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“She’s not your wife,” I said.
The redness of the sun seemed to dance on his face, then he looked at me in the way a man does when he knows that one day he will have his revenge and that his victim in the meantime will be powerless to defend himself or to guess the moment when the blade will fall. This was what I had done to myself.
The women returned from the clubhouse. Adonis picked up his racquet and walked onto the court. “Sorry to have kept you, ladies,” he said. “Let’s have at it, shall we? What a beautiful evening it is.”
Chapter Sixteen
I DROVE OUT BY the golf course and parked under a tree and waited until the woman named Leslie emerged from the clubhouse and got in her car, an old Honda. She had changed into jeans and a snap-button denim shirt. It started to rain. I followed her up to Metairie into a 1950s subdivision lined with two-bedroom houses, all of them with the same gravel roofs and faux brick walls and lawns that resembled Astroturf.
I waited at the end of the street while she parked in her driveway and went into the house. Before I could pull up, the front door opened again and I saw her give money to a teenage girl under the porch light. The girl got into a car and drove away. I waited until Leslie went back in the house, then I parked in front and stepped across a rain ditch and rang the bell. She opened the door, a sandwich in one hand. “My,” she said.
“Could I talk with you a few minutes?”
“What’s on your mind, cowboy?”
I glanced at my slacks and shoes. “I look like a cowboy?”
“Yeah, one who thinks he’s gonna get an easy ride.”
“Wrong,” I said.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said.
I felt the rain blowing on my neck. “You look familiar.”
“I used to see you in the Quarter. You were a souse back then.”
“Yeah, I remember now. You were a dancer in a joint on Bourbon.”
“I didn’t dance. I just took it off.”
“I remember,” I said. “Vividly.”
She took a bite out of the sandwich. “Cute, but no can do, sweetie.”
“No can do what?”
“Let you pump me in multiple ways.”
“You cut to it, don’t you?” I said. “Why’d you make a face at me with your finger in your mouth?”
“I like to give limp-dicks a throb or two.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What, you think I’m a comedian?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Where’d you get the scar?” It looked like a flattened worm on her jawbone.
“A pimp named Zipper Clum was in a bad mood.”
“If it’s any consolation, a psychopath took Zipper’s arm off with a machete.”
She combed back her hair with her fingers, her eyes still on mine. Her hair looked sprayed and stiff as wire. “Okay, honey bunny, let’s make it fast. I have a daughter to take care of.”
She let me inside. I sat on the sofa while she went in back. She returned with a young girl in a reclining wheelchair. The girl rested on her side as though she were sleeping. “This is Elizabeth,” Leslie said. “Elizabeth, this is Mr. Robicheaux. He’s a friend of ours.”
“Hello, Miss Elizabeth,” I said.
