The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (3 page)

Linda Lee was a good girl, took care of her baby brother when she was only six and a half, didn’t make straight A’s but did well enough, active in the MYF (“that’s Methodist Youth Fellowship”), and didn’t deserve the life she’d had. Her marriage hadn’t worked out and now she was dead.

Skip tried to keep her voice neutral. “She was married?”

“Five years. To Harry Beaver. Everybody liked Harry. He seemed like a wonderful husband for Linda Lee.”

“But he wasn’t?”

“Well, see, Harry drank. Nobody knew it, of course, because he was always so jolly and nice. I mean we knew he drank; we just never saw him drunk. Did you know you can be a complete alcoholic and never get, you know, commode-huggin’ or anything? When she told us, that did help explain why she never did get pregnant. I guess if you’re always full of booze—oh, well I shouldn’t talk about that. And also why he never had no real ambition. Like to broke Linda Lee’s heart, though.” She stopped to get control. “Oh, that poor, poor girl.”

“How long have they been divorced?”

“Oh, I don’t even think it’s final yet. She filed just before she left town.”

“How did Harry take it?”

“Well, he was broken up about it. He just loved that little girl to death.”

“Do you know how I could reach him?”

“Oh, are you gon’ break the news? Thank you so much—I just don’t think I could stand to do that. Here’s his number.” She rattled it off. “Or else you might try over to the sheriffs office. Harry’s a deputy here in Sunflower County.”

“Mrs. Strickland, could I just ask you something? Do you know if your daughter had any enemies?”

“Linda Lee? She was the most popular girl in town.”

“I see. Then perhaps someone was jealous of her.”

“I didn’t mean she ran around. I meant people liked her.”

“Did she know anyone whose name began with A?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can’t tell you why I’m asking, but it’s important.”

“First or last name?”

“Either one.”

“I sure can’t think of anyone, except maybe Tommy Axelrod, used to live next door to us. But he and his folks left town about ten years ago. Linda Lee used to babysit for him. ’Course, she knew his folks too, but that was different.”

“Has she heard from Tommy at all?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Does the letter A mean anything else to you?”

“Nothin’ except ‘angel,’ and that’s what my baby was.” A freshet of tears drowned her voice.

Skip kept her on the phone long enough to assign Miss Kitty to Mr. Ogletree. Then she phoned the Sunflower County sheriff’s department, and got a lieutenant named Mike Bilbo, who said Harry Beaver was out. He said Harry was a good officer and didn’t have a mean bone in his body, but he hated to see what was gon’ happen when he found out somebody’d killed Linda Lee. They’d been living apart for six months before Linda Lee left town, but Harry never could accept it—said Linda Lee’d come back to him, it was just a phase she was going through.

Not only had Harry been at work every day of the last week, but he was reliable as a Japanese car, never did miss a day. Bilbo had personally seen him at church on Sunday and a barbecue Saturday evenin’.

So if he’d killed his ex-wife, he’d have needed wings.

Time to discuss the case with Cappello and Joe, a not unpleasant thought. She called Joe “lieutenant” now, out of respect for his rank, but she still thought of him as “Joe,” a friend. A warm friend. He’d turned into the kind of executive who liked to shoot the breeze with his detectives, find out how each case was going, help out when he could, and she looked forward to running things by him, enjoyed the hell out of their rapport.

Cappello wasn’t nearly so warm. She was all business, almost brusque, but she was a dynamite officer. When Skip got her transfer, she’d wanted Cappello for a partner, but had ended up working under her instead. Which was okay. Very much okay. Skip had wanted to learn from her. This way she could do that and still work alone, a situation she cherished sometimes. Skip found she tended to reinvent police work with each new problem, and she didn’t always like to be observed. Cappello was a straight by-the-book type who might not appreciate a lot of free-wheeling creativity.

Skip checked with Cappello, then Joe. Both were free and ready to listen. Neither said a word until she got to the part about the A. Joe had started to look grim at the mention of the bag slung over Linda Lee’s shoulder, and the A did even less for his mood.

“I got a bad feeling, Skip. Writing on the wall isn’t normal.”

She bit her tongue, forebore to say the obvious. She understood what he meant, and murmured, “No.”

