Lousiana Hotshot

failure to get along with them.”
    “Eddie, you hired me. Would you just try to trust me? They’re the ones calling names. The father called me the ‘n’ word.”
    Eddie realized she was right. She was brash, but she was showing pretty good judgment on most things. He really should try to trust her. He was embarrassed, both by the conclusions he’d been drawing and by Bergeron’s use of the epithet. Unfairness always embarrassed him. “You right, Ms. Wallis. You right. I ought to trust ya. And I’m real sorry ya had to go through that. But would ya mind telling me what set it off?”
    “I reached for my I.D. and he grabbed my arm and pulled me in the door— I think he thought I had a gun.”
    “Why would he think that? Ya think he’s just paranoid?”
    “He might be; he sure acted crazy. And one thing I’m sure of— he’s really distraught about his daughter dying. It might just be that. But I think he’s got a reason.”
    Eddie said, “Now why would that be?”
    “When he had me inside, he said— wait a minute…” She set down her wineglass and prowled around in her purse until she found a tiny notebook. “I wrote this down later; I thought it might be important. He said, ‘now you get on the phone and you get her back over here’.”
    Eddie’s sweat-alarm had spread from his lip to his pits. “They’ve got Pamela.”
    “Yeah. And I guess he thought I’m one of them. Because I’m black.”
    He saw she was right. They would think that because they wanted to; their imaginations, in their panic and disorientation, would tell them that any black person must be at fault for the disappearance of one daughter and the death of another; and therefore that any black person could deliver Pamela back to them.
    They must be out of their minds with fear. Eddie thought briefly about Angela, his own daughter dead or missing, but let it go quickly; you didn’t think about the unthinkable.
    “Bergeron kicked me, by the way.”
    “Ya want to press charges? Ya could, ya know.”
    “Nah. Goes with the job.”
    He could tell she was trying to impress him.
Well, hell,
he thought.
She’s succeeding.
    “It did occur to me Pamela was hiding out at Cassandra’s, so I went out to her house to check, and she wasn’t. But I did lay it out pretty thoroughly for Aziza— Rhonda dead, Pamela missing, people who might think they’re God in it up to their eyeballs.”
    “How’d she react?”
    “Like always. Utter and complete denial. She says if Cassandra says Toes isn’t one of the guys in the pictures I showed her, then he isn’t.” She shrugged. “And he might not be. I honestly don’t know if Toes is the brother, or a friend I wasn’t able to photograph.”
    Eddie reached for the telephone. “Well, hell, Ms. Wallis, it’s time to get the police in on this. They can just walk up to Tujague and ask him. If he don’t want to answer, they can sweat him.”
    “I thought of that.”
    “Ya thought of that? Well, did ya call ‘em? What’s the point of thinking about it if ya didn’t call ‘em?”
    “I called them several times.”
    He was getting pissed off— she thought of every damn thing. “And?”
    “And they didn’t call me back.”
    “Oh. Well. Ya have to call somebody ya know.”
    “I did. I called Skip Langdon. By the way, she says she knows you.”
    “Skip Langdon didn’t call ya back?” He had a hard time believing that one.
    “She did, but the Juvenile officer didn’t. The one on Cassandra’s case.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Her name’s Detective Corn.” She emphasized the “her” ever so slightly, and perhaps a bit triumphantly. Eddie recognized it as the sort of thing that usually irritated him, but he was getting used to Ms. Wallis. And he was pretty mellow from the scotch. And beyond either of those things, he wanted his assistant to have dinner with him. He wasn’t ready to go home yet, and he wanted to practice talking about his son, try out saying his name a few times, before he did.
    “Well, I’ll call her,” he said. He did, and he also called a buddy of his, exactly as Talba had, and left messages for both of them.
    He was about to ask her to come grab a bite when he noticed she was staring intently at him. “Eddie?” she said. “How bad did I screw up?”
    He thought about it. “I don’t know that you screwed up at all. Sounds like you might have done a pretty good job, all things considered.”
    He was deeply ashamed that it had fallen to her