The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (12 page)

“I thought that was just AA.”

“It’s just not a party crowd. Which brings me to the reason I called. I’m having an Axeman party. Come and protect the rest of us. You could even wear your uniform.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“I’m sorry. I knew it was going to happen. I was just thinking what a nightmare that whole thing’s going to be—if we don’t catch him by then. Sort of a mini-Mardi Gras.”

“Listen, Skippy, the party’s on even if you do. Please come!”

“I have a horrible feeling I’m going to be working.”

“I hope not—you won’t believe the band we’re having.”

And then the dreaded call did come.

“Skippy, I thought I ought to let you know I saw you at the meeting.” Skip stifled a sigh as she realized her mother’s voice was back to normal—too sugary, trying too hard to please; phony as Naugahyde. “I know why you were there and I just wanted to let you know I won’t blow your cover.”

The TV words sounded strange with no r’s, pillowed into a softness that belied their origin.

“Mother. Thanks for calling. I guess you noticed I was hiding.”

“That’s why I didn’t speak to you.”

“Well, thank you for that. But I need to ask you something important—what do you mean you know why I was there?”

“Well, you just said you were hiding.”

“Did you mean you thought I was on a case?”

“Of course I thought you were on a case. You wouldn’t be caught dead at a meeting like that.”

Did she dare press it anymore? She thought not. There was no way an Uptown matron could know which case she was on. But she had to hand it to her mother—she had great instincts. Any other mom would see her overweight daughter at OA and rejoice. How had Elizabeth figured it out? She decided, for the moment, not to ask.

“I didn’t think you would either.”

“Well, there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

“I liked the way you talked in there.”

“Well, it wasn’t for you, it was for me. I didn’t see you till later. And I was mortified.”

“Mortified! Why?”

“What I said was personal.”

Oh, brother
. “Well, I’m sorry I overheard it. But I really liked it. You sounded so real.”

“Real! What do you mean by that?”

“I just liked it, that’s all.”

“Well, I don’t mean to pry, but I was wondering about your case. If the police are coming to OA meetings, it must mean something.”

Oh, it does; it does. And what do you do when you have a potential great source with a mouth like a tuba and not an ethical bone in her body?

Run for cover.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Skippy, please. Did I ever tell you what Santa was bringing?”

“Well, look, I really can’t discuss departmental business, but you know how women go to those meetings and kind of put their purses down and get all involved and don’t pay attention?”

“You’re looking for a pickpocket.”

“Well, I can’t really say, but anyway, whatever it is, we’ve had several complaints. And I mean several. I just think I need to warn you to be careful when you go to the meetings. In fact…”

“What, Skippy?”

“Maybe you should consider not going for a while.”

“Because of a
pickpocket
?”

Damn, she’d gone too far. “Just a thought, that’s all.”

“It’s not a pickpocket! Skip Langdon, you tell me what this is all about.”

It was the voice of a parent speaking to a five-year-old—a bullying parent, and she heard it as such. Normally, she realized, she would simply have responded without recognizing it, but the professional dilemma was giving her distance. She was still so busy trying to resolve her problem that she could listen to what was happening, be objective about it.
I must have heard that voice a thousand times,
she thought, and realized with a pang how different it was from the one shed heard in the meeting.

“I’m really sorry, Mother, but you know I can’t discuss department business.”

“You lied to me!”

“Mother, I really need your help. Were you serious about not blowing my cover?”

“Well, if there’s danger, I think people ought to know about it.”

She spoke slowly, hoping her voice sounded calm. “Listen, it can’t hurt to watch your purse, can it? It would really help me if we could leave it at that right now.”

“How dumb do you think I am, Margaret Langdon? Do you think I’ve forgotten you’re in Homicide?”

Oh, shit!

But, exasperated, she found herself laughing. “I forgot you knew. Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. I was there for the same reason you were.”

“I know you weren’t. Even if you
are
fat as a pig, you wouldn’t go to OA any more than you’d go to church on Sunday. The way you neglect your spiritual life is just outrageous.”

“That’s not true, Mother. I’m praying for a higher power to come to my rescue right now.”

