The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (17 page)

“I wonder if you know a woman named Di? Diamara Breaux?”

”Am I supposed to?” The young woman had a full mouth, wore no lipstick, and could have been a movie star.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe this might be a kind of center for people who’re into voodoo.”

The voodoo woman shrugged.

“I need to find her.”

“I don’t know her.” Her mouth hardened and she went back to her book.

Skip hadn’t mentioned her job because she didn’t want to tip Di’s voodoo friends that a cop was asking about her. But she believed this woman; she seemed authentically not to give a damn.

She pulled out her badge. “I’m Skip Langdon. New Orleans police.”

“Oh.” The woman laid the book down, her face serene.

“Good book?”

“I’m sorry. I thought you were a weirdo. We get ’em in here.”

“Could I ask your name?”

“Kendra. Kendra Guillory.”

“Pretty name. Listen, you’re not in trouble and neither is the woman I asked about. I’m just trying to verify whether she’s really who she says she is. I gather by your book that you work here because you’re interested.”

Guillory waited.

Skip wondered why she felt so embarrassed. She had a feeling there was something secret about practicing voodoo, that people didn’t like being asked about it. “I don’t know how to say this, exactly,” she said, “but is there a sort of voodoo community in New Orleans? Do people who practice get together? Do they know each other?”

“We prefer to call it Voudun.”

“Sorry.”

She shrugged again. “This woman says she’s a priestess, right? She offers to do spells and gris-gris for a price—is that the idea?”

“I can’t really talk about that.”

“I hate these frauds, I swear I do. We don’t do it for money. It’s a religion. People don’t get that. You know what she probably did? She probably read a couple of books”—she swept an arm around—“and now she says she can raise the dead or something. Maybe she channels Marie Laveau. You wouldn’t believe some of these people.”

“You’re sure you don’t know her?”

“Don’t know the name. What’s she look like?”

“White. Very small, black hair with a lot of curls, perfect figure—extremely pretty woman. Maybe forty, maybe fifty; I don’t know.”

“Look, membership is secret. If she were an initiate, I couldn’t tell you. But I hate these damn frauds. So, okay, I don’t know her.”

“Well, that’s a big help. How do I know you’re not protecting her?”

“You don’t. But I’m trying to help you.”

“Do white people do this stuff? Just tell me that.”

“Whooo! You’d better believe it. Here’s something—have you seen her altar?”

“Her altar?”

“Yeah. If she’s for real, she’ll have an altar with spirit water on it, maybe an ancestor picture, some statues and shells or something. It’d be kind of spooky-looking, I guess; to you. There’s one in the museum—you can go look if you want.”

“Where would she have it?”

Guillory shrugged. “Could be anywhere in her house.”

Skip cursed herself for not taking an investigative trip to the bathroom. “How about stars and crescents?”

“On her altar?”

“On some kind of velvet cloth with a crystal ball on it.”

Guillory rolled her eyes. “Forget it. Look, I’ll even make some calls for you.”

Skip perused the literature, catching up on the seven African Powers while Guillory made her calls.

“Nothing,” she said finally. “If she were really practicing, she’d have to shop at a botanica. There’s only one, and there’s one magic shop where you can get incense and stuff. I just checked them out. Nobody’s ever seen this babe.” Guillory’s earrings were made of brown feathers with white dots. They swung with the rhythm of her indignation.

“Uh-oh. Maybe you should put a gris-gris on her.”

“That’s not what we do. This museum is here for educational purposes and I’m going to educate you right now. Listen to this and listen good—we don’t go around hexing people. You ever heard of Elleggua the Trickster? I saw you looking at those books, maybe you have by now. You start hexing, what do you think Elleggua’s going to do? He’s probably going to remind you that what goes around comes around: If that woman’s a fraud, let him deal with her; I don’t want him dealing with me.”

She was frowning, and failing so utterly in her efforts to look fierce that for the first time Skip realized she probably wasn’t even twenty yet.

Feeling silly and not a little intrigued, she asked Guillory to recommend a couple of books, and bought them.

Then she went home and called Cindy Lou.

“Hey, girl. You caught this creep yet?”

“You mind being called on Saturday?”

