Louisiana Bigshot

by Julie Smith

  She thanked Marshannon and left with an embarrassment of riches. She’d sure been right about talking just to black people. If even a third of what he said was true, she’d learned more about Clayton Patterson from him than she had from the rest of the town put together.

  Now what to do with it all? Make a run for Calvin, as had been her first instinct? Or try for Betty Majors?

  She looked at her watch. Betty Majors ought to be getting off about now, and Pearl Street was close. Nothing made better sense than to go see her now. But something made Talba hesitate. Clayton was dead; Donny was dead. And Calvin’s parents had told her Calvin was dead. The question was, why? The obvious answer was, to keep her from talking to him. They feared for him. Should Talba fear for him as well?

  She did. And yet, how was she going to keep him alive by going to see him first? His parents would have phoned to say she was coming, so he’d be warned. And he was a cop; he could take care of himself. She settled on Betty Majors.

  She got back on the interstate and headed toward Clayton. She was three or four miles down the road when she noticed a silver Lincoln behind her. The one she’d seen before? Every other car on the road was silver these days.

  She’d have to keep watching it. She changed lanes, made as if to get off at the next exit Slowly, unobtrusively, so did the Lincoln. Did that settle it? Probably. She thought she should assume she was being tailed.

  At first that was merely intellectually interesting, and then she noticed her palms were sweating. I’m turtling out, she thought, going into denial. It was an extremely dangerous defense mechanism. She couldn’t afford to do it, she had to be alert.

  She tried another lane change, noticed the other car did too.

  Well, hell. He was practically insulting her intelligence, he was so bad at this. Who did he think he was, anyhow? Her palms were still sweating, but she was getting mad. That was good—it meant she was awake. She might as well make it work for her. What she needed was his license number. How to get that?

  She pondered it almost all the way back to Clayton, keeping the car in sight wondering if she’d been stupid with the lane changes, telegraphed that she’d spotted him.

  Aha! She remembered Eddie’s trick of tailing a car from in front—it was a neat reversal, and she could reverse the reversal. Get this car in front. She pulled off at a gas station.

  And sure enough, it worked beautifully. The Lincoln sailed by, as if it had no interest whatsoever in a gray Isuzu Trooper. Talba shot out of the station after it, bearing down, but she had overestimated her steed. The Lincoln simply opened up, and no matter how hard she pushed the Trooper, it was no contest.

  She was pissed off. There was an up side—not only had she lost him, he’d lost her. But it might not be over, she thought—in a town like Clayton, he could find her.

  Once back in town, she tried the phone book again, and once again it delivered for her. There was a John Majors on Pearl Street, and she was willing to bet he was married to Betty.

  It was Betty who answered the door, still in her white uniform—the woman Talba had picked out at the cemetery. “I know you. You the detective.” She was more or less scowling, but her voice held no malice.

  “Yeah, but I’m not really so bad.” Talba gave her a winning smile. “I was Clayton’s friend. Maybe you were too.”

  “I been workin’ there a long time.”

  “Listen, Miz Majors, I heard what that preacher said, and that wasn’t the Clayton I knew. Something’s rotten in this town. Something’s wrong here. You know that, don’t you?”

  The older woman opened the door. “Come in, child,” she said. “Come on in.” She had a round sweet face, and only three or four gray hairs right around the part. She didn’t really look old enough to have worked in one place for sixteen years.

  “Would you like some iced tea?”

  “Thank you. I b’lieve I would.”

  Talba used the few minutes it took Majors to get the tea to take in her surroundings. They certainly supported the cobbler’s children cliché—the place was a mess. Dust was everywhere, and so were old newspapers, even a few dirty dishes.

  Majors came back with one glass of tea only, held in her hand, not on a tray. She gave it to Talba and looked around herself.

  “Lawd, lawd, I’m embarrassed. My girl Amber’s s’posed to take care of this house”

  “Oh, please,” said Talba, unsure how to reassure her. “You’re nice just to see me.” She sipped the tea and nodded to show that it was good. “I saw you at the cemetery.”

