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."
"It's what happened, though, isn't it?"
"Maybe I had them killed. It's what they deserved. I'm glad they're dead."
"I think it's all right to feel that way," I said.
"What are you going to do with what I've told you?"
"Take you home or to a treatment center in Lafayette."
"I don't want to go into treatment again. If I can't do it with meetings and working the program, I can't do it at all."
"Why don't we go to a meeting after work? Then you go every day for ninety days."
"I feel like everything inside me is coming to an end. I can't describe it."
"It's called 'a world destruction fantasy.' It's bad stuff. Your heart races, you can't breathe, you feel like a piano wire is wrapped around your forehead. Psychologists say we remember the birth experience."
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, then cracked the window as though my words had drawn the oxygen out of the air.
"Lila, I've got to ask you something else. Why were you talking about a Hanged Man?"
"I don't remember that. Not at all. That's in the Tarot, isn't it? I don't know anything about that."
"I see."
Her skin had gone white under her caked makeup, her eyelashes stiff and black and wide around her milky green eyes.
I WALKED THROUGH THE rain into the hospital and rode up in the elevator with Lila's tissue-wrapped spray of carnations in my hand. Helen Soileau was in the waiting room.
"You get anything?" I asked.
"Not much. She says she thinks there were three guys. They sounded like hicks. One guy was running things," she replied.
"That's got to be Harpo Scruggs."
"I think we're going about this the wrong way. Cut off the head and the body dies."
"Where's the head?"
"Beats me," she said.
"Where's Purcel?"
"He's still in there."
I walked to the open door, then turned away. Clete was sitting on the side of Megan's bed, leaning down toward her face, his big arms and shoulders forming a tent over her. Her right hand rested on the back of his neck. Her fingers stroked his uncut hair.
THE SKY CLEARED THAT night, and Alafair and Bootsie and I cooked out in the back yard. I had told the sheriff about my conversation with Lila Terrebonne, but his response was predictable. We had established possible motivation for the execution of the two brothers. But that was all we had done. There was no evidence to link Archer Terrebonne, Lila's father, to the homicide. Second, the murders still remained outside our jurisdiction and our only vested interest in solving them was the fact that one of the shooters wore an Iberia Parish deputy sheriffs uniform.
I went with Lila to an AA meeting that night, then returned home.
"Clete called. He's in New Orleans. He said for you not to worry. What'd he mean?" Bootsie said.
EIGHTEEN
RICKY SCARLOTTI ATE BREAKFAST THE next morning with two of his men in his restaurant by St. Charles and Carrollton. It was a fine morning, smelling of the wet sidewalks and the breeze off the river. The fronds of the palm trees on the neutral ground were pale green and lifting in the wind against a ceramic-blue sky; the streetcar was loading with passengers by the levee, the conductor's bell clanging. No one seemed to take notice of a chartreuse Cadillac convertible that turned off St. Charles and parked in front of the flower shop, nor of the man in the powder-blue porkpie hat and seersucker pants and Hawaiian shirt who sat behind the steering wheel with a huge plastic seal-top coffee mug in his hand.