The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) (14 page)

“Of course, this particular councilwoman had spoken off the record, as usual. No problem there. She said I could call her a ‘high-up figure in city government’ or something. But ten minutes later, I got a phone call from her. She said, ‘ Janie, I was just thinking. I think maybe I spoke too fast. I think maybe it would be better if you didn’t use the quote at all.’ Now who the hell could have gotten to her? No one could have known about the phone call—absolutely no one—except her assistant. Are we to believe this civil servant of thirty years is a member of the Blood of the Fucking Lamb? Is everybody’s assistant in the whole city?”

Skip saw instantly what had happened. She said without hesitation, “Your phone’s tapped!”

Jane looked as if she’d been bitten. “What? This is the
Times-Picayune
we’re talking about—how the hell could the phone be tapped?”

“It’s either that or what you said—everybody’s assistant is a follower of Jacomine. I don’t know why I never saw it before—that’s why he seems so ubiquitous. Or one of the reasons. Another reason is that he is.”

“Can you imagine what my boss will say if I suggest the phone’s tapped?”

“You’re paranoid and crazy, and would you consider early retirement.”

They both laughed. Jane was starting to look more relaxed. “You know, it makes sense. And it fits with— omigod, my home phone’s tapped too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Jacomine used to call me at home a lot. But never— and I do mean never—unless I was working in the garden and had dirt up to my elbows. I used to wonder how he did it.”

“He could have had you watched.”

She nodded. “You know, one of my neighbors did tell me she saw a prowler going through my garbage.”

“That was no prowler, that was a parishioner.” This was doing Skip a world of good. When the same things happened to someone else that had happened to her, she could think them through, put a label on them. Jane was right—when you were the target, the overkill seemed so unlikely you didn’t even consider it. Hence, the experience was crazy-making.

Jane was almost bubbly. “I feel better. I feel a lot better. And it isn’t even the wine.”

“Me, too. In fact, I’m ordering a glass to celebrate.”

Jane said, “Good idea, because we’re going to be here awhile. I’m barely started. The thing is, there was some merit to running any story at all because it might encourage disaffected followers to call, so I kept at it. I’d heard he was a healer, and that’s news—I mean, it would be if he got elected. A mayor of a major American city who can heal the sick? This is worth investigating.

“So I asked if I could go to a church service, and they said yes, which surprised me. But meanwhile the pressure continued. I did another story on another public official, a man called Ferguson—just a day-in-the-life kind of profile—and first thing that morning, Ferguson called to thank me for the nice story. Next, Jacomine was on the phone, in the most incredible snit. He said he heard I was the
Picayune’s
hatchet woman and after seeing that story, he knew it was true. Ferguson and ‘all his people’ had been on the phone to Jacomine all morning, lamenting about my betrayal and warning him about me.”

Skip said, “Well, that’s easy. He was lying.”

Jane nodded. “That’s easy to say, isn’t it? But do you see how it creates an atmosphere of paranoia and unease? I told Jacomine that Ferguson had called to thank me, and he said yes, Ferguson had told him that. He’d called me because he felt at my mercy and he was afraid if he didn’t treat me with kid gloves I’d go after him again. So was Ferguson lying to me?

“I could have called him up and asked him, but I was damned if I’d get into that kind of fifth-grade, carrying-tales thing Jacomine was doing.”

Skip nodded vigorously. “It seems so incredibly childish.”

“Exactly. It’s so inept you even feel a little sorry for him. Imagine my surprise when I saw how well it worked.”

She paused. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I think the thing about crazy people is, they don’t feel silly about doing whatever enters their heads. So they do things to get what they want that a normal person would be far too inhibited to do.

“My mistake was, I didn’t realize it would work.

“Anyway, he gets me all in a tizzy about that, and then a couple of days later, he calls up and he says, ‘Janie, I’m really trying to trust you, and I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you from doing the story, but I’m having serious second thoughts about letting you come to a church service.’

