Mean Woman Blues

by Smith, Julie

  The problem was, he didn’t know enough about her habits to go wait for her at a place she might turn up. He racked his brain until it finally occurred to him that every rich Texas woman would have at least one habit.

  Accordingly, he phoned Nieman-Marcus, said he needed to talk about his bill, and was referred to a Donald McCullough. He then went to the store itself (to get around the caller ID problem) and, by means of a simple ruse or two, actually managed to make a call from the credit department. He was rewarded with the ubiquitous voice mail. Good. The real Rosemarie would probably have just blundered in and interrupted.

  “This is Donald McCullough at Nieman-Marcus,” he told the robot. “I’m returning your call about your bill. Four p.m. at my office will be quite convenient. See you tomorrow.”

  She would know his voice, but how she’d respond, he couldn’t say. What he would do in her shoes would be to go to McCullough’s office, look around for the caller, wait around a bit and leave if they didn’t show up.

  If she did that he could catch her at the bottom of the escalator on the next floor down. Of course, she might decide to turn him in, but he was willing to take the chance. He knew enough about her to make her extremely cautious when dealing with him. Besides, the two of them loved each other. Always had.

  Feeling cocky the next day, he waited a few blocks from her house, on the route he knew she’d have to take, and the sight of her driving by in her big sleek white Lexus made him happier than anything had in months. In fact, it made him feel like a million dollars. Bulletproof. Absolutely on top of the world.

  He decided to abandon the charade of waiting by the down escalator and in fact caught her as she was coming in the door and planted a big one on her just as she opened her mouth to say his birth name: “Earl Jackson! What the devil do you think you’re doing?” He could just hear her saying his first name, the one he’d had when he married her, in that phony British accent of hers, but anything to keep his name quiet.

  “Rosemarie. You’re looking pretty.”

  “Well, you look like hell.”

  * * *

  Rosemarie Owens let him take her arm and stroll her around the store, pretending now and then to admire an expensive bauble. Running wasn’t going to help anything. She figured he probably wanted money; she could just give him some and send him on his way. “The whole world’s chasin’ me,” he said. “— or haven’t you heard?”

  Mmm hmm. Definitely money. She said, “Earl, that wasn’t nice what you did to me— having me kidnapped that time.”

  “Well, the guy let you go, didn’t he? I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

  She was silent, for once at a loss for words. What kind of man had you kidnapped and didn’t even say he was sorry?

  “Now, Rosemarie, we may have both done a few things— regarding each other— that we regret…”

  “Like getting married, you mean?” They had gotten married when she was fifteen, he sixteen. She was Daniel’s mother.

  “You hurt me, baby. You really hurt me.”

  She turned to him, smiling, and hugged his neck. “Oh, Earl, you know I’m kidding. I’ve still got a soft spot for you, damn your eyes.” The sad thing about it was, she did.

  “‘Damn your eyes.’ Americans don’t talk like that, Rosemarie.”

  She shrugged. “What can I do for you, Earl Jackson, former husband and the FBI’s second-most-wanted man?”

  “I thought you’d never ask, rich lady. First off, I need to talk different. More like you do.”

  What in hell? she thought. She gave him a look meant to convey that she’d just realized she was dealing with a being from a different solar system. And that she saw what he was getting at. “Ah. You need a disguise.”

  “You’ve got one. I figure you know where to get ’em.”

  Rosemarie was perfectly aware that people said she reminded them of Ivana Trump. She knew she had a certain brassy attractiveness they couldn’t quite place. Her former husband was one of few who remembered she’d once been Mary Rose Markey of Savannah, Georgia.

  She weighed her words carefully, not wanting to give him ideas. “You want me to help you get away.”

  “Well, not exactly, honey bunch. I’ve kind of got plans to stick around.”

  Bad news. No good could come of this. But she couldn’t let him know she was afraid of him, had to make the monster eat out of her hand. She did her best to look concerned for him and hoped it didn’t come off as frightened for herself. She said, “Earl, it’s too dangerous.”

