Louisiana Bigshot

quickly.
    Talba nodded. Good enough, she thought.
    “Listen, Talba, I’ve been thinking—I wonder if you’d do me a favor?”
    “Like get those poems out of there? Sure, I would.”
    He actually cracked a smile. “No, I’ll get Mary Pat to take care of it. I was wondering if you’d go to the funeral with me.”
    She was taken aback. “Me? What for? I’d stick out like the proverbial thumb.”
    He looked sheepish. “Uh, yeah. That’s why I’m asking you. See, they won’t throw a black person out—they couldn’t.”
    “And you think they’d throw you out? Come on—nobody throws anybody out of a funeral.”
    “Her dad told me if I come he’ll personally whip my ass. The cops told the family about the poem and the client report.”
    “Hold it here. Just wait a minute. You think my being there would stop him from whipping your ass? That’s question one. Question two is, why would you want to go to this thing?” She didn’t say it, but if she were the family, she wouldn’t want him there either.
    “She was afraid of them, Talba. I can’t leave her alone with them.”
    She wondered if he knew how crazy he sounded. “Why was she afraid of them?”
    “Because they were horrible to her.”
    “Abusive, you mean?”
    “If extreme nastiness constitutes abuse, then yes, they were abusive, even in the last few months. As for childhood stuff, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know. All I know is, she used to shudder when she mentioned them.”
    “Mentioned which one? Her mom or her dad?”
    “All of them, though not by name, especially. Just ‘my family.’ The funeral’s Saturday. It’s really, really important to me to go. Say you’ll come with me.”
    It would probably complicate matters, but she assented. For one thing, she wanted to say good-bye herself. For another, she wanted to meet these people her friend had been afraid of.
    “One more thing.” Talba indicated the datebook. “Did you look at her schedule for the day she died?” She turned to it. “Only two clients all day—and both were in the morning. Did she die in the morning or afternoon?”
    “They said she’d been dead no more than two hours. But Tuesday was her yoga day. She went at noon and usually came”—he looked around, as if surprised—“well, here, actually, for lunch afterward. Got home by two-thirty or three. She didn’t have regulars Tuesday afternoons, but she’d take emergencies. She always liked to leave room in her schedule in case someone needed her.”
    “Don’t I know it. Well, what I’m getting at here—” She focused on the week she’d had her own emergency. “What I’m getting at is whether she had clients whose names she didn’t write down. I see she did, because I came in the week before. My name’s not here.”
    Jason only nodded sadly. She could tell he’d already been over this territory in his own mind.
    In the end, neither one of them ate the veggie muff. Talba didn’t even have the heart to take it home for later.
    Once in her own space, when she could take the time, she went through Babalu’s Rolodex and datebook minutely, checking each name in the datebook against the Rolodex; identifying regular clients; trying to figure out if Babalu had anyone new in her life; seeing who she needed to talk to.
    Only one name seemed out of context. There was no Rolodex entry for a Donny Troxell—someone Babalu had met for coffee recently—and no follow-up to the coffee date. Another name was conspicuously absent—that of her ex-husband, Rob Robineau.

Chapter Seven
    Talba could kiss the kind of parents who gave their children middle names like “Xavier.” Who could be easier to find than a Robert Xavier Robineau? She had him before she went to bed that night, and the next morning at seven-thirty she was standing at his door.
    This was another trick Eddie’d taught her. If ever there was a time when people were home, it was before their day got started. The hell of it was, it meant starting her own day about two hours before she was ready to get up. But it worked. She had to hand it to the old man—it nearly always worked.
    Robineau lived in a scuzzy part of Metairie, out near Causeway. There were a lot of dirt-cheap apartments here—perfectly clean and decent, just no-frills—and Robineau had found himself one. Fortunately, it was the kind of apartment complex where you couldn’t do any serious yelling without letting all the neighbors in on your