Louisiana Bigshot

by Julie Smith

  He liked high-fiving, he was just too damned uptight to do it. He was going to come around, though; she was going to see to that.

  Talba sat down. A little seed of hope was taking root in her. She figured anything he had to say was going to help them keep the client. “So did Trey say who killed her?”

  “Swore to God he didn’t know. Said the whole town had a motive, though; or rather anybody in the whole town.”

  “Now, come on. Does that sound a little like an exaggeration?”

  “Well, sure it does. But you gotta remember, for him the whole town probably means a handful of his father’s best friends.”

  “Yeah! Listen to you, Eddie. You’ve got something there. Probably means five or six people, max.”

  Eddie sighed. “Well, ten or twenty, anyhow. You want to know the motive, or not?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” The question surprised her—she’d expected many motives.

  “He said she knew too much.”

  “Knew too much? What could she have known? She was just a kid—how could she know about some adult crime or conspiracy or something? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yeah, it does, Ms. Wallis. Yeah, it does. Use ya head.” He made it sound like “hay-id.”

  She let her mind go blank, and, in time, something floated to the top. “Oh, my God! She lied. She did know who scalped her.” She tapped her foot impatiently. “And it was somebody in the family. Just like Betty Majors said.”

  “Least it was somebody the ‘whole town’ was willing to cover up for. Let’s backtrack here. Donny Troxell knows his father is dying, so he calls Clayton and talks her into telling him Donny didn’t really do it, and King did.”

  “King?”

  “Let’s try him on for size.” He shrugged. “Could be anybody whose name Papa Troxell recognizes. So Papa blows the whistle with his dying breath…”

  “Maybe it wasn’t his dying breath before he did it.”

  “Agreed. So King kills him (or maybe kills him), and then kills Donny and Clayton.”

  Put like that, it stopped Talba. “Kills his own daughter?”

  Eddie drummed his fingers. “It’s a sticking point, I’ll grant you. Trey said his dad had a motive—along with everyone else in town—but I don’t know.” He stopped to think about it “Naah. I can’t buy it. If the whole town knows he did it, anyhow, then why kill his daughter—why even kill the Troxells—to cover it up?”

  “Not King then.”

  “There’s more to it, Ms. Wallis. There’s just more to it than we got. And something else bothers me. Why kill Clayton now? She’s always known who did it.”

  “Because she started talking. All of a sudden she was a threat.”

  Eddie shook his head. “I don’t buy it, Ms. Wallis. The perp could just deny it. He could say it was the hallucination of a dying man, or that Donny and Clayton cooked it up to make Mr. T’s passin’ easier…”

  “Hold it. Why should Clayton do a favor for Donny if he scalped her?”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to make more sense than murder. And so far nothin’ does.”

  “Well, there’s something there. It’s still tied up in a knot is all.”

  Eddie picked up a pen and started pecking at some notes on his desk. “Go get ’em, Ms. Wallis.”

  “Eddie, listen. Jason’s cooling his heels in my office. That’s what I came in about—he wants to drop the case till we get the transcript.”

  Eddie looked up, baggy eyes boring into her. “Why the hell would he do a damfool thing like that? ’Scuse my French?”

  “He says he’s out of money.”

  “Well, shit, ’scuse my French. This one’s just gettin’ interesting.”

  “I thought maybe you could talk to him—tell him we’ve got some new information.”

  Eddie folded his arms across his chest more or less hugging himself. He stared in her direction, but he was looking through her.

  Oh, shit, she thought, he’s furious. Like I could help this.

  Finally, he said, “Tell ya what we’re gonna do, Ms. Wallis. I’ve never done this in the history of E. V. Anthony Investigations. But we’re gonna cut young Jason a deal. Tell him we’re gonna go halvsies with him on this. We’re gonna bill him for half our hours and eat the rest.”

  Talba was flabbergasted. “We can’t afford to do that.”

  “I’m gonna pay you. Don’t worry about that. Just go do it.”

  “But Eddie, why? Why the hell would you do a thing like that?”

