The Kindness of Strangers (Skip Langdon Mystery #6) (The Skip Langdon Series) (13 page)

“Sorry. I guess I was being paranoid.”

“Listen, Skip, the brass is very fed up with this. For your own good, please think about that. Will you?”

“I will, Sylvia. I promise.”

“Good. Then I’ll tell you about the call I just had—the guy sounded like a nut case. I think you might be on to something.”

Skip let out her breath so hard it was almost a whistle. “Sylvia. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

She unplugged her phone, and no sooner had she done it than her doorbell rang. It was Henry, the mailman.

“Got a few letters for you, Skip.” He had an armload. “What you been doin’—answering chain letters?”

“Don’t knock it, Henry. There’s a five-dollar bill in each one of those.”

As she talked to him, she looked up and down the street, hoping she was being reasonably discreet—if they were writing to her, they had her address, which meant they probably had her under surveillance.

As usual, every available parking place was taken, but she thought she saw the top of someone’s head in a dark red Saturn. Even that was no big deal. Here in the Quarter, people seemed to sit around in cars for hours sometimes—talking, resting, maybe selling drugs.

She went back in and opened a few letters. They nearly all started out the same way: “Dear Detective Langdon, I want to tell you how much the Rev. Errol Jacomine has done for the community.”

She counted them. There were sixty-three.

When she left the house, she glanced once again at the red Saturn. There was definitely someone in it.

She picked up some things at Matassa’s and returned. The car was gone.

* * *

If there were such a thing as protesting too much, Jacomine was certainly doing it. He had to be guilty of something—else why bother trying to stop an investigation?

Skip knew what he would say: “Our people have just had so much trouble, they’re so disenfranchised that, frankly, we’re used to being abused. That’s all we expect anymore, and we’ve learned to cope with it.”

But everybody had trouble, everybody was disenfranchised, and nobody behaved like this. There was a big scandal somewhere, and it wasn’t only in the future, she was sure of that. It could be happening in the present— political skulduggery was probably going down even now at a rate she couldn’t even imagine. But she didn’t know what form it would take or (since they knew her and were probably watching her) how to investigate it. Her gut feeling was to go for whatever he was trying so hard to cover up.

She phoned a friend in Records. “Jeanie? I need a big favor.”

“I heard you were on leave.”

“Yeah, but no one’s gonna know.”

Jeanie sighed. “You’d do the same for me, right? Whatever it is.”

“I need a sheet on somebody.”

“Easy enough.”

“And an NCIC search.” The National Crime Information Center was a federal wanted system—a little hit-or-miss, but the only service available.

“Okay. Give me a name.”

“Errol Jacomine.”

“You got to be kidding.”

“Hey. Would I do it for you?”

Next, there was nothing like her good old hometown sources. When she was looking for a missing person who’d once been a member of some off-brand sect, she’d called the religion editor at the
Times-Picayune
to ask about three churches she’d narrowed it down to. He hadn’t known a thing about them, but one had turned out to be Jacomine’s.

She felt a twinge of conscience now at never having called him back. Realizing there was something badly wrong with Jacomine, she’d reported him to the department’s intelligence officer, who’d brushed her off. But she hadn’t even thought of nice Stanley at the T-P.

Never too late, she thought, and dialed him. “Stanley? Skip Langdon from NOPD.”

“Ah, yes. We talked about a year ago.”

“I’m calling because one of those churches I asked you about was Errol Jacomine’s.”

“Oh, was it now? My, my. Now there’s a development. What did you think of him?” She heard keen interest in his voice, but by now she’d had enough Jacomine experience not to go blurting indiscretions.

“Well, I had opinions. I’m wondering if you’ve done any work on him lately—in view of his emergence in politics.”

He sighed. “If you don’t know the answer, you must be on the right side.”

“Oho. Calls and letters? Pressure on your boss and your boss’s boss? Maybe even your wife? Is that what we’re talking about here?”

“And how would you know about that?”

“I think we better talk.”

Chapter Nine

STANLEY CAME OUT to meet her and took her into an interview room. So far they’d only talked on the phone, and she had to admit surprise at seeing him. He was no one’s idea of a religion editor.

