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

by Julie Smith

  The story she meant was done almost over Skip’s dead body. It was shortly after the shooting that had changed her life, that had her so depressed; it made a hero of her at a time when she would just as soon have put her head under the covers and stayed there.

  Today I don’t feel that way, she thought with surprise. Too bad Boo’s gone. She was a great therapist.

  “Stanley here says you’ve had a little trouble with the Blood of the Lamb people.”

  “Trouble! I’m a mental case. There’s something so crazy-making about these people…”

  “Jane, I have to interrupt for a minute. I need to tell you I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m on a leave of absence from the police department.”

  Both Jane and Stanley looked puzzled. “What’s this about, then?”

  “Last year I met Jacomine on another case and I thought he was bad news. Not just bad, but real bad. Like psychopathic. A megalomaniac. I’m not crazy for Perretti or Jackson, but Jacomine’s more dangerous than David Duke—only in a different kind of way. So when I went on leave I started investigating him—just because nobody else was doing it.” And to save my sanity.

  Jane said: “Just as a concerned citizen.” Skip couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.

  Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Is this inside information?”

  “I’m not part of anybody’s campaign, if that’s what you mean. I’m investigating because I think it’s important. Period.”

  Jane gave her an oddly knowing look. “Okay. I think I know how you feel. I’d be happy to pool information.”

  “Stanley?”

  He stood. “I’m turning it over to you lovely ladies. ‘Scuse me, but I’ve got to go scare up a lady rabbi who’s into Hebrew goddesses.”

  Jane said, “What would you think about grabbing some lunch? I’ve found it helps a lot if I have a drink when I talk about this stuff.”

  When she had one before her, and they were sitting at an isolated table at an unpopular restaurant, she still spoke softly, both she and Skip remembering that even in normal New Orleans circumstances it wasn’t safe to talk about private things in public.

  Jane drained off about a third of her wine at one gulp. “I gibber when I try to do this,” she said. “I absolutely can’t be coherent about it.”

  Skip looked at her, inviting the tale.

  “Nothing bad happened to me. I mean, like bad bad. Like terrible. I don’t know why I’m such a basket case.”

  Skip waited, letting her get her thoughts together.

  “There’s something about it I can’t wrap my mind around. Maybe I just can’t believe anybody could go through something as elaborate as the show they put on for me. It’s crazy, it’s not what adults do.” She gulped some more wine. “I’ve been toying with the notion of evil. I’m not sure what that is, but this might be it.”

  “How would you define it?”

  “I don’t know. Being so self-involved, so controlling, so power-hungry that you could mobilize a virtual army just to stop one newspaper story that would have probably been more flattering than otherwise—certainly would have been objective and no more damaging than any of the stories on the other candidates.”

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s see if I can do it. All I did was call for the interview, and I started getting calls—’Let me tell you all about the Reverend Mr. Jacomine, a giant among men.’ And my boss got the calls and so did his boss. And furthermore, some of the calls came from people I knew—even from friends—and these people seemed to be—I can’t explain it—on his side.” She pushed her hair behind her ear, in the process tilting her chin far up, as if to disconnect her mind from her heart, to stop the flow between the two organs.

  “I mean, there shouldn’t have been sides at all. I wasn’t even aware that there were. But somehow—I can’t tell you how—it was as if we were squared off against each other, Jacomine and me, and he’d gone and recruited all my friends to fight against me. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “It wouldn’t—I’d probably think you were on the edge—except that a similar thing is happening to me. Similar, but not exactly the same—because he and I are enemies. I really am out to get him.”

  “How did he get to my friends? I still don’t get that.”

  “‘Tell me about it.”

  “You, too?”

  Skip nodded. “It really hurts my feelings.”

  Jane laughed. “I know what you mean.”

