Louisiana Lament: A Talba Wallis Novel - Softcover

In addition to the Talba Wallis series, Louisiana Hotshot and Louisiana Bigshot, Julie Smith is also the author of the Skip Langdon mystery series and the Rebecca Schwartz series. Her first Skip Langdon book, New Orleans Mourning, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel.

A former reporter, she lives in New Orleans most of the time.

Chapter One
 
 
The glad tidings had barely arrived: On this particular autumn day, early in the twenty-first century, New Orleans was not going to end up in Davy Jones's locker.
The weather service claimed that under certain unfortunate conditions--all of which had been present for hours--the river would flood, the lake would flood, the land bowl between them would fill, and the city would sleep with the fishes. But Hurricane Carol had just veered to the west, sparing The City That Care Forgot, as has every major storm since Betsy in '65. The early-October near-miss was getting to be almost as much a New Orleans tradition as termite swarms on Mother's Day.
But you never got used to trying to decide whether to build an ark or not.
Everyone who could afford to had left town. Those who couldn't had spent the early morning praying to Our Lady of Perpetual Succor--or at least St. Expedite--for a quick fix.
Now that it was granted, Carol was still moving slow and dumping rain by the barrel. The city, unlike its usually playful self, was shrouded in a pall of gray. It was going to be this way all day, and maybe the next.
The schools were closed, and so were the city offices, but there was still power, and the phones worked. It was business as usual for many, if you didn't count the apocalyptic rain and the snarled traffic.
Both Talba Wallis and her boss, Eddie Valentino, were among those who'd decided to play Russian roulette. But Talba had arrived at E.V. Anthony Investigations, not flushed with the triumph of having guessed right, but late, soaked, and out of sorts. Normally not a pessimist, she actually uttered the old Dorothy Parker line when the phone rang: What fresh hell is this?
"Talba?" said a voice she didn't know. "Talba, it's Janessa."
"Who?" she asked, in the confusion of the moment.
"Janessa." Long pause. "Janessa ya sister."
Janessa, her sister. Whom she had seen exactly once in her life. Who had let it be known she wanted nothing to do with Talba. And who, today of all days, was on the other end of the line. Talba hadn't come close to assimilating this when Janessa spoke again. "I got a situation here."
"What kind of situation?"
"Bad. Real bad. Can you come on over here?"
It didn't occur to Talba to panic. She barely knew the girl. "Janessa, what's going on?" she asked calmly.
"I'm on Philip Street, just off St. Charles." She gave Talba an address on the river side of the avenue, in the Garden District, not at all the type of place Talba would expect to find Janessa. The Garden District was old, white, wealthy, stuffy, and way, way out of her sister's range of experience, Talba would have guessed. Janessa had impressed her as a young woman who'd stick pretty close to her own neighborhood, and this wasn't it.
"So, Janessa..." She was about to repeat her question when her caller hung up.
Well, hell. When she first found Janessa--which hadn't been all that easy, even for an ace PI and acknowledged computer genius (acknowledged by herself, at any rate)--she'd opened herself up to this. She wanted to help the kid, right? Apparently, that was going to require going out in the pouring rain. She selected an umbrella from the agency stand (the office manager, Eileen Fisher, kept a handy supply for days like this) and told Eileen she had to go out.
She drove her old Isuzu to the distinctly upscale, slightly familiar neighborhood, found a parking place, opened the umbrella, and stumbled to the address Janessa had given her, which she hadn't remotely recognized. She stared in surprise at the nineteenth-century mansion, realizing she'd been there before, as a guest. But unless her sister was making house calls these days, she couldn't see Janessa there.
Janessa was still a manicurist, so far as she knew, and the lady of the house certainly had need of manicures. Allyson Brower generally looked as if she spent about fifty percent of her time getting ready for fabulous parties, and the other fifty percent giving them. The latter part was more or less accurate. It was one of these that Talba had attended a couple of months before.
She climbed the few steps, but she had no time to ring the bell. The door swung open on a young girl so vastly changed Talba wouldn't have recognized her on the street. Though her job was grooming other women, the Janessa Talba knew didn't go in much for grooming herself. She was overweight and unkempt, or had been.
This Janessa still had some meat on her bones, but her hair was now woven into gorgeous braids--probably extensions like Talba's. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, but somehow, the outfit seemed carefully chosen, certainly carefully fitted. It flattered her full figure.
"Janessa?" Talba blurted. "You look terrific."
