"He's got an inoperable brain tumor. The guy's walking death. That's his edge."
"Better come in, Mr. Guidry."
"I don't give a deposition until he's in custody. I want the sheriffs guarantee on that."
"You won't get it."
"One day I'm going to make you suffer. I promise it." He eased the phone down into the cradle.
ON MONDAY, ADRIEN GLAZIER knocked on my office door. She was dressed in blue jeans and hiking shoes and a denim shirt, and she carried a brown cloth shoulder bag scrolled with Mexican embroidery. The ends of her ash-blond hair looked like they had been brushed until they crawled with static electricity, then had been sprayed into place.
"We can't find Willie Broussard," she said.
"Did you try his father's fish camp?"
"Why do you think I'm dressed like this?"
"Cool Breeze doesn't report in to me, Ms. Glazier."
"Can I sit down?"
Her eyes met mine and lingered for a moment, and I realized her tone and manner had changed, like heat surrendering at the end of a burning day.
"An informant tells us some people in Hong Kong have sent two guys to Louisiana to clip off a troublesome hangnail or two," she said. "I don't know if the target is Willie Broussard or Ricky Scarlotti or a couple of movie producers. Maybe it's all of the above."
"My first choice would be Scarlotti. He's the only person who has reason to give up some of their heroin connections."
"If they kill Willie Broussard, they take the squeeze off Scarlotti. Anyway, I'm telling you what we know."
I started to bring up the subject of Harpo Scruggs again and the possibility of his having worked for the government, but I let it go.
She dropped a folder on my desk. Clipped to two xeroxed Mexico City police memorandums was a grainy eight-by-ten photograph that had been taken in an open-air fruit market. The man in the photo stood at a stall, sucking a raw oyster out of its shell.
"His name is Ruben Esteban. He's one of the men we think Hong Kong has sent here."
"He looks like a dwarf."
"He is. He worked for the Argentine Junta. Supposedly he interrogated prisoners by chewing off their genitals."
"What?"
"The Triads always ruled through terror. The people they hire create living studies in torture and mutilation. Call Amnesty International in Chicago and see what they have to say about Esteban."
I picked up the photo and looked at it again. "Where's the material on the other guy?" I asked.
"We don't know who he is. Mr. Robicheaux, I'm sorry for having given you a bad time in some of our earlier conversations."
"I'll survive," I said, and tried to smile.
"My father was killed in Korea while people like Jack Flynn were working for the Communist Party."
"Flynn wasn't a Red. He was a Wobbly."
"You could fool me. He was lucky a House committee didn't have him shipped to Russia."
Then she realized she had said too much, that she had admitted looking at his file, that she was probably committed forever to being the advocate for people whose deeds were indefensible.
"You ever sit down and talk with Megan? Maybe y'all are on the same side," I said.
"You're too personal, sir."
I raised my hands by way of apology.
She smiled slightly, then hung her bag from her shoulder and walked out of the office, her eyes already assuming new purpose, as though she were burning away all the antithetical thoughts that were like a thumbtack in her brow.
AT EIGHT-THIRTY THAT NIGHT Bootsie and I were washing the dishes in the kitchen when the phone rang on the counter.
"This is what you've done, asshole. My reputation's ruined. My job is gone. My wife has left me. You want to hear more?" the voice said.
"Guidry?" I said.
"There's a rumor going around I'm the father of a halfwit mulatto I sold to a cathouse in Morgan City. The guy who told me that said he heard it from your buddy Clete Purcel."
"Either you're in a bar or you've become irrational. Either way, don't call my home again."
"Here it is. I'll give you the evidence on Flynn's murder. I said evidence, not just information. I'll give you the shooters who did the two brothers, I'll give you the guys who almost drowned Megan Flynn, I'll give you the guy who's been writing the checks. What's on your end of the table?"
"The Iberia prosecutor will go along with aiding and abetting. We'll work with St. Mary Parish. It's a good deal. You'd better grab it."
He was quiet a long time. Outside, the heat lightning looked like silver plate through the trees.
"Are you there?" I said.
"Scruggs threatened to kill me. You got to bring this guy in."
"Give us the handle to do it."
"It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it, you arrogant shithead."
I waited silently. The receiver felt warm and moist in my hand.
"Go to the barn where Flynn died. I'll be there in forty-five minutes. Leave the muff diver at home," he said.
"You don't make the rules, Guidry. Another thing, call her that again and I'm going to break your wagon."
I hung up, then dialed Helen's home number.
"You don't want to check in with the St. Mary sheriff's office first?" she said.
"They'll get in the way. Are you cool on this?" I said.
"What do you mean?"
"We take Guidry down clean. No scratches on the freight."
"The guy who said he'd dig up my grave and piss in my mouth? To tell you the truth, I wouldn't touch him with a baton. But maybe you'd better get somebody else for backup, bwana."
"I'll meet you at the end of East Main in twenty minutes," I said.
I went into the bedroom and took my holstered 1911 model U.S. Army.45 from the dresser drawer and clipped it onto my belt. I wiped my palms on my khakis unconsciously. Through the screen window the oak and pecan trees seemed to tremble in the heat lightning that leaped between the clouds.
"Streak?" Bootsie said.
"Yes?"
"I overheard your conversation. Don't worry about Helen. It's you that man despises," she said.
HELEN AND I DROVE down the two-lane through Jeanerette, then turned off on an oak-lined service road that led past the barn with the cratered roof and sagging walls where Jack Flynn died. The moon had gone behind a bank of storm clouds, and the landscape was dark, the blackberry bushes in the pasture humped against the lights of a house across the bayou. The leaves of the oaks along the road nickered with lightning, and I could smell rain and dust in the air.
"Guidry's going to do time, isn't he?" Helen said.
"Some anyway."
"I partnered with a New Orleans uniform who got sent up to Angola. First week down a Big Stripe cut his face. He had himself put in lockdown and every morning the black boys would spit on him when they went to breakfast."
"Yeah?"
"I was just wondering how many graduates of the parish prison will be in Guidry's cell house."
Helen turned the cruiser off the road and drove past the water oaks through the weeds and around the side of the barn. The wind was up now and the banana trees rattled and swayed against the barn. In the headlights we could see clusters of red flowers in the rain trees and dust swirling off the ground.
"Where is he?" Helen said. But before I could speak she pointed at two pale lines of crushed grass where a car had been driven out in the pasture. Then she said, "I got a bad feeling, Streak."
"Take it easy," I said.
"What if Scruggs is behind this? He's been killing people for forty years. I don't plan to walk blindfolded into the Big Exit." She cut the lights and unsnapped the strap on her nine-millimeter Beretta.
"Let's walk the field. You go to the left, I go to the right… Helen?"
"What?"
"Forget it. Scruggs and Guidry are both pieces of shit. If you feel in jeopardy, take them off at the neck."
We got out of the cruiser and walked thirty yards apart through the field, our weapons drawn. Then the moon broke behind the edge of a cloud and we could see the bumper and front fender of an automobile that was parked close behind a blackberry thicket. I circled to the right of the thicket, toward the rear of the automobile, then I saw the tinted windows and buffed, soft-yellow exterior of Alex Guidry's Cadillac. The driver's door was partly open and a leg in gray pants and a laced black shoe was extended into the grass. I clicked on the flashlight in my left hand.