THAT NIGHT BOOTSIE AND I fixed ham and onion sandwiches and dirty rice and iced tea at the drainboard and ate on the breakfast table. Through the hallway I could see the moss in the oak trees glowing against the lights on the dock.
"You look tired," Bootsie said. "Not really."
"Who's this man Scruggs working for?"
"The New Orleans Mob. The Dixie Mafia. Who knows?"
"The Mob letting one of their own kill a priest?"
"You should have been a cop, Boots."
"There's something you're not saying."
"I keep feeling all this stuff goes back to Jack Flynn's murder."
"The Flynns again." She rose from the table and put her plate in the sink and looked through the window into the darkness at the foot of our property. "Why always the Flynns?" she said.
I didn't have an adequate answer, not even for myself when I lay next to Bootsie later in the darkness, the window fan drawing the night air across our bed. Jack Flynn had fought at the battle of Madrid and at Alligator Creek on Guadalcanal; he was not one to be easily undone by company goons hired to break a farmworkers' strike. But the killers had kidnapped him out of a hotel room in Morgan City, beaten him with chains, impaled his broken body with nails as a lesson in terror to any poor white or black person who thought he could relieve his plight by joining a union. To this day not one suspect had been in custody, not one participant had spoken carelessly in a bar or brothel.
> The Klan always prided itself on its secrecy, the arcane and clandestine nature of its rituals, the loyalty of its members to one another. But someone always came forward, out of either guilt or avarice, and told of the crimes they committed in groups, under cover of darkness, against their unarmed and defenseless victims.
But Jack Flynn's murderers had probably not only been protected, they had been more afraid of the people they served than Louisiana or federal law.
Jack Flynn's death was at the center of our current problems because we had never dealt with our past, I thought. And in not doing so, we had allowed his crucifixion to become a collective act.
I propped myself up on the mattress with one elbow and touched Bootsie's hair. She was sound asleep and did not wake. Her eyelids looked like rose petals in the moon's glow.
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING I turned into the Terrebonne grounds and drove down the oak-lined drive toward the house. The movie set was empty, except for a bored security guard and Swede Boxleiter, who was crouched atop a plank building, firing a nail gun into the tin roof.
I stood under the portico of the main house and rang the chimes. The day had already turned warm, but it was cool in the shade and the air smelled of damp brick and four-o'clock flowers and the mint that grew under the water faucets. Archer Terrebonne answered the door in yellow-and-white tennis clothes, a moist towel draped around his neck.
"Lila's not available right now, Mr. Robicheaux," he said.
"I'd very much like to talk to her, sir."
"She's showering. Then we're going to a brunch. Would you like to leave a message?"
"The sheriff would appreciate her coming to his office to talk about her conversation with Father James Mulcahy."
"Y'all do business in an extraordinary fashion. Her discussions with a minister are the subject of a legal inquiry?"
"This man was almost killed because he's too honorable to divulge something your daughter told him."
"Good day, Mr. Robicheaux," Terrebonne said, and closed the door in my face.
I drove back through the corridor of trees, my face tight with anger. I started to turn out onto the service road, then stopped the truck and walked out to the movie set.
"How's it hangin', Swede?" I said.
He fired the nail gun through the tin roof into a joist and pursed his mouth into an inquisitive cone.
"Where's Clete Purcel?" I asked.
"Gone for the day. You look like somebody pissed in your underwear."
"You know the layout of this property?"
"I run power cables all over it."