82 Desire

bedrooms and everything.”
    “Hold it. Hold it a minute,” said Steve. “I’ve got an idea. I’m going to spend some time with Kenny and see what I can find out.” He stood up. “Kenny? Hey, Kenny! I’m going to take Napoleon for a walk—want to bring Angel?”
    ***
    Talba was pissed as hell at the damn cop, and pissed at Darryl Boucree, who had to be the one who dropped the dime on her. Fuck him and fuck her, in that order.
    She called Lamar, intending to ask him over for dinner.
    “Hey, Lamar. What are you doing?”
    “Baronessa. Gettin’ ready for a date. Why?”
    Was she hearing right? Ahh… she realized what must have happened. So this was his cute way of confronting her. “No reason,” she said, and hung up. “Mama?” she called. “Mama, did Lamar call here last night?”
    “Sho’ did. I tol’ him you was out on a date.”
    Well, that was that, then—she and Lamar were a former item. Lamar was a petty bastard—she’d be lucky if he didn’t come over and cut up her underwear or something.
    Damn. She’d been hoping to bounce her current dilemma off someone. Couldn’t be Lamar. Couldn’t be Darryl. Even if he called, he couldn’t be trusted. And it certainly wasn’t going to be her mama.
    Damn , she thought again. What am I going to do? Go back to work? Guess I have to, to keep them from getting suspicious. And anyway, I might want a job there sometime. I’ve got to keep in good with Robert Tyson. Maybe I could still get him to show me the back door to that encryption program.
    But, no. The damn cop would probably have been in the computer by now. No way that file was going to be there. But it might. She just couldn’t shake that thought.
    But so what? Even if I got it, I’d still have to turn it over to the cops, and I could hardly justify selling it to the client as well.
    The client who might also be the murderer.
    Damn, she was mad at that cop. She did feel bad about failing to give up Newman’s name—she should have, no two ways about it—but the damn cop didn’t have to be so nasty about it. Who was the bitch, anyway? Well, easy enough—Talba had about a dozen ways to access the Times-Picayune’s database.
    Idly, her hands began playing over the keys. About a million references came spewing out at her.
    Well, look at this. The bitch is somebody—and somebody I know, too.
    Everybody knew about the crazy policewoman who’d twice had the misfortune to mess with Errol Jacomine—just about the most dangerous man in the country right now.
    I’d better be a little more careful , Talba thought. This bitch is tough.
    Hey, hey, hey, look at this! The girl’s father’s a pill man. Dr. Richard Langdon—hey, she was a debutante. Queen of a carnival ball? You’ve got to be kidding. How’s that possible?
    When she had read it all, Talba found she had a new respect for the complicated creature who’d so unceremoniously jerked her around this afternoon. There’d probably been hell to pay when she became a cop. Miz Clara was probably nothing compared to Miz Lizzie (if that was Elizabeth Langdon’s nickname).
    Just for fun, Talba checked out the parents. Uh-huh, there it was. Lizzie was a volunteer queen—if it was a museum, she worked for it; if a disease, against it.
    Omigod. Look at this. Not only was Dick a pill man, he was a gynecologist. What if he were her pill man? The doctor who named her? Their ages were about right.
    She riffled through the clips, but couldn’t find a thing about his residency or internship. She tapped into another database, a local doctors’ directory. Aha, there it was. Charity Hospital. It didn’t give a specific date, but the time had to be about right. Had to be.
    She started fantasizing about it—about the moment when she could get into Charity’s computer. What would she do? Look up her mother’s records? There was a doctor on her birth certificate, but her mother said he wasn’t the one. It was another one, a young cute one who came around in the mornings, and seemed so nice.
    Morning rounds, Corey had told her—a resident or intern. To complicate matters, he could have been either at LSU or Tulane—it would have to be hospital, not med school, records. And who knew, these many years later, if they even had records of who did which rotation when? She began to get dizzy, the way she always did when she felt overwhelmed.
    Okay, stop now. Stop, Talba, just stop. Just breathe for a minute.
    But no one was going to let her breathe. She