Louisiana Bigshot

died—she’d known her for years and never seen it.
    The paper even ran pictures of Clayton in various stages of her recovery—with head shaved and stitches showing; with an inch of hair and hideous scars; and so forth, until she was once more a beautiful high school girl.
    Ye gods,
Talba thought,
no wonder she couldn’t stand to talk about it. This is worse than the injury.
    The young Clayton must have been hell-bent on revenge to permit it. That in itself was a measure of how much she’d changed before becoming the Babalu Talba knew.
    At any rate, it worked—that and the “incontrovertible evidence.” Troxell was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years at Angola.
    Talba wondered if he’d served the whole sentence. Perhaps so—the timing was almost right. The crime took place sixteen years ago; his name had appeared in Babalu’s appointment book a few weeks before she died.
    Maybe he got out and came after her again,
she thought.
How did the police miss this?
    But it was easy to see how they had—they didn’t know about the scalping and no one bothered to tell them, since they reported a heroin overdose and a suicide note to the family. To anyone who didn’t believe she was far too healthy in mind and body to go back to heroin, it looked open and shut. But obviously, no one in Clayton fell into that category.
    I wonder,
Talba thought,
if I’ve just solved the case.
She couldn’t wait to talk to Eddie about it. But on the drive home, she found the person she needed most to talk to was Darryl. The newspaper’s black-and-white images of Clayton, hurt and healing, pitiful, vulnerable, miserable, wouldn’t leave her. She needed the warmth of his arms around her. She’d encountered violence in her own childhood—unlike Jason, Darryl knew about it. And he knew how to make her forget it.
    Today, he chose to do it (quite unwittingly) by announcing that he’d all but sewed up the Subaru—only it was an Isuzu Trooper.
    “Is that better or worse?” she said.
    “Well, the main thing is, it’s gray, which makes it almost invisible. Nobody’d notice it on surveillance.”
    “Ummm. A ghost car—I like it. Does it run?”
    “It sure does. I took the liberty of having it checked out. We can go right over and see it now.”
    At that, her eyes filled with tears; she turned quickly away.
    “What is it?”
    She couldn’t tell him what it was; it was gratitude, and not just for the car. She blurted: “Babalu had a boyfriend who scalped her.”
    “What?”
    She knew he had heard her. It was just that the thing seemed so unlikely one had the need to have it repeated. On the way to see the car, she told him the story.
    He said, “You think Troxell did it?”
    “He’s one hell of a grudge holder if he did.”
    “He’d have to be nuts.”
    “Well, isn’t anybody who kills someone?”
    “I don’t know. Some people kill for gain.”
    “But don’t they have a fundamental screw loose?”
    They’d had this conversation before; Darryl took a slightly more cynical view of human nature than she did. “I don’t know,” he said. “What about drug dealers, polluters, insurance companies who don’t provide the services they’re supposed to—people die because of all of them. And they’d all tell you they’re just trying to make a living.”
    “Well, anyway, this wouldn’t be gain—I guess the motive would be revenge.”
    “For breaking up with him when he was a kid?”
    “Like I said. Screw loose. Makes me think twice about trying to see him alone.”
    “A cop wouldn’t do it without backup—why should you?” He looked at her sidewise but not with any real disapproval. He wasn’t at all overprotective—in fact, hardly ever seemed to worry about her. She liked that; she was a worrier herself.
    “Because I’d have to take Eddie, that’s why. What kind of backup would that be?”
    “You know, Baroness—”
    “Your Grace will do.”
    “Did Your Grace ever think about getting a ladylike little firearm?”
    Her tears came again. “You know I can’t do that.” She had an extremely unpleasant history with guns.
    “Oops. Sorry.”
    “Oh, forget about it. Are we getting close?”
    “Almost there.” They were across the river, on what was always called the West Bank, though you had to go east to get there, in a neighborhood where a lot of the homes had bars on the windows.
    “Bet the car’s a wreck,” she said.
    “I told you—I’ve seen it. I think some mini-gangster bought it and