Mean Woman Blues

by Smith, Julie

  It wasn’t lost on Skip that Jim Jones, the person responsible for the most deaths in the twentieth century who wasn’t a head of state, was also a preacher— also a white one— who preyed on people of color by embracing liberal causes, matters of human rights and equality, claiming to be their friend. She sometimes wondered what Jacomine thought of Jones, whether the dead preacher was a hero of his or if he was unable to recognize their similarities.

  She gave it up for the moment and gave Shellmire a ring.

  “Skip. Glad you called. I’ve got something for you.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Oh, Lord is right. The news is not good. I’ve been watching Bettina. She’s got a cell phone and a regular phone, but she makes a lot of calls from pay phones. A lot of different pay phones.”

  “Near her house?” Skip asked desperately. If Bettina was calling Jacomine, they had to get a tap.

  “All over town. Never the same one twice.”

  “Damn.” No chance of a tap. “Where do you go from here?”

  “I just have to keep working the case.” She could hear the exasperation in his voice.

  “Keep in touch,” she said, and hoped that he would.

  She went back to studying the photos, trying to think what to do. Well, why try to figure it out alone? She’d been appointed to head a task force; she might as well get one together. After some thought, she decided on a seasoned detective she’d known since her days at headquarters, Danny LeDoux, and a relative rookie, Mercia Hagerty. They were both good officers— that was a given. In addition, they offered diversity. LeDoux was black; so was more than half the city. Hagerty was white, and she cleaned up nicely; she wouldn’t look out of place shopping for antiques. Skip phoned them with the news, setting a meeting for later that day. And let her thoughts go back to Jacomine.

  LeDoux and Hagerty arrived for the meeting rarin’ to go. They couldn’t thank her enough for giving them a piece of the case.

  She thought, God, I wish I had their enthusiasm.

  What she had to do was pretend. They couldn’t know her mind was elsewhere. “Okay, here’s what we know so far. Last week, the L.A. Times broke a story about stolen cemetery art. The Times-Picayune picked it up, with pictures. And next thing you know, their switchboard lit up, if they even have switchboards any more. People recognized stuff from their own relatives’ plots. And that started a stampede: Everybody went to check on their family plots, and just about everybody has something missing.” She sighed, knowing she was exaggerating, but wanting to convey the enormity of the task, its importance as a potential public relations coup for the department.

  LeDoux said, “If it’s all gone, that makes it kind of tough to catch anybody red-handed.”

  “Danny, for Christ’s sake,” Hagerty said. “It’s not like you go out there and see bare ground.”

  Skip made conciliatory air pats. “Okay, so I exaggerated. There’s probably enough ornate stuff around here that you could loot graves from here to doomsday and not run out. And there are way too many cemeteries to watch. That’s the part that makes it tough.”

  Both faces brightened. “Hey, how about…”

  “…a sting.”

  The two officers high-fived, delighted at having thought of the same thing. Good, Skip thought. They work and play well with others. She’d chosen well: Some of their enthusiasm was starting to rub off.

  Hagerty said, “Why don’t I go up and down Magazine Street? I could say I’m a decorator from Texas or something; maybe I’ve got a client who needs some six-foot statues of saints.”

  “Oh, get obvious about it,” LeDoux said.

  She frowned. “Well, something like that.”

  “I like it,” Skip said. “But you take the French Quarter; I’ll take Magazine.” These were the two main antiques districts in the city. “I live in the Quarter; everybody knows me there.”

  “Langdon,” LeDoux said. “Everybody knows you everywhere. You’re too high-profile for this.”

  It was true. She could go undercover on some things, but not this; her picture had been in the Times-Picayune too many times. And now that she thought of it, Abasolo had said he was appointing her for her publicity value. That meant her name was going to be in the paper again. That was going to play hell with the sting idea.

  “I’ve got it,” LeDoux said. “Let Hagerty do Magazine and the French Quarter. But we’ll double-dip. I’ll go in offering what she’s looking for. Then, if anybody bites on that, we can haul them in for questioning.”

