"What are you talking about?"
"Do yourself a favor and go home, Robicheaux."
&n
bsp; She stood up, tucked her hair under her beret, and walked off alone toward the tennis court. A moment later I saw her leaning on her arms against the wire mesh, looking at nothing, her face wan and empty in the shadow of the myrtle bushes.
She was right about Tony Cardo, though. Ten minutes later, when I was about to signal Clete that it was time to hang it up, Cardo excused himself from his guests and walked across his lawn to a glassed-in sun porch at the back of his house. I went to the side door of the house and knocked. The Negro houseman answered, a polishing cloth in his hand.
"I'd like to see Mr. Cardo," I said.
"He be out directly."
"I'd like to see him inside, please."
"Just a moment, suh," he said, and walked into the back of the house. Then he returned and unlatched the screen. "Mr. Cardo want you to wait in the library."
I followed the houseman through a huge, gleaming kitchen, a living room furnished with French antiques and hung with a chandelier the size of a beach umbrella, into a pine-paneled study whose shelves were filled with encyclopedias, sets of science and popular history books, novels from book clubs, and plastic-bound collections of classics, the kind that are printed on low-grade paper and advertised on cable TV stations. The chairs and couch were red leather, the big glass-topped mahogany desk one that would perhaps befit Leo Tolstoy.
Tony slid open the far door and stepped inside in his terry cloth robe and sandals. Before he closed the door again, I looked out on the sun porch and saw the back of a wheelchair framed against a lighted television screen. The floor around the chair was strewn with toys and stuffed animals.
"I didn't give you your magazine," I said, and took the copy of the Atlantic out of my pocket and handed it to him.
"Hey, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it."
"I have to go, too. I just wanted to tell you I'd like to do business with you, but I have to have something firm. Like this afternoon, Tony."
"I want you to understand something, and I don't want you to take offense. The house is a family place, I don't do business in it. Call Ray Fontenot tomorrow. We'll work something out. You got my word on it."
"All right."
"Your face looks a little cloudy."
"I don't trust Fontenot. I don't know that you should, either."
"Serious charge. What'd he do?"
"He's an addict and he looks after his own butt."
"They all do."
"Thanks for having us out."
"Wait a minute, don't run off. I heard you were in 'Nam."
"Ten months, before it got real hot."
"Those scars on your thigh, you got hit?"
"A bouncing Betty on a trail. It was a dumb place to be at night."
"Sit down a second. Come on, you're not in that big a hurry. Then you got to go back to the States?"
"Sure. A million-dollar wound."
"In the corps, unless you get the big one, you got to earn two Hearts before you skate."
"You were hit?"