PI On A Hot Tin Roof

dress that looked awful on her. Redheads ought to wear brown, Talba thought, or some deep wine color. But Adele’s taste had probably carried the day, and Lucy wouldn’t have fought it.
    Afterward, Talba dropped by the house, mostly to make sure her young friend wasn’t coming apart. Lucy as usual had retreated to the solitude of her room and the comfort of her kitten. She’d changed to her torn jeans and a man’s T-shirt, maybe one of Royce’s.
    Talba entered without knocking. “You two okay?”
    “Oh, please. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a kid. ‘Tiggers don’t like funerals.’” She singsonged the Tigger part, mocking the sentiment. “But now I’ve been to two.”
    The kitten jumped off the bed and toddled over to sniff Talba’s toes.
    Lucy seemed eager to distract herself. “Hey, listen, I’ve got a present for Raisa—want to see?” She held up a tape, which she inserted into her VCR.
    “Sure.”
    It was her own version of the poetry reading, the tape Darryl made, in which Raisa, predictably, figured as prominently as the poets. The surprising thing was that Rikki was in it, too—not actually in the scenes at Reggie and Chaz, but in new ones taped in Lucy’s bedroom, which she had cut in. The kitten chased a ball, turned on her back and disemboweled a toy, sniffed and explored, groomed, and sometimes stared expectantly, after which the scene shifted back to the reading as if Rikki were watching it.
    “Cool!” Talba exclaimed. “How’d you do that?”
    Lucy shrugged. “I just intercut it.”
    Talba felt a strange quivering in her stomach, the beginning of an idea. “You intercut it? Can you do that with audiotape?”
    “Sure, if you’ve got the patience. Why?”
    “Just curious.” But she couldn’t wait to run her idea by Eddie. In her head, the whole case had just turned itself upside down.
    ***
    Ms. Wallis had on a suit today. It was a pantsuit, but she wore it with high heels, which she never wore to work, and she’d added jewelry for a change.
    “Lookin’ halfway professional,” Eddie said, accepting the coffee she brought him. “What’s the occasion?”
    “Funeral clothes. Did you forget?”
    “Oh, yeah—Suzanne. How’d it go?” He was big on funerals. The whole city was, for that matter, but Eddie particularly liked them on the theory that murderers never missed them, like pyromaniacs always went to fires. Of course, his theory had never actually borne fruit that you could take to court, but what the hell, it was still a good theory.
    “Eddie, I’ve got an idea.”
    “Oh, Jesus. Here we go.” He pushed his glasses down his nose.
    “Can we go in the other room? I want to show you a tape.”
    They had a television in there, with a VCR hooked up for viewing surveillance tapes.
    “Dammit. My leg hurts today.” He had an old injury, but it wasn’t bothering him. He just wanted to give her a hard time.
    The room in question was actually more like a closet where they kept their surveillance equipment, the coffeemaker, and a little refrigerator. Ms. Wallis already had the tape set up along with a chair for Eddie. When he had made a sufficient production of limping in and settling himself, she proceeded to treat him to a recorded poetry reading interspersed with stupid cat tricks. Fortunately, he was only required to watch about ten minutes before she said, “See what she did with the cat? Fourteen years old.”
    He didn’t get it. “What, ya think it should get an Academy Award or something? Anybody could do that. Oldest trick in the book.”
    “My point exactly.” She turned off the tape. “And you could do it with audiotape.”
    “Yeah? So?”
    “So, what if that recording on the marina phone was done that way? Suppose you got a word here and a word there from various voicemails Buddy left—or even called him and asked a leading question that required him to say stuff you wanted—or picked stuff up from Lucy’s home movies—and you strung them together to say he was coming to the marina and the night watchman could go home? And then you recorded it and played it on the marina voicemail?”
    He finally saw where she was going. “Yeah, I getcha. You’d just hook up the audio lines from the videotape onto an audiotape and press ‘record.’ There’s even a counter on the videotape. You could figure out when the word starts and stop it when the word stops. Yeah. All there is to it. A child could do it. Let’s go back to my