Louisiana Bigshot

by Julie Smith

  Her expression brushed his words away. She just loved being superior, but she didn’t like it worth a damn when he caught her at it. She said, “What kind of car was it?”

  “Silver Lincoln. Couldn’t see the plate.”

  “He was on my tail, too.”

  “So that’s what you were hidin’.” He felt fury roar up his spine; blood rush to his face. “Goddammit, Ms. Wallis! When ya gonna figure out what’s important and what’s not?”

  “Hey, Eddie, calm down. It could have been anybody. He didn’t shoot at me.”

  Eddie was so mad he couldn’t even think of any words. “Shit! Just shit! Get outta here, Ms. Wallis. Just get on outta here.”

  “Eddie, I’m sorry.” Three words he thought he’d never hear from her. And then she left him to pull himself together, get his heart to slow down, his hands to stop shaking.

  * * *

  Talba was genuinely sobered—not by Eddie’s temper tantrum; she’d seen that before. Simply by the knowledge that somebody’d actually shot at him. It might be only a warning, but it was vicious.

  She felt the need to escalate, to move in double time. And, anyway, she’d had it with waiting for Calvin Richard to develop a conscience. This time she didn’t go through Skip. She called the department personnel office and let them ring him. And when she had him, she minced no words. “Sergeant Richard, this is Talba Wallis. Someone shot at my partner. It’s time we talked.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t resist. “Ms. Wallis, I’m real sorry about that. Listen, I’m sorry I hung up on you, too. I got some time now if you like—you want to come on by? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Just like that. Instant turnabout. She wondered why. He was attached to the First District, just outside the French Quarter. It was a prime location for coffeehouses, and she could have used a midmorning jolt. But evidently Richard meant the offer only as a figure of speech. “Let’s go for a walk in St. Louis Number 1,” he said. He was talking about the cemetery across the street. He wanted privacy.

  Calvin Richard was a handsome man, his skin a good, rich mud color, his hair in a buzz cut.

  She said, “Your parents told me you were dead. Now why would that be?”

  “Yeah. They told me they did that.” He stared straight ahead, no expression at all on his handsome features.

  “Why did they want me to think that?”

  “I really couldn’t say, Ms. Wallis.” He was sweating lightly.

  “Look, Calvin.” She no longer bothered with “Sergeant.” “Something very strange is going on in your hometown. I think Clayton was killed because Donny Troxell didn’t attack her, and she was about to blow the whistle on the person who did. If I’m right, it’s somebody mean enough to hire two goons to give her an overdose of heroin. I don’t think it’s you because it was somebody white. Somebody the other whites are covering up for. So tell me something—why are you helping them?”

  He still wouldn’t look at her. Still kept staring straight ahead. “You don’t know what you’re foolin’ with.”

  “Don’t give me that crap.” She was angry now. Furious. “You knew that girl and you know who killed her.” It was a shot in the dark, just something she blurted, but even as she said it, she knew it must be true. He knew and he wasn’t saying. Though she had only a side view, she could see the rage and fear in his face. He walked away from her without a word, a good-bye, any recognition at all.

  Her cell phone rang.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Eddie said, “Ms. Wallis, ya busy? I got some real interestin’ reading matter for ya.”

  The transcript of the trial had come in. It was a tome as thick as a dictionary, sitting on her desk in a pristine plastic cover. By the time she got back to the office, Eddie had gone to lunch.

  Where to start? Jury selection looked long and boring. Okay, she could skip that.

  She began with opening statements. The prosecutor, one Steven Ortenberg, said he would prove that Donny Troxell had been hurt and angry when his girlfriend, Clayton Patterson, broke up with him, so angry that he went out and bought a machete with the intention of harming her; that he had removed the screen from her bedroom window, forced open the window, and attacked her with the machete, ripping the skin from the skull and causing horrible injuries; he had become frightened by her screams and left, once again through the open window, and later been caught with the bloody weapon in his car.

  Pretty much the story as Talba understood it from the way the paper had reported it.

