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

by Julie Smith

  “Dad, could I ask you something?”

  “Just get out of here.”

  Alex went into his bedroom and brought back a copy of Fake It Till You Make It. “Do you recognize this?”

  “What do you mean, do I recognize that?”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “You crazy, boy? Do I know what it is? What planet are you from?”

  “I know you know it’s a book. I mean, do you recognize the title and author?”

  “You gone nuts or somethin’? What are you doin’ to me?”

  Alex was sick and tired of being patient. “Who wrote the book, Dad?”

  “You got old-timers’ or somethin’, Elec? Don’t you even recognize your own damn garbage?”

  Alex threw the book into the living room, not giving a damn if he broke the spine, or a window, or a lifetime of vows. Why in hell did he have to live with the world’s only seventy-five-year-old six-year-old?

  As his rage rose, so did his libido. Damn that Skip Langdon! If it hadn’t been for her, it wouldn’t be like this. He wanted a woman and he wanted her now. Hell, he’d settle for a teenage girl if it weren’t against the law. He didn’t care. As long as she was female and ready.

  He strode out, banging his boots on the wood floor, slamming every door he could find whether it was on his way or not, and jumped on his hog.

  The white walls of Casamento’s were as soothing as Skip had known they’d be. It was a sentimental favorite of hers and Steve’s—he was crazy for the fried oysters and she liked the scrubbed tiles, the trailing philodendrons.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t come to L.A.”

  “Listen, kiddo, this is the biggest case of your career. You don’t have to apologize.”

  She stopped dead. He was right, but she hadn’t known that when she canceled her plans. She’s just felt she had to see the thing through no matter what.

  “You’re a good cop,” he said, with real admiration in his voice.

  She realized he couldn’t possibly know whether she was a good cop or not, but still … a lot of people would have gone ahead and taken their vacations. What instinct had told her not to? She couldn’t have known the case would get national attention, would terrify the town and spawn a mini-Jazzfest. All she had known was that the same asshole had killed a nice young woman and a nice old man who had a teddy bear. Maybe it was the teddy bear that got her, so forlorn on the floor beside its dead owner.

  But she wasn’t given to sentimentality. It wasn’t that. Steve was right, she thought with surprise. A good cop—a really good cop—wouldn’t have left, would have seen the case through no matter what, would have gotten the Mabus case even though it wasn’t really hers; wouldn’t have quit in the middle.

  Am I really a good cop?

  Probably.

  She was taken aback.

  Really?

  She’d never been a good anything in her life—not student, not daughter, not a damn thing. She was used to not being good.

  But there was plenty of evidence she was good at this. Joe had handpicked her for Homicide; he had chosen her for the task force; he was already urging her to take the sergeant’s exam next time it was given.

  Why did she have a tendency to listen to the likes of O’Rourke instead of to her own good sense? She didn’t know, but it was there, it was true. And she felt a sudden wave of affection for Steve for being on her side.

  She wanted to say, “Steve, I love you. I want you, I want to fuck you under the table.”

  She couldn’t even say the first part.

  “What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”

  She shook her head. “Got a pearl.” She took the tiny gray thing out of her mouth. “Think it’s good luck?”

  He shrugged.

  “Thanks for saying I’m a good cop.” That was as far as she could go, and she hated it. Her insides were full of affection for him, love for him, that ached to get out, and she didn’t know how to release it. If they could make love, if they’d done that instead of opting for a more conventional lunch, wouldn’t he know? Wouldn’t he be able to tell? She knew the answer was no; sex wasn’t love, more often than not didn’t mean a thing to most people. She had to tell him or she’d blow apart. She had to tell him sometime, but not today. Not while she was trying to solve the damn case. Later.

  “So how’s the case coming?”

  “Bad. I’m getting desperate.”

  “He didn’t kill anyone last night. Maybe he’s done.”

  Skip’s stomach flopped. “I don’t think so. I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  “Since when does a cop date suspects?” The question popped like an angry blister, splattering her with bits of doubt and hostility.

  “Steve!”

  He said nothing, just glared at her.

  “You know it wasn’t a real date.” She stared down at her plate.

  “Somehow I have a hard time believing the famous Dr. Alexander Bignell is really a murder suspect. Somehow it’s easier to believe he’s a smart, famous, rich, sophisticated guy you’d rather stay home and date than come to California to see me.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Listen, Skip, I had a few drinks last night and I was really looking forward to seeing you. I guess I’d have swallowed anything. But in the cold light of day, when I finally put it together who the guy is, it got a little obvious. I’m going home on the red-eye tonight.”

  “Don’t!” She grabbed his hand.

  “Don’t?” He was clearly puzzled. He just stared at her, neither reclaiming his hand nor curling his fingers around hers.

  “Steve, don’t you understand how far I’ve gone already, telling you what I did? Maybe I’m a good cop and maybe I’m not. A good cop doesn’t talk about her cases.”

  “Jesus shit.” His fingers curled.

  “You understand?”

  “You have beautiful eyes, you know that?”

  “They’re pleading now.” She squeezed his hand.

  “Shit. You’re telling me Bignell really is a suspect? One of the most famous psychologists in the country is actually suspected of killing two people and writing a crazy letter?”

  “Shhhh.” All she could think of was being overheard.

  “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  She nodded very slightly, knowing she’d already answered, still feeling guilty about it.

  “Let’s walk.”

  “I have to get back to work.”

  When they were in the car, he said, “Alexander Bignell!” Like an explosion.

  “Alex. Elec to his daddy.”

  “What in hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Just a Southern pronunciation.”

  “Is he it? I mean is this one of those cases where the police know who the killer is, they just haven’t got proof yet?”

  “I wish. Can you keep a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ve narrowed it down to about thirty suspects.”

  “Oh, come on. You can’t stop now.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you any of this and you know it.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Kiss me.”

  They ended up necking in front of Casamento’s.

  “At least no one can see in,” said Skip when she stopped to breathe. “We’re steaming up the windows.”

  “Would you care?”

  “Not if Second District station weren’t right across the street,” she said. “Which it is. Give me my purse, will you? I’ve probably got lipstick everywhere.”

  As she pulled out her makeup bag, a folded paper dropped on the seat.

  “What’s this?” Steve opened it up, not asking permission. “Oh, shit. Suddenly I get it.”

  Skip grabbed it from him—it was a schedule of CODA meetings, the teddy-bear group starred and underlined.

  “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.

  TWENTY-TWO

  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, peopl
e 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?