The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) (2 page)

Darryl was a tall, lanky black dude, with glasses and a fabulous smile. He was a bartender, high school English teacher, and musician, the last of which would have made him cool even if he hadn’t had the mercurial charm of a con man who’d missed his calling. Skip figured his female students would never forget him—she knew Sheila wouldn’t.

“Sit down,” said Skip. “Want some pizza?”

Torian nodded, not taking her eyes off Darryl.

“Hey, Darryl. Wanna dance?” It was Sheila, galumphing into the room as if she were Kenny.

“No way. I’m too old for that stuff.”

Sheila came up behind him, dropped a hand on each shoulder, and squeezed. “Oh, come on.”

“Uh-uh. That’s for young people.”

“You’re young.” She slid one of her hands to his neck and moved her fingers ever so slightly.

Skip gave Jimmy Dee a discreet look, and saw something like terror on his face. Probably afraid he’s going to have to stop it, she thought, but not to worry.

Darryl said, “Is there a bug crawling on my neck?” and slapped at Sheila’s hand. “Ooooh, what’s this?” He grabbed it and stared for a moment, holding it suspended. Then he brought up the other hand and touched the palm. “Hey, you’re a Virgo. Right?”

“Oh, right, Darryl, it’s September fourth, of course I’m a Virgo.”

“It’s right here in your palm. See that? Know what else? It’s gonna rain. See? It’s right there.”

“Oh, great. We’ve had hurricane warnings for days. Big deal, it’s going to rain.”

“We’re not getting Hurricane Faye. Uh-uh, it’ll be another. See that little line?”

“Hey. My palm’s supposed to be about me.”

“There’s your life line—look. It’s real long. You might make it to sixteen.”

Giving up, Sheila jerked away. “Okay, don’t dance. Come on, Torian.”

Obediently, Torian followed, big sad eyes raking the adults as she left.

As soon as they were out of hearing range, everyone except Jimmy Dee burst out laughing.

He covered his eyes. “One day I’m going to kill her.”

Skip said, “What’s the matter with the other one?”

He shrugged. “She’s a real serious kid, that’s all.”

* * *

Skip slept most of the next day, which was the way she spent most of her free time these days.

On Monday her sergeant, Sylvia Cappello, gathered up her brood like some mother animal taking them out to forage: “Hey guys, back to the scene of the crime.”

They’d been to the St. Thomas Project the day before, and three days before that. Homicides were getting to be so common there it made you wonder who was left alive.

Skip piled in the car with the rest of her platoon—there were so few police vehicles, they traveled in a pack.

The victim would be a kid, she thought. The motive would be drugs.

It was an article of faith among Homicide detectives that kids in some of the projects didn’t care whether they lived or died, and more or less expected the latter. Skip thought that was probably right, and it depressed her to see the same thing day after day—kids killing kids, misery in their mamas’ eyes, hardness in the survivors’.

But then, everything depresses me.

Her stomach flopped.
Everything except my job. What’s happening to me?

She sat up straighter, hoping that would help.

It was raining, the tail end of a weary storm that had once been a hurricane, but had cooled down. Nonetheless, the car window was open. Skip turned toward it for air.

Someone poked her in the ribs. “Ain’t that right, Langdon?”

“ ‘Isn’t,’ Dickie, ‘isn’t.’ ”

“Well, idn’t that right?”

“Isn’t what right?”

“Perretti gets elected, we’re out of a job—he’ll burn the damn place down.”

The car shook with police humor. Perretti was the right-wing candidate for mayor—or so he wanted to be perceived. He wasn’t going to burn the projects, and he wasn’t going to stop crime by hiring a neo-Nazi police chief who could “get the job done,” but he was probably going to wear out his vocal cords promising he was.

Skip hated him and was probably going to vote for him, which made her hate herself.

There was a knot of people in the courtyard of the project, some of them witnesses Skip knew from other homicides. It made her slightly sick to realize she’d interviewed a couple of them three or four times.

The body was crumpled up in a doorway, Lloyd Rogers, a young man in jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t cover his belly, a fat young man with short hair and a pair of running shoes that had probably cost a hundred dollars or more.

A child of seventeen or eighteen.

He had been shot in the chest with an automatic weapon.

