Louisiana Bigshot Read online

  Praise for LOUISIANA BIGSHOT,

  the SECOND book in the Talba Wallis series by Edgar-winning author Julie Smith:

  “Talba Wallis has to be one of the most distinctive female detectives in the business. Her personality and her poetry are riveting reasons to read this book.”

  —The Times-Picayune, New Orleans

  “Smith has launched Talba Wallis on a welcome series of her own. Wallis is fine fun to get to know… a consistently interesting and likable woman of depth and complexity.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Smith has perfect pitch. It’s great to hear her again.…Smith gives us a multilayered mystery and a quirky, believable heroine.”

  —Booklist

  “Smith’s new series is a whole other kettle of crayfish: wilder and funnier.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Join Edgar winner Julie Smith for a climax as harrowing as it is cunning.”

  —The Clarion Ledger, Jackson, MS

  “Highly evocative of the Big Easy, Louisiana Bigshot is an easy read filled with colorful, exciting people drawn with affection and intelligence. Talba seems to get smarter with each novel, and there’s even a small cameo appearance by Skip Langdon, Ms. Smith’s other New Orleans detective.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “The quirky pleasure of watching the Baroness strut her stuff is worth the price of admission.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Unusual subject matter set off by an appealing but street wise heroine makes this a strongly recommended choice.”

  —Library Journal

  “The strongly drawn characters are appealing. The interplay between the young black woman and her much older white boss is warm and respectful; Smith nicely plays it against the very real and very dangerous racial divide that Talba encounters when she investigates her friend’s smalltown past.

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Louisiana Bigshot is a character-driven tale with plenty of action, suspense, and steamy southern atmosphere… It’s an exhilarating romp that will have you cheering for Talba.”

  —The Mystery Review

  The Talba Wallis Series

  LOUISIANA HOTSHOT

  LOUISIANA BIGSHOT

  LOUISIANA LAMENT

  P.I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF

  Also by Julie Smith:

  The Skip Langdon Series

  NEW ORLEANS MOURNING

  THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

  JAZZ FUNERAL

  DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK

  (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

  HOUSE OF BLUES

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION

  (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

  82 DESIRE

  MEAN WOMAN BLUES

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  THE SOURDOUGH WARS

  TOURIST TRAP

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

  The Paul Mcdonald Series

  TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

  HUCKLEBERRY FIEND

  As Well As

  WRITING YOUR WAY: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL TRACK

  NEW ORLEANS NOIR (ed.)

  LOUISIANA BIGSHOT

  A Talba Wallis Mystery

  By

  JULIE SMITH

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Louisiana Bigshot

  Copyright 2002 by Julie Smith

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  ISBN: 9781617504464

  Originally published by Tor, a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  www.booksnimble.com

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: November 2012

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Praise for LOUISIANA BIGSHOT

  The Talba Wallis Series

  Also by Julie Smith

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Sign Up...

  Guarantee

  The Talba Wallis Series

  Also by Julie Smith

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from MEAN WOMAN BLUES

  DEDICATION

  To four good kids:

  Stella Tripp, Grant Smith, Paloma Tripp, and Will Smith

  Chapter One

  Under normal circumstances, getting a Louisiana PI license is so routine as to be boring—you take a course, you pass a test, and you pay your money. Usually, there’s only one slight catch—you can’t be issued a license unless you’re already hired. But Talba Wallis seemed to have found another one.

  She was already hired, and she’d made ninety-seven on the test. For nearly five months she’d worked as an apprentice for Mr. Eddie Valentino of E.V. Anthony Investigations.

  And still, she almost didn’t get her license.

  You have to submit a few little things with your application—a copy of your driver’s license, five-by-seven-inch photo, and fingerprints. For the last, the State Board of Private Investigator Examiners provides official FBI cards. All you have to do is take them to any law enforcement agency that offers a fingerprinting service and plunk down a few small bucks.

  “Piece o’ cake,” Eddie said. “Take ya ten minutes, max.”

  So one gorgeous September day on her lunch hour, Talba drove out to 715 South Broad Street, headquarters of the New Orleans Police Department.

  A good thing it’s close, she thought. She had a client coming in at one, and at three, she had to resume her surveillance of a suspected errant wife. The woman was a college professor whose last class was over then, and Talba was in a hurry to wrap up the case. Eddie’s jokes about “extracurricular activities” were getting tedious.

  Nonetheless, she was in a great mood. She sailed in feeling buoyant and powerful. Finally, finally, she was getting the damned license. She liked the job a lot. A whole lot. And a funny thing, it was a great way to make friends. It wasn’t something anyone ever thought about on career day at school, but once you said the words private investigator, it was amazing how many people blurted, “I’d love to do that!”

