'I'll be right with y'all,' I called through the screen.

'Like hell you will,' I heard one of them say as they walked back toward their cars.

'I'll drive you back to New Orleans. I think maybe you've got a bad case of stomach flu,' I said to Lucinda.

'Just fill my gas can for me. I'll be all right in a little bit.' She took a crumpled five-dollar bill from her Levi's and put it on the tabletop.

'I have to go back for my truck, anyway. It's at a dock down by Barataria Bay. Let's don't argue about it.'

But she wasn't capable of arguing about anything. Her breath was rife with bile, her elongated turquoise eyes rheumy and listless, the back of her white T-shirt glued against her black skin. When I patted her on the shoulder, I could feel the bone like coat hanger wire against the cloth. I could only guess at what it had been like for her at the NOPD training academy when a peckerwood drill instructor decided to turn up the butane.

I carried the gas can down to her Toyota, got it started, filled the tank up at the dock, and drove her to New Orleans. She lived right off Magazine in a one-story white frame house with a green roof, a small yard, and a gallery that was hung with potted plants and overgrown with purple trumpet vine. Around the corner, on Magazine, was a two-story bar with a colonnade and neon Dixie beer signs in the windows; you could hear the jukebox roaring through the open front door.

'I should drive you out to the boatyard,' she said.

'I can take a cab.'

She saw my eyes look up and down her street and linger on the intersection.

'You know this neighborhood?'

'Sure. I worked it when I was a patrolman. Years ago that bar on the corner was a hot-pillow joint.'

'I know. My auntie used to hook there. It's a shooting gallery now,' she said, and walked inside to call me a cab.

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

It was late evening after I picked up my truck down in Barataria and drove back into the city. I called Clete at his apartment in the Quarter.

'Hey, noble mon,' he said. 'I called you at your house this afternoon.'

'What's up?'

'Oh, it probably doesn't amount to much. What are you doing back in the Big Sleazy, mon?'

'I need some help on these vigilante killings. I'm not going to get it from NOPD.'

'Lose this vigilante stuff, Dave. It's a shuck, believe me.'

'Have you heard about some guys having their hearts cut out?'

He laughed. 'That's a new one. Where'd you get that?' he said.

'Lucinda Bergeron.'

'You've been out of Homicide too long, Streak. When they cancel them out, it's for money, sex, or power. This vampire or ghoul bullshit is out of comic books. Hey, I got another revelation for you. I think that Bergeron broad has got a few frayed wires in her head. Did she tell you she went up to Angola to watch a guy fry?'

'No.'

'It probably just slipped her mind. Most of your normals like to watch a guy ride the bolt once in a while.'

'Why'd you call the house?'

'I'm hearing this weird story about you and a Nazi submarine.'

'From where?'

'Look, Martina's over here. I promised to take her to this blues joint up on Napoleon. Join us, then we'll get some étouffée at Monroe's. You've got to do it, mon, it's not up for discussion. Then I'll fill you in on how you've become a subject of conversation with Tommy Blue Eyes.'

'Tommy Lonighan?'

'You got it, Tommy Bobalouba himself, the only mick I ever met who says his own kind are niggers turned inside out.'

'The Tommy Lonighan I remember drowned a guy with a fire hose, Clete.'

'So who's perfect? Let me give you directions up on Napoleon. By the way, Bootsie seemed a little remote when I called. Did I spit in the soup or something?'

The nightclub up on Napoleon was crowded, the noise deafening, and I couldn't see Clete at any of the tables. Then I realized that an exceptional event had just taken place up on the bandstand. The Fat Man, the most famous rhythm and blues musician ever produced by New Orleans, had pulled up in front in his pink Cadillac limo, and like a messiah returning to his followers, his sequined white coat and coal black skin almost glowing with an electric purple sheen, had walked straight through the parting crowd to the piano, grinning and nodding, his walrus face beaming with goodwill and an innocent self-satisfaction, and had started hammering out 'When the Saints Go Marching In.'

The place went wild.

Then I realized that another event was taking place simultaneously on the dance floor, one that probably not even New Orleans was prepared for-Clete Purcel and his girlfriend doing the dirty boogie.

While the Fat Man's ringed, sausage fingers danced up and down on the piano keys and the saxophones and trumpets blared behind him, Clete was bopping in the middle of the hardwood floor, his porkpie hat slanted forward on his head, his face pointed between his girlfriend's breasts, his buttocks swinging like an elephant's; then a moment later his shoulders were erect while he bumped and ground his loins, his belly jiggling, his balled fists churning the air, his face turned sideways as though he were in the midst of orgasm.

His girlfriend was over six feet tall and wore a flowered sundress that fit her tanned body like sealskin. She waved bandannas in each hand as though she were on a runway, kicking her waxed calves at an angle behind her, lifting her chin into the air while her eyelids drifted shut and she rotated her tongue slowly around her lips. Then she let her mouth hang open in a feigned pout, pushed her reddish brown hair over the top of her head with both hands, flipped it back into place with an erotic challenge in her eyes, and rubbed a stretched bandanna back and forth across her rump while she oscillated her hips.

At first the other dancers pulled back in awe or shock or perhaps even in respect; then they began to leave the dance floor two at a time and finally in large numbers after Clete backed with his full weight into another dancer and sent him careening into a drink waiter.

The Fat Man finished, wiped his sweating face at the microphone with an immaculate white handkerchief, and thanked the crowd for their ongoing roar of applause. I followed Clete and his girl to their table, which was covered with newspaper, beer bottles, and dirty paper plates that had contained potatoes French-fried in chicken fat. Clete's face was bright and happy with alcohol, and the seams of his Hawaiian shirt were split at both shoulders.

'Martina, this is the guy I've been telling you about,' he said. 'My ole bust-'em or smoke-'em podjo.'

'How about giving that stuff a break, Clete?' I said.

'I'm very pleased to meet you,' she said.

Her face was pretty in a rough way, her skin coarse and grained under the makeup as though she had worked outdoors in sun and wind rather than on a burlesque stage.

'Clete's told me about how highly educated you are and so well read and all,' she said.

'He exaggerates sometimes.'

'No, he doesn't,' she said. 'He's very genuine and sincere and he feels very deeply for you.'

'I see,' I said.

'He has a gentle side to his nature that few people know about. The people in my herbalist and nude therapy group think he's wonderful.'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Clete study the dancers out on the floor as though he had never seen them before.

'He says you're trying to find the vigilante. I think it's disgusting that somebody's out there murdering colored people in the projects and nobody does anything about it.'

'Clete doesn't seem to give it much credence.'

'Look, mon, let me tell you where this vigilante stuff came from. There's a citizens committee here, a bunch of right-wing douche bags who haven't figured out what their genitalia is for, so they spend all their time jacking up local politicians and judges about crime in the streets, dope in the projects, on and on and on, except nobody wants to pay more taxes to hire more cops or build more jails. So what they're really saying is let's either give the blacks a lot more rubbers or do a little less to stop the spread of sickle-cell.'