“Naturally, I said, ‘What’s wrong now,’ and he said, ‘I was talking to a minister this morning and he warned me about you.’ Now, Skip, I don’t even know any ministers. So I said, ‘Who was that?’ and he said, ‘I can’t tell you; only that it was a black minister.’ I said, ‘What did he tell you?’ And Jacomine said, ‘He said you’re obsessed with sex.’ ”

“What on Earth is that supposed to mean?” Skip asked.

“Exactly. So I start going back in my mind—have I ever interviewed a black minister? Done some church story? Did I wear a miniskirt? Was it something like that? Or was this just some conservative dude who saw some of the stories I did that did involve sex in some form or other? What on Earth was he talking about?”

“Did you ask him?”

“Of course. He said he didn’t know, it was just what the minister said. Well, naturally, I was tempted to say, ‘Well, then, why can’t I come to church? Do you have orgies to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”? ‘ And maybe he was trying to provoke me into saying that. I did say, ‘What does this have to do with my coming to church?’ And he said it was a matter of trust. If I was the sort of person he couldn’t trust, I’d twist things. Anyway, in the end he did agree to let me come, and I did go, and sure enough, he did a few healings, which I dutifully reported in my story.”

Skip nodded, feeling a little overwhelmed, but Jane said, “And that’s when the real stuff started. First of all, this weird thing happened at church. He was showing me around with a bunch of church members, and we ended up in this small room that he said was a meditation room, all white and decorated with hanging plants.

“It was really a tiny place, and all of a sudden I realized we were alone and the door was shut. All the people with us had melted away, and he started talking about how his wife had a bad back and couldn’t have sex—can you imagine? I didn’t know if he was going to try to grab me or what. My heart started pounding really fast, but I thought, ‘No problem, all I have to do is yell, this building is full of people,’ and then I looked at my watch and said a photographer was going to meet me, I wonder where he is, and Jacomine led me out as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

“But put that together with that whole ‘obsessed with sex’ routine and what does it spell?”

Frankly buffaloed, Skip shook her head. “It makes no sense at all.”

Jane leaned back in her chair. “I’m so glad to have confirmation. It doesn’t to me either. I’ve turned it over and over in my mind, and I can’t make a coherent story out of it. It makes no sense. And yet it must have some kind of logic to it—have I used the word ‘crazy-making’ yet? By the way, you’re the first person I’ve told that to. It made me feel defiled somehow. I know I was being manipulated, I just don’t know what the object was. If I told it to a man, I guess he’d say Jacomine was trying to get into my pants, but that makes even less sense than any other theory—of which I have none, by the way.”

“Well, if he were really, really crazy—•”

“Which he is.”

“Then he might think no woman can resist him—and if you didn’t, then he’d have you in his power.”

Jane’s face twisted into a frown. “I’ve thought of that, but—is anybody that crazy? I mean, one minute he’s telling me how dangerous I am and how he’s scared to death of me, and the next, he’s making me his sex slave. How do you cram both of those things into one mind?”

Skip shrugged.

“Anyhow, I went back and wrote a first draft, which I finished right before I went home one night and showed to my editor. He said he thought it wasn’t quite balanced enough in view of the delicate subject this obviously was, which I thought was completely wrong. Why should we bend over backwards when these assholes were so obviously trying to control what we ran? But I said sure, I’d be glad to put in some more community quotes saying what a great guy people thought Jacomine was.

“Then that night Jacomine calls me at home. He says he’s heard the story’s going to run the next day and it’s a hatchet job. Now how could he know it was even written? So naturally I asked him, and he said that was just what he
heard
. The question is, who told him?

“My city editor? Stanley? He saw a copy. Whoever it was, it was probably someone I trusted and was close to.”

“Wait a minute. Was it in the computer?” Skip asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe they got into it.”

Jane shrugged. “It’s possible. But, my God, it wasn’t like there was a million dollars at stake, or even anything at all. It was a completely innocuous story that was about to get slanted in his direction.

“Anyway, the upshot was, I rewrote it six times. And every time I rewrote it, it had to go up the ladder to the top, and every time, it came back with orders to water it down a little bit more. Meanwhile, Jacomine was calling every day with versions of what he’d ‘heard.’ And that’s just calling
me
. God knows who else’s ear he was bending, but I’ve got a few ideas. Frankly, I don’t even rule out blackmail on this one.