“Look, girl with a good reputation, in town for six weeks, doesn’t know anybody—it doesn’t wash. How does a girl like that get killed in her own apartment? If nobody’s mad at her, and nobody knows her, who’s gonna kill her? Pervert, right? That’s bad enough, but she had all her clothes on. All right then, maybe not a pervert. So what’s left?”

Skip shifted uncomfortably. “Another kind of crazy.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m worried about. Somebody she let into her apartment; somebody who didn’t grab her on the street; guy who looks okay to some girl from Mississippi. Where does she meet a guy like that?”

“At a bar maybe. I don’t know.”

“Okay, a bar. But why’d he kill her?”

Skip sighed. “She was there.”

Joe wagged his head back and forth, as if to rid it of the thoughts it was generating. “This ain’t normal. It just isn’t, that’s all.”

“Maybe it was someone she knew—maybe the A meant something between them.”

“Yeah. And maybe you want to go see your boyfriend so bad your judgment’s messed up.”

Skip smiled. “Oh, it’s not that bad.” She produced a snapshot of Linda Lee, taken from an envelope in a vanity drawer. “I thought I could show this around.”

“Yeah, but where?”

That was the problem. As an army marches on its stomach, New Orleans staggers on its liver. If every cop in Louisiana were set end to end on a cat’s cradle of a bar tour, they still couldn’t cover the territory.

“Bars,” she said. “But selectively. Maybe she had a favorite near where she lived. Also, I could hit other places in her neighborhood. The corner store, stuff like that.”

Joe shook his head. “And hope somebody just happened to see her talking to the murderer? I hate to say it, but I don’t see it being very productive. What do you think, Sergeant?”

Cappello shrugged. “Try the neighbors again. That’s all I can think of.”

“Okay. I’ll do it tonight.” But it didn’t feel like enough. Not by a long shot.

Still, it was a good night to be a cop, to have any assignment at all. She had a great excuse for cutting short her brother’s engagement party.

Later, driving to Commander’s Palace in a silk dress—as tarted up as she ever got—she thought about what Joe had said when she’d told him that: “You don’t want to go? Why not just skip the whole thing?”

He had seemed genuinely puzzled. Would a normal person do that, she wondered? Her relations with her family were so abnormal she didn’t have the least idea. Her dad hadn’t spoken to her since she enrolled in the academy. Her mother, whose lifetime ambition was to achieve greater and greater social prominence, preferably through her children, had virtually no use for her either. And her brother Conrad was a joke.

New Orleans was a city rife with types, losers, and weirdos, and Conrad didn’t fit in—he was a misplaced, latter-day Sammy Glick, clawing his way to who-knew-what in a milieu where ambition was considered almost embarrassing. Skip knew perfectly well he had about as much interest in her as in one of the roaches that skittered over her kitchen counters—and as much regard for her. She returned the sentiment.

And yet he’d had to invite her; her mother’d felt obligated to phone and beg her to come; and Skip had known there was no choice. Otherwise it wouldn’t look right. The bride-to-be might ask ticklish questions. The Langdons wouldn’t look normal.

She wondered what the hell “normal” really was. And why she was helping Conrad with his own egregious social-climbing—she had every idea that’s what the engagement was all about.

She was doing it because she couldn’t bear too much more familial disapproval, she thought. Did anyone ever grow up?

Joe must have—he hadn’t seen why she couldn’t just cash out of the whole sordid affair. But surely that wasn’t the usual thing in the South. You did what you did because things had always been done that way and because someone else wanted you to. Not because there was any point in hell in it.

She took a deep breath.

Come on, you wouldn’t be a cop if that were true.

She answered herself: It isn’t always true, just too often for comfort.

Ah, comfort. What about that one? Where did you go to find that one? Out in the stratosphere, she supposed, where “normal” lived. She wasn’t going to find it here tonight.

It was a small party—just her family and the bride’s—which was going to make it interesting. Her dad really couldn’t ignore her without drawing attention to himself, which would brand him the odd man out in front of people he wanted to impress. The Whites were from Baton Rouge, but they were related to the Gilliats, a very important family, the one that Conrad no doubt thought he was marrying into. He had met his betrothed at their house.

