Louisiana Lament

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.
    And now a little thing like a missed stop sign was about to ruin it all. One minute Talba was barreling toward truth and justice; the next, a force from hell struck with a sound like a gunshot, leaving her humiliated and hurting. For a moment she thought maybe it
was
a gunshot; she wouldn’t put it past the lying, low-down sack of manure she was following.
    But, no, it was a Ford Explorer—a car about twice the size of Talba’s Camry—which had been lawfully moving through the intersection. She hadn’t seen the car or the stop sign. A crowd was beginning to gather. A siren wailed in the distance. And Talba’s back was killing her.
    In her current state, she really couldn’t go back to the office and deal with Eddie about this thing. He could be slightly more of a pain in the patootie than Miz Clara herself.
    There was only one good thing about this—that it wasn’t Eddie’s car that got wrecked. And not just because his was really his wife Audrey’s Cadillac. It was handsomely appointed with the Global Positioning System that Talba had bought half-price from some fly-by-night spy shop having a fire sale. She had a weakness for shopping at spy shops; her idea was, with the GPS Eddie could track her if she got in a tight spot. But after spending a week’s salary on it, she realized he didn’t even have a laptop for the tracking system. So, under great protest, she’d made him let her install it in his own car.
    Under
very
great protest. Eddie claimed the Twenty-First-Century PI needed only six pieces of equipment, one of which was a child’s toy and only two of which were electronic—cell phone, tape recorder,