"Mr. Robicheaux?"
"Yes."
"This is Persephone Green. I met you years ago when my name was Giacano."
"Yes, I remember," I said, although I didn't.
"Are you sure? Because you were drunk at the time."
I cleared my throat.
"My husband is trying to say, we don't have anything to do with problems in New Orleans' black community," she said. "You leave us alone. You tell your friend the same thing."
"Your husband's a pimp."
"And you're an idiot, far out of his depth," she said, and hung up the phone.
Either the feminists had reached into the mob or the New Orleans spaghetti heads had spawned a new generation.
I used my overtime to take the afternoon off and went to Red Lerille's Health and Racquet Club in Lafayette. I did four sets of curls and military and bench presses with free weights, then went into the main workout room, which had a glass wall that gave onto a shady driveway and the adjacent tennis courts and was lined with long rows of exercise machines. Because it was still early in the day, there were few people on the machines. A half dozen off-duty steroid-pumped Lafayette cops were gathered around a pull-down bar, seemingly talking among themselves.
But their eyes kept drifting to the end of the room, where Karyn LaRose lay on a bench at an inverted angle, her calves and ankles hooked inside two cylindrical vinyl cushions while she raised herself toward her knees, her fingers laced behind her head, her brown thighs shiny with sweat, her breasts as swollen as grapefruit against her Harley motorcycle T-shirt.
I sat down on a Nautilus leg-lift machine, set the pin at 140, and raised the bar with the tops of my feet until my ankles were straight out from my knees and I could feel a burn grow in my thighs.
I felt her on the corner of my vision. She flipped her sweat towel against my leg like a wet kiss.
"Our bodyguard isn't speaking these days?" she said.
"Hello, Karyn."
She wiped her neck and the back of her hair. Her black shorts were damp and molded to her body.
"You still mad?" she said.
"I never worry about yesterday's box score."
Her mouth fell open.
"Sorry, bad metaphor," I said.
"If you aren't a handful."
"How about requesting me off y'all's security?" I asked.
"You're stuck, baby love."
"Why?"
"Because you're a cutey, that's why." She propped her forearm on top of the machine. She let her thigh touch mine.
"Sounds like control to me," I said.
"That's what it's all about, sweetie." She bumped me again.
"Stop playing games with people, Karyn. Aaron Crown's out there. He doesn't care about clever rhetoric."
"Then go find him."