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mister hasn’t embraced his Lord, no, but I’m pleased to say he has come as far as making eye contact with Him.”
    Although paid only to be a maid, Lulana did double duty as a spiritual guide to her employer, whose past she knew and whose soul concerned her.
    “The mister is gardening,” she said. “You could wait for him in the parlor or join him in the roses.”
    “By all means, the roses,” Michael said.
    At the back of the house, in the immense kitchen, Lulana’s older sister, Evangeline Antoine, softly sang “His Lamp Will Overcome All Darkness” as she pressed dough into a pie pan.
    Evangeline served as Aubrey’s cook and also as an amen choir to Lulana’s indefatigable soul-saving efforts. She was taller than her sister, thin, yet her lively eyes and her smile made their kinship obvious.
    “Detective Maddison,” Evangeline said, “I’m so glad you’re not dead yet.”
    “Me too,” he said. “What kind of pie are you making?”
    “Praline-cinnamon cream topped with fried pecans.”
    “Now that’s
worth
a quadruple heart-bypass.”
    “Cholesterol,” Lulana informed them, “won’t stick if you have the right attitude.”
    She led them through the rear door onto the back veranda, where Moses Bienvenu, Aubrey’s driver and handyman, was painting the beautifully turned white balusters under the black handrail.
    Beaming, he said, “Detective O’Connor, I’m amazed to see you haven’t shot Mr. Michael yet.”
    “My aim’s good,” she assured him, “but he can move fast.”
    Well-padded but not fat, a robust and towering man with hands as big as dinner plates, Moses served as a deacon at the church and sang in the same gospel choir as his sisters, Lulana and Evangeline.
    “They’re here to see the mister but not to trouble him,” Lulana told her brother. “If it looks like they’re troubling him, after all, lift them by the scruffs of their necks and put them in the street.”
    As Lulana went inside, Moses said, “You heard Lulana. You may be police officers, but she’s the law around here. The Law and the Way. I would be in your debt if you didn’t make it necessary for me to scruff-carry you out of here.”
    “If we find ourselves getting out of hand,” Michael said, “we’ll scruff-carry each other.”
    Pointing with his paintbrush, Moses said, “Mr. Aubrey is over there past the pagan fountain, among the roses. And please don’t make fun of his hat.”
    “His hat?” Michael asked.
    “Lulana insists he wear a sun hat if he’s going to spend half the day in the garden. He’s mostly bald, so she worries he’ll get head-top skin cancer. Mr. Aubrey hated the hat at first. He only recently got used to it.”
    Carson said, “Never thought I’d see the day when anyone would be the boss of Aubrey Picou.”
    “Lulana doesn’t so much boss,” said Moses. “She sort of just tough-loves everyone into obedience.”
    A brick walkway led from the back veranda steps, across the lawn, encircled the pagan fountain, and continued to the rose garden.
    The sculptured-marble fountain featured three life-size figures. Pan, a male form with goat legs and horns, played a flute and chased two nude women—or they chased him—around a column twined with grapevines.
    “My eye for antiques isn’t infallible,” Michael said, “but I’m pretty sure that’s eighteenth-century Las Vegas.”
    The rosebushes grew in rows, with aisles of decomposed granite between. In the third of four aisles stood a bag of fertilizer, a tank sprayer, and trays of neatly arranged gardening tools.
    Here, too, was Aubrey Picou, under a straw hat with such a broad brim that squirrels could have raced around it for exercise.
    Before he noticed them and looked up, he was humming a tune. It sounded like “His Lamp Will Overcome All Darkness.”
    Aubrey was eighty years old and had a baby face: an eighty-year-old baby face, but nevertheless pink and plump and pinchable. Even in the deep shade of his anticancer