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"It's the stuff of great love affairs," Clete said.
"Who built the big casino downtown?" Whitey said. "Mobbed-up guys with real smarts from Chicago and Vegas, right? Where do they build it? Between Louis Armstrong Park and the Iberville welfare project, the two most dangerous areas in downtown New Orleans. If you win at the table, you just walk outside and hand your money over to the muggers. How's that for fucking smarts? You think the lesson is lost on the local schmucks?"
Clete and I looked at each other.
Twenty minutes later we were on I-10, speeding past Lake Pontchartrain. Fog puffed out of the trees on the north shore of the lake, and the rain was falling on the lake's surface inside the fog.
"She's the funnel for the wiseguys and Jimmy Ray Dixon into LaRose's administration, isn't she?" Clete said.
"That's the way I'd read it."
"I don't think I'm going to survive having a wetbrain like Whitey Zeroski explain that to me," he said.
Early the next morning I went to Sabelle Crown's bar at the Underpass in Lafayette. The black bartender told me I'd find her at the city golf course on the northside.
"The golf course?" I said.
"That's where she go when she want to be alone," he said.
He was right. I found her sitting on a bench under a solitary oak tree by the first fairway, a scarf tied around her head, flipping bread crusts from a bag at the pigeons. The sky was gray, and leaves were blowing out of the trees in the distance.
"Your old man tried to drop a car frame on top of Jimmy Ray Dixon," I said.
"The things you learn," she said.
"Who got you started in the life, Sabelle?"
"You know, I have a total blackout about all that stuff."
"You left New Iberia for New Orleans, then disappeared up north."
"This is kind of a private place for me, Dave. Buford LaRose tried to have Daddy killed out on the Atchafalaya River. Haven't you done enough?"
"Were you in Chicago?" I asked.
She brushed the bread crumbs off her hands and walked to her parked automobile, the back of her scarf lifting in the wind.
After I returned to the office, I got a telephone call from the sheriff.
"I'm in Vermilion Parish. Drop what you're doing and come over for a history lesson," he said.
"What's up?"
"You said this character Mookie Zerrang was a leg breaker on the Mississippi coast and a button man in Miami?"
"That's the word."
"Think closer to home."
I signed out of the office and met the sheriff on a dirt road that fed into a steel-and-wood bridge over the Vermilion River ten miles south of Lafayette. He was leaning against his cruiser, eating from a roll of red boudin wrapped in wax paper. The sky had cleared, and the sunlight on the water looked like hammered gold leaf. The sheriff wiped his mouth with his wrist.
"Man, I love this stuff," he said. "My doctor says my arteries probably look like the sewer lines under Paris. I wonder what he means by that."
"What are we doing here, skipper?" I said.
"That name, 'Zerrang,' it kept bouncing around in my head. Then I remembered the story of that Negro kid back during World War II. You remember the one? Same name."
"No."
