Louisiana Bigshot

by Julie Smith

  Talba nodded pleasantly. She had a nice little speech all rehearsed. “Umm-hmm. My boss. I’m with the Edible Complex catering service.” She checked her watch again. “She’s taking forever.” Talba looked at the man and smiled her sweetest smile. “Giving an estimate.”

  “Where?” the man asked, “Which house?”

  Talba shrugged. It was starting to get ugly, but it was too soon to panic. “To tell you the truth, I got so interested in my book, I didn’t notice.” She gestured at the book. “Have you read Susan Dodd’s new book yet?” She figured he hadn’t read much of anything, ever.

  He was getting red in the face. “Let me tell you something, lady. You better figure the hell out where she is, and you better both be clean out of the town of Clayton within five minutes.”

  What to say to that one? I have as much right as you to be here? She thought not.

  Instead, she looked at her watch again. “We really have been here quite awhile.” She smiled at him again. “Sure, I can leave if I’m making you nervous. I’ll call her on the cell phone and tell her to let me know when she wants to be picked up.” All perfectly reasonable. But maybe just a tad too explanatory?

  “You do that.” The man crossed his arms and stood there till she had closed her book, slid back over to the driver’s seat, and left.

  So much for that idea, she thought, and headed crossly out of town, figuring to go straight for the judge next time she came to Clayton.

  She was nearly back to the Wendy’s where she’d eaten lunch when she saw the flashing light behind her—a sheriff’s car, signaling her to pull over.

  The man who got out was young and white, sunburned, with sun-bleached hair in a buzz cut, wearing a brown uniform.

  “Can I see some I.D., please?”

  God, how she hated to be asked for I.D.—she was going to have to get her name legally changed.

  “N’Awlins’,” he said, running the syllables all together. “Whatchew doin’ in Clayton?”

  “I have business here.”

  “What kinda business is that?”

  She had no idea whether this was coincidence or the result of a phone call from the red-faced man. But something told her not to lie. She gave him the same smile she’d given the last one, all sweetness and innocence. “I’m a PI.” She gestured at her purse, beside her on the seat, the same purse out of which she’d just dug her driver’s license. “Would you like to see my license?”

  Suddenly the young man looked terrified. “You keep your hands right where they are.”

  Talba complied.

  “Now put them outside the car.” Once again she obeyed.

  The man opened the door himself.

  “Get out the car.”

  As soon as she was out, he spun her around and cuffed her. “Am I under arrest?”

  He didn’t answer, a favorite trick of cops, she’d noticed.

  But she figured she must be, because he put her in the back of his car and took her back to his office, where he threw her in a cell.

  No one asked her a single question; no one booked her or read her her rights or told her to have a nice day—just took her possessions and locked her up. I could be here forever, she thought. No one even knows where I am.

  Sure, they had to give her a phone call, but the way they did things here in Clayton, she figured that could be next week or next month. She sat down and took stock.

  As jails went, she figured it probably wasn’t too bad, but it sure wasn’t the Royal Orleans. The best part was, she was the only one in her cell, which was furnished with one bunk, one tired and stained mattress, one rough blanket, one steel washbasin, and one disgusting jail commode. The hell of it was, she was so nervous she was going to have to use it soon.

  Nervous. Well, that was one way to put it.

  They kept her there three hours before they let her use the phone, three hours during which no one spoke a word to her. Finally, a black deputy, a man she’d never seen before, flung open the door, blank-faced, and asked her if she wanted to make a phone call.

  It was seven o’clock. Eddie’d be home already, and she didn’t know his home number. It was written in her address book, but they’d confiscated that. Calling either Miz Clara or Corey was out. That left Darryl.

  Please be home. Please, she prayed as she dumped her money in the phone.

  “Hello?” Darryl’s voice.

  “Thank God. Darryl, I’m in jail.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody’ll say a word to me. I’m in the St. Sebastian Parish jail—I was in Clayton on the case. Call Eddie to come get me, will you?” And then she remembered something. “Oh, hell. His home number’s unlisted. You’ll have to go see him.”

