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more than ten minutes in all the years I’ve known you. But if you’re saying you’ll get through this, yeah, I guess you will. You always do. Take care, friend. Buy you dinner some night?”
    “Sounds good. I’ll call you.”
    “No you won’t, Lew. You’ll mean to, but you won’t do it. And then eventually I’ll just come on over there and pry you out of the house and haul you off somewhere. Just like always.”
    He started away, shaking his head.
    “Don …”
    “Yeah?” Turning back. I had never noticed before this just how deeply the web of fine lines had sunk everywhere into his face, or that flesh now hung slack beneath chin and cheekbones. Even his eyes had a grayish cast to them.
    “Thanks.”
    “Hey, don’t embarrass me in front of Verne’s friends. I hate it when you get all teary-eyed, I ever tell you that?”
    “I mean it.”
    “Yeah. I know you do. I know that.”
    “You hear much from Josie?”
    “Not so long as the checks keep coming. Shit, I don’t mean that. She sends me pictures of the kids every few months. She’s real good about doing that.”
    “She still loves you, Don.”
    “Yeah. Well. Guess I better go shut down a few crack houses, huh? Got a few hours left in the day. You sure you don’t want a ride?”
    “I’m sure.”
    He climbed into the Regal, his own, that he’d been driving at least ten years, waved to me in the rearview and hauled it into a lumbering U back toward down-town. The department kept offering him new official cars and he kept telling them his was fine, he was used to it.
    I walked down State to Freret and turned right. Kids on bicycles heading to and from classes at Tulane or Loyola shot past me. I hadn’t had a car since Vicky left. At first I’d planned to buy one, but I kept putting it off for one reason or another, and after a while it just stopped being important. I’d got used to walking and liked it, and if I had to get somewhere I couldn’t walk, well, cabs in New Orleans are plentiful as roaches.
    I crossed Napoleon and, one street over, turned onto General Pershing. Blackjack Pershing, they called him. Most of his mounted troops were “buffalo soldiers.” Black men. They performed so well that Pershing suggested only blacks should be taken into the armed services. Except for officers, of course.
    Squirrels ran along power lines with blue jays screaming and swooping about them. It was garbage pickup day for this part of town; emptied plastic bins sat inverted or on their sides before most houses. This stretch was pure New Orleans, a jumble of wrought iron, balconies, leaded glass, gingerbread, Corinthian columns. Grand old homes well preserved, decaying ones once every bit as grand and now carved into multiple dwellings, simple raised cottages and bungalows.
    I walked along thinking hard about Verne, and about something I’d read in an art journal, unable to sleep, at two or three that morning. The lives we lead, it said, the art or artifacts we produce, all these are but scrims, one layer over countless other layers, some that reveal, some that conceal.
    Twenty-six years ago I killed a man. I was playing detective in those days, and I was pretty crazy back then too, so I guess I must have been trying on some half-imagined role as avenging angel. Like other roles I’ve tried, before and since, it didn’t fit.
    The thing is, I rarely think about it. Though from time to time, walking these shabby streets (especially at night, it seems), I’ll glance into a stranger’s face and something there, in his eye, takes me back. Dostoyevsky said that we’re all guilty of everything. And while I never could bring myself to accept Christian notions of sin and atonement, there’s definitely something to karma. The things we do pile up on us, weigh us down. Or hold us in place, at very least.

Chapter Four
    I TRIED TO CALL BOUDLEAUX AFTER READING through the report, but his machine told me he was in Lafayette on business and would be away