Mean Woman Blues (36 page)

She felt like a different person now; that period was behind her. One good thing was left: her desire to do something besides paint. She was still an artist; that was a given. It wasn’t about to go away. But she was going to paint differently now, maybe with more of an edge. It was a metamorphosis Isaac had gone through, after he’d given up being The White Monk, and she could feel it happening to her. But she was going to do some other work as well; she’d been given an opportunity, and she was going to grab it. She bustled into the hospital full of news.

“Isaac, guess what? The bank dropped the charges. I just had a call from my lawyer. George Pastorek’s still my lawyer! Can you believe it? After all this, he still went right ahead and worked on my problem. He said I have to pay him, though— I have to do some more TV appearances with him, tell what happened to me— and he gave me a chance to work for his consumer group this summer, to help pay my way through school. I have to go to New York, but that’s okay, it’s only for a few months.”

She was a little worried about that part, how Isaac was going to take it. She scrutinized his face; he looked like he’d lost his last friend.

“Oh, Isaac, I won’t go! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”

“It’s not that. You go. I’m happy for you.”

“What is it then?”

“My father died. It was just on CNN.”

The news hit her like a bullet. “Your father? I’m sorry. But…” She was about to say, “You didn’t love him at all,” but she stopped herself.

“I didn’t think I’d be sad, but I am; you only get one father. Terri, he never had a chance.”

She was flabbergasted. The truth was, he’d never given anyone a chance, including his two sons. “I don’t follow.”

“He could have been a good person— a normal, regular, happy person. Something happened, and he just never was; I don’t know what.”

“You mean, like something in his childhood?’

“Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe he was born the way he was. Which makes you wonder—” He left the thought unfinished, apparently unwilling to venture into philosophical territory. “Terri, imagine having to live that way! Always suspicious, always afraid, always scheming, seeing enemies everywhere. Never having someone to love. God, it’s just so sad.”

Terri thought his father was the personification of evil. Isaac might be crazy, he might be in denial, but you couldn’t say he wasn’t generous. She’d never loved him more.

Skip awakened to a fine May morning, with a kiss of breeze off the river and hardly a drop of humidity. She and Shellmire stopped at PJ’s for a
grande
to go and one for Abasolo.

Afterward, Shellmire took off his seersucker jacket and tucked it into Skip’s backseat.

“Hot day,” she said.

“But lovely, isn’t it? Too bad old Errol isn’t here to enjoy it with us. Swear to God, I miss him already.”

“Spare me the black humor, Turner.” Skip spoke more sourly than she intended.

He raised an eyebrow as she got in and started the car. “I thought you’d be in a great mood this morning.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said, and barely said a word on the drive to Mid-City. She was still trying to process the news: that her old enemy was really dead, the years of threat and fear truly over.

By the time they got Abasolo, the coffee had started to kick in. It was almost farther to the sergeant’s house than to the East itself. On the Interstate, it’s no more than seven minutes away, far, far closer than the hour’s drive to the North Shore, though the psychological distance is the length of California.

As she took the high-rise to the East, across the Industrial Canal, she listened to the men banter and noticed that, though it didn’t grate on her particularly, she still wasn’t ready to contribute. She was in the mood that had caused her mother to inquire, when she was a kid, whether she had ants in her pants.
Termites
, she thought. She’d dreamed about them again.

Still joking when they turned onto Bettina’s street the men missed seeing the young woman approaching her building. Skip snapped, “Hey! Something’s going down. Let’s see if that woman goes to Bettina’s apartment. I’m going to cruise by and then stop. Y’all watch her.”

But Skip could see too, out of the corner of her eye. The woman went to Bettina’s door, rang the doorbell, and waited, not even slightly nervous, as if she belonged there and wasn’t expecting cops for breakfast.

Skip cut her motor and parked, still attracting no attention.

Abasolo said, “Let’s go.”

“No, wait. Let’s see if she gets in.”

The woman rang the bell again and knocked. For good measure, she hollered something they couldn’t hear, and even held her ear to the door. When she turned around and for the first time, Skip saw her face, she yelled, “Oh, shit. Let’s get her!”

She got out of the car and started walking. The woman, realizing someone was in the street, looked in her direction and registered nothing.