But when she’d finally gotten off the phone, it didn’t seem funny at all. She noticed she was sweating, even though the AC was on high. Her hands trembled. She hadn’t realized Elizabeth still had so much power over her.

She stripped to her underwear and sat on the floor, closing her eyes and taking deep breaths. She had a dozen books on meditation, wanted its promised solace like some people want to quit smoking, but she could never seem to sit still long enough to make it work. At the moment attempts to empty her mind resulted only in the ping-ponging of disjointed thoughts.

Was her mother in danger? Had she sacrificed the personal for the professional?

Surely, surely, surely not. There’s a million twelve-step groups. What are the chances the killer’s in that one?

But something Elizabeth had said echoed in her mind:
There’s a lot you don’t know about me.

Maybe she went to three meetings a day, like Mary Shoemaker. Skip dismissed the thought:
Anyone who’d make that remark about my “spiritual life” couldn’t possibly have one.

That was the ping; the pong said,
You don’t really know.

And the ping said, Don’t be silly.
You’re just feeling guilty because she manipulated you into it.

Over it all reverberated the part that really counted, the part that would be there for a long time, the phrase that even Steve Steinman wouldn’t be able to kiss away:

Fat as a pig!

Fat as a pig!

Fat as a pig!

“I’M DI, AND I’m codependent.”

“Hi, Di.”

Di was a gorgeous woman, a woman of a certain age, but what age that was Skip couldn’t have said—thirties to fifties was the best she could do. It hardly mattered. She had probably been ordinary at birth, awkward at twelve, and magnificent at fifteen; she would die magnificent so long as she didn’t let her hair go gray. In ten or twenty years, even that wouldn’t hurt.

She was small, a quality about which Skip was ambivalent at best. Yet she was so perfectly proportioned, so oddly beautiful in that dark, strange way of Southern women, that even tall people couldn’t miss her. She wore black jeans and a T-shirt with a hand-painted parrot on it, a lavender parrot. Her expensive, many-strapped sandals showed plenty of toe cleavage; her toenail polish matched her parrot. A lesser dresser, Skip thought, would also have worn lavender eye shadow, but Di had chosen a dull gold. She was as well turned out as she was beautiful. The odd thing about her was the oversized doll in her lap.

This was obviously a hugely popular meeting—there were probably fifty people in the small, stuffy room, sitting either on the floor or on half-size chairs meant for children. It was a Sunday-school room in a Baptist church, a cheerful yellow room, the walls decked with children’s drawings, a room apparently chosen for ambience rather than comfort.

Skip had chosen the floor over one of the tiny chairs, but still she felt huge and awkward, wildly uncomfortable, restless as a kid in Sunday school. Maybe that was part of the deal. It didn’t matter a damn because this was where she wanted to be. Fully a third of the people in the room, not one of whom was a child or even a teenager, cuddled teddy bears or dolls.

Mary Shoemaker had described the group a little—it was Codependents Anonymous (Coda, to initiates) with an inner-child focus—but she hadn’t mentioned anything about toys. And why should she have? Tom Mabus’s teddy bear was one of those details that hadn’t been given to the press.

Di led the group through virtually the same twelve-step ritual Skip had so detested at OA, but this time she found herself relaxing a little, almost getting used to it.

Di said the subject was vulnerability.

“I talked to my daughter today,” she said, “and she said to me, ‘Mom, you’re still a kid, you’re always going to be a kid.’ And I was hurt. Isn’t that weird? Nothing is more important to me than this group. Some of you know how hard I’ve worked to let my kid out, to really experience things like a child again, but when she said that, I thought, ‘You’re supposed to be a mother, not a kid. If your kid thinks you’re a kid, there must be something wrong with you.’ And I realized how vulnerable my inner child still is, how much more work I have to do, reassuring her and letting her know she’s loved.”

There was more, some of which Skip followed and some of which she didn’t. Mostly, she found herself distracted, wondering why the hell a grown woman would be so hurt by something her daughter said.

Fat as a pig!
came at her like a slap in the face, and with it the memory of her feelings when she’d heard her mother share, some of them adult, lots of them childish.

So that’s it. Your inner child is the part of you that didn’t grow up, that kicks in when your parents run the same old familiar numbers on it.

