Crescent City Connection (Skip Langdon Mystery #7) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  He had to count right now, and some other things, but the word problem had receded for a while—a good thing, too, or he couldn’t work with Revelas, who was his best friend at the moment. It could pop up at any time, though. He never knew what would trigger it.

  Damn!

  He swore because he’d lost count and he had to start all over again.

  He tapped Revelas on the shoulder and crossed his index fingers in an X—their signal that The Monk was meditating.

  Revelas was so black he looked painted. Though he was technically unable to blush, he looked so distressed, so truly embarrassed at disturbing The Monk, he might as well have turned pink. He was one of the most sensitive people The Monk had ever met, though the wife he had stabbed to death may have had her own opinion.

  Everybody knew The Monk counted. That is, they didn’t really—they just knew he couldn’t be disturbed when he was sweeping or he might never finish. The Monk didn’t tell them why.

  No doubt they thought he was thinking deep and holy thoughts when he was only counting his broom strokes. In truth he hardly ever thought deep and holy thoughts, or so it seemed to him. To him, his spiritual growth seemed so slow it was like watching a plant grow.

  Today, he could believe in it, though—and in God, or the gods, in Kali or Coyote, in Jehovah or Allah.

  He just plain felt good, almost as if his life was about to change—though how it could, he couldn’t imagine.

  Maybe it was the painting he was working on—the angel who was half-white, half-black. He called it Pregnant with Possibility. Her head was the size of a pin, she had no neck, and her huge belly contained both heaven and hell.

  It was a breakthrough for him. Most of his work was crude, raw, obvious as fur. This one was minutely detailed. It terrified him, yet he was obsessed by it and couldn’t stop working on it.

  He had dreamed of her lately, the lady with Pandora’s Box so neatly juxtaposed with Valhalla.

  Dahveed hated the painting and said he couldn’t sell it, it wasn’t the sort of thing he handled, and maybe The Monk ought to try his luck over on Julia Street. This was Dahveed’s greatest insult. Though his gallery was in a high-rent section of the French Quarter—very nearly the highest—Julia Street, in his lexicon, meant effete and la-di-da. The Monk paid him no mind at all. He was painting it because he had no choice, not because the House of Blues might take it. They had taken some of his paintings, and Revelas had acted as if he’d been elected president. This was nothing to The Monk. One of his vows was that of poverty.

  He prided himself, if not on poverty itself, on being a true outsider, being able to get along without much money.

  His salary here at the gallery, plus the little he got from his paintings, covered the rent with enough left over for food and utilities. He knew how to cook rice and beans and other things—vegetables, mostly—that cost practically nothing and were about the best things you could eat. He burned a lot of candles, which really cut down on electricity, and he needed only white robes to wear. A woman friend had made those, before his vows were complete.

  He finished his chores and waved good night to Revelas. He had painted in the early part of the day, and now he could get on his motor scooter and go home and pursue his spiritual life.

  Once home, he cleaned his house from top to bottom. This might have been easy, as there was very little in it, but The Monk was a thorough cleaner. He threw off his robe and washed it, along with his towels and sheets from the night before. Then, naked, he pulled up his one tatami, shook it out, and swept his floors—living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom.

  He scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen. Then he got in the shower and let the water run till all the hot was gone. Finally, after donning a clean white robe, he could put his tatami back down, light a candle, and sit down to meditate.

  On Mondays, he would start with a mantra and then he would stop and simply sit, until he realized a subject had taken hold in his head; and then he would ponder that subject. He would sit with that subject, that idea, for a whole week, and the next Monday a new one would come to him.

  It was Saturday now, and for nearly a week the subject had been his mother. This wasn’t the first time—far from it—but it was always hard for him. He felt her pain when he thought of her, when he let himself go to her in meditation—such a lovely woman, so sweet, so naive. So deeply betrayed.

