P.I. On A Hot Tin Roof

by Julie Smith

  Kristin whirled. Talba started around the desk, but by the time she got there, the other woman had done a three-sixty (or technically, two one-eighties), and she was coming at her, elbows bent, palms out, ready to shove. Talba registered that much before the elbows straightened and she took a blow in the chest, which knocked her backward. She struggled to get her balance. Her adversary kept coming.

  Later, she thought that she should have heard Skip running, heard her radioing for help, but at the time, amazingly, she was in the zone. Not turtling out; right there. Not exactly on top of her game, but fully focused on trying to think of what the hell to do. You kick a man in the groin—what do you do with a woman? She had once read one of those Internet warning things about how not to attract rapists, and the very first thing to do (after staying out of parking garages) was never wear a ponytail, because they were easy to grab. Kristin wasn’t wearing one, but she had plenty of hair to pull. Talba grabbed for some.

  Kristin jerked her head back, but she threw a fist at Talba’s chest. It probably would have hurt a lot worse without the vest, but it was still no day at the beach.

  More Internet self-defense methods were coming to her, something about elbows. She threw her right one at Kristin’s boobs, and that was better. “Uuuuuhhhh,” the woman said, and teetered on her itty-bitty heels. But she was still standing. “Down!” Talba shouted. “Down, goddammit!” She kicked at Kristin’s knees, but the other woman kicked back, with those nasty little heels. Kristin was no Jackie Chan, but you still couldn’t get close to her with that going on. Her hand snaked out, but not at Talba—at Talba’s desk. It came up with a pen in it.

  Talba knew from the Internet what she was going to do with that—she was going to go for the eyes. Only one thing to do. She closed them.

  Closed them, lowered her head, and butted like a billy goat, catching her assailant full in the face. That did the trick—she could see flowered turquoise panties as Kristin went over backward. And then the woman’s legs hit the floor, revealing a no longer beautiful face. If Talba wasn’t mistaken, the lovely Miss LaGarde was going to need rhinoplasty to look her best in court.

  “You bitch!” Kristin screamed, one hand gingerly touching her battered face.

  She heard pounding footsteps, and Skip skidded into the office, barely stopping before she fell over the fallen former angel face. Shooting a quick look at Talba, who was rubbing the top of her head, she flipped Kristin over and cuffed her. Standing up, she barked, “You all right?” somewhere in Talba’s direction.

  “No!” Kristin screamed. “Call an ambulance.”

  “Thank God,” Talba said to Skip. “Is Adam okay?” Skip didn’t answer. Instead, she rushed back to the hall, Talba following. She saw immediately why Skip had skidded—the floor and much of the walls were slick with blood—arterial blood, it seemed, from the looks of what was going on on the floor. Abasolo was bent over a man, applying pressure to his thigh, and Skip radioed for help, then took over as he ripped off his belt, to try to tie it into a tourniquet. The man was moaning in agony, his face turned away. Talba had to step around the whole grisly tableau to see that it was Royce Champagne.

  Chapter 25

  At Langdon’s insistence, Talba went with the three of them to the hospital, ostensibly to make sure she wasn’t seriously hurt—though she knew perfectly well she wasn’t. But she was shaking and cold, utterly wrung out—the shock, Langdon said, the adrenaline crash. She was amazed at the “a” word—for once, adrenaline had been her friend. And now that she thought of it, this wasn’t the first tight spot she’d fought her way out of. The turtle mechanism seemed to go off when she was blindsided—the surprise set off her imagination, and that stopped all motion. But she’d gone into this thing with her eyes open.

  Also, the danger was real, not something in her head. The body had responded as it was programmed to do, as it did when soldiers went to war. She didn’t try to figure it out. She made herself stop thinking about it.

  Kristin must have gone out to meet Royce last night. It was probably his idea for her to call Talba with an ass-covering apology. Why had Talba believed that just-out-for-a-ride story? Then there was the suggestion that she bring the tape downstairs—what was Kristin going to do, shoot her from the car? No, someone else was going to grab her, or maybe follow her back to her office and kill her there.

  Hindsight. Even Langdon had missed that one.

