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

by Julie Smith

  “I jumped her. Just like I did this morning.” She shook her head again—this was something else that wouldn’t sink in. “I tried to kill my own mother. Twice.”

  Her lawyer started: “Melody!”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Ham pulled me off and I ran out of the house. Didn’t think, just ran. I had to get the hell out.”

  “Did you hear anything else?”

  “No. Well, maybe. It might have been my imagination.”

  “What?”

  “I thought I heard a scream.”

  “Patty screamed?”

  “No, Ham, I thought.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “No. Just yelled, like …”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I guess … I mean I thought later … I guess that’s when she did it.”

  Skip tried to keep her face impassive. She couldn’t say “poor kid” again. “And that was all?”

  “I just kept running.”

  “Okay, let’s stop for now. Your dad can take you home.”

  “I can go?”

  She sighed. She’d gotten through the interview fine. For the first time she looked frightened. “What am I going back to?”

  It was the moan of a motherless child.

  Skip went to get Patty. “Is George still here?”

  “He took Melody home. But your lawyer’s waiting for us.” Gray Renegar was one of the best criminal lawyers in the state. George was nothing if not a good provider.

  Patty sighed. “George’ll be unhappy. He doesn’t like Gray’s advice.”

  Skip wondered what she meant. As they made their way to the interview room where they’d meet Renegar, Patty said, “I’m sorry I shot you. I guess I went a little crazy.”

  A more accomplished southerner than she, Skip thought, would come up with a polite reply. She couldn’t.

  When they reached their destination and everyone was seated. Skip said, “Do you understand your rights?”

  Patty nodded. “I want to waive them.”

  “What?” She stared at Renegar, who spoke automatically to Patty.

  “I have to advise you against that.”

  “George wants me to.”

  “Patty, has it occurred to you that you and George might have a conflict in this thing? I’m your lawyer and I’m telling you to keep your mouth shut.”

  Patty looked surprised, apparently unused to such talk. She said, “He’s right, Gray. I want to plead guilty. If I stand trial, Melody will have to testify. Neither of us wants that.”

  What do you know—a shred of maternal feeling. Or is she just mouthing George’s words?

  The latter, Skip thought. Definitely the latter. She felt oddly let down. She’d expected more of a fight. But she could hear Melody’s words of a few minutes before, now metaphorically fraught: Patty had a vote, but she always took my father’s side.

  “He doesn’t know what happened,” Patty said. “He just knows I killed Ham. I told him that.”

  Her hair was the hair of a woman used to having others groom her; it was sticking out all over, stiff with spray and sweat. Crying had eroded her makeup. She looked haggard and beaten.

  Renegar said, “Patty, I have to advise you—”

  “Shut up!”

  His eyes were the color of his name, and hard. “Could we just get it on the record, please?”

  She kept quiet while he told her again to keep her trap shut. And then she said, voice dripping with sarcasm: “May I start now?” A lot of anger was about to come out.

  “He turned my own child against me—and now my husband. My own husband would rather see me in jail than … oh, never mind.

  “He threatened me—he threatened to tell George and Melody if I didn’t vote to sell the business. They only needed one vote, you see. But I couldn’t do that, it wasn’t what George wanted, so of course I wasn’t about to.”

  “And what did he threaten you with?”

  “Oh, about being Melody’s father.” She seemed distracted, wanting to get on with it—she’d already told this story.

  Renegar looked as if he were going to have a cow.

  “I thought he’d forgotten.”

  “Forgotten!” Skip blurted it, unable to keep quiet.

  “Well, it only happened two or three times. I mean, I just—waited until George was out getting drunk and Ham was asleep. Then I’d take off my clothes and get in bed with him. He didn’t say a word. He was seventeen—would any seventeen-year-old boy in the world say no?”

  Still a child.

  Skip wondered if she’d let him down easy or even mentioned the fun was over. Probably not, she thought. And of course she’d have been sure to seduce George around that time—or told him she had if he was the kind of drunk who wouldn’t remember.

  “We never said a word about it.”

  “You and Ham?”

  She shook her head. “Until the other day. I really thought he—I don’t know—didn’t even know, maybe. Thought he was dreaming or something.”

  Oh, sure.

  “Anyway, she was really George’s baby. Ham’s genes were his genes.”

  Renegar cleared his throat. “Can we get on with it, please?”

  Skip said, “So Ham threatened to tell George and Melody he was Melody’s father.”

  “He called and asked me to come over—I knew it was going to be bad, I knew it. He’d asked me before, about the vote. He’d been begging me. The bastard, it was none of his business. And then he sounded so serious on the phone. He said, ‘Look, it’s to your advantage to show up.’ So I had some wine before I left, and then I had some with him. I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “What did you do when he threatened you?”

  “Nothing. Melody just came out of nowhere and started beating me. He pulled her off, but I realized what had happened—he’d turned my own child against me. The lowlife, scum-sucking bastard! I work all these years to raise this beautiful little family, and along comes Ham and poof—my own child tries to kill me. I could just—”

  “And you did, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, goddammit! I did. I didn’t even think. I was in a white-hot rage—I can get in it again just thinking about it—and I picked up the knife before I thought. I don’t remember stabbing him, but I must have because—” She stopped, sobered for the moment, color draining.

