Louisiana Bigshot

her.
    “I figured that from your name.”
    “Oh, yeah. That’s kind of a giveaway.”
    It was going on eleven now. Talba had plenty of time to go to the courthouse and order the Troxell transcript before meeting Frenette.
    The woman who got off the elevator at noon was quite smart-looking, kind of in the Michelle vein. Despite her name, she was about as ebony as a paper bag.
    “Ebony Frenette? Talba Wallis.”
    Frenette did a double-take. “You’re a sister!”
    Talba had to laugh. “You know what? I am.”
    “You’re black and you’re a woman—and young. You’re young and you’re cute too. They oughta do a TV show about you.”
    “Oh, yeah. I’m really interesting—you know it.” Talba liked this woman. Well, maybe she was flattered by her, but there was something about her ingenuousness that was easy to take, and that might prove useful. This was a girl who blurted.
    “You free for lunch by any chance?” she asked.
    Frenette said, “You want to have lunch with me? Sure, I’ll have lunch with you. You just tell me some stories.”
    “Maybe you’ve got one for me—did you ever think of that?” They ended up going to a nearby sandwich place. Frenette was really quite pretty, seeming much younger than her thirty-two or so years. Though Talba herself was the younger, the woman was making her feel like some big-time city slicker. It was kind of fun.
    Talba drew her out for a few minutes (as Eddie always advised), learning that she’d gone to college for two years, gotten pregnant, gotten married, loved her kid to death, but always regretted not finishing college, especially after the husband dumped her and she ended up being the breadwinner. She wanted to go back to night school, but little Tawana needed a babysitter, and Ebony hated to ask her mama, so maybe in a few years… and now she was dating a nice man who worked as a mechanic, but there was no financial future in it. It was really a very ordinary life, Talba thought. No wonder she seemed exotic to Ebony. On impulse, she asked, “Do you ever get bored?”
    Ebony seemed astonished. “Bored? No, ma’am, I don’t get bored. I work way too hard to get bored.” She bit into her white toast BLT so hard she almost broke a tooth.
    Not for the first time, Talba wondered what it was like not to ever get bored. What did people think about when they painted houses or filed? Why did some minds have to twist themselves around poems, and others could stand at parade rest? Sometimes she envied ordinary people.
    But what the hell,
she thought.
I
am a baroness.
    Ebony said, “You must have a pretty interesting life, huh?”
    Talba described surveillance to her.
    “Now I b’lieve that would bore me,” Ebony said.
    “Yeah, it probably would. It does me.”
    “So tell me—what you want to talk to me about? I’ve been turning it over and over in my mind, trying to think, and I can’t think of nothin’.”
    “This goes back a long, long way—you ever know a girl named Clayton Patterson?”
    “Clayton! Yeah, I been knowin’ Clayton. She died last week or something.”
    “Tell me about her.”
    “What for? What you working on?”
    “Well, to tell you the truth, I can’t tell you. You know how it is when something’s under investigation? You’re not supposed to talk about it. But I’ll tell you one thing—it’s about something that happened back when y’all were in high school.”
    “Ya mean when Donny Troxell scalped her? Oweee, that was awful! I couldn’t b’lieve Donny’d do a thing like that.”
    “Really?” Talba pretended deep interest in her salad.
    “I gotta be honest. I never did like Clayton all that much. She just had… somethin’ about her attitude. I just didn’t like her. Now Donny Troxell—he treated me nice. I had a math class with him, and he even showed me how to do problems sometimes. Just as nice as pie. Wonder what Clayton did to make him mad enough to go after her like that?”
    “I was hoping you knew.”
    They both laughed. “No, I don’t know. Always did wonder. Let me see—Donny must be out of jail by now. I sure haven’t thought about him in a long time. Wonder what ever happened to him?”
    “Well…” Talba let time go by. “He died too, Ebony. About the same time Clayton Patterson did.”
    The woman came alert. “No! What happened to him?”
    “He got killed in a mugging.”
    “I just can’t believe it! It’s a shame, you know that? I never thought he had a mean bone in his