  “Anyway,” she continued, “it was obvious something was up. And here’s what the paper said—that I couldn’t write about any of my personal experiences. Okay, I can kind of see it, because he’s running for office and we wouldn’t want to single out any one candidate, but it wasn’t even put that way. They said nobody cares about how you get the story, they just care about the story. Now I ask you—is that responsible journalism? Surely when someone tries to influence a story in a way that no one’s ever even seen before, that’s a story. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know anything about journalistic ethics, but yes. Sure. I’d say that’s a story.”

  “Well, I wasn’t allowed to breathe a word of it. So if that wasn’t the story, there was still a story to get beyond just ‘here’s who the candidate is’—which, by the way wasn’t available, because they were blocking it. I started calling up everybody in town who I thought might have been involved with Jacomine in any political kind of way to see if anyone knew anything. And I got the same thing every time—or anyway, one of two stories. One was, ‘Oh, we better not talk about that’—no explanation, just a polite refusal. The other was what a great guy Jacomine was. Nothing else. Nothing!

  “But I had an ace in the hole. There’s this one City Councilwoman who’ll talk straight with the press. I’m not saying she isn’t self-promoting, but she’s very down to Earth and she doesn’t bullshit. So I called her. She said, ‘Listen, Janie, it’s very simple. Here’s a man who can mobilize votes. If he says I’ll have fifty people over there tomorrow to put up signs, he does. A hundred people to stuff envelopes—no problem. He delivers what he says he will, and it’s usually something big. And then he does it again. Are you getting the picture?’

  “Well, what could be simpler? Of course that had to be it—everybody wanted him on their side because of what he could do for them. And now that he was running for mayor, people owed him a lot of favors—I was just beginning to see how many—and if he won, he was going to be in a position to dole out favors to them. So I had what I needed—something to make sense out of the whole thing.

  “Of course, this particular councilwoman had spoken off the record, as usual. No problem there. She said I could call her a ‘high-up figure in city government’ or something. But ten minutes later, I got a phone call from her. She said, ‘ Janie, I was just thinking. I think maybe I spoke too fast. I think maybe it would be better if you didn’t use the quote at all.’ Now who the hell could have gotten to her? No one could have known about the phone call—absolutely no one—except her assistant. Are we to believe this civil servant of thirty years is a member of the Blood of the Fucking Lamb? Is everybody’s assistant in the whole city?”

  Skip saw instantly what had happened. She said without hesitation, “Your phone’s tapped!”

  Jane looked as if she’d been bitten. “What? This is the Times-Picayune we’re talking about—how the hell could the phone be tapped?”

  “It’s either that or what you said—everybody’s assistant is a follower of Jacomine. I don’t know why I never saw it before—that’s why he seems so ubiquitous. Or one of the reasons. Another reason is that he is.”

  “Can you imagine what my boss will say if I suggest the phone’s tapped?”

  “You’re paranoid and crazy, and would you consider early retirement.”

  They both laughed. Jane was starting to look more relaxed. “You know, it makes sense. And it fits with— omigod, my home phone’s tapped too.”

  “Why do you say that?”r />
  “Jacomine used to call me at home a lot. But never— and I do mean never—unless I was working in the garden and had dirt up to my elbows. I used to wonder how he did it.”

  “He could have had you watched.”

  She nodded. “You know, one of my neighbors did tell me she saw a prowler going through my garbage.”

  “That was no prowler, that was a parishioner.” This was doing Skip a world of good. When the same things happened to someone else that had happened to her, she could think them through, put a label on them. Jane was right—when you were the target, the overkill seemed so unlikely you didn’t even consider it. Hence, the experience was crazy-making.

  Jane was almost bubbly. “I feel better. I feel a lot better. And it isn’t even the wine.”

  “Me, too. In fact, I’m ordering a glass to celebrate.”

  Jane said, “Good idea, because we’re going to be here awhile. I’m barely started. The thing is, there was some merit to running any story at all because it might encourage disaffected followers to call, so I kept at it. I’d heard he was a healer, and that’s news—I mean, it would be if he got elected. A mayor of a major American city who can heal the sick? This is worth investigating.

