PI On A Hot Tin Roof

hear someone on the second floor. I thought it was Lucy going to the bathroom, but it must have been Royce getting the tape. Anyhow, at the time, I didn’t think much about it. I just had yet another drink and went beddy-bye. Slept very damn soundly, I might add.”
    “You never heard Buddy fall?” It seemed to Talba the house might have shaken a bit.
    She shook her head. “Absolutely not. But he was probably sitting down at the time. He probably
didn’t
fall. Royce probably got to the end of his rope and threw the blackamoor at him in a rage. But he must have calmed down and realized all he’d have had to do to cover it up would be wipe his prints off the statue, make the tape, and get someone to help him move the body. But he wouldn’t have known how to make the tape himself. That’s why he must have called Kristin.” She winced. “That and the fact that he thought he could trust her because he was screwing her. He and Kristin could easily have gotten Buddy out of there, and no one the wiser.”
    “But someone was, apparently.”
    For a moment, Adele looked puzzled. “Oh. You mean Suzanne. I guess she woke up. Or somehow figured it out. Or maybe Royce was fool enough to think if he killed her, that psychopath Kristin really would have married him, the idiot.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed at her eye. “Goddammit, he never had a chance.”
    Privately, Talba disagreed. He’d had at least two chances to keep blood off his hands and he’d blown them both. “Why,” she said, “do you think
he
killed Suzanne? Kristin could have done it—she was the one who ended up with LaGarde’s gun. Maybe he gave it back to her after they shot Buddy.”
    Adele sighed. “She has an excellent alibi.”
    Talba remembered that Kristin had offered to alibi LaGarde when the heat was on him. “Not her father,” she said.
    “No. People in her office. Clients. She was in the office all day—had meetings straight through. Oh, yes. Little Kristin looked after herself.”
    “So did Royce really try to frame her—with the gun?”
    “Hell,
no! He was a fool to the very end. It was the bitch’s idea to frame her dad. Royce killed Suzanne and gave the gun back to her, poor trusting idiot.”
    “But how do you
know
that?”
    “I know what my grandson told me,” she snapped. “Kristin thought that alibi thing would protect her. She didn’t count on a conspiracy charge.” She paused and then put all the venom she possessed into what she said next. “Idiot!”
    It seemed to be Adele’s favorite word of the day.
    Her conjectures about the murder seemed far too well thought out to be theory only. Talba suspected that Royce had told her the story before Suzanne was killed, and counted on her silence on that one also. She was still confused about one thing, but she didn’t quite know how to ask it. “So they planned the setup together, but who actually fired the shot to make it work?”
    “Are you kidding? That bitch Kristin. Royce could never do a cold thing like that.”
    Her faith in her grandson was touching, but Talba tended to agree with her. Kristin was definitely the cooler of the two customers. She finally asked the main thing she’d come to find out. “How’s Lucy?”
    “Terrible. Refuses to see Dr. Watson any more. Hates him. Hates me.”
    “She’s not answering my calls, either.”
    “Hates the world.” Adele shook her head, apparently to shut out anything and everything. She’d begun weeping, and got up to find more tissues.
    Talba took the hint and left, but she had a tiny bit of a plan—there was one thing she might be able to do for Lucy. She called Cindy Lou Wootten, a psychologist she knew who sometimes consulted with the police department, and asked for a name.
    “Let me call Skip,” Wootten said. “She knows somebody.”
    “Skip? How would she know a kid shrink?”
    “Trust me—she does. I’ll get back to you.”
    The name she got from Langdon was Joanne Leydecker, known to one and all as “Boo.” “I’ve already called her,” Langdon said. “She’ll meet the kid. How you arrange it is up to you.”
    “Boo? That’s a name?”
    “B-o-o.”
    “Tell me about her.”
    “The short version is, she’s a woman who’s had a lot of trouble. She’s also a great shrink. I went to her myself.”
    “But this is for a kid.”
    “Well, she specializes in kids now. She has an adopted son who’s also had it hard and somehow they ended up with each other. Trust me,