His face was flushed, his collar wilted like damp tissue paper around his thick neck.

'Go on back to the worm business, Dave,' he said. 'That guy comes around your house again, do the earth a favor, screw a gun barrel in his mouth and blow his fucking head off. Leave me alone now, will you? I don't feel too good. I got blood pressure could blow gaskets out of a truck engine.'

He wiped at his mouth with his hand. His lips were purple in the refrigerated gloom of his office. He stared at a collection of thumbtacked news articles and photographs on his corkboard as though his eyes could penetrate the black-and-white grain of the paper, as though perhaps he himself had been pulled inside a photograph, into a world of freight cars grinding slowly to a stop by a barbed-wire gate that yawned open like a hungry mouth, while dogs barked in the eye-watering glare of searchlights and files of the newly arrived moved in silhouette toward buildings with conical chimneys that disappeared into their own smoke.

Or was I making a complexity out of a histrionic and disingenuous fat man whose self-manufactured drama had accidentally brought a stray misanthrope out of the woodwork?

It was hard to buy into the notion that somehow World War II was still playing at the Bijou in New Orleans, Louisiana.

I left him in his office and walked outside into the light. The heat was like a match flame against my skin.

'It sounds deeply weird,' Clete said, biting into his po'-boy sandwich at a small grocery store up by Audubon Park, where the owner kept tables for working people to eat their lunch. 'But maybe we're just living in weird times. It's not like the old days.'

'You believe this American Bund stuff?'

'No, it's the way people think nowadays that bothers me. Like this vigilante gig and this Citizens Committee for a Better New Orleans. You knew Bimstine and Tommy Lonighan are both on it?'

'No. When did Lonighan become a Rotarian?'

'Law-and-order and well-run vice can get along real good together. Conventioneers looking for a blow job don't like getting rolled or ripped off by Murphy artists. Did you know that Lucinda Bergeron is NOPD's liaison person with the Committee?'

He chewed his food slowly, watching my face. Outside, the wind was blowing and denting the canopy of spreading oaks along St. Charles.

'Then this preacher whose head glows in the dark shows up at your dock and tells you he's part of the same bunch. You starting to see some patterns here, noble mon?' he said.

'I don't know what any of that has to do with the guy who hurt Bootsie.'

'Maybe it doesn't.' He watched the streetcar roll down the track on the neutral ground and stop on the corner. It was loaded with Japanese businessmen. In spite of the temperature they all wore dark blue suits, ties, and long-sleeve shirts. 'If I were a worrying man, you know what would worry me most? It's not the crack and the black punks in the projects. It's a feeling I've got about the normals, it's like they wouldn't mind trying it a different way for a while.'

'What do you mean?'

'Maybe I'm wrong, but if tomorrow morning I woke up and read in The Times-Picayune that an election had just been held and it was now legal to run the lowlifes through tree shredders, you know, the kind the park guys use to grind oak limbs into wood chips, it wouldn't be a big surprise.'

'Did you ever hear of anybody in the city who fits the description of this guy Buchalter?'

'Nope. I've got a theory, though; at least it's something we can check out. He's an out-of-towner. He went to your house to shake up your cookie bag. Right? There doesn't seem to be any obvious connection between our man and any particular local bucket of shit we might have had trouble with. Right? What does all that suggest to you, Streak?'

'One of the resident wise guys using out-of-town talent to send a message.'

'And whose Johnson did we just jerk on? It can't hurt to have a talk with Tommy Bobalouba again, can it?'

'I thought he was part of your meal ticket.'

'Not anymore. I don't like the way he acted in front of Martina. You take an Irish street prick out of the Channel, put him in an eight-hundred-thou house by Lake Pontchartrain, and you've got an Irish street prick in an eight-hundred-thou house by Lake Pontchartrain. How about we have a little party?'

'I'm on leave, and I'm out of my jurisdiction.'

'Who cares? If the guy's clean, it's no big deal. If he's not, fuck that procedural stuff. We scramble his eggs.'

The cashier cut his eyes toward us, then turned the floor fan so that our conversation was blown out the open door, away from the other customers.

'Let me call home first,' I said.

'No argument?'

I shrugged my shoulders. He watched my face.

'How much sleep did you get last night?' he asked.

'Enough.'

'You could fool me.'

'You want to go out to Lonighan's or not?'

There was a pause in his eyes, a fine bead of light. He made a round button with his lips and scratched at his cheek with one fingernail.

Lonighan lived a short distance from the yacht club in an imitation Tudor mansion that had been built by a New Orleans beer baron during the 1920s. The grounds were surrounded by a high brick wall, at the front of which was a piked security gate, with heavy clumps of banana trees on each side of it, and a winding driveway that led past a screened-in pool and clay tennis courts that were scattered with leaves. We parked my truck, and Clete pushed the button on the speaker box by the gate.

'Who is it?' a voice said through the box.

'Clete Purcel. Is Tommy home?'

'He's over at his gym. You want to come back later or leave a message?'

'Who are all those people in the pool?'

'Some guests. Just leave a message, Clete. I'll give it to him.'

'When'll he be home?'

'He comes, he goes, what do I know? Just leave a fucking message, will you?'

'Here's the message, Art. I don't like talking to a box.'

'I'm sorry, I'll be down. Hey, Clete, I'm just the hired help, all right?'

A moment later the man named Art walked down the drive with a pair of hedge clippers in his hand. He was bare-chested and sweaty and wore grass-stained white shorts and sandals that flopped on his feet.

'Open up,' Clete said.

'You're putting me in a bad place, man. Why'd you have to get Tommy upset?'

'I didn't do anything to Tommy.'

'Tell that to him. Christ, Clete, you know what kind of guy he is. How you think he feels when a broad tells him off in public?'

'You gonna open up?'

'No.'

'You're starting to piss me off, Art.'

'What can I say? Wait in your truck, I'll send you guys out some drinks and sandwiches. Give me a break, all right?'

He walked back toward the house. The swimmers were leaving the screened-in pool for a shady area in the trees, set with lawn chairs, a drinks table, and a smoking barbecue pit. The skin flexed around the corners of Clete's eyes.

'You still got your binoculars?' he asked.

'In the glove compartment.'

He went to the truck and returned to the gate. He focused my pair of World War II Japanese field glasses through the steel bars and studied the people in the shade.

'Check it out, mon,' he said, handing me the glasses.

One woman lay on a reclining chair with a newspaper over her face. A second, older, heavyset and big-breasted, her skin tanned almost the color of mahogany, stood on the lawn with her feet spread wide, touching each toe with a cross-handed motion, her ash blond hair cascading back and forth across her shoulders. A third woman, with dyed red hair, who could not have been over twenty or twenty-one, was bent forward over a pocket mirror, a short soda straw held to one nostril, the other nostril pinched shut with a forefinger. Seated on each side of her was a thick-bodied, sun-browned, middle-aged man with a neon bikini wrapped wetly around the genitals, the back and chest streaked with wisps of black and gray hair. The face of one man was flecked with fine patterns of scab tissue, as though he had walked through a reddish brown skein of cobweb.