"I'm interested in all of it."

"I mean, the abrasions on her skin could have been unrelated to her death. Didn't you say her husband knocked her around before she fled the home?"

"Yes."

"I found evidence of water in the lungs. It's a bit complicated, but there's no question about its presence at the time she died."

"So she was alive when she went into the marsh?"

"Hear me out. The water came out of a tap, not a swamp or marsh or brackish bay, not unless the latter contains the same chemicals you find in a city water supply."

"A faucet?"

"But that's not what killed her." He wore an immaculate white shirt, and his red suspenders hung loosely on his concave chest. He snuffed down in his nose and fixed his glasses. "It was heart failure, maybe brought on by suffocation."

"I'm not putting it together, Clois."

"You were in Vietnam. What'd the South Vietnamese do when they got their hands on the Vietcong?"

"Water poured on a towel?"

"I think in this case we're talking about a wet towel held down on the face. Maybe she fell, then somebody finished the job. But I'm in a speculative area now."

The image he had called up out of memory was not one I wanted to think about. I looked at the fractured light on the bayou, a garden blooming with blue and pink hydrangeas on the far bank. But he wasn't finished.

"She was pregnant. Maybe two months. Does that mean anything?" he said.

"Yeah, it sure does."

"You don't look too good."

"It's a bad story, Doc."

"They all are."

TWENTY-TWO

THAT EVENING CLETE PARKED HIS convertible by the dock and hefted an ice chest up on his shoulder and carried it to a fish-cleaning table by one of the water faucets I had mounted at intervals on a water line that ran the length of the dock's handrail. He poured the ice and at least two dozen sac-a-lait out on the table, put on a pair of cloth gardener's gloves, and started scaling the sac-a-lait with a spoon and splitting open their stomachs and half-mooning the heads at the gills.

"You catch fish somewhere else and clean them at my dock?" I said.

"I hate to tell you this, the fishing's a lot better at Henderson. How about I take y'all to the Patio for dinner tonight?"

"Things aren't real cool at the house right now."

He kept his eyes flat, his face neutral. He washed the spooned fish scales off the board plank. I told him about the autopsy on Ida Broussard.

When I finished he said, "You like graveyard stories? How about this? I caught Swede Boxleiter going out of the Terrebonne cemetery last night. He'd used a trowel to take the bricks out of the crypt and pry open the casket. He took the rings from the corpse's fingers, and a pair of riding spurs and a silver picture frame that Archer Terrebonne says held a photo of some little girls a slave poisoned.

"I cuffed Boxleiter to a car bumper and went up to the house and told Terrebonne a ghoul had been in his family crypt. That guy must have Freon in his veins. He didn't say a word. He went down there with a light and lifted the bricks back out and dragged the casket out on the ground and straightened the bones and rags inside and put the stolen stuff back on the corpse, didn't blink an eye. He didn't even look at Boxleiter, like Boxleiter was an insect sitting under a glass jar."

"What'd you do with Boxleiter?"

"Fired him this morning."

"You fired him?"

"Billy Holtzner tends to delegate authority in some situations. He promised me a two-hundred-buck bonus, then hid in his trailer while I walked Boxleiter off the set. Have you told this Broussard guy his wife was murdered?"

"He's not home."

"Dave, I'll say it again. Don't let him come around the set to square a beef, okay?"

"He's not a bad guy, Clete."

"Yeah, they've got a lot of that kind on Camp J."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I sat with Cool Breeze on the gallery of his father's house and told him, in detail, of the pathologist's findings. He had been pushing the swing at an angle with one foot, then he stopped and scratched his hand and looked out at the street.

"The blow on the back of her head and the marks on her shoulders, could you have done that?" I said.

"I pushed her down on the steps. But her head didn't hit nothing but the screen."

"Was the baby yours?"

"Two months? No, we wasn't… It couldn't be my baby."

"You know where she went after she left your house, don't you?" I said.

"I do now."

"You stay away from Alex Guidry. I want your promise on that, Breeze."

He pulled on his fingers and stared at the street.

"I talked with Harpo Scruggs Sunday night," I said. "He's making noise about your testifying against the Giacanos and Ricky Scarlotti."

"Why ain't you got him in jail?"

"Sooner or later, they all go down."

"Ex-cop, ex-prison guard, man killed niggers in Angola for fun? They go down when God call 'em. What you done about Ida, it ain't lost on me. T'ank you."

Then he went back in the house.

I ATE LUNCH AT home that day. But Bootsie didn't sit at the kitchen table with me. Behind me, I heard her cleaning the drainboard, putting dishes in the cabinets, straightening canned goods in the cupboard.

"Boots, in all truth, I don't believe Megan Flynn has any romantic interest in an over-the-hill small-town homicide cop," I said.

"Really?"

"When I was a kid, my father was often drunk or in jail and my mother was having affairs with various men. I was alone a lot of the time, and for some reason I didn't understand I was attracted to people who had something wrong with them. There was a big, fat alcoholic nun I always liked, and a half-blind ex-convict who swept out Provost's Bar, and a hooker on Railroad Avenue who used to pay me a dollar to bring a bucket of beer to her crib."

"So?"

"A kid from a screwed-up home sees himself in the faces of excoriated people."

"You're telling me you're Megan Flynn's pet bête noire?"

"No, I'm just a drunk."

I heard her moving about in the silence, then she paused behind my chair and let the tips of her fingers rest in my hair.

"Dave, it's all right to call yourself that at meetings. But you're not a drunk to me. And she'd better not ever call you one either."

I felt her fingers trail off my neck, then she was gone from the room.

TWO DAYS LATER HELEN and I took the department boat out on a wide bay off the Atchafalaya River where Cisco Flynn was filming a simulated plane crash. We let the bow of the boat scrape up onto a willow island, then walked out on a platform that the production company had built on pilings over the water. Cisco was talking to three other men, his eyes barely noting our presence.

"No, tell him to do it again," he said. "The plane's got to come in lower, right out of the sun, right across those trees. I'll do it with him if necessary. When the plane blows smoke, I want it to bleed into that red sun. Okay, everybody cool?"

It was impressive to watch him. Cisco used authority in a way that made others feel they shared in it. He was one of their own, obviously egalitarian in his attitudes, but he could take others across a line they wouldn't cross by themselves.

He turned to me and Helen.

"Watch the magic of Hollywood at work," he said. "This scene is going to take four days and a quarter of a million dollars to shoot. The plane comes in blowing black smoke, then we film a model crashing in a pond. We've got a tail section mounted on a mechanical arm that draws the wreckage underwater like a sinking plane, then we do the rescue dive in the LSU swimming pool. It edits down to two minutes of screen time. What d'you think about that?"