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

by Julie Smith

  She called him at work. “Hey, Troy. I’m gon’ be down at Jack’s later on.” A bar near her sister’s.

  “I was just thinkin’ about you.”

  “You were?”

  “Whatchew want to go to Jack’s for? Why don’t I pick you up, take you someplace nice?”

  “I cain’t be late, now.”

  He laughed. “Dorise, you worry too much.”

  They went out and had crawfish and beer. Before, they’d been to hear music, or to a party. They hadn’t talked much yet. She knew what Troy did, he had a good job driving a bus, and he knew she was a widow with a little girl, but he didn’t know about Delavon—or anything about her, really.

  She was sitting there working on her crawfish, poking at the tail joints, delicately separating meat from shell, when he said, “You got pretty hands, Dorise. I been watchin’ ’em.”

  She didn’t know what to think. “That mean you don’t like my face.”

  He laughed. “You funny, you know that? I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like your face. But you got pretty hands, too.”

  He reached out and grabbed one of them. “Know what I like? You don’t put all that polish and shit on ’em.”

  Her sister did. Her nails were royal purple one day, pussy-pink the next, and half the time they had designs on them. Dorise giggled. “Little moons and stars—you don’t like that? Gold-colored fleur-de-lis?”

  “I like nice brown hands. Brown like God made ’em.” He turned her hand over. “Nice soft pink palms.”

  He rubbed her palm with his finger and it gave her a funny feeling, the sort she’d almost forgotten. But she was embarrassed. She pulled her hand away.

  “Dorise, what you do with those hands?”

  “You don’ know?”

  “You never told me.”

  She could hardly believe it. “I work for Uptown Caterers.” She said the name and everything because she was proud of it, like men were when they said they worked for Shell Oil or something.

  Sure enough, Troy was so impressed he whistled. “Well, ain’t that just—you know—uptown.”

  “They nice people. I’m real lucky.”

  “You cook and everything?”

  “No, uh-uh, I’m a server.”

  “You serve the food?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, uh-huh, I supervise the jobs, really. Make sure everything’s there, then I serve—sometimes I tend bar if they want me to. And I wash dishes and pack up—do just about everything.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah. You know, I really do. I love it.”

  “What you like about it?”

  She had never had anyone ask her that. She told him, feeling as if she were giving him part of herself. Nobody else knew how she felt in those places, how comfortable and happy, as if she were Mistress of the Manor—but somehow, not at all grand. Simply as if she were in control for once.

  * * *

  In Skip’s life, Errol Jacomine was the one who got away. He was a con man and a murderer, but so were lots of scumballs. Jacomine was something else, someone who treated human life like gardeners treat bug life. He had run not one but many a con, and murdered as often as he felt the need—or possibly the desire. She’d messed up a very good thing he had, and she knew it was only a matter of time until he came for her—or for someone she loved.

  Every spare moment she had, she tried to reel him back in. The problem was, he’d come to prominence in a big way almost overnight. She’d been able to run down his early life in Savannah, Georgia, including a murder he’d once been accused of. Then he’d had a period as a minister with a minuscule denomination called the Christian Community, during which he made a big splash in Atlanta.

  That one ended when one of the ladies of the church complained of sexual favors required as part of pastoral counseling sessions, and other ladies came forward in something resembling a stampede.

  He was perfecting the art of healing in Atlanta—some said he could even raise the dead—and he continued that when the church took away his congregation and sent him to southwest Louisiana. Eventually, he started his own church, the Blood of the Lamb Evangelical Following, which was about the time Skip encountered him. As a minister with growing influence, he began to dabble in politics.

  The Christian Community had kept poor records. All Skip had was this: In Atlanta, he had a family—in Louisiana, none.

  After things blew up in her face, his wife, Tourmaline, had quite literally gotten out of Dodge. The Community had three missions, one in the backwoods of Honduras, and Tourmaline Jacomine had asked them to send her there. It was the least they could do to oblige. Mary Lou, the bossy secretary for the Community, swore there was not only not a phone, there wasn’t even a fax machine. Skip doubted that, but her efforts to find a number had failed.