  They wouldn’t, of course. For one thing, there was the tedium—of records searches, surveillance, online research, court appearances, intake interviews, half a dozen other things. For another, most people thought divorce cases were sleazy, and these were a good chunk of the work. Actually, Talba liked them—she liked catching scumbags (of either sex) and, though originally hired for her computer skills, she’d turned out to be good at it. It wasn’t a job for everybody, but, despite the fact that she was such a c
omputer wiz she impressed even herself, a sensitive and talented poet (in her opinion), and a baroness (she’d decided), it suited her.

  So she was in an excellent mood as she entered the building. A female functionary sporting two-inch purple nails with a tiny picture on each of them pointed to a door on the right. No stairs, no elevator. Couldn’t be more convenient.

  Talba stepped through to a nearly dark, closet-sized anteroom opening onto a large, light comfortable-looking room, which was populated by two people—an enormous woman in a black dress and a smallish, wiry-looking man in uniform. Both were African-American, as was Talba herself. The well-padded woman had a motherly look to her. Pencil in hand, she was poring over something in which she seemed to have a deep and abiding interest.

  She may or not have heard Talba enter, but either way, she didn’t look up. The man was talking on the phone. Talba stood politely for a few minutes, curious as to what was so important the woman couldn’t take time out to serve a customer. And finally, she got tired of it. “Excuse me,” she said.

  The woman looked at her over nondescript glasses that couldn’t hide a pair of bulging eyes. A thyroid thing, Talba thought, figuring it was causing the weight problem.

  “I’m here to get fingerprinted.”

  “Whatcha need prints for?”

  “I’m applying for my PI license.”

  “That’ll cost ya thirty dollars. You can get it done for fifteen dollars at the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.”

  “Here’s fine. I don’t mind the charge.”

  The woman raised an eyebrow, as if she disapproved of spendthrifts. “Ya filled out ya cards?”

  “No, do I need to?”

  “Use black ink and be sure ya print.”

  In the anteroom, there was an end table she could probably write on, but not enough light to see. “May I come in to fill them out?” There were at least five empty desks.

  “This room’s part of the police department.” The woman went back to her paperwork, leaving Talba rummaging for a pen and hoping if she found one, it would be black.

  She ended up going outside to fill out the card.

  When she returned, the large woman seemed almost cordial. “Come on in,” she said, with a near-smile, and Talba opened the dutch door separating the spaces.

  The other woman came forward to sit at the front desk. “Let me have the cards and ya driver’s license.” The instructions on the application had been explicit—the fingerprinter must see the applicant’s license. The woman studied the documents for almost five minutes before she finally raised her head, face outraged, suddenly a different person.

  “You got different names on these things!”

  It was true.

  Talba’s birth name was an embarrassment to all concerned—to herself, to Miz Clara, and to the human race in general. A white obstetrics resident who thought he was funny had named her. However, the state required the same name on your driver’s license that appeared on your birth certificate.

  “Talba” was her own name, the name she’d given herself and always used except when performing her poems, at which times she used its ceremonial form, “the Baroness de Pontalba.”

  She pointed out where she’d written her official name on the FBI card, in the space asking for aliases and AKAs. “I’d prefer to use ‘Talba’ on my license,” she said.

  “You can’t do that. Ya name’s Urethra.” It took all Talba’s strength not to wince.

  Damn! Something was severely off here. The license was issued by a state board—what right did a city functionary have even to express an opinion on the subject?

  But the fat lady wasn’t the sort you argued with. Talba said, “The board might agree, I don’t know. Can’t know till I apply.”

  The woman wasn’t listening. She’d begun doing something online, holding Talba’s license and FBI cards as she clicked her way through what was evidently a Yellow Pages site. “There’s no Eddie Valentino in here.”

  The card had asked for her employer’s name and address. “I work for E.V. Anthony Investigations. Eddie’s the ‘E.V.’ part.”.

  “I’m gon’ call the state board.” The woman got up and waddled to a glass cubicle in the back of the room. Talba heard her dial and say, “This is Sergeant Rouselle.”

  This woman was a cop? That was a shocker. She wasn’t in uniform and she wore no badge. Besides that, she seemed not to have either the personality or the build for it. Minor bureaucrat was the way Talba’d pegged her. The sort who got off on ruining people’s days.

  Cop or no, she suddenly realized, she was about to become snarled in a bureaucratic snafu that was going to make her miss her one o’clock.

  She walked back to the cubicle and held out her hand. “Sgt. Rouselle, I think I’ll go over to Jefferson Parish, after all. May I have my license, please?”

  The sergeant turned on her, shouting, bulging eyes blazing behind dirty lenses. “You’re going to jail if you snatch this out my hand!”

