PI On A Hot Tin Roof

picturesque community of Lake Catherine.
    On the right side of the Chef, the Lake St. Catherine side, each street was a tree-lined lane that curved just enough that you couldn’t see the end. She explored a little first, and decided she’d come too far when she came to a sign that said, UPTOWN LAKE CATHERINE, POPULATION A LITTLE MORE OR LESS THAN DOWNTOWN . She reversed direction and turned down Bob’s street, which may have been downtown or uptown—it was difficult to tell in a settlement consisting of only a few small lanes, some jumbled up with old fishing shacks on canals, some boasting newly built Caribbean-style houses. At the end of Bob’s street, she found a cul-de-sac with four houses in a row, Bob’s being the first. Strangely, it had windows, but no door. Two cars were parked in the driveway, a good sign.
    She parked and walked toward the front until she could see through a window. She was looking at a sort of watery garage, filled (in the garage part as opposed to the water part) with equipment and ropes, and populated by a number of cats and kittens climbing on a rope pile. If felines around here bred like this, no wonder Rikki had needed a home. Though only a dinghy occupied the berth, a chaland was moored a few feet further out. With a surprised (and somewhat delighted) chortle, she saw that the roof of the boat garage was actually the floor of the family’s abode, though the structure was designed in such a way that you couldn’t tell from the street. Talba had never seen anything like it. She made her way to the side of the house, where she found a few steps leading up to a door, upon which she knocked as boldly as if she hadn’t just fetched up in a foreign country.
    The door was opened by a teenage boy wearing a T-shirt and half-wearing the ubiquitous low-slung baggy jeans of his generation, the fashion statement that had once inspired a state lawmaker to introduce a legislative remedy that quickly became known as “the butt-crack law”. Ridiculed by the media as a “cheeky but assinine” idea bound to make the state the “butt” of jokes throughout the nation, it never passed, though there were times when every adult in the state (however supportive of civil liberties) thought of it with longing. Talba did at the moment—the kid was fat and probably thought he dressed to make himself look thinner. It wasn’t working.
    He had a curious choir-boy haircut like the Beatles had worn some forty years earlier. It went poorly with the hip-hop pants, but beautifully framed a round cherubic suntanned face that probably concealed the mind of a master criminal. No one who looked that angelic could possibly have an honest bone in his body.
    His face made Talba smile. “Hi. Your dad home?”
    The kid looked suspicious. “You selling something?”
    Talba reached in her backpack for the leather case containing her license and badge, which she flipped open, figuring the kid would appreciate the badge, even if Eddie didn’t. “I’m a private investigator.”
    He wasn’t impressed. “No, you’re not. P.I.s can’t have badges.”
    “You’re misinformed, sir.” Talba gave him a smile that she hoped was slightly mischievous, yet a little schoolteacherish as well. “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges, but we can
have
them if we want.”
    That did it. “Really? You can? How do you get to be a P.I.?” A kid was a kid.
    “You take a course and pay some money—that’s all there is to it. Of course, it helps to be brilliant and resourceful, but it’s not a requirement.”
    He ignored the last part—kids never seemed to get her jokes. “Wow. They didn’t cover that on career day at school.”
    “At my school either. Can I talk to your dad?”
    “Depends.”
    Uh-huh. As evil as she’d figured. But she humored him. “Depends on what?”
    “Lemme see your piece.”
    She was taken aback. “You mean my gun? I don’t carry a gun. My weapon of choice is a T-ball bat—want to see that?”
    “Don’t mess with me, man.”
    A man’s voice came from a few feet away. “Who’s at the door, Donnie?”
    The kid turned around and the man came into view. Bob Cheramie. “Mr. Cheramie,” she said. “I wonder if I could—”
    But he could see her now. “Hey! You’re the chick I saw yesterday. With Warren LaGarde.”
    Behind Donnie, he opened the door a little wider. She could see that the room was a kitchen. The more you knew about the house, the stranger it got. Cheramie was holding a