  “Saw you too. Couldn’t miss ya. You and the boyfriend everybody hate.”

  Talba risked a chuckle. “He’s not half as bad as the husband was.”

  Betty made a noise like a squawk. “I heard that.” She nodded and rocked her body. “I sure heard that.”

  Talba wondered if she’d established enough rapport by Eddie’s standards to proceed. Betty had an expectant look, as if she were wondering when this show was going to get on the road. She was the one who broke the ice. “People are sayin’ you don’t think Miss Clayton killed herself.”

  Talba tried to hide her surprise. Her efforts at discretion were evidently laughable. “Do you?” she countered.

  Majors answered without hesitation. “I know she had reason to.” She let a beat go by. “They was mean to her, Ms. Wallis.”

  “Talba.”

  “I ain’t never seen people be so mean to they own flesh and blood.” She teared up and pulled a tissue from her uniform pocket. “I tried to he’p. I did the best I could, but ain’t nothin’ could he’p that child but another family.”

  “You tried to help recently? Or—”

  The woman shook her head before she could finish. “No’m. I ain’t see Clayton for years, bless her heart. I tried to he’p then. When she was growing up. Somethin’ bad happened to her, and I don’t mean just that scalpin’ thing. Mmmph, mmmph. Lot more to that than meets the eye.”

  Talba kept quiet, hoping for more. But Betty Majors only cried quietly into her tissue. Finally, Talba said, “What do you mean by that?”

  “Wish I could tell ya, I surely do. I don’t know exactly. But I sure do know there’s somethin’.”

  Talba smiled. Time to play the maid card. “My mama does what you do.”

  “She somebody maid?”

  “Lots of people’s. She does day work. And she always knows everybody’s business. Says people don’t care what they say in front of the maid.”

  “Oh, she right about that. Most of the time they most certainly don’t. I know when Mr. King got a new little chippy, I know how often he come home drunk, I know how many fish he catch over the weekend. Why, he don’t even censor his nigger jokes in front of me. Now and then, when he tellin’ one, he say, ‘Now, Betty, you know I’m not a racist,’ when I know good and well he is. He stupid enough to think I believe him, but most of the time he don’t even bother. He just go ahead, tell his jokes, don’t pay no attention to me.

  “And I know all the same stuff about Little King—I ain’ gon’ call him Trey—and he drink nearly’s much as his daddy and chase tail twice as much.

  “I know when Deborah got her period and when she stop havin’ her period once and for all. I know who she mad at and who she havin’ a fight with, and usually it’s two-three people at once. Ain’t nothin’ I don’t know ’bout those people.

  “And they give me a week off when somebody crawls in the window and try to kill my baby! Their oldest child scalped by an intruder, and they give me a week off! Clayton in the hospital, people comin’ and goin’, every kind of thing, and they give me the week off! Now what you think about that?”

  “I think they didn’t want you knowing their business.”

  Majors nodded with satisfaction. “Tha’s what I think. And you know what else I think?”

  Talba thought she did, but she asked politely, “What?”

  “I think one of ’em done it.” She nodded again, several times for emphasis. “
Yep. Sho’ as ya born. One of ’em done it. Scalped they own child.”

  “You think it was one of the parents?”

  “Oh, could of been Little King. Yep. Sho’ could of been him.”

  “Why do you think he would have done it?”

  Majors shrugged almost absently, her tears dried now. She was clearly excited by the subject matter. “He might of done it out of pure jealousy,” she said.

  “Of Clayton?” Talba couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I thought the rest of them hated her.”

  “No, ma’am. Uh-uh. Till that moment, till that night of reckonin’, she was the apple of her daddy eye. All her young life, they love her just like all folks love they chirren. Then they give me the week off and when I come back they hate her.” She snapped her fingers. “They never was nice to her another day in her life.” She brought up another tissue from somewhere and wiped a few more tears. “Nobody oughta be treated the way they treat that child.”

  “What did they do, exactly?”

  She turned her palms up. “Wasn’t what they did so much as the way they talk to her. Mean. Just kinda mean. Like she know they secret and they hate her for it.”

