82 Desire

waited, and she’d be happy to try again. Eloise just said, “Call me.”
    That was it. No clients, no other friends. Evidently, Allred wasn’t too popular a guy.
    Since this place was tied to the other crime scene, she couldn’t go through the Rolodex, but she did sneak to the back to see if there was forced entry. It was impossible to tell—there was an open window, but no broken glass.
    She radioed Paul Gottschalk to come over when he could, and called for district officers to secure the place. Then she called the station, asked the desk officer to put Eloise Allred through the DMV, and got an address in Metairie.
    It was Saturday: Maybe Eloise was home. When the district car came, Skip took off to find out.
    Eloise lived in an old apartment complex—maybe thirty years old, late-’60s vintage. It had a pool, but had probably never been luxurious, had probably catered to semitransient semiprofessionals. Now it was pretty run-down.
    Skip leaned on Eloise’s doorbell and got no answer. She leaned again. Something told her to try a third time, and sure enough, a cranky voice came through the intercom. “What is it?”
    “Skip Langdon, NOPD.”
    “What the hell do you want?”
    “I need to talk to you about your husband.”
    “Gene?” A note of alarm came into her voice. “Has something happened to him?”
    “I think you’d better let me in.”
    The buzzer sounded, and over it, Skip heard a wailing. “Ohhh, no.”
    The woman was standing at the door, wearing a flower-print housecoat that might have been twenty years old. She was overweight, big in the belly, puffy. Her blond hair looked uncombed, and, futhermore, looked as if that was simply the way she wore it. Skip saw what Verna Smith meant about the contrast to Jane.
    This woman was older than Jane, by six or seven years maybe. But instead of healthy skin nourished by plenty of vegetables, she had a pasty, bloated-looking hide already crisscrossed with wrinkles. And bags under her eyes that were probably partly genetic and partly due to cigarettes and drinking and long nights. She looked forty-five going on sixty. She stank of vodka.
    “He didn’t return my phone call. He didn’t call me. I thought it was just because of that little—uh—thing I said to him.” Her chin was starting to quiver.
    Skip said, “Mrs. Allred, can I get you some water or something?”
    Allred shook her head, keeping her eyes lowered so she wouldn’t have to see the truth in Skip’s.
    Skip pushed past her to the kitchen and got her the water anyway. When she got back, Allred was sitting on a reproduction Victorian sofa covered in rose brocade. Skip held out the glass. “Here. Drink this.”
    Allred shook her head, her eyes staring past Skip to the wall.
    Skip pulled up a ladder-back rocker with an orange crocheted pillow in it—a piece absolutely incongruous with the sofa—and waited a few moments.
    Finally, she said, “Mrs. Allred, why are you so sure your husband is dead?”
    Allred buried her head in her hands and started blubbering.
    Skip simply waited.
    “He knew this was going to happen. He knew it.”
    “What was going to happen?”
    “He was going to die by violence. He always said it—’I’m gonna smoke as much as I want. Probably be dead before I’m forty anyway.’ “ She looked at Skip. “He is dead, isn’t he?”
    “I’m sorry. Yes, he is. At least, we think so. Do you have a picture of him?”
    Unspeaking, moving like a robot, Allred got up and fetched a framed photo from the top of the television—herself and the man dead in his office.
    Skip nodded again. “Yes. Could you make a positive identification?”
    Allred held a tissue to her mouth. “What happened? What the hell happened? He was so—he seemed so jaunty last time I saw him.”
    “I thought you said he expected to die.”
    “Well, he did.” She shrugged. “That was just his nature. He was depressed, I guess. Like, all the time. But last week, he was almost happy.”
    Skip waited, but Allred said only, “What the hell happened?”
    “It looks as if someone shot him, Mrs. Allred.”
    The woman gasped.
    “Who do you think might have done it?”
    Slowly, Allred walked the picture back to its accustomed place and sat down again, the tissue once more at her mouth. She seemed to be biting down on her finger, perhaps in an effort to feel something other than pain. She looked alert now, though, as if she were thinking, not simply shocked and numb, staring at the