  The young defense attorney, Lawrence Blue, the man she’d talked to in Sacramento, who was now a state senator and had clammed up on her so completely, in those days was full of passion and idealism, if the words on paper were any indication.

  He contended that Donny Troxell had not attacked Clayton Patterson, that he could not have attacked Clayton Patterson because he’d been with two friends that night, two friends who would testify, in this court of law, that he could not have done it. There was no evidence in the world that Donny Troxell had ever owned a machete, ever bought a machete, or indeed, ever even seen a machete before police showed him the bloody weapon they found in Donny’s car the morning after Clayton Patterson was attacked, a car, in fact, that had sat in his driveway all night, unlocked.

  There was not a shred of evidence to connect him with that machete, Lawrence Blue declaimed, not a fingerprint, not a witness, nothing at all except that it turned up in his car. And how did it get in his car?

  “I submit,” Lawrence Blue argued, “that it was placed there by someone seeking to incriminate Mr. Troxell. By the same someone who removed the screen from Clayton Patterson’s window, but who, in his haste and confusion, also removed every single screen from the Patterson house and left each one on the ground underneath its respective window.

  “Why was this done?” Lawrence Blue asked. “It was almost certainly done in some misguided attempt to prove that someone had entered the house from the outside, when no such thing occurred. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what crazed burglar removes each and every screen from the house into which he intends to break, especially, and this is important, ladies and gentlemen—especially in the case of a crime of passion, which my colleague, Mr. Ortenberg, would have us believe this was?

  “Who would do this? A son, ordered by his father to make it seem as if someone had broken into the house, too young to make a rational decision, too terrified to think it through? A father, frightened and fearful, knowing only that he must protect his family, no longer able to think logically? You will find, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that one of the screens was destroyed, and that that one was the one covering Clayton Patterson’s bedroom window. It did not come off easily. Whoever tried to remove it failed, then removed the others, and finally, perhaps after having been ordered to do so, ripped it apart. In fact, the same person also broke the window of Clayton Patterson’s bedroom, but not from the outside, ladies and gentlemen. Not from the outside. The fragments of glass fell, not into the room, but onto the ground outside the window. No one broke in through that window. That window was broken from the inside in an attempt to make it look as if someone came in that way.

  “Does it sound as if I am telling you Donny Troxell was set up? Was framed, as it were? Ladies and gentlemen, that is exactly what I’m telling you. Someone in that house, for whatever reason, attacked Clayton Patterson and then attempted not only to cover it up, but to fix the blame on Mr. Troxell.

  “Later, Mr. Ortenberg will show you pictures of the injured Miss Patterson—pictures indicating a horrible crime—in an attempt to turn you against Mr. Troxell, yet these pictures themselves will show that Mr. Troxell did not commit the crime. They will show that Miss Patterson’s wounds were caused by a diagonal cut to the left side of her face, a blow delivered by a person standing between Miss Patterson’s bed and the door to her bedroom, not a person standing between the window and the bed. A person who was already in the house. Could Mr. Troxell have a
lready been in the house? Anyone could have, ladies and gentlemen; anyone could have. But if Mr. Troxell was already in the house, why then does Mr. Ortenberg argue that he broke in?

  “Finally, ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk about timing. The attack, according to Miss Patterson and her family, took place around ten-fifteen p.m. Yet the first call to the sheriff’s office came in at eleven-ten. Eleven-ten, ladies and gentlemen. At no time in that period was an ambulance or a doctor called. Fifty-five minutes between the attack and the call to the sheriff’s office, and no call to a doctor or a hospital.

  “Has any of you ever seen a scalp wound? Have you any idea how much a scalp wound bleeds? Picture your own child with a scalp wound. Imagine your horror.

  “Wouldn’t you call a doctor immediately? Or take your child to an emergency room? Certainly you would. Yet the family of one of the most prominent men in Clayton did not.

