Big Easy Bonanza

operated on the double standard.”
    “It’s a funny town. If I did nothing, my dad would be happier than he is with what I
am
doing.”
    “Oh, but you’ve really done something.”
    “Not to hear Don Langdon tell it. He wouldn’t be happy till he heard I was picking up some man’s dirty underwear—some rich, socially prominent man’s.”
    “Of course then you’d have a maid and wouldn’t have to.” They laughed. Marcelle would inherit money now, and she could have a maid herself. It wasn’t what she wanted.
    She said, “Daddy was a wonderful man, Skip. Really he was. He did believe in the arts; he tried like hell to help all those poor musicians and never held it against them even if they were junkies. He said it was a crime the way this country treats its artists. And he felt that way about poor people too, which is why he worked so hard in politics. He really cared, Skippy. And he tried to give Henry and me a sense of—I don’t know, social responsibility or something. As well as ambition. He wanted us to work as hard as he had to, not just to be little rich kids who didn’t know how to do anything.” She made a face. “Like me.”
    “You know how to be a mama.”
    “It isn’t enough.” As she spoke, she put it all together for the first time—her need to do something, to have something of her own—with Chauncey’s values. She felt momentarily strengthened, as if her father were still with her, as he had been at her first piano recital, whispering, “You can do it, baby.”
    Skip said, “I’d better go. Could you think real hard about one last thing?”
    “Okay.” Why not? She felt strong now, with Chauncey’s ghost whispering.
    “Was LaBelle in the house the night you saw her? Or might she have been at some other time?”
    Marcelle closed her eyes. Could Chauncey have let her in and then made her leave when things turned nasty? Not very likely, but—
    “Maybe,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
    “I think there’s a chance your father was shot with a gun from his own collection.”
    “No!”
    “I’m not sure. Do you know if he had a pair of Colt 44.40s?”
    “No. Are those guns?”
    “They’re the ones we found at Tolliver’s.”
    “They didn’t look familiar,” she said doubtfully, “but I’ve never paid the least attention to the damned collection. If you like, I could look and see if anything’s missing—I mean, if there’s a piece of shelf that isn’t dusty or something. Would that help?”
    “A written record of what he had would be better.”
    “Okay, I’ll go through his desk.”
    “I’d appreciate it.”
    When she was gone Marcelle fell in a heap on her bed, unable even to make André’s breakfast. Staring at the ceiling fan, she wondered if she had known her father at all. Speaking to Skip, she had felt perfectly confident that her father couldn’t have had an illegitimate child, couldn’t have kept such a thing from his family. But he had had a secret love affair with his secretary, who had treated Marcelle like a younger sister.
    She thought of the scene she had seen Chauncey enact with LaBelle. Bad enough if she were his mistress, but intolerable if she were his daughter. And if Marcelle found it intolerable, how about the larger community? She had worried that her father’s affirmative action work would be endangered. What if he had had a daughter with a black woman—this Jaree—and then shunned her? He would end up not merely a laughingstock but an object of hatred.

2
    In the bright light of midmorning, Skip’s post-midnight panic returned. The day was getting away from her. She called Homicide. Cappello had gone as far as it was possible to go on the Toyota owner for the moment, but the news was frustrating. It seemed Horton Charbonnet worked for an oil company and lived near Carrollton. One Jeanette Nelms, a UNO student whom he had hired to take care of his dog and three cats, told Cappello that to the best of her knowledge Charbonnet was where he said he was—visiting friends in Houston—and would be there until Wednesday. He hadn’t left a phone number and hadn’t said a word about a car. She had gotten the house-sitting job through an ad, didn’t know him, and didn’t have the slightest idea whom he might have lent his car to.
    Damn! Charbonnet could be the key to the whole thing—unless he’d simply parked his car on the street for a few days and somebody’d stolen it.
    She called Steve, just to touch base, soothe any