"That's the point, mon. Earl's got no handles on him. We sent the shit bags up the road because they were born to take a fall. Earl's part of the system. There're people who love him. You think I'm giving you a shuck? Did you see him on The Geraldo Rivera Show? Some of those broads were ready to throw their panties at him. It's me and you who've got the problem. We're the geeks, Dave, not this guy. He's a fucking hero."

His breath was heavy with the smell of beer and cigarettes.

He crushed a beer can in his palm and dropped it on the table, then studied the tops of his big, coarse, red hands. He had tried to comb his sandy hair back over the divots where his stitches had been, but I could still see crusted lesions like thin black worms on his scalp.

"Oh, hell, what do I know?" he said, and looked down the street at the traffic in the hot sunlight, as though it somehow held the answer to his question.

Back in my office, I got hold of Lyle Sonnier at his church.

"Hey, Loot, I'm glad you called," he said. "I've been thinking about throwing a big dinner here at the church, actually more like a family reunion, and I wanted to ask you and Bootsie."

"Thanks, Lyle, but right now I'm looking for Vic Benson, the fellow you think might be your father."

"What do you want him for?"

"He's part of an investigation."

"You don't have to look far, then. He's right here."

"What?"

"We had lunch together just a little while ago. He's out back painting some furniture for our secondhand store right now."

How long has he been there?"

"He came in this morning."

"I think he tried to take your brother's head off last night with a piece of piano wire."

"Get real, Dave. He's a wino, a bundle of sticks. He has to wear lead shoes on a windy day."

"Tell that to Weldon."

"I already talked to Weldon. He says it was a Joey Gouza hit."

"Believe me, Lyle, Joey has no desire for more trouble in Iberia Parish."

"So if it wasn't Gouza, it was probably one of the walking brain-dead who follow Bobby Earl around. But no matter how you cut it, it wasn't the old man. Good God, Dave, what's the matter with you? Weldon could beat that poor old drunk to death with his shoe."

"Why do you think Bobby Earl might be involved in it?"

"He's bad news, that's why. He stirs up grief and hatred among the very people that's sitting out there in my flockpoor white and black folk. I'm tired of that character. Somebody should have stuffed his butt in a garbage can a long time ago."

"That may be true, Lyle, but that doesn't mean he's trying to whack out your brother."

I waited for him to say something, to offer me the linkage to Bobby Earl.

"Lyle?"

"Well, anyway, in my opinion the old man's harmless. You gonna arrest him?"

"No, I don't have enough for a warrant."

"Then what's the big deal?"

"I'll be over there later today or at least by Monday to talk to him. Tell him that for me, too. In the meantime you might ask yourself why he's shown up after all these years? Does he seem like a man of goodwill to you?"

"Maybe he wants to atone but he hasn't learned the words yet. It takes a while sometimes."

"Like we used to say out in Indian country, don't let them get behind you."

"That's what somebody said at My Lai, too. Give all that Vietnam stuff to the American Legion, Dave. It's a drag."

"Whatever you say, Lyle. Hang loose."

"Hey, I'll get back to you with a date for that dinner. I want your butt there, with no excuses. I'm proud to be your friend, Dave. I look up to you, I always did."

What do you say to someone who talks to you like that?

In order to get a jump-start on the day I used to go on dry drunks that were the equivalent of inserting my head in a microwave for ten minutes. I had come to learn that a conversation with any one of the Sonniers worked just as well.

It was Friday afternoon, and it was too late and I was too tired for a round-trip to Baton Rouge to interview Vic Benson, who was probably Verise Sonnier, particularly in view of the fact that I had no tangible evidence against him and talking to him was like conversing with a vacant lot, anyway.

The heat broke temporarily with a thirty-minute rain shower that evening, then the wind came up cool out of the south, scattering dead pecan leaves up on my gallery, and the late sun broke through the layered clouds as red and molten as if it had been poured flaming from a foundry cup.

We had a short-lived crisis at the bait shop. I was filling up the bowls in the rabbit hutches by the side of the house when I heard a loud yell in the shop, then saw Tripod racing out the door, his loose chain slithering across the planks, with Alafair right behind him. Then Batist came through the door with a broom raised over his head.

Alafair caught Tripod up in her arms at the end of the dock, then turned to face down Batist, whose black, thick neck was pulsing with nests of veins.

"I gonna flatten that coon like a bicycle patch, me," he said. "I gonna wipe up that bait shop wit' him."

"You leave him alone!" Alafair shouted back.

"I cain't be runnin' a sto', no, with that nasty coon wreckin' my shelves. You set him down on that dock and I gonna golf him right over them trees."

"He ain't did anything! Clean up your own mess! Clean up your own nasty cigars!"

In the meantime, Tripod was trying to climb over her shoulder and down her back to get as much geography between him and Batist as possible.

Oh Lord, I thought, and walked down to the dock.

"It's too late, Dave," Batist said. "That coon headed for coon heaven."

"Let's calm down a minute," I said. "How'd Tripod get into the bait shop again, Alf?"

"Batist left the screen open," she said.

"I left the screen open?" he said incredulously.

"You were fishing out back, too, or he wouldn't have gotten up on the shelf," she said. Her face was flushed and heated, her eyes as bright as brown glass.

"Look his face, look his mouth," Batist said. "He eat all the sugar in the can and two boxes them Milky Ways."

Tripod, whose fur was almost black except for his silver ringed tail and silver mask, didn't make a good witness for the defense. His muzzle and whiskers were slick with chocolate and coated with grains of sugar. I picked up the end of his chain. The clip that we used to fasten him to the clothesline was broken.

"I'm afraid we've got Tripod on a breaking-and-entering rap, Alf," I said.

"What?" she said.

"It looks like he's going to have to go into lockdown," I said.

"What?"

"That means let's put him in the rabbit hutch until tomorrow when I can fix his chain. In the meantime, Batist, let's close down the shop and think about going to the drive-in movie."

"It ain't my sto', it ain't my Milky Way. I just work here all day so I can clean up after some fat no-good coon."

Alafair was about to fire off another shot when I turned her gently by the shoulder and walked her back through the pecan trees in front of the house.

"He was mean, Dave,' she said. "He was gonna pod."

"No, he's not mean, little guy," I said. "To Batist, running the bait shop is an important job. He just doesn't want anything to go wrong while he's in charge."

"You didn't see what he looked like." Her eyes were moist in the deep shade of the trees.

"Alafair, Batist grew up poor and uneducated and never learned to read and write. But today he runs a business for a white man. He wants to do everything right, but he has to make an X when he signs for a delivery and he can't count the receipts at the end of the day. So he concentrates on things that he can do well, like barbecuing the chickens, repairing the boat engines, and keeping all the inventory squared away. Then Tripod gets loose and makes a big mess of the shelves. So in Batist's mind he's let us down."