"The sheriff has invited you to come down to the department," I said.

"No, thank you," he said.

"We need your help with a friend of yours. It won't take long," Helen said.

The red flag on the golf pin popped in the wind. Leaves drifted out of the pecan trees and live oaks along the fairway and scudded across the freshly mowed grass.

"I'll give it some thought and ring y'all later on it," he said, and started to reach down to retrieve his ball from the cup.

Helen put her hand on his shoulder.

"Not a time to be a wise-ass, sir," she said.

Guidry's golf companions looked away into the distance, their eyes fixed on the dazzling blue stretch of sky above the tree line.

Fifteen minutes later we sat down in a windowless interview room. In the back seat of the cruiser he had been silent, morose, his face dark with anger when he looked at us. I saw the sheriff at the end of the hall just before I closed the door to the room.

"Y'all got some damn nerve," Guidry said.

"Someone told us you're buds with an ex-Angola gun bull by the name of Harpo Scruggs," I said.

"I know him. So what?" he replied.

"You see him recently?" Helen asked. She wore slacks and sat with one haunch on the corner of the desk.

"No."

"Sure?" I said.

"He's the nephew of a lawman I worked with twenty years ago. We grew up in the same town."

"You didn't answer me," I said.

"I don't have to."

"The lawman you worked with was Harpo Delahoussey. Y'all put the squeeze on Cool Breeze Broussard over some moonshine whiskey. That's not all you did either," I said.

His eyes looked steadily into mine, heated, searching for the implied meaning in my words.

"Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a priest Friday morning," Helen said.

"Arrest him, then."

"How do you know we haven't?" I asked.

"I don't. It's none of my business. I was fired from my job, thanks to your friend Willie Broussard," he said.

"Everyone else told us Scruggs was dead. But you know he's alive. Why's that?" Helen said.

He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his mouth, saying something in disgust against his hand at the same time.

"Say that again," Helen said.

"I said you damn queer, you leave me alone," he replied.

I placed my hand on top of Helen's before she could rise from the table. "You were in the sack with Cool Breeze's wife. I think you contributed to her suicide and helped ruin her husband's life. Does it give you any sense of shame at all, sir?" I said.

"It's called changing your luck. You're notorious for it, so lose the attitude, fucko," Helen said.

"I tell you what, when you're dead from AIDS or some other disease you people pass around, I'm going to dig up your grave and piss in your mouth," he said to her.

Helen stood up and massaged the back of her neck. "Dave, would you leave me and Mr. Guidry alone a minute?" she said.

BUT WHATEVER SHE DID or said after I left the room, it didn't work. Guidry walked past the dispatcher, used the phone to call a friend for a ride, and calmly sipped from a can of Coca-Cola until a yellow Cadillac with tinted windows pulled to the curb in front.

Helen and I watched him get in on the passenger side, roll down the window, and toss the empty can on our lawn.

"What bwana say now?" Helen said.

"Time to use local resources."

THAT EVENING CLETE PICKED me up in his convertible in front of the house and we headed up the road toward St. Martinville.

"You call Swede Boxleiter a 'local resource'?" he said.

"Why not?"

"That's like calling shit a bathroom ornament."

"You want to go or not?"

"The guy's got electrodes in his temples. Even Holtzner walks around him. Are you listening?"

"You think he did the number on this accountant, Anthony Pollock?"

He thought about it. The wind blew a crooked part in his sandy hair.

"Could he do it? In a blink. Did he have motive? You got me, 'cause I don't know what these dudes are up to," he said. "Megan told me something about Cisco having a fine career ahead of him, then taking money from some guys in the Orient."

"Have you seen her?"

He turned his face toward me. It was flat and red in the sun's last light, his green eyes as bold as a slap. He looked at the road again.

"We're friends. I mean, she's got her own life. We're different kinds of people, you know. I'm cool about it." He inserted a Lucky Strike in his mouth.

"Clete, I'm-"

He pulled the cigarette off his lip without lighting it and threw it into the wind.

"What'd the Dodgers do last night?" he said.

WE PULLED INTO THE driveway of the cinder-block triplex where Swede Boxleiter lived and found him in back, stripped to the waist, shooting marbles with a slingshot at the squirrels in a pecan tree.

He pointed his finger at me.

"I got a bone to pick with you," he said.

"Oh?"

"Two Lafayette homicide roaches just left here. They said you told them to question me."

"Really?" I said.

"They threw me up against the car in front of my landlord. One guy kicked me in both ankles. He put his hand in my crotch with little kids watching."

"Dave was trying to clear you as a suspect. These guys probably got the wrong signal, Swede," Clete said.

He pulled back the leather pouch on the slingshot, nests of veins popping in his neck, and fired a scarlet marble into the pecan limbs.

"I want to run a historical situation by you. Then you tell me what's wrong with the story," I said.

"What's the game?" he asked.

"No game. You're con-wise. You see stuff other people don't. This is just for fun, okay?"

He held the handle of the slingshot and whipped the leather pouch and lengths of rubber tubing in a circle, watching them gain speed.

"A plantation owner is in the sack with one of his slave women. He goes off to the Civil War, comes back home, finds his place trashed by the Yankees, and all his slaves set free. There's not enough food for everybody, so he tells the slave woman she has to leave. You with me?"

"Makes sense, yeah," Swede said.

"The slave woman puts poison in the food of the plantation owner's children, thinking they'll only get sick and she'll be asked to care for them. Except they die. The other black people on the plantation are terrified. So they hang the slave woman before they're all punished," I said.

Swede stopped twirling the slingshot. "It's bullshit," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"You said the blacks were already freed. Why are they gonna commit a murder for the white dude and end up hung by Yankees themselves? The white guy, the one getting his stick dipped, he did her."

"You're a beaut, Swede," I said.

"This is some kind of grift, right?"

"Here's what it is," Clete said. "Dave thinks you're getting set up. You know how it works sometimes. The locals can't clear a case and they look around for a guy with a heavy sheet."

"We've got a shooter or two on the loose, Swede," I said. "Some guys smoked two white boys out in the Basin, then tried to clip a black guy by the name of Willie Broussard. I hate to see you go down for it."

"I can see you'd be broke up," he said.

"Ever hear of a dude named Harpo Scruggs?" I asked.

"No."

"Too bad. You might have to take his weight. See you around. Thanks for the help with that historical story," I said.

Clete and I walked back to the convertible. The air felt warm and moist, and the sky was purple above the sugarcane across the road. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Swede watching us from the middle of the drive, stretching the rubber tubes on his slingshot, his face jigsawed with thought.