PI On A Hot Tin Roof

sign of gentrification.
    So, of course the neighbors were mad. Not only had they bought a little chunk of paradise, it was a crowded paradise. The last thing they wanted was commercial activity in their haven.
    “What goes on here, exactly?” Talba asked. “I mean, I don’t see any action. Shouldn’t there be boats here, unloading shrimp or something?”
    “This is the slow season. But I’ll show you how we do it. See, the boats dock right here, and we unload with a thing like a large vacuum cleaner that goes down into the hold—you know what the hold is?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “It’s like a big bin, or bins, where the boats keep the shrimp, packed with layers of ice. The shrimp goes into our bins, here”—he indicated deep plastic vats on the dock—“and then we put it on the conveyor, where it’s separated from the water and ice, so we don’t have to pay for that too—see, it’s done by weight. Then it goes into those wire baskets, which hold a hundred pounds each. Used to go into the plastic ones—those are called champagnes, nothing to do with our family. They hold seventy pounds, and they were used when shrimp was sold by the barrel. But now it’s by the pound. We weigh it and put it back in our own bins, once again packed with layers of ice. They can hold seven hundred pounds. Then the bins go in the refrigerator, and from there the shrimp’s sold. All there is to it.”
    Talba couldn’t really see what there was to learning the business, but she supposed it had to do with how large the shrimp were, and what the going rate was. She nodded as if she got it.
    “Stack the bins and the baskets, and hose everything down, will you? That’s a fire hose, by the way—use both hands. Don’t worry about the trash—just throw it in the water.”
    “In the water?” Talba couldn’t believe what she was hearing. That meant more or less in people’s front yards. “No, we better haul it. Got some plastic bags?”
    “Don’t worry about it. Catfish’ll eat the shrimp heads. It’s all organic; natural recycling.”
    “What about the other stuff?” Styrofoam cups, papers, assorted other detritus.
    Brad shrugged. “Who’s gonna haul it? You or me?”
    Talba sighed. “Ideal situation, you.”
    “Well, listen up, Eddie. You want to be environmentally correct, you do it; just don’t expect any help from me.”
    Of course he didn’t have plastic bags, but he did steer her to a market across the highway. On her way to get bags, she took the opportunity to explore the neighborhood, which wasn’t easy, considering that nearly every street ended in a cul-de-sac. The place had been carefully constructed so that almost every house was on the water. How it got its name was clear—the canals. The streets had names like Genoa, San Marco, and Murano. It was a kind of Disney Venice, without reproduction Italian palaces. Instead, the new homes—though semipalatial—came in any style you could name.
    Some were Southern, with columns, some were Caribbean, some looked like Spanish or Moroccan villas. A couple sported Grecian statues, an unfortunate few were a postmodern mess, and one or two even looked vaguely Italian. Most of the newest ones seemed to be at the end opposite the pass, and Talba began to see that if you lived at this end, the development looked very new and shiny indeed.
    Oddly—at least to her—the streets were clogged with cars. Maybe people used the money they saved on housing to buy cars to get them back to civilization. And at least three of the vehicles were Orleans Parish district cars. It must be a popular haven for cops.
Fits,
she thought.
Cops never live in high-crime neighborhoods.
    When she’d had a decent spin, she drove back to the marina and started filling a bag with crustacean corpses and coffee cups. While she was doing it, she listened. And watched.
    Royce sat in his little office drinking coffee and flapping his jaw at his buddy, but doing very little else so far as she could see, until a man drove up and went in—a dark white man, maybe a Cajun. They talked awhile, but Talba couldn’t hear much until Royce gave him a tour. She was still bagging garbage, and black women bagging garbage, it turned out, were as invisible as rumor had it. “Nice little operation ya got,” the man said. “I want ya to know how much me and my buddies appreciate what ya doin’ for us. Seem like nobody wants to buy the real stuff no more.”
    That word “stuff” caught her