by Smith, Julie
Rage enveloped her like a blanket. She had been the despair of her mother all through Catholic school, always getting in fights and kicking the boys in the shins.
“Fuck you,” she shouted, and hurled her body at him headfirst, butting him in the stomach. She heard something crack, probably his head hitting the wall. He started to fall and she righted herself, turned, and split, at more or less warp speed. Sure enough, there was someone there to save her—an elderly white woman was walking toward her.
“Help!” she shouted, and the woman screamed herself, obviously terrified at the sight of a wild-haired black hellion hurtling toward her—probably afraid she was about to be caught in the middle of a shoot-out. Talba couldn’t have guaranteed that she wasn’t.
The woman froze. “Dial 911,” Talba hollered, and kept running. Her car was two blocks away.
She stole a glance behind her and saw that there was indeed a man behind her, though not running. She hadn’t noticed anything about the man in the office except his ski mask—though she thought he’d been wearing jeans. This one was also wearing jeans, and he was white. She hadn’t a clue if he was the intruder.
About a block further on, when she was nearly to her car, she saw that the man was still walking toward her, and fast, she thought. She still couldn’t see his face. She kept running.
She fumbled for her key, glancing around now and then to see if he was close. He was getting into a tan van.
I’ve got to get calm, she thought. There were lots of cars, plenty of businesses, dozens of people on the streets. Surely she was safe. Surely she could just walk in someplace and ask to use the phone to call the police.
But panic seized her as tightly as the rage of moments ago. What the fuck am I into? she thought. What’s the deal with Russell Fortier disappearing?
The thing was, she had committed a few little illegalities in the course of her work for Allred. Maybe someone was upset about something.
Could she outrun this dude or not? It was worth a try.
Once again, she felt in her purse for the key, and this time her hand closed on it. She saw that the man was already out of his parking spot. She shoved the key in the ignition, but her fingers were so slick with sweat she didn’t trust them on the steering wheel.
Still, at this point there was no choice. He could drive up beside her and shoot her through the window.
Instead, he drove past her. Could it be that this was a different man? Maybe he wasn’t chasing her. He stopped at the stoplight. She was four cars behind him.
As he went through the intersection, she turned right, wondering how this could be so easy.
Yet she drove around a few random blocks, and still the van didn’t follow.
Damn, she thought. Why didn’t I get his license number?
But it was obvious why. She was too scared.
Nothing to do but go home. She stopped at Schwegmann’s on Elysian Fields, as she’d promised Miz Clara, and was approaching calm as she got back in the car and went home.
But there, in the center of her modest block, smack in the middle between Desire and Piety, was a tan van.
Oh, Jesus Christ, she thought, what now? My mama’s in the house.
She got out of the car warily, looking around her, wishing she had a gun.
Someone seized her from behind, clamping a hand over her mouth. She felt the roughness of his beard as the man leaned close to her ear.
He whispered, “Open the door,” and she realized he meant her own car door.
She worked it.
“No. The back door.”
He pushed her in and slid in beside her. She felt something slip over her head, and then she was wearing the ski mask, backward, so that it formed a blindfold.
“Scream and your mother’s dead,” the man said.
Inside the wool mask was unbearably hot. Why a ski mask? she thought. Why not a stocking mask? She realized that wouldn’t have disguised the man’s race. But he’d blown that one. The man was white.
He spoke to her gently, much more nicely than you’d expect from someone who’d just threatened to kill your mother. “You’re okay. I’m not going to hurt you and I’m not going to hurt your mother. You’re involved in something you don’t understand, that’s all. Wait till tomorrow and call me at the office.” She felt something slide into her hand, something he was pressing into her palm. A business card.
“Now, wait till I’m gone and then go in the house. Your mother’s okay.” She waited till she heard her car door slam and then ripped off the mask. He had his back to her so she still couldn’t see his face, but she damn sure wasn’t going to sit there like a dummy when she had a chance to get his plate number.