Skip’s mother had told her Camille had some kind of job at the Gilliats’ shipping company, but Skip hardly expected her to rise to CEO. Within two years, she’d bet, Camille would be a permanently retired shipping exec and full-time mommy with a wandering eye.

The rest were already seated. That was good. She waved the gentlemen back down when they made to stand, which relieved her father of the dreadful responsibility of a duty kiss. To smooth things over, she babbled.

“So sorry I’m late—I can only stay for a drink. We got a very strange case today and I have to work.”

“What do you do, Skip?” asked Mrs. White.

Oh, no—Conrad hadn’t briefed them. She saw her father flush, her mother’s fingers tighten on her glass.

Camille said, “She’s a homicide detective—can you believe it? Skippy, you just can’t know how I’ve been dying to meet you—we’ve never had anything remotely so exciting in our family.”

And so the talk politely turned to her “interesting” career choice.

Camille was short and cute: short, curly brown hair, blue eyes, tiny little nose, milky skin—skin to kill for, as a matter of fact. She wore a halter-top blue dress that perfectly set off a figure that belonged on a teenager. She couldn’t have been sexier if she’d worn a lace teddy and couldn’t have been more proper in a business suit.

She was the sort of woman guys like Conrad must construct from their own dreams of perfection. When Conrad introduced her to his senior partners, their eyes were going to light up like the neon nipples of a sign on Bourbon Street. In the first second they knew her, they were going to flash forward, seeing her fitting in at social events through the decades, tossing her head and making precisely the right coquettish remark, never embarrassing, just borderline-bawdy. Just perfect.

Conrad had probably told her about his sister the black sheep and the little problem with Dad. And, of course, she’d figured out the perfect way to handle it.

“How did you get promoted to Homicide? I mean, you’re so young—it’s a big honor, isn’t it?”

“I had a friend.” It was true. If it weren’t for Joe Tarantino, she’d have left the police department in the first place, and in the second place she’d still be giving drunks directions in VCD. Joe had talked her into staying on, had said she had terrific potential, that she was a good officer who was going to be excellent. A few months later there’d been some personnel changes and Joe was head of Homicide now. Skip had nearly fainted when he’d had her transferred to his division. He hadn’t been bullshitting. He’d meant it. He really thought she was good.

She’d never been a student, having flunked out of Newcomb and barely made it through Ole Miss. Before that, she’d so poorly understood her environment that her parents had made her feel wildly incompetent—and she was, she’d wryly admitted since. But police work was something she could do. She was big and she was physically adept; maybe in this atmosphere her size and strength gave her the confidence to use the brains that really were what made her good. She didn’t know. All she knew was she felt she’d come home.

“You can’t fool me, Skippy. I’ve heard about you.”

Aghast, Skip glanced at her father. But he was smiling benignly on the whole domestic scene. Camille was handling the whole thing as adeptly as Conrad must have known she would.

“Alison Gaillard just thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. She’s always telling Skippy Langdon stories.”

Her mother raised an eyebrow—she’d probably had no idea her daughter had renewed an old acquaintanceship with Alison, and that was going to raise Skip about a hundred points in her estimation. Her dad looked positively giddy.

She wondered if it would be impolitic to ask Camille if she’d ever considered joining the diplomatic corps and decided it would probably break the mood.

She admitted to herself that she liked the girl. What wasn’t to like? Nothing that showed, that was for sure, but there was certainly something suspect about her—she was about to throw away a perfectly good life on Conrad Langdon. Something had to be wrong with her.

Skip ordered a Perrier.

“Yes,” said the waiter, “Perrier.” He gave it the American pronunciation, not so subtly correcting her. Skip’s thoughts turned instantly to Steve Steinman. That was the sort of thing that could keep him going for an entire afternoon.
Why in New Orleans, with its touted French heritage?
he would ask. She would explain that it was probably because there was a Perrier Street that was more Perri-than-thou rather than Perriay, and that would get him going again. As far as he was concerned, New Orleans was Mars.

“What are you smiling about?” Conrad managed to make it an accusation.

Oh, certain things the Kama Sutra doesn’t even mention
.

She considered it, but in the end wimped out. “Just having fun.”