Jazz Funeral (2 page)

Steve said, “Make mine potato.”

Skip sighed. “Okay, I’m ready. How about a gin and tonic instead?” The pot wasn’t providing much social lubrication.

The men turned back around. “The po’boy,” said Jimmy Dee, “is undoubtedly—despite blackened redfish, Paul Prudhomme, Oysters Rockefeller, Galatoire’s, and the beignet—the zenith of New Orleans cuisine. What I would order for my last meal if I were a convicted felon. Oyster, of course. Not merely the world’s greatest sandwich, but possibly the world’s greatest meal.”

“Hear, hear!” Steve was definitely interested.

“This town’s equivalent of the hero, but the very comparison is a travesty and an outrage.”

“Yes, but what does it have to do with Hamson?”

“Be patient, my boy.” It was like telling fire to be cold. “You’ve heard, perhaps, of George Brocato?”

“No.”

“Well now, he was a poor boy. Or so the story goes. Hence the name.”

Skip spoke between clenched teeth: “Dee-Dee, you’re being tedious.”

“Am I?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought I was building dramatically.”

“To?”

“Poor Boy’s Po’ Boys, of course.”

“Ooooh.” Steve sighed, contentment personified. “They just came to L.A. Oh, man! Fast food heaven. I don’t know how they do it.”

“Well, the high prices help.”

“Oh, man, worth every penny. Cheap at twice the price.”

“You’re a real believer.”

“It’s like having Mother’s in L.A. Or Mumfrey’s. Are you trying to say Ham’s the Poor Boys scion?”

“Exactly.”

“So George is the dad, huh?”

“Right. You’ll probably meet him tonight.”

“Well, I wondered why Ham had so much money. Oh, man, maybe they’ll serve po’ boys tonight.”

Skip thought she’d never seen Steve reduced to such a pure level of infantile pleasure.

It was the eve of the second weekend of JazzFest, second biggest annual party in the world’s most serious party town—a Wednesday, with JazzFest to swing once again into full gear in another few hours. It would wail Thursday through Sunday, as it had the previous Friday through Sunday. When it was over, some 300,000 people would have had their ears massaged and palates tickled at eleven stages and sixty-four food booths.

In other towns, thought Skip, festivals lasted one weekend, and weekends started Friday evening at the earliest. But here they were, kicking this one off on Wednesday. Sometimes she was glad she hadn’t stayed in San Francisco, where she’d once fled. Back there, she thought with distaste, you had to be up and jogging at six. Here, that was considered a good time to go to bed.

The party they were going to was a benefit to which Steve had been invited because of the little job he was doing for Ham, the promotional video for Second Line Square. Second Line Square was Ham’s dream, some said his obsession. Ham had a plan to keep JazzFest going year-round—or something approaching that.

He wanted a permanent structure, down by the riverside, that would house an ongoing festival of New Orleans music and become, according to his dream, the city’s leading tourist attraction. The Jazz and Heritage Foundation’s own two projects, the Heritage School of Music and WWOZ, the jazz radio station, would be housed there, with the Heritage School much expanded. Preservation Hall would move there too, if Ham had anything to say about it. Five or six important groups would play at once, every night, and there would be lectures, films, interviews with artists, every cultural experience that could be dreamed up to showcase the city’s musical heritage. There’d be food and crafts booths too, but all carefully monitored, only the highest quality. It would be New Orleans’ answer to the Grand Ole Opry.

The place would be self-supporting—which meant it would have to be huge, and therein lay part of the problem. People said the same things they always said about development—it would wreck the view, it would take up space that ought to be park land, it would create parking problems, and it would cost too much. So Ham had failed to muster support from the Jazz and Heritage Foundation, which ran the festival. It was a bitter blow, but certain commercial interests needed hardly any convincing at all to pump money into it, and so he had started the Second Line Square Foundation, which was currently in the process of whomping up support.

Steve’s video—to be shown to civic groups and potential backers, would be snippets of JazzFest interspersed with interviews supporting Ham’s position—the Tower Records folks, for instance, telling the home folks how many European tourists come in to buy tapes of their beloved New Orleans music, how they beg to know where they can go hear it. There’d be statistics, numbers, every kind of educational rah-rah, all softened by the stuff that soothes the savage breast.