But it had been splashed with something, probably mud. He drove off while she was still squinting at it. She looked at the card in her hand and let out a little gasp.
It bore the crescent and star of the New Orleans Police Department. DETECTIVE SKIP LANGDON, it said.
She dashed inside. “Mama? Mama, you okay?”
Her mother was watching Oprah. “Girl, why ain’t you out looking for a job?”
“Did you send me to college to make chicken fricassee? I hope so, ‘cause that’s what I’m gonna do.”
“Hmmph. For ya no-account boyfrien’ wit’ the horrible hair. Not for ya mama.”
Talba had stuffed the damn ski mask into the Schwegmann’s bag. She took it out and looked at it. Fuck! she thought. No way a cop would have treated a white person that way—threatenin’ to kill my mama! I think I might call Public Integrity.
That was the office called Internal Affairs elsewhere, but she hesitated, deciding instead to try Allred’s office one last time. No one answered. All day she kept calling and getting no answer.
She ran the whole thing by Lamar that night, after they’d eaten the chicken fricassee. Whatever her mama said, Lamar was not no-account, any more than she was. He was a grad student at Xavier, in the art department, and he was a damn good artist, especially, as her mama said, if you listened to him. He had fabulous dreads and looked something like Lenny Kravitz, whom he had once seen in the French Quarter, and whose style he greatly admired.
He was outraged. “Are you kidding? Call Public Integrity! Call ’em now! Don’t even call the cop back. Just call and report him. Do a thing like that! Damn.”
“Well, I just thought—”
“I’m gonna do a painting. You know what, I’m gonna paint what happened. Give me that ski mask. He really put it over your head?”
She didn’t have time to answer.
“Maybe I’ll actually use the thing itself in the painting—make a collage with it. Yeah, all red and blue. How dare they do that to my baby? Can’t imagine a cop doing a thing like that.”
“Oh, come on, Lamar.”
“I mean, oh sure, I can imagine it. A good cop’s harder to find than a good artist in this town. Baby, you just lucky you got one. You want to go to bed? “ He nuzzled her.
“Not with my mama—”
“Oh, your mama. You got to grow up, Talba. Fuck this shit. I’m leavin’. Leavin’ right now.”
He marched out the door, his dreads swinging in the breeze. It was something he did about once a week.
“Pshaw,” Miz Clara said. “I come up with that boy’s mama. If she was alive, he wouldn’t be like that.”
“Now, Mama. Lamar’s an artist.”
“Lamar a sperled brat. That what Lamar is.”
Four
IT WAS SATURDAY morning and Skip had been up since seven-thirty. Life was complicated. The whole place was in an uproar, not just her own space.
Skip had the slave quarters—now called the garconnière—at her best friend Jimmy Dee Scoggin’s house. Jimmy Dee shared the Big House, as they’d taken to calling it, with his two adopted children, his late sister’s kids, Sheila and Kenny, and a black-and-white dog called Angel.
Steve Steinman, who was staying with Skip, also had a dog—a German shepherd named Napoleon. Skip hated Napoleon and Napole
on hated her. In fact, Napoleon hated just about everybody except Kenny and Steve.
Normally, all this made for a pretty lively household, but with the tension in the garconnière and one other little detail, it was currently chaos.
The other detail was Jimmy Dee’s friend Layne. Jimmy Dee’s beloved, if the truth be told. Jimmy Dee was gay, a fact that had turned out to be easier for the kids to accept than anyone thought it would, and Layne was about to be a new addition to the family. Everyone was thrilled about it. The kids loved him. (“His main virtue,” Dee-Dee said wryly, “is that he isn’t Uncle Jimmy.”) And Steve was crazy about him, which was a great tension-reliever, since he wasn’t entirely insane for Dee-Dee himself.
However, Layne’s moving in meant getting a room ready for him, which required more than the normal amount of effort, since Layne was a puzzle designer by trade. This meant any amount of paraphernalia, including games from just about every country in the world.
