The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series)
Read The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) Online
Authors: Julie Smith
Tags: #Mystery, #detective, #female sleuth, #women sleuths, #police procedural, #New Orleans, #hard-boiled, #Twelve Step Program, #AA, #CODA, #Codependents Anonymous, #Overeaters Anonymous, #Skip Langdon series, #noir, #serial killer, #Edgar
“BRILLIANT.”
San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“A multilayered masterpiece … I read this one on the E train at 5:15
A.M.
and didn't look up once…. Julie Smith's New Orleans is a subterranean Mardi Gras where the masks cover smiling sociopaths and even Deadly Nightshade comes sheathed in silk.”
ANDREW VACHSS
“Smith catches New Orleans from blues in the night to beignets at dawn…. The serial killer is currently an all-too-frequent sub-genre of crime fiction, yet it holds its ground because writers like Smith keep finding new dimensions in it.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Smashing … NEW ORLEANS MOURNING was a tough act to follow. THE AXEMAN'S JAZZ is a wonderful, completely satisfying encore.”
The Denver Post
“Well-researched, engaging, with solid psychological insights, this novel is the perfect follow-up to Skip Langdon's NEW ORLEANS MOURNING debut.”
SUE GRAFTON
“OUTSTANDING.”
Booklist
THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ IS THE SECOND SKIP LANGDON MYSTERY
The Skip Langdon Series
(in order of publication)
NEW ORLEANS MOURNING (*Edgar-winner for Best Novel)
THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ
JAZZ FUNERAL
DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)
HOUSE OF BLUES
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)
82 DESIRE
Also by Julie SmithMEAN WOMAN BLUES
The Rebecca Schwartz Series
DEATH TURNS A TRICK
THE SOURDOUGH WARS
TOURIST TRAP
DEAD IN THE WATER
OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS
The Paul Macdonald Series
TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
HUCKLEBERRY FIEND
The Talba Wallis Series
:
LOUISIANA HOTSHOT
LOUISIANA BIGSHOT
LOUISIANA LAMENT
P.I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF
As Well As:
WRITING YOUR WAY: THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL TRACK
NEW ORLEANS NOIR (ed.)
A Skip Langdon Mystery
By
JULIE SMITH
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
The Axeman’s Jazz
Copyright © 1991 by Julie Smith
eBook ISBN 9781617507212
Cover by Nevada Barr
Originally published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First booksBnimble electronic publication: May 2012
Digital editions by eBooks by Barb for
booknook.biz
FOR VICKY BIJUR AND CHARLOTTE SHEEDY
ONE
NEW ORLEANS COULD wreck your liver and poison your blood. It could destroy you financially. It could shun you or embrace you, teach you tricks of the heart you thought Tennessee Williams was just kidding about. And in August it could break your spirit.
It was the steady diet of cholesterol and alcohol that got your body, the oil glut that had hit the economy. The weather did the rest. If you could tolerate the heat and the damp, the lightning changes in the atmosphere, indeed, if you took to them, you could get addicted. If you didn’t, you didn’t belong.
If you were one of those who did belong, you could know the fragile sweetness of love on a rainy morning, the feral taste of lust on a stormy afternoon, the randy restlessness that travels through the air with the scent of ozone.
But sometimes in August, when the city had been a sauna for months, when the unmoving air seemed as toxic as that of Pluto, everything seemed to stink and so did everyone. And you couldn’t move.
You couldn’t make a phone call, you couldn’t do your filing, you had no ambition, the simplest chore was too much.
And that was with air conditioning.
Skip Langdon wondered what kind of hellhole the city had been before it was invented.
She had just come back from lunch and her ankles were swollen. Some said it was the salt in the seafood that did it, some said just the heat. She’d noticed it sure as hell didn’t happen in winter.
But no problem. In two days she’d be out of here. A line from an old song—“California Dreamin’”—popped into her head. It was about winter, but it perfectly described her state of mind. In the Crescent City the bad season was summer. Though her head was full of sea breezes instead of smog, at the moment even L.A. in a smog alert seemed preferable to New Orleans in August. And Skip had a tolerance for the heat, almost liked it.
