PI On A Hot Tin Roof

fifty?”
    “Yeah. Just. Same deal with me—I could only get four hundred, but I had a couple of hundred bucks, and a hundred of that went for your bail. I can give you the fifty, and still buy you breakfast.” Talba looked at her watch. “But, Angie, it’s three a.m. It’ll take hours to process him—believe me, I know. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep and we’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”
    “I can’t leave him.”
    Talba had enough sense not to argue. “Okay, okay. Where’s your car?”
    “They made me leave it parked on Esplanade, near the old Mint—that’s where we got picked up. Al was playing a gig there. Just get me there and I’ll take care of the rest. You’ve done enough for one night.”
    Talba sighed. There was nothing she’d rather do than go home, but she felt like Angie did—she couldn’t really leave a friend in trouble. “Look. I’ll go with you to get the money and post the bond. But you don’t have to wait for Al—he’s got a wife. Or something. She can go get him.”
    “I don’t trust her.”
    Talba sighed again. But the way Angie stumbled when she tried to walk, teared up every five minutes or so, and kept absolutely silent told her the lawyer simply wasn’t up to it. She was in shock, too disoriented to function. In the end, they posted the bond, and finally went by Brazil’s house to alert his wife and give her taxi fare to go get him. By then it was almost five, and Angie was so far gone she’d stopped speaking entirely. Her eyes had receded into sockets deep as potholes.
    Not good,
Talba thought,
very not good,
and wondered what to do to help. Just take her home and tuck her in, maybe. Stay with her in case she woke up hysterical. But sometime on the drive home, Angie breathed, “Talba?” in a mousy voice, very different from her normal commanding contralto. “Is a hamburger possible?”
    Yes!
Talba thought.
The fever broke.
“La Peniche ought to be jumping about now.”
    The lawyer winced.
    “Okay, okay, we’ll get a burger to go.”
    She drove to the Faubourg Marigny hangout and found a parking place. “I’ll just be a minute.”
    “No. I don’t want to stay in the car alone.”
    “Come with me, then.”
    Zombie-like, Angie opened the car door.
    “Sure you can walk?”
    “Of course I can walk. I was in jail, not a war.” She was definitely bouncing back. And somehow, the cheerful atmosphere and good smells of the restaurant had such a salubrious effect that she agreed to sit down and order, ‘like normal people,’ as she put it.
    Talba ordered a full breakfast, but Angie stuck with the hamburger plan, and wolfed it, washing it down with a bourbon and water. “Want to tell me what happened?” Talba asked, between bites of grits and scrambled eggs. She was getting a second wind herself.
    “Somebody planted drugs in my car.”
    “It wasn’t locked?”
    “Sure it was locked. They opened it with a slim jim or something.”
    “Angie,” she said gently. “Al’s got a history. I know you want to believe in him and all, but do you realize how unlikely that sounds?”
    “No, listen. They couldn’t search without probable cause, right? Here’s what they did. One of them came running down the street, ran into us, knocked a bunch of stuff out of our hands, and dropped a crack pipe on the sidewalk. These two cops just happened to appear out of nowhere, saw the pipe, and just casually looked in the front window, where there just happened to be pot on the front seat. Then they found rock in the trunk, and threw us up against the car before we knew what was happening. Listen, if I did have pot, would I leave it on the seat of my car?”
    “How do you know the guy dropped the pipe? It could have been Al’s, right? He must have had it in something he was carrying.”
    Angie set down her glass, now about two-thirds empty. Her face was taking on a lot more color. “Talba. I saw the guy drop it. Anyway, the pipe’s not the point—it was just a prop. The point is, there was pot in plain sight in my car. And the cops were there way too fast. It just doesn’t add up.”
    You’re dreaming,
Talba thought. “You know how much juice it would take to get two cops to do something like that? And why would anyone care? Alabama might be a Big Chief, but he’s just not that big a fish.”
    “They didn’t want him. It’s not even a good arrest—the judge’ll throw it right out. They wanted me. That’s why I’m such a wreck. You think a