  The good news, the Community said, was that Tourmaline had only another year to serve.

  After Atlanta, there was no record at all of the Jacomines’ grown son—not so much as a Social Security number.

  Despite the advice of her therapist to get on with her life, Skip had gone over and over the same old territory. But there was one thing she hadn’t done. The only person back in Savannah who really remembered mischievous young Earl (as he’d been called before he was Errol) was his talkative—if totally deaf—aunt Alice.

  “I’m going back to see her,” she told Steve.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What about Layne’s healing?”

  “What?” But she knew what he meant—she was just astounded that he remembered, given the way he’d scoffed.

  Layne Bilderback was the lover of her neighbor, landlord, and best friend, Jimmy Dee Scoggin, who lived in the Big House along with Kenny, Sheila, and Angel.

  Jimmy Dee had had no one but Skip until his sister died and he literally inherited Kenny and Sheila. About the same time, after many years of solitude, he met Layne, necessitating much emergency education for the children on gay lifestyles. As it turned out, they were great fans of the relationship—two uncles were better than one, in their opinion. “Especially,” as Jimmy Dee put it, “when I’m one of them.”

  Then came Angel. Everybody loved her, Jimmy Dee included. In no time, he was fond of saying he’d fallen in love with three people and a dog.

  The problem was, Layne was allergic to the dog.

  No remedies, conventional or alternative, had the least effect, but Skip had an idea—she happened to know a coven of witches who’d agreed to try their hand at a healing. Layne could have managed without her, but she had promised to take Kenny, who was just dying to see witches at work.

  “Maybe I’ll stay overnight,” she told Steve. “You can take Kenny to the healing.”

  “Is it okay if I wear a garlic clove?”

  “Oh, forget it. I’ll be back.”

  Aunt Alice liked her—Skip felt this was due mostly to the fact that she offered the simple courtesy of not treating deaf as stupid. And Skip liked Aunt Alice—she liked her exuberance and her courage. When she visited the first time, Aunt Alice had talked candidly about a relative she thought was dangerous, though everyone else in the family had decided to find him amusing— Earl Jackson, aka Errol Jacomine.

  She greeted Skip this time in a lavender windsuit with gray trim. It was meant for walking, but Aunt Alice was heavy and moved slowly, as if what walking she did was done under duress. Her gray hair was short, upswept in front, curled on the sides, and rigid with spray—she’d just been to the hairdresser.

  She held both of Skip’s hands and looked at her like a long-lost relative. “Hey, precious. You look so pretty.” Instantly, Skip recalled the way she had taken to Alice the first time they met, partly because of the woman’s warmth but also because of her intelligence—and the sense that Alice, because of her deafness, was much underestimated by her relatives.

  Skip came and sat down. She was presented with a writing pad—Aunt Alice could talk to you, but you had to write to her
.

  “Did you get my letter?”

  Skip nodded. She wrote, “Thank you. That was sweet of you.”

  Skip’s encounter with Jacomine was national news. Aunt Alice had written to say she knew Skip was just doing her job even though Earl Jackson was a blood relative, and she, for one, not only applauded, she was real sorry the bastard got away.

  “It’s good to see you again, honey. What can I do for you this time?”

  “I know it’s stupid to ask,” Skip wrote, “but has Jacomine been in touch with anyone in the family?”

  “Now, honey, you know I would have let you know.”

  “Just thought I’d ask,” she wrote, and pulled out a list of the things she’d already done to trace Jacomine: looked for his wife, looked for his son, badgered the Christian Community. “Can you think of anything else I could do?”

  Aunt Alice’s index finger, under a layer of ladylike pink nail polish, flicked at the list. “Didn’t even know he’d married again.”

  Skip’s stomach flipped over. Blood pounded in her ears: this was something. She wrote, “Again? You mean this wasn’t his first marriage?”

