"No, thanks."
"Well, all right, then. We'll seal this place, and you can follow us on down to the district." His sleepy brown eyes smiled at me. "What are you looking at?"
The breakfast table was an old round one with a hard rubber top. Among the streaks of canned food that had been blown off the table by Romero's shotgun blast was a pattern of dried rings that looked as if they had been left there by the wet impressions of glasses or cups. Except one set of rings was larger than the other, and they were both on the same side of the table. The rings were gray and felt crusty under my fingertips.
"What's the deal?" he said.
I wet my fingertip, wiped up part of the residue, and touched it to my tongue.
"What's it taste like to you?" I said.
"Are you kidding? A guy who collected human ears. I wouldn't drink out of his water tap."
"Come on, it's important."
I wet my finger and did it again. He raised his eyebrows, touched a finger to one of the gray rings, then licked it. He made a face.
"Lemon or lime juice or something," he said. "Is this how you guys do it out in the parishes? We use the lab for this sort of stuff. Remind me to buy some Listerine on the way home."
He waited. When I didn't speak, the attention sharpened in his face.
"What's it mean?" he said.
"Probably nothing."
"On no, we don't play it that way here, my friend. The game is show-and-tell."
"It doesn't mean anything. I messed up tonight."
He took the cigarette back out of his pocket and lit it. He blew the smoke out and tapped his finger in the air at me.
"You're giving me a bad feeling, Robicheaux. Who'd you say he confessed to killing before he died?"
"A girl in New Iberia."
"You knew her?"
"It's a small town."
"You knew her personally?"
"Yes."
He chewed on the corner of his lips and looked at me with veiled eyes.
"Don't make me revise my estimation of you," he said. "I think you need to go back to New Iberia tonight. And maybe stay there, unless we call you. New Orleans is a lousy place in the summer, anyway. We're clear about this, aren't we?"
"Sure."
"That's good. I aim for simplicity in my work. Clarity of line, you might call it."
He was quiet, his eyes studying me in the kitchen light. His face softened.
"Forget what I said. You look a hundred years old," he said. "Stay over in a motel tonight and give us your statement in the morning."
"That's all right. I'd better be on my way. Thank you for your courtesy," I said, and walked out into the darkness and the wind that blew over the tops of the oak trees. The night sky was full of heat lightning, like the flicker of artillery beyond a distant horizon.
Three hours later I was halfway across the Atchafalaya basin. My eyes burned with fatigue, and the center line on the highway seemed to drift back and forth under my left front tire. When I thumped across the metal bridge spanning the Atchafalaya River, the truck felt airborne under me.