  He nuzzled her neck to test the waters, and it took all her will power, but she didn’t flinch. “I think you need some champagne to steady your nerves.”

  Really good idea, she thought, and made up her mind to seduce him. Hell, she still thought he was attractive. Not good-looking— not for a second. Earl Jackson always had been a warty little toad, and time hadn’t improved him. But he had something. An energy or something. She needed time to think, and sex would put him in a good mood.

  They went and drank some champagne and then they checked into a hotel. And then, for the first time in forty years, she made love to her ex-husband. What he said in the afterglow was kind of interesting: “Know what Baby? You’re the only woman I ever loved. I mean that.”

  She doubted it, but there was a kind of respect between them; there was definitely something there. “Come on, Earl,” she said. “You just slept with me to see if I was wearing a wire. Like some people I know.”

  It was a reference to a little insurance policy he’d bought for himself, a recording he’d made of a certain conversation they’d had and sent to her shortly after she’d come into her money. That is, he’d sent a copy to her and made that fact very clear. If he went down, she went down. She was still smarting about that.

  She knew that she still had the soft, white, unspeakably delicate skin she’d had when she was a teenager, and he stroked her shoulders and her arms and her breasts and belly as he told her his crazy plan. So crazy it just might work.

  And considering the alternative, it had to.

  He started out slow. “I’m going to need some speech lessons.”

  She nodded, thinking it over. She could help him with that. The idea had appeal: Rosemarie Owens as Pygmalion. She wondered if she could pull it off, decided it might be a hell of a lot of fun to try.

  “I know a guy,” she said, “but he’s in England. How would you get a passport?”

  “Maybe you could bring him over. Say you’ve met a diamond in the rough.”

  She nodded, and Earl said, “Do you know an English plastic surgeon?”

  That one was easy. “Mexican. Lots of them.”

  He sighed. “Looks like I’m going to need papers.”

  She made a little face, wondering how to find a reliable forger. The Internet, maybe. “We’re just going to see what we can do, aren’t we? May I ask what you’re going to do once you’ve reinvented yourself?”

  “Well, now. You own a cable television station, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m gonna be a TV star. What do you think of that?”

  Now he was getting way too close to home. She gave him the alien look again. “Frankly, Scarlett, I think you’ve got a screw loose.”

  “Just hear me out now. Just hear me out. This is something The Lord showed me. And it’s what I was meant for.” His voice dropped on that one, as if he actually awed himself. “All these years and now I know.”

  Rosemarie rolled her eyes. “You and God, Earl! You and God.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  His eyes flamed fury. She’d forgotten that about him: how fast he could turn mean. Clearly this was no time to make fun of his new life’s work, however crazy it might be.

  “Nothing. Go on; I’m interested.”

  “Well, it was a sort of vision. I was holed up in some cheap motel in Biloxi, and the Lord showed me what I had to do. I looked at those televangelists, and I looked at those talk
shows, and I looked at those reality shows, and I thought, You know what? There needs to be a whole different kind of talk show, a talk show that could help God help real people. A talk show with a mission. And you know what that mission would be?”

  She shook her head, wondering where on Earth he was going with this.

  “The mission is to right wrongs, lady. Real people’s wrongs. If somebody gets cheated, badly treated, or roughed up by the assholes in power, why, Mr. Right will have them tell the story on his show, and then we’ll follow up with some solid reporting on the underlying phenomenon of whatever it was, and then the show’ll sponsor a letter-writing campaign or whatever seems appropriate. To right the wrong. See?”

  Her heart rate was starting to pick up by a good little bit. This was a bloody great idea, the kind of thing that could really catch on, breathe life back into her floundering cable station. He was right; it combined three incredibly popular genres, and it would give people a chance to act out their angst. Not just the contestants but also the viewers. With the right host, it could become a national sensation.

