P.I. On A Hot Tin Roof

by Julie Smith

  “Why?”

  “Says to let sleeping dogs lie. Why does that generation love clichés so much?”

  “Well, I figured it was just some kind of family stuff. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t take it seriously.” She tried again with her question. “But, listen, what was going on with this Bob guy?”

  “I don’t know. Is it important?”

  “Let me put it this way. I’m thinking Buddy’s death had something to do with the marina—and I saw this guy there. Can you find out his name?”

  “Probably. Let me call you tomorrow. By the way, haven’t you put in about twelve hours by now?”

  “At least. Should I stop?”

  Kristin didn’t answer right away. Finally, she said, “Let’s keep on it.”

  Talba hung up, feeling like the phone call alone was a day’s work. She went to feed her own whiny cats.

  And by morning, she had the shrimper’s name—Kristin had left it on her voicemail at work. The guy was Bob Cheramie, and he lived near Lake St. Catherine, just up the road from Venetian Isles, the area where the Dorands lived. What, she wondered, was a shrimper’s schedule like? (Assuming he came home at night, that is—she knew they often stayed out a few days at a time.) Well, she had to assume it. The old Benjamin Franklin, she surmised—early and early. And she’d missed the first early. Just in case, she made a pretext call to the Cheramie home, and ascertained that Mr. Cheramie, to quote his voicemail, was out. So it would have to be sometime between the first and the second earlys: just before dinnertime, perhaps.

  This would be a perfect day, she decided, for a drive to Covington—to see if Kristin had two parents who hated her. Like Venetian Isles, Covington was a place Talba had never been to—though she’d heard plenty about it. It was in upscale St. Tammany Parish, across the lake, and there just wasn’t much reason to go there if you were a young African-American starving poet and computer jockey. Add “P.I.” to the mix, and there might be, but so far it hadn’t come up.

  What she had done before was cross the causeway over Lake Pontchartrain, and she dreaded doing it again. Unlike the more familiar—and attractive—suspension bridge, with its sweeping views, this one was built on concrete pilings, and crossing it felt like driving an endless white road across an infinite stretch of nondescript water. In truth, it was only twenty-four miles long, but it felt like a hundred. It had to be the most boring bridge in the world. The “north shore,” as St. Tammany Parish was known in New Orleans, was a popular white-flight area, and there were times when Talba simply couldn’t understand white people. The idea might be to get away from crime and grime, but to her no amount of safety and fresh air was worth twice-daily ordeals on that soul-destroying span.

  On the other side, she encountered tree-lined highways and—yes!—relentless cleanliness. The malls seemed brand new, the grass freshly mowed, the cars scrubbed shiny. It was about seven miles from the end of the bridge to Covington, and the town itself was preceded by the usual stretch of Anywhere, U.S.A.—fast-food emporia, gas stations, supermarkets, Kinko’s, Wal-Mart, and Office Depot.

  She followed the signs for the Covington Central Business District, and immediately after crossing the Bogue Falaya River, found herself on a street boasting offshoots of the more local businesses you could find in New Orleans itself—but upscale ones only. Here was another Villa Vici (furniture), Mignon Faget (jewelry), and Ballin’s (clothing), plus a couple of familiar restaurants, one of which was a branch of the world-revered Acme Oyster House. At least those with no need to commute didn’t have to hit the causeway for food and spiffy supplies.

  But the business district wasn’t at all what she pictured. She’d been expecting a picturesque main drag lined with storefronts housing darling boutiques and adorable gift shops, of the sort you’d find in a tourist town. But Covington wasn’t a tourist town. Its business seemed to be conducted largely out of several streets’ worth of converted houses, mostly bungalows that seemed to her to date from the 1920s or so. Spanish moss hung from the trees, a phenomenon you didn’t see on the other side of the lake. It was quite charming in a completely unselfconscious way.

  Inside the bungalows, according to the signs, were lawyers’ offices, health-food stores (three that she counted), coffeehouses, a cigar store, and a pub or two. She found Greta LaGarde’s antiques shop in a cottage nestled between a store that sold musical instruments and one that housed a day-care center.

