“Mr. Kidd,” Bell said. He was wearing his seersucker jacket and had a paper plate full of ice cream and cake, just like mine, and a red plastic spoon. “I thought it was you. You’ve changed your dress.”

“Just passing through,” I said easily enough. I was wearing a blue work shirt and jeans and was clean-shaven again. The Gauguin image died on the operating table in Memphis. “Closed the place in New Orleans. I’m heading back to Minnesota for the fishing opener.”

“Lot of excitement down here ‘bout the time you left,” Bell said, taking a cut of the ice cream.

“Yeah. I heard Miz Dessusdelit killed herself.”

“She wasn’t the only one. Had a murder-suicide out at the animal control. Grisly thing; the whole town was in an uproar,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yeah?” I didn’t want to ask because I’d already heard enough about it. “What happened?”

“Don’t know exactly. But it looks like Arnie St. Thomas forced Duane Hill

you remember Duane, the guy you fought in the parking lot? - he forced old Duane into the vacuum box they used to kill dogs and pushed the button on him. Duane died scratching at the Plexiglas doors, trying to get out.”

“Goddamn,” I said.

“It was ugly,” Bell said, licking the spoon. “He could just barely get a grip on the edge of the Plexiglas doors, and he broke off all his fingernails trying to pull them open. Blood all over the place in there

There was a lawn chair set up in front of the doors. We think old Arnie sat there and watched him try to scratch his way out.”

“Jesus.”

“He had very little to do with it, I’m afraid,” Bell said.

I’d never asked LuEllen about the death of Duane Hill, and I never would. If she wanted to tell me about it someday, I’d listen

Bell was still talking. “After Duane died, Arnie must have killed himself. Took us all day to figure out what happened. We thought at first that somebody else might have been involved. Then the police started getting photographs. Somebody took some pictures of Duane and Arnie killing these two black people, man and a woman, putting their bodies in the river. One of them was Hill’s girlfriend. The other one, the man, was a guy around town here. We think he maybe was bumping the girl, and Hill found out.”

“So he killed them? Hill did?”