Lousiana Hotshot

grandly at the pile she’d given him.
    He didn’t crack a smile, and she made a mental note to lay off the bragging. It wasn’t going over. “I’m just kidding. It really took me about an hour and a half.”
    “You tellin’ me the truth?”
Da trut.
    She made an attempt to look modest, but it was something she hadn’t tried before; she wasn’t sure she succeeded. “Yes sir. Give or take.”
    “Tell me about your experience.”
    “Well, it was a funny thing. I had a problem I needed a private eye for. So I picked one out of the phonebook, and the guy hired me.”
    “Oh, yeah? Who was that?”
    “Gene Allred.”
    He leaned forward a little, and his eyes threw off sparks like a couple of mini-fires. The guy had something she hadn’t seen at first. “Gene Allred? I knew Gene Allred. Crooked son of a bitch.”
    Talba laughed. “Guess you right.” She hardly ever lapsed into dialect, but this guy was such an old-time New Orleanian it was catching. “A little sleazy, but he sure could detect.”
    “What was so special about ya he just had to hire ya?”
    “He said I had the right demographics.”
    Valentino raised an eyebrow.
    “Meaning I could go undercover in places he couldn’t. That and my computer skills. Gene was kind of a Luddite.”
    “A what?”
    “Luddite. You’re one too, aren’t you?”
    “I’ll let ya know when ya clue me in what ya talkin’ about.”
    “A Luddite is somebody who’d rather give the government thirty-four cents than send email.”
    “I got no time for that crap.”
    “I rest my case. But an awful lot of detective work is done on computers these days. Which must be why you advertised.”
    “It ain’t the business it was.” Valentino’s shoulders sagged forward as if he’d just suffered a defeat. Talba hated seeing him that way; found it made her truly sad, and noticed for the first time the sadness in the detective’s eyes. The sadness, and the intelligence; and the kindness.
    Oh shit,
she thought, realizing she had started to care about him. She recognized instantly that it wasn’t a sexual thing— never could be, never would be. She had a great boyfriend, a dynamite boyfriend, and this dude was white, married, old enough to be her father, and so depressed he probably couldn’t get it up. Definitely not sexual, but definitely something, and something she thought she recognized. Something not too healthy.
    Valentino’s eyes— the sad, intelligent, oh-so-kind eyes, the terribly caring, deeply understanding, tender-as-the-night eyes, were the sort of eyes sometimes referred to as soulful; the sort that, in a young, attractive man were almost guaranteed to get a young woman in trouble.
    She had seen those eyes before, seen them on many an attractive, hurt, tough, scary young face; and she had followed them where they had led and had gotten in the kind of trouble they invariably got you in. She was such a sucker for that kind of thing her mother and brother had sunk to trying an intervention to get her to dump her last boyfriend, the one before Darryl, the one she now recognized was the second biggest asshole in the city of New Orleans (she being the biggest for not seeing it sooner).
    She knew perfectly well why these eyes were so attractive. They were irresistible because they were the only soft thing in a hard face; a worldly, leather-tough face that had seen it all and dealt with it, a face you wouldn’t want to mess with. They were a cry for help from a soul that desired no help, wanted no help, chose no help, couldn’t in any way
be
helped.
    They were not eyes that cried, they were themselves the tears; they were the fatal tip-off that that mutilated and now aggressively armored soul needed to be kissed and made well. That the imaginary tears must be wiped away: crying, desperate eyes replaced by the carefree, corner-crinkled eyes of a man who has just been made to laugh by his beloved; or the devoted, follow-you-to-the-grave eyes of a man who has just made love to her. Or to anyone. Or to a plank with a mink-lined hole in it.
    Oh, yes. Talba was not only under thirty, but well under twenty-five, and already she knew everything about eyes like that— everything except what they meant when they were underscored by velvet-soft pouches so big they needed a bra; so bloodstained, so seemingly bruised you wanted to order emergency ice. What they meant when they sometimes sparked like small fires and peered from the head of an old white man who said