  From Darryl’s house, that would take almost an hour.

  “Hang on, Your Grace. We’ll get there as fast as our fat little legs will carry us.”

  But when Eddie arrived, he was alone, and Talba figured that was probably a good thing. It was almost midnight.

  The bags under his eyes seemed to have tripled since the day before. They were the size of steamer trunks, the color of bricks crumbling from centuries of exposure.

  ***

  Eddie had finished dinner (eggplant parmigiana), and, full of rich food and a cocktail or two, had repaired to his den and stretched out in his recliner for a little nap before bed. Angie was over for dinner; she was helping Audrey load the dishwasher and then she’d probably go home. Eddie couldn’t understand why she’d never stay, watch a little television with the folks; but she always had “work to do.” Or something.

  Something shook him awake; an earthquake maybe.

  “Oh, Gawd, you jumped like you got a guilty conscience. Come on; Darryl Boucree’s here. About Talba.”

  “That’s a reason to wake me up? Somethin’ wrong? She get thrown in jail or somethin’?” He was joking.

  Audrey’s face was straight as a poker. “Yeah. She did.”

  He sat up too fast, causing the chair to fold with a thump and his head to swim a little. “Ms. Wallis?” He was getting accustomed to the idea; also to his sudden change of altitude. “Ms. Wallis got herself arrested? What’d she do?”

  Angie was just walking into the room, waving a wet dish towel. She looked like she was going to a funeral. Even at her parents’ house for a little home cooking, she was wearing her usual black—black jeans, black T-shirt, black sneakers. She’d look good in any color on God’s earth and this was the way she dressed. Eddie didn’t get it.

  “DWB,” she said.

  “Huh?” Eddie was only vaguely aware of having heard the term.

  “Driving while black. Look, I’ll drive up and get her out. You stay here and rest.” It pissed him off the way Angie always knew best. She was a lawyer, which he was proud of, but why the hell couldn’t she have been a doctor? He’d never met a lawyer that didn’t have more opinions than God, and Angie’d been like that before her first day of kindergarten.

  “Angie, for God’s sake.” He struggled up out of the chair. “Where the hell is she? Excuse my French.”

  “Clayton. St. Sebastian Parish.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” He stumbled to the living room, where Talba’s boyfriend stood, looking worried, like an expectant dad or something. He was a tall black man with glasses, far too handsome for Eddie’s tastes. (He’d once said that to Angie, whereupon she sniffed back, “You mean he looks too white.”) Eddie said, “Darryl, what’s goin’ on?”

  “Talba doesn’t seem to know. Says they picked her up, threw her in jail, and won’t tell her why.”

  “Well, what the hell did she do?” Instantly, he regretted his mistake. “If you say DWB, I swear to God I won’t even bail her out.”

  “DW—what? Oh, yeah. Well, she didn’t mention that. And I don’t know about bail. I could do that by myself. She wanted me to see if I could get you to come with me.”

  Now that Eddie understood. Deep in his heart he knew this was bound to be a black-white thing.
>
  “I see what you’re saying, Darryl. I’m gon’ go get her, all right. But I think it’d be better if you didn’t come along.” Darryl looked down at the floor, something Eddie would have guessed he didn’t do very often. The man was a schoolteacher, highly educated and used to respect. Here was a situation he couldn’t control.

  Finally, having thought it through, he raised his gaze and nodded. “Yeah. I expect you’re right.”

  “Well, anyway, I’m white. This is just one of those things. I’m as sorry as I can be.” Angie and Talba thought he was a racist—hell, Audrey probably did too—but he hated to see this kind of thing. It was embarrassing for everybody concerned and it put white people in a bad light. “You go on home now. We’ll call ya once I get her out.”

  Angie was dying to go, of course—just perishing to get up on her lawyer high horse and give those back-country rednecks a lesson in law. Eddie was so damned pissed off he had half a mind to unleash her on them, but that wasn’t going to help Ms. Wallis’s case.

  He drove all the way up to Clayton in the middle of the night, falling asleep once, waking up to find himself about to change lanes involuntarily and plow into somebody.

