Jazz Funeral (Skip Langdon #3) (Skip Langdon Mystery) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  “Shit!”

  “Okay. Let’s crank up again.”

  The drummer player said, “What do you want to hear, Jailbait?”

  Realizing he meant her, Melody felt embarrassed. “My name’s Mel—” She stopped just in time, head spinning at what she’d almost done. “Janis!” she said, shouting to cover her mistake.

  “This one goes out to Janis,” he said, and smiled, his eyes crinkling. He looked almost appealing. “What’ll it be?”

  “How about ‘Breakaway’?”

  “Not without Irma Thomas,” he sneered.

  “I can sing it,” Melody said. She was surprised they even knew it.

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. An audition.”

  The woman said, “Oh, hell. Let’s just do ‘Jambalaya.’”

  Melody thought the blond—Chris, his name was—winked at her. She looked him full in the eyes, tilted her head slightly. “I can sing that too.”

  He shrugged, lifted an eyebrow. He was interested, Melody thought with amazement. Not in the song, but in her. Her palms started up again. “Go to it,” said Chris.

  She turned around to face the audience. No one was there, really. Just a couple of strollers in the square, and a few more down Chartres Street. That made it easy. Melody took a deep breath and started belting: “Jambalaya, crawfish pie, file gumbo …”

  The familiar words bounced off the concrete louder than she’d expected, raised the energy in the street like a parade coming through. Melody felt the shock of it, saw the strollers in the square point and start to walk toward her. She’d only sung in controlled situations before, had no idea how she’d sound out here.

  Someone behind her said, “Holy shit.” One of the guys, she couldn’t tell which one. And that was all she needed.

  After that, it was fun. Her feet started to move and magic happened. The music flowed through her like a gift from another dimension. She was a musician, she was an artist, this was who she was. She knew now, just as she’d known it the first day she’d sung the same song, and danced in front of her mother’s full-length mirror, just fooling around but feeling the magic. She’d been about eight.

  Part of what was happening, the sudden party feel of it all, was the song. She realized it even as a crowd started to gather. People responded to songs they already knew. But, hell, it wasn’t just that, she was singing well. Really well. They were loving her. They were tossing money.

  Melody finished the song, and before the applause had stopped, before she had time to catch her breath, Chris started “Breakaway.” The others joined in, but Melody got there first:

  “I made my reservations

  I’m leavin’ town tomorrow

  I’ll find somebody new and

  There’ll be no more sorrow …”

  They did that and then they did “La Ti Da,” and some others; Chris just started a song, never asking if Melody knew it. And she always knew it. The crowd never got huge, but people came and went and dollars piled up in the kitty.

  After about an hour and a half, they took a break. The ugly guy, the piggy one, was all over her, hugging her, kissing her, sweating on her. “You are something, kid!”

  Melody shrugged graciously. “You guys just needed a singer.”

  “Let’s go eat,” said the redhead. “I’m Sue Ann, by the way. And this is Chris.” She leaned on him for a moment, sending a message, Melody thought. But Sue Ann grabbed the fat one too, around the upper arm. “This is Randy.”

  They went over to Decatur Street, walked down to get a pizza, Sue Ann asking questions a lot faster than Melody could think of answers.

  “Where are you from?”

  Where the hell was she from? “Abbeville,” she said.

  “Funny, you don’t look like a Cajun.” This from Chris.

  “Um, only on my mom’s side.” She wished she’d thought to get a story together.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “In New Orleans? Gosh. Seems like forever. How ‘bout y’all?”

  “Oh. Awhile.” They didn’t like answering questions either.

  Chris kept looking at her sideways, keeping his distance, seeming amused, as if she were a hamster someone had brought him to play with. It made her nervous, but on the other hand, it was attention from the person she wanted it from. She wanted to get closer, to close the distance between them, but she didn’t know how. She felt tongue-tied every time he spoke to her, wouldn’t have known what to say even if she’d met him as Melody Brocato.

  Oh, God. What if they ask for a last name?