  “Because what?”

  “He made a horrible noise.”

  “Like a scream?”

  “Like a snuffle. And the knife was in him.”

  He’d probably been dead before Melody hit the sidewalk.

  Later, telling Steve about it, Skip said, “So Renegar asked, ‘How’d you feel then, Patty? Sorry?’ And do you think she took the hint? Oh, no. Poor man. It didn’t even occur to her to pretend she knew she’d committed a tiny little sin against society.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she was scared so she left. Just drove aimlessly for a while, but did the horror of what she’d done take hold? Hell, no. She remembered she was supposed to pick up Melody, and then she caught on she could be in big trouble. So she coolly goes back—goes back, can you believe it?—to wash the glasses and wipe the knife. Then she drives over to Blair’s, saying she’s late because she stopped at the store to get something for dinner. And then she actually does go shopping so the story will check out. Arrives home with a pound and a half of shrimp.”

  Steve whistled. “Boy, do I feel sorry for that kid.”

  It was raining, but the front windows were up because the roof of the balcony protected it. Skip got up and walked over. She didn’t know why, just knew the thought of Melody made her want to feel the wet warmth, smell the ozone.

  She had been born a pawn in a game, born to a mother forever locked in a dance of wills with her father—one desperate to be loved, the other determined to withhold love. Skip didn’t know why, and wondered. Patty had been so desperate, she’d forgotten Melody, forgotten
she had a daughter to love, or perhaps she was simply so self-involved she couldn’t have been much of a mother anyway.

  That was bad enough, but it happened to lots of kids. What Melody had suffered seemed unbearable. Skip wondered how she would get through. Whether she could recover.

  Steve came up behind her, held her against his chest. “What are you thinking?”

  “It’s funny, I’ve only seen Melody once, but I feel close to her. I wish I could—you know …”

  “Be friends with her?”

  “I guess.”

  “That’s the down side of the job.”

  “A million stories in the naked city.”

  “Ships that pass in the night.”

  “Another day, another case.”

  They were trying to be brave, to cheer each other up, but it wasn’t going to work. Tonight they’d feel sad. And make love and wake up feeling better. She was glad to have Steve with her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  On the way to the cemetery, the band playing “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” George was grappling once again with the alien idea that he had lost a son.

  Sometimes I wonder if I ever knew I had one.

  Now he felt the loss in his chest, in his gut, in his temples. And the feeling was almost too much, as if his body was stretched to the limit, a balloon inflated past capacity. It started to come out his eyes, then his throat. He was crying. He, George Brocato, was crying in public.

  But it wasn’t in public. It was in a limousine with his daughter. Still, he was the father, he wasn’t supposed to cry. He turned his face to the window, hoping no one could see in. But he was making noise; he couldn’t stop that. He was almost as panicked at the thought Melody would know as he was sad. And then he felt her hand take his and intertwine her fingers. She didn’t say a word.

  When he had regained control, he looked at her, wondering how she was. There were only three options: terrible, worse, and on the verge of collapse. Yet she looked all right. Her jaw worked, and she had on sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes, but otherwise she seemed almost stony. She was holding it in.

  How terrible, he thought, to be sixteen and go through this and not even be able to cry. He said, “Darlin’, you can cry if you want. Daddy’s here.” He never referred to himself in the third person; everything was different today.

  She shook her head. “It’s okay, Daddy. It doesn’t feel real. It’s like a dream.”

  It was shock. He’d been through it too, days ago, when Ham died. He felt like a different person now. Certainly he belonged to a different family, and in a way it was better. He had lost his son, he had lost his wife, it was hard to imagine anything worse—except, he thought, the way he’d been living most of his life: as if those people didn’t matter, as if Melody didn’t, George himself didn’t.

  He felt as if he’d found some lost part of himself that could be with Melody now in a way he’d never been able to before. The saddest, most pathetic part of it all was that he had been responsible for everything. For being a drunk, for letting Patty down when they were first married, for treating her like a piece of property, creating an atmosphere in which she had to do something to protect herself; and the thing she’d done was have a child with his son. It was monstrous, and yet he knew, it was so clear to him now, that this was his monster. The enormity of it made him feel shriveled and impotent, a spider in a flame.

  But worse, so much worse, was Patty’s killing Ham—also his doing, to George’s way of thinking, this new, strange, weight-of-the-world way that had him looking back practically to childhood at the ways he’d botched his life. His doing because he hadn’t loved Patty, because her whole life had been devoted to winning him: her husband of seventeen years.

  He had tried to tell Melody. He wanted her to know what he had become. Her reply shocked him: “Dad, you can’t feel guilty, it’ll eat you up. You just have to take responsibility for what’s yours and let Mother take what’s hers. I mean, it isn’t all yours.”

  She was right, he saw that, and couldn’t imagine how she could have known such a thing, and then he remembered that Patty had insisted on sending her to a psychiatrist, that Dr. Richard. He hadn’t seen the point, but he supposed this was the sort of thing that came out if it, and it wasn’t bad. At her age she knew more than he did.