Skip heard the men get out behind her, and suddenly the woman took off running. Must have looked scary as hell, Skip realized.

She hollered, “Halt! Police!” but the woman wasn’t about to halt. It was a fairly neat little block, mostly single-family homes with front yards unencumbered by fences. Provided there were no cars in driveways (at the moment there weren’t), you could race across them at will, and the woman did.

“Fuck!” Skip muttered to herself and pounded after her. She didn’t hear the men behind her. The woman was younger, smaller, and faster. She rounded the corner, slowing down only a second, but that, and the fact that the girl was not a sprinter, not in shape at all, began to give Skip an advantage. She yelled again, “Halt! Police!” and wondered why she bothered.

But another half block and… yes! A running tackle. She had the girl on the ground, and she was just realizing she was too exhausted to cuff her.

Abasolo loped up. “Turner’s waiting. He’s getting too old for this shit. And by the way, what shit would that be?”

Skip’s breath was ragged. “Cuff her, would you? I can’t move.”

The girl came to life. “You can’t arrest me. I ain’ done nothin’.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why’d you run?” Abasolo didn’t even know why Skip had run, but he was right there, bless his heart.

“Meet Mary Jones,” Skip finally managed to gasp.

“Ah. As in, ‘Mary had a little statue.’ Well, that just do explain things.”

“That ain’ my name,” the girl said.

Abasolo cuffed her while Skip dusted herself off. “Now, Mary…”

“I said that ain’ my name.”

“All right, what is your name?”

“Trenice.”

“Okay, Trenice, what were you doing at the Starnes apartment this morning?”

“I take care of Jacob.”

“You’re the babysitter?”

“Yes, ma’am. Nobody answer this mornin’, though. I don’t know why. Bettina ain’ call me or nothin’; car’s there and everything. And I know I heard Jacob cryin’.”

Skip and Abasolo let their eyes meet. He said, “You and Shellmire go. I’ll take care of her.”

Once again, Skip broke into a dead run; realizing how far she had to go, though, she slowed to a jog, and it irritated her, watching Shellmire watch her toil. He hadn’t put his jacket back on.
Maybe getting older isn’t so bad
, she thought.

“That was the babysitter. Says she got no answer, but she heard the baby crying and the car’s still there.”

“You beat that out of her or what?”

“I’ll explain later. You do the honors.” Her speech was ragged; she was still out of breath and sweating heavily. Shellmire banged loudly, and they waited. And in the silence, a loud wail came back at them, obviously a baby’s cry.

“Jacob?” Skip yelled. “Jacob, it’s okay.” Her dream of termites came back to her, the termites that in her mind, meant Jacomine; meant disaster.

“Do you smell something?” Shellmire asked.

She sniffed the hot air. “Very faintly. I’ve got a bad feeling, Turner.”

On impulse she tried the door; to her amazement it opened.

The smell was stronger, not overpowering, but unmistakable. Something was dead in there. Except for the baby’s cries, all was quiet.

“Bettina? Jacob?”

They split up, guns drawn, Skip down the hall to the bedrooms, Shellmire to the living room and kitchen.

She found the baby first standing up in his crib, now evidently so frightened— or fascinated— he’d stopped crying.

“Hi, Jacob,” she whispered. “You okay, Buddy? Hang tight one more minute, okay?”

Bettina was in the next room, very obviously dead in her bed, an empty medicine vial and a Jim Beam bottle on the table beside her. The room was hot; green flies were already crawling on her. “Turner! In here!”

About that time, the baby started howling again. Shellmire stopped on his way to pick Jacob up. Skip met him in the hall and took the kid. “She’s dead; go look. I don’t want the baby in there.”

She took Jacob into the living room, where she rocked and petted him, not even stopping to open windows. Shellmire came back in, glancing nervously at Jacob. He said, “Ambulance and child protection guys on the way.” He pressed his lips together a moment. “Skip, there’s a note. It’s just lying on the bureau— no envelope, nothing.”

“Take the baby, would you?” Jacob howled anew when she left.

“Without Him, I am nothing,” the note said. And then, without further ado, it got down to business: “I do hereby bequeathe my only son, Jacob Starnes, to the custidy of my sister, Rose Maintree. All my worldly goods I leave to my sister Rose. I am sorry to leave this way.”

