"We'll see."

"Look, I know you've got a big workload piled on you right now, but I've got a problem I need you to look into when you have a chance. Like maybe first thing tomorrow morning."

I looked back at him without speaking.

"Baby Feet Balboni," he said.

"What about him?"

"He's in New Iberia. At the Holiday Inn, with about six of his fellow greaseballs and their whores. The manager called me from a phone booth down the street he was so afraid one of them would hear him."

"I don't know what I can do about it," I said.

"We need to know what he's doing in town."

"He grew up here."

"Look, Dave, they can't even handle this guy in New Orleans. He cannibalized half the Giacano and Cardo families to get where he is. He's not coming back here. That's not going to happen."

I rubbed my face. My whiskers felt stiff against my palm.

"You want me to send somebody else?" the sheriff asked.

"No, that's all right."

"Y'all were friends in high school for a while, weren't you?"

"We played ball together, that's all."

I gazed out the window at the lengthening shadows. He studied my face.

"What's the matter, Dave?"

"It's nothing."

"You bothered because we want to bounce a baseball buddy out of town?"

"No, not really."

"Did you ever hear that story about what he did to Didi Giacano's cousin? Supposedly he hung him from his colon by a meat hook."

"I've heard that same story about a half-dozen wiseguys in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. It's an old N.O.P.D. heirloom."

"Probably just bad press, huh?"

"I always tried to think of Julie as nine-tenths thespian," I said.

"Yeah, and gorilla shit tastes like chocolate ice cream. Dave, you're a laugh a minute."

Chapter 3

Julie Balboni looked just like his father, who had owned most of the slot and racehorse machines in Iberia Parish during the 1940s and, with an Assyrian family, had run the gambling and prostitution in the Underpass area of Lafayette.