“You work for them?”
“I’m a cashier in one of their restaurants. They’re not white slavers.”
“You and the other two ladies at the tennis courts bear a lot of similarities.”
There was a beat. “You’re saying we’re collectibles?”
“Adonis doesn’t do anything for free.”
“How’d you like a slap across the face, cop or not?”
“I think you’re heck on wheels, Ms. Rosenberg.”
She rolled her fingertips against the heel of one hand. “You’re not going to be a problem, are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
She paused. “Want a piece of pie?”
“Sure,” I said.
She got up and took the pie from the oven and set in on the counter, then sliced it with a knife, her back to me. She had the physicality of a working-class woman, as well as the confidence. She handed me a piece of pie on a plate.
“Did you ever speak at the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting?” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” she said.
“ ‘Oh, yeah’ what?”
“I knew that one would catch up with me one day.”
I remembered her in a much more detailed way now. She had been heavier, probably from a jailhouse diet, her hair much longer, partially dyed; she was just beginning the steps of the program. But I remembered her most for her candor. Women speakers are the most honest at A.A. meetings and often give histories about themselves that men do not want to hear, because they fear the same level of honesty will be required of them. Leslie Rosenberg went the extra mile and left nothing out. Had there been a parole officer at the meeting, she could have violated herself back to the Orleans Parish Prison.
She ran away from home at age seventeen and hooked up with three outlaw bikers who gang-raped her on the way to Sturgis. She had an abortion in Memphis and spent three months in jail for soliciting at a truck stop on I-40. The next two stops were Big D and New Orleans and runway gigs with a G-string and pasties, then Acapulco and Vegas with oilmen who could buy Third World countries with their credit cards.
Miami was even more lucrative. She went to work for a former CIA agent turned political operative who set up cameras in hotel rooms and blackmailed corporate executives and Washington insiders. She helped destroy careers and lives and woke up one morning next to the corpse of a married man who died from an overdose in his sleep and whose family she had to face at the police station. One week later, she swallowed half a bottle of downers, turned on the gas in the oven, and stuck her head in. Three weeks later, she slashed her wrists. One month after that, she helped a pimp roll a blind man.
It’s not the kind of personal history you forget.
“Something wrong with the pie?” she asked.
“It’s good. Do you still go to meetings?”
“Mostly to N.A. I was into drugs more than alcohol.”
“Who’s the father of your little girl?”
“The dead guy I woke up with. I think I said that at the meeting.”
She waited for me to speak, but I didn’t.
“You’re wondering why I had one abortion but not another one?” she said. “I figured I owed the guy something. Or his family. Shit if I know. Anyway, I love Elizabeth.”
“Where does the Balangie family come in?” I said.
“I moved back to New Orleans, and Penelope saw me at the clinic where I take Elizabeth. I told her my story. She introduced me to Adonis. That was it.”
“That doesn’t sound like Adonis.”
“Try getting to know him.”
“No strings attached?”
“I’m going to say this only once,” she said, “and that’s because I don’t want you walking out of here with the wrong story. Adonis is a gentleman. He asks. You get my meaning?”
“He asks?”
“Yeah, fill in the blanks.”
“You’re an intelligent woman. There’s something weird going on with the Balangies, and I have a feeling it bothers you.”
She tried to stare me down.
“You ever hear of a guy who has a face like a reptile?” I said.
“No.”
“A guy who enjoys breaking the necks of pimps?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
I was tired and the rain was blowing hard, the banana fronds outside pressing wetly against the glass. I knew I would probably hit high winds around Morgan City. I put on my coat.
“Adonis told me something I didn’t understand,” she said.
I waited.
“He said to watch out for a guy who calls himself a revelator. I asked him what a revelator was. He said a guy with leather wings and a torture chamber for a brain.”
“That’s all he would say?” I asked.
“Then he said he was kidding and tried to shine me on.”
“That’s the Adonis I know,” I said. “A guy who scares people to death, then refuses to explain himself.”
“You don’t know anything about a revelator?”
“Latter-day Saints use the term,” I said. “But I doubt Adonis hangs out with the Mormon Tabernacle crowd. Want my advice, Ms. Rosenberg?”
“Drop the ‘miz’ crap.”
“If Adonis gives away something, it’s for a reason. His father was the same way. The Balangies never forget a debt, an injury, or a favor. But the one they remember the most is the injury. Ask any prostitute from New Orleans to Galveston who tries to go independent.”
“Boy, you’re the light of the world,” she said.
“More like a dead bulb,” I replied. “Good night, Miss Leslie. Excuse me. Leslie. I think you’re probably a fine lady.”
For just a moment her face softened and showed a vulnerability that didn’t go with anything she had told me.
“Hey,” she said.
“What?”
“If you’re in the neighborhood.”
“You mean drop by?”
“Elizabeth likes you.”
I said good night and ran through the rain to my unmarked car just as lightning leaped through the clouds and lit up the entire neighborhood. The tiny boxlike houses trembled like a cardboard replica of Levittown, then the darkness folded over them. It was one of those rare moments when the ephemerality of the human condition becomes inescapable and you want to smash your watch and shed your mortal fastenings and embrace the rain and the wind and rise into the storm and become one with its destructive magnificence.
Dana Magelli called me from NOPD the next day. “Trying to get yourself smoked?” he said.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.
“My sister-in-law plays tennis at the same courts as Adonis Balangie.”
“I tried to force his hand.”
“How’d that work?”
“Guess,” I replied.
“I’d go easy on that, Dave. But that’s not why I called,” he said. “A black woman named Sarah Gooding got stopped on St. Charles for a broken taillight. The patrolman ran her tag and found she had three bench warrants for traffic violations and one for soliciting. He also smelled weed inside the car. She had a little boy in the backseat and said she was leaving town. The officer searched her vehicle and found thirty thousand dollars in the trunk.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I talked to her. She tried to lie her way out of it. She said she’d saved the money over the years, and she and her son were moving to Mississippi. I explained to her that the bills had purple dye on them and were probably from a robbery. I also told her the prints on her sheet for the solicitation pinch matched prints we found in the taxi driven by the pimp who got his neck broken. That’s when she broke down.”
“Wait a minute. You found her prints in the taxi driven by Melancon?”