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hook you. Then before you know it, you’re writing a series for them.”
    “Yeah. Yeah, LaVerne told me a thing or two about your pride.”
    “Which in my particular case went after a fall.”
    “And I read your books, Lew. All of them.”
    “Then you must be one hell of a man for sure. Don’t know if I could do it.”
    “Yeah,” he said, placing cup and saucer on the floor beside him and waving off my tacit offer of more. Some people still know how to let a good thing be. “You wanta stop pushing me away here, Lew? ‘S’not much about this whole thing that’s funny. You know?”
    I shook my head. Not disputing him: agreeing. The invisible something eased off on my throat and went back to its dark corner.
    “I’m listening,” I said.
    “Good.” He took a cream-colored envelope out of his inside breast pocket and held it, edge-down like a blade, against one thigh. “You know anything about LaVerne having a kid?”
    “She never had any. Always told me she couldn’t.”
    “Not only could, it seems, but also did. Back when she was married to Horace Guidry—”
    “Her doctor.”
    He nodded. “Went on fertility drugs or something, I guess, when he kept insisting. Then when they split, I guess he got full custody, no visitation. Even a restraining order.”
    “In consideration of the respondent’s unwholesome past, no doubt.”
    “And of the petitioner’s large sums of money and standing in the community, right. You got it.”
    “Why would she never have said anything?”
    “I asked her that once, when she first told me. She couldn’t say. But I think maybe it was kind of like she shut that door completely—like she had to, just to keep on getting by. Know what I mean?”
    I did. I also knew that winds have a way of coming out of nowhere and blowing those doors open again.
    We sat there silently a moment and he said, “Yeah, I guess we don’t ever know anybody as well as we think we do, huh?”
    “I’m beginning to think we don’t ever know anyone at all.”
    “Yeah. Well anyway, we’re sitting in Burger King one night, we’d been together seven or eight months by then, and LaVerne looks across at me between bites and she says: I’ve got a kid, you know. Talk about getting hit by a semi. And she proceeds to tell me all about it, right there and then, with these teenage kids blowing wrappers off straws at each other in the next booth. So what you think I should do about it? she asks me afterward. What you wanta do? I say. And she goes: I think maybe I have to try and talk to her, Chip. I think I want my daughter to know who her mother was. Cause of course she’d be like eighteen now, able to make her own decisions about things like this. And the stuff LaVerne saw every day at that shelter she was working at, it had to make her think about all that. Parents and children, husbands and wives, all the things they can do to one another. About being all alone, too.”
    “You find her?”
    “We started looking. Retained a lawyer to contact the father—”
    “Anything there?”
    “Damn little. Lots of fast footwork from his lawyers. Including, as I understand it, a brief admonitory call from a judge.”
    “I take it, then, that the girl—what’s her name?”
    “Alouette. We’re not sure what last name she’s using.”
    “I take it she’s not with the father. With Guidry.”
    “Apparently not for some time. And short of a court order, which wasn’t about to happen, that’s pretty much all we could get out of the good doctor’s lawyers. Then finally our own lawyer suggested we might want to get in touch with a PI out in Metairie, a guy who specializes in finding people—”
    “Who was that?”
    “A. C. Boudleaux.”
    “Achille. I know him. He come up with anything? If he didn’t, you might as well hang it on the line, ‘cause nobody else will either. He’s good.”
    “Here’s his report.” He handed over the envelope. “It’s not much, but he was only on it for a couple