“Hell, no. It’s good to hear from you. I could feel left out if I let myself.”

“That’s how I spend my life. There’s a lot of good guys in that department, but somehow I always end up working with O’Rourke.”

“Hodges is kind of crotchety too. But Adam Abasolo—now, there’s a fox.”

Thinking of Steve Steinman, she said, “I kind of like teddy bears.”

“Honey, I know what you mean. And they’re so good for the inner child. But you didn’t call me up for girl talk, I bet.”

“I need professional help.”

“My meter’s running.”

“How can I find out if somebody who says she’s a therapist really is?”

“Look in the phone book, maybe?”

“Oh, shit.” She hadn’t looked, somehow assuming that wasn’t Di’s style. “Hold on a minute.” As she checked, she filled Cindy Lou in on Di and her two peculiar last-minute statements of the night before. “Anyway,” she finished, “the voodoo folks don’t know her. And now I’ve checked the phone book. She’s not under ‘psychotherapists.’ Are there organizations she ought to belong to? She says she does hypnotism—does she have to have some kind of certificate for that?”

“So far as I know, in Louisiana anybody can hang out their shingle and say they’re a hypnotherapist. But most of them know each other—you could see if they know her. And yes, there are organizations she might join. If she’s a therapist who happens to know hypnotism, she’d have to be licensed to be in private practice.”

Skip asked who did the licensing and made a note to follow up first thing Monday morning.

Cindy Lou said, “Listen, you get into anything interesting, call me up. You know what? I like working with you. There’s not that many people appreciate my sense of humor. You always laugh in meetings.”

Skip couldn’t stifle a smile, though no one could see it. Cindy Lou liked working with her. Cindy Lou had specifically asked to work with her. Her hero had spoken kindly.

“Hey, girl, I’ve got an idea. I guess I can’t do it, but you can. Or maybe it’s routine—I don’t know. I was thinking about not just asking people’s neighbors about them or whatever you do, but visiting their families. Seeing where they come from.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You could use some kind of ruse. Just kind of check out the scene.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“Well, if you run into something really ugly, you could concentrate on that person. A serial killer doesn’t just come out of nowhere—he comes out of hatred and meanness. You know that FBI study? They put together a chart of family background characteristics based on their interviews. The stuff they found the killers had in common varied from thirty-three percent to seventy-four percent. Guess what was seventy-four? History of psychological abuse. Next was seventy-two percent—’negative relationship with male caretaker figures.’ You could look for that kind of stuff. You might get a feeling about someone.”

“Police work—” She stopped. She’d almost said, “Police work isn’t about feelings,” but she knew better than to speak that way to a psychologist; she’d probably be told it ought to be. There was something else as well—intuition did play a part in police work; a big part. If you had a feeling somebody with a gun was behind you, you’d better duck first and then turn around. She said, “I’ll think about it, Cindy Lou.”

She sat by the cradled phone awhile and tried to get the idea out of her mind. It was preposterous. It could very well be a waste of time….

That one didn’t fly. What else was she going to do with her time?

… And it wasn’t sound police work. That was the important one. You didn’t go around questioning a suspect’s intimates unless they were mad at him; if they were on speaking terms, word would get back. But in this case, what if word did get back? Did that mean he’d stop killing? Would that be so bad?

Somehow it didn’t strike her that forebearing to talk to people’s relatives at this point was going to make or break the case. And she liked the idea. She really liked the idea. She didn’t have the least sense of what made some of these people tick. Especially Di.

And Joe had said to be creative.

She attacked the phone book.

There were enough Breauxs in it to populate the state of Rhode Island, and she didn’t even know if Breaux was Di’s married or maiden name, or one she’d taken for good luck. But one thing was sure—there couldn’t be more than one Diamara Breaux in town. If anybody was related to her, they’d know who she was talking about.

She put on a pair of shorts and got a glass of instant iced tea. And in a scant hour and fifteen minutes had located Diamara’s mother. She’d said only that she was a friend who was looking for Di. Next she’d have to think of an excuse to ask impertinent questions—if she decided to get creative.