  “I feel real bad about that girl.” He paused for so long Talba thought he was finished. “And real good about the future of this agency if we get out of this alive.” She didn’t have the least idea whether he was joking or not. It took some doing, but she talked Jason into the deal. Then she went back to waiting.

  Calvin Richard called back just before noon. He sounded slightly sullen, like a kid who’s been ordered to do the last thing he wants to. “Detective Langdon said to call you about the Patterson suicide.”

  “Yes, I have some information for the police on that.”

  “Is that right?” He spoke with that cop reticence, that poker-faced, tell-nothing blandness.

  It irritated her so much she decided to mirror it. She kept silent until he spoke again. “How can I help you, Ms. Wallis?”

  “I’m developing information that indicates Clayton Patterson was murdered.”

  “With all due respect, Ms. Wallis—I know you’re a friend of Langdon’s—but this is really a police matter. I presume you haven’t seen the crime lab and autopsy reports?”

  “I have not.”

  “Well, if you had, you might not be throwing around these allegations.”

  “So far I haven’t accused anyone, Sergeant.”

  “How can I help you, Ms. Wallis?”

  “I’m calling you because you knew her.”

  “Oh?” He was doing it again.

  “I’ve seen your picture, Sergeant, so I know you’re African-American. I’m going to tell you I am too. There are things about this case I don’t get, and I thought you might be able to explain them.”

  “What makes you think I knew her?” His voice was much weaker, almost shaky. She had a sudden vision of him wiping away sweat and wondered what she had said, exactly.

  “You had to know her. You went to high school with her.”

  “Ms. Wallis, can I call you back on that?” He hung up, not so much as pausing for a good-bye.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Eddie had two names he wanted to play with. The first was one Little King had given him: Sheriff Ransdell. Dickie Ransdell, he learned, upon further investigation. A man nearly seventy, and his friends still called him Dickie.

  The other was the judge in the scalping case: Judge Gaylord Samuel. Eddie wondered what on earth his friends called him.

  He spent the morning doing his own kind of investigation—Ms. Wallis would have gone online and looked up everything she could find about them. Eddie called around and got everything he could on them. It wasn’t much, but bad acting wasn’t what he was looking for. Eddie was a great believer in connections. He was looking for cronies, names he could use to grease the introductions, little flattering anecdotes he could tell back to them, make them feel like he was their pal. He’d been damned lucky with Junior Brashear—he couldn’t count on something like that happening again.

  One thing his calls produced—bad news about the judge.

  He was in the hospital recovering from a stroke. That didn’t necessarily mean Eddie wasn’t going to go see him, but he wouldn’t try him first. The sheriff was retired now and known to play golf. “Morning or afternoon?” Eddie asked, but his informant didn’t know. If morning, he’d probably be home now, maybe having a postprandial nap and a little action with the wife. If afternoon, Eddie’d just have to wait till he finished playing.

  He went to the house first, a fifties ranch-style in a deathly quiet subdivision. One car in the driveway, o
ne in front; a good sign. He knocked.

  No action. He knocked again.

  Some kind of fluttering at the window.

  He probably had interrupted a nap and hoped to hell it hadn’t included an afternoon delight or he was soon going to be facing one grumpy old man.

  The man who opened the door was a shrunken, wiry grandpa with a sparse shock of brownish hair spread thinly across a shiny skull. He’d come to the door in his underwear; hard to make it clearer you didn’t want to be disturbed. Eddie had a lot of back-pedaling to do.

  “Dickie Ransdell? I sure am sorry to disturb you. Should have called first but Jake Kellogg said, “Just go by the house, he’ll be glad to see you…”

  “You a friend of Jake’s?”

  “Jake and I go back thirty, thirty-five years. Listen, I really am sorry. Let me call you and—”

  “No, no. Come on in. Let me put a pair of pants on.”

  He ushered Eddie into a living room equipped, in small town America fashion, with a television and two La-Z-Boys.

  There were plenty of fake house plants, but that was the only sign Dickie lived with a woman—except that the place was immaculate. That certainly argued for a wife. Yet there were only the sounds of one person getting dressed.

  Ex-sheriff Ransdell strode out again in polo shirt, polyester pants, white belt, and boots. His three or four strands of hair had had a comb run through them, and his face had been washed.