  He always cried, and he wondered if it were literally her pain he felt, if he could, by sheer force of his mind and soul, reach across continents and oceans and find her, pluck her pain out, suffer it for her.

  She was one of life’s true innocents, so vastly undeserving of the thing fate had sent her. After she had gone—and after the incredible perfidy of his sister-in-law—he had left town to become an itinerant seeker, almost literally with a begging bowl, like the Buddha himself.

  By a stroke of amazing luck—and because of a woman he met—he ended up in New Orleans, where the river flowed so close you could stick your toes in, where the air was velvet and carried the music of a thousand artists trying as hard as he was to bring order to their own chaos. It was a wonderful place to be in love, and The Monk had been, though he had had a name then, before his woman dumped him. That was when he took his vows.

  The art started before that, on the road. He didn’t know how, or why; just one day he was sketching on the lined page of an old notebook, and he realized that he’d fallen into a sort of trance. As soon as he was able, he bought some art supplies, and the thing came out of him, he couldn’t stop it.

  It was better, in a way, than sitting; he felt better afterward, anyway. Sometimes he felt that his meditating, his spiritual practice, was going nowhere—and yet, what would he replace it with? What else was there (other than his art)?

  The idea terrified him. It had been confirmed again and again—for some reason, maybe only God could say (or one of the gods), he had not been born to be loved. He was innately unlovable. He did not know why this was—why some people had such an easy time, were loved and surrounded by friends, and others were destined to be alone. It was a subject of deep concern to him, and yet if that were the case for him, so be it. One of the goals of his spiritual life was to learn to accept what was.

  He was watching the candle, so caught by the flame, so deep in its hypnotic envelope, that he felt for a moment at peace with the universe and himself, breathing with the tiny fire, and the world. It was the feeling that mystics might mean when they speak of bliss—The Monk wasn’t sure—but it was certainly among the top three feelings he’d ever had. It never lasted more than a moment, but this time it seemed barely to arrive before it was literally chased away by a knock on the door.

  The Monk had no friends who would visit him—Dahveed or Revelas would probably bail him out of jail if he found himself there, and the woman who made the robes would sew for him, but none of them would come calling. It was probably a Jehovah’s Witness.

  He ignored it. But the knock came again; and again, louder, faster, a bit staccato. It sounded slightly hysterical to him, though it was only a knock. What could you tell from a knock? Yet he wondered if there was a problem—perhaps his next-door neighbor’s house was on fire, or her phone was out and she needed his. The Monk had no idea why he kept his phone—each month when the bill came, he considered having it disconnected, yet he never did and he never knew why. Perhaps this was why. Perhaps Pamela needed it now.

  He got up and crossed the room before he remembered two things: Pamela was so fat that he’d have heard her footsteps on the porch. She had come up once before, and he had heard her. And that time she hadn’t knocked, she had yelled, “Monkey.” That was her nickname for him, though she claimed it wasn’t the simian, but the diminutive of “Monk,” therefore spelled “Monkie.”

  It couldn’t be Pamela.

  As soon as he had the thought, the knocking stopped. He returned to his tatami and resumed his meditations.

  He had a breakthrough. It was an image of his mothe
r with her eyes closed, her hands stretched out in front of her, sleepwalking through a busy street.

  Maybe it didn’t have to be that way, he thought. Maybe she could have just opened her eyes.

  Tomorrow, he would meditate on that—his mother with her eyes open, and maybe he’d be able to see what she would have seen.

  He could have his treat now.

  The Monk had a vice, which he permitted himself to indulge once a week on Saturday—Haagen-Dazs ice cream. He had to clean his entire house every day (which he would naturally do anyway) and complete two hours of meditation every day, as well as twelve hours of painting a week, and a few other little things, mostly involving kindnesses to Revelas and Pamela, and then he could have a quart of any flavor he wanted (he varied them), to be eaten over the course of two days. Ice cream could not be eaten on weekdays.