  On the other hand, Kristin and Royce? On the face of it, it made no sense at all.

  But it started to fall into place if you considered the economic possibilities of such an alliance. (And Kristin’s well-known wandering eye.) She was a woman who was heavy into economic possibilities. Talba thought about her Lexus, her antique silver, her art collection; her dismissal of her nice house as a dump. She must have been counting the minutes till she could get her hands on the Champagne mansion. Then there was the disrespect she got from her father the boss. Getting rid of Daddy was probably even more appealing than shedding Buddy.

  While Talba waited her turn in the emergency room, she pried Abasolo’s story out of him: Royce had come in with a gun, Abasolo had warned him, Royce had raised the gun, both had fired, and the Kevlar vest had come in handy. Abasolo had a nasty bruise on his chest (or so he said—he didn’t offer to show her), but no holes in it. Royce, on the other hand, had a crater in his thigh.

  Abasolo had shouted that he was all right (Talba hadn’t heard this, but she took his word for it), and Skip, running out of the coffee room, peeled off her jacket and threw it to him on the way to help Talba. Abasolo held it tight on Royce’s wound till Skip could check on Talba, cuff Kristin, and return to help him. About thirty seconds worth of action, and damn good police work, in Talba’s opinion.

  Meanwhile, Kristin maintained that she was only paying for a job well done and had jumped Talba because she thought the P.I. had set some trap for her that involved gun-toting thugs. Royce, she suggested, was in it with Talba. They were planning to kill her and/or frame her for two murders, she wasn’t sure which. Eventually, her lawyer turned up to tell her to zip her lip, but the cops now had a nice story to run by Royce, who hollered “Bitch!” and even ruder epithets—and spat out his own version—before his own lawyer slapped duct tape over his mouth.

  Talba spent a few hours at Headquarters, but between tête-à-têtes with Langdon and Abasolo, she at least had time to call Eileen Fisher about a cleanup crew.

  And she called Eddie: “EdDEE. Ever see Gunfight at the OK Corral?”

  “I’m hangin’ up. Right now.”

  “Just don’t go back to the office today, okay? I know you can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  Maybe, she thought on signing off, there’d been a better way to handle that. So she called Angie, reeled off her yarn, and asked her to pour oil on the waters. After that, she returned the twenty-seven calls she’d logged from Jane Storey, but only to say she couldn’t say anything, but to treat her nicely in tomorrow’s paper and Jane would get her reward when the details shook out.

  It took a while longer, but Talba finally got a chance to talk to Langdon alone. Quite simply, it seemed that Royce and Kristin turned on each other. The way Skip told it, they both produced more or less the same story. “He said, she said,” Skip sighed. “See, Royce says he was a happily married man, but somehow Kristin managed to seduce him—just once, of course—and after that, she just couldn’t leave him alone, no matter how much he resisted her unwelcome advances.”

  Talba smiled. “It could happen to anybody, right?”

  “Poor little Royce,” Skip said. “Well, one night he’s minding his own business and Kristin gets in a drunken brawl with Buddy, and naturally Royce comes running downstairs to see what’s going on. You can just imagine his horror and grief at the sight of his own father dead on the library floor, having been beaned by his sweetie with a marble statue.”

  “One of those damned blackamoors,” Talba said.

  “Yeah. Figure of a guy in a turban.”


  “Buddy had two—Adele was kind of embarrassed by them.”

  “Ugly damn things,” Skip said. “Well, the evil Kristin coerces him into helping him disguise the murder by saying if he didn’t, she’d wake up the household and accuse him of it.”

  “What’d she tell him the argument was all about?”

  “Buddy’s obsessive jealousy. So Royce reluctantly agrees, and they hatch a plan. First they lift the Bacchus tape from Lucy’s room, and make a phony tape for Wesley Burrell. Then they load Buddy in the trunk and Kristin steals Daddy’s gun—”

  “Hold it—how do they do that?”

  “Kristin has a key to Daddy’s house and she knows the alarm code. So they get the key, drive to the marina, put Buddy in the boat, and take it out far enough so no one hears the shot—or at least they hear it from a distance—and Kristin shoots her own fiancé in the head to cover up what really happened. You following so far?”

