The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (29 page)

“That’s what you meant by thirty suspects—they all go to this damn thing, don’t they?”

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been going myself.”

He kept on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Oh, baby, have you got yourself a case. ‘Murder Anonymous.’ ‘Twelve Steps to Murder.’ ‘Hi. I’m Alex and I’m a compulsive killer.’ Promise me one thing. Sell me the movie rights.”

“Shut up, dammit.” She was trying to wipe smeared lipstick off her chin.

“I’m serious. It’d be a hell of a movie.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something? I haven’t solved it yet.”

He wasn’t listening. “So that’s what the A is for.”

“What, Alex? I hate to tell you, but half the suspects have A names and so does one of the cops on the task force.”

“It might be for ‘Anonymous.’ ”

“Why not Axeman?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, who the hell knows? We don’t know what the A means and we’ve been working on it twenty-four hours a day. What makes you think you can come in and figure it out in twenty minutes?”

“Touchy, aren’t we?”

Skip’s lipstick slid off-target, half-melted in the heat. “Damn, it’s hot.”

Di had bought a cat candle for attracting power, wisdom, and spiritual helpers. She had set up her altar the way it said you were supposed to do it in the voodoo book she had bought last May and finally gotten around to. And then she had taken a purple bath for power, adding mustard seed and washing with two whole eggs. She hadn’t been able to find the recommended dragon’s blood incense and instead had substituted lavender, which seemed purplish enough.

Now she was naked—all the books said you should practice magic in the nude, and she adored being naked. She had smudged her living room with sage. (She could have used tobacco, the book said, but how gross.) She had done the door, then the corners, clockwise, and then herself. She had lit rose incense, her favorite. (The book had recommended only a “nice” one.)

She had sprinkled the comers with “spirit water,” in which she had had to use her Giorgio perfume. (She could have used a “spirit” like rum or Pernod, but since she didn’t drink she didn’t have any. And the book had been very specific—if you used perfume, it had to be good perfume.) Actually, she hated the Giorgio in its original strength—it had been given to her by a hopeful who hadn’t realized his hopes. But it was certainly “good,” and didn’t smell too bad diluted down to spirit water.

She didn’t have a chalice, so she held a wine glass of spirit water, about to invoke the powers of the four directions. She was loving the mingled scents of sage and rose and Giorgio florals, reveling in her nakedness, her beauty, knowing how lovely she looked, arms outstretched with the chalice so that her breasts lifted, so involved, so powerful she could almost forget her hideous scar and the lump that marred her smoothness.

She was starting to feel a strange ache in her pelvis, the beginnings of desire, but she wasn’t sure why. Was her own naked body turning her on? Or was it the energy of the magic she was creating? She began to chant, calling the East, making it up as she went along.

O Santana dawn ozone, scirocco zephyr khamsin, blow! Blow like a dragon’s breath at first light, powerful and stirring….

She was loving it, feeling herself truly talented at this, a great priestess genuinely inspired, when someone hollered, “Di, for Christ’s sake! What the hell are you yelling in there? You all right?”

You couldn’t be nude in air conditioning. She had had to open one of the French doors, the ones in the bedroom. Apparently someone was standing underneath the balcony there.

Furious, she threw on the caftan she had doffed for her ritual, strode into the bedroom, leaving the spirits of the East blowing lonesome through her circle.

“Who’s down there?”

“It’s me. Alex. I thought you might like some company.”

There had been a time when she hadn’t been able to resist, when he had come nearly every afternoon and they had sweated together in her fairy-tale bed. But that was before she’d found out how many other women he was sleeping with. Well, actually not how many—there was no way to know how many—just that she was one of a vast, panting crowd. She’d never said what was wrong, had just stopped being available.

No. Now that she thought of it, it hadn’t been quite like that. Before she’d started seeing Sonny, she was seeing a gorgeous young black from Al-Anon, in fact still saw him now and then. She’d forgotten about Alex, but she’d never said a word to him. He’d just stopped coming around. Damn him! She hated being the rejected one.

“I’m busy,” she said, her voice icy.

“It’s three o’clock. Time for one of our three o’clock specials.”

She hiked the caftan up, showing as much leg as possible, and stepped out onto the balcony.

“I’m sorry, Alex. I’m otherwise engaged.”