It wasn’t Skip’s case, it belonged to the one named Dickie, a young, cocky dude just transferred from Robbery. He asked Skip to talk to the guy’s wife.

“Wife! He’s barely old enough to date.”

He pointed. “She’s the one over there. In the pink shorts.”

Her name was Kiva, and she looked about Sheila’s age.

Kiva said, “Let’s go to my auntie house. She stay over there.” They walked across the courtyard.

“How long were you married?” asked Skip.

“Oh, we ain’ married exactly; we just always be together.”

Skip thought: What’s “always” to someone her age?

Her aunt looked fifty and was probably thirty-five. She had the stringy-necked, flat-assed body of a longtime crack addict. A baby clung to her, a light-skinned girl of about two or two and a half, chubby legs sticking out from blue rompers trimmed with red plaid ruffles, her hair decorated with barrettes in crayon colors. She had on a Barney T-shirt stained with chocolate milk.

“Mama? Mama!” She ran to Kiva and grabbed one of her bare legs. She looked up at Skip and said gravely, “My daddy dead.”

Skip felt feathers start to fly in her stomach, the beating of wings in there.

The child nodded. “Daddy dead. Daddy day-edd.” She seemed taken with the rhythm of it.

“Somebody told her?” Skip said inanely.

Kiva looked at her as if she were speaking Russian.

“I have to sit down for a minute.” Skip’s knees were buckling, her neck was wet with sweat. Her heart pounded.

* * *

Later, in her office, Cappello paced, the twin lines between her eyes drawing closer together.

Skip sat, a hand over her eyes, speaking raggedly. “It was like a flashback. I swear; I saw Shavonne. Crawling. I saw her like it was real.”

Cappello held up a hand, palm out:
Don’t tell it.

“Look, it’s never happened before. You know it hasn’t. It’s not going to happen again.”

“Skip, I’m worried about you, don’t you see that? This case has about as much chance of getting solved as Jimmy Hoffa’s murder. But Dickie just arrived—he doesn’t know about Delavon, and he doesn’t know you. What he knows is, you couldn’t do a simple interview today. What if he talks about it? You want it to get back to O’Rourke?” O’Rourke was her nemesis, a sergeant who hated her for no reason.

Skip shrugged helplessly. “Sylvia, it happened. I can’t take it back.”

“Skip, you’ve got a problem. If you don’t do something about it, I’ll have to send you to Cindy Lou.” Cindy Lou worked for the department on a contract basis.

“She’s my best friend—how can she be my psychologist?”

Cappello made her voice low, so Skip would have to pay close attention. “I’m your friend, too, and I’m trying to tell you something. If I send you to Cindy Lou, this becomes a departmental matter. Do you follow?”

Skip realized she hadn’t really understood. If Cappello sent her to Cindy Lou, it wouldn’t be for a friendly pep talk—it would be to have her fitness for duty evaluated.

She stared at the sergeant, thinking,
I didn’t know I was that bad.

“Skip?”

“I need to think, Sylvia. Can we talk again after lunch?”

Cappello smiled, and Skip understood that she really was her friend. “Sure.”

She needed to think and she needed to talk—with her good friend who happened to be the department psychologist. Cindy Lou’s familiar voice floated over the phone: “Hey, girlfriend. Lunch?”

“My treat. I need advice. Bad.”

“Girl, you’re right about that.”

“Somewhere private.”

“No such place.”

They ended up whispering at Semolina. “I blew it on a case today. I had a flashback of some kind.”

“Uh-huh.” Cindy Lou didn’t even look up from her pasta, seemed to shrink into herself—just a friendly pair of ears, nonthreatening, non-judging.

Skip told her what had happened at the project, but there was no need to fill in the background. Lou-Lou had been around when it happened, had spent hours talking to Skip about it, had been there through the long months of depression.

“I think,” Skip finished, “Cappello wants me to take a voluntary leave of absence.”

“‘Tell me something. Are you enjoying your work right now?”

“No. But I’m not enjoying anything. You know that.”

“Do you want to take a leave?”

“No! God, no.”

“Why not?”

Skip thought a minute, thought of the long days with nothing in them, days in which her mind could wander and hark back, showing her Shavonne again, crawling across the floor; days when the image wouldn’t leave her. “I’m afraid to,” she said.

“Afraid of what?”