But was that it? Di was talking about something that had happened with her daughter, not her mother. And what did the dolls and teddy bears mean?

“I’m Leon and I’m codependent.”

“Hi, Leon.”

Despite the heat, Leon wore a coat and tie, the tie loose at the neck.

He could have just taken it off.

But she suspected Leon hardly ever took off his tie, maybe slept in it, if the worry lines around his mouth were any indication. She remembered Cindy Lou’s remarks about obsessiveness. Leon looked as if he had it in spades. He had thinning blond hair and a wiry body, could have been attractive if he’d known how to smile.

“We don’t have vulnerability in my family. We work in banks or maybe shipping companies and we rise to the top.” He said the last four words in a mock bass and he did smile. And he
was
attractive.

The teddy bear in his lap was the size of a two-year-old. He stroked it as if it were a real animal.

“We don’t get hurt, we get mad. We’re an entire family of rageaholics. If somebody says to us, ‘Hey, Leon, baby, it kind of gets to me the way you always forget my birthday and never come home till midnight and always have to go to the office on Saturday,’ and I think, ‘I’ll divorce you now,’ do we get upset? Do we say, ‘Hey, I’m losing my wife, I must have really screwed up, this really hurts’? Not in my family we don’t. We stuff all our feelings of hurt and guilt and spew out bile. After we yell at her awhile, we say, ‘You know, she never was good enough for the likes of us. Her family comes from New Iberia and her butt’s too big and always was.’ And then we say, ‘If she thinks she’s getting a penny of our money, she’s out of her pathetic Cajun mind.’ ”

Skip realized she knew who he was. He was Leon Wheatley, whose divorce was infamous Uptown; for days while it was happening, Alison Gaillard had fed her chilling stories of Wheatley arrogance and penuriousness. But here was Leon, from one of the fanciest families in New Orleans, making what amounted to a public confession with a teddy bear on his lap.

“We always make it the other guy’s fault. We’ll do anything to keep from admitting we might be hurt. We don’t have an inner child. In fact, we never get to be children even when we’re under ten. So I’m having to kind of…” He paused, sweating from the effort, Skip thought, of what he was saying “…give birth to one. He feels bad sometimes and I let him do that. I just let him know that’s okay, it’s okay to feel bad. Nothing like that’s ever been okay in my family.”

His voice was almost a whisper by the time he was done. He was still caressing the bear with strong, sensual strokes that he seemed to be using to distract himself. There was something weird about it, something raw and embarrassing—as if he were doing it to the bear because it was what he wanted for himself. Skip wanted to hug him, to comfort him, and understood that his need was so strong, had been so openly expressed, that it was practically impossible not to feel that way.

Leon Wheatley!

She couldn’t believe any adult on the planet could do what he’d just done in front of strangers, and certainly not Leon Wheatley.

Again, she wanted to applaud, to go up and clap him on the back. Half of what he’d said made no sense at all to her, but the way he said it had seemed so real, had reminded her so much of Elizabeth speaking, that she couldn’t help being moved.

A man named Abe shared next, another tall wiry one, wearing glasses. “I was the kind of kid who always got everything I wanted. I mean I came from that kind of family.”

I bet. You’ve got that smug voice guys get whose mothers told them every day how great they were.

And I’m jealous.

“I’m trying to deal now with what happens when you can’t have what you want. I realize my kid just never developed those muscles—the ones that handle vulnerability. There’s a lot of things I want right now that I can’t have. I don’t even want to live in this city, but I have to now. I don’t want to be the age I am; I want things I can’t get anymore.”

Things! You mean women, right?

“I have to talk to my kid; I say, ‘Listen, I’m trying to be a good parent—to you, and to my own birth-children—but it isn’t easy because I’m kind of a kid myself.’ ”

Skip decided this wasn’t getting her any clearer on the concept and let her mind wander. She thought Abe seemed to be talking to someone in particular, and looked where he was looking. A lovely young blonde, no doubt the sort he couldn’t get anymore, might be the object of his affection, but she looked as if she was with the young man sitting next to her. (Of course
he
might be the target, but Skip didn’t think so.)