  The store was a far cry from the dusty flea-market sort, and another whoop and holler from the elegance of Royal Street. It was actually more like a gift shop. There was a lot of good stuff for wedding gifts with price tags taped to them set out on beautifully restored tables. Huge bowls held decorative painted balls that had no reason for being except to fill empty bowls. Silver and brass candelabra, some with crystals hanging on them, held fancy beeswax candles that also could be had for a price. Festooned sconces and gold mirrors hung on the walls. It was almost painfully Tasteful. Talba itched to hang some Mardi Gras beads and strew some ethnic fabrics around to funk it up a little.

  And its proprietor, if it was she, was a step up from the store itself. She looked as if she could preside with perfect poise over the snootiest emporium of elegance. In fact, she more or less personified elegance, and she was a step up from the current Mrs. LaGarde as well—in appearance, at any rate. She wore her age the way Diane Keaton did—as if she came from a distant planet where a beautiful older woman was as much prized as a beautiful older table.

  Her thick silver hair cascaded in a lush bob, and her lavender sweater and midcalf black skirt perfectly complemented it. Small gold and diamond earrings that veered over the line from merely Tasteful to baroquely elegant glittered at her ears, though they showed only when she flicked her hair a certain way. She was every inch a Greta, and almost a baroness, though in a European kind of way.

  “Mrs. LaGarde?” Talba asked, almost timidly.

  “Yes? I’m Greta LaGarde.” She looked at her visitor with curiosity but no disrespect, as if hardly anyone approaching her description ever entered the premises, yet was welcome anyhow, on the off-chance she happened to have a pocketful of bucks.

  Talba introduced herself. “I’m Talba Wallis, and I’m doing some work for your daughter. I’m a P.I., actually—she hired me to try to find out what happened to her fiancé.”

  “Really.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I was wondering if you knew Buddy Champagne.” Talba watched her face carefully, and was not disappointed. A telling little eleven formed between her brows—the gorgeous Greta evidently eschewed Botox along with vulgar hair color. There was anger there—though at whom it was directed Talba could only guess.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died, he didn’t disappear—or am I missing something?”

  “What happened the night he died, I mean.”

  “You mean who killed him? Don’t we have police for that? Leave it to Kristin to think she can do a better job than they can.”

  “I’ve noticed she has her own opinions.”

  “Well, that’s an understatement, one opinion being that her mother didn’t need to meet her fiancé.” LaGarde turned her back, straightening a candle that looked perfectly upright to Talba. “I’m afraid I never knew the man. I wasn’t even at her engagement party.”

  “Oh. Well, I happened to be there, and I don’t believe she knew it was meant to be an engagement party—Buddy kind of sneaked up on her.”

  “You were there?” She turned around and stabbed Talba with a thrust of blue eyes. “You must be…I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Guilty as charged. Yes, I’m the woman you may have seen on the news.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why would Kristin hire you, of all people?”

  Talba tried out a weak little laugh, a nervous one. She should have seen this coming. “Good question. I’m a little confused about it myself. But I guarantee you she did—if you like, you can call her and confirm it.�
� Talba held her breath—this was the one thing she didn’t want Greta LaGarde to do.

  “No, I believe you. It’s the sort of thing Kristin would do. She always likes to make herself look good—it’s her stock in trade.”

  Talba wasn’t following. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Look, if you’re successful—and you’ve already shown yourself to be competent—then she gets the credit for solving Buddy’s murder.”

  “Why would she want to do that? Couldn’t it be simpler? Couldn’t it just be that she wants to know the truth?”

  LaGarde laughed. “Kristin? Nothing’s ever simple with my daughter, Miss Wallis. You must know that by now.”

  The time had come, Talba thought, to let down her hair. “To tell you the truth, your ex-husband went so far as to warn me against her. I was wondering—it is kind of an odd situation—can you shed any light on it?”

  “I’m sure Warren has his own agenda. He always does. What was it you wanted to see me about?” She was getting haughtier by the minute. And on her, haughty looked intimidating.

  “Sometimes the tiniest piece of information can lead to something. I was just curious to know what you thought about the man your daughter was going to marry.”

  “I only know what she told me—after the fact. The fact of his death, I mean, not their engagement. I first heard they were engaged when Warren called me in a fury—after the damn engagement party.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  She didn’t seem to know how to answer that one—didn’t seem to have considered hurt. Finally, she said, “Yes. It did.”