“Wait. Di…”

But she had stepped back in and closed the French door. Even if she had to turn on the air conditioner, which meant she had to keep the caftan on, she wasn’t opening the damn thing again. Alex could go find another afternoon delight.

Damn! Now he was leaning on her doorbell. What did it take to make him understand he wasn’t welcome?

She put on a tape of Tibetan temple bells, turned it up loud, let the buzzer become part of the music. If that didn’t get her into a trance fast, nothing would.

Then she smudged again, sprinkled again, called the quarers, and sat in a half-lotus. Leon Wheatley had been scheduled to speak at the inner-child group that night, but he had a summer cold. She’d spent the morning on the phone, trying to find another speaker, but hadn’t succeeded. She probably could have gotten Abe, or maybe Alex, but somehow she didn’t trust either of them—they were given to grandstanding. And Sonny and Missy were too green. So she’d have to do it herself.

She had made the circle, taken the power bath, because she wanted to meditate, to feel her inner rhythms, listen to her inner voice, really know what she was supposed to talk about, what the universe wanted. She knew she was powerful today. She had proof. She had started to feel sexual and a man had appeared to answer her needs. But she had conserved that energy, put it instead to sacred use.

The subject came as soon as she went into a trance, perhaps brought by Alex, who had in turn been brought by the powers of air, the spirits of the East that had come when she called. There were no coincidences; Di knew that.

The subject was disappointment, betrayal; loss of innocence.

EVERYONE ON THE task force was at the inner-child meeting. Cindy Lou was there as well, already drawing glances from Alex and Abe. To Skip’s horror, Steve Steinman was sitting next to Missy McClellan.

It was just like Steve to come. She’d long since decided it was really she who interested him, that he wasn’t just a cop groupie, but he wouldn’t have been a filmmaker if he hadn’t been a voyeur at heart. Except that Steve wasn’t the kind of voyeur who watched other people having sex. It wasn’t even violence that especially interested him. It was adventure, the thrill of an unfolding tale. He had probably been serious about buying Skip’s story if she solved the case.

She tried not to be annoyed. It was a free country and the twelve-step programs were open to anyone. He had as much right to be there as she did. But he knew what she was doing there, knew the Axeman was probably in the room, probably guessed that others in the room were also officers. There was something about it that she didn’t like, that made her feel as if she were onstage. And there was something else—fear that he’d somehow give the police away.

What if he did? She shrugged mental shoulders. Maybe it was time they made themselves known, got people nervous and talking. Anyway, thanks to her “creative” police work, the one person who mattered might already know Skip was dangerous.

They had already said the Serenity Prayer and now Di was going through the opening rituals—the twelve steps, the twelve promises, the twelve traditions, a dozen of this, a dozen of that. She was having different people read selected bits, people she’d pre-chosen rather than simply passing the materials around, letting people read at random. Di was very precise, very controlling, Skip realized.

When the boring part, as Skip thought of the opening, had ended, Di said she would be the speaker that night because Leon couldn’t make it. Convenient, Skip thought, since the speaker, she’d noticed, got to speak longer than others who shared. Di seemed a fan of the spotlight. Tonight she’d brought a baby doll, a toy about the size of a real baby, in a little white dress and cap. She was holding it in the burp position, stroking its back, symbolically comforting her inner child.

“I learned about betrayal early,” she said, “when I lost my parents. My father simply left home whenever he felt like it; we never knew when he was going to go again or whether he was ever going to come back. And finally he didn’t come back. When I was a teenager. He’d been gone three years before my mother mentioned it.”

She went on for a while about the pain of being left by her father and then she started in on her mother: “She felt she had to work. I don’t know if this was true. I don’t know if my father sent money or not. All I know is I felt rejected. I thought it was a choice she made to get away from me, to get out of the house so she wouldn’t have to be around me. But maybe she really needed to. She could have; I don’t know.

“What I do know is that she could have been more careful about the places she left me. It wasn’t called ‘day-care’ in those days, but there were places where kids went after school if their parents worked.” She started to tear up. “I don’t know if they were all bad, but I was beaten at three out of the four I was sent to. Once with a belt, once with a shoe; once I was turned over a man’s lap and spanked. I was nine at the time. He did it in front of all the other kids. Beating wasn’t all either. They treated you like dirt. If you were a kid, you were nothing. They’d say, ‘Wash the dishes,’ and you had to—for twenty-five people—or they’d beat you again. You had to do anything they told you.”

