PI On A Hot Tin Roof

match. I’m wondering…” Talba geared up for a lie. “Well, here’s the real reason I wanted to talk to you. It’s a little delicate, but I get the impression Kristin’s worried that he may have killed Buddy to stop the marriage. Is that possible?”
    Greta was back in possession of herself. “That Kristin would knowingly set her father up for exposure? Or that Warren would kill someone? No to the first. She’d take the information and find a way to use it to get what she wants from him.”
    “Which is?”
    “I’ve never understood a single thing about my daughter—or my ex-husband for that matter.”
    “I see—and the second question?”
    “Would Warren kill someone if it suited him? Certainly. That night he called, he ranted about what trash Buddy was. He said he couldn’t see why the girl’s mother—that was what he called me—‘the girl’s mother’—couldn’t do anything to stop it. I said it was none of my business, and he said, ‘Goddammit, I hope I’m not going to have to kill him.’”
    Talba felt a need to double-check what she was hearing. “He threatened to kill Buddy?”
    She sniffed. “If that’s a threat, I guess he did. I know one thing. He’s certainly capable of killing someone if that person’s in his way. I’m not sure he hasn’t.”
    Where to go with that one, Talba wondered. Was this too much information? “Uh…I’m at a bit of a loss. Are you saying you suspect him of killing someone else?”
    Greta laughed, her laugh as bitter as her words. “Certainly not. You wanted to know who he is, and no one knows better than me. A man who’d leave his wife of twenty-five years and the mother of his child for some tacky little floozy—after everything those two put me through—would probably kill someone too. Wouldn’t you say?”
    Talba laughed too, but with a certain amount of humor. Greta had unwittingly said something funny, to Talba, anyway. “It would depend on what he’d put me through.”
    “Kristin. That was enough. I never wanted to have children, but Warren wanted a son.”
    This was a woman who was at least a couple of stitches short of a sweater. Maybe a whole row of stitches. “Toxic parents” was a term Talba had heard, but never really understood. She was getting the hang of it now. The question was, which parent was the more toxic?
    For all she knew, Greta might have killed Buddy for no better reason than to derail Kristin’s happiness. She was also beginning to see what Kristin saw in Buddy—with parents like these, he was a prince.
    “By the way,” she said, “what was it Kristin told you about Buddy after the fact?”
    “She told me I’d have hated him. But she was wrong. Anybody who can handle that one is welcome to her.”

Chapter 19
    After that dose of cyanide, Talba felt disoriented. She stopped for gas in Mandeville and, seeing that she was on a lovely road lined with peaceful-looking pines, decided to continue for a bit, to have a drive in the country to see if she could shake Greta’s ghost.
    She passed a plethora of upscale subdivisions, some of them gated, but she never got the feeling of being crowded, or even particularly in the suburbs. It still felt like the country, and even more so once she came to the Tchefuncte River in Madisonville, whose banks were planted with wide swaths of grass. She stopped the car and sat on a concrete bench under an oak on the far bank, thinking to digest the experience while looking at water.
    Kristin was coming into much clearer focus. Talba thought of the way Adele loved her, Lucy loved her—the way she worked so hard for their esteem, the way she was always volunteering to do things. She must be one of those pleasers who tap-danced for every audience she could muster because no matter how fast she’d moved her little legs as a kid, her parents saw only missteps. It would explain her extramarital affairs, too—probably no amount of approval was ever enough.
    Poisonous as the interview had been, Talba was glad she’d had it. It was a somewhat unconventional way of backgrounding the client, but a lot more informative than surfing the Net (though she’d never admit it to Eddie).
    But her bread and butter came from surfing and she went back to the office to put in a day of it—on other cases—to pass the time until she judged a shrimper might be home. Sixish, maybe. She left the office at five, once more taking I-10 to Chef Menteur and cruising the Chef until she came to the