"Just fine. Lovely day, isn't it?" she replied.
"Do we have our friend's attention?" he asked, his back to the glass doors.
"Yep," I said.
He took a notebook out of his pocket and studied the first page of it.
"Well, I have to pick up a couple of things for my wife, then meet her and her mother in Lafayette. We'll see you-all," he said. He put the notebook back in his pocket, then walked to the front doors of the finance company, cupped his hands around his eyes to shield them from the sun, and peered through the tinted glass.
After he had driven away, Alex Guidry came out on the sidewalk.
"What are you people doing?" he said.
"You're an ex-cop. Guess," Helen said.
"That man's a federal agent of some kind," Guidry said.
"The guy who just left? He's an ex-jock. He was ail-American honorable mention at LSU. That's a fact," I said.
"What is this?" he said.
"You're in the shithouse, Mr. Guidry. That's what it is," Helen said.
"This is harassment and I won't put up with it," he said.
"You're naive, sir. You're the subject of a murder investigation. You're also tied in with Harpo Scruggs. Scruggs has asked for immunity. You know where that leaves his friends? I'd get a parachute," I said.
"Fuck you," he said, and went back inside.
But his shirtsleeve caught on the door handle. When he pulled at it he ripped the cloth and hit a matronly white woman between the shoulder blades with his elbow.
TWO HOURS LATER GUIDRY called the office.
"Scruggs is getting immunity for what?" he asked.
"I didn't say he was 'getting' anything."
I could hear him breathing against the receiver.
"First guy in line doesn't do the Big Sleep," I said.
"Same answer. Do your worst. At least I didn't flush my career down the bowl because I couldn't keep a bottle out of my mouth," he said.
"Ida Broussard was carrying your baby when you killed her, Mr. Guidry."
He slammed down the phone.
THREE DAYS LATER, IN the cool of the evening, Lila Terrebonne and Geraldine Holtzner came down the dirt road in Clete Purcel's chartreuse Cadillac, the top down, and pulled into the drive. Alafair and I were raking leaves and burning them on the edge of the road. The leaves were damp and black, and the smoke from the fire twisted upward into the trees in thick yellow curds and smelled like marijuana burning in a wet field. Both Lila and Geraldine seemed delighted with the pink-gray loveliness of the evening, with our activity in the yard, with themselves, with the universe.
"What are you guys up to?" I said.
"We're going to a meeting. You want to tag along?" Geraldine said from behind the wheel.
"It's a thought. What are you doing with Clete's car?" I said.
"Mine broke down. He lent me his," Geraldine said. "I went back to Narcotics Anonymous, in case you're wondering. But I go to AA sometimes, too."
Lila was smiling, a wistful, unfocused beam in her eye. "Hop in, good-looking," she said.
"Did y'all make a stop before you got here?" I asked.
"Dave, I bet you urinated on radiators in elementary school," Lila said.
"I might see y'all up there later. Y'all be careful about Clete's tires. The air is starting to show through," I said.
"This is a lovely car. You drive it and suddenly it's 1965. What a wonderful time that was, just before everything started to change," she said.
"Who could argue, Lila?" I said.
Unless you were black or spent ' 65 in Vietnam, I thought as they drove away.
THE AA MEETING THAT evening was held in the upstairs rooms of an old brick church out on West Main. The Confederates had used the church for a hospital while they tried to hold back the Federals on the Teche south of town; then, after the town had been occupied and looted and the courthouse torched, the Federals inverted half the pews and filled them with hay for their horses. But most of the people in the upper rooms this evening cared little about the history of the building. The subject of the meeting was the Fifth Step of AA recovery, which amounts to owning up, or confessing, to one's past.
There are moments in Fifth Step meetings that cause the listeners to drop their eyes to the floor, to lose all expression in their faces, to clench their hands in their laps and wince inwardly at the knowledge that the barroom they had entered long ago had only one exit, and it opened on moral insanity.
Lila Terrebonne normally listened and did not speak at meetings. Tonight was different. She sat stiffly on a chair by the window, a tree silhouetted by a fiery sunset behind her head. The skin of her face had the polished, ceramic quality of someone who has just come out of a windstorm. Her hands were hooked together like those of an opera singer.
"I think I've had a breakthrough with my therapist," she said. "I've always had this peculiar sensation, this sense of guilt, I mean, a fixation I guess with crucifixes." She laughed self-deprecatingly, her eyes lowered, her eyelashes as stiff as wire. "It's because of something I saw as a child. But it didn't have anything to do with me, right? I mean, it's not part of the program to take somebody else's inventory. All I have to do is worry about what I've done. As people say, clean up my side of the street. Who am I to judge, particularly if I'm not in the historical context of others?"
No one had any idea of what she was talking about. She rambled on, alluding to her therapist, using terms most blue-collar people in the room had no understanding of.
"It's called psychoneurotic anxiety. It made me drink. Now I think most of that is behind me," she said. "Anyway, I didn't leave my panties anywhere today. That's all I have."
After the meeting I caught her by Clete's car. The oak tree overhead was filled with fireflies, and there was a heavy, wet smell in the air like sewer gas.
"Lila, I've never spoken like this to another AA member before, but what you said in there was total bullshit," I said.
She fixed her eyes on mine and blinked her eyelashes coyly and said nothing.
"I think you're stoned, too," I said.
"I have a prescription. It makes me a little funny sometimes. Now stop beating up on me," she said, and fixed my collar with one hand.
"You know who murdered Jack Flynn. You know who executed the two brothers in the swamp. You can't conceal knowledge like that from the law and expect to have any serenity."
"Marry me in our next incarnation," she said, and pinched my stomach. Then she made a sensual sound and said, "Not bad, big stuff."
She got in the passenger seat and looked at herself in her compact mirror and waited for Geraldine Holtzner to get behind the wheel. Then the two of them cruised down a brick-paved side street, laughing, the wind blowing their hair, like teenage girls who had escaped into a more innocent, uncomplicated time.
TWO DAYS PASSED, THEN I received another phone call from Alex Guidry, this time at the dock. His voice was dry, the receiver held close to his mouth.
"What kind of deal can I get?" he said.
"That depends on how far you can roll over."
"I'm not doing time."
"Don't bet on it."
"You're not worried about a dead black woman or a couple of shit bags who got themselves killed out in the Basin. You want the people who nailed up Jack Flynn."
"Give me a number. I'll call you back," I said.
"Call me back?"
"Yeah, I'm busy right now. I've already reached my quotient for jerk-off behavior today."
"I can give you Harpo Scruggs tied hand and foot on a barbecue spit," he said.
I could hear him breathing through his nose, like a cat's whisker scraping across the perforations. Then I realized the source of his fear.
"You've talked to Scruggs, haven't you?" I said. "You called him about his receiving immunity. Which means he knows you're in communication with us. You dropped the dime on yourself… Hello?"
"He's back. I saw him this morning," he said.
"You're imagining things."