The girl pulled her inside, shut the door quickly. On closer inspection, she didn't look terrific. She looked scared to death. Her face was tear-streaked and grayish. Talba spoke again. "What is it? This is Allyson Brower's house, isn't it?" She swiveled her head to get her bearings, and gasped when she saw a gun, water dripping from it, on a console table in the foyer. A long-haired cat lapped at the little puddle the drip had formed. Under Talba's gaze, the cat dropped heavily to the floor.
Janessa moved toward the gun, but Talba thrust out an arm to block her. "Wait. What's going on here?"
"You take the gun. Somebody might be in the house."
Talba's scalp prickled. She hated guns worse than some people hated rats. She dropped her dripping umbrella and frantically grabbed for her cell phone. Janessa groped her forearm. "Ya can't call the po-lice."
Fighting panic, Talba threw the door open and tried to speak calmly. "Janessa, let's go outside. If you've got a prowler, we don't need to be in the house."
Janessa peered anxiously in the opposite direction, then back at Talba. "No, I think it's all right. I already checked."
"What is it, then?"
Janessa glanced once more at the gun, and seemed to come to a decision. "Come on." She turned and walked away, leaving her sister soaking and confused. Talba found her cell phone--into which 911 had already been programmed--and followed anxiously through the center hall and kitchen, into a loggia, and out to Allyson's luxurious patio and swimming pool, the setting for her over-the-top parties, which were quickly becoming famous in a city with a lot of competition.
It wasn't so festive at the moment.
A woman--almost certainly Allyson--was floating face-up in the pool, hair swirling about her head. Her blue eyes were open and staring. But still as marbles. She was dressed in sandals, capris, and a blouse tied at the waist. Her face was white as wave-froth.
To all appearances, she was dead, and had been for hours.
But she didn't look as if she'd drowned. Talba had never seen a bullet wound up close, but the perfect round hole, dark with blood, in the woman's left forehead had to be one. Blood had stained her lemon-colored blouse--but not badly. If she'd bled a lot, the water had washed most of the blood away. Talba really hadn't known Allyson well (and hadn't particularly liked her) but there was something so sad about this used-up object, bereft of animation and joy and hope, that tears sprang to her eyes.
And then panic seized her. "Is that Allyson?"
"She dead, ain't she?"
She had to be, but maybe there was a chance..."Help me get her out of there."
"Already thought of that," Janessa said. "How we gon' do it?"
It was a reasonable question. The Wallis girls were African American, Talba from an extremely modest background. Though they'd grown up separately, Talba hadn't had the benefit of swimming lessons at a country club and she doubted Janessa had, either. "Can you swim?" she asked. Miserably, Janessa shook her head.
"Did you shoot her, Janessa?"
"No!"
"Who did?"
"I ain' know. Found her like this."
Panic continued to surge like current through Talba's body. That gun was between them and the door. "Come on. We've got to get out of here. The killer could still be in the house." She darted into the kitchen, through the house, and back to the foyer, Janessa running after her. Talba breathed a sigh of relief, seeing the gun still dripping on the silver-leaf table. The door remained open, and rain was beating in. She didn't know which was worse, venturing into the storm or staying inside.
Janessa put a hand on her arm. "I think we okay. I took the gun, looked in every room. Nobody here." She pushed the door closed, fighting the wind and rain. "I wait right here for you and nothin' happen. We all right, I think. What we do now?"
Talba put the phone to her ear.
"Who you calling?" Janessa asked.
"Nine-one-one."
Her sister looked horrified, but made no move to stop her.
"I need an ambulance at 1321 Philip Street," Talba said into the phone. "There's been a shooting." She hung up before the dispatcher could ask any questions. The first thing was to get some help for Allyson--in the unlikely event she wasn't beyond it--the second to get a friend on the scene. She had one who worked Homicide. She dialed information, got a number for the Third District, and asked for Detective Skip Langdon. "She isn't in at the moment," a cheerful voice told her. A male one that obviously belonged to a morning person. "May I take a message?"
"It's an emergency."
"You want her pager number?"
Talba took it, left a message, and sighed, knowing she'd have to wait for a call-back. She turned to her sister. "Okay, Janessa, we've got a minute, but that's about all. Let's make it count. What the hell are you doing here?"
"I work here," the girl said sullenly. "I'm a artist now. We paintin' a marsh in the bathroom."
Allyson and her wall paintings. She'd had three or four two months earlier and must be adding more. "Go on."
"I came in for work, found her like this. Called you."
"That's it?"
Janessa nodded.
"Well, where the hell did the gun come from?"
"Found it by the pool."
"By the pool."
"Right on the edge. I'm lookin' in the pool, lookin' at the gun, tryin' to figure out i...