"Geraldine Holtzner's been driving it all over the area."
"Streak, the Terrebonnes might hurt themselves, but they don't get hurt by others. What does it take to make you understand that?"
"The Canadian shooter is a guy named Jacques Poitier. Ever hear of him?"
"No. And if he gives me any grief, I'm going to stick a .38 down his pants and blow his Jolly Roger off. Now, let me get some sleep."
"Megan told you she's going to France?"
The line was so quiet I thought it had gone dead. Then he said, "She must have called while I was out. When's she going?"
Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
THE SET THAT HAD been constructed on the levee at Henderson Swamp was lighted with the haloed brilliance of a phosphorus flare when Lila Terrebonne drove Clete's convertible along the dirt road at the top of the levee, above the long, wind-ruffled bays and islands of willow trees that were turning yellow with the season. The evening was cool, and she wore a sweater over her shoulders, a dark scarf with roses stitched on it tied around her head. She found her father with Billy Holtzner, and the three of them ate dinner on a cardboard table by the water's edge and drank a bottle of nonalcoholic champagne that had been chilled in a silver bucket.
When she left, she asked a grip to help her fasten down the top on her car. He was the only one to notice the blue Ford that pulled out of a fish camp down the levee and followed her toward the highway. He did not think it significant and did not mention the fact to anyone until later.
THE MAN IN THE blue Ford followed her through St. Martinville and down the Loreauville road to Cisco Flynn's house. When she turned into Cisco's driveway, a lawn party was in progress and the man in the Ford parked on the swale and opened his hood and appeared to onlookers to be at work on his engine.
On the patio, behind the house, Lila Terrebonne called Cisco Flynn a lowborn, treacherous sycophant, picked up his own mint julep from the table, and flung it in his face.
But on the front lawn a jazz combo played atop an elevated platform, and the guests wandered among the citrus and oak trees and the drink tables and the music that seemed to charm the pink softness of the evening into their lives. Megan wore her funny straw hat with an evening dress that clung to her figure like ice water, and was talking to a group of friends, people from New York and overseas, when she noticed the man working on his car.
She stood between two myrtle bushes, on the edge of the swale, and waited until he seemed to feel her eyes on his back. He straightened up and smiled, but the smile came and went erratically, as though the man thought it into place.
He wore a form-fitting long-sleeve gold shirt and blue jeans that were so tight they looked painted on his skin. A short-brim fedora with a red feather in the band rested on the fender. His hair was the color of his shirt, waved, and cut long and parted on the side so it combed down over one ear.
"It's a battery cable. I'll have it started in a minute," he said in a French accent.
She stared at him without speaking, a champagne glass resting in the fingers of both hands, her chest rising and falling.
"I am a big fan of American movies. I saw a lady turn in here. Isn't she the daughter of a famous Hollywood director?" he said.
"I'm not sure who you mean," Megan said.
"She was driving a Cadillac, a convertible," he said, and waited. Then he smiled, wiping his hands on a handkerchief. "Ah, I'm right, aren't I? Her father is William Holtzner. I love all his films. He is wonderful," the man said.
She stepped backward, once, twice, three times, the myrtle bushes brushing against her bare arms, then stood silently among her friends. She looked back at the man with gold hair only after he had restarted his car and driven down the road. Five minutes later Lila Terrebonne backed the Cadillac down the drive, hooking one wheel over the slab into a freshly watered flower bed, then shifted into low out on the road and floored the accelerator toward New Iberia. Her radio was blaring with rock 'n' roll from the 1960s, her face energized with vindication inside the black scarf, stitched with roses, that was tied tightly around her head.
THE MAN NAMED JACQUES Poitier caught up with her on the two-lane road that paralleled Bayou Teche, only one mile from her home. Witnesses said she tried to outrun him, swerving back and forth across the highway, blowing her horn, waving desperately at a group of blacks on the side of the road. Others said he passed her and they heard a gunshot. But we found no evidence of the latter, only a thread-worn tire that had exploded on the rim before the Cadillac skidded sideways, showering sparks off the pavement, into an oncoming dump truck loaded with condemned asbestos.
* * *
THIRTY-FOUR
IF THERE WAS ANY DRAMA at the crime scene later, it was not in our search for evidence or even in the removal of Lila's body from under the crushed roof of the Cadillac. Archer Terrebonne arrived at the scene twenty minutes after the crash, and was joined a few minutes later by Billy Holtzner. Terrebonne immediately took charge, as though his very presence and the slip-on half-top boots and red flannel shirt and quilted hunting vest and visor cap he wore gave him a level of authority that none of the firemen or paramedics or sheriffs deputies possessed.
They all did his bidding or sought sanction or at a minimum gave an explanation to him for whatever they did. It was extraordinary to behold. His attorney and family physician were there; also a U.S. congressman and a well-known movie actor. Terrebonne wore his grief like a patrician who had become a man of the people. A three-hundred-pound St. Mary Parish deputy, his mouth full of Red Man, stood next to me, his eyes fixed admiringly on Terrebonne.
"That ole boy is one brave sonofabuck, ain't he?" he said.
The paramedics covered Lila's body with a sheet and wheeled it on the gurney to the back of an ambulance, the strobe lights of TV cameras flowing with it, passing across Terrebonne's and Holtzner's stoic faces.
Helen Soileau and I walked through the crowd until we were a few feet from Terrebonne. Red fla
res burned along the shoulder of the road, and mist clung to the bayou and the oak trunks along the bank. The air was cold, but my face felt hot and moist with humidity. His eyes never registered our presence, as though we were moths outside a glass jar, looking in upon a pure white flame.
"Your daughter's death is on you, Terrebonne. You didn't intend for it to happen, but you helped bring the people here who killed her," I said.