  Skip sighed. “Done deal. I’ll do the phones and computer stuff. What else?”

  Hagerty bit her lip. “I suppose we could pick certain cemeteries and do some kind of surveillance.”

  She was shouted down by Skip and LeDoux. “What if we pick the wrong ones?”

  “Well, how about if we just took a day and visited the main cemeteries where the looting’s going on— Lafayette 1 and Lake Lawn Metairie, for instance; St Louis 1 and 2; maybe St. Roch— and see what it looks like there, what hours the thieves can work, if they can get in at night, what sections offer the best pickings? We might even be able to figure out where they’re going to hit next I mean, if two rows are completely looted, and the next hasn’t been touched, stands to reason…”

  “Great idea!” Skip said. “And we can talk to the groundskeepers, anybody we see, and give them our numbers in case they see anything. Want to do it tomorrow?”

  “You got it.”

  Skip went back to her office, thinking to call every antique store in L.A., Atlanta, and Charleston. But first she called Abasolo. “You haven’t told the press about this task force thing, have you?”

  “I’m going to tomorrow. Why?”

  “Has it occurred to you it’s like saying, ‘Hey, hens, the fox is on the way’?”

  “Work around it, Langdon. The chief wants it.”

  “Let’s just hope the bad guys are real dumb.”

  “Or can’t read.”

  But success didn’t hinge on either of those things, and she knew it. It was all about how convincing Hagerty and LeDoux could be— and how greedy the thieves were.

  She worked on her Atlanta calls for the rest of the afternoon, to no avail; nobody had seen anyone offering merchandise of the sort she described, or at least no one was admitting it.

  She left feeling discouraged and frustrated, not an uncommon state of mind for her lately. She was looking forward to a soothing evening with Steve. He’d invited her over for dinner, and she figured he’d make something special. She was his first official dinner guest in his new house.

  But first she stopped off at hers, to metamorphose from cop to guest. As she approached, she could hear voices in the courtyard. Angel, the kids’ adorable black-and-white mutt, stormed the gate, barking as if Skip were a horde of barbarians. “Hey, Ange, it’s only me,” she said and watched the little dog change from a furious harpy into a wriggling love worm. For the first time that day, she started to relax. “Yeah, you love me, don’t you? Why can’t Napoleon be like you?”

  She’d never understood what Steve and the shepherd saw in each other.

  But they had history: Back when Kenny first came to live with his uncle, he had a period of wetting the bed. Figuring he needed a friend, Steve found the dog and brought him to Kenny without consulting Jimmy Dee, whereupon Napoleon tried to attack not only Skip but also Dee-Dee and Sheila’s boyfriend, Emery. Dee-Dee took him back to the pound, and Steve adopted him once again, for himself, earning a place in Kenny’s heart forever. The shepherd had since settled down a bit, but he still loved only two humans: Steve and Kenny.

  As she approached the courtyard, Jimmy Dee held up a martini glass. “Cocktail for the lady?” He and Layne were having a jolly old time. Even Kenny was there, trying to teach Angel some kind of trick.

  “No, thanks. I’m going over to Steve’s.”

  “There’s a law against a pre-drink drink?”

  Skip laughed. “There probably ought to be,” s
he said and entered her refurbished slave quarters.

  She stepped in the shower and washed off the office dust. Re-dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, she felt a hundred percent better. Here, in her own world behind the walls, megalomaniac killers seemed a million miles away. Jimmy Dee produced some white wine. “Come on. Sit a minute.”

  “Oh, what the hell. Steve’s cooking; he won’t care.”

  Kenny lit up as she plopped into a chair. “Hey, Aunt Skip, watch this. Up, Angel. Up.”

  The dog jumped up to his chest, turned around in midair, and bounced off.

  “Pretty good, huh?” He slipped Angel a treat. “The next step’s jumping up to my shoulder.”

  Layne said, “She’s too little. She’ll never do that.”

  “She can. She just has to use my chest like a stepping stone. It’s in this book I got.”