  Talba nodded, riveted.

  “Well, that’s it. You buying it?”

  “It fits with the facts, anyhow. But what about Suzanne? Kristin killed her, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. Must have, anyhow. Royce wouldn’t know a damn thing about that, and Kristin still had the gun.”

  “The motive being?”

  Skip heaved her shoulders in a big fake shrug. “Royce wouldn’t know, but it must have been jealousy because Kristin was so obsessed with him. So he had to stand by and see his own wife murdered and couldn’t even go to the cops because of his completely understandable part in the cover-up of Buddy’s murder.”

  “Oh, boy. In that case, what was he doing in my office?”

  “Well, he had to try to help recover the tape because it incriminated him, even though he was completely innocent.”

  “Right. That sure explains the gun.”

  “Oh, that. Well, Kristin explained how dangerous you are, being a blackmailer and all, and he fired because he’d encountered a strange man holding a gun on him. Wouldn’t anyone?”

  “Good enough lawyer, a jury might buy it.”

  “But you forget, if the DA buys that scenario, Kristin’s the one on trial, and naturally she’d have to testify in her own defense.”

  “Okay. Hit me with the ‘she said.’”

  “Would you believe it? It’s practically the same story, only in reverse. See, even though she was deeply devoted to Buddy, Royce seduced her (really, just once)—”

  “Could happen to anybody.”

  “Uh-huh. And after that he just couldn’t leave her alone, no matter how much she resisted his unwelcome advances. So finally, unbeknownst to her, Royce goes to his father and says the two of them are in love, but Buddy, of course, rightly refuses to believe him, and a fight breaks out, which ends with Royce killing him with the very same marble statue he said Kristin killed him with. She figures he must have somehow stolen her key to her father’s house, lifted the gun, moved the body to the marina all by himself, and shot his dad to obscure the evidence, after first making the tape. She figures all this out, but she figures I won’t, so that’s why she hires you—so he’ll get his just deserts.”

  “But she doesn’t tell me anything about her suspicions.”

  “Right. But then later Royce kills Suzanne because somehow she must have found out, after which Kristin finds the gun in her car and gets scared because she knows he planted it.”

  “But she still doesn’t mention any of this to anybody.”

  “Right. Must have had a lot of faith in you, Baroness, knowing you’d somehow get to the bottom of it, not having a clue where you were going.”

  “But then I figure out about the tape and she tries to buy it back. How does she explain that? Not to mention the fact that Royce turns up in my office with a gun.”

  “Well, see, she gets brave and confronts Royce all by her sweet self, and he coerces her into getting the tape for him. Says he’ll kill her if she doesn’t, and she knows how dangerous he is, because by now he’s pretty much admitted to all the rest of it—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And she had no idea he was going to follow her into your office. Why, he was probably going to kill her.”

  “And me.”

  Skip slapped her hands together and folded them, seemingly in conclusion. “That’s her theory.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “No way they weren’t in it together. The main question is, who actually killed Buddy? No prints on the statue, naturally.”

  “Well, I’ve got another couple of questions. Why hire me, and why turn in the gun?”

  “Okay, what’s your theory?”

  “I think they always meant to frame LaGarde—only they needed me to make it work. They couldn’t manipulate you, but they thought they could lead me right to LaGarde. So they let me spin my wheels, then they plant the gun, and the idea was, I turn it in, then he goes to prison, and Kristin takes over the business. And Royce inherits his half of his mother’s money. When Buddy died, the money probably passed to Lucy and Royce. I already know the house did.”

  Skip nodded. “Right on that count. Celeste had a trust that matured before she died, and Buddy got the money.”

  “So if they were in it together, Royce and Kristin could get married and they’d be in control of two major fortunes.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think, too.”

  “Only thing was, they thought they needed me to poke around enough to set LaGarde up. Probably thought I couldn’t detect my way out of a broom closet, but then I found the tape, and they panicked.”

  “We’re on the same page, Baroness. Just give me a few more days.”

