PI On A Hot Tin Roof

go to Biloxi, if that’s what you mean. What color are my bags?”
    “Tan. You look rested.”
    “Too damn rested.” Audrey had wanted to work in the garden and then she had been too tired for what he was in the mood for. “Angie came over. Everything’s fine with her case—the DA dismissed the charges. By the way, this Champagne thing is taking up too much time. Weren’t you supposed to renegotiate after ten or twelve hours? Ya musta put in thirty by now.”
    Ms. Wallis snapped her fingers. “Oh, darn. It slipped my mind.”
    “Could ya be serious for once?”
    “Well, it did come up, but Kristin said to keep on it.”
    “Well, ya can’t work it forever—it ain’t ethical. There comes a time when ya’ve gone far enough. And we just got a pile of employment checks from a shipping company. And two new insurance cases. One’s a black guy—I’m gon’ need ya on that one.” Before Ms. Wallis, he’d done it all alone. But a white guy in a black neighborhood was conspicuous even without a camera.
    “Okay.” She nodded shortly, not even interested. “I think I’ve got to admit defeat.” She went through her LaGarde family adventures, which led off a long pier to nowhere—unless you really needed to know how crazy they all were. But so far as Eddie was concerned, for all they knew after all this work, Buddy could be the victim of a random killer.
    “They’re all whack jobs,” he said. “Too much information and not enough goddam conclusions.”
    “’Scuse your French,” Ms. Wallis said. He was getting so he hardly even bothered anymore.
    “Look, why don’t ya take some time, write the client report, and I’ll look it over and see if I can think of anything else we can do. If we can’t”—he sighed—“we gotta just tell Miss LaGarde we can’t help her.”
    It occurred to him she was conferring with him a lot more than usual on this one—that wasn’t like Ms. Wallis. She was usually Miss Piss and Vinegar.
    ***
    Write the client report. She wondered how she was going to explain the hours she’d spent interviewing the client’s ex-husband and her parents. Finally, she put it under “research.”
    She wrote and then rewrote the damn report, gave it to Eddie, did about twenty employee checks, and went home to her mama.
    She was at lunch on Tuesday—egg salad on wheat—when she got the call from Lucy. The girl was crying.
    “Baby, what is it? Why aren’t you in school?”
    “Royce came and got me. Something happened to Suzanne, but I don’t know what. Oh, God, I wish I were dead. Talba, they won’t tell me what happened!”
    What did you say to a fourteen-year-old who was dealing with a family catastrophe for the third time in a month? Her voice was shaky. “Suzanne?”
    “Mommo’s in her room, crying; and Royce went out. Oh, God, Talba, I think she’s dead. Can’t you find out what’s going on? They won’t tell me anything.”
    Dead. The word fell like a black glove on Talba’s ears. How could Suzanne be dead? She was a young healthy woman.
    “Did Royce say where he was going? Did he go to the hospital?”
    “He didn’t say anything. He just said there was a family emergency and brought me home, and he wouldn’t say a word the whole way home. And Mommo came out and hugged me, and started crying so hard she couldn’t talk. She just went back in her room and closed the door. By then Royce was gone.”
    “What’s Royce’s cell phone number?”
    Lucy reeled it off to her.
    “Okay. Do you have Brad Leitner’s?”
    “Just a minute.”
    Talba sat composing herself for a few minutes, trying to decide whom to call. She decided on Leitner.
    “Brad, it’s Talba Wallis. Lucy’s hysterical and nobody’s with her. What’s happened?”
    For once he was civil. “Omigod, that poor kid. Suzanne got killed. Royce went over to the funeral home.”
    Talba matched her voice to his: calm, polite. “What do you mean she got killed?”
    “She was mugged on her way back to her car after her yoga class. Royce is a zombie.”
    “What happened,
Brad?”
    “Nobody knows. The police just showed up with the bad news. Her purse was gone and she was shot in the head.”
    “Oh, Jesus.”
    “Look, I’ll go over to the house.”
    “What’s your relationship with Lucy like?”
    “It’s good. Royce is crazy about her, so we’ve done lots of stuff together, just the three of us. I like the kid.”
    “Brad, somebody’s got to tell her what happened. She says Adele’s in her