  “Oh, lordy, lordy. How would you know? Yes, ma’am, he was married, and thereby hangs a tale. Now where’d I put that thing?” She got up and left the room. Skip wanted to chase her, grabbing at the flapping folds of her purple windsuit.

  But there was nothing to do but wait, drumming her fingers, swinging her leg, all but biting her nails.

  “Here it is.” Aunt Alice handed her a clipping from People magazine, about a Texas millionaire who’d just married a nineteen-year-old fashion model who looked like she’d probably suck her thumb if she got to feeling insecure.

  Skip stared at it. “I don’t understand.”

  “See that other picture? That was Earl Jackson’s first wife.” She nodded, caught up in the utter satisfaction of having a good story to tell. “Course, she was Mary Rose then.”

  The inset at the bottom was a head shot of the woman scorned—Rosemarie Owens, a hard-looking blonde with helmet hair, very much in the Ivana Trump mode. She’d gotten an eight-million-dollar settlement, and was suing for more.

  Skip was flabbergasted. But then everything about Jacomine flabbergasted her—to her, he was a weedy-looking, slightly ferrety, crepey-skinned, slimy little salamander, hardly capable of inspiring mother love, much less the devotion of hundreds of followers.

  “How on Earth … ?” she wrote, and then she added a series of exclamations and question marks.

  Aunt Alice chuckled, thoroughly enjoying herself. “Well, she was too young to know better. ’Bout fourteen, I think—maybe a little more. She and Earl ran away together.”

  “She’s from Savannah as well?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, it was quite a story. They ran away and then later he came back by himself. And then way, way after that, she came back and brought him a baby.”

  Skip wrote, “A little late for that, wasn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t a baby exactly, it was a seven-year-old.”

  The Christian Community records had indicated only one son—Skip wondered if there were two children instead. “What was its name?”

  “You know, I can’t really recall.” Aunt Alice nodded again. “Haven’t heard of Rosie since. Can’t imagine how shocked I was when I picked up this magazine and there she was staring up at me.”

  “You’re sure that’s her?”

  “Course I’m sure. Mary Rose Markey always did look like some little animal likely as not to bite you. Look at her picture—you ever seen a nose like that one? It’s not the kind of thing you forget. Besides, her age is right, her name’s right, and the article flat out says she’s from Savannah. Now I may not be a detective, but I can add two and two as well as you can.” She chuckled. “Besides, after this ran, the local papers picked it up. No mention of Earl, though. That probably goes back too far for ’em.”

  “What happened to the boy?”

  “Oh, Earl raised him, I reckon. Or—I guess—got him another wife who did. He moved out of town shortly after Rosie came back. Begged her to stay with him, I heard.” Alice shook her head. “Guess she was already off to catch her a Texas millionaire.”

  “He begged her? You mean he didn’t dump her when he came back without her?”

  “Oh, I b’lieve she had quite enough of Mr. Earl Jackson right quick. But Earl now—he was crazy about that girl. Always made me suspicious of her. They say like attracts like—you know?”

  Skip wrote, “I thought opposites did.”

  “I’ll tell you somethin’, precious. Earl Jackson acted like he was the spawn of the devil himself—I never in my life seen a mean child but that one. Bad, yes; up to no good; mischievous. All that stuff. But mean? Only once. And I just got a feelin’ Miss Rosie ain’t no angel, either.”

  Skip left feeling elated—it was her first lead in six months.

  She just had time to catch her plane—or so she thought. In fact, it was half an hour late, so that she was late making her connection in Atlanta. As she trotted through the airport, she saw a tangled knot of people crowded into a bar—apparently staring at a television. For a moment, she was confused—was it football season? Definitely not. It was getting longer every year, but didn’t yet extend into spring.

  Her seatmate on the plane seemed nervous—finger-drumming, knee-swinging nervous, the way Skip had been at Aunt Alice’s. Finally, he turned to her. “Hear any more about Billy Hutchison?” The football player who’d just been acquitted of killing his wife.