  Talba squirmed. That was certainly the impression she was getting and it was ugly. She said, “I met the young one a day or two ago. Hunter.”

  For the first time in the interview, Majors smiled. “Sho’ is a funny name, ain’t it? Clayton. Hunter. King. Trey. Who those people think they is? Well, now, her I like. Young Miss Hunter, she my baby. She didn’t have nothin’ to do with that scalpin’ and she never had no need to punish her sister for it. ’Course any time she nice to Clayton, the whole family mean to her.”

  Talba shivered, and not from the iced tea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Talba (“the Baroness”) Wallis could get so damn proud of herself. She’d just sashayed into Eddie’s office, put her hands on her hips, and pronounced, “You are not going to believe what I got today.”

  Eddie rubbed his left temple, feeling a headache coming on. If her voice weren’t so goddamn beautiful, she’d drive him crazy.

  “That’s what Audrey always says when she’s been shopping.”

  “What?” Ms. Wallis looked taken aback.

  He could see she didn’t get the joke; he didn’t know why he bothered. “Never mind, Ms. Wallis. Full speed ahead.” That pretty much described her, he thought. If he were the poet instead of she, and if he were going to write a poem about her, that might be the title of it: “Full Speed Ahead.”

  “Somebody in Clayton’s family attacked her. The maid says so—woman named Betty Majors. And if anybody’d know, she would.”

  “She heard ’em talking about it?”

  “No. That’s the interesting part. They gave her the week off.”

  “I don’t see how you get a family scalpin’ out of that one.”

  “They hated her after that—Clayton, I mean.”

  He wasn’t getting it. “Uh-huh. What does that prove?”

  Talba just looked disgusted on him—like she was some big college-educated character and she just kind of knew things by osmosis. He decided to try a new tactic. “You didn’t tell me you were going back to Clayton—I thought I told you to stay out of that town.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s why I didn’t mention it.”

  “Don’t you think you’re getting a little too big for ya britches?”

  Now she looked guilty.

  “It’s what ya mama says, idn’t it? Sometimes I pity Miz Clara. I truly do.”

  She tapped his desk with her pencil, making some point or other. “Eddie, I’m a grown woman. You want to know what I did? I think it was pretty clever, actually—I didn’t even go in the white neighborhoods. I just interviewed black people.”

  He shook his head. “Umph, umph. Ms. Wallis, Ms. Wallis.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with that. I was just thinking ya don’t disappoint—I can always depend on ya to be resourceful.”

  “Why thank you, Eddie. I appreciate that.”

  She was childishly grateful for any crumb of praise. He wondered why that was—Miz Clara had to have been a good mother. Anybody who could fry chicken like that woman could was born to be a mama. He said, “What else ya got?”

  “I don’t know about this one.” She spoke uneasily.

  “Come on. Give it up.”

  “A man who was in her class said Clayton used to go after black guys. In high school.”

  Eddie whistled. “Ah. Now maybe we’re getting somewhere. So Miss Clayton Debutante Patterson liked a little…” Suddenly he realized almost anything he could say would be offensive on some level.

  “What the guy said was, she liked licorice sticks.”

  Eddie’s cheeks went hot. “Language, Ms. Wallis!”

  “What’d I say?” She wasn’t doing a halfway decent job of looking innocent.

  “You ambushed me!”

  “Me? I ambushed you?”

  “I’m gon’ let it go this time, young lady, but in future ya keep a civil tongue in ya head, ya hear me?” He was uncomfortably aware that this was the way he used to speak to his daughter, Angie. “I will not tolerate foul language of any kind in this office.”

  “Sorry. Excuse my French.” She was still giving him great big innocent eyes, but her lips were twitching.

  “Goddammit, Ms. Wallis!”

  “Oops. ’Scuse your French.”

  He sat there and fumed for a minute, trying to think of a way to recapture his dignity. Finally, he decided to trick her. “That gives Donny Troxell a hell of a motive.” He left the bait dangling.