But Skip couldn’t say it, not even to her best friend. “I don’t know,” she said. “What would I do all day?”

Cindy Lou crossed her legs and pinned her with a hard stare. “Go into therapy.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Why haven’t you done it already?”

“I don’t know, I thought … I guess every night I thought I’d wake up fine the next morning.” She was quiet a moment. “I guess it just didn’t occur to me.”

Lou-Lou snorted. “It’s not like no one suggested it.”

“What?”

“Skip. I’ve mentioned it a million times. So has Jimmy Dee.”

“You have?”

“Those very words: ‘Maybe you should go into therapy.’ And you usually say, ‘Maybe I will if things don’t get better.’”

“Oh. Well, I …” She was so surprised she couldn’t go on.

“What?”

“I don’t know why I haven’t. I really don’t.”

“Listen, I haven’t wanted to say this before, because I know how important your job is to you. But I think you should know how precarious things are. Here’s a little statistic—eighteen months is the average amount of time policemen stay on the job after killing someone.”

Skip felt her mind go blank. “Why? What does that mean?”

Cindy Lou shrugged. “You should know better than I. Think about it.”

“I don’t have to. My job means everything to me—I’ll do anything to keep it.”

Cindy Lou rifled her purse and came up with a card. “I’ve got a friend who just moved to your neighborhood—she’s a fantastic therapist, and I think you’d like her.”

Skip took the card. “Joanne Leydecker.”

“She’s called Boo.”

“Her clients call her Boo?”

“Probably. She’s smart and incredibly down to earth— absolutely no bullshit about her. She just might be right for you.”

At the moment, doing anything at all, going anywhere, seemed such an effort that the fact that Boo lived five minutes away was the most appealing thing about her.

Suddenly, the idea of not having to go to work, not having to go through the motions of her life pretending she was really living it seemed like a soft, warm bed.

Chapter Two

BOO APPROACHED HER phone, as always, with a towel for the dust. It was sawdust and plaster dust and brick dust and the dust of old paint, sanded away for the new. Dust was her life these days; dust and contractors and Joy, her baby. Her husband and her practice were secondary.

She dialed and was almost relieved when her husband wasn’t in his office. She had one tiny thing to tell him, and he hated it when she wouldn’t chat. He’d been brought up the New Orleans way; you took things slow and easy. He made friends with waiters when Boo just wanted them to take her order. He knew every shop owner in the French Quarter, and they’d only moved here a few months ago. Boo didn’t even know the clerks at Matassa’s, though she popped in for something nearly every day. To her husband, any conversation that lasted less than ten minutes was plain rude.

It was convenient, but slightly odd that no one answered, she thought. It was mid-afternoon. He was always there. Was anything wrong?

She smiled at herself. When she couldn’t get someone, or didn’t hear from them—even when they didn’t return her call—she was always sure something was wrong.

Real well-adjusted, Boo. Some shrink you are.

She’d left herself five minutes for chitchat. Now she could have a yoga break before the new client. She was feeling refreshed by the time the doorbell rang.

“Skip? Hi, I’m Boo. It’s this way—we’re sort of under construction.”

“Beautiful house. And it’s going to be gorgeous. Omigod, is that what I think it is?”

Boo had led her client nearly halfway to the back entrance. She saw that the workmen had left open the door in the living room wall.

“Uh-huh—the lady who owned it before turned the porte cochère into a garage. Can you believe it?”

“Do you know how rare that is—a garage in the Quarter?”

“We didn’t when we bought the house, but everyone remarks on it.” She kept walking, out the back, across the courtyard, and into the outbuilding.

Her client looked it over appraisingly. “So you made the slave quarters into an office.”

Boo nodded. “It’s the only thing finished so far. That and the baby’s room.”

The office was pale pink, furnished with antiques that were good but not pretentious. The chairs were covered with chintz —cheerfulness was the least she felt a therapist ought to offer.

“What a pretty room,” Skip said, and Boo motioned her to a chair containing a longhaired gray and white cat.

Skip picked the cat up, producing a soft protest.

“Melpomene! What are you doing here?” Boo shooed the cat and looked sheepishly at Skip. “Hope you’re not allergic.”

“No, I love cats.”

“Cindy Lou tells me you’re a police officer.”

“Uh-huh. Also your neighbor. You can’t have lived here long.”