Louisiana Lament

entry.”
    “Did you notice that the window had been broken from the inside?”
    “No, sir, I didn’t.”
    “Did you notice that all the screens on the house had been removed?”
    “No, sir, I didn’t.”
    “We went to school together, didn’t we, Deputy?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “And you were valedictorian, as I recall. Tell me something—how’d a smart fellow like you miss something as obvious as that?”
    At this point Ortenberg objected, but Talba got the point. Apparently, Blue hoped the jury would too.
    Talba read on. Though Mr. Ortenberg’s case against Troxell was circumstantial, even she had to admit that Blue’s didn’t entirely live up to the promise of the opening statement. The biggest blow was that Troxell’s alibi fell through. One of the witnesses simply wasn’t called. The other hedged on the hours he’d been with Troxell, making it possible for Ortenberg to suggest that Troxell had enough time by himself to commit the crime. Clayton herself didn’t testify, nor did either of her parents.
    Still, Blue fought the good fight. In his closing statement, he seesawed back and forth, recapping the testimony of Ortenberg’s witnesses and his own. “If you convict Donny Troxell, a most horrendous miscarriage of justice will occur. You have heard the testimony of the eminent forensics expert, Dr. Robin Taylor,” (whom Blue had called) “that the window was not broken from the outside, and could not have been broken from the outside. And you have heard the testimony of Deputy Buddy Calhoun, valedictorian of his high school class, one of the most promising young men of our generation, that he didn’t notice this extremely curious fact….”
    Talba stopped reading, feeling something like a cold wind on the back of her neck. She sucked in her breath, dropped the transcript like a hot coal, turned to her computer, and ran a search on Hubert J. Calhoun.
    Ms. Wallis came into his office late in the afternoon, waving that big huge tome and hollering so loud they could probably hear her in Shreveport. “Eddie. Goddammit, it’s in here. What’s going on in Clayton.
Exactly
what’s going on.”
    “Ya mean ya solved the case, Ms. Wallis?”
    “Goddammit, Eddie. This is ugly. Listen to this: what if I told you the arresting officer in that machete case was a young deputy named Hubert J. Calhoun who happened to be nicknamed Buddy? And then, what if I told you our only nonracist gubernatorial candidate, the hope of all decent people in the state, and certainly all black people in the state, was born in 1955 in Clayton, Louisiana?”
    “Well, I wouldn’t say that, Ms. Wallis. I was planning to vote for the other guy myself.” He let her struggle with that one while he sought to regain composure. The hair on his arms was standing up.
    “Eddie, for Christ’s sake!”
    He patted thin air. “Now, calm down, Ms. Wallis. Just calm down. Lay it out for me all neat and tidy. Dot your
i
s and cross your
t
s.”
    She sucked air and sat down. “Okay. Clayton’s dad attacks her—or her mother or brother maybe, and the family’s got big pull with the sheriff, so they cover it up. To do that, they need to get the arresting officer’s cooperation. Which they get.”
    “You sayin’ Buddy Calhoun was in on the cover-up? Why would he do a fool thing like that?”
    “Plenty of reasons. Maybe he was just going along with the system—in other words, he was willing to be corrupted. Or he might have had a personal thing with the Pattersons. Friend of the family, say.”
    “Or maybe something we don’t know yet.”
    “Could be.” She was too impatient to dwell on it. “But he’s really got something to lose if it comes out now.”
    “Yeah. The election.”
    She looked like she was in shock. “I feel so damn betrayed.”
    “
Never
put your faith in politicians, Ms. Wallis. Every one of ’em’s scum. Never known it to fail.”
    “I thought this one was different.”
    “If you’re right, this one
is
different—crazier and more dangerous. Reg’lar megalomaniac.”
    She sighed, deeply and cathartically, and went back to her storyline. “Maybe Calhoun’s the one Donny Troxell’s father called that last morning—because if Donny didn’t do it, then his father’d know for damn sure Buddy Calhoun had helped frame him.”
    “Or maybe he just called his old buddy, Sheriff Ransdell. Way things work in Louisiana, that’d be good enough.”
    “So if Old Man Troxell was going to blow the whistle on