  She sat up in bed and laughed, breasts flapping like tether-balls. She loved it, actually loved it. “Earl, Earl, Earl,” she said. “Talk about thinking outside the box! You’re a sketch, you know that? I’ll have to keep you around just to amuse myself.” It was daring and dangerous and so insane she just had to do it (leaving escape hatches for herself, of course). “I even like the name.”

  “Mr. Right. That’s me.”

  “You?”

  “Wake up, Rosemary. What the hell do you think the makeover’s for?”

  “You crazy bastard. You can’t get away with that.”

  He rolled over on her. “It’s worth trying, isn’t it? Besides, consider the alternative.”

  She didn’t care to.

  “If you’re going to jail, might as well be later rather than sooner, right, lady?”

  “Oh, well. Maybe I’ll meet an assassin before you get busted.” Or think of some other way out.

  In a matter of months, she made Earl Jackson into David Wright, host of a new show called Mr. Right. He now had a new way of speaking, one with no dropped g’s and a vaguely British cast to it; a new— and younger and handsomer— face, with a far, far better jawline; new, iron-gray hair, and lots of it; heel lifts; blue contact lenses; even, due to workouts and shoulder pads, a different body.

  And Mr. Right was now a minor hit on its way to becoming a major one. It was a show that believed in action, and people loved it. Its popularity was growing at such a rapid rate that Rosemarie was dizzy with greedy delight and so were her sponsors.

  Earl was a natural for it; he’d been in show biz all his life, if you counted preaching. And he’d had plenty of practice sounding like Mr. Sincere. Of course, he was a killer and a snake in the grass and could get her thrown in jail for the rest of her life, but for now they were pulling it off.

  After she’d made him over, he turned her on so much she had to put a stop to having sex with him before it got out of hand. And it wasn’t because he was so all-fired hunky, she suspected; it was because she’d made him. Whooo! Way too big a turn-on. She got herself a nice, young, seriously buffed ex-football player first chance she got, and after that she kept her distance and her fingers crossed. She had to think of a way out of this.

  Especially knowing what she did now. One night, in the throes of passion, he told her what was really going on: “Oh, Baby, I can go all the way on this! I know it! You know what I have done? I have finally, at long last, come to an understanding of God’s plan for me. Everything else in my life has just been flailing around. God has finally put me where I belong, and God will take me to the highest office in the land, where I will do the work of the Lord on the grand scale I was meant to.”

  Someone else might have asked them to run that by her again. But she knew Earl Jackson. There was no question in her mind just how crazy he was, what he intended to do. A piece of her actually thought he could pull it off and was just dying to see him try.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Turner Shellmire was waiting for Skip in the parking lot of the Third District. It gave her a turn, seeing a male form looming so publicly. If Jacomine had found a kamikaze shooter to kill her, all he had to do was wait for her just like this. He’d have time to turn her into a sieve before anyone could return the favor.

  In the old days— four or five years ago— New Orleans had had a homicide department, and Skip had been a hard-working member of it. But “decentralization” had come to the city on the river, along with community policing, “accountability,” “comstat,” and certain other fin-de-siècle crime-fighting ideas first tried in New York and increasingly considered the hip and groovy nineties way. New Orleans had hired the same consultants who’d successfully worked the plan in New York City and had adopted all their ideas except one: The city that invented boob-baring for beads had zero tolerance for zero tolerance. (Or so the experts were told. Plenty of natives thought this was a sop to the tourists.)

  The effect, however, was that decentralization became the most dramatic manifestation of the new order. Basically, it meant the detective bureau was dissolved and its members dispersed to the district stations, where they became what some of them called “gen dicks”: general detectives rather than specialists. The only ones who were still exclusively homicide investigators were those on the Cold Case Squad, which handled murder cases for the Eighth District as well as the cold ones its name implied. They still worked out of headquarters, where you parked your car in an underground garage and no one could wait for you in an open parking lot. Seeing Shellmire, Skip was once again a bit resentful about being sent to the boonies.

