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cigarette, pitches it out into the trees, perhaps moves out of the moon's glow so Roland's face will be better illuminated. Then he sights along the barrel and puts another round from the .357 Magnum right through Roland's eyebrow.
    He walks with a heavy step back up the embankment, where a companion has waited for him as though he were watching the rerun of an old film.
    Chapter 5
    LISTENED, HIS powder blue porkpie hat slanted down on his forehead, his eyes roving out into the hall while I talked. He wore an immaculate pair of white tennis shorts and a print shirt covered with parakeets.
    The back of his neck and the tops of his immense arms were flaking with sunburn. ”Kidnapping a guy already in custody is pretty slick. Who do you figure these characters were?“ he said, his eyes leaving two uniformed deputies on the other side of the glass. ”Guys who knew the drill, at least well enough to convince a night jailer they were FBI.“
    ”The grease balls “Maybe.”
    “It's not their normal style. They don't like to stray into federal jurisdiction.” He glanced through the glass partition into the hall again. “Why do I get the feeling I'm some kind of zoo exhibit?”
    “It's your imagination,” I said, my face flat. “I bet.” Then he winked and pointed at a deputy with one finger. The deputy looked down at some papers in his hand. “Knock it off, Clete.”
    “Why'd you ask me down here?”
    “I thought you'd like to go fishing.”
    He smiled. His face was round and pink, his green eyes lighted with a private sense of humor. A scar ran through part of his eyebrow and across the bridge of his nose, where he had been bashed with a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel.
    “Dave, I know what my old Homicide podjo is going to think before he thinks it.”
    “I've got two open murder cases. One of the victims may have been Sonny Boy Marsallus's girlfriend.”
    “Marsallus, huh?” he said, his face sobering.
    “I tried to have him picked up by NOPD, but he went off the screen.”
    He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair.
    “Leave him off the screen,” he said.
    “What was he into down in the tropics?” I asked.
    “A lot of grief.”
    Helen Soileau came through the door, without knocking, and dropped the crime scene report on my desk.
    “You want to look it over and sign it?” she said. Her eyes went up and down Clete's body.
    “Do y'all know each other?” I said.
    “Only by reputation. Didn't he work for Sally Dio?” she said.
    Clete fed a stick of gum in his mouth and looked at me.
    “I'll go over the report in a few minutes, Helen,” I said.
    “We couldn't get a print off the cigarette butt, but the casts on the footprints and tire tracks look good,” she said. “By the way, the .357 rounds were hollow-points.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    Clete swiveled around in his chair and watched her go back out the door.
    “Who's the muff-driver?” he said.
    “Come on, Clete.”
    “One look at that broad is enough to drive you to a monastery.”
    It was a quarter to five.
    “Do you want to pull your car around front and I'll meet you there?” I said. He followed me in his old Cadillac convertible to the Henderson levee outside Breaux Bridge. We put my boat and outboard in the water and fished on the far side of a bay dotted with abandoned oil platforms and dead cypress trees. The rain was falling through shafts of sunlight in the west, and the rain looked like tunnels of spun glass and smoke rising into the sky. Clete took a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer from the cooler and snapped off the top with his pocketknife. The foam slid down the inside of the neck when he removed the bottle from his mouth. Then he drank again, his throat working a long time. His face looked tired, vaguely morose. “Were you bothered by that crack Helen made about Sally Dio?”
    “So I ran security for a grease ball I also had two of his goons slam my hand in a car door. Sometime when you have a chance, tell