Ham lived in Old Metairie, what passed for a suburb in New Orleans. Folks who moved there from Uptown were sometimes wept over, practically kissed good-bye and packed off with a team of huskies. Yet, if you took the expressway, it was about a ten- minute drive from downtown. Ham hadn’t actually crossed the line into Jefferson Parish—he was in the five-street transition area “near the cemeteries,” where you could get both the suburban safety of Metairie and the social correctness of a New Orleans address.

As they tooled down Metairie Road, past the landmark cemeteries, Steve said, “Okay, tell me what to expect.”

“Lots of food. Jambalaya, crawfish pie—”

“What else? Who’ll be there?”

“Big names in music. And the creme de la creme, I’ll bet. I don’t really know because it’s the first time he’s done this, but it’s predictable when you think about it. He’s probably invited everybody in town who’s got money, and he’ll lure them here with celebrities. All the musicians he can get—and that’ll be plenty.”

“Rub elbows with Ti-Belle Thiebaud and eat five pounds of crawfish.”

“Well, we know she’ll come. Aaron Neville’s not such a sure thing.”

“Aaron Neville! You’re kidding!”

“Hey, baby, have you forgotten where you are? Aaron Neville, Alan Toussaint, Wynton Marsalis—it could all happen.”

“Holy shit.”

“There’s even rumbling about Nick Anglime.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, it’s not all that farfetched. He’s moved to New Orleans. To Audubon Place.”

“Sometimes I wonder about you, Detective. Do you ever check out any of these rumors?”

“What rumors?”

He guffawed. “What rumors! I come to this town every four months maybe, and I never get here that there’s not some new story about a different celebrity who’s moved here.”

“Well, Allison Gaillard’s husband’s cousin, who just moved to town, lives next door to the realtor who sold him the house.” She watched him double over. He’d have been on the car floor if not for his seat belt. Skip didn’t see what was so funny.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“If you only knew how many of those stories I’ve heard.”

“Okay. Fifty bucks says Anglime shows.”

“Hell, no. Dinner at Arnaud’s.”

“Done.” It was a bet you couldn’t really lose, or she might not have made it. She was aware there was truth to what he was saying. Those sorts of rumors did fly—sometimes you were even shown the building that some movie star had just bought from someone your boss’s wife’s sister knew really well. But somehow the star was never seen around town, and eventually you saw somebody else watering the flowers at the house and knew you’d once again fallen for urban folklore.

So far she hadn’t heard of an Anglime sighting. And if there’d been one, the word would be out. Even Skip, who had barely been born in his heyday, knew “the American Mick.” She liked his stuff, along with Dylan’s and the genuine Mick’s. She thought she’d have done well in the sixties. The music was good and people swore all the time. It was a decade with rebel appeal, and she was nothing if not a rebel—sometimes to the despair of the New Orleans Police Department.

“Somehow,” said Steve, “I didn’t picture Ham in this setting.”

It was a gracious neighborhood, dignified without being stuffy —too many kids for that sort of thing. The trees were grown, the ivy trained. The houses were several decades instead of several centuries old.

“Why not?”

He thought a minute. “Oh, hell, it’s not Ham. It’s Ti-Belle.”

“I see what you mean. But she’s a new addition. He originally moved here with his wife Mason.”

“Mason. That’s a weirder name than Ti-Belle.”

“What do you expect? She’s from a good family. I guess they were your basic young affluent couple with a yen to send their kids-to-be to Country Day, which is right in the neighborhood.”

“This is hardly the country, but you’re right—what should I expect? Uh, Skip, here’s what I didn’t expect—that little black and white bunny over there.”

“Where?”

“Oh, just hopping around on somebody’s lawn. With three baby bunnies. There it was another a block back.”

“Look, there’s some more over there. They’re all over the neighborhood. Someone moved to Covington and let their pet rabbits loose when they left—I forget who—but they did what rabbits do.”

Steve had lost interest. “What happened to Mason?”

Skip shrugged. “What usually happens, I guess. Realized she got married too young. She’s been gone five years, and Ham just never moved. Then when Ti-Belle came on the scene, I guess—well, I don’t know. I’m seeing your point more and more. She’s like an exotic flower in a bed of busy Lizzie.”

Steve spoke in a different tone, suddenly excited. “What’s going on?”