  “You know Jake Kellogg, you must be from New Orleans. What brings you up our way?”

  “Oh, Jake. I been knowing him so long I can’t even remember not knowing him. He was telling me about the time you and him were after some ol’ boy committed a robbery in Gonzalez, ended up over in Marrero in some titty bar—”

  Ransdell finished for him. “And it turned out, he wasn’t one of the patrons, he was a waitress—master of disguise, that one was. Broke a fingernail on the way to jail.”

  They guffawed a little and then Ransdell said, “Don’t believe I caught your name, by the way.”

  “Well, where are my manners?” Eddie got up and extended his hand. “Anthony Edwards.”

  “What can I do you for, Mr. Edwards?”

  “Jake tells me you were involved in a right interesting case a few years ago. Young girl cut with a machete…”

  The sheriff’s face scrunched into a scowl. “What the hell you doing comin’ in my house like this? Claimin’ to know my friends?” He moved fast, walking toward Eddie, trying to box him in.

  Eddie raised a placating arm. “Now, take it easy, Dickie, take it easy.”

  All of a sudden, Eddie heard steps in the hall, light ones. A woman in a robe stepped into view, her gray-blond hair still disheveled from sleep. She had a rifle raised to her shoulder. “What’s going on here?”

  Eddie turned to her politely, nonthreatening as you please. “Well, ma’am, to tell you the truth I’m not sure.”

  The sheriff stepped back far enough to permit Eddie to pass by him. “You will leave our house now, and you will leave this town now.”

  “Yes sir, I sure will. Pleasure meeting you, Dickie. You too, ma’am.” He hoped the irony wasn’t lost on them.

  He had taken the precaution of parking around the corner so that, in case of just such a crisis, his car couldn’t be recognized. He returned to it and drove, at exactly the speed limit, to the county hospital, where he parked in a huge lot, his car becoming one of many just like it (or close enough).

  Truth to tell, he was shaken by the freezing welcome. It wasn’t every day he got thrown out of a former lawman’s house at gunpoint. He needed to do what he had to as quickly as possible and get out of Clayton once and for all. The last thing he wanted to do was call Ms. Wallis to come bail him out.

  He asked at the desk for Judge Samuel’s room and was given a number, which he took as a sign that the judge was up to having visitors.

  He was sleeping, his wife at his side, wearing a look of unutterable sadness. I should go, Eddie thought. I shouldn’t do this.

  But somehow, he couldn’t stop himself. The man was very gray.

  “Yes?” the wife said.

  “Are you Mrs. Samuel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eddie Valentino, Mrs. Samuel. I wanted to ask your husband about an old case of his. Is he able to talk at all?”

  She turned fearful eyes upon him, uncertain what to say. The man in the bed spoke in a whisper, eyes still closed. “What case is that?”

  “Judge Samuel. How do you do, sir? I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “You’re not disturbin’ me, son. I’m not going anywhere. Tell me what I can do for you.” He sounded as if every word could be his last. The woman looked terrified. “Tell me what case you mean.”

  Eddie stepped forward uncertainly, so as to be able to hear. “It was the Donny Troxell case, sir.”

  The man’s eyes opened, searing through space. “I’m not gon’ talk about that!” Clearly the Judge couldn’t turn his head to see Eddie. Just as clearly, he was furious. He started to cough. The coughs began slowly and built to a frightening crescendo. His wife called a nurse, who rushed in and began to reposition him. Eddie had no idea how serious the cough was, whether life-threatening or not but if so, he couldn’t help but notice that the judge garnered all his strength to hurl his possibly last words at Eddie: “You idiot!” Mrs. Samuel turned a face of pure hatred upon him.

  Eddie got out of there fast. He felt small. Though he had no idea what he’d said that tortured this man, it was obvious his usual methods weren’t working in Clayton. He felt bad for the judge and bad for his wife and very much as if he deserved the old man’s parting epithet. He felt like an idiot. He felt a deep need to gain back some of his self-respect and he knew perfectly well there was a way around the stonewalling. But there was no talking cure here. If he and Talba were going to dig into the past they were going to have to do it almost literally—with a mountain of paper and a pickax. There was nothing to do but wait for the damn transcript.