  When he got the news, when the cad came, he somehow wasn’t surprised at what Patty had done. He had lived with this woman for seventeen years, and much as he’d tried to keep his distance from her, to hold back, to live a separate life, he had an inkling of who she was. And what their life was. He knew, he knew when Melody told him, he knew with a thud like an anvil landing that there had been something between Patty and Ham, that Melody was not his child in the same way she was Patty’s.

  He didn’t know how he knew this, or that he’d known it ad her life, he just knew that he had. Perhaps it was something about the timing of the birth, or something in Ham’s manner toward Patty; perhaps Melody was like Ham in some way that suggested paternity. He couldn’t put his finger on it, couldn’t remember much at all from the drunken period. But he knew now that this was why he’d held back from Melody, that there had been something in him like revulsion regarding her. He thought now that she—or his feelings about her—set thoughts in motion, memories, emotions; stirred things up that he didn’t want disturbed.

  Now that he knew all this, he understood that odd feeling he’d had when Ham died—of relief, almost, instead of grief. All those years, in some way he couldn’t yet get to the bottom of, he must have been jealous of his own son.

  He wondered briefly if the old, unacknowledged wound was what kept him from Patty as wed, but felt a tug in his gut that told him it wasn’t that, or wasn’t just that, that there was a lot more. He thought about the rest of it, the other things. These were things he’d always known as wed. It amazed him to see them now, fanned out like a poker hand, and know that they’d always been there, held closely.

  Now I know this. I could change. Maybe it’s not too late for Patty and me.

  But it was. She’d killed his son.

  The sad music was soothing, Melody found. Made her feel better instead of worse, gave her a little distance, a chance to think.

  She was trying to get used to this unaccustomed, unwieldy feeling in her chest. It hurt, it felt like a lump of cement. She thought it was love. Well, she knew it was. But she had thought love felt good, felt happy and joyous, and this thing felt distant and unattainable. It was taking the form of longing; she knew because this was a feeling as familiar to her as her own blue eyes, only usually it seemed to come from somewhere outside.

  The love was for her dad. It was just so new to her she didn’t know what to do with it, and that was what the longing was about.

  He’d gone to sleep yesterday after picking her up at the police station—had simply left her and gone to sleep! She’d been so desperate, she’d ended up taking his car—without permission—over to Ti-Belle’s. And miraculously, Ti-Belle had been there. She was having a glass of iced tea with a strange man. (Though she was quick to explain that he was a drummer, someone whose set she’d just caught at JazzFest because she was getting rid of Johnny Murphy.) Melody didn’t care about that—she just wanted Ti-Belle alone, to herself, wanted to bury her face in her chest and cry. Later, she realized she could have gone to Richard—that Richard hadn’t turned on her after all, but she hadn’t thought of that. Ti-Belle was the closest thing she had to a sister—to any kind of real relative, her mother being in jail and her father the sort of person who could fall asleep an hour after learning his wife had been arrested for the murder of his son.

  But later it turned out he hadn’t been asleep. He’d been thinking—maybe crying, Melody didn’t know. What she did know was the person who came out of that room wasn’t the father she remembered. It was a beaten, vulnerable, much softer man. Or was she different—had he always been like that? But he said it himself: Ham’s death had changed him.

&n
bsp; It wasn’t the first thing he said. If he wanted to win her over, he’d certainly begun on the right foot: “Melody, I want to do everything I can to help with your music. I know I haven’t been very supportive, and I regret that.”

  It was stiff and his delivery was a little pompous, almost seemed to contain a note of belligerence, but she put that down to embarrassment. She heard what he was saying—he was saying he was taking her seriously in a way he never had before.

  He hadn’t ever had the least interest in her music, hadn’t even gone to her piano recitals, and later, when she’d started singing, his disinterest had been more like disdain. He’d stopped a hair short of ridicule.

  “I want to be a different person from now on.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “When you disappeared, I knew how much—” He couldn’t finish. Was he going to say that he loved her? He didn’t know how. And yet her chest fluttered in a way that said something important was going on. If he’d just glibly said “how much I love you,” in a meaningless monotone, without affect, it wouldn’t have been nearly so moving, she thought.

  “I know, Dad.”

  He looked relieved. “Will you sit down?” He led her into the living room, where they’d probably never sat together in their lives.

  He sat on a sofa, legs crossed formally, she on a chair, feeling awkward in her shorts. “Ham died; you ran away. I saw what I’d been missing and I knew that I was the cause of it. I saw that I really wasn’t a good father, either to you or to Ham, and I wasn’t a good husband. Patty is the way she is because of me.”

  “No, she isn’t, Dad. She picked you because she couldn’t really … couldn’t do it either.” She noticed that she too had shied from the L word. “Dr. Richard told me that.”

  “You discuss us in there?”

  In spite of everything, Melody had laughed. “Daaaad! What do you think therapy’s all about?”

  “I guess I thought she’d just tell you not to be such a brat and that’d be that.”

  Could this be her father? Making a joke?

  “Look, Melody, remember when you were a little girl? We were close then, weren’t we?”