Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux 9)

While the buffet was being laid out on a row

of picnic tables, Buford organized a touch football game and prevailed even upon the most reluctant guests to put down their drinks and join one team or another. Some were from the university in Lafayette but most were people well known in the deceptively lighthearted and carnival-like atmosphere of Louisiana politics. Unlike their counterparts from the piney woods parishes to the north, they were bright, educated, openly hedonistic, always convivial, more concerned about violations of protocol than ideology.

They were fun to be with; they were giddy with alcohol and the exertion of the game, their laughter tinkling through the trees each

time the ball was snapped and there was a thumping of feet across the sod and a loud pat of hands on the rump.

Then a white-jacketed black man dinged a metal triangle and everyone filed happily back toward the serving tables.

"Run out, Dave! Let me throw you a serious one!" Buford hollered, the football poised in his palm. He wore tennis shoes, pleated white slacks, the arms of his plum-colored sweater tied around his neck.

"That's enough for me," I said.

"Don't give me that 'old man' act," he said and cocked his arm to fire a bullet, then smiled and lofted an easy, arching pass that dropped into my hands as though he had plopped it into a basket.

He caught up to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Wow, you feel like a bag of rocks. How much iron do you pump?" he said.

"Just enough to keep from falling apart."

He slipped the football out of my hands, flipped it toward the stable. He watched it bounce and roll away in the dusk, as though he were looking at an unformed thought in the center of his mind.

"Dave, I think we're going to win next month," he said.

"That's good."

"You think you could live in Baton Rouge?"

"I've never thought about it."

Someone turned on the Japanese lanterns in the trees. The air smelled of pecan husks and smoke from a barbecue pit dug in the earth. Buford paused.

"How'd you like to be head of the state police?" he asked.

"I was never much of an administrator, Buford."

"I had a feeling you'd say something like that."

"Oh?"

"Dave, why do you think we've always had the worst state government in the union? It's because good people don't want to serve in it. Is the irony lost on you?"

"I appreciate the offer."

"You want to think it over?"

"Sure, why not?"

"That's the way," he said, and then was gone among his other

guests, his handsome face glowing with the perfection of the evening and the portent it seemed to represent.

Karyn walked among the tree trunks toward me, a paper plate filled with roast duck and venison and dirty rice in one hand, a Corona bottle and cone-shaped glass with a lime slice inserted on the rim gripped awkwardly in the other. My eyes searched the crowd for Bootsie.

"I took the liberty," Karyn said, and set the plate and glass and beer bottle down on a table for me.

"Thank you. Where'd Boots go?"