  “I submit that the occupants of that house had a reason for that, ladies and gentlemen. A reason involving a cover-up and a frame-up. It is not our business here today to accuse anyone. Exactly who attacked Clayton Patterson may never be known. Miss Patterson says she was asleep and has no idea. But it was not Donny Troxell. It was someone who did not break into that house, someone who was visiting or who lived there. I can’t tell you who it was—but it was someone that family wanted to protect.”

  Talba felt her palms sweating, the back of her neck sweating, sweat pouring off her waistband. Cover-up hardly began to describe this thing. If half the things Blue said were true, how the hell had Troxell been convicted? How, in fact, had the sheriff’s office overlooked this stuff?

  She read on. The prosecution’s first witness was the first officer on the scene, Sheriff’s Deputy Hubert J. Calhoun.

  Deputy Calhoun said that he arrived at the scene to find Clayton Patterson crying, her head wrapped in bloody towels, and that the first thing he did was call an ambulance.

  “Did you ask the Pattersons why they hadn’t called an ambulance themselves?” Blue asked on cross-examination.

  “No sir, I didn’t,” the deputy replied.

  “Did you wonder?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Did you ask Clayton Patterson who attacked her?”

  “Yessir, I did. She said she didn’t know.”

  “Did you think that was strange?”

  “No, sir. She said she was asleep at the time.”

  “Did you ask her who would have reason to attack her?”

  “Yessir. She said she couldn’t think of anyone.”

  “What led you to suspect Donny Troxell?”

  “We developed that information based on statements of various witnesses.”

  “What witnesses were those?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Patterson.”

  “Did you examine the windows in her bedroom?”

  “I did.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I found evidence of forced entry.”

  “Did you notice that the window had been broken from the inside?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “Did you notice that all the screens on the house had been removed?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “We went to school together, didn’t we, Deputy?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And you were valedictorian, as I recall. Tell me something—how’d a smart fellow like you miss something as obvious as that?”

  At this point Ortenberg objected, but Talba got the point. Apparently, Blue hoped the jury would too.

  Talba read on. Though Mr. Ortenberg’s case against Troxell was circumstantial, even she had to admit that Blue’s didn’t entirely live up to the promise of the opening statement. The biggest blow was that Troxell’s alibi fell through. One of the witnesses simply wasn’t called. The other hedged on the hours he’d been with Troxell, making it possible for Ortenberg to suggest that Troxell had enough time by himself to commit the crime. Clayton herself didn’t testify, nor did either of her parents.

  Still, Blue fought the good fight. In his closing statement, he seesawed back and forth, recapping the testimony of Ortenberg’s witnesses and his own. “If you convict Donny Troxell, a most horrendous miscarriage of justice will occur. You have heard the testimony of the eminent forensics expert, Dr. Robin Taylor,” (whom Blue had called) “that the window was not broken from the outside, and could not have been broken from the outside. And you have heard the testimony of Deputy Buddy Calhoun, valedictorian of his high school class, one of the most promising young men of our generation, that he didn’t notice this extremely curious fact….”

  Talba stopped reading, feeling something like a cold wind on the back of her neck. She sucked in her breath, dropped the transcript like a hot coal, turned to her computer, and ran a search on Hubert J. Calhoun.

  Ms. Wallis came into his office late in the afternoon, waving that big huge tome and hollering so loud they could probably hear her in Shreveport. “Eddie. Goddammit, it’s in here. What’s going on in Clayton. Exactly what’s going on.”

  “Ya mean ya solved the case, Ms. Wallis?”

  “Goddammit, Eddie. This is ugly. Listen to this: what if I told you the arresting officer in that machete case was a young deputy named Hubert J. Calhoun who happened to be nicknamed Buddy? And then, what if I told you our only nonracist gubernatorial candidate, the hope of all decent people in the state, and certainly all black people in the state, was born in 1955 in Clayton, Louisiana?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that, Ms. Wallis. I was planning to vote for the other guy myself.” He let her struggle with that one while he sought to regain composure. The hair on his arms was standing up.

  “Eddie, for Christ’s sake!”

