The Bayou Trilogy: Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, and The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell

said. He found himself walking to the same window the captain had been drawn to. “You’re supposed to ride herd on me. They put my little fuckin’ brother on me to make sure I only uncover the right dirt. I saw it comin’, soon as I opened that door.”
    “Come on,” Francois barked. “Look, I’m just here to coordinate things. You know, a lot of people are nervous about this case. Some nasty misunderstandings could come out of this if it’s played to the crowd, man. You know that. So we need to straighten it out quickly.” He then pushed up from the desk and faced his shorter brother. “Besides, I’m only a year younger.”
    “You haven’t really been younger for a long time.”
    A smile spread Francois’s thick lips.
    “I know,” he said.
    A sort of fond sadness meandered through Shade. It was partly because he loved his brother and knew him perfectly, partly because he did not know him at all. The unlighted chamber where one’s true and most secret longings and convictions are housed has a door that is impressively sealed. The more you turn the knob and peek through the keyhole, the more you have to guess, and the less you know.
    “You sound proud to be older than you should be,” Shade said.
    “Oh,” Francois breathed theatrically, “being young is an overrated sidetrack.” He shrugged his shoulders like a wink. “I’m more impressed by the mainline of things.”
    “You’re willing enough to pay the price of riding it.”
    “You pay the price, big bro, whether you ride it or it rides you. Let’s be our ages, huh?”
    There had been a time, not too long ago, when Francois had been energetic in his defense of the stepped-on multitudes, passionate in his pleas for those mendicants before the bar, those old neighborhood losers whose humanity he would not deny. He’d had a threat in his stance toward the system that had not always been kind to those close to him, and a mind quick to become belligerent in his quest of justice for the smallfry. Justice. But over the last few years something had changed, an unexpected metamorphosis brought on by the passing of days. Marriage to a Hawthorne Hills lady; turning thirty; a series of educational connivings with triple-last-named deal cutters who groveled profitably, and only into golden cups; and consequent greenbacks. He still sought justice, but more and more, justice had become a pseudonym, an alias, for Francois Shade, late of Lafitte Street, but lately of Wyndham Lane.
    “Okay,” Shade said. “Let’s us do talk some turkey. What’s in this for you, ol’ brother o’ mine?”
    Their eyes met and there was no shame or fear in either face.
    “It’s my job. For now.” Francois made an excusing gesture with his hands. “This thing could have interesting ripples for years. Alvin Rankin was black, you know.”
    “I think I made a mental note of that, yes.”
    “Well, he was a good man. A good Democrat. It wouldn’t be the worst thing for me to be the man who prosecuted on this. But that depends on whom I’m prosecuting, too.”
    “Ah. So if you can cook it up in a way that the party’s skirts are entirely clean you might make city councilman, or something.”
    “Well, yes. But that’s just the crudest bit of it. As far as cities are concerned, Rene, if you want to be elected in the next thirty years, you better have good rapport with blacks and Latins. A lot of whites aren’t ready to understand that, but they’re going to the hard way if they don’t get with it.”
    “And this helps you there.”
    “It could. It’s not a career maker, but, yes, it could help. I mean, any white pol who wants to be mayor and stay mayor had best take wide steps away from those old amusing Irish sorts of ways. It’s quaint, but it won’t play much longer.”
    “Well, thanks,” Shade said. “That’s fairly blunt.”
    Both men smiled, and Shade felt tickled by the vibrations of some strange, submerged pride, for he’d just been tipped by a knowing