Louisiana Bigshot

the floor, something Eddie would have guessed he didn’t do very often. The man was a schoolteacher, highly educated and used to respect. Here was a situation he couldn’t control.
    Finally, having thought it through, he raised his gaze and nodded. “Yeah. I expect you’re right.”
    “Well, anyway, I’m white. This is just one of those things. I’m as sorry as I can be.” Angie and Talba thought he was a racist—hell, Audrey probably did too—but he hated to see this kind of thing. It was embarrassing for everybody concerned and it put white people in a bad light. “You go on home now. We’ll call ya once I get her out.”
    Angie was dying to go, of course—just perishing to get up on her lawyer high horse and give those back-country rednecks a lesson in law. Eddie was so damned pissed off he had half a mind to unleash her on them, but that wasn’t going to help Ms. Wallis’s case.
    He drove all the way up to Clayton in the middle of the night, falling asleep once, waking up to find himself about to change lanes involuntarily and plow into somebody.
    It was a damn shame he had to do this. It was a shame what they did to Ms. Wallis, first of all, but his having to get her out was even more of a shame, because it was going to blow his cover in Clayton. Ms. Wallis probably shouldn’t even have come up there alone—these were just assholes abusing their power, and, like he’d told Darryl, it was just one of those things.
    But if his cover was blown that was bad for the case. It sure would be nice if at least one of them could be anonymous here.
    It looked to Eddie like there were only two people in the whole sheriff’s office—a black deputy who looked permanently pissed off and a white kid who didn’t look old enough to wear a badge. A really stupid-looking white kid. This was the one he was going to have to schmooze.
    “Hey, there.” He stuck out his hand. “Eddie Valentino out of New Orleans.”
    The kid didn’t want to shake, but his nametag said “Greene.” Why the hell couldn’t it be a less common name?
    “Deputy Greene, I presume? Say, you related to Lamar Greene? Former Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy, back when I was on the job. Y’all a law enforcement family?” Eddie’d never met a Lamar Greene in his life, but he thought he detected a slight thawing in the deputy’s stone-face.
    The kid shook his head. “No, sir. Not unless it’s some other branch of the family. Know quite a few Jefferson Parish deputies, though. You know anybody’s still on the job?”
    “Oh, sure. Almost everybody.” And thus did the schmoozing begin. Fifteen minutes later and he and Deputy Greene were asshole buddies. Deputy Greene knew perfectly well what Eddie was there for, but somebody had to blink first, and Eddie was sleepy. When he figured the time was right, he said, “I understand you got one of my employees locked up.” Like he had an office full of employees.
    “Yeah. Yeah, we might. Got a little black gal says she’s a PI in there.” He pointed toward a door that must lead to the jail.
    They had her license. They knew damned well she was a PI, and they knew who she worked for—the name of the firm was right there on it.
    “What kind of trouble she givin’ y’all?”
    He shrugged. “Guess she was tryin’ to do surveillance without tellin’ us she was there. Man called and complained about a suspicious person in a parked car. She gave him some crazy story, and he called us, axed us to pick her up.”
    “Ohgawd. I’m embarrassed. What’s she say about it?”
    He looked Eddie full in the face, lip curling so defiantly he knew the man was lying. “She didn’t have no story. Wouldn’t say a damn word to us.”
    “Well, what law’d she violate?”
    “Trespassing, speeding, loitering, resisting arrest, battery.” He shrugged. “You name it.”
    Time to pull rank, maybe. “Sheriff know you got her?”
    “Sheriff’s orders to hold her.”
    “Oh. Well. Who’s the sheriff of St. Sebastian Parish these days?”
    “Junior… uh, Dunbar Brashear.”
    “Oh my gawd. Is that little Junior Brashear? His daddy and I were up at LSU together. I remember that boy when he was just a little old thing. Get him on the phone, will you?”
    The young man looked ill at ease for the first time. “He said to hold the nigger till morning.”
    Eddie fixed him with an old man’s weary stare. “Son, I know Junior Brashear. He ain’t never said the
n
word in his life. That ain’t no way