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eyes drift down slow to her bosom, like he was being cool, forgetting that his wife, Marietta, sometimes played tennis with this woman, a fact that, when he thought about it, was a puzzlement indeed. “You know what I mean?”
    “Oh, Maynard,” laughed Chéri, twisting and posing on the barstool like a beauty queen, “can’t you just see me racing through town with that siren blaring?”
    Harry pushed his duffel bag with the hidden camera a little closer, getting what he hoped was a good shot of her long neck preening, with the front page of the Times-Picayune he’d dropped on the bar in the picture. With the date showing. Yep, Uncle Tench was gonna be proud of him all right, all the money Harry was saving him and Preferred Reliance Insurance on Chéri’s claim.
    Just about then a tall, lanky man in a pearl-buttoned shirt, sitting down the bar from Maynard piped up. “You say the woman driving that ambulance out at the airport was a skinny black bitch?”
    “Now, watch your mouth in front of the lady,” warned Calvin.
    “Sorry, ma’am. No offense,” he said.
    Harry had seen this man—long, tall, looked like a cowboy in his jeans—where? Yes! When he was working rigs off Grand Isle. Pipe-handler. One of those nervy, macho bastards fitting new lengths of pipe onto old while the end was still drilling, whirling a couple hundred miles an hour.
    “No offense taken.” Chéri dimpled at the tall pipe-handler, proving she was a good ol’ girl who could hang with the best of ’em. “You’re right though. Driver was skinny. Skinny, light-skinned woman.”
    “Bet it was G.T.”
    Calvin nodded. “Bet it was, Jimbo.”
    Jimbo. Harry knew he’d seen him before. Jimbo King.
    “That G.T.’s Jimbo’s neighbor, lives in the other half of a duplex, double shotgun, over on General Pershing, right off St. Charles,” Calvin was explaining. Jimbo’s always bellyaching about her. Messing in his bi’nis.”
    “Who’s bellyaching?” Jimbo leaned into it. “And the street’s General Taylor, not Pershing.”
    Calvin jumped back as if he realized a good bartender never would have stepped out that far anyway. “Hell, Jimbo, you know what I mean.”
    “Yeah, well, you’d be griping, too, some bi—somebody wouldn’t even let you have a fight with your wife without sticking her nose in.”
    “You ought not to be fighting with your wife in the first place,” Chéri put in.
    “Well, I’ll tell you, pretty lady, you may know what you talking about when it comes to your life—fancy clothes, talking about limos and showfurs—but not my life. Times ain’t been this bad in the oil bi’nis since, shit, since things was powered with steam. That’s why wimmenfolk is acting so uppity.” He turned away from Chéri now, addressing the other men. “Wimmen’ll do that when you got so much weighing on you you cain’t hardly see over it. Just keep pushing and pushing. Trying to wear the pants.”
    “That’s what you were saying before,” said Maynard. “When you were talking earlier about your wife. What was it you said to her?”
    “You mean after she got back up off the floor?” Jimbo grinned.
    Harry looked away, stared out toward the door. Slime-balls like this made his flesh crawl.
    Jimbo answered Maynard. “Said, ‘Cain’t you see I’m carrying a heavy load here, woman? Man out of work don’t need none of your shit.’” Then he paused for a sip, following his shot of bourbon with a slug of Diet Dr Pepper. He ignored the pout growing on Chéri’s face like she’d been popped by a bee.
    Harry didn’t miss it though. Then he looked back at Jimbo. Mean sapsucker—sucking his diet soda through his crooked grin and his bad, white-trash teeth. Yeah, a man like Jimbo would think diet pop was just the thing when he was out of work. Laying up, his lean would turn to blubber when times were bad. But Harry could see Jimbo had lost neither lean nor mean.
    “So what’d she do then?” asked Maynard.
    “After she