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“How about your stepdaughter? Where is she?”
“With Mark Shondell.”
“That’s a fucking disgrace,” I said.
I had taken it to the edge. It wasn’t wise. His eyes drifted onto my face. “This is my club. We don’t use that kind of language here. We don’t speak about family matters, either.”
“I don’t get you,” I said. “You were in the airborne. You’re educated and smart. Cops may not like you, but they respect you.”
“So?”
“You’re playing tennis while your stepdaughter is in the hands of a molester.”
He watched the shadows of the palm trees swaying on the clay courts, which were a soft pink and seemed to have absorbed the afterglow of the sun. “You know who Bill Tilden was?”
“A national tennis champion during the twenties?”
“He made two famous statements about tennis: ‘Doubles is a game of angles’ and ‘Women emasculate genius.’ I like the former more than the latter.”
“What does that have to do with criminality?” I said.
“It has to do with everything. And ‘criminality’ is a relative term.”
I knew the argument and the rhetoric. The Mafia was no different than corporations. Prostitutes were sex workers and prostitution was a consensual and victimless activity. Marijuana was harmless. Sado-porn was protected by the First Amendment. Legalized gambling helped the poor. Blah-blah-blah.
“Sell your lies to someone else, Adonis.”
“I think you’re here for another reason.”
I felt my stomach clench. I cleared my throat. I held my eyes on his. “Ms. Balangie came to New Iberia because she was terrified about her daughter.”
“And you helped her out at your office?”
Then I knew he knew. “She had a flat in front of my house. I changed her tire and asked her inside. I talked to her a long time. Then she left.”
My mouth was dry, the wind cold on my face. A black man wearing a white jacket and white gloves put a tray of stuffed shrimp on the table. Adonis thanked him. The sprinkler system for the grounds came on. I could hear a jet of water striking the trunk of a palm tree.
“Are you listening?” I said.
“She told me. I’m not sure what I should do with you.”
“Say that again?”
“You may not have done anything wrong, but you thought about it. And the next time out, you will. It’s a matter of time, isn’t it?”
I stood up. I wanted to pull him out of his chair. He bit into a shrimp and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “You’ve come uninvited to my table,” he said. “You’ve tried to embarrass me in front of my friends, and you’ve sullied my wife’s name in public. I’m going to let these things pass. But only once.”
I could feel a tremble in my right hand, sense a flicker behind my eyes, a sound like a hummingbird in my ear. “The guy with the harelip tried to burn Clete Purcel to death, in his skivvies, hanging upside down from a steel hook. That same guy was carrying my address. I think you know who he is.”
“You look a little tense. You’re not going to do something you’ll regret, are you?”
“If I told you what I want to do, you’d be on your way home.”
“Should I call security?”
“Penelope is a nice lady. She did nothing wrong. That’s what I came here to say.”
“You refer to my wife by her first name?”