  He got a five-dollar bill and picked up the shepherd’s crook that Revelas had made for him, a multicolored, intricately carved instrument that Revelas said was supposed to remind him of the twenty-third Psalm, though The Monk couldn’t get past the fact that it wasn’t the narrator who was the shepherd. Nevertheless, he appreciated the gesture and he dearly loved the crook, although he never permitted himself to take it to work and used it only on special occasions.

  He opened his door, and nearly tripped over a waif sitting on his steps, her back to him. She turned and said, “Oh. I thought no one was home.”

  It was his Angel.

  He watched fear start at her eyes and spread over her face. “Omigod, I’m sorry. I was looking for my uncle.” She got up and started to back away. But The Monk stepped toward her.

  She stepped backward again. He needed to speak, but he couldn’t. He could only make faces and gesture, waving his crook.

  She turned and ran.

  He could not call to her to stop, could only pound after her until he caught her.

  * * *

  For Skip, it had been a great weekend—she and Steve left Napoleon in Kenny’s capable hands and drove to Nottoway Plantation, where they spent Saturday night and damn near forgot about kids who shot each other and cops who did, too.

  They went hiking Sunday afternoon and arrived home exhausted. It was probably around five A.M. Monday morning when Napoleon started barking.

  Steve couldn’t be roused to reason with him. Skip tossed for an hour and finally got up. She was on the first watch anyway and had to be at work at eight. Might as well go in early and maybe leave a little early.

  She was the first in her platoon to arrive and, coincidentally, the one up for the next case.

  The others came in one by one—her sergeant first, Sylvia Cappello, and then the young guy named DeFusco, and Jerry Boudreaux and Charlie Dilzell and Adam Abasolo, also a sergeant, but not hers.

  The call came in at five after eight. Later they found out the dispatcher had lost it: “The chiefs been shot! The chiefs been shot!”

  Corinne, the secretary for Homicide, simply gave the call to Cappello, her face white, her lips drawn, but not losing it, not saying a word. Skip couldn’t hear what the dispatcher said; she was told later. Still, Corinne’s whiteness, her tension were enough—it was something bad. A policeman, Skip thought, her heart sinking. But she never thought of the chief.

  Cappello didn’t tell them till they were in the car. “The call’s at Chief Goodlett’s house. A man’s been shot there.”

  Jerry Boudreaux said it for all of them: “Oh, shit.”

  “Sylvia, goddammit. Is it the chief?”

  He hadn’t even been sworn in yet.

  “There were several calls. People said different things.”

  She didn’t speak again during the ride and, oddly, neither did anyone else except Charlie Dilzell, who seemingly out of the blue hollered out, “Fuck!” when they were nearly there. It was as if they were in awe of such a thing, as if it demanded silence out of respect.

  In Skip’s case, she was simply trying to hold it together, to assimilate the fact that Albert Goodlett, her friend and the only possible hope of a thoroughly decayed department, was really gone. In her heart she knew he was. Cappello was being circumspect, but it had to be that. And yet it couldn’t be; it was impossible.

  Goodlett lived in a modest neighborhood out in Gentilly. Everyone who lived there was outside. The street was choked with district cars.

  The chief’s car was in the driveway, and the chief was still sitting in it, the whole area closed off with yellow tape. The car had no rear windshield. The chief had an entrance wound in the back of his head and, as a result, no face left.

  Someone had apparently driven by and opened up with automatic gunfire. Or perhaps they had been parked, waiting for the chief to back out of his driveway.

  Skip was dazed, wondering how the hell she was going to function. Cappello didn’t even bother to take her aside. She said simply, “Langdon, I want you to handle this. You’ve got kind of a knack with heater cases.”

  Jerry Boudreaux said, “This ain’t no heater case. It’s a fuckin’ volcano.”

  Skip’s heart pounded. She wanted the case badly, almost as much as she didn’t want it.

