But the people in that six-cell area were not the ordinary residents of a city or parish prison. One was an enormous demented Negro by the name of Jerome who had smothered his infant child. He told me later that a cop had worked him over with a baton; although he had been in jail two weeks, there were still purple gashes on his lips and lumps the size of birds' eggs on his nappy head. I would come to know the others, too: a biker from New Orleans who had nailed a girl's hands to a tree; a serial rapist and sodomist who was wanted in Alabama; a Vietnamese thug who, with another man, had garroted his business partner with jump cables for a car battery; and a four-time loser, a fat, grinning, absolutely vacant-eyed man who had murdered a whole family after escaping from Sugarland Farm in Texas.

I was given one phone call and I telephoned the best firm in Lafayette. Like all people who get into serious trouble with the law, I became immediately aware of the incredible financial burden that had been dropped upon me. The lawyer's retainer was $2,000, his ongoing fee $125 an hour. I felt as though my head were full of spiders as I tried to think in terms of raising that kind of money, particularly in view of the fact that my bail hadn't been set and I had no idea how high it would be.

I found out at my arraignment the next morning: $150,000. I felt the blood drain out of my face. The lawyer asked for bail reduction and argued that I was a local businessman, an ex-police officer, v a property owner, a war veteran, and the judge propped his chin on one knuckle and looked back at him as impassively as a man waiting for an old filmstrip to run itself out.

We all rose, the judge left the bench, and I sat dazed and light-headed in a chair next to the lawyer while a deputy prepared to cuff me for the trip back to the jail. The lawyer motioned to the deputy with two fingers.

"Give us a minute, please," he said. He was an older, heavyset man, with thinning cropped red hair, who wore seersucker suits and clip-on bow ties.

The deputy nodded and stepped back by the side door to the courtroom.

"It's the pictures," he said.

"Vidrine's entrails are hanging out in the bathtub. It's mean stuff to look at, Mr. Robicheaux. And they've got your knife with your prints on it."

"It must have fallen out of my pocket. Both of those guys were all over me."

"That's not what Mapes says. The bartender had some pretty bad things to say, too. What'd you do to him?"

"Told him he was going to be busted for procuring."

"Well, I can discredit him on the stand. But Mapes-" He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"There's the fellow we have to break down. A man with chain burns all over his face and back can make a hell of a witness. Tell me, what in God's name did you have in mind when you went through that door?"

My palms were damp. I swallowed and wiped them on my trousers.

"Mapes knew Vidrine was a weak sister," I said.

"After I was gone, he picked up my knife and took him out. That's what happened, Mr. Gautreaux."

He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, made a pocket of air in his jaw, cleared his throat and started to speak, then was silent. Finally, he stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out the side door of the courtroom into the sunlight, into the wind ruffling the leaves of the oak trees, the noise of black kids roaring by on skateboards. The deputy lifted my arm and crimped one cuff around my wrist.

Batist and his wife kept Alafair with them the day I was arrested, but the next day I arranged for her to stay with my cousin, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. She was taken care of temporarily, Batist was running the dock, and my main worry had become money. Besides needing a huge unknown sum for the lawyer, I had to raise $15,000 for the bondsman's fee in order to make bail. I had $8,000 in savings.

My half brother, Jimmie, who owned all or part of several restaurants in New Orleans, would have written a check for the whole amount, but he had gone to Europe for three months, and the last his partners heard from him he was traveling through France with a group of Basque jaz players. I then discovered that bankers whom I had known for years were not anxious to lend money to a. man who was charged with first-degree murder and whose current address was the parish jail. I had been locked up nine days, and Batist was still visiting banks and delivering loan papers to me.

Our cells were unlocked at seven A.M. when a trusty and the night screw wheeled in the food cart, which every morning was stacked with aluminum containers of grits, coffee, and fried pork butts. Until lockup at five in the afternoon, we were free to move around in an area called the bull run, take showers, play cards with a deck whose missing members had been replaced with cards fashioned out of penciled cardboard, or stare listlessly out the window at the tops of the trees on the courthouse lawn. But most of the time I stayed in my cell, filling out loan applications or reading a stiffened, water-stained issue of Reader's Digest.

I was sitting on the side of my iron bunk, which hung from the wall on chains, printing across the top of an application, when a shadow moved across the page. Silhouetted in the open door of my cell was the biker who had nailed his girl's hands to a tree. He was thick-bodied and shirtless, his breasts covered with tattooed birds, and his uncut hair and wild beard made his head look as though it were surrounded by a mane. I could feel his eyes move across the side of my face, peel away tissue, probe for the soft organ, the character weakness, the severed nerve.

"You think you can cut it up there?" he said.

I wet my pencil tip and kept on writing without looking up.

"What place is that?" I said.

" Angola. You think you can hack it?"

"I'm not planning on being there."

"That's what I said my first jolt. Next stop, three years up in the Block with the big stripes. They got some badass dudes there, man."

I turned to the next page and tried to concentrate on the printed words.

"The night screw says you're an ex-cop," he said.

I set my pencil down and looked at the opposite wall.

"Does that make a problem for you?" I said.

"Not me, man. But there's some mean fuckers up on that farm… There's guys that'll run by your cell and throw a gasoline bomb in on you. Melt you into grease."

"I don't want to be rude, but you're standing in my light."

He grinned, and there was a malevolent light in his face. Then he stretched, yawned, laughed outright as though he were witnessing an absurdity of some kind, and walked away to the window that gave onto the courthouse lawn.

I did push-ups, I did curls by lifting the bunk with my fingertips, I took showers, and I slept as much as I could. At night I could hear the others breaking wind, talking to themselves, masturbating, snoring. The enormous Negro sometimes sang a song that began, "My soul is in a paper bag at the bottom of your garbage can." Then one night he went crazy in his cell, gripping the bars with both hands and bashing his head against them until blood and sweat were flying out into the bull run and we heard the screw shoot the steel lock bar on the door. " ' On the thirteenth day I received two visitors I wasn't prepared for. A deputy escorted me down the spiral metal stairs to a window; less room that was used as a visiting area for those of us who were charged with violent crimes. Sitting at a wood table scarred with cigarette burns were Dixie Lee Pugh, one arm in a sling, his yellow hair crisscrossed with bandages, and my old homicide partner, Cle-tus Purcel. As always, Clete looked too big for his shirt, his sport coat, the tie that was pulled loose from his throat, the trousers that climbed above his socks. His cigarette looked tiny in his hand, the stitched scar through his eyebrow a cosmetic distraction from the physical confidence and humor in his face.