Louisiana Bigshot

and didn’t know he knew her? What if Matthew ended up being Sophia’s baby doc?
    She thought,
Why couldn’t I have been Corey? Scientific mind, plenty of money, no imagination—why do I have to put up with this instead?
    She was disappointed in the chase, that was what it was. She’d gotten so used to turning up dirt it was like an addiction. So far as she could find, this man was so bland he’d probably never gotten his name in the paper, not even when he got married. Evidently, he didn’t support political causes, go to charity balls, or otherwise hang with what Miz Clara called “the niggerati,” a thought that set off another—if he’d been a different kind of man, her own sister might be about to become a debutante. Talba and Miz Clara would read about her making her bow, see her picture in the paper, and never even have a clue.
    And that thought set off a third—Michelle being who she was, little Sophia Pontalba would undoubtedly be a debutante some day.
    Talba’s brain was spinning out of control.
    She rubbed her temples as if that would stop it, and then, barely aware of the impulse before she acted on it she backgrounded Calvin Richard, going through one of the services and finding nothing suprising. And then, as she nearly always did on a new case, she Googled him.
    Google, she’d found, was great for turning up really personal things about people, like what sites they’d posted on. One man, for instance, a fellow from up around Shreveport, showed up on the Internet only twice. His name appeared with a photo of his wife’s adorable toy poodle entwined with his own Rottweiler on a veterinary site; and also under an inflammatory letter he’d written to a white supremacist site. Since the man was a potential juror in a criminal case with a black defendant, the latter was hugely important information—enough to enable her client to get him dismissed for cause.
    She had Googled Matthew Simmons to no avail, but Calvin Richard was something else altogether. Or his wife Tanitha was. There were lots of references to her, on sites about childhood developmental disorders. Checking one at random, Talba saw that a whole newspaper article had been scanned in about children so afflicted, one of whom was little Damian Richard. In it Tanitha was quoted extensively.
    Talba read it again. It was a
Times-Picayune
story that had been picked up by the wires and then had been scanned in to many of the sites—hence Tanitha’s ubiquity. It covered the disorders themselves (the best known of which was autism), the particular ways in which children who had them suffered, what the lives were like of families in which they appeared, and the toll it took on them emotionally, in terms of effort, and financially.
    Damian had been unlucky enough to be diagnosed with what the doctors called Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), which, according to the article, some said was a euphemism for “We don’t know what’s wrong.”
    Damian seemed a perfectly normal little boy until he was about two and a half, when his parents noticed he still wasn’t talking and, not only that, didn’t even seem to hear well. He wouldn’t look them in the eye and generally didn’t seem to want to play with other children.
    Then came an extensive—and no doubt very expensive—round of psychiatric and neurologic evaluations, which figured out very little except that Damian couldn’t communicate like other kids and had severe problems with language—in other words, that he was going to need a lot of help. Indeed, he’d been enrolled in a special school which even had such arcane equipment as a “hug machine,” and he was making progress.
    Skipping through a few other articles on the subject, Talba learned that race wasn’t a risk factor but that sex was, many more boys being afflicted than girls, that doctors had no idea what caused these disorders, and that education was considered crucial.
    “The most important intervention,” wrote one expert, “is early and intensive remedial education.”
    Tanitha, the original article said, had done exactly what Talba had done—researched PDD on the Internet, taken the doctor’s advice to heart, and found a good school for her child, where she herself volunteered three days a week.
    All well and good. But did Damian have a scholarship? How did a policeman’s salary stretch that far? Talba just had to wonder.
    Maybe the mom had money. Talba checked her out