  She sent the other detectives to canvass the neighbors and went in to see the widow, whom she knew slightly. The woman fell upon her chest as if they were best friends—any old port, Skip thought—and cried like a child. Skip’s eyes filled as well, and she choked up.

  I will be calm, she chanted to herself. I will not cry. I will be professional.

  A lot of officers might lose it in a case like this—it wasn’t your everyday homicide—but Skip couldn’t. She had once when she should have been cool—it had to do with the man she’d shot, Shavonne’s father—and that was how she ended up on leave. Cappello was sticking her neck out trusting her with this one. For right now, she couldn’t afford to show emotion. So she had to comfort the widow as best she could, hanging by a thread, yet appearing stoic as a statue.

  She just held the woman tight and mouthed the usual meaningless soothing sounds: “That’s right, Bernice—you’re okay, Bernice. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  The hell it was.

  “I’m going to catch this bastard,” she said. “And you’re going to help me, aren’t you? You feel like you can do that?”

  Bernice pulled out of Skip’s grasp. “He just walked out the door. He was on his way to work.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then … it sounded like the end of the world.” Bernice started weeping again, remembering the peppering, drilling hailstorm of the fusillade.

  “Where were you?”

  “In the kitchen. I was still drinking coffee. Oh, baby … oh, Skip…”

  “What?”

  “I hardly even said good-bye. I was just reading the paper, and he came in to kiss me good-bye. I barely even looked up—I just kind of let him peck me.”

  “On the cheek?” It was an unprofessional question, but Skip wanted to make Mrs. Goodlett feel better.

  “Why, no. On the lips.”

  Skip had never seen a good-bye cheek-peck. “You see? He knew you loved him.”

  She thought of the familiarity of the scene—the husband leaving as he had a million times, coming in automatically for an automatic kiss, the two partners going through it almost like robots, they were so used to it. Yet underneath there was a vast canyon of feeling, this enormous pocket of love that the chief’s death had opened up. Skip felt her eyes fill again, in sympathy with the widow’s regret.

  “What did you do?’

  “I dropped my coffee. I just sat there staring into space for a minute and by the time I got up, the shooting had stopped. I went to the door and … everybody was there.”

  “Everybody?”

  “All the neighbors were coming out. And he was still in the car. Other people got there first. They told me not to go any closer and so I didn’t.” Her mouth crumpled up. “The last time I saw him was in here saying good-bye.”

  “Kissing you. Remember that
, Bernice.”

  “The kids …”

  “Somebody went to get them?”

  She nodded. “They don’t even know yet.”

  “Bernice, I know this is hard, but please try to help me for a minute. Do you know anyone who’d want to kill him? Anyone who threatened him?”

  “No.” She said it as if the idea had never occurred to her. “Everyone loved him.”

  “He was a tough cop, Bernice. He must have had enemies.”

  She shrugged. “Racists. But everybody …” She stopped, apparently afraid of giving offense.

  Skip was silent.

  “I mean, there’s always the fear … when you achieve something.”

  When a black person achieves something. It was obvious what she meant.

  Skip said, “Anything specific?”

  Bernice shook her head. “Nothing. No.”

  Skip wondered if she had something here. Probably not, she thought. More likely some criminal he’d crossed, some gang who thought he was too good a cop, some crazy. Or the mob. If it was mob activity, things were about to come out that she didn’t even want to think about.

  She made her manners and went outside. Charlie Dilzell was racing toward her. “Langdon! We got a witness. Guy across the street saw the shooter.” He pointed at an upstairs window. “Guy went over to the window to tie his tie—checking out the weather, he said. Saw a white Chevy pickup parked in front of the chief’s house. Man got out, started shooting, got back in, and drove off.”

  “Did he get the plate number?” It was more or less a rhetorical question—they weren’t going to get that lucky.

  “Said the truck wasn’t in the right position. But he could see down into the bed of the truck. It was full of painting supplies.”

  “What’d the guy look like?”