Lousiana Hotshot

with anything?”
    “Oh, no thanks, I’ll just read a magazine.” It was obvious the woman was dying of curiosity, but Talba figured once was enough to tell her story.
    It was another few minutes— twenty maybe— before a stocky man came in, a man who’d be sixty-five in a matter of days, stood five-feet-ten, and limped a little. Not even giving him a chance to greet the help, she rose and extended her hand. “Mr. Valentino, I presume.”
    “Good morning. Good morning,” he said, clearly a little flustered.
    “I didn’t know about the limp.”
    “Say that again?” Now he was irritated.
    Talba noticed that he said “dat” for “that.” He had the kind of New Orleans accent that sounded, for all the world, as if he’d grown up in Brooklyn. She held up her file. “Everything else was on the Internet. But I missed the limp.” She nodded at the secretary. “You’re Eileen Fisher, aren’t you?” She turned back to Valentino. “And you’re about to have a birthday. Congratulations.”
    Smoke was starting to come out of Valentino’s ears. “What the hell is this?”
What da hell is dis?
    “This,” she said, “is a young hotshot, able to play the computer like Horowitz tickled the ivories. No visible piercings and well under thirty. Talba Wallis at your service.”
    Valentino looked exhausted, but he stuck out his hand manfully. “Eddie Valentino. You gotta be a friend of Angela’s.”
    “Angela? I must be missing something.”
    “Come on, come on. Angela put ya up to this.”
    “Angela. Your wife’s name is Audrey, it can’t be… oh! Daughter. She must be your daughter.”
    He was laughing now. “Angie, Angie— don’t you ever give up?”
    “Mr. Valentino, I’m as much of a hotshot as you’re gonna get, but your daughter’s name wasn’t in any of the databases. Now if I’d known I was going to need it, I could have had it in two seconds.”
    A look of astonishment spread over his features. Talba figured he was starting to catch on. “How’d you know who placed the ad?”
    Talba shrugged. “You advertised for an investigator. I investigated.”
    Valentino closed his eyes and shook his head slowly, a man clearly at the end of his rope. “Eileen, you got any coffee?”
    “Yes sir. Of course.” The girl looked terrified.
    “Bring us some, will ya? Ms. Wallis, come on in.” He led the way to one of three other rooms she could see, another of which seemed to be a combination coffee and copy room. Valentino’s office wasn’t a whole lot grander. He turned on a light and slipped behind a desk, gesturing at two facing chairs. Talba took one, and for the first-time really looked at him.
    His hair was salt-and-pepper, not yet white, and not soon to be, but his face was deeply lined. Almost as if it had been carved out of a once-handsome, very Mediterranean demeanor that had become, for some reason, very tired. Deeply, deeply tired. The bags under his eyes were duffels. She almost asked if he were getting enough sleep.
    “Start at the beginning, Ms. Wallis.”
    She passed him most of the file, holding back her ace in the hole. “Here’s the background check I did on you, complete with driving record and newspaper clips. I see you worked on the Houlihan case.”
    He nodded impatiently. “Yeah, yeah. Okay, you’re a hotshot. Ya went to Harvard?” Eileen brought in a couple of mugs of coffee, and he had his to his face almost before he’d finished speaking.
    “Xavier. Computer skills mostly self-taught, except for five years at TeleSyst. Five years off and on, I mean— some of it was summer stuff while I was in school. But I bow to the applicant who did go to Harvard
and
brings you a package like this.”
    “Pretty pushy broad, aren’t ya?” His eyes crinkled a little. He was starting to loosen up. Talba knew guys like this— the way they showed they liked you was to get insulting.
    Best to let it go, she thought. Stow the righteous indignation. She gave him a grin instead. “I try to be.” He had drunk about half his coffee by now, and it was doing him a world of good. His skin was looking less gray, his eyes starting to show some spirit, the purple of the duffels smoothing to puce.
    What’s in that stuff?
she thought, and took a sip herself. If she hadn’t already been sitting, it would have knocked her on her butt.
    “How much investigative experience ya had?”
    “About two months.” She paused. “Not counting the ten minutes I spent on this.” Gesturing