She sat on the floor and tried to meditate. She did this a couple of times a week, often more, and hadn’t yet succeeded. Today she lasted eight minutes, most of it spent trying to keep from thinking about what made Di tick.

If it was supposed to relax her, it didn’t. But if she was getting in touch with her feelings, she made progress, though of a sort she didn’t need. In the tiny mind-clearing interval—maybe thirty scattered seconds—she became aware of how tired she was, how much effort it took to pretend she was someone she wasn’t.

Only the thought of the two victims made her get dressed and keep her coffee date with Missy and Sonny. Missy had said they worked at Charity Hospital, asked to meet her in the lobby.

She wore shorts and a T-shirt. “Hi, Skip. This is gon’ have to be real informal. Sonny’s on duty in the emergency room. Nothing much is going on this afternoon, but he can’t really go too far. Maybe just the coffee room inside?”

Skip hesitated. Most Homicide detectives spent a lot of time in Charity’s accident room. If she saw someone she knew, her cover was blown. On the other hand, if she refused, she’d draw attention to herself. “Sure,” she said finally, and hoped for the best.

As they headed down the corridor, she said, “Is Sonny a doctor?”

“Second-year medical student.”

Skip came back quickly before Missy could ask what she did. “Are you two married?”

Missy gave her a shy smile and held up her left hand. “Not quite yet.”

Skip took her hand and examined the diamond. “What a lovely ring.”

“I’m a real, real lucky girl. Sometimes I can’t even believe a great guy like Sonny could love me.” A look flitted on and off her face, a look so sad Skip nearly winced. “This way.”

Sonny was sitting on a bench in the hallway of the Accident Room, actually a complex of small treatment rooms that Skip knew only too well, as did most cops in the city. He was reading a newspaper, waiting for them.

“Honey, you remember Skip? From Thursday night?”

“I don’t think we actually got introduced.” He held out his hand. She was sure he hadn’t the slightest recollection of her.

“I saw you two and I thought how nice you looked.”

“That just shows how deceiving appearances can be.” With his words came the disarming smile that had probably been automatic for him since he was two and a half. Or did they teach it to fraternity pledges the way medical schools taught doctors who God was? She wondered if he’d learned that lesson yet, and for the first time thought about whether or not it came easy.

Sonny led them to a closet of a coffee room with a Chez Panisse poster on the wall. What a weird thing, Skip thought, with all the great restaurants in New Orleans.

Missy had brought cups of good coffee from somewhere and served them up, saying she was sorry about the Styrofoam. She’d also picked up a bag of bakery cookies. This was a girl who had raised “nice” to a fine and delicate art. A Southern girl. Skip caught herself thinking “girl” instead of “woman” and considered the implications; she decided the judgment was right.

She thought it must be a measure of spiritual growth that at the moment she no longer felt either intimidated by these two or contemptuous of them because they were perfect. They understood the rules, had been born knowing how to be Southerners, how to fit in, how to be properly female in Missy’s case, male in Sonny’s, how to be homecoming queen or captain of the football team. They were golden, they were sun-kissed.

They were from Mars.

Or that was her feeling some of the time about the Missys and Sonnys of the world. That was when she felt contemptuous. She knew, of course, that she was actually the Martian; when that bothered her, she felt intimidated. At the moment, she merely admired them. Plato would have, she felt sure—would have known them for the ideal they were.

There was only one thing wrong with this perfect picture—she’d met them in a twelve-step program, the first step being an admission that your life was out of control. Obviously they weren’t there to meet people; even if they hadn’t had each other, these two didn’t need mixers. Of course they were codependent—Missy noticeably so, and Sonny on the grounds that nearly everyone was, according to the experts. But the fact that they’d noticed it made them different from the usual run of perfect couples.

She decided to come out with it. “You two look so well-adjusted—I was really amazed to see you in the meeting.”

Missy shook her head, smiling a little wistfully. “I wonder what ‘well-adjusted’ is.”

Sonny said, “Well-adjusted, hell. How about sane? Who do you know who’s even sane?”

“You look sane as anything to me.”

Missy rested an elbow on his shoulder. “Oh, he is. You wouldn’t believe how sane he is, and I don’t know what on earth I’d do without him.”