PI On A Hot Tin Roof

out of a broom closet, but then I found the tape, and they panicked.”
    “We’re on the same page, Baroness. Just give me a few more days.”
    ***
    “So what do you think, Eddie?” Ms. Wallis asked. Eddie had had to forgive her for the OK Corral. Sure, it messed up his office, and, well, yes, it was kind of stupid and dangerous. But it did show ingenuity. Not to mention the fact that it worked.
    But the best part, in his opinion, was the way she’d folded the cops into her scheme to trap Kristin. She’d gotten around them. He liked that. He wondered if he’d have had the guts to do it himself.
    “What I think,” he said, “if either of those two birds tried to apply for a job as a White House spin doctor, they’d be laughed right out of the place. And nobody, but
nobody
can come up with dumber lies than the jokers in the West Wing.”
    “Yeah. They need lying lessons from the master.”
    “Uh-uh,” said Eddie. “They need about a hundred years in maximum security. Or worse. But I still don’t see why they bothered to shoot Buddy. The whole idea was to cover up who killed him—all they had to do was make the tape and move the body.”
    “That was to frame LaGarde. One or the other of them must have thought of it right at the get-go. Buddy had a gun in his night table; I found it when I was working there. They could have used that and made it look like suicide if that was what they were after.”
    “Oh. What do you bet that explains the second gun? The one Royce had when he came to the office?”
    Ms. Wallis snapped her fingers. “Eddie, you’re a genius.”
    “Uh-huh. Talked to LaGarde yet?”
    “Oh, sure. And he cleared up a couple of big things for me. When Kristin came in with the gun yarn, she seemed really, really upset—pale, shaky, the whole thing—like she was about to faint. Absolutely took me in. I told her dad she sure was a good actress, and he said when she was a little kid, she used to drink salt water and throw up to create that little effect.”
    “The woman’s got a screw loose.”
    “Her dad’s an expert on that one. He just had to mention he tried to warn me, which, by the way, would have worked against him if those two had succeeded. He’s not even paying for Kristin’s lawyer.”
    “Well, that’s pretty cold. He
is
her father.”
    “Yeah, but she tried to set him up. The whole idea was to get rid of him and take over his business.”
    Eddie shifted, uncomfortable with such a pat explanation. “Yeah, but he knew she was a sociopath, and he’d have to know she set him up—no way would he sign it over to her. I never really got why he kept her on the payroll, anyhow.”
    A canary-feathers look came over her face. She’d figured it out, of course. “He had to. That was the other thing I asked him about. It was all in Grandpa’s will—you remember the whole LaGarde empire started with Warren’s daddy. She was to go to work for the company and learn the business, and after Warren’s death—or if anything ever happened so that he couldn’t run the business—Kristin took it over. And once she had control of it, that would have been all she wrote—she’d have stolen every dime he and Tootsie-pop ever had. That’s the real reason she and Royce hired me—they
really
needed to put him away. Sure, the police might have done it, but they could steer their humble employee in the right direction.”
    “Or thought they could.”
    She acknowledged his vote of confidence with a pseudo-salute. “And the fact that Kristin hired a P.I. made her look above reproach. She gave the game away herself—by freaking out when I told her about the tape. But if it had worked, she and Royce would have walked away with the entire LaGarde einpire and half of whatever Buddy left—which was considerable, by the way, even if you don’t count that Creole Versailles they’ve got over there, which would probably go for about six million by itself.”
    “Well, how about Lucy and Adele? How were they were going to screw them out of the rest of the Reedy money?”
    “Gives me goose bumps just to think about it. Where were these people going to stop?”
    Eddie said, “They really were an item, then? Kristin and Royce?”
    Ms. Wallis laughed. He had meant it ironically, and she took it as such, which pleased him. “It was all about greed,” she said. “Every bit of it. If we can extrapolate from what the ex-husband said, LaGarde foisted Kristin off on Buddy to get what he wanted