Lousiana Hotshot

stopped herself in time, and jumped away. In the silence, she could hear sniffling from the front of the church.
    When the hymn was over, the fit stopped, whatever it was.
    The minister came forward to thank “the choir of Gethsemane Baptist Church, which has come to worship with us today and to help us surrender up to God the soul of Rhonda, beloved sister of Pamela Bergeron, a devout and faithful member of the Gethsemane choir.”
    Talba was struck by the word “devout.” Somehow, neither of the girls she and Eddie had interviewed seemed all that devout, but how could you know if you didn’t ask? She particularly didn’t see Cassandra as a Jesus freak, but the girl
was
in a choir. Why? Talba wondered.
    The minister got on with the show. He said he had known Rhonda personally, but not well, and had interviewed all her family about her and that she, too, had loved music, almost as much as she loved Jesus and her family. Oh, yes, she loved music, and she loved animals, too, and had once had a dog named Grizzy. And she had graduated from Ben Franklin High School and had gone on to pursue a lifelong interest in fashion, taking a job at Millie the Milliner’s, though it took her far from home, deep into the dark heart of the French Quarter itself. And she had done well there, and she had thrived, and now this young woman had been taken from her family and her loving friends…”
    He went on like that for a while. He mentioned the way people loved her and she had made the customers feel at home, and she had been a faithful and loyal employee, but, in truth, the gist of it seemed to be that Rhonda hadn’t done very much with her life except work in a hat shop.
    But she had loved music and she had loved to hear her sister perform with the Gethsemane Baptist choir, and her favorite song had been “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which the choir would now perform and would like to dedicate to her memory and to the Bergeron family.
    They hadn’t even gotten to “sweet” before Talba was sobbing again. Before, it had been as if she had contracted a sudden crying disease, a bug that simply came and controlled her body, pushing out of it tears and unwanted sounds. This was different. A flood of sadness had enveloped her and invaded her and was now flailing for expression. And the flood of sadness was an old friend.
    She knew it as well as she did her own skepticism, her dislike of sanctimonious ministers, be they Methodist or Baptist, black or white, and yet she could not imagine how she did.
    I’ve been here before,
she thought, and suddenly she wasn’t Talba Wallis going out of control in one of the pews, but a tiny brown angel floating over the congregation, looking down at the people, staring down at Rhonda’s casket, and the salt-and-pepper choir, and seeing, quite distinctly, Urethra Tabitha Sandra Talba Wallis, the Baroness de Pontalba, keening like some Third World mourner for a woman she never knew.
    She must have truly been making a spectacle of herself, for once again, the woman to her right, so soundly rebuffed before, dared to touch her again, to put an arm around her. And with the touch, the vision dissolved.

Chapter 7
    Eddie had awakened Monday with yet another headache, but he damn sure wasn’t going to give in to it. He downed three cups of black coffee, and pried himself into his office.
    Audrey kept nagging him to see a neurologist, and if the headaches kept up, he was going to have to. He felt like shit. They always left him feeling washed-out and without enthusiasm. Depressed, Audrey would say.
    This getting old most assuredly was not, as they said, for sissies. Sixty-five in a couple of weeks and he felt a hundred and five.
    He had a bad feeling Audrey and Angie were up to some damn thing, mostly because they hadn’t nagged him about having a party. Five or six of his old buddies from his cops-and-robber days were taking him to lunch at Galatoire’s, something they never did. Therefore, Audrey had probably put them up to it to make him think that was the party. But there had to be more. Audrey and Angie were going to try to cheer him up, he knew it.
    Damn, he felt bad. He thought the reason he was so depressed was the damn machine. The way his business had changed from active pursuit— the real deal— to sitting in his office hitting a keyboard.
    Well, now he had a Baroness to deal with that shit. So why did he have headaches? He couldn’t figure it, unless he had a brain tumor.
    “Hello,