The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) (43 page)

“He’s starting to break.”

“What makes you say that? He sounds like some other person—like…”

“His dad.”

It dawned on her that that was right. “Yeah.”

Cindy Lou shrugged. “Well, why not. His dad’s an asshole. Come to think of it, all doctors are assholes. Now that you mention it, we’ve all got a little asshole in us. Why not Sonny? Damn right it’s not like him. That’s what he keeps under that golden-boy routine of his. If he’d let it out more…”

“Oh, don’t say it.” She was getting cross.

Into the megaphone she said, “Sonny, I feel like you need to talk. I promise I’ll get all the help I can for you when this is over.”

“Skip, you know this is no way to treat a doctor. Get me out of here now. Get me a limousine to the airport and a ticket out of here.” He paused, thinking. “To the Bahamas.”

“Let Alex go.”

“You know I can’t let Alex go.”

“Sonny, why’d you write the letter?”

“I wish to God I’d never written the damn letter! Jesus, I wish I’d never done it!” The arrogant Sonny was gone.

“Why’d you do it, Sonny?”

“I don’t know.”

Cindy Lou pinched Skip. “Don’t answer. Let him think about it a little bit.”

The quiet was killing. The air was thick enough to squeeze.

Finally Sonny said, “I thought I ought to.”

“Okay, okay,” said Cindy Lou. “Let him think about what that means.”

Skip didn’t know much about Cindy Lou’s fancy theories of “splits” in non-split personalities, but this was familiar ground, this she had seen before. And it did seem like something split, every time she saw it. It was a more elaborate version of that weird thing that made experienced criminals forget to wear gloves, brag in bars about wasting somebody, tell you they didn’t mean to do it before you ever accused them. And half the time the thing they didn’t mean to do, the crime they described in detail, wasn’t the one they were being questioned about.

It was the mechanism that makes a man park his car outside his girlfriend’s house on a day he knows his wife’s going to be in the neighborhood. It was the urge to confess, the part of not just every criminal, but every human being, that wants to be caught.

In a few minutes, Cindy Lou said, “Ask him about the Axeman.”

Skip said, “Why the Axeman, Sonny? You could have written some other kind of letter.”

“I grew up with the Axeman.” His voice was very soft. “My grandfather told me about him. It was like the bogeyman. He’d say, ‘If you don’t be good, the Axeman’ll get you.’ And sometimes … sometimes when I wouldn’t go to bed he’d put a sheet over his head and say, ‘The Axeman cometh!’ ”

“And then what?”

“Then we’d roughhouse. He’d tickle me and I’d laugh a lot.”

“It was true, wasn’t it, Sonny?”

“What?”

“The Axeman got you.”

Sonny didn’t answer. They waited about ten minutes. Finally Skip said, “Did the A stand for Axeman?”

He said something she couldn’t hear, that no one could hear.

“What?”

“I didn’t mean to do it that way. That wasn’t what I wanted. But it happened the first time and I had no choice. Do you understand what I’m saying? After that the Axeman existed. I had to let—”

“You had to what?”

Once again he didn’t answer.

“Why did it happen that way the first time? If you didn’t want to do it, why did you?”

“The goddamn lipstick broke!” He sounded furious, and once again Alex made some kind of involuntary movement.

“The lipstick broke? You meant to write something else?”

“I already told you.” This time he spoke in a conversational tone, not trying to be heard; sounding sullen.

“No you didn’t.”

“I told Missy.”

Skip looked at Missy. She shrugged, obviously had no idea what he meant.

“She doesn’t remember.”

“I told her.”

“Tell her again.”

He shouted the word as if to be heard in Baton Rouge, and the anguish in it seemed that of every lost soul since the dawn of madness. “Atonement!”

The sound was like a diamond rubbing against a diamond, harder on the soft evening than a footfall on a flower; primitive and ugly and inevitable. Yet the feeling of that tiny terrified child so many years ago was so naked in the shout, it had an underlying innocence, almost a bewildered sweetness, so much did it express about the wish to undo what is done.

It was answered by an answering shout, every bit as hard and ten times as ugly, for it had no anguish in it, nothing resembling innocence, but hatred instead. Evil. It was more a toxin than a sound; spewed slime. “Asshole!”

Robson spewed it. “The A was for asshole, you asshole. You’ve always been an asshole, ever since the day you came naked into this world! And you’re still an asshole! No father deserves an asshole like you!”

