He poured coffee in two cups and put a cinnamon roll in his mouth and looked out the window at the sun in the pine trees.
'Did you hear me?' I said.
'I got enough to do right here. I caught Swede Boxleiter in the Terrebonne cemetery last night. I think he was prizing bricks out of a crypt.'
'What for?'
'Maybe he's a ghoul. You know what for. You planted all that Civil War stuff in his head. I'd love to tell Archer Terrebonne an ex-con meltdown is digging up his ancestors' bones.'
But there was no humor in his face, only a tic at the corner of one eye. He went into the other room and called Iberia General, then came back in the kitchen, his eyes filled with private thoughts, and began beating eggs in a big pink bowl.
'Clete?'
'The Big Sleazy's not your turf anymore, Streak. Why don't you worry about how this guy Scruggs got off his leash? I thought y'all had him under surveillance.'
'He lost the stakeout at the motel.'
'You know the best way to deal with that dude? A big fat one between the eyes and a throw-down on the corpse.'
'You might have your butt in our jail, if that's what it takes,' I said.
He poured hot milk into my coffee cup. 'Not even the perps believe that stuff anymore. You want to go to the hospital with me?' he said.
'You got it.'
'The nurse said she asked for me. How about that? How about that Megan Flynn?'
I looked at the back of his thick neck and huge shoulders as he made breakfast and thought of warning NOPD before he arrived in New Orleans. But I knew that would only give his old enemies in the New Orleans Police Department a basis to do him even greater harm than Ricky Scarlotti might.
We drove back up the tree-lined highway to New Iberia in a corridor of rain.
AT IBERIA GENERAL I sat in the waiting room while Clete went in to see Megan first. Five minutes after we arrived I saw Lila Terrebonne walk down the hall with a spray of carnations wrapped in green tissue paper. She didn't see me. She paused at the open door to Megan's room, her eyelids blinking, her back stiff with apprehension. Then she turned and started hurriedly toward the elevator.
I caught her before she got on.
'You're not going to say hello?' I asked.
I could smell the bourbon on her breath, the cigarette smoke in her hair and clothes.
'Give these to Megan for me. I'll come back another time,' she said.
'How'd you know she was here?'
'It was on the radio… Dave, get on the elevator with me.' When the elevator door closed, she said, 'I've got to get some help. I've had it.'
'Help with what?'
'Booze, craziness… Something that happened to me, something I've never told anybody about except my father and the priest at St. Peter's.'
'Why don't we sit in my pickup?' I said.
WHAT FOLLOWS IS MY reconstruction of the story she told me while the rain slid down the truck's windows and a willow tree by the bayou blew in the wind like a woman's hair.
She met the two brothers in a bar outside Morgan City. They were shooting pool, stretching across the table to make difficult shots, their sleeveless arms wrapped with green-and-red tattoos. They wore earrings and beards that were trimmed in neat lines along the jawbone, jeans that were so tight their genitalia were cupped to the smooth shape of a woman's palm. They sent a drink to her table, and one to an old man at the bar, and one to an oil-field roughneck who had used up his tab. But they made no overture toward her.
She watched them across the top of her gin ricky, the tawdry grace of their movements around the pool table, the lack of attention they showed anything except the skill of their game, the shots they speared into leather side pockets like junior high school kids.
Then one of them noticed her watching. He proffered the cue stick to her, smiling. She rose from her chair, her skin warm with gin, and wrapped her fingers around the cue's thickness, smiling back into the young man's face, seeing him glance away shyly, his cheeks color around the edges of his beard.
They played nine ball. Her father had taught her how to play billiards when she was a young girl. She could walk a cue ball down the rail, put reverse English on it and not leave an opponent an open shot, make a soft bank shot and drop the money balls-the one and the six and the nine-into the pocket with a tap that was no more than a whisper.
The two brothers shook their heads in dismay. She bought them each a bottle of beer and a gin ricky for herself. She played another game and beat them again. She noticed they didn't use profanity in her presence, that they stopped speaking in mid-sentence if she wished to interrupt, that they grinned boyishly and looked away if she let her eyes linger more than a few seconds on theirs.
They told her they built board roads for an oil company, they had been in the reformatory after their mother had deserted the family, they had been in the Gulf War, in a tank, one that'd had its treads blown off by an Iraqi artillery shell. She knew they were lying, but she didn't care. She felt a sense of sexual power and control that made her nipples hard, her eyes warm with toleration and acceptance.
When she walked to the ladies' room, the backs of her thighs taut with her high heels, she could see her reflection in the bar mirror and she knew that every man in the room was looking at the movement of her hips, the upward angle of her chin, the grace in her carriage that their own women would never possess.
The brothers did not try to pick her up. In fact, when the bar started to close, their conversation turned to the transmission on their truck, a stuck gear they couldn't free, their worry they could not make it the two miles to their father's fish camp. Rain streamed down the neon-lighted window in front.
She offered to follow them home. When they accepted, she experienced a strange taste in her throat, like copper pennies, like the wearing off of alcohol and the beginnings of a different kind of chemical reality. She looked at the faces of the brothers, the grins that looked incised in clay, and started to reconsider.
Then the bartender beckoned to her.
'Lady, taxicabs run all night. A phone call's a quarter. If they ain't got it, they can use mine free,' he said.
'There's no problem. But thanks very much just the same. Thank you, truly. You're very nice,' she replied, and hung her purse from her shoulder and let one of the brothers hold a newspaper over her head while they ran for her automobile.
They did it to her in an open-air tractor shed by a green field of sugarcane in the middle of an electric storm. One held her wrists while the other brother climbed between her legs on top of a worktable. After he came his body went limp and his head fell on her breast. His mouth was wet and she could feel it leaving a pattern on her blouse. Then he rose from her and put on his blue jeans and lit a cigarette before clasping her wrists so his brother, who simply unzipped his jeans without taking them off, could mount her.
When she thought it was over, when she believed there was nothing else they could take from her, she sat up on the worktable with her clothes crumpled in her lap. Then she watched one brother shake his head and extend his soiled hand toward her face, covering it like a surgeon's assistant pressing an ether mask on a patient, forcing her back down on the table, then turning her over, his hand shifting to the back of her neck, crushing her mouth into the wood planks.
She saw a bolt of lightning explode in the fork of a hardwood tree, saw it split the wood apart and tear the grain right through the heart of the trunk. Deep in her mind she thought she remembered a green felt pool table and a boyish figure shoving a cue like a spear through his bridged fingers.
LILA'S FACE WAS TURNED slightly toward the passenger window when she finished her story.
'Your father had them killed?' I said.
'I didn't say that. Not at all.'