And that translated to building cabinets and bookshelves, which necessitated a house full of workmen.
That put everybody on edge, just about all the time. Skip was just as happy to be going over to Steve’s cottage to help him sand kitchen cabinets. “Can I help?” Kenny asked wistfully. “Anybody can sand.”
“Okay, sure. Get Angel and come on.”
From where they all stood in the courtyard, they could hear Dee-Dee and Layne arguing in the kitchen. “But I need to have things where I can see them.”
“Well, I need to have them where I can’t.”
Kenny looked forlorn. “They were so nice to each other before all this started.”
Skip laughed. “So were we.”
And now Steve looked hurt. “I’m still nice to you.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve always been the difficult one. Everyone knows that.”
Kenny said, “Oh, never mind, I guess I’ll stay there.” He went back into the house, elephant-legged shorts flopping about on skinny legs. His feet looked like Nike-clad boards attached to his ankles. His shoulders slumped.
Steve said, “Now see what you’ve done.”
“Damn!” She went after him. “Kenny! Kenny, I was just kidding. Come on—moving’s one of the five most stressful things you can ever do. Nobody means anything. We’re just discombobulated.”
She could have bitten her tongue, knowing he was going to ask about the other stresses. His mother had died a few years ago. He knew firsthand about stress.
But he said nothing, just kept walking, shoulders slumped.
Dee-Dee stared at her. “What’d you do to him?”
“Oh, nothing. He’s upset because everybody’s snappy.”
“Oh, God, is it all worth it? Maybe we all just ought to go for a hike.”
Skip shrugged. “Cabinets to sand.”
But Kenny turned around. “Yeah. Maybe we ought to.” He was the rare kid who didn’t mind doing things with adults.
Skip saw he was smiling. “Y’all have fun.” She rejoined Steve in the courtyard.
He said, “Listen, I’ve been thinking. You need a day off. Why don’t you stay home and wash your hair or something?”
“You know what? That’s not a half-bad idea.” She did need a day off.
They drank another cup of coffee and she kissed Steve good-bye. She was puttering about the kitchen thinking about flopping down with a good book when her pager went off, a rare thing for a Saturday morning.
“What the hell?” she said aloud, and looked at it. It registered a number she didn’t recognize. “Oh, well.” Wearily she dialed it.
A woman answered, and she identified herself. “Detective Skip Langdon.”
“Oh.” The woman sounded surprised. “I get Sandra.”
In a moment, a younger woman came to the phone. “Yes?”
“Someone there paged Detective Skip Langdon.”
“I paged Detective Langdon.”
Skip said, “Yes?”
“You’re Detective Langdon? Something’s funny here. I’m looking for a man.”
“Something’s funny all right. ‘Cause I’m not one.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” The woman hung up.
Skip shrugged and went back to loading the dishwasher. In a moment her pager went off again. It was the same number. Impatiently, she dialed again.
The woman said, “I’ve thought things over. Somebody gave me your card. Said he was you. I think we need to talk about it.”
“Okay. Talk.”
“Uh-uh. Not on the phone. How do I know you really are Detective Langdon?”
“Listen, it’s my day off. Why don’t you come in first thing Monday morning?”
“The man who gave me your card—I found him rifling a friend’s office. He hit me and chased me, and somehow got to my house before I did. He said he’d kill me if I screamed, and he threatened to kill my mother. Then he blindfolded me, gave me your card, and said call him in the morning. I was going to call Public Integrity—maybe it’s good I didn’t.”
“My card doesn’t have my pager number on it.”
“No. It was written on the back.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m not telling you till I can see you.”
It didn’t matter—Skip had her number. But she didn’t like the sound of this. “Okay,” she sighed. “Meet me at my office in half an hour. You know where the Third District is?”
“No.”
“Seventeen hundred Moss Street.”
