be bothered by anybody tonight," he said.

"That badge you got. Pawnshop windows are full of them."

"Sharp eye," Clete said, his mouth still grinning. "I remember another story about you. You beat up a kid in a filling station. A high school kid. You fractured his skull."

"I told you what Mr. Earl said. You can come back tomorrow, or you can write him care of the state legislature. That's where he works."

"Nice tie," Clete said, reached through the gate, knotted the man's necktie in his fist, and jerked his face tightly against the bars. "You've got a serious problem, Lefty. You're hard of hearing. Now, you get on that box and tell Mr. Earl that Cletus Purcel and Detective Dave Robicheaux are here to see him. Is my signal getting through to you? Are we big-picture clear on this?"

"Let him go, Clete," I said.

A tall, good-looking man with angular shoulders in a striped, gray double-breasted suit, his silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest, walked down the drive toward us.

"Sure," Clete said, and released the gateman, whose face had gone livid with anger except for the two diagonal lines where the flesh had been pressed into the iron bars of the gate.