  “I gather you aren’t close.”

  At that, her eyes watered. “I’d like to be. The good Lord only knows I’ve always wanted that. My daughter pushes me away at every opportunity.”

  Bitterness here, Talba thought, and wondered if she could capitalize on it. “She seems to be close to her father.”

  Greta snorted, and it isn’t pretty when a personage like Greta snorts. “If you can be close to a glacier.”

  “I gather he didn’t approve of the match. I’m wondering…” Talba geared up for a lie. “Well, here’s the real reason I wanted to talk to you. It’s a little delicate, but I get the impression Kristin’s worried that he may have killed Buddy to stop the marriage. Is that possible?”

  Greta was back in possession of herself. “That Kristin would knowingly set her father up for exposure? Or that Warren would kill someone? No to the first. She’d take the information and find a way to use it to get what she wants from him.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’ve never understood a single thing about my daughter—or my ex-husband for that matter.”

  “I see—and the second question?”

  “Would Warren kill someone if it suited him? Certainly. That night he called, he ranted about what trash Buddy was. He said he couldn’t see why the girl’s mother—that was what he called me—‘the girl’s mother’—couldn’t do anything to stop it. I said it was none of my business, and he said, ‘Goddammit, I hope I’m not going to have to kill him.’”

  Talba felt a need to double-check what she was hearing. “He threatened to kill Buddy?”

  She sniffed. “If that’s a threat, I guess he did. I know one thing. He’s certainly capable of killing someone if that person’s in his way. I’m not sure he hasn’t.”

  Where to go with that one, Talba wondered. Was this too much information? “Uh…I’m at a bit of a loss. Are you saying you suspect him of killing someone else?”

  Greta laughed, her laugh as bitter as her words. “Certainly not. You wanted to know who he is, and no one knows better than me. A man who’d leave his wife of twenty-five years and the mother of his child for some tacky little floozy—after everything those two put me through—would probably kill someone too. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Talba laughed too, but with a certain amount of humor. Greta had unwittingly said something funny, to Talba, anyway. “It would depend on what he’d put me through.”

  “Kristin. That was enough. I never wanted to have children, but Warren wanted a son.”

  This was a woman who was at least a couple of stitches short of a sweater. Maybe a whole row of stitches. “Toxic parents” was a term Talba had heard, but never really understood. She was getting the hang of it now. The question was, which parent was the more toxic?

  For all she knew, Greta might have killed Buddy for no better reason than to derail Kristin’s happiness. She was also beginning to see what Kristin saw in Buddy—with parents like these, he was a prince.

  “By the way,” she said, “what was it Kristin told you about Buddy after the fact?”

  “She told me I’d have hated him. But she was wrong. Anybody who can handle that one is welcome to her.”

  Chapter 19

  After that dose of cyanide, Talba felt disoriented. She stopped for gas in Mandeville and, seeing that she was on a lovely road lined with peaceful-looking pines, decided to continue for a bit, to have a drive in the country to see if she could shake Greta’s ghost.

  She passed a plethora of upscale subdivisions, some of them gated, but she never got the feeling of being crowded, or even particularly in the suburbs. It still felt like the country, and even more so once she came to the Tchefuncte River in Madisonville, whose banks were planted with wide swaths of grass. She stopped the car and sat on a concrete bench under an oak on the far bank, thinking to digest the experience while looking at water.

  Kristin was coming into much clearer focus. Talba thought of the way Adele loved her, Lucy loved her—the way she worked so hard for their esteem, the way she was always volunteering to do things. She must be one of those pleasers who tap-danced for every audience she could muster because no matter how fast she’d moved her little legs as a kid, her parents saw only missteps. It would explain her extramarital affairs, too—probably no amount of approval was ever enough.

  Poisonous as the interview had been, Talba was glad she’d had it. It was a somewhat unconventional way of backgrounding the client, but a lot more informative than surfing the Net (though she’d never admit it to Eddie).

  But her bread and butter came from surfing and she went back to the office to put in a day of it—on other cases—to pass the time until she judged a shrimper might be home. Sixish, maybe. She left the office at five, once more taking I-10 to Chef Menteur and cruising the Chef until she came to the 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 d
oor 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.”