“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?”