Mean Woman Blues (8 page)

“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.

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.

For all Skip knew, Bettina wasn’t guilty of anything more than being young and dumb, but it still pissed her off that the woman had so easily walked away from a human train wreck.

Shelllmire said, “Any other followers?”

“Doing time.” That, at least, was gratifying, but unless Jacomine wanted to mastermind a jailbreak, they were never going to be any use to him again, thus no use to Skip and Shellmire. “Look, I should be going.”

“Don’t go yet. We’re just getting started.”

But she wanted to go; the conversation was making her anxious.

“Would you like me to sweep your house?”

“Sure.” This was something she hadn’t thought of. “Could you do Steve’s too?”

“Consider it done.”

He sent someone out the next day and reported later that both her phone and Steve’s were tapped.

So the feds checked Jimmy Dee’s and found it clean, but that provided little solace. Skip felt as if she’d been kicked. How the hell was she supposed to think about cemetery angels when the devil himself was eavesdropping on her?

I’ve got to do something,
she thought.
I can’t just let it lie.

An idea came to her:
Why don’t I just work the case as if I’m assigned to it? In my off-hours, say?

It was time, and she knew it. She’d let herself feel safe for too long. Why, she couldn’t have said, except that she so desperately wanted to live a normal life. And because she didn’t know what else to do. In reality, her safety was as fragile as a thread and had been for two years.

Maybe
, she thought,
there’s nothing you really can do. Maybe it’s like owning a house in the French Quarter. You whack away at it for a while, rebuilding and painting and fluffing and buffing, and then you lie down exhausted; next thing you know you have termites.

I have termites of the lifestyle.

She doodled on a yellow pad, stars and spirals that came out of nowhere. And she wrote:
What would I do if I were working the case?

The answer was obvious: Go see Bettina.

Bettina Starnes, her name was, but she wasn’t in the phone book.

Okay, fine. Maybe she was still on probation.

She was, and her probation officer had her address, in New Orleans East. After work, Skip drove out there, just to get a gander, maybe check out the neighborhood, see if it looked like Bettina had a sugar daddy.

But if Bettina was still in contact with Jacomine, it sure wasn’t for material reasons. She lived in a rundown brick fourplex, poorly maintained and badly built to begin with, one of six or eight in a small, under-financed development. One of the four apartments was boarded up.

Bettina was a smallish, youngish, plumpish woman, African-American with a round face that wasn’t really pretty but managed somehow to be so downright pleasant you just couldn’t imagine her involved with a bunch of thugs and murderers, no matter how sheeplike their clothing. She had frustrated Skip and the feds— and certainly the D.A.’s office— when she was arrested shortly after giving birth.

Surely, Skip thought at the time, she didn’t know what she was doing. How
could
she have believed the vicious claptrap that came out of Jacomine’s mouth? She couldn’t possibly have a violent bone in her body.

But everyone did, according to Cindy Lou Wootten, the police psychologist. She’d evaluated Bettina and pronounced her a woman who practiced the fine art of manipulation the way a doctor practices medicine.

Damn, she was good— as her freedom attested.

She met Skip at the door in surgical scrubs, fuschia in color, an ear-to-ear smile showing slightly buck teeth, her baby on her right hip.

With her left hand nails painted a pearl-white, she reached out and grabbed Skip’s elbow, the best handshake she could manage with the baby in her arms. Skip was grateful for the encumbrance, reasonably sure the woman would have tried for a hug if she’d had her hands free.

“Detective Langdon! How’ve you
been
?”

“Just fine, Bettina. Mind if I come in?”

“You’re always welcome. You know that, baby.” Baby! To the detective who’d tried to pop her for murder. She spoke in the soft maternal voice of a favorite aunt, a voice that wrapped around you like a comforter. It had to be half the reason she was free today.

Bettina stepped aside to let Skip in, revealing a living room so Spartan Bettina might have been a Shaker instead of an evangelical fanatic. There was a greenish square of carpet on the floor, probably a remnant. A wooden settee and a hard wooden chair that matched it were the only furniture, except for a couple of ancient end tables, undoubtedly found at a thrift store. The chair sported a yellow pillow large enough to fit on the seat.

Two or three toys were scattered on the green rug, certainly not the exuberant litter one might expect in the home of a working mother with a child under two. Not a single picture hung on the walls.

The place was stifling. Bettina said, “Sorry it’s so hot in here. AC broke; they never did fix it.”

Bettina put the child down and pointed to a narrow hall, evidently opening out to a bedroom. At any rate, Skip could hear electronic murmurs coming from that direction. “Go watch television, darlin’. Go on, now.”

The boy bounced on rubbery knees, raising his arms to be picked up. When his mother failed to respond, he began to make little whiny noises, his sweet face twisting and turning in panic. Bettina put a hand at the back of his head, “Go on, baby. We’ll play with your toys in a little bit.”

The kid stuck out his lip but seemed to decide TV was his best course of action. And once he’d made up his mind, he tore off down the hall like a chubby missile.