  ***

  “So what do you think, Eddie?” Ms. Wallis asked. Eddie had had to forgive her for the OK Corral. Sure, it messed up his office, and, well, yes, it was kind of stupid and dangerous. But it did show ingenuity. Not to mention the fact that it worked.

  But the best part, in his opinion, was the way she’d folded the cops into her scheme to trap Kristin. She’d gotten around them. He liked that. He wondered if he’d have had the guts to do it himself.

  “What I think,” he said, “if either of those two birds tried to apply for a job as a White House spin doctor, they’d be laughed right out of the place. And nobody, but nobody can come up with dumber lies than the jokers in the West Wing.”

  “Yeah. They need lying lessons from the master.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Eddie. “They need about a hundred years in maximum security. Or worse. But I still don’t see why they bothered to shoot Buddy. The whole idea was to cover up who killed him—all they had to do was make the tape and move the body.”

  “That was to frame LaGarde. One or the other of them must have thought of it right at the get-go. Buddy had a gun in his night table; I found it when I was working there. They could have used that and made it look like suicide if that was what they were after.”

  “Oh. What do you bet that explains the second gun? The one Royce had when he came to the office?”

  Ms. Wallis snapped her fingers. “Eddie, you’re a genius.”

  “Uh-huh. Talked to LaGarde yet?”

  “Oh, sure. And he cleared up a couple of big things for me. When Kristin came in with the gun yarn, she seemed really, really upset—pale, shaky, the whole thing—like she was about to faint. Absolutely took me in. I told her dad she sure was a good actress, and he said when she was a little kid, she used to drink salt water and throw up to create that little effect.”

  “The woman’s got a screw loose.”

  “Her dad’s an expert on that one. He just had to mention he tried to warn me, which, by the way, would have worked against him if those two had succeeded. He’s not even paying for Kristin’s lawyer.”

  “Well, that’s pretty cold. He is her father.”

  “Yeah, but she tried to set him up. The whole idea was to get rid of him and take over his business.”

  Eddie shifted, uncomfortable with such a pat explanation. “Yeah, but he knew she was a soci
opath, and he’d have to know she set him up—no way would he sign it over to her. I never really got why he kept her on the payroll, anyhow.”

  A canary-feathers look came over her face. She’d figured it out, of course. “He had to. That was the other thing I asked him about. It was all in Grandpa’s will—you remember the whole LaGarde empire started with Warren’s daddy. She was to go to work for the company and learn the business, and after Warren’s death—or if anything ever happened so that he couldn’t run the business—Kristin took it over. And once she had control of it, that would have been all she wrote—she’d have stolen every dime he and Tootsie-pop ever had. That’s the real reason she and Royce hired me—they really needed to put him away. Sure, the police might have done it, but they could steer their humble employee in the right direction.”

  “Or thought they could.”

  She acknowledged his vote of confidence with a pseudo-salute. “And the fact that Kristin hired a P.I. made her look above reproach. She gave the game away herself—by freaking out when I told her about the tape. But if it had worked, she and Royce would have walked away with the entire LaGarde einpire and half of whatever Buddy left—which was considerable, by the way, even if you don’t count that Creole Versailles they’ve got over there, which would probably go for about six million by itself.”

  “Well, how about Lucy and Adele? How were they were going to screw them out of the rest of the Reedy money?”

  “Gives me goose bumps just to think about it. Where were these people going to stop?”

  Eddie said, “They really were an item, then? Kristin and Royce?”

  Ms. Wallis laughed. He had meant it ironically, and she took it as such, which pleased him. “It was all about greed,” she said. “Every bit of it. If we can extrapolate from what the ex-husband said, LaGarde foisted Kristin off on Buddy to get what he wanted from a crooked judge, but he had no idea she’d try to marry him. Know what LaGarde told me? He asked her why, and she said, ‘I like the house.’ I’ll just bet she did. I’ve been to her house—that woman is into possessions in a big way. I’ll bet she couldn’t wait to get that monster for herself and turn it into the Hearst Castle South. Meanwhile, she gets involved with Royce—she’s got a history of that kind of thing—and then…”