  “Billy Hutchison? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Somebody shot the son of a bitch. What goes around comes around, don’t it?” He had a red face and a country accent. He probably opposed abortion and kept an arsenal handy in case any blacks wandered into his neighborhood. She didn’t need a psychic to tell her he’d revel in something like this—something with the potential to set off race riots. (That is, assuming a white man had shot Hutchison.)

  But there was something about what he said—“what goes around comes around”—that had a certain fearful symmetry.

  Three

  LOVELACE JACOMINE WAS about to hit her snooze alarm for the fourth time when the clock was wrenched from her.

  “Hey, L. Not okay.” Her roommate, Michelle, was standing over her, in T-shirt and Calvin Klein briefs, hair sticking straight up, bossy as always.

  “I’m not going to class.”

  “Fine. Dandy. Just quit hitting the alarm, okay? I can sleep another hour.”

  “Oh, hell.” Lovelace got up and grabbed the shirt she’d worn the day before, pulling it over her head on the way to the bathroom. She splashed water, ran a comb through, pulled on jeans. She’d be late to class, but not that late.

  Philosophy. It didn’t make sense. How could you think deep thoughts before nine A.M.? She didn’t like doing anything before ten, but she’d wanted to take the damn class, God knew why.

  She shrugged into her jacket—these early spring days were still cool, especially this time of day—and grabbed her backpack. As she walked out of the building, she noticed the coffee stain on the front of her Henley shirt.

  Damn.

  But there was no time to change. She glanced at her watch and started to run. By now, just about everyone who was going to class was already there. She felt suddenly panicked. What was the point of going to college if you couldn’t be more conscientious than this?

  She had such a long way to go she slowed for a while to get her breath. She heard something behind her, not footsteps but something.

  And that was all. A hand went over her mouth, another around her waist. She never resisted, never had a chance.

  She figured later that he must have done some carotid-artery knockout thing, or maybe she was so deeply in shock that she lost her memory. Whatever it was, the next thing she knew, she was in a car, gagged, lying down on the seat, hands and feet bound.

  The last time she had felt so helpless she’d been eleven,
at her dad’s cabin in some forest in the middle of nowhere. He had shot a deer and wanted to show her how to clean it. Horrified, finding no words to describe how dreadful she found it—the dead animal, the prospect of defiling it—she ran away.

  He chased and caught her, and made her sit and watch. He hadn’t needed bonds, but she might as well have been tied tight as a calf, so much a prisoner was she.

  The place was awful. Her dad was awful, with his damn lifetime supplies of everything (including ammunition), his tobacco-chewing friends with their camo fatigues and their doomsday scenarios. So far as she could tell, they pretty much thought everybody was stupid except them, and the world was probably going to crack apart any minute, causing black people to storm these pathetic cabins in the woods.

  She chided them for being racists, and they said if she had any sense she would be, too. In fact they made fun of her, called her Little Miss Yankee Liberal, and she shrank further and further into herself. That was the summer she made it through about half of Dickens and a little of Dostoyevsky.

  She would get a Coke and some Oreos and retreat to her closet-sized room with one of the books she’d brought. Then she’d dunk the cookies in the Coke, lose herself in stories of people—some of them kids—who were worse off than she was, and she’d feel almost happy. She gained weight just when she was supposed to be having an active outdoor life, and her dad was cruel about it. He called her names she couldn’t remember without feeling the heat and shame of tears, even now, and so she never thought about it.

  The little room—she thought it really had been a closet—had been okay, though. All it had in it were two things—a narrow built-in platform fitted with a mattress and, perpendicular to that, a sort of wide shelf with a mirror over it that served as a dressing table. That left about enough room to stand up and undress, and no place to put anything other than a couple of stacks of jeans and T-shirts, which was how she kept her clothes—in stacks on the floor. Her books she tucked under the shelf, and she put her panties on top of them, decently out of sight.

  Her dad had built the bed and shelf just for her, so she could come visit. Much as she wished he hadn’t bothered, she did love the room. It was her only refuge from her opinionated, nasty, gun-toting dad—and from the place itself, with its dead animal heads, off-putting noises, and primitive appointments.