PI On A Hot Tin Roof

well-known wandering eye.) She was a woman who was heavy into economic possibilities. Talba thought about her Lexus, her antique silver, her art collection; her dismissal of her nice house as a dump. She must have been counting the minutes till she could get her hands on the Champagne mansion. Then there was the disrespect she got from her father the boss. Getting rid of Daddy was probably even more appealing than shedding Buddy.
    While Talba waited her turn in the emergency room, she pried Abasolo’s story out of him: Royce had come in with a gun, Abasolo had warned him, Royce had raised the gun, both had fired, and the Kevlar vest had come in handy. Abasolo had a nasty bruise on his chest (or so he said—he didn’t offer to show her), but no holes in it. Royce, on the other hand, had a crater in his thigh.
    Abasolo had shouted that he was all right (Talba hadn’t heard this, but she took his word for it), and Skip, running out of the coffee room, peeled off her jacket and threw it to him on the way to help Talba. Abasolo held it tight on Royce’s wound till Skip could check on Talba, cuff Kristin, and return to help him. About thirty seconds worth of action, and damn good police work, in Talba’s opinion.
    Meanwhile, Kristin maintained that she was only paying for a job well done and had jumped Talba because she thought the P.I. had set some trap for her that involved gun-toting thugs. Royce, she suggested, was in it with Talba. They were planning to kill her and/or frame her for two murders, she wasn’t sure which. Eventually, her lawyer turned up to tell her to zip her lip, but the cops now had a nice story to run by Royce, who hollered “Bitch!” and even ruder epithets—and spat out his own version—before his own lawyer slapped duct tape over
his
mouth.
    Talba spent a few hours at Headquarters, but between tête-à-têtes with Langdon and Abasolo, she at least had time to call Eileen Fisher about a cleanup crew.
    And she called Eddie: “EdDEE. Ever see
Gunfight at the OK Corral?
”
    “I’m hangin’ up. Right now.”
    “Just don’t go back to the office today, okay? I know you can’t stand the sight of blood.”
    Maybe, she thought on signing off, there’d been a better way to handle that. So she called Angie, reeled off her yarn, and asked her to pour oil on the waters. After that, she returned the twenty-seven calls she’d logged from Jane Storey, but only to say she couldn’t say anything, but to treat her nicely in tomorrow’s paper and Jane would get her reward when the details shook out.
    It took a while longer, but Talba finally got a chance to talk to Langdon alone. Quite simply, it seemed that Royce and Kristin turned on each other. The way Skip told it, they both produced more or less the same story. “He said, she said,” Skip sighed. “See, Royce says he was a happily married man, but somehow Kristin managed to seduce him—just once, of course—and after that, she just couldn’t leave him alone, no matter how much he resisted her unwelcome advances.”
    Talba smiled. “It could happen to anybody, right?”
    “Poor little Royce,” Skip said. “Well, one night he’s minding his own business and Kristin gets in a drunken brawl with Buddy, and naturally Royce comes running downstairs to see what’s going on. You can just imagine his horror and grief at the sight of his own father dead on the library floor, having been beaned by his sweetie with a marble statue.”
    “One of those damned blackamoors,” Talba said.
    “Yeah. Figure of a guy in a turban.”
    “Buddy had two—Adele was kind of embarrassed by them.”
    “Ugly damn things,” Skip said. “Well, the evil Kristin coerces him into helping him disguise the murder by saying if he didn’t, she’d wake up the household and accuse
him
of it.”
    “What’d she tell him the argument was all about?”
    “Buddy’s obsessive jealousy. So Royce reluctantly agrees, and they hatch a plan. First they lift the Bacchus tape from Lucy’s room, and make a phony tape for Wesley Burrell. Then they load Buddy in the trunk and Kristin steals Daddy’s gun—”
    “Hold it—how do they do that?”
    “Kristin has a key to Daddy’s house and she knows the alarm code. So they get the key, drive to the marina, put Buddy in the boat, and take it out far enough so no one hears the shot—or at least they hear it from a distance—and Kristin shoots her own fiancé in the head to cover up what really happened. You following