“We’ll go fishing, too. As soon as we get back,” I said.

“That depends on what Dr. Bonin says.”

“What do these guys know?”

I saw Molly smiling in the doorway. “You just got eighty-sixed,” she said.

“Today?” I asked.

“I’ll bring the car around to the side entrance,” she said.

I tried to think before I spoke, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to think about. “My meds are in the top drawer,” I said.

Five days had passed since Clete was visited by Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes, and gradually he had pushed the pair of them to the edge of his mind. Golightly had taken too many hits to the head a long time ago, Clete told himself. Besides, he was a basket case even as a criminal; he’d made his living as a smash-and-grab jewelry-store thief, on a par with gang bangers who had shit for brains and zero guts and usually victimized elderly Jews who didn’t keep guns on the premises. Also, Clete had made innocuous calls to his sister and to his niece, who was a student at Tulane, and neither of them mentioned anything of an unusual nature occurring in their lives.

Forget Golightly and Grimes, Clete thought. By mistake, Golightly once put roach paste on a plateful of Ritz crackers and almost croaked himself. This was the guy he was worrying about?

On a sunny, cool Thursday morning, Clete opened up the office and read his mail and answered his phone messages, then told his secretary, Alice Werenhaus, he was going down to Cafe du Monde for beignets and coffee. She took a five-dollar bill from her purse and put it on the corner of her desk. “Bring me a few, will you?” she said.

Miss Alice was a former nun whose height and body mass and gurgling sounds made Clete think of a broken refrigerator he once owned. Before she was encouraged out of the convent, she had been the terror of the diocese, referred to by the bishop as “the mother of Grendel” or, when he was in a more charitable mood, “our reminder that the Cross is always with us.”