  He was turning onto the Interstate when he noticed a silver car behind him, a Lincoln Continental, he thought. Actually, he’d seen the Lincoln for some time, but only now did it occur to him that it might be tailing him. He tried some tricks—changing lanes, even getting off the Interstate—and yes, he was definitely being followed. By someone who didn’t care if he was made and yet having been made, didn’t simply go home, message delivered. Once on the frontage road, Eddie turned onto a nameless backroad, then stopped abruptly and let the car sail past hoping to get its plate number, blissfully unaware that his young assistant had tried the same thing.

  As soon as the driver realized he’d been had, he screeched into a one-eighty and barreled back toward Eddie, who was still parked, too startled even to take action. And then Eddie heard a sound like a backfire.

  For a moment he clung to the reality of a split-second before: was it a backfire? In his heart he knew it wasn’t. It was a gunshot; he was unarmed and about to die.

  The second shot hit the car, and Eddie hit the floor. Yet that was the last one he heard. Timidly rearing up after the longest minute of his life, he found himself alone on a deserted stretch of highway. He had to urinate so badly he didn’t think he could get to a gas station.

  What the hell, he could get out here and go. The guy wasn’t coming back. His job was done.

  He drove back to New Orleans in peace and entered his own office bellowing. “Ms. Wallis, get in here! I gotta talk to you now.”

  When a surprised Talba stumbled into his cubicle, he shouted, “Goddammit, ’scuse my French! Somebody just shot at me! Banged up Audrey’s Cadillac too.”

  “Oh, shit, Eddie. What happened?”

  “What happened? What happened, is we’ve wore out our welcome in Clayton, once and for good and all. Ya not going back there for any reason, and ya gonna give me ya word on that.”

  “Okay, Eddie. Sure.” She looked scared to death. Good.

  “And if ya do, ya fired. It�
��s that simple. I am not having my employees getting shot at. Bad enough ya got thrown in jail. I mean it, Ms. Wallis, this is life-threatenin’.”

  Eileen Fisher crept into the room, nervous, her lightly pimpled brow now slightly damp. “Eddie, you okay? Somebody shot at ya?” She was his niece, though she avoided calling him “uncle” at the office.

  “Hell, no, Eileen, nobody shot at me. I swear to God if one word of this gets to ya Aunt Audrey, I’m firin’ you too. Swear to God, do ya hear?”

  She nodded, face pink as a petunia. She just stood there a moment, the silence lengthening. Finally, she said, “I think I better get y’all some coffee.”

  Eddie waved her out of there. “Naah, we’re fine. We’re fine, okay? All in a day’s work. You okay, honey?” Niece or not, he never called his employees pet names. However, if Eileen quit, there’d be hell to pay in the family. He had to calm her down. “There’s no danger, Eileen. No danger at all. Ya okay with that?”

  He finally got a smile out of her. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever ya say, Uncle Eddie.” She was a good kid, just a little timid. “Don’t call me ‘uncle’ in the workplace.”

  She smiled at him over her shoulder.

  Ms. Wallis, now. She wasn’t timid. As soon as Eileen was gone, she was full speed ahead again. “Eddie, who was it? Brashear’s goons?”

  “Naah, hell. Brashear.” He was starting to come down from the adrenaline rush. “Brashear’s lame as they come. It was somebody else, Ms. Wallis. Private citizen.” He could feel his hands starting to shake. He put them in his lap so she wouldn’t notice. “They shot from a car. Followed me first—then I pulled over and boom!”

  Her face was full of emotion. She seemed so hard-bitten half the time. But look at her now. “You could have been killed,” she said.

  “Uh-uh, that wasn’t the plan. The idea was to send a message loud and clear: ‘Get the hell out of Clayton and stay out.’ Okay, fine, we get it. We been to Clayton. We didn’t actually conquer yet, but we came and we saw. And we ain’t going back.”

  He watched the little sunrise of surprise on her face at his use of the Latin quote. “Hey, Ms. Wallis, wake up—I went to Catholic school. Ya don’t have to go to college to know everything.”