PI On A Hot Tin Roof

own neighborhoods. She’d once met a waitress in the French Quarter who’d lived in the suburb of Kenner her whole life, yet never been to the Quarter before she took the job.
    But there was a Home Depot in New Orleans East, and a Wal-Mart, so Talba’d been there. She knew there was a Vietnamese neighborhood somewhere in the East, but she’d certainly never seen that.
    Today, she did, though. Royce continued on the Chef until businesses began to appear with signage in Asian characters, and still he kept driving. Finally, they passed something she’d seen on the map—a large wooded area called the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge—and a little ways past that was a sign that said VENETIAN ISLES . It was a subdivision bounded on its other end—north or east, Talba wasn’t sure—by a body of water clearly marked CHEF MENTEUR PASS .
    There were several marinas on the right side of the highway, where there was open water—Lake Borgne, if she remembered correctly. Venetian Isles lay on the left. It seemed to be on a peninsula between Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain, which were connected by the pass. The map had indicated that if you crossed the bridge over the pass, you got to a little community on a smaller body of water called Lake St. Catherine. On the other side of this lake, another pass, The Rigolets, flowed from Lake Pontchartrain into Lake Borgne, and also, by taking a small jog, into Lake St. Catherine. If you kept going, you got to Slidell and eventually to the Gulf Coast. All new territory to Talba—she wondered if Eddie and Audrey came this way when they went to the coast for their famous weekends.
    Exploring that area was for another day, however. Today, Royce turned up a street in the Venetian Isles neighborhood and came out on a canal where the marina was nestled. It seemed to consist of a small office, a big refrigerator, a few berths for boats, some conveyor setups, and a longish dock that ran the length of the property. There were a lot of baskets lying around that looked like ordinary bushel baskets, except that they were made out of wire. There were also some plastic ones, more or less strewn about, along with enormous plastic bins. The place wasn’t much to look at, and there was absolutely nothing going on.
    But another truck was parked there, and a man came out of the little office as Talba got out of her car. “Good,” Royce said. “Brad’s here.”
    “Hey, buddy,” he called, and gave a large wave.
    Brad waved back and as they drew nearer, Talba saw that he was a slim, well-built young man about Royce’s age, with a shaved head. There was something about his face that Talba didn’t quite like, but couldn’t put her finger on. A slightly calculating look, maybe. He wore an old Saints T-shirt, a pair of cutoffs, an earring, and some kind of abstract tattoo on his right arm.
    “Sandra, Brad Leitner. Hey, buddy, this is Sandra, but you can call her Eddie. She’s on cleanup duty.”
    “Why Eddie?”
    “She’s a laugh riot—regular little Eddie Murphy.”
    “Hey, Eddie. Say something funny. We could use a laugh.”
    “Man walks into a bar—”
    Leitner was already shaking his head.
    “Okay. There’s a priest, a rabbi, and a minister—”
    Leitner looked beseechingly at Royce. “This is seriously not working for me.”
    “You want
good
jokes,” Talba said, “my hourly rate’s fifty bucks.”
    “Think I’ll pass. Place smells like a garbage dump. You’re just in time.” He went back into the office.
    He was right. The place was filthy, and stank. Stank badly. The dock was littered with—among other things—decaying shrimp heads and even whole shrimp. Very dead ones. She could see why the neighbors were upset.
    “Ever been here?” Royce said. “Whole place is on canals. Almost every house has a water view. A lot have docks.”
    The neighborhood must be a find for house hunters. It seemed very modest—the figures she’d found put the average mortgage somewhere in the $800 range, though surely that had changed—and yet it still seemed to offer that nearly untouchable amenity: affordable water views. The American dream for a song. Yet she could see the neighborhood was changing. Many of the houses looked as if they’d been built between the ’50s and ’70s, but they were dwarfed by new ones that she bet hadn’t been included in those five-year-old figures. It looked as if some of the older dwellings had been torn down to build the monsters, a sure