  She took it without hesitation. “Yeah, but if she got into a relationship with another boy, that guy would have one too.” Eddie had hoped she’d waffle about the possibility of a black kid as a suspect; he’d have enjoyed seeing her squirm.

  He stuck the needle in a little deeper: “I kind of like that theory.”

  She pushed her hair behind her ears, a gesture that, in his experience, meant women were thinking. Maybe fiddling with their scalps stimulated their brains. “There’s one other thing,” she said. “There were five black students in that class, only three of whom were listed in the Clayton phonebook. One was Marshannon Porter, the man I spoke to. Another was Ebony Frenette, to whom I also spoke.”

  To whom I also spoke, he thought. He didn’t even trust white people who talked like that, let alone black ones.

  “The third is Calvin Richard. I went to see his parents, who reported him dead.”

  “Oh, shit! ’Scuse my French, Ms. Wallis. But it looks like half of Clayton Patterson’s high school class has already kicked the bucket, and they’ve hardly been out long enough to have a reunion. Something fishy about that.”

  “Only he’s not dead,” she said, making Eddie feel like an idiot. “At least, Marshannon says he’s not. And he says Calvin and Ebony were an item in high school.”

  “Well, if Clayton had something going with Calvin, maybe Ebony scalped her. Now that I do like. It’s kind of a woman’s crime, when you think about it. Women like to cut.”

  Talba nodded. “Yeah, ninety-nine percent of the machete attacks in America are perpetrated by women. I think I read it somewhere.” It could have made him mad, but she smiled when she said it. “That’s right, isn’t it, Eddie?”

  “Ms. Wallis, ya need to go shoppin’.”

  “Why?”

  “Get yaself some bigger britches.”

  “Naaah. I’d just outgrow those too.” Damn, she reminded him of Angie. “Listen, I got authorization from Jason to order the transcript in the scalping case.”

  Eddie raised an eyebrow. “Did ya now?” Very good move, he thought, but he wasn’t ready to concede it aloud.

  “Yeah, but it’ll take a few days to get here.”

  “Always does.”

  “In the meantime, I need to go see the judge—”

  Eddie stopped her cold. “No, ma’am, ya don’
t. You need to stay out of Clayton for awhile. Bad enough ya had to go get yaself arrested and make me blow my cover. I’ll go talk to that judge myself. Matter of fact I might even have a better idea. You just concentrate on this Calvin Richard.”

  “Did I mention Richard’s a cop?” she asked. Dropping another bombshell. She must be having the time of her sassy young life.

  “You think you’re funny, don’t ya? I haven’t got time for this, Ms. Wallis. Ya got any more to report?”

  “Uh… no.”

  She hesitated a bit too long. “Yes, ya do, Ms. Wallis. Come on now. Out with it.”

  “No, Eddie, I don’t.” She shrugged as if he were wasting her time. But he hadn’t been a cop and a PI his whole life for nothing. She was holding something back. “I’m gonna tackle Calvin first thing tomorrow.”

  “I don’t b’lieve I’d do that if I was you. He might not appreciate it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s Saturday, that’s why. Let the man have the weekend in peace. Ya been working too hard on this anyway, what with that funeral last week and everything. Give it a rest, Ms. Wallis. Go home and go out with that young man with all the teeth.”

  “Eddie Valentino, is that a racist remark?” There was no fire in the words, but he supposed she felt she had to say them.

  He sighed. “No, Ms. Wallis, it isn’t. I s’pose it’s jealousy.” Audrey and Angie had way too much to say about Darryl Boucree. All of it good.

  ***

  In fact, Talba had forgotten it was the weekend. She did have a date with Darryl, though it was for the next night, and it wasn’t a date so much as a forced march—Raisa would be along. She also had another date, if not with destiny, at least with herself, to work on her own case. But not till tomorrow.

  She called Miz Clara, who answered gruffly, as usual. “Mama, you sound like you’re expecting the IRS.”

  “Ummph.”

  “You want to go see Michelle and the baby? I can come get you and take you over there to the hospital.”