She was aware that the fact that she’d be seeing her friend Steve Steinman probably played no small part in her wanderlust. She’d met him here at Mardi Gras and hadn’t seen him since. Would he be different on his own turf? Did he live in a sterile condo or a funky old house? (Whatever it was, it couldn’t be any worse than her studio on St. Philip Street.) Was he a good housekeeper? (She hated a man who wasn’t.)
Was she really in love with him, or had they just gotten caught up in the moment? She felt absurdly adolescent about this vacation.
Or at any rate, she supposed she did. She hadn’t dated in high school, had been too tall, too fat, too confused, and probably, to the other kids, too weird. Of course she’d been to Miggy’s and Icebreakers, sixth-grade dancing school and seventh-grade subscription dances—every McGehee’s girl had. But the “normal” course of events hadn’t materialized.
She smiled—rather nastily—as she imagined how much that must have chagrined her social-climbing parents. It had so chagrined her at the time she hadn’t noticed the neat revenge in it. But in the end, they’d won—they’d worn her down to the point she’d agreed to make her debut. If they’d known she’d end up a cop, they probably would have saved their money.
The phone jangled her out of her reverie and she saw that she’d doodled a pathetic paraphrase, “August is the cruelest month,” without realizing it.
“Langdon. Homicide.”
She might be semi-conscious, but she wasn’t dead yet. It still gave her a thrill to say that, to listen to herself proclaiming what she was, to feel she’d made it in her hometown. Informally, she was a detective now, and she had been for a month. Technically, she was still a patrol officer, since “detective” wasn’t a rank in the New Orleans department, just a description.
At Mardi Gras, she’d been a rookie walking a beat (literally walking—VCD, the Vieux Carré District, was the only walking beat in town). A week later she’d almost resigned—and now here she was in Homicide. She still only half believed it.
It was the desk officer on the phone. Some French Quarter apartment manager had had some kind of crazy suspicion about one of his tenants. Two guys from VCD had responded and found a body.
That was bad. She was the only one in the office and her vacation started in two days. Her sergeant, Sylvia Cappello, had tried not to get her in too deep before she left—most homicides that weren’t solved in the first week didn’t get solved—but it looked as if the plan might have backfired.
It was an old building, poorly kept, the real-estate market being so soft no one could afford to fix anything up.
One of the VCD guys was smoking out front, making Skip long momentarily for her uniform. (She’d had to buy clothes for her transfer, having had hardly a rag in her closet before it came through.) At the moment, she was wearing a basic-black skirt—she’d bought three of them—with a beige silk blouse and a pair of flats. She had had the courage not to wear heels, but a rare moment of social insight had suggested she really couldn’t skip pantyhose. So at the moment her legs felt like sweaty sausages.
“Hi, I’m Langdon.”
The uniform smiled. He was cute. “Apartment four.”
She hoped to God the AC was on.
A man called down the stairwell, “Are you a friend of Linda Lee’s?”
She shook her head, tried to look friendly as the old guy came into view. “I’m from Homicide.” She showed her badge.
He looked nearly eighty, thin, with shrunken shoulders. He frowned, but not so much, she thought, with displeasure as with the fear of giving it. He reminded her of her grandfather, her father’s father back in Mississippi.
He extended his hand. “Curtis Ogletree. I’m the manager. Thought you might want to talk to me.”
“Thanks. In a minute I’ll knock on your door if I may— I’ll just have a look first.”
“I better go in with you.”
“That’s okay. I can handle it.”
But he tried to follow her. A true Southern man, she thought, determined to do his duty no matter how unpleasant for himself, how inconvenient for others. By God, he was going to be helpful. Her grandfather had driven her nuts, actually removing her paper dolls from her tiny hands, cutting the clothes out himself, never understanding why she screamed in rage and frustration.