It was signed “Bettina Starnes.”

So probably, despite the speed of decomposition, she’d killed herself only the night before. The late spring heat was merciless.

In the past, Skip might have suspected that somehow this had been engineered by Jacomine himself.

Maybe, in a way, it had. Maybe he’d told Bettina to kill herself if he died. Or maybe it was her own idea. If you believed what she wrote, it amounted to the same thing. She must have left the door unlocked, figuring the babysitter would try the door when she got no answer.

It was another hour before the baby had been called for, the body removed, and the crime lab satisfied. In the course of it, Mary Jones had been sent back to the Third in a district car, to await questioning— something Skip was going to enjoy— and Turner, who didn’t have to hang around for the formalities, had left to get an address on Rose Maintree.

When they were all free, Abasolo said, “You can do the talking at Rose’s.”

“Thanks a lot,” Skip said.

“Not at Rose’s house, though,” Shellmire said. “The woman’s a math teacher at Warren Easton High School.”

That might bode well for Jacob
, Skip thought. It had to be better than being raised by Bettina, who might be a child who needed a father, a religious fanatic, or just a crazy person, depending on how you looked at it.

Skip went in alone and broke the news to a dry-eyed, distant Rose Maintree, who, to her surprise, thanked her politely but didn’t ask a word about Jacob. Skip revised her opinion: The little boy, born with physical problems and now orphaned before age two, simply couldn’t catch a break.

Shellmire eyed her when she got back. “How’d it go?”

“Might as well have been talking to a robot. That’s some family; she didn’t even ask about Jacob.”

The agent made a sound like “ooof.”

The termites swarmed that night, driving the whole party— Skip, Steve, and the Scoggin-Ritter family— out of the courtyard and into the Big House.

Sheila had made the entire dinner— a light summer supper, really— to practice her new skills and to celebrate the family’s delivery from what Uncle Jimmy had taken to calling “The Fear Years.” Skip had just told the story of her day.

“It’s almost like Jacomine wasn’t human,” Sheila said.

Skip nodded. “No sociopath has human feelings; that wasn’t what was so scary. Jacomine had no sense of his own limits. Karen told me he actually thought he could be president!”

Steve stopped his fork in midair, like somebody’d ordered him to halt, “Come on!”

“Swear to God. He was going to use the Mr. Right gig to become the most popular man in America— follow right in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps.”

“Oh, my God. Batshit doesn’t begin to describe…”

“Well, it never stopped him before; all in all, being nuts was his biggest asset. That and knowing how to tap into emotional veins. No question that
Mr. Right
show was becoming a phenomenon in Dallas.”

“I’m just curious,” Layne said. “How far do you think he’d have gotten if Terri hadn’t been on his show?”

“Actually, not much farther. The producer told the FBI she thought he’d knocked his wife around after the show, and Karen kept talking about losing a baby. I just wonder if he caused her to miscarry.”

“Meaning he was starting to decompensate?”

“Yeah. He was used to giving all the orders. In the real world— without his precious ‘following’— he couldn’t be his usual megalomaniac self.”

Kenny looked puzzled.

“What’s the matter, sport? Don’t you know that word—
megalomaniac
?’

“Oh, please. You can’t live in this house and not know
megalomaniac
. Power crazy, right? I was thinking of Mary Jones. How’d she pull that scam off, just her and Bettina?”

“Oh, Trenice. I forgot. That’s the best part. She completely caved, told the whole story. She’s just a neighbor of Bettina’s, not a Jacomine follower or anything like that. Bettina offered her money to do that little impersonation she did. Looks like that’s the whole gang, just Bettina and the babysitter. Plus a couple of guys Bettina hired to steal the stuff they put in Steve’s backyard.”

“Either of them named Lobo, by any chance?”

“That’s the bad news. Darnell and William.”

Steve grumped, “Lobo’s probably the asshole that poisoned Napoleon.”

“And shot at me.”

“So what’s gonna happen?” Kenny asked.

Skip shrugged.

“Lobo’s Frank O’Rourke’s headache; O’Rourke’s the point man on Isaac’s case, and good luck to him. But Trenice’ll probably go down. And maybe somebody at the
Times-Picayune
’ll get a good yarn out of it all.”