'You want me to talk to her?'
'I suspect so. She won't leave.'
'Who is she?'
'Her name is Lila Terrebonne. She says she lives in Jeanerette.'
Helen Soileau got in a cruiser with me and we drove to St. Peter's. The late sun shone through the stained glass and suffused the interior of the church with a peculiar gold-and-blue light. Lila Terrebonne sat in a pew by the confessional boxes, immobile, her hands in her lap, her eyes as unseeing as a blind person's. An enormous replication of Christ on the cross hung on the adjacent wall.
At the vestibule door Father Mulcahy placed his hand on my arm. He was a frail man, his bones as weightless as a bird's inside his skin.
'This lady carries a deep injury. The nature of her problem is complex, but be assured it's of the kind that destroys people,' he said.
'She's an alcoholic, Father. Is that what we're talking about here?' Helen said.
'What she told me wasn't in a sacramental situation, but I shouldn't say any more,' he replied.
I walked up the aisle and sat in the pew behind Lila.
'You ever have a guy try to pick you up in church before?' I asked.
She turned and stared at me, her face cut by a column of sunshine. The powder and down on her cheeks glowed as though illuminated by klieg lights. Her milky green eyes were wide with expectation that seemed to have no source.
'I was just thinking about you,' she said.
'I bet.'
'We're all going to die, Dave.'
'You're right. But probably not today. Let's take a ride.'
'It's strange I'd end up sitting here under the Crucifixion. Do you know the Hanged Man in the Tarot?'
'Sure,' I said.
'That's the death card.'
'No, it's St. Sebastian, a Roman soldier who was martyred for his faith. It represents self-sacrifice,' I said.
'The priest wouldn't give me absolution. I'm sure I was baptized Catholic before I was baptized Protestant. My mother was a Catholic,' she said.
Helen stood at the end of Lila's pew, chewing gum, her thumbs hooked in her gunbelt. She rested three fingers on Lila's shoulders.
'How about taking us to dinner?' she said.
AN HOUR LATER WE crossed the parish line into St. Mary. The air was mauve-colored, the bayou dimpled with the feeding of bream, the wind hot and smelling of tar from the highway. We drove up the brick-paved drive of the Terrebonne home. Lila's father stood on the portico, a cigar in his hand, his shoulder propped against a brick pillar.
I pulled the cruiser to a stop and started to get out.
'Stay here, Dave. I'm going to take Lila to the door,' Helen said.
'That isn't necessary. I'm feeling much better now. I shouldn't have had a drink with that medication. It always makes me a bit otherworldly,' Lila said.
'Your father doesn't like us, Lila. If he wants to say something, he should have the chance,' Helen said.
But evidently Archer Terrebonne was not up to confronting Helen Soileau that evening. He took a puff from his cigar, then walked inside and closed the heavy door audibly behind him.
The portico and brick parking area were deep in shadow now, the gold and scarlet four-o'clock flowers in full bloom. Helen walked toward the portico with her arm around Lila's shoulders, then watched her go in the house and close the door. Helen continued to look at the door, working the gum in her jaw, the flat of one hand pushed down in the back of her gunbelt.
She opened the passenger door and got in.
'I'd say leapers and vodka,' I said.
'No odor, fried terminals. Yeah, that sounds right. Great combo for a coronary,' she replied.
I turned around in front of the house and drove toward the service road and the bridge over the bayou. Helen kept looking over the seat through the rear window.
'I wanted to kick her old man's ass. With a baton, broken teeth and bones, a real job,' she said. 'Not good, huh, bwana?'
'He's one of those guys who inspire thoughts like that. I wouldn't worry about it.'
'I had him made for a child molester. I was wrong. That woman's been raped, Dave.'
ELEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING I CALLED Clete Purcel in New Orleans, signed out of the office for the day, and drove across the elevated highway that spanned the chain of bays in the Atchafalaya Basin, across the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge, then down through pasture country and the long green corridor through impassable woods that tapered into palmettos and flooded cypress on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. Then I was at the French Quarter exit, with the sudden and real urban concern of having to park anywhere near the Iberville Welfare Project.
I left my truck off Decatur, two blocks from the Cafe du Monde, and crossed Jackson Square into the shade of Pirates Alley between the lichen-stained garden of the Cathedral and the tiny bookstore that had once been the home of William Faulkner. Then I walked on down St. Ann, in sunlight again, to a tan stucco building with an arched entrance and a courtyard and a grilled balcony upstairs that dripped bougainvillea, where Clete Purcel kept his private investigative agency and sometimes lived.
'You want to take down Jimmy Fig? How hard?' he said.
'We don't have to bounce him off the furniture, if that's what you mean.'
Clete wore a pressed seersucker suit with a tie, and his hair had just been barbered and parted on the side and combed straight down on his head so that it looked like a little boy's.
'Jimmy Figorelli is a low-rent sleaze. Why waste time on a shit bag?' he said.
'It's been a slow week.'
He looked at me with the flat, clear-eyed pause that always indicated his unbelief in what I was saying. Through the heavy bubbled yellow glass in his doors, I saw Megan Flynn walk down the stairs in blue jeans and a T-shirt and carry a box through the breezeway to a U-Haul trailer on the street.
'She's helping me move,' Clete said.
'Move where?'
'A little cottage between New Iberia and Jeanerette. I'm going to head security at that movie set.'
'Are you crazy? That director or producer or whatever he is, Billy Holtzner, is the residue you pour out of spittoons.'
'I ran security for Sally Dio at Lake Tahoe. I think I can handle it.'
'Wait till you meet Holtzner's daughter and boyfriend. They're hypes, or at least she is. Come on, Clete. You were the best cop I ever knew.'
Clete turned his ring on his finger. It was made of gold and silver and embossed with the globe and anchor of the U.S. Marine Corps.
'Yeah, 'was' the best cop. I got to change and help Megan. Then we'll check out Jimmy Fig. I think we're firing in the well, though,' he said.
After he had gone upstairs I looked out the back window at the courtyard, the dry wishing well that was cracked and never retained water, the clusters of untrimmed banana trees, Clete's rust-powdered barbells that he religiously pumped and curled, usually half full of booze, every afternoon. I didn't hear Megan open the door to the breezeway behind me.