They had just rounded the corner and come into view of Ham’s house. It was obvious it was Ham’s house because there was most assuredly a party in progress—but it appeared to be on the front lawn. “Must be damn crowded if they’re spilling out on the sidewalk.”

She parked half a block away, and as they came closer, she noticed the noise seemed odd, unlike party noise. It was a little too shrill, a little uncertain. No one was eating, and stranger still, no one was drinking. The clump of guests clustered on the yard seemed to get quieter as she and Steve approached, to follow their movements visually. It made Skip self-conscious. What did they want? She thought she saw people she knew in the crowd, but she couldn’t be sure. No one spoke to her.

Steve said, “Did someone die?”

“Let’s go around back.”

Good smells wafted. Ham had hired a lot of caterers, in keeping with local custom—the idea was to get a dozen or so crews from different restaurants to set up little backyard booths, each serving one dish so people could sample and stroll.

A trailer parked in the driveway had put on vast caldrons of crawfish to boil. They’d be dished up in baskets and devoured at newspaper-covered tables. But the tables hadn’t been set up.

The restaurant crews, who had portable cooking units, were trying to look busy, but mostly they looked simply forlorn. Some had set up and started cooking, some hadn’t; none was serving. A confused-looking bartender was surrounded by bottles, but had no table on which to assemble a bar.

“At $250 a pop,” fumed a red-faced man, “you’d think we’d at least get a drink.”

Skip saw her brother, Conrad. Not her favorite person, but a truly great information source. “Hey, Conrad. You remember Steve?”

Conrad looked as if he cared for Steve slightly less than Jimmy Dee did. “Hey, Steve.” He didn’t bother speaking to Skip.

“Where’s Camille?” Skip liked her brother’s new wife a lot better than she liked her brother.

“Around front, I guess. Trying to figure out what’s going on. You seen Ham?”

She shook her head. “We just got here.”

“Well, looks like you beat Ham and Ti-Belle.” He looked disgusted.

The shrill, uncertain buzz they’d noticed was developing a hysterical note. This was a party that wasn’t fun. Bemused, Skip and Steve worked their way back around to the front.

“Ham I could see,” said Skip. “He could have had to work late—it’s his busiest time. But where’s Ti-Belle?”

“Oh, ‘bout two houses away, I’d say. Approaching at a dead run, having just parked a Thunderbird with a squeal of wheels.”

Skip had heard the squeal, but had paid it no mind. Now she saw a very thin woman coming towards them, hair flying, long legs shining brown, sticking out from a white silk shorts suit. Over one shoulder she carried a lightweight flight bag. Golden-throated Ti-Belle Thiebaud, the fastest-rising star on the New Orleans music scene.

Steve said, “I’d know those legs anywhere.”

She never performed in any garment that wasn’t short, split, slit, or halfway missing. Some said the whole country would know those legs soon. They said she was going to be bigger than large, larger than huge.

Thiebaud was approaching at a dead trot, fast giving way to a gallop. She was wearing huge hoop earrings. She had giant black eyes and shining olive skin, flyaway blond hair that looked utterly smashing with her dark complexion. Her skin clung to her bones, hanging gently, as naturally as hide on a horse. She probably didn’t even know what a Nautilus machine was—no doubt started the day with coush-coush and syrup and didn’t set her fork down till she went to bed. Obviously she’d never worked out a day in her life and never needed to. Skip had seen her perform, but never up close. She thought she might have just laid eyes on the most gorgeous woman in Louisiana, if you didn’t count her pal Cindy Lou Wootten.

“How’d Ham get
her
?” she blurted.

A black man waved at the singer, tried to slow her progress, pretend it was a party: “Hey, Ti-Belle.”

Thiebaud paid him no mind, but cast a look at the crowd in general. Skip saw twin wrinkles at the sides of her nose—one day they’d be there permanently, if she worried a lot in the meantime.

“Hi, y’all.” She was trying to smile, but it wasn’t working. “Excuse me a minute.” She let herself in and closed the door behind her.

Almost immediately, a scream that could have come from anyone—the hottest Cajun R&B singer in America or any terrified woman—ripped through the nervous buzz.

Skip’s eyes locked with Steve’s. “Stay here.”

For a second everyone froze; and then the heroes in the crowd started for the door. It was locked. Thwarted, they looked around, confused.