Louisiana Lament

one morning left. He could have called the guy and threatened him.”
    “But why would he? Why wouldn’t he have just called the cops?”
    “I don’t know. He was dying. He must have known it—maybe he just wanted the guy to know he knew.”
    At least she admitted there was something she didn’t know. “Okay, so maybe ya theory’s right. Suppose he used his last morning to call the guy. And then that guy goes out and gets a friend and they give Clayton an overdose; then they go mug poor ol’ Donny, who was just gettin’ his life together. By the way, that AA thing was good. Your lyin’s gettin’ a little better.”
    She squirmed a little. “That’s pretty high praise from The Man.”
    Eddie thought,
She’s just a girl.
She was so damned uppity sometimes he forgot that.
    “But, no, it wasn’t quite like that,” she continued. “When I got back, I checked the
Times-Picayune.
There was a tiny little story about Donny’s death—and it was the day before Clayton’s.”
    “Who cares about that? The whole thing’s just goddamn farfetched, excuse my French.”
    “Well, maybe there were two people in on the scalping.”
    Eddie raised an eyebrow, something he was pretty good at. She backed down. “Okay, okay, it’s farfetched. But still. It’s damned coincidental, right?”
    That one he couldn’t get around. Like most people who’d seen a few things in his life, he didn’t really believe in coincidences. “Awright, let’s look at it in practical terms. Ya client doesn’t think his precious girlfriend who he loved so much he was humpin’ somebody else, excuse my French, could of possibly O.D.’d, because she was too damn healthy and never touched the stuff. That about right?”
    “About.”
    “Well, then you’re doin’ him some good. You’re workin’ on a facsimile of a murder motive here, and I’d be the first to say I wouldn’t have thought you had a Chinaman’s chance.”
    She shifted in her chair. Something had made her mad. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. And sure, I’ll excuse your French. The racist comment’s real nice too.”
    What the hell was she talking about?
    He must have let his guard down for a minute. She gave him a superior smirk. “You don’t even know what you said, do you? You think ‘Chinaman’s chance’ is perfectly okay.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s just an expression.” She didn’t challenge him on that, just gave him another smug little look. (But later, when he told the story to his daughter Angie, he just about never heard the end of it.)
    “Look, I just gave you a compliment. Why don’t ya go ahead and ax the client if he wants to go on with it?” He spread his own hands in a great big, expansive, anything’s-possible.
    “Eddie, come on. You know I’ve already done that.” She was so impatient she was practically snapping at him.
    That was about it for Eddie. “Why is it people your age know so damn much, huh? Lived half as long and know twice as much—how ya manage that, huh?”
    Was that hurt on her face? It was. Kind of like the look Trudy, his wife’s dachshund, got when he let the cat in the den.
    “Eddie, I didn’t mean anything. I just—”
    “Look. Go for the defense lawyer, why don’t ya’? If anybody knows what went on, it’s got to be him.”
    “Exactly what I was thinking,” she said.
    “In a pig’s eye,” he answered, but he was joking now, over his fit of pique.
    The truth was, this thing was giving him the shivers. He’d probably been far too negative with Ms. Wallis—he’d have to eat his words later. For even as she talked, his discomfort was growing. How did you explain not one but two fatal coincidences? The damn case was probably a lot more dangerous than it was lucrative, but he didn’t dare say that to her. She’d only go after it all the harder.
    Ms. Wallis, Ms. Wallis,
he thought to himself, and shook his head the way he used to when his daughter Angie got too big for her britches.
    * * *
    Talba spent the rest of the day backgrounding the attorney who’d defended Donny Troxell in the scalping case. He was a native Claytonian (if they called themselves that) who’d gone to law school at Tulane, and who, if she read between the lines correctly, was probably a member of the same country club the Pattersons belonged to. His name was Lawrence Blue, for openers. Talba didn’t know much about WASP names, but she figured that was one.
    He had a wife named Kathleen and three children.