  Robicheaux. That was safe. Everyone was named Robicheaux.

  But they didn’t ask. They asked how old she was, or the piggy one did. “Eighteen,” she said, not missing a beat.

  The guys slapped each other high fives. Melody flushed, thinking they were congratulating each other because she wasn’t jailbait after all, nearly dying of embarrassment. But Randy explained, “They all say that. We got a standing bet.”

  Angry, she said, “Who is ‘they,’ please?”

  “Every cute runaway comes to the Quarter.”

  Sue Ann said, “Don’t let ‘em bother you. They’re just a couple of small-town guys in the big city.”

  “Well, listen to Miss Sophistication,” said Randy. “Like you’re not from Meridian, Mississippi.”

  “Shut up, big guy, or you’re going to bed without.” If that meant what Melody thought it meant, it was good news.

  As if on cue, Chris said, “Hey, Janis, where you crashin’?”

  “Uh … well, I…” She couldn’t come up with a single idea.

  Sue Ann said, “You don’t have a place?

  Melody shook her head.

  “Want to stay with us?”

  She shrugged—coolly, she hoped. “Sure.” As if she did this every day.

  They finished off their pizza and had a quick conference about which songs they were going to do tomorrow, Melody being careful not to suggest any of Janis’s songs, lest they make the connection. Everything they knew, Melody knew. Not for nothing had she worked her butt off the last two years, with Joel and Doug.

  Chris was the best musician of the three, almost as good as Doug, though he couldn’t touch Joel, and he looked at Melody with respect. Chris respected her, she could feel it. Considered her a colleague. The worst day of her life had turned into the best.

  Melody wanted to go back and make more money, but they said you weren’t really allowed to play past eight, and they’d stopped at eight-fifteen. They’d only made twenty-two dollars, and most of it had gone for the pizza. But to Melody it was manna. She’d started out with seven bucks in her jeans and now she was a professional singer.

  She looked at her watch. It wasn’t even nine-thirty. What was next?

  “Beatty’s?” asked Randy.

  “What’s that?”

  “The runaway bar,” Chris said. “It’s where you’d go tonight if you hadn’t met us. You’d have hung around, watching it get later and later, and then this one bar on Decatur would have started hopping, and you’d have noticed everybody in there was about your age. And you’d have gone in and a lot of guys would have hit on you and finally someone would have offered you a place to crash tonight.”

  “A guy?”

  He shrugged. “Anybody. People take care of each other in the Quarter.”

  She was fascinated. “Are we going there?”

  “Hell, no. I can’t take that scene.”

  “Just for a while,” said Randy.

  So they went.

  The bar, which opened out to the street, was essentially a three-sided room. The furnishings were basic, if you were being kind, and Chris was right—no one there was over thirty, probably not over twenty-five. This early, it was pretty sparsely populated, which Chris said was good, he hated it when it was crowded. Randy and Chris played the video games across from the bar while Melody and Sue Ann got acquainted. Mostly, Melody asked questions and looked around. Some punk rockers were starti
ng to arrive, pretty tough-looking customers, and she bet there’d be more as the night wore on. She wondered how she’d look all punked-out.

  Chris came back, Randy tagging behind. “I can’t take this scene.” He gestured with his head. The place was starting to hop. A lot of people looked pretty unsteady already. They got a six-pack and some go-cups and went out to the Moonwalk, all four of them. Melody wasn’t too happy about it, but didn’t feel she had a choice, since she was depending on them for shelter. She had a pretty good idea about what was going to happen—Randy was going to make a play for her while Chris looked on in that amused way he had.

  Sure enough, the fat one fell into step beside her, sat down next to her when they reached the Moonwalk. That part was right. But Chris wasn’t paying even the slightest attention. He was talking to Sue Ann, not intimately, just joking around, but Melody might as well not have existed.