  Sheila came outside, in jeans that rode on her hips and a T-shirt that barely grazed her bottom rib. She was a big girl, like Skip, but somehow, she got away with the bare midriff— on aesthetic grounds, at any rate. Uncle Jimmy was another matter. He didn’t bother to hide his frown; Sheila didn’t bother to acknowledge it. “Anybody know how to fold stuff in?”

  For a moment, everyone tried silently to make sense of the question. Finally, Layne said, “You mean, like egg whites?”

  “Yeah. Egg whites. How’d you know?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” He got up to save the soufflé, and Skip took it as a cue.

  “Gotta motor— I have to stop at Matassa’s for some of my fabulous homemade hors d’oeuvres. Angel, you’re a good dog. I want to see the whole trick by tomorrow.”

  Steve’s house looked fresh and inviting in its new blue paint. Skip had been able to talk him into a little fuschia trim, which had turned it downright spiffy, never mind the feasting insects that infested it.

  She stepped lightly to the door, carrying a bottle of decent wine bought a week earlier and the bag of cheese and crackers that was all she’d managed to score at Matassa’s. The few sips of wine she’d had in the courtyard had lightened her mood even more than the shower.

  She rang the doorbell, bracing herself for Napoleon’s onslaught, not even particularly dreading it. She was greeted with silence. In fact with even more silence than a non-barking dog. The house was spookily quiet.

  Fear flamed up her spine. Carefully, she set the groceries down and felt for the gun in her shoulder bag. She edged her way down the steps and around to the side of the house.

  As she neared the gate, she heard faint noises, but what they were she couldn’t figure out. She stopped to listen: It was a person’s voice, twisted in an odd anguished sound, as if the owner were hurt. And the owner had to be Steve.

  She wondered if she should call for backup and dismissed the idea. She had a key to the house; she could go in and assess the situation. She was about to move back to the door when she suddenly realized what the sound was. Someone was crying.

  It occurred to her that a person had a right to cry in his own backyard without a cop with a drawn gun traipsing through his house. He wasn’t pleading with anyone and wasn’t the sort to cry if he were being held prisoner.

  She decided to behave like a normal person instead of a paranoid fool. “Steve? Steve, it’s Skip. Are you all right?”

  “Skip? Oh, God. I’m coming.”

  She heard him walking toward her, which was reassuring, and when he opened the gate, she saw that he was alone, which was even more so. He was a big man, with a big chest and a lot of hair on his head. (Not for nothing did Jimmy Dee refer to him as her “bear.”) The sight of him coming apart was nearly as upsetting as finding him in a hostage situation. In some ways, she was frightened, but she was also sad, soaked in his sadness, whatever its cause. She felt as if a relative had died and thought that must be what had happened.

  She was frantic, danced up and down while he fumbled with the gate. “What is it? Steve, what is it?”

  He didn’t speak until he had his arms around her, giving her the bear hug they both needed, nearly crushing her ribs, a not-so-easy task given that she was nearly as tall as he was and had plenty of heft to take the pressure. “Someone killed Napoleon.”

  “Oh, Steve!” She’d never liked the dog, but she loved Steve, and the person who subjected him to this kind of misery would have her to answer to. “He got run over?”

  “Come here.” He drew her down the passageway and into the courtyard, where Napoleon lay on the flagstones, a miserable pile of rumpled fur. He looked helpless in death, nothing like the formidable animal he had been, a dog that never could make up its mind just to settle down and live a peaceful life.

  Now, looking at all that was left of him, she felt herself tearing up.

  Steve said, “They threw something over the back fence; that’s all I can figure. See, the Harrisons aren’t home.”

  “Harrisons.” Skip couldn’t follow.

  “My next-door neighbors. Anybody could have come in and just… nailed him.”

  “He was shot?”

  “Oh, I wish. He would have been if you’d been here. I’d have gotten your gun and done it myself. He was poisoned. He died in horrible agony.”

  “Oh, Steve! You saw it.”