  He patted thin air. “Now, calm down, Ms. Wallis. Just calm down. Lay it out for me all neat and tidy. Dot your is and cross your ts.”

  She sucked air and sat down. “Okay. Clayton’s dad attacks her—or her mother or brother maybe, and the family’s got big pull with the sheriff, so they cover it up. To do that, they need to get the arresting officer’s cooperation. Which they get.”

  “You sayin’ Buddy Calhoun was in on the cover-up? Why would he do a fool thing like that?”

  “Plenty of reasons. Maybe he was just going along with the system—in other words, he was willing to be corrupted. Or he might have had a personal thing with the Pattersons. Friend of the family, say.”

  “Or maybe something we don’t know yet.”

  “Could be.” She was too impatient to dwell on it. “But he’s really got something to lose if it comes out now.”

  “Yeah. The election.”

  She looked like she was in shock. “I feel so damn betrayed.”

  “Never put your faith in politicians, Ms. Wallis. Every one of ’em’s scum. Never known it to fail.”

  “I thought this one was different.”

  “If you’re right, this one is different—crazier and more dangerous. Reg’lar megalomaniac.”

  She sighed, deeply and cathartically, and went back to her storyline. “Maybe Calhoun’s the one Donny Troxell’s father called that last morning—because if Donny didn’t do it, then his father’d know for damn sure Buddy Calhoun had helped frame him.”

  “Or maybe he just called his old buddy, Sheriff Ransdell. Way things work in Louisiana, that’d be good enough.”

  “So if Old Man Troxell was going to blow the whistle on the whole thing, Calhoun was going to get dirty, and it was sure as hell going to come out where the information came from. That’s why Clayton was killed now, after all these years. Because for the first time, she talked, and for the first time, it mattered. Donny Troxell, the same. Clayton met with him before she saw Ralph Troxell—she may have told Donny who did it, too. Or maybe Calhoun just assumed she did.”

  Eddie felt like going outside for some air. “Easy, Ms. Wallis. You just take it easy now.”

  But she was off in her own world. “So many things have just fallen in
to place—that’s why Calhoun was at her funeral. And that sign in the Pattersons’ yard! Some detective—I never even thought about it.”

  “You mind tellin’ me what ya talking about?”

  “The maid, Betty Majors, told me King Patterson was a racist. I never put that together at all—why the hell would a racist be supporting Calhoun?”

  Eddie couldn’t even be bothered reprimanding her for swearing. He was getting too excited himself. “Probably his biggest contributor, under the circumstances.”

  “Well, I checked that out too.”

  He sighed. “I’m damn sure you did, Ms. Wallis. Damn sure.”

  “He has contributed the maximum allowable by law, but I’ll bet anything if I kept at it I could discover some ways he gave Calhoun more under different names. I just thought we’d better talk first.”

  “Yeah. Real good decision, Ms. Wallis. I don’t mind tellin’ ya certain things are startin’ to make sense for me too. Like this: I see Sheriff Ransdell, I get chased, I get shot at. There’s too much stuff happenin’ here.” He shook his head. “Just too much damn stuff. Tell you what. Why don’t we just try something?” If what she thought was happening, they were as vulnerable as anyone else.

  He got out a couple of ordinary-looking briefcases containing his most prized equipment—something so specialized he didn’t even include it in the six items every PI needed. Most of them didn’t need this—they could just hire Eddie. It was his sweep kit.

  The first thing was to hook it up to the phone line system. That required leaving the office and took a few minutes, but the peace of mind was worth it. Talba followed, no doubt trying to figure out what he was doing—she could probably do it too, just from looking over his shoulder. But he didn’t have the heart to tell her to stay in the office. He found the large metal box where the phone bank was. “Uh-huh. Yep.” Forget peace of mind. “We’re tapped—every line in our office, including Eileen’s. Let’s just leave that on for now.”

  “Holy shit!” Talba’s eyes were like a kid’s. It would have been a pure delight to see her so unnerved if he hadn’t been feeling real queasy right about then. All he said was, “Did ya forget you’re a lady, Ms. Wallis?”