  Randy was going on and on about something that had happened to him in high school, something to do with football, punctuating his story by touching her leg, her arm, anything he could get away with. She wanted to tell him to stop, but then he’d sulk, and she didn’t want to piss him off right at the outset. And she was still trying to avoid contributing to Chris’s amusement-at-her-expense. Randy had sucked down his first beer on the short walk and was now into his second. He smelled beery and sweaty; revolting. He had his hand on her shoulder now, leaning close, not merely touching, but really latched on, like a barnacle or something. The hand was dirty. There were black lines under each fingernail, on the knuckles. She was going to have to say something or throw up. Involuntarily, though, she looked around at Chris, wanting his help but not daring to admit it to herself. She caught his eye and saw his expression change from bland to alert. Not amused.

  He said, “Hey, Janis, want to go down to the river?”

  She said, “Sure,” swiveling slowly, as if she’d expected it, known it was due. Later, she realized she must have looked utterly desperate.

  There were benches like bleachers, which you could climb down and sit on, dabble your feet in the Mississippi itself. “Come on,” said Chris, and clambered ahead of her. At the bottom they stood clutching their beers, peering into the stillness of the water. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he said.

  But it was more than pretty. It was vast and calming, soothing in an unexpected way that was new to her. “It’s like … a mom,” she blurted, and thought what a dork she sounded, what a baby.

  But Chris nodded. “Yes. It’s like being rocked. Just listening to it, just being this close. It’s an entity. It feels like a thing with a personality.”

  She stared at him. She didn’t know who he was, where he came from, but she hadn’t expected this. She had thought he was handsome, talented, transient, and no one she could take seriously—in other words, someone perfectly suited to be her first fuck, to be used and discarded. She wanted it that way because it wouldn’t get messy. Now she thought she could fall in love with him.

  “I grew up near the ocean. In South Carolina, where it’s like velvet. People who come there, Yankees, hate to go in—they say it’s like being in a dirty bathtub. Because it’s so warm.”

  “And what’s it like, really?”

  “Like heaven.” He smiled at her, a shy smile, she realized, and she liked that. “Just like heaven.”

  She smiled back, but didn’t know what to say, just held his gaze. He didn’t speak either, and she felt uncomfortable. She slid her eyes back toward the river, took another sip of beer. She twisted her ring the way she did when she was nervous, the cameo ring that Nonna, her father’s mother, had given her. It had been Nonna’s, which made it an heirloom, her mother said, and so she wore it, but it was too small for her. She had to wear it on her pinky, where it looked much too big, but she kind of liked that, thinking that at Country Day it passed for eccentric.

  Chris took her hand, made her stop twisting, calling attention to her nervousness, which embarrassed her. “I wanted to tell you,” he said, “your singing was …”

  She waited, knowing he was searching for a word that would flatter her but still not compromise him, a low-key word.

  “Extraordinary,” he said finally.

  The guy was cute, but the phoniness of it pissed her off. She snorted. “Extraordinarily what?”

  She was pleased with the sound of her voice—brittle, edgy, just this side of hostile. The woman who spoke in that voice would brook no nonsense.

  But Chris only laughed. “Tough cookie,” he said, and let the suspense build for a moment. Extraordinarily amateurish, he might have said, and a piece of her was sure he was going to. She was braced, ready for it, sure she could take it, anything would be better than stupid, lukewarm pleasantries.

  “What are you, a prima donna? You were great. And you know it too, don’t you?”

  She stared at him, shocked. “You really thought so?”

  He touched her cheek. “Yeah.” He said it so softly she almost missed it.

  Her stomach felt fluttery, a sensation she associated with stage fright. Again she looked ahead and took a sip from the can. She thought of reclaiming her hand, the one he was holding, but she found, on consideration, that she didn’t want to at all. Involuntarily, she squeezed his hand instead, and immediately regretted it, knowing it sent a signal she hadn’t meant to send.

  Not looking at her, staring at the West Bank like she was, he spoke again. “What’s your real name?”

  “I told you. You don’t believe me?”

  “You just don’t look like a Janis.”

  “I don’t? What do I look like?”

