Lousiana Hotshot

a tiny transmitter wrapped in a tissue. There was banging around outside. She took her time fixing the bug to the underside of the desk lip and then coughed some more into the tissue. Standing now, as if she could somehow calm her troubled body. On the desk she saw something that froze her— the burgundy binder Eddie used for client reports, with his name embossed on it.
    It was Aziza’s; had to be. Which left little doubt about what had happened to her.
    She understood that she could go to Skip Langdon with this, that this was evidence Sergeant Aucoin couldn’t brush off. She needed a picture of it, though, and footsteps were coming down the hall. She hacked a little harder.
    Toledano handed her a glass of water; Mika followed him into the room, carrying a pitcher. She drank long and convincingly, she hoped. “Thanks. It happens sometimes. If there’s— uh— dust.” She paused, as if suddenly remembering her manners. “Or mold, of course. Do you have allergies, Mr. Toledano?”
    The question was meant to throw him off-balance, and did. “Shit, no, I ain’t got no allergies,” he said, sounding half-furious, half-embarrassed. Perhaps he found it an affront to his masculinity.
    But maybe he had something else to be angry about. She was undoubtedly named in the client report. Would this ape connect the poet with the baby detective? Probably not, she thought, if he’d even read the thing— Mika’d probably given him an executive summary.
    “Say, what you think of Mika?” He was admiring the rear view of her as she returned to her post.
    Talba was so taken aback she almost started coughing for real. “She my girl,” he said proudly. “My oldest.”
    “Your daughter?” Now, there was a wrinkle. “She’s beautiful. Smart too, I bet.”
    He nodded. “Yep. We got her fillin’ out applications for college. She gon’ be the intellectual in the family.”
    That won’t take a lot,
Talba thought,
unless the mother has it quite a bit over this piece of garbage.
God, she
hoped
the girl hadn’t seen the client report. “Well, anyway, about NOAAP,” she said, eager to stop thinking about this man as someone with a family, people who loved him, and just as eager to leave behind the recognition of Mika’s similarity to Cassandra.
    He nodded. “Yeah. Ya proposition.” He was almost smiling normally, hardly leering at all.
    “It stands for New Orleans Association of African-American Poets.”
    He nodded again, looking almost alert.
    “We had this idea. We’d like to put together a book of rap lyrics.”
    “And you’d like to use some of the Baron’s.”
    “We sure would. And some by those artists I met the other night— Pepper Spray, wasn’t that it?— and some by other indigenous groups. The idea’s to use only New Orleans artists…”
    She half expected him to ridicule the word “indigenous,” since she figured he hadn’t a clue what it meant, but instead, he said, “Now what’d we want to do that for?”
    “You’re the Baron’s promotional manager, aren’t you?”
    “Ya got the right department. I’m just askin’, what’s in it for us?”
    “Money, you mean?” She perfected her posture, looking elegantly down her nose; she could do haughty pretty well. “I wasn’t under the impression the Baron really needed any.”
    “Get real, lady. Ain’ nobody work for nothin’.”
    “They certainly do, Mr. Toledano. It’s called
pro bono.”
    “Pro boner?”
    She ignored his stupid shit-eating grin. “The collection will benefit children with birth defects caused by drugs—” She was making this up as she went along. “— I recall that the war against drugs is an important cause of the Baron’s.”
    “Lady, you got to be kiddin’.”
    “But…” She made herself the very picture of confusion. “Wasn’t that how we met? He wrote that song… we thought it could be the centerpiece of the collection… the title could come from it, perhaps…”
    “Shee-it!” He was laughing now. “The Baron don’t care ‘bout that shit. That was just P.R. Ya know what I mean? Just P.R.”
    She smiled, ever so knowingly. “And so would this be, Mr. Toledano. So would this. We thought you could get quite a lot of good press out of it— and so could we. It wouldn’t cost anybody anything— the songs have already been written. And the kids would get a little money, too. Which is really the important thing.”
    The light dawned on his slow features like the first rays of the day.