  “So I asked if I could go to a church service, and they said yes, which surprised me. But meanwhile the pressure continued. I did another story on another public official, a man called Ferguson—just a day-in-the-life kind of profile—and first thing that morning, Ferguson called to thank me for the nice story. Next, Jacomine was on the phone, in the most incredible snit. He said he heard I was the Picayune’s hatchet woman and after seeing that story, he knew it was true. Ferguson and ‘all his people’ had been on the phone to Jacomine all morning, lamenting about my betrayal and warning him about me.”

  Skip said, “Well, that’s easy. He was lying.”

  Jane nodded. “That’s easy to say, isn’t it? But do you see how it creates an atmosphere of paranoia and unease? I told Jacomine that Ferguson had called to thank me, and he said yes, Ferguson had told him that. He’d called me because he felt at my mercy and he was afraid if he didn’t treat me with kid gloves I’d go after him again. So was Ferguson lying to me?

  “I could have called him up and asked him, but I was damned if I’d get into that kind of fifth-grade, carrying-tales thing Jacomine was doing.”

  Skip nodded vigorously. “It seems so incredibly childish.”

  “Exactly. It’s so inept you even feel a little sorry for him. Imagine my surprise when I saw how well it worked.”

  She paused. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I think the thing about crazy people is, they don’t feel silly about doing whatever enters their heads. So they do things to get what they want that a normal person would be far too inhibited to do.

  “My mistake was, I didn’t realize it would work.

  “Anyway, he gets me all in a tizzy about that, and then a couple of days later, he calls up and he says, ‘Janie, I’m really trying to trust you, and I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you from doing the story, but I’m having serious second thoughts about letting you come to a church service.’

  “Naturally, I said, ‘What’s wrong now,’ and he said, ‘I was talking to a minister this morning and he warned me about you.’ Now, Skip, I don’t even know any ministers. So I said, ‘Who was that?’ and he said, ‘I can’t tell you; only that it was a black minister.’ I said, ‘What did he tell you?’ And Jacomine said, ‘He said you’re obsessed with sex.’ ”

  “What on Earth is that supposed to mean?” Skip asked.

  “Exactly. So I start going back in my mind—have I ever interviewed a black minister? Done some church story? Did I wear a miniskirt? Was it something like that? Or was this just some conservative dude who saw some of the stories I did that did involve sex in some form or other? What on Earth was he talking about?”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “Of course. He said he didn’t know, it was just what the minister said. Well, naturally, I was tempted to say, ‘Well, then, why can’t I come to church? Do you have orgies to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”? ‘ And maybe he was trying to provoke me into saying that. I did say, ‘What does this have to do with my coming to church?’ And he said it was a matter of trust. If I was the sort of person he couldn’t trust, I’d twist things. Anyway, in the end he did agree to let me come, and I did go, and sure enough, he did a few healings, which I dutifully reported in my story.”

  Skip nodded, feeling a little overwhelmed, but Jane said, “And that’s when the real stuff started. First of all, this weird thing happened at church. He was showing me around with a bunch of church members, and we ended up in this small room that he said was a meditation room, all white and decorated with hanging plants.

  “It was really a tiny place, and all of a sudden I realized we were alone and the door was shut. All the people with us had melted away, and he started talking about how his wife had a bad back and couldn’t have sex—can you imagine? I didn’t know if he was going to try to grab me or what. My heart started pounding really fast, but I thought, ‘No problem, all I have to do is yell, this building is full of people,’ and then I looked at my watch and said a photographer was going to meet me, I wonder where he is, and Jacomine led me out as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

  “But put that together with that whole ‘obsessed with sex’ routine and what does it spell?”

  Frankly buffaloed, Skip shook her head. “It makes no sense at all.”

