'You don't know the name of the guy you hit across the face with a.45?'
'No, I didn't check it out.'
'Isn't he the same guy who smashed a beer bottle on Marvin Oates's head?'
'Could be, Helen. I'm on the desk.'
'Then get off it. While you're at it, pull the telephone pole out of your ass,' she replied.
Just before noon I walked down to the sheriffs office. He was reading a fishing magazine and eating a ham- and-egg sandwich.
'Sorry to interrupt,' I said.
He closed the magazine and brushed the crumbs off his mouth with the back of his wrist. 'What is it?' he said.
'I'm sorry about my conduct. It's not going to happen again.'
'I'm glad to hear you take that position. But you're on the desk.'
'We've got two open homicides. What's the harm if I help Helen?'
'You tell me. You've gone into St. Martin Parish twice now and thrown one black person in the bayou and stomped another one into jelly. We're lucky we don't have black people burning down the town. You leave me at a loss for words.'
I could see the genuine bewilderment in his face, as though the simple fact that I worked under his supervision made him doubt his own sanity.
'I guess I dropped in at a bad time,' I said.
'No, it's just you, Dave. What you've never understood is that you resent authority just like the people we lock up.
'That doesn't leave a lot unsaid, does it?' I said.
'No, I don't guess it does,' he replied. He picked up his magazine again, his cheeks blotched with color.
I signed out of the office and wrote the word 'dentist' in the destination box. Then I drove my truck across the railway tracks to the shotgun cottage of Marvin Oates.
The yard was covered with trash-shrimp husks, spoiled food, used Q-Tips, disposable female items-that seemed to have been methodically sprinkled from the gallery out to the street. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass and distant rain. I walked around back and saw Marvin in a sweaty T-shirt, scuffed boots, and a beat-up cowboy hat, hacking dead banana trees out of the ground with a machete. A bolt of lightning popped across the bayou in City Park. He looked in the direction of the lightning bolt, as though it contained meaning directed specifically at him. He had not heard me walk up behind him, and he remained motionless, the machete dripping from his hand, listening, watching the stormclouds that creaked with thunder, the wind blowing leaves out of the trees.
'Who threw garbage all over your front yard?' I said.
He jumped at the sound of my voice. 'Folks that belong on chain gangs, if you ask me,' he said.
'You seem to be a pretty good student of Scripture, Marvin. Maybe you can help me with a question that's been bothering me. What does the Old Testament admonition about an eye for an eye actually mean?' I said.
He grinned. 'That's easy. The punishment ain't s'p-posed to be greater than the crime. It's got to be in equal measure,' he replied.
'So if you were a judge, what would you do to the people who raped and killed the Boudreau girl?'
'Send them to the Death House up at Angola.'
'Cancel their whole ticket?'
'She never harmed nobody. Them men didn't have no right to do what they done.'
'I see. This guy Antoine Patout, the one who hit you upside the head with a beer bottle?'
'Miss Helen was already out here. I ain't gonna talk no more about that fellow got his rear end slashed. Think what y'all want.'
'I think his punishment fit the crime. He broke a bottle on your head and maybe he or some of his friends trashed your yard. So now he won't be sitting down for a while. But Frankie Dogs was a special case. You know, shoving your face into a toilet bowl like that while other people watched? Maybe he made fun of you while he did it, too. I heard he dumped your magazines and Bibles all over the bathroom floor. I figure a guy like that deserves to get smoked.'
'You asked me a question about the Boudreau girl, but you try to turn my words around and use them against me. People has been doing that to me my whole life, Mr. Robicheaux. I dint think you was that kind of man,' he said.
'It's nothing personal.'
'When folks treat you simple-minded, it's real personal.'
He went back to his work, slashing the machete across the base of a banana tree that had already given fruit and whose stalk had gone mushy with rot. He pushed against die stalk until it snapped loose from the root system in a shower of loam, exposing the concentric circles of brown pulp inside.
'See, it's plumb eaten up with ants and cockroaches. You got to prune back the tree to free it of disease and give it new life. It's God's way,' he said, and flung the stalk on a fire.
That afternoon, when I arrived home from work, I saw Perry LaSalle's Gazelle parked by the cement boat ramp and Perry leaning against the fender, one foot propped on the bumper, the top button of his sports shirt loosened. His relaxed posture made me think of a male model in an ad. But it was a poor disguise for the agitation he was obviously trying to hide.
'I've got a problem. Or maybe we both do. Yeah, I think your stamp is on this, Dave. Undoubtedly, it's got the Robicheaux mark,' he said, nodding profoundly.
'On what?' I said.
'Let me run it by you. Actually, it all took place in one of your old haunts,' he said, and told me of the incident that had occurred the previous night on a back road in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Two black women ran a crib next to a bar that had been built in the 1950s, deep inside a woods that admitted almost no light through the canopy, a landlocked elevated piece of swamp strung with air vines, layered with dead leaves and river trash and webbed algae. The people who drank in the bar were leftovers from another era, mostly men who still spoke French and did not shave for days, rarely traveled more than a few parishes from the place of their birth, and considered events in the outside world unimportant and unrelated to their lives.
It was a place where Legion Guidry drank. Either before or after he visited the crib next door.
The two men who sought him out were obviously not from the Atchafalaya Basin. They wore sports coats and open-necked shirts, and although they were dark-featured, their accents were not Cajun. They even seemed viscerally repelled by the litter on the ground, the rusted cars in the undergrowth, the smoldering pile of garbage behind the bar. When they entered the crib, which was actually a tar paper-and-board shack, with a woodstove for heat and a gasoline-powered generator for electricity, one of the black prostitutes rose from the cot she was resting on and stared mutely at them, waiting for one of them to produce a badge.
'Where's the guy belongs to that red truck out there?' one of the men asked. He didn't look at her when he spoke. He had touched a doorknob with his hand when he entered the shack, and he tore a square of paper towel from a roll on the table by the prostitute's cot and wiped his palm and fingers with it.
'That's Mr. Legion's truck,' the woman said.
'I didn't ask you his name. I asked where he was,' the man said, balling up the paper towel in his hand, looking for a place to throw it.
The black woman wore a halter and a pair of shorts but felt naked in front of the two white men. Their hair was cut short, lightly oiled, neatly combed, their clothes pressed, their shoes shined. They smelled of cologne and had shaved late in the day. They had no sexual interest in her at all, not even a mild curiosity.
'He ain't been here yet,' she said.
'This is a waste of time,' the second man said.
'He's not up at the bar and he's not here, but his truck is outside. Now, you want to tell me where he is or you want us to walk you out in the trees?' the first man said.
'Mr. Legion got a crab trap. He goes out in the bay and brings it back to the bar and boils up some crabs for
