"What? Why you ask a question like that?"
"No reason, really."
He tried to reconcentrate his thoughts. "A Mexican guy was at your place, right? A guy with fried mush. It wasn't an accident he was there."
"Go on."
"He was muleing tar for the projects. They call him Arana, that means 'Spider' in Spanish. He's from a village in Mexico that's got a church with a famous statue in it. I know that because he was always talking about it."
"That sure narrows it down. Who sent him to my bait shop?"
"What do I get?"
"We can talk about federal custody."
"That's worse. People start thinking Witness Protection Program."
"That's all I've got."
He tore a match from a book and struck it, held the flame to his cigarette, never blinking in the smoke and heat that rose into his handsome face.
"There's stuff going on that's new, that's a big move for certain people. You stumbled into it with that peckerwood, the one who killed Jimmy Ray Dixon's brother."
"What stuff?"
He tipped his ashes in a small tin tray, his gaze focused on nothing. His cheeks were pooled with color, the fingers of his right hand laced with smoke from the cigarette.
"I don't think you've got a lot to trade, Mingo. Otherwise, you would have already done it."
"I laid it out for you. You don't want to pick up on it..." He worked the burning end of the cigarette loose in the ashtray and placed the unsmoked stub in the package. "You asked me a personal question a minute ago. Just for fun, it don't mean anything, understand, I'll give you a number. Eleven. None of them ever saw it coming. The guy with the fried head at your place probably wasn't a serious effort.
"I say 'probably.' I'm half-Jewish, half-Irish, I don't eat in Italian restaurants. I'm outside the window looking in a lot of the time. Hey, you're a bright guy, I know you can connect on this."
"Enjoy it, Mingo," I said, and hit on the door with the flat of my fist for the turnkey to open up.
Later that same day, just before I was to sign out of the office, the phone on my desk rang.
It was like hearing the voice of a person who you knew would not go away, who would always be hovering around you like a bad memory, waiting to pull you back into the past.
"How's life, Karyn?" I said.
"Buford will be in Baton Rouge till late tonight. You and I need to talk some things out."
"I don't think so."
"You want me to come to your office? Or out to your house? I will, if that's what it takes."
I left the office and drove south of New Iberia toward my home. I tried to concentrate on the traffic, the red sky in the west, the egrets perched on the backs of cattle in the fields, the cane wagons being towed to the sugar mill. I wasn't going to give power to Karyn LaRose, I told myself. I owed her nothing. I was sure of that.
I was still trying to convince myself of my freedom from the past when I made an illegal U-turn in the middle of the road and drove to the LaRose plantation.
She wore a yellow sundress, with her platinum hair braided up on her head, a Victorian sapphire broach on a gold chain around her neck.
"Why'd you park in back?" she said when she opened the door.
"I didn't give it much thought," I said.
"I bet."