  Jane leaned back in her chair. “I’m so glad to have confirmation. It doesn’t to me either. I’ve turned it over and over in my mind, and I can’t make a coherent story out of it. It makes no sense. And yet it must have some kind of logic to it—have I used the word ‘crazy-making’ yet? By the way, you’re the first person I’ve told that to. It made me feel defiled somehow. I know I was being manipulated, I just don’t know what the object was. If I told it to a man, I guess he’d say Jacomine was trying to get into my pants, but that makes even less sense than any other theory—of which I have none, by the way.”

  “Well, if he were really, really crazy—•”

  “Which he is.”

  “Then he might think no woman can resist him—and if you didn’t, then he’d have you in his power.”

  Jane’s face twisted into a frown. “I’ve thought of that, but—is anybody that crazy? I mean, one minute he’s telling me how dangerous I am and how he’s scared to death of me, and the next, he’s making me his sex slave. How do you cram both of those things into one mind?”

  Skip shrugged.

  “Anyhow, I went back and wrote a first draft, which I finished right before I went home one night and showed to my editor. He said he thought it wasn’t quite balanced enough in view of the delicate subject this obviously was, which I thought was completely wrong. Why should we bend over backwards when these assholes were so obviously trying to control what we ran? But I said sure, I’d be glad to put in some more community quotes saying what a great guy people thought Jacomine was.

  “Then that night Jacomine calls me at home. He says he’s heard the story’s going to run the next day and it’s a hatchet job. Now how could he know it was even written? So naturally I asked him, and he said that was just what he heard. The question is, who told him?

  “My city editor? Stanley? He saw a copy. Whoever it was, it was probably someone I trusted and was close to.”

  “Wait a minute. Was it in the computer?” Skip asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe they got into it.”

  Jane shrugged. “It’s possible. But, my God, it wasn’t like there was a million dollars at stake, or even anything at all. It was a completely innocuous story that was about to get slanted in his direction.

  “Anyway, the upshot was, I rewrote it six times. And every time I rewrote it, it had to go up the ladder to the top, and every time, it came back with orders to water it down a little bit more. Meanwhile, Jacomine was calling every day
with versions of what he’d ‘heard.’ And that’s just calling me. God knows who else’s ear he was bending, but I’ve got a few ideas. Frankly, I don’t even rule out blackmail on this one.

  “Anyway, the story finally ran, six weeks later. All of the other stories in that series took an average of four hours’ work—a one-hour interview, maybe an hour’s research, and a couple of hours to write them. They all sailed through with hardly a word from any editor.

  “When I went home the night before this one ran, I was pretty disappointed in the whole process. I had all six versions before me, and I could see it getting more and more sanitized in every version. The one I’d just turned in was unbelievably bland, didn’t begin to scratch the surface of what we knew about him, and was really pretty one-sided in his favor. But I comforted myself with the fact that at least it had the healing paragraph in it. I had actually seen healings at his church, and I wrote about them—as I mentioned, that’s pretty unusual in a mayoral candidate.

  “But guess what? I got up the next morning, read the paper, and that paragraph wasn’t there. It disappeared. Simply was not there. And I saw the final version right before I went home. I’ll tell you I went into that paper livid. Absolutely loaded for bear. I asked every single editor what happened and you know what they did? Shrugged their shoulders. One of them said, ‘weird.’

  “That was it. That was all. After Jacomine had put us all through six weeks of hell, no one gave the tiniest damn. No one even cared. Now I ask you, what went on there?”

  “Someone got paid.”

  “Or blackmailed. Or converted. God, I don’t know. But whatever it was, I don’t think it was simple.”

  “Was anything missing besides the healing paragraph?”

  “Yes, but it was nothing that mattered. It was just a phrase in a sentence about what he’d been doing before he came here. I think it said he was in New Iberia—or maybe St. Martinville. I mean, why bother?”

  Skip was sitting up straight, feeling a little like a bloodhound that’s happened on a particularly redolent sock. “That,” she said, “might bear investigating.”