He was a black man—short, rotund, wearing the kind of baggy print trousers for sale in health clubs, though if he’d ever been in one it wasn’t doing much good. He had on a Dr. Dre T-shirt, and his bald head was so shiny it looked waxed.

“You’re looking at me like you think I’m weird. You think I’m weird?”

“Not exactly. But I’ll bet the archbishop does.”

“Yeah, I bet he does.” He laughed. “I’m so weird the paper didn’t even want to give me any kind of job, despite my fabulous credentials and affirmative action potential. So they offered this little gig to get rid of me, never knowing I had family here, and sickness in it. It was either take their dirty job or get me one as a bartender or something.

“But guess what? I love it. And I’m great at it. Love to go to voodoo ceremonies; crazy for priests who can’t keep their hands off the kiddies.” At Skip’s look, he said, “Journalistically speaking, of course. Why should the police guys get all the exposés? You should pardon me, but that’s one hell of a department you’ve got over there. My successes aside, cracking this Jacomine thing’s another ball game. Tell you the truth, I’ve only been nibbling around the edges of it.

“When the big man decided to run for mayor, a young reporter came to talk to me about him, a young political wanna-be—don’t ask, to me it’s the world’s most boring beat. Anyway, she came in here, all full of piss and vinegar and said she’d talked the powers that be into letting her do little features about everybody who’d filed for mayor. A pretty tiresome chore, so I guess the regular political guys were happy to let one of the youngsters do it.

“So she wanted some background on Jacomine. I told her what I must have told you—that I didn’t know him at all. She said she’d looked in the clips and there wasn’t a damn thing on him, but then she got a call from somebody talking about his work in the community.” He stopped himself. “You got to let her tell it. She needs to talk about it; in fact, if you want to know the truth, she could probably use a good therapist right about now.”

“So could I—mine quit because her husband works for Jacomine.”

Stanley’s demeanor changed so suddenly Skip was startled. Thunderclouds settled over his sunny features. “Who is this guy?” he shouted. “How the hell can he be everywhere at once.”

Seeing her shrink back in her chair, he said, “Oops. Sorry. He’s got us all a little on edge.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

He left and came back with a woman in her late twenties, with long brown hair and blue eyes. The hair had a funny sheen to it, and Skip could see roots—obviously she was prematurely gray, but unwilling to live with it.

Skip liked her looks—high cheekbones, but a round face, very friendly; a good smile. “I’m Jane Storey,” she said. “I’ve heard of you.”

“From Jacomine’s people?”

“Oh, no, they don’t communicate with me directly. Though there was a time when Errol called me nearly every day. I’ve read about some of your cases. And of course Eileen Moreland did that great piece about you.”

The story she meant was done almost over Skip’s dead body. It was shortly after the shooting that had changed her life, that had her so depressed; it made a hero of her at a time when she would just as soon have put her head under the covers and stayed there.

Today I don’t feel that way
, she thought with surprise. Too bad Boo’s gone. She was a great therapist.

“Stanley here says you’ve had a little trouble with the Blood of the Lamb people.”

“Trouble! I’m a mental case. There’s something so crazy-making about these people…”

“Jane, I have to interrupt for a minute. I need to tell you I’m not here in any official capacity. I’m on a leave of absence from the police department.”

Both Jane and Stanley looked puzzled. “What’s this about, then?”

“Last year I met Jacomine on another case and I thought he was bad news. Not just bad, but real bad. Like psychopathic. A megalomaniac. I’m not crazy for Perretti or Jackson, but Jacomine’s more dangerous than David Duke—only in a different kind of way. So when I went on leave I started investigating him—just because nobody else was doing it.”
And to save my sanity.

Jane said: “Just as a concerned citizen.” Skip couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.

Jane’s eyes narrowed. “Is this inside information?”

“I’m not part of anybody’s campaign, if that’s what you mean. I’m investigating because I think it’s important. Period.”

Jane gave her an oddly knowing look. “Okay. I think I know how you feel. I’d be happy to pool information.”

“Stanley?”