  Talba backed away, “I wasn’t going to—”

  The other officer got off the phone quick and strode over to the cubicle, patting air as if to calm a child. “Now, ma’am, just calm down. Just take it easy now.”

  “But I didn’t… look, all I want to do is go. I’m on my lunch hour.”

  “I get the feeling you’re worried you’re going to get your boss in trouble. This is nothing to do with you and nothing to do with him.”

  What language was he speaking?

  Who cared?

  “Look, Officer, I’m on a schedule.”

  “Just take it easy and nobody’s going to get in any trouble.” It suddenly got through to Talba exactly what the situation was: He was telling her the sergeant really could throw her in jail if she wanted to. All she’d have to do was say Talba assaulted her to get her license; or had pot breath; or anything she wanted to. In a word, she was trapped.

  She sat and steamed. After about twenty minutes, Officer Rouselle waddled on out. “All right. You want to get fingerprinted?”

  Talba looked at her watch, considering. There was still time to make her one o’clock—barely—if the show could just get on the road. “Can we do it now?”

  “Now?" the sergeant shouted. “Can we do it now? You don’t respect my title or my position, do you? I need a little more respect out of you, missy. Hear me: you must use the same name on these cards as is on your driver’s license…”

  Talba was desperate to scream at the woman: It's not up to you, Fat Stuff! It’s up to the state board. But that was definitely going to get her arrested.

  It developed the sergeant could read her mind. She just stared, heaving a huge sigh. And then, still clutching Talba’s license, she picked up the phone.

  “Captain Regilio, please. Well, then, the lieutenant.” Talba’s heart thumped in a way it hadn’t since she’d gotten in a shootout the previous spring. It’s the adrenaline, she realized. Damn! This petty bureaucrat has me scared to death.

  That pissed her off almost more than the rest of it.

  Then there was the problem of how the hell she was going to explain to Eddie (or her mother or even her boyfriend) that she was innocent—whatever the charge. The fact was, she did have a mouth on her. The irony was, for once she was keeping it shut. Eventually, two uniformed male officers and one white woman in shorts arrived to receive another ten minutes of Sgt. Rouselle’s rants. “I called y’all in because this woman’s trying to provoke me.”

  Suck it up, Talba told herself. Keep your mouth shut or you’re going to jail.

  Her teeth hurt from gritting them. Finally one of the other officers gently pried the license from Sgt. Rouselle’s grasp and handed it back to Talba, who once again held out her hand. “May I have my fingerprint cards?”

  “I’m gon’ confiscate those. They’re not your property, they’re the FBI’s.”

  Oh, yeah? So now you’re the FBI?

  She looked beseechingly at the others, but they only stared back poker-
faced.

  Well, who cared? At least she was legal to drive back to the office. She never had to breathe a word. She’d just go tomorrow to Jefferson Parish and no one would be the wiser.

  She arrived back at the office at five after one. Her client was sitting in the reception room, and Eileen Fisher, Eddie’s office manager, looked way too nervous for comfort. “That Ms. Wallis?” Eddie hollered. “Ms. Wallis, could you come in here a minute? I just had a phone call from the state board. What’s this about you gettin’ arrested?”

  It was a hell of a way to begin a career.

  But Eddie had been gentle with her. “I’m gon’ let you off this time, Ms. Wallis. So long as you learned somethin’ from this experience.”

  “If you mean I’m supposed to suck up to some power-hungry harpie out of Kafka’s worst nightmares…”

  “I don’t mean that a’tall, Ms. Wallis. I mean I hope ya learned to never, ever, for any reason do anything in any New Orleans city office you can do somewhere else. I mean that, now. Save us both a lot of time, lot of headache.”

  She was about to say, Yes sir, she sure wouldn’t, and leave clicking her heels together, when he held up a finger. “And one more thing if you don’t mind—could ya make some kinda effort not to be more trouble than ya worth?”

  That was a month ago. She had her license now—in the name of Talba Wallis, thank you very much. But the whole gig looked to be falling apart again.

  She could barely hear the words through the fuzz in her brain: “Miss, are you all right?” The speaker was the other driver, a white man in his forties.

  Hell, no, she wasn’t all right. Four days of surveillance and she finally had the pond scum in the Cadillac with the paramour, feet away from her camera lens. Inches from delicious triumph.

  But now nothing. Nothing but a hurting back, a totaled car, maybe a missed paycheck. Maybe even the ax—after that little episode with Sgt Rouselle, Eddie’s patience was pretty thin.

  And her mama, Miz Clara, did so love having her baby daughter employed! Even as a PI. Time was when Miz Clara thought there were only three suitable jobs for a Wallis child—doctor of medicine, speaker of the house, and first African-American president. But that was before she caught onto the stage-mom potential of having a flamboyant daughter who happened to be not only a poet, performance artist, and computer genius but also a detective.