“Anyway, the story finally ran, six weeks later. All of the other stories in that series took an average of four hours’ work—a one-hour interview, maybe an hour’s research, and a couple of hours to write them. They all sailed through with hardly a word from any editor.

“When I went home the night before this one ran, I was pretty disappointed in the whole process. I had all six versions before me, and I could see it getting more and more sanitized in every version. The one I’d just turned in was unbelievably bland, didn’t begin to scratch the surface of what we knew about him, and was really pretty one-sided in his favor. But I comforted myself with the fact that at least it had the healing paragraph in it. I had actually seen healings at his church, and I wrote about them—as I mentioned, that’s pretty unusual in a mayoral candidate.

“But guess what? I got up the next morning, read the paper, and that paragraph wasn’t there. It disappeared. Simply was
not there
. And I saw the final version right before I went home. I’ll tell you I went into that paper livid. Absolutely loaded for bear. I asked every single editor what happened and you know what they did? Shrugged their shoulders. One of them said, ‘weird.’

“That was it. That was all. After Jacomine had put us all through six weeks of hell, no one gave the tiniest damn. No one even cared. Now I ask you, what went on there?”

“Someone got paid.”

“Or blackmailed. Or converted. God, I don’t know. But whatever it was, I don’t think it was simple.”

“Was anything missing besides the healing paragraph?”

“Yes, but it was nothing that mattered. It was just a phrase in a sentence about what he’d been doing before he came here. I think it said he was in New Iberia—or maybe St. Martinville. I mean, why bother?”

Skip was sitting up straight, feeling a little like a bloodhound that’s happened on a particularly redolent sock. “That,” she said, “might bear investigating.”

Chapter Ten

TORIAN LOVED FRIDAY nights—loved the first sight of her dad after a week, loved having dinner with him and Carol (who actually cooked, unlike her mother), then the ritual of getting her little sister ready for bed, and finally, talking to her dad while Carol disappeared discs creetly for a while.

Marly was only her half sister, but Torian had never had a whole sister and Marly was good enough. In fact, she was one of the wonders of the world, as far as Torian was concerned. She was fair, like her dad and Carol and Noel, not dark like Torian and Lise. She had tiny, neat fingernails the size of cake crumbs, but they were getting bigger now—she was ten months old and about to walk, Carol thought.

She was a year younger than Joy, Noel’s daughter, and infinitely more fascinating—to Torian, anyway. Every week, she seemed a different child. And Torian gloried in each of her tiny achievements—smiling, sitting up, drinking from a cup—as if Marly were her own child.

I wish she were
, she thought sometimes.
I’d love to have a baby.

But there were so many other things to do, too—live in Paris, write poetry, marry Noel and travel everywhere with him.

And finish high school, of course.

But maybe she didn’t have to do that. Maybe she could somehow get her GED. Maybe she could just run away and worry about it all later.

Anything to get away from Lise.

But that would mean leaving Noel; therefore it was out of the question—unless she could somehow run away with him. How to do that? she wondered.

He wants to, too. I know it.

Her dad honked and she ran out, grabbing her backpack with its change of clothes. She was only allowed to stay two nights and one day. Sundays, she had to come back to the dreary old apartment in the Quarter. Theoretically, she and Lise were supposed to have quality time then, but her mother usually had a hangover and wanted to spend time with Charles anyhow. Torian was left to run the streets with Sheila, which wasn’t her idea of a terrible time, but she’d rather have spent Sundays in Old Metairie, with her dad.

The carpets there were beige and soft under her toes. She had her own room, which was much nicer than the one Lise had given her. It had all new, white-painted furniture, and flower-print Roman shades. Torian and Carol had picked out the fabric, which was more expensive than everything in her room in the French Quarter.

There was a lot more light here, too, and the paint was fresh—it was gray with grime at Lise’s—and she’d never seen a roach here. Not even when she raided the refrigerator in the middle of the night, which she couldn’t do at Lise’s, because there was never anything in it.