"You don't care to talk about him?"

He laid the pencil flat on his desk blotter. "I don't like to even remember him. Fortunately today I don't have to," he said.

CLEM MADDUX SAT ON his gallery, smoking a cigarette, in a swayback deer-hide chair lined with a quilt for extra padding. One of his legs was amputated at the torso, the other above the knee. His girth was huge, his stomach pressing in staggered layers against the oversized ink-dark blue jeans he wore. His skin was as pink and unblemished as a baby's, but around his neck goiters hung from his flesh like a necklace of duck's eggs.

"You staring at me, Mr. Robicheaux?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"It's Buerger's Disease. Smoking worsens it. But I got diabetes and cancer of the prostate, too. I got diseases that'll outlive the one that kills me," he said, then laughed and wiped spittle off his lips with his wrist.

"You were a gun bull at Angola with Harpo Scruggs?"

"No, I was head of farm machinery. I didn't carry a weapon. Harpo was a tower guard, then a shotgun guard on horseback. That must have been forty years ago."

"What kind of hack was he?"

"Piss-poor in my opinion. How far back you go?"

"You talking about the Red Hat gang and the men buried under the levee?"

"There was this old fart used to come off a corn-whiskey drunk meaner than a razor in your shoe. He'd single out a boy from his gang and tell him to start running. Harpo asked to get in on it."

"Asked to kill someone?"

"It was a colored boy from Laurel Hill. He'd sassed the field boss at morning count. When the food truck come out to the levee at noon, Harpo pulled the colored boy out of the line and told him he wasn't eating no lunch till he finished sawing a stump out of the river bottom. Harpo walked him off into some gum trees by the water, then I seen the boy starting off on his own, looking back uncertain-like while Harpo was telling him something. Then I heard it, pow, pow, both barrels. Double-ought bucks, from not more than eight or ten feet."

Maddux tossed his cigarette over the railing into the flower bed.

"What happened to Scruggs?" I asked.

"He done a little of this, a little of that, I guess."

"That's a little vague, cap."

"He road-ganged in Texas a while, then bought into a couple of whorehouses. What do you care anyway? The sonofabitch is probably squatting on the coals."

"He's squatting-"

"He got burned up with a Mexican chippy in Juarez fifteen years ago. Wasn't nothing left of him except a bag of ash and some teeth. Damn, son, y'all ought to update and get you some computers."

TWELVE

TWO DAYS LATER I SAT at my desk, sifting through the Gypsy fortune-telling deck called the Tarot. I had bought the deck at a store in Lafayette, but the instruction book that accompanied it dealt more with the meaning of the cards than with the origins of their iconography. Regardless, it would be impossible for anyone educated in a traditional Catholic school not to recognize the historical associations of the imagery in the Hanged Man.

The phone on my desk buzzed.

"Clete Purcel and Megan Flynn just pulled up," the sheriff said.

"Yeah?"

"Get him out of here."

"Skipper-"

He hung up.

A moment later Clete tapped on my glass and opened the door, then paused and looked back down the hall, his face perplexed.

"What happened, the John overflow in the waiting room again?" he said.

"Why's that?"

"A pall is hanging over the place every time I walk in. What do those guys do for kicks, watch snuff films? In fact, I asked the dispatcher that. Definitely no sense of humor."

He sat down and looked around my office, grinned at me for no reason, straightened his back, flexed his arms, bounced his palms up and down on the chair.

"Megan's with you?" I said.

"How'd you know that?"

"Uh, I think the sheriff saw y'all from his window."

"The sheriff? I get it. He told you to roll out the welcome wagon." His eyes roved merrily over my face. "How about we treat you to lunch at Lagniappe Too?"

"I'm buried."

"Megan gave you her drill instructor impersonation the other day?"

"It's very convincing."

He beat out a staccato with his hands on the chair arms.

"Will you stop that and tell me what's on your mind?" I said.

"This cat Billy Holtzner. I've seen him somewhere. Like from Vietnam."

"Holtzner?"

"So we had nasty little marshmallows over there, too. Anyway, I go, 'Were you in the Crotch?' He says, 'The Crotch?' I say, 'Yeah, the Marine Corps. Were you around Da Nang?' What kind of answer do I get? He sucks his teeth and goes back to his clipboard like I'm not there."

He waited for me to speak. When I didn't he said, "What?"

"I hate to see you mixed up with them."

"See you later, Streak."

"I'm coming with you," I said, and stuck the Hanged Man in my shirt pocket.

WE ATE LUNCH AT Lagniappe Too, just down from The Shadows. Megan sat by the window with her hat on. Her hair was curved on her cheeks, and her mouth looked small and red when she took a piece of food off her fork. The light through the window seemed to frame her silhouette against the green wall of bamboo that grew in front of The Shadows. She saw me staring at her.

"Is something troubling you, Dave?" she asked.

"You know Lila Terrebonne?"

"The senator's granddaughter?"

"She comes to our attention on occasion. The other day we had to pick her up at the church, sitting by herself under a crucifix. Out of nowhere she asked me about the Hanged Man in the Tarot."

I slipped the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the tablecloth by Megan's plate.

"Why tell me?" she said.

"Does it mean something to you?"

I saw Clete lower his fork into his plate, felt his eyes fix on the side of my face.

"A man hanging upside down from a tree. The tree forms a cross," Megan said.

"The figure becomes Peter the Apostle, as well as Christ and St. Sebastian. Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot with darts by his fellow Roman soldiers. Peter asked to be executed upside down. You notice, the figure makes a cross with his legs in the act of dying?" I said.

Megan had stopped eating. Her cheeks were freckled with discoloration, as though an invisible pool of frigid air had burned her face.

"What is this, Dave?" Clete said.

"Maybe nothing," I said.

"Just lunch conversation?" he said.

"The Terrebonnes have had their thumbs in lots of pies," I said.

"Will you excuse me, please?" Megan said.

She walked between the tables to the rest room, her purse under her arm, her funny straw hat crimped across the back of her red hair.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" Clete said.

THAT EVENING I DROVE to Red Lerille's Health amp; Racquet Club in Lafayette and worked out with free weights and on the Hammer-Strength machines, then ran two miles on the second-story track that overlooked the basketball courts.

I hung my towel around my neck and did leg stretches on the handrail. Down below, some men were playing a pickup basketball game, thudding into one another clumsily, slapping one another's shoulders when they made a shot. But an Indonesian or Malaysian man at the end of the court, where the speed and heavy bags were hung, was involved in a much more intense and solitary activity. He wore sweats and tight red leather gloves, the kind with a metal dowel across the palm, and he ripped his fists into the heavy bag and sent it spinning on the chain, then speared it with his feet, hard enough to almost knock down a kid who was walking by.

He grinned at the boy by way of apology, then moved over to the speed bag and began whacking it against the rebound board, without rhythm or timing, slashing it for the effect alone.