A few minutes later a Hispanic stableman is holding Gladys steady as I struggle to heave myself up into her saddle. With a grunt, I finally manage to do so, muscles and tendons I didn’t know I had straining from the effort. I’m still squirming and fidgeting, trying to get comfortable and balanced, when she clip-clops over on her horse of choice for the afternoon, a beautiful white stallion she tells me is named Cooper.

“Ready to ride?” she asks.

Without waiting for my response, she gives her animal a squeeze with her heels and starts trotting out toward the fields. I hear a low roar of engines and off to the right, see two workers each riding a four-wheeled ATV, heading to a fence line.

“Yah!” I urge Gladys and give her reins a gentle tug. She jerks and bucks, nearly tossing me off. But then, thank goodness, she seems to sense that she has a pure tenderfoot on her mature back, and she starts heading into the right direction.

Soon I’ve caught up to Emily and Cooper, who start, quite literally, running circles around us on the smooth green pasture, moving with elegance and grace. As for me, Gladys is ambling along in a straight line and I’m still holding on for dear life with the reins, resisting the temptation to lean forward and wrap my arms around her long neck.

“Your carousel riding has obviously served you well,” she observes with a smile.

I feel like at any moment gravity is going to tug me to the ground. “Hey, I’d like to see you try to make a pot of sous vide ham hock jambalaya sometime.”

“I hire and fire cooks, Detective Rooney,” she replies, with the confident tone of one always being in charge. “I never claimed to be one.”

Fair enough. For a woman who grew up in one of New Orleans’ biggest foodie families, she is on record as saying she can barely boil water. She’s a money person. An “epicurean entrepreneur,” as she’s put it, with only a casual interest in fine dining. While her relatives studied at Cordon Bleu, she went to Columbia Business School. Today, she splits her time between managing the finances of the restaurants and food distributors she co-owns, and overseeing this nonprofit horse farm.

By now we’re riding parallel, though I can sense that she wishes she could let Cooper run free to the horizon, instead of plodding along with a first-timer like myself. We’re away from the main stables by the house, though there are two other low-slung wooden buildings off to the right, several hundred feet away, even larger than the stables we exited, and one of them has a large antenna set to the rear. Near the buildings are two tall, empty flagpoles.

“Tell me about David,” I say.

Which makes her snicker.