She sobbed, getting more and more into herself as a kid out of Dickens, while Skip mentally compared her story with her mother’s. They were different, but not wildly different, about what you might expect from a mom who needed to believe she’d done the best for her kid and a kid who felt abused. It was curious, though, that Di hadn’t mentioned the sister. Surely her suicide must have been one of the traumatic events of Di’s life. Why was she leaving it out?

“So that was my first experience with betrayal; there was my dad’s first, then my mother’s. I had to accept the loss of my parents, realize that neither of them really loved me. Maybe they thought they did, but they didn’t. They were always telling me to be a big girl, to act like a big girl, not to cry because big girls didn’t cry. They never let me be myself and never asked who I really was. They just wanted me to be what they wanted, a big girl who didn’t cry even when she got deserted by her parents and beaten by strangers. That’s why I’m so grateful for this group and so glad to be able to cry now.”

Skip wrote down “grateful” and put a one beside it. She’d decided to count how many people expressed their gratitude before the meeting was over; she also wrote “stuffing feelings,” “inner rhythms,” and “higher power.” There was an art to sharing, she was beginning to see, and it had to do with using the correct terms.

“I’ve read that true adults can’t be betrayed. That they pay attention to their feelings rather than stuffing them.” Here Skip gave the proper term a one. “That they can catch on to what’s happening early, that they protect themselves, take care of themselves, don’t let people take advantage of them.”

Was she ever going to shut her face? Even one or two of the regulars began restlessly to cross and uncross their legs.

“But maybe in some ways we never grow up. I was betrayed recently—lost my innocence a second time. And it was as if my kid was in control—the adult me didn’t know what to do, couldn’t stop it.”

Skip perked up. Undoubtedly this would be a story of a love affair gone wrong, possibly with someone in the room. And then if they were lucky, maybe that person would “share” his side. She didn’t know how much closer this got them to catching a murderer, but it was a diversion.

“I had breast cancer,” said Di, “and I came through it just fine. The irony of it was that my real ordeal started after my recovery. For the next six months I kept finding fibroid lumps in my other breast, and it scared me to death every time.”

Some of the men in the room paled.

“Finally it came time for my reconstruction, and the doctors all agreed that with my history the best thing was this operation in which they amputate the other breast and start from scratch.”

Skip heard several gasps.

“They build you two whole new breasts out of tissue from your abdomen. My plastic surgeon said it was really great because you got a tummy tuck along with your reconstruction. But he didn’t tell me I was going to have a hideous scar. That was the first thing.

“The second thing was, I noticed I couldn’t get out of bed without drawing my knees all the way up to my chin. The first time I went to the doctor, he looked at my breasts and said, ‘Those are the prettiest ones I’ve ever done.’ I said I didn’t seem to have any muscle tone in my stomach anymore, and he said, ‘Well, of course not, dear. You don’t have any muscles.’ And then he picked up one of my breasts, almost fondling it, and said to his nurse, ‘Didn’t I do a beautiful job?’

“I said, ‘What do you mean, I don’t have any muscles?’ and he said, ‘Well, I cut your muscles when I did the surgery. Now you’ve got a flat tummy and you’ll never have to do sit-ups again.’ Then he laughed. And he said, ‘You can’t do sit-ups again. But you’ve got one of the prettiest pairs of tits in the parish.’ “ She stopped and sobbed into a tissue. Then she said, just to make sure everyone got it, “He treated my body like a piece of sculpture he was working on!”

“Then great big ugly lumps popped out on my stomach. Fist-sized lumps. Several of them. And it hurt. It felt like something was loose in there. He said, ‘Oh, you think you’re in so much pain; all you ever do is think about yourself. Well, you’ve got a really weak abdominal wall. This time I’m going to put nylon netting in there to reinforce it. That’ll hold you!’ So I had to have another operation, and it didn’t hold. Now I have nylon netting in my stomach and another ugly lump. Every time I go to see my doctor he tells me I’ve just got the weakest abdominal wall he’s ever seen, but I sure have pretty tits. So it’s my fault half the operation didn’t work, but all to his credit the other half did.