He watched the shadows of the palm trees swaying on the clay courts, which were a soft pink and seemed to have absorbed the afterglow of the sun. “You know who Bill Tilden was?”
“A national tennis champion during the twenties?”
“He made two famous statements about tennis: ‘Doubles is a game of angles’ and ‘Women emasculate genius.’ I like the former more than the latter.”
“What does that have to do with criminality?” I said.
“It has to do with everything. And ‘criminality’ is a relative term.”
I knew the argument and the rhetoric. The Mafia was no different than corporations. Prostitutes were sex workers and prostitution was a consensual and victimless activity. Marijuana was harmless. Sado-porn was protected by the First Amendment. Legalized gambling helped the poor. Blah-blah-blah.
“Sell your lies to someone else, Adonis.”
“I think you’re here for another reason.”
I felt my stomach clench. I cleared my throat. I held my eyes on his. “Ms. Balangie came to New Iberia because she was terrified about her daughter.”
“And you helped her out at your office?”
Then I knew he knew. “She had a flat in front of my house. I changed her tire and asked her inside. I talked to her a long time. Then she left.”
My mouth was dry, the wind cold on my face. A black man wearing a white jacket and white gloves put a tray of stuffed shrimp on the table. Adonis thanked him. The sprinkler system for the grounds came on. I could hear a jet of water striking the trunk of a palm tree.
“Are you listening?” I said.
“She told me. I’m not sure what I should do with you.”
“Say that again?”
“You may not have done anything wrong, but you thought about it. And the next time out, you will. It’s a matter of time, isn’t it?”
I stood up. I wanted to pull him out of his chair. He bit into a shrimp and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “You’ve come uninvited to my table,” he said. “You’ve tried to embarrass me in front of my friends, and you’ve sullied my wife’s name in public. I’m going to let these things pass. But only once.”
I could feel a tremble in my right hand, sense a flicker behind my eyes, a sound like a hummingbird in my ear. “The guy with the harelip tried to burn Clete Purcel to death, in his skivvies, hanging upside down from a steel hook. That same guy was carrying my address. I think you know who he is.”
“You look a little tense. You’re not going to do something you’ll regret, are you?”
“If I told you what I want to do, you’d be on your way home.”
“Should I call security?”
“Penelope is a nice lady. She did nothing wrong. That’s what I came here to say.”
“You refer to my wife by her first name?”
“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.
The girl had her mother’s good looks and eyes that were as innocent and empty as blue water. Leslie turned on the television and inserted a video underneath. SpongeBob sprang to life on the screen. The girl made a mewing sound.
“Come into the kitchen,” Leslie said.
“I never got your last name.”
“Rosenberg.”
The house was old, but all the furniture, rugs, curtains, and appliances seemed new. I sat at the breakfast table. She opened the refrigerator. “I make Elizabeth a snack before bedtime. While I do that, you can tell me why you’re here. Then you leave.”
“You know anything about Adonis’s stepdaughter? Her name is Isolde.”
“I don’t ask him questions about his family.”
“That’s convenient.”
She gave me a look.
“You’re just a tennis partner?” I said.
“You’re about to get yourself invited back out the door.”
She cut a piece of pie and put it on a plate with a spoon, then went into the living room. I knew I probably couldn’t imagine the amount of care she had to give her daughter, which I was sure involved changing diapers and bathing and feeding and dressing her, never having enough asleep, and ultimately accepting exhaustion as a way of life. In other words, I believed Leslie Rosenberg had her own Golgotha. She came back in the kitchen and washed the plate and spoon in the sink.
“I’m not out to nail Adonis, Miss Leslie. I need to find Isolde. I think she’s a victim of human trafficking.”
“What’s with the ‘miss’ routine?”
“It’s a leftover courtesy from a gentler time.”
“A little of that Aunt Jemima stuff goes a long way. Isolde Balangie is a victim of human trafficking? One of the richest teenage girls in New Orleans? Where do you get this stuff?”
I had the feeling Leslie Rosenberg didn’t take prisoners. She sat down across from me. “You see all this? The house, everything that’s in it? It comes from the Balangie family.”