Skip got there first, carrying yet another coffee. She read the paper while she waited.
And in about ten minutes, an African-American woman arrived, a young, pretty one with gorgeous hair, large of butt and bust, stuffed into black jeans and a white T-shirt.
“I’m the woman who called. Talba Wallis.”
“Sit down, Ms. Wallis.”
“If the guy wasn’t you, who was he? He knows where I live. How the hell could he know that?”
“You better start from the beginning.”
“I’ve been working with a private detective—Gene Allred.”
Skip nodded as if it meant something. She had no idea who that was.
“I went to his office yesterday and this guy in a ski mask was there. I told you the rest.” She ran through the story again, in slightly more detail. “I thought maybe Gene was in some kind of trouble, maybe in jail—I kept calling him and getting no answer.”
“Did you try him at home?”
“I don’t know his home number.”
“Let me try a couple of things.” Skip tried the phone book and she tried Central Lockup; he wasn’t listed and he wasn’t in jail.
“Can you describe the man?”
“I never saw his face, but he was white and tall. Thin, I’d say.”
“What were you working on with Allred?”
“I can’t really talk about that.”
There’d be time enough to insist, if a crime had been committed. “Could I see the card the man gave you?”
“Sure.” She handed it over.
The pager number was there, in Skip’s handwriting.
There was nothing to do except get Wallis’s address, and Allred’s. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait a minute. Is that all? What do you think happened to me?”
“I think you know more about that than I do. But you don’t want to talk about it.”
“It wouldn’t be ethical.”
What the hell. Allred’s office was in her district, and practically on the way home. She wasn’t going to be happy unless she swung by and took a look.
The door was unlocked. As soon as she opened it she knew by the stink there was a corpse in there.
She stepped in and closed the door behind her, grateful for air-conditioning, yet her nose was still deeply offended. There could be no doubt this was a crime scene, but it would help, she thought, to know how many corpses were in there, and if they were human or rodent.
The place was a wreck—p
apers and file folders everywhere.
She stepped over and through a sea of strewn paper on the way to the inner office, which was likewise strewn. Glancing around, she saw that the mess came from filing cabinets in both rooms.
Allred, if it were he, was in the second room. He had fallen backward, one hand over his head, a big hole in his chest. He was fortyish, with thinning blond hair, dressed in olive polyester—the fabled cheap suit of private-eye patter. His face was ghost-white, the blood having had plenty of time to sink to the bottom of his body. Curiously, an arm had been thrown over his head, a finger pointing. His mouth was open slightly, almost in an O, and his eyes were wide open, staring in perennial amazement. A parade of bugs marched in them.
Rusty-looking stuff—the man’s blood—spattered the floor and his clothes.
Okay, fine, one corpse. Human. Male.
She knew enough to call it in, and she couldn’t justify contaminating the scene any further. She stepped into the hall, radioed the dispatcher, and waited for a district car to get there.
That done, she was free to find a phone and call her sergeant.
“Skip. It’s Saturday—haven’t you heard?” Abasolo’s voice had an edge. She’d probably caught him in bed with someone.
“AA, I’ve got a corpse that has my name on it. Young lady paged me at home, told me a wild story, and showed me one of my own cards, with my pager number on it in my handwriting. Said a dude she found at the crime scene in a ski mask chased her, threatened her, then gave her my card and said to call him in the morning. And there’s one other thing. I’ve got a bad feeling the card might be the one I gave Bebe.”
“Come on. You must give out cards all the time.”
“Let me call Bebe—I called you first. What do you think, by the way?”
“The guy said he was you?”
“Implied it, anyway.”
“I think you were right the first time. That’s a corpse with your name on it.”
Skip found more change and gave Bebe a call. “Ms. Fortier, Skip Langdon.”
“Oh, Skip. Call me Bebe.” She sounded nervous. “Do you have any news?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t. But I need to check something out with you. Remember that business card I gave you?”
“Sure. What about it?”