  “Hey, Turner,” she called. “You my police escort?”

  “For today,” he said. “For today.” He shook his head unhappily, the corners of his mouth turning toward the floor. “I don’t know about tomorrow.”

  “Well, I do. Tomorrow, Jimmy Dee’ll go to work, and the kids’ll go to school, and the FBI won’t be able to do a damn thing, and the sniper’ll have a clear shot.” She spoke with such hopelessness she hated the sound of it.

  Shellmire looked at her in surprise. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “I’m just worried, that’s all.”

  “Have a drink with me?”

  Skip liked the sound of that. Shellmire wasn’t the sort who’d waste his time trying to cheer her up: if he wanted to buy her a drink, he must have something to say.

  She suggested a place near the lake, since they were in the neighborhood anyway and Shellmire lived on its north shore. But the agent said he wasn’t going home, had miles to go before he slept, had to work out a plan to keep her alive. She wished, as she let him follow her back to the French Quarter, that she had any confidence he’d be able to.

  Being cops, they could park where they wanted, and Skip suggested the Napoleon House. “You might as well absorb a little color while you’re down here.”

  Once again, Shellmire turned thumbs-down. “It’s a CC’s kind of night.”

  “Why?”

  “Lightning never strikes twice.” CC’s was a coffeehouse in the same block where she’d been shot at.

  “I didn’t think you were a superstitious kind of guy.”

  “I’m not; we’ve got agents covering the block.”

  She laughed. “Fat lot of good that’ll do.”

  He shrugged and ordered coffee for both of them. “Look, I’ve been working all day to get you some protection…”

  “Just me?”

  “Hell, no. Everybody down to Angel and Napoleon.”

  “Napoleon’s safe: they’ve got to know how much we hate each other. They know everything else.”

  “Skip, I’m afraid you were right back at the station. We can’t really do anything. I’m just as sorry as I can be.”

  She leaned back and looked at him, waiting for more.

  Now that the bad news was over, he was all business. “Can you get
them to pack up and go away?”

  “For how long?”

  “Long as it takes.”

  “Dammit Turner, I hate it when you say dumb stuff.”

  “Intelligence isn’t my strong point.”

  “Wrong. We’re both here because you’ve got some ideas about how to get him.”

  “I don’t. I thought you might.”

  “I’m out of ideas. I thought Daniel’s sentencing might flush him out.”

  Shellmire took a long pull on his coffee and patted his mouth with a handkerchief, eschewing the paper napkin the coffee shop had provided. “Well, it did in a way. What’s happened to the other son?”

  “You mean The Artist Formerly Known as The White Monk? He’s moved on to great things; he even asked to paint me.”

  “And did you pose?” Shellmire was a bit of a slob, but he could be attractive. At the moment his face was lit up with amusement.

  “Twice,” she said. “Nude.”

  “Right.”

  In fact, the first part was true: She had posed twice. She liked The Monk.

  Shellmire said, “Who else was Jacomine close to, besides that Owens woman?”

  “Ah, yes, the first wife. The one he had kidnapped.”

  “That was her story. We never were sure she wasn’t working with him, but we watched her for six months after he disappeared. Phone taps and everything.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nada.” He chewed his lip. “How about the pregnant woman?”

  “Ah. The lovely Bettina. Still scot-free, damn her.”

  “Sore point?”

  “You got it.” Bettina was a follower of Jacomine’s who’d claimed she’d been held against her will and forced to have sex with all the men of The Jury, Jacomine’s vigilante organization. Her baby— evidently a product of her time with the group— had turned out to have a congenital disorder that required hours of attention each day. And Bettina herself, not very bright but extremely good at people-pleasing, had managed to convince the D.A.’s office they couldn’t find twelve people who’d convict her of anything at all, much less conspiracy to commit murder. She’d pleaded out and ended up with probation.