  Boldly, she turned to face him again, and he stared at her for a long moment. “Olivia,” he said. “No—something Shakespearean. Viola. Juliet. Better yet, Julianna. Something Mediterranean and complex—and soft as the night.”

  “Desdemona?”

  “Too sophisticated. Something with depth, but innocence.”

  Her cheeks burned. She didn’t like being seen as innocent. “Are you really named Chris? It’s perfect for you.”

  “I know. That’s why I picked it.”

  “Are Sue Ann and Randy their names?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t know who they are. But I know you. Your family has money, but they don’t really appreciate you. They treat you like a kid and don’t recognize your talent, maybe they’re violent; maybe not always, but finally—today; yesterday. Maybe it was one violent incident that did it. You couldn’t handle it anymore. So you ran away.”

  Tears welled as he spoke and poured down her cheeks by the time he finished. She wasn’t even embarrassed, just caught up in the incredible, wonderful, unprecedented sensation of being understood. “Did it happen to you?” Of course it had; how else could he know?

  “It happened to you,” he said.

  A sob came out of her, unbidden, unexpected, like vomit. She turned her back to him, covered her mouth with her hands, desperately trying to stem this humiliating uprising of emotion, aware that her back must look as if she had St. Vitus’s Dance. He left her alone for a moment, and then she felt him move closer, turn so that he could hold her whole body tight to his chest, his arms wrapped around her from behind, his face against her cheek. It was so gentle, so thoughtful a gesture, it felt so warm and intimate that the sobs begin to die almost immediately.

  She put her hands on his, which were now crossed on her chest. “I’m afraid they’ll find me,” she said, whispering, though she didn’t know why.

  “What?”

  She spoke more loudly, turned her face to his, or as far toward his as she could, so that she was in profile, their cheeks touching again. “I’m afraid of them,” she said.

  His mouth was at her ear. “I know,” he whispered.

  It didn’t occur to her to question how he knew, only to marvel that he did. She struggled out of the soft embrace, hating to do it, but needing to look at him some more, and turned around to face him. She took both his hands, surprised at her boldness but ne
eding to touch him. “I just ran away today.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She considered, finally shook her head. “No. A lot of things happened. I feel like I lost everything at once. I mean, my family and friends and…” She paused, suddenly shy. She had been about to say “my boyfriend,” but thought better of it. “I can’t go back. I can never go back.”

  “Your folks live in New Orleans?”

  She nodded.

  He looked at her for a long while, assessing. “Wonder how you’d look as a blonde?”

  She laughed, the sound coming out of her as unexpectedly as the sobs had. She saw suddenly how easy it was going to be. “That’s it! All I have to do is look different.”

  “That’s what they all do—the runaways.” He stared at her. “But I like the way you look now.” He was kissing her before she saw it coming, his lips on hers, his tongue probing, his hands reaching for her face, tenderly, gently. It wasn’t like kissing Flip, or anyone at Country Day, or anyone in the world, maybe. It was like fire and honey at the same time. So sweet, so impossibly sweet, but so incendiary, sweeping, like a brushfire. Flip kissed like a baby; this was a whole new category. Or maybe one kiss was much like another; maybe she was different. She put a hand on Chris’s neck, to pull him closer to her. His skin was impossibly hot.

  In a while, she said, “I need a break,” and pulled herself away, reached awkwardly for her beer, but only succeeded in knocking it off the bench.

  Chris pulled her back. “Let’s go to bed.”

  There they were, the magic words. Everything was working out so perfectly according to plan that Melody couldn’t quite keep up. She felt dazed, out of focus. Chris put his arms around her, simply held her, not pushing anything, which gave her time to think. And she realized it had all been a fantasy, that she’d never expected to end up like this, with Chris—to get the thing she wanted. She was so used to being thwarted—to being a child instead of an adult, always at someone else’s mercy—that she wasn’t prepared to get her wish. Or maybe she just wasn’t ready to do it. It was something you thought and thought about and it was a big, big deal.

  Oh, hell, be a grown-up.