  It was a damn shame he had to do this. It was a shame what they did to Ms. Wallis, first of all, but his having to get her out was even more of a shame, because it was going to blow his cover in Clayton. Ms. Wallis probably shouldn’t even have come up there alone—these were just assholes abusing their power, and, like he’d told Darryl, it was just one of those things.

  But if his cover was blown that was bad for the case. It sure would be nice if at least one of them could be anonymous here.

  It looked to Eddie like there were only two people in the whole sheriff’s office—a black deputy who looked permanently pissed off and a white kid who didn’t look old enough to wear a badge. A really stupid-looking white kid. This was the one he was going to have to schmooze.

  “Hey, there.” He stuck out his hand. “Eddie Valentino out of New Orleans.”

  The kid didn’t want to shake, but his nametag said “Greene.” Why the hell couldn’t it be a less common name?

  “Deputy Greene, I presume? Say, you related to Lamar Greene? Former Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy, back when I was on the job. Y’all a law enforcement family?” Eddie’d never met a Lamar Greene in his life, but he thought he detected a slight thawing in the deputy’s stone-face.

  The kid shook his head. “No, sir. Not unless it’s some other branch of the family. Know quite a few Jefferson Parish deputies, though. You know anybody’s still on the job?”

  “Oh, sure. Almost everybody.” And thus did the schmoozing begin. Fifteen minutes later and he and Deputy Greene were asshole buddies. Deputy Greene knew perfectly well what Eddie was there for, but somebody had to blink first, and Eddie was sleepy. When he figured the time was right, he said, “I understand you got one of my employees locked up.” Like he had an office full of employees.

  “Yeah. Yeah, we might. Got a little black gal says she’s a PI in there.” He pointed toward a door that must lead to the jail.

  They had her license. They knew damned well she was a PI, and they knew who she worked for—the name of the firm was right there on it.

  “What kind of trouble she givin’ y’all?”

  He shrugged. “Guess she was tryin’ to do surveillance without tellin’ us she was there. Man called and complained about a suspicious person in a parked car. She gave him some crazy story, and he called us, axed us to pick her up.”

  “Ohgawd. I’m embarrassed. What’s she say about it?”

  He looked Eddie full in the face, lip curling so defiantly he knew the man was lying. “She didn’t have no story. Wouldn’t say a damn word to us.”

  “Well, what law’d she violate?”

  “Trespassing, speeding, loitering, resisting arrest, battery.” He shrugged. “You name it.”

  Time to pull rank, maybe. “Sheriff know you got her?”

  “Sheriff’s orders to hold her.”

  “Oh. Well. Who’s the sheriff of St. Sebastian Parish these days?”

  “Junior… uh, Dunbar Brashear.”

  “Oh my gawd. Is that little Junior Brashear? His daddy and I were up at LSU together. I remember that boy when he was just a little old thing. Get him on the phone, will you?”

  The young man looked ill at ease for the first time. “He said to hold the nigger till morning.”

  Eddie fixed him with an old man’s weary stare. “Son, I know Junior Brashear. He ain’t never said the n word in his life. That ain’t no way for you to be talking to me.”

  “Well, I don’t happen to have his phone number, Mr. Valentino.”

  Damn! And things had been going so splendidly. He’d have Ms. Wallis out of jail by now if he hadn’t lost his temper.

  He ended up having to call Junior Brashear’s daddy and going at it backasswards.

  The elder Dunbar Brashear didn’t even live in Clayton; he was a retired gentleman up in Baton Rouge and damned unhappy to be waked up, but he knew enough to get his son to release a citizen he hadn’t even arrested before he got his ass in a sling.

  The whole thing ended with Junior Brashear coming down to the jail and doing the honors himself, looking a little like the Pillsbury doughboy with a three-day beard. Junior seemed like a man who liked his beer and drank barrels of it, waiting for his disposition to improve. The whole time he was there, he never spoke to Talba. His parting shot to Eddie was this: “I think you’ll find you’d do well to keep your employees out of the partic’lar neighborhood we found Urethra in.”