A sound like a sob came out of Sonny. Slowly, gradually, he lowered the arm around Alex’s neck, and then he let Alex’s hand go, the one he had held behind his back. As if on balloons, Alex started to walk. Sonny’s sobs did not tear the air as his shout had done, as Robson’s had. They were like a bass beat that lodged in Skip’s body, permeated to her toes. It was the deepest misery she had ever heard or felt.

But Cindy Lou was deep in what she would probably have called denial if she’d had her wits about her. “That’s ironic as hell,” she said, and walked away.

Skip had burned her uniform once, when she had felt overwhelmed at corruption she couldn’t attack; helpless. But that seemed a matter of petty bureaucracy now. This wasn’t the city or the state or the department; this was the race. The human animal; the beast. What was she supposed to do now, burn her skin?

The answer came to her almost as quickly as the question. Yes, bum it. Burn it with passion. With love. If it’s human beings who disgust you, get as close as you can to one of them. Let the slime pour out of you as your head fills, your body fills, with life and hope. And starting over. And love.

How could she think of love at a time like this? And yet she saw that it was the only sane thing she could think of. She phoned Steve and told him to come get her key, to wait for her. She told him she loved him.

She still had a long night ahead.

By the time she joined him, she knew one more thing she didn’t want to: why Sonny had framed Di, had found it so necessary to write the Axeman note that named her lipstick color, arrived so promptly because it was mailed so promptly; was written and mailed after strangling Jerilyn. Who had been carefully killed with Di’s scarf, after which the typewriter had been carefully planted.

Such elaborate plans.

Di was the only one of his victims for whom he had no compassion, whom he truly wanted to destroy. He had planned the frame in the half-hour between the time he realized he hated her and the time he killed Jerilyn. He had to go home for the scarf and lipstick, but the lost time was worth it. Di had committed an unpardonable sin. She had blown the whistle on his father.

THE END

Thanks, as usual, to Betsy Petersen and this time to William Petersen as well; also to Rhoda Faust, Becky Alexander, Chris O’Rourke, Carolyn Shaffer, Jon Carroll, Diane Angelico, and the knowledgeable staff in the accident room at Charity Hospital, especially Scott Slayden, Dr. Paul Brunik, and Dr. Eric Lucas. More thanks to John Taylor at Atascadero State Hospital, Bob Bunn and Belinda Maples of the FBI, Luisah Teish, author of
Jambalaya
, which I enjoyed and relied on, and to numbers of helpful if necessarily anonymous folk in various twelve-step programs. Special, extra thanks to Captain Linda Buczek of the New Orleans Police Department, who is exceedingly patient and prodigiously generous with her time and expertise. If I got things wrong, it certainly isn’t the fault of anyone whose name appears here.

The next Skip Langdon mystery is JAZZ FUNERAL; find out more at
www.booksbnimble.com
and
www.juliesmithbooks.com

If you enjoyed this book, let us keep you up-to-date on all our forthcoming mysteries. Sign up for our newsletter at
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The Skip Langdon Series
(in order of publication)

NEW ORLEANS MOURNING (*Edgar-winner for Best Novel)

THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

JAZZ FUNERAL

DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

HOUSE OF BLUES

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

82 DESIRE

MEAN WOMAN BLUES

The Rebecca Schwartz Series

DEATH TURNS A TRICK

THE SOURDOUGH WARS

TOURIST TRAP

DEAD IN THE WATER

OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

The Paul Macdonald Series

TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

HUCKLEBERRY FIEND

And don’t miss ALWAYS OTHELLO, a Skip Langdon story, as well as the brand new short story, PRIVATE CHICK, which asks the question, “Is this country ready for a drag queen detective?” More info at
www.booksBnimble.com
.

JULIE SMITH is a New Orleans writer and former reporter for the San Francisco
Chronicle
and the
Times-Picayune
.
New Orleans Mourning
, her first novel featuring New Orleans cop Skip Langdon, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, and she has since published eight more highly acclaimed books in the series, plus spun off a second New Orleans series featuring PI and poet Talba Wallis.

She is also the author of the Rebecca Schwartz series and the Paul Mcdonald series, plus the YA novels CURSEBUSTERS! and EXPOSED. In addition to her novels, she’s also written numerous essays and short stories and is the editor of NEW ORLEANS NOIR, an anthology of dark stories, each set in a different New Orleans neighborhood.