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sidewalk. She wore a nine-millimeter automatic in a hand-tooled black holster and a pair of handcuffs stuck through the back of her gunbelt.
    “I met Miss Pisspot of 1962 at the jail this morning,” she said.
    “Who?”
    “That FBI agent, what’s her name, Glazier. She thinks we set up Cool Breeze Broussard to get clipped in our own jail.”
    “What’s your take on it?”
    “The mulatto’s a pipehead. He says he thought Breeze was somebody else, a guy who wanted to kill him because he banged the guy’s little sister.”
    “You buy it?” I asked.
    “A guy who wears earrings through his nipples? Yeah, it’s possible. Do me a favor, will you?” she said.
    “What’s up?”
    Her eyes tried to look casual. “Lila Terrebonne is sloshed at the country club. The skipper wants me to drive her back to Jeanerette.”
    “No, thanks.”
    “I could never relate to Lila. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because she threw up in my lap once. I’m talking about your AA buddy here.”
    “She didn’t call me for help, Helen. If she had, it’d be different.”
    “If she starts her shit with me, she’s going into the drunk tank. I don’t care if her grandfather was a U.S. senator or not.”
    She went out to the parking lot. I sat behind my desk for a moment, then pinged a paper clip in the wastebasket and flagged down her cruiser before she got to the street.
     
    LILA HAD A POINTED face and milky green eyes and yellow hair that was bleached the color of white gold by the sun. She was lighthearted about her profligate life, undaunted by hangovers or trysts with married men, laughing in a husky voice in nightclubs about the compulsions that every two or three years placed her in a hospital or treatment center. She would dry out and by order of the court attend AA meetings for a few weeks, working a crossword puzzle in the newspaper while others talked of the razor wire wrapped around their souls, or staring out the window with a benign expression that showed no trace of desire, remorse, impatience, or resignation, just temporary abeyance, like a person waiting for the hands on an invisible clock to reach an appointed time.
    From her adolescent years to the present, I did not remember a time in her life when she was not the subject of rumor or scandal. She was sent off by her parents to the Sorbonne, where she failed her examinations and returned to attend USL with blue-collar kids who could not even afford to go to LSU in Baton Rouge. The night of her senior prom, members of the football team glued her photograph on the rubber machine in Provost’s Bar.
    When Helen and I entered the clubhouse she was by herself at a back table, her head wreathed in smoke from her ashtray, her unfilled glass at the ends of her fingertips. The other tables were filled with golfers and bridge players, their eyes careful never to light on Lila and the pitiful attempt at dignity she tried to impose on her situation. The white barman and the young black waiter who circulated among the tables had long since refused to look in her direction or hear her order for another drink. When someone opened the front door, the glare of sunlight struck her face like a slap.
    “You want to take a ride, Lila?” I said.
    “Oh, Dave, how are you? They didn’t call you again, did they?”
    “We were in the neighborhood. I’m going to get a membership here one day.”
    “The same day you join the Republican Party. You’re such a riot. Would you help me up? I think I twisted my ankle,” she said.
    She slipped her arm in mine and walked with me through the tables, then stopped at the bar and took two ten-dollar bills from her purse. She put them carefully on the bar top.
    “Nate, this is for you and that nice young black man. It’s always a pleasure to see you all again,” she said.
    “Come back, Miss Lila. Anytime,” the barman said, his eyes shifting off her face.
    Outside, she breathed the wind and sunshine as though she had just entered a