  That made Eddie as mad as anything else that had happened that night, and he had a list as long as your arm.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It wasn’t at all clear to Talba whether she’d been dragged off for being black in a white neighborhood or because somehow the Pattersons knew she was watching their house.

  “Ms. Wallis,” Eddie had said when she broached the question, “it just don’t make no never-mind. If there’s one thing to be learned from this, it’s that you stick out too much in Clayton to work this case.”

  “Not where I’m going, I don’t,” she said huffily, and the next day, on about three hours sleep, she was back in her car, driving up I-10 to Clayton. She got Jason on her cell phone. “Look, everyone in Clayton’s clammed up like they’ve got lockjaw. I need the transcript of Troxell’s trial, but I’m afraid it might cost a few hundred bucks. Can you handle it?”

  “Hell, yes,” he said, his voice grim. “Get that if you don’t do anything else. I need to know what happened there.” Okay, that was one good thing. Talba was humiliated at having had to call Eddie the night before. And all the more determined to make sense out of the case; well, frankly, to prove herself. She knew that was what it was, knew she didn’t have to, and couldn’t stop herself. She’d gotten up early, gotten online, and checked out Ebony Frenette, Marshannon Porter, and Calvin Richard. To no avail.

  Okay, Eddie, okay, call information first, she said silently as she, looked up their addresses.. She should have written them down yesterday.

  She looked at her watch. It was still early enough to catch someone before work. Yes! Good planning might pay off, for once. She stopped at a gas station to ask directions, found Calvin Richard lived only a few blocks away, and decided to try him first.

  She liked Richard’s neighborhood. It was much more modest than any she’d yet been to in Clayton, neat as an English village, and, so far as she could see, black. Everyone on the street was black; even the dogs were black.

  Let Deputy Dog find me here, she thought.

  The Richard house was a wooden bungalow painted yellow with white trim; pansies bloomed in a neat bed out front. A gleaming new Cadillac sat in the driveway. Calvin must be doing well for himself.

  She rang the doorbell and had to conceal her disappointment when the door was opened by a woman in her fifties. Nonetheless, she mustered a smile. “Good morning,” she said. “I
’m looking for Calvin Richard.” Taking a chance, she pronounced it the Cajun French way—ReeSHARD—and apparently, she guessed right.

  The woman nodded, brow furrowed. She was a full-figured woman without being oversized, dark with neat hair. She wore white pants, sandals, and a close-fitting T-shirt. She was probably somewhere around Miz Clara’s age, but a whole lot sexier. It occurred to Talba that that was what a little money could do.

  “Just a minute.” The woman closed the door, which struck Talba as odd, but maybe her mama hadn’t taught her any manners.

  She had to wait quite a while, so long she wondered if the woman had simply brushed her off. But why say “just a minute” in that case? She tried to be patient, but it didn’t come naturally. Finally, a man came to the door, a businessman about the same age as the woman, in tan slacks and a blue shirt. He had a tie hung around his neck, but not yet tied. Yes, she thought, this is far and away the best time for an interview.

  “I’m Calvin Richard.” ReeSHARD. That part was good. “You’re looking for me?”

  “No, sir. But I might be looking for your son. I’m looking for the Calvin Richard who graduated from Clayton High School in the late eighties.”

  “May I ax what you need him for?” The man’s voice was gentle, a little too much so, she thought. For some reason, he was making her nervous.

  “I’m a friend of a friend. Our mutual friend thought he might be able to help me with something I’m working on.”

  “Oh? And who would that be?”

  Something was definitely amiss here. He wasn’t supposed to be the one asking the questions. She tried redirecting the conversation. “Is he your boy? My friend says really nice things about him.”

  “Who would that be?” he said again.

  “It’s someone he went to school with.” She decided to come clean. “I’m a private investigator working on a case—but don’t worry. Calvin’s not involved in any way. I just thought he might be able to help me with some information.”

  “Oh, I see. And what’s your name, miss?”

  “Talba Wallis. But it won’t mean anything to him.”