  “Yeah… Yeah… I heard him out here, kind of making little whimpering noises. So I came out, and he just didn’t look right, you know what I mean? I can’t explain it, you could just tell he felt bad. And he was salivating a lot, so I knew he’d eaten something. Then I noticed his rear end was quivering and then his shoulders. Skip, he was shaking all over, like a Chihuahua. I touched him, and he yipped, like it hurt, and he was hot, like he had a fever. And then he fell down. Can you imagine how sad that was?” He was tearing up again, and his voice was getting loud and outraged.

  Skip put herself in his shoes. “And you didn’t want to leave him to call the vet because you were afraid he might die without you.” She wondered which decision she’d have made.

  “It wasn’t even like that; I knew it was too late. I just had to watch him die. I couldn’t even hold him or stroke him, because it hurt him. I just hope my being there was… I don’t know— something for him.”

  Skip wondered if she could hug Steve, or if, right now, he couldn’t be touched either. She opened her arms, and Steve folded himself around her. “I’m so sorry.”

  He spoke against her shoulder, so that she could feel his breath. “Who would do something like that to an innocent animal?”

  For once, Napoleon did look innocent. “Jacomine,” she said and wished she hadn’t almost immediately.

  Instantly Steve turned his outrage on her. “What did you say? Did you say ‘Jacomine’? Skip, this isn’t about you. This is about that poor dog lying over there.”

  “Napoleon… uh… had enemies?” She was trying to strike a semi-light note without seeming completely heartless; she was also fishing for information.

  “You ought to know,” he said resentfully.

  She knew what he was doing: that anger and sadness were closely related, that he was using one to cover the other. It was the sort of thing she might do herself. But it felt terrible when you were the object of the anger.

  As if to restore the peace, Steve said, “The neighbors hate him. I get all kinds of complaints because he barks too much.”

  “It takes a really crazy person to kill a dog.” Skip spoke neutrally, hoping he’d think about it.

  “Naaah, it just takes a heartless redneck drunk.”

  “Anybody around here like that?”

  “Everybody.”

  “I’m serious. This would take planning. You’d have to figure out…”

  “You wouldn’t have to figure out shit! You’d just go out to your garage, find something that said CAUTION! in great big letters, put it in a hot dog, and lob it over the fence.” He shrugged to make his point. “Simple as that.”

  Could be, she thought. But her heart was about to pound out of her chest. She pulled out her cell phone. �
��Excuse me for a moment.”

  “Who’re you calling?”

  She twitched her lip a bit as if mouthing a name, and turned her back slightly, hoping he’d think it was so she could hear better. She was calling Shellmire of the FBI.

  Consulting his caller I.D., he answered, “How’s it going, big girl?”

  “Watch that ‘big’ stuff, Turner.”

  “Whatcha got, kid?”

  “Someone poisoned Steve’s dog.”

  “Jacomine?” he fired back, making it a question, but Skip was gratified that his mind had leapt to the same place hers had.

  “Steve says not. He says the dog had enemies.”

  “You know how crazy someone has to be to kill a dog?”

  She almost laughed, hearing her own words come back to her. “I wish we were on a speaker phone. He thinks I’m paranoid.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “Turner, he’s not really in any condition to talk.”

  “Skip, I know he’s your boyfriend. But this is a big-deal federal case, in case you’ve forgotten. Also, somebody just shot at you, and with that dog out of the way, you’ll be a much easier target.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that.” Sighing, she held out the phone. “Shellmire wants to talk to you.”

  “Shellmire? You called Shellmire?”

  “Just listen to what he has to say.”

  Actually, judging from what she could overhear, Shellmire had more questions to ask than admonitions to deliver. But he must have gotten a few of those in too. Steve was even sulkier when he got off the phone. “I don’t need this shit.”

  Unsure what the agent had told him, Skip waited.

  Steve said, “My fuckin’ dog’s dead.” It wasn’t a way he talked at all; neither the profanity nor the pure childishness of the statement sounded anything like him.

  Hoping for a laugh, she said, “Such a lovely animal too.”

  Steve got up and stomped into the house.

  Shocked, she phoned Shellmire back. “What on Earth did you tell him?”