He stood. “I’m turning it over to you lovely ladies. ‘Scuse me, but I’ve got to go scare up a lady rabbi who’s into Hebrew goddesses.”

Jane said, “What would you think about grabbing some lunch? I’ve found it helps a lot if I have a drink when I talk about this stuff.”

When she had one before her, and they were sitting at an isolated table at an unpopular restaurant, she still spoke softly, both she and Skip remembering that even in normal New Orleans circumstances it wasn’t safe to talk about private things in public.

Jane drained off about a third of her wine at one gulp. “I gibber when I try to do this,” she said. “I absolutely can’t be coherent about it.”

Skip looked at her, inviting the tale.

“Nothing bad happened to me. I mean, like bad bad. Like terrible. I don’t know why I’m such a basket case.”

Skip waited, letting her get her thoughts together.

“There’s something about it I can’t wrap my mind around. Maybe I just can’t believe anybody could go through something as elaborate as the show they put on for me. It’s crazy, it’s not what adults do.” She gulped some more wine. “I’ve been toying with the notion of evil. I’m not sure what that is, but this might be it.”

“How would you define it?”

“I don’t know. Being so self-involved, so controlling, so power-hungry that you could mobilize a virtual army just to stop one newspaper story that would have probably been more flattering than otherwise—certainly would have been objective and no more damaging than any of the stories on the other candidates.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s see if I can do it. All I did was call for the interview, and I started getting calls—’Let me tell you all about the Reverend Mr. Jacomine, a giant among men.’ And my boss got the calls and so did his boss. And furthermore, some of the calls came from people I knew—even from friends—and these people seemed to be—I can’t explain it—on his side.” She pushed her hair behind her ear, in the process tilting her chin far up, as if to disconnect her mind from her heart, to stop the flow between the two organs.

“I mean, there shouldn’t have been sides at all. I wasn’t even aware that there were. But somehow—I can’t tell you how—it was as if we were squared off against each other, Jacomine and me, and he’d gone and recruited all my friends to fight against me. Does that make any sense at all?”

“It wouldn’t—I’d probably think you were on the edge—except that a similar thing is happening to me. Similar, but not exactly the same—because he and I
are
enemies. I really am out to get him.”

“How did he get to my friends? I still don’t get that.”

“‘Tell me about it.”

“You, too?”

Skip nodded. “It really hurts my feelings.”

Jane laughed. “I know what you mean.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “it was obvious something was up. And here’s what the paper said—that I couldn’t write about any of my personal experiences. Okay, I can kind of see it, because he’s running for office and we wouldn’t want to single out any one candidate, but it wasn’t even put that way. They said nobody cares about how you get the story, they just care about the story. Now I ask you—is that responsible journalism? Surely when someone tries to influence a story in a way that no one’s ever even seen before, that’s a story. What do you think?”

“I don’t know anything about journalistic ethics, but yes. Sure. I’d say that’s a story.”

“Well, I wasn’t allowed to breathe a word of it. So if that wasn’t the story, there was still a story to get beyond just ‘here’s who the candidate is’—which, by the way wasn’t available, because they were blocking it. I started calling up everybody in town who I thought might have been involved with Jacomine in any political kind of way to see if anyone knew anything. And I got the same thing every time—or anyway, one of two stories. One was, ‘Oh, we better not talk about that’—no explanation, just a polite refusal. The other was what a great guy Jacomine was. Nothing else. Nothing!

“But I had an ace in the hole. There’s this one City Councilwoman who’ll talk straight with the press. I’m not saying she isn’t self-promoting, but she’s very down to Earth and she doesn’t bullshit. So I called her. She said, ‘Listen, Janie, it’s very simple. Here’s a man who can mobilize votes. If he says I’ll have fifty people over there tomorrow to put up signs, he does. A hundred people to stuff envelopes—no problem. He delivers what he says he will, and it’s usually something big. And then he does it again. Are you getting the picture?’

“Well, what could be simpler? Of course that had to be it—everybody wanted him on their side because of what he could do for them. And now that he was running for mayor, people owed him a lot of favors—I was just beginning to see how many—and if he won, he was going to be in a position to dole out favors to them. So I had what I needed—something to make sense out of the whole thing.