"I'm having a party tomorrow night. Want to come?" she said.

"I'd better pass, Lila."

"I did a Fifth Step, you know, cleaning house. With an ex-hooker, can you believe it? It took three hours. I think she wanted a drink when it was over."

"That's great. I'm happy for you."

Lila looked at Alafair and waited, as though an unstated expectation among us had not been met.

"Oh, excuse me. I think I'll go inside. Talk on the phone. Order some drugs," Alafair said.

"You don't need to go, Alf," I said.

"Bye-bye," she said, jittering her fingers at us.

"I've made peace with my father, Dave," Lila said, watching Alafair walk up the steps of the gallery. Then: "Do you think your daughter should talk to adults like that?"

"If she feels like it."

Her eyes wandered through the trees, her long lashes blinking like black wire. "Well, anyway, my father's in the car. He'd like to shake hands," she said.

"You've brought your-"

"Dave, I've forgiven him for the mistakes he made years ago. Jack Flynn was in the Communist Party. His friends were union terrorists. Didn't you do things in war you regretted?"

"You've forgiven him? Goodbye, Lila."

"No, he's been good enough to come out here. You're going to be good enough to face him."

I propped my rake against a tree trunk and picked up two vinyl bags of leaves and pecan husks and carried them out to the road. I hoped that somehow Lila would simply drive away with her father. Instead, he got out of the Oldsmobile and approached me, wearing white trousers and a blue sports coat with brass buttons.

"I'm willing to shake hands and start over again, Mr. Robicheaux. I do this out of gratitude for the help you've given my daughter. She has enormous respect for you," he said.

He extended his hand. It was manicured and small, the candy-striped French cuff lying neatly across the wrist. It did not look like a hand that possessed the strength to whip a chain across a man's back and sunder his bones with nails.

"I'm offering you my hand, sir," he said.

I dropped the two leaf bags on the roadside and wiped my palms on my khakis, then stepped back into the shade, away from Terrebonne.

"Scruggs is blackmailing you. You need me, or someone like me, to pop a cap on him and get him out of your life. That's not going to happen," I said.

He tapped his right hand gingerly on his cheek, as though he had a toothache.

"I tried. Truly I have. Now, I'll leave you alone, sir," he said.

"You and your family pretend to gentility, Mr. Terrebonne. But your ancestor murdered black soldiers under the bluffs at Fort Pillow and caused the deaths of his twin daughters. You and your father brought grief to black people like Willie Broussard and his wife and killed anyone who threatened your power. None of you are what you seem."

He stood in the center of the road, not moving when a car passed, the dust swirling around him, his face looking at words that seemed to be marching by in front of his eyes.

"I congratulate you on your sobriety, Mr. Robicheaux. I suspect for a man such as yourself it was a very difficult accomplishment," he said, and walked back to the Oldsmobile and got inside and waited for his daughter.

I turned around and almost collided into Lila.

"I can't believe what you just did. How dare you?" she said.

"Don't you understand what your father has participated in? He crucified a living human being. Wake up, Lila. He's the definition of evil."

She struck me across the face.

I stood in the road, with the ashes of leaves blowing around me, and watched their car disappear down the long tunnel of oaks.

"I hate her," Alafair said behind me.

"Don't give them power, Alf," I replied.

But I felt a great sorrow. Inside all of Lila's alcoholic madness she had always seen the truth about her father's iniquity. Now, the restoration of light and the gift of sobriety in her life had somehow made her morally blind.

I put my arm on Alafair's shoulder, and the two of us walked into the house.

CISCO FLYNN WAS IN MY office the next morning. He sat in a chair in front of my desk, his hands opening and closing on his thighs.

"Out at the dock, when I told you to look at the photos? I was angry," I said, holding the duplicates of the three photographs from the buried jar.

"Just give them to me, would you?" he said.

I handed the photographs across the desk to him. He looked at them slowly, one by one, his face never changing expression. But I saw a twitch in his cheek under one eye. He lay the photos back on the desk and straightened himself in the chair.

His voice was dry when he spoke. "You're sure that's Terrebonne, the dude with the missing finger?"

"Every road we take leads to his front door," I said.

"This guy Scruggs was there, too?"

"Put it in the bank."

He stared out the window at the fronds of a palm tree swelling in the wind.

"I understand he's back in the area," Cisco said.

"Don't have the wrong kind of thoughts, partner."

"I always thought the worst people I ever met were in Hollywood. But they're right here."

"Evil doesn't have a zip code, Cisco." He picked up the photos and looked at them again. Then he set them down and propped his elbows on my desk and rested his forehead on his fingers. I thought he was going to speak, then I realized he was weeping.

AT NOON, WHEN I was on my way to lunch, Helen caught up with me in the parking lot.

"Hang on, Streak. I just got a call from some woman named Jessie Rideau. She says she was in the hotel in Morgan City the night Jack Flynn was kidnapped," she said.

"Why's she calling us now?"

We both got in my truck. I started the engine. Helen looked straight ahead, as though trying to rethink a problem she couldn't quite define.

"She says she and another woman were prostitutes who worked out of the bar downstairs. She says Harpo Scruggs made the other woman, someone named Lavern Viator, hide a lockbox for him."

"A lockbox? Where's the Viator woman?"

"She joined a cult in Texas and asked Rideau to keep the lockbox. Rideau thinks Scruggs killed her. Now he wants the box."

"Why doesn't she give it to him?"

"She's afraid he'll kill her after he gets it."

"Tell her to come in."

"She doesn't trust us either."

I parked the truck in front of the cafeteria on Main Street. The drawbridge was up on Bayou Teche and a shrimp boat was passing through the pilings.

"Let's talk about it inside," I said.

"I can't eat. Before Rideau got panicky and hung up on me, she said the killers were shooting craps in the room next to Jack Flynn. They waited till he was by himself, then dragged him down a back stairs and tied him to a post on a dock and whipped him with chains. She said that's all that was supposed to happen. Except Scruggs told the others the night was just beginning. He made the Viator woman come with them. She held Jack Flynn's head in a towel so the blood wouldn't get on the seat."

Helen pressed at her temple with two fingers.

"What is it?" I said.

"Rideau said you can see Flynn's face on the towel. Isn't that some bullshit? She said there're chains and a hammer and handcuffs in the box, too. I got to boogie, boss man. The next time this broad calls, I'm transferring her to your extension," she said.

I SPENT THE REST of the day with the paperwork that my file drawer seemed to procreate from the time I closed it in the afternoon until I opened it in the morning. The paperwork all concerned the Pool, that comic Greek chorus of miscreants who are always in the wings, upstaging our most tragic moments, flatulent, burping, snickering, catcalling at the audience. It has been my long-held belief as a police officer that Hamlet and Ophelia might command our respect and admiration, but Sir Toby Belch and his minions usually consume most of our energies.