'Skipper-'
He hung up.
A moment later Clete tapped on my glass and opened the door, then paused and looked back down the hall, his face perplexed.
'What happened, the John overflow in the waiting room again?' he said.
'Why's that?'
'A pall is hanging over the place every time I walk in. What do those guys do for kicks, watch snuff films? In fact, I asked the dispatcher that. Definitely no sense of humor.'
He sat down and looked around my office, grinned at me for no reason, straightened his back, flexed his arms, bounced his palms up and down on the chair.
'Megan's with you?' I said.
'How'd you know that?'
'Uh, I think the sheriff saw y'all from his window.'
'The sheriff? I get it. He told you to roll out the welcome wagon.' His eyes roved merrily over my face. 'How about we treat you to lunch at Lagniappe Too?'
'I'm buried.'
'Megan gave you her drill instructor impersonation the other day?'
'It's very convincing.'
He beat out a staccato with his hands on the chair arms.
'Will you stop that and tell me what's on your mind?' I said.
'This cat Billy Holtzner. I've seen him somewhere. Like from Vietnam.'
'Holtzner?'
'So we had nasty little marshmallows over there, too. Anyway, I go, 'Were you in the Crotch?' He says, 'The Crotch?' I say, 'Yeah, the Marine Corps. Were you around Da Nang?' What kind of answer do I get? He sucks his teeth and goes back to his clipboard like I'm not there.'
He waited for me to speak. When I didn't he said, '
'I hate to see you mixed up with them.'
'See you later, Streak.'
'I'm coming with you,' I said, and stuck the Hanged Man in my shirt pocket.
WE ATE LUNCH AT Lagniappe Too, just down from The Shadows. Megan sat by the window with her hat on. Her hair was curved on her cheeks, and her mouth looked small and red when she took a piece of food off her fork. The light through the window seemed to frame her silhouette against the green wall of bamboo that grew in front of The Shadows. She saw me staring at her.
'Is something troubling you, Dave?' she asked.
'You know Lila Terrebonne?'
'The senator's granddaughter?'
'She comes to our attention on occasion. The other day we had to pick her up at the church, sitting by herself under a crucifix. Out of nowhere she asked me about the Hanged Man in the Tarot.'
I slipped the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the tablecloth by Megan's plate.
'Why tell me?' she said.
'Does it mean something to you?'
I saw Clete lower his fork into his plate, felt his eyes fix on the side of my face.
'A man hanging upside down from a tree. The tree forms a cross,' Megan said.
'The figure becomes Peter the Apostle, as well as Christ and St. Sebastian. Sebastian was tied to a tree and shot with darts by his fellow Roman soldiers. Peter asked to be executed upside down. You notice, the figure makes a cross with his legs in the act of dying?' I said.
Megan had stopped eating. Her cheeks were freckled with discoloration, as though an invisible pool of frigid air had burned her face.
'What is this, Dave?' Clete said.
'Maybe nothing,' I said.
'Just lunch conversation?' he said.
'The Terrebonnes have had their thumbs in lots of pies,' I said.
'Will you excuse me, please?' Megan said.
She walked between the tables to the rest room, her purse under her arm, her funny straw hat crimped across the back of her red hair.
'What the hell's the matter with you?' Clete said.
THAT EVENING I DROVE to Red Lerille's Health amp; Racquet Club in Lafayette and worked out with free weights and on the Hammer-Strength machines, then ran two miles on the second-story track that overlooked the basketball courts.
I hung my towel around my neck and did leg stretches on the handrail. Down below, some men were playing a pickup basketball game, thudding into one another clumsily, slapping one another's shoulders when they made a shot. But an Indonesian or Malaysian man at the end of the court, where the speed and heavy bags were hung, was involved in a much more intense and solitary activity. He wore sweats and tight red leather gloves, the kind with a metal dowel across the palm, and he ripped his fists into the heavy bag and sent it spinning on the chain, then speared it with his feet, hard enough to almost knock down a kid who was walking by.
He grinned at the boy by way of apology, then moved over to the speed bag and began whacking it against the rebound board, without rhythm or timing, slashing it for the effect alone.
'You were at Cisco's house. You're Mr. Robicheaux,' a woman's voice said behind me.
It was Billy Holtzner's daughter. But her soapy blue eyes were focused now, actually pleasant, like a person who has stepped out of one identity into another.
'You remember me?' she asked.
'Sure.'
'We didn't introduce ourselves the other day. I'm Geraldine Holtzner. The boxer down there is Anthony. He's an accountant for the studio. I'm sorry for our rudeness.'
'You weren't rude.'
'I know you don't like my father. Not many people do. We're not problem visitors here. If you have one, it's Cisco Flynn,' she said.
'Cisco?'
'He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around.'
She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.
'You let that guy down there shoot you up?' I asked.
'I'm all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You're a funny guy for a cop. You ever have a screen test?'
'Why not get rid of the problem altogether?'
But she wasn't listening now. 'This area is full of violent people. It's the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black man who's coming after the Terrebonnes, why don't you do something about him?' she said.
'Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?'
'Which? Yeah, that's a good question. You know the story about the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had stuff like that in my family, I'd jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila Terrebonne's a drunk.'
'It was nice seeing you,' I said.
'Gee, why don't you just say fuck you and turn your back on people?'
Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a towel and threw it at me.
'That kick-boxing stuff Anthony's doing? He learned it from me,' she said.
Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with
