Big Easy Bonanza

They only think, ‘film, wow, glamorous’ or ‘dance; gee, talented.’ They don’t think about the process, about what it’s like to live with the thing inside you trying to get out.”
    Cookie said, “Maybe we can get you a cheap abortion,” but no one so much as glanced at him.
    Skip was thinking guiltily that indeed she hadn’t stopped to think about it, about what Steve really did, and what it meant to him.
    Marcelle was rapt. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I think about it every time I look at a picture I love or a statue or even a beautiful piece of furniture. I think of the woodworker, planing his wood, and touching it and rubbing it and applying oil to it. When I see Henry act, I can’t believe it’s my brother who can do that. I’d give anything if it were me. It makes me want to cry.” She teared up.
    Cookie said, “What? What makes you want to cry?”
    Skip thought she would talk some more about how deprived she was, poor little Southern kid who couldn’t do anything, she was jus’ so helpless, but Marcelle flushed and spoke in a whisper. “Beauty,” she said. “Art.”
    An embarrassed silence fell. Skip thought,
No one says things like that. They think them, but they don’t say them
. And she realized how very much she felt like that herself. Or used to. She had let that part of herself die in recent years. But now she remembered a one-woman show she had seen in college, how she couldn’t stop staring, how she had felt a lump in the back of her throat. She was stoned at the time and thought it was that. But the feeling had been back, it came up at least once every time she set foot in a museum; sometimes she felt it looking at certain blocks in the Quarter. She ignored it; she pretended it wasn’t there.
    The name of the artist from the college show flashed into her mind and she knew she’d seen it in the paper recently. She wanted one of the paintings on her wall—something by that artist, something that gave her that feeling. She saw her dump of an apartment suddenly covered with beautiful paintings, not heavy metal posters at all, and she smiled, picking up her glass to invite a toast.
    “To art,” she said.
    “Hear, hear.”
    “To artists,” said Marcelle, so obviously including Cookie that he stopped pouting and served dessert.
    Among many half-drunken assurances that it was a work of art, a masterpiece, a chef d’oeuvre and competition for the Mona Lisa, they washed down a multilayered chocolate cake with champagne, and Skip felt an unaccustomed mellowness that had nothing to do with drink spread through her body.
    She wondered if they were all actually growing up, putting away old resentments, old prejudices, and becoming different people—people, she thought with a jolt, who would actually like to know one another—be friends, as Cookie had suggested. Was she ready for that?

Tolliver
1
    SHE WOKE UP early and kissed Steve awake. They had spent the night at Cookie’s. “I gotta go, D.W. Griffith.”
    He pulled the pillow over his head. “Oh, my aching head. I can’t believe we really had that conversation.”
    “In vino Veritas, Roger Corman. I’m taking you a lot more seriously from now on.”
    “How about just taking me?” He pulled the sheet off to show her his erection.
    God, it was beautiful; she could almost taste it already. She started to slide down his body, hormones suddenly activated to full throttle.
    But there isn’t time; it’s Monday morning and you’re a cop. Remember?
    She sat up. “Oh, shit. I can’t. I’ve got to go home before I go to work.”
    “Damn.” He rolled over.
    “Yeah.”
    She was probably scheduled for the stakeout at LaBelle’s today, as she had been for days, but she needed to check her machine.
    Jimmy Dee’s voice trilled at her first: “Good morning, my tiny true love. I suppose there’ll be nothing left of you but a bone and a hank of hair if you’re out rutting with that elephantine friend of yours. Give scrawny old Dee-Dee a call if you’ve still got a mouth left.”
    And then Duby’s flat, emotionless voice: “Skip, I hope you haven’t left for your stakeout. We’ve closed out the St. Amant case. Report to your usual district this morning.”
    Closed out the St. Amant case?
    Her finger shook as she dialed. “Lieutenant. I must have been in the shower. What’s going on?”
    “Have you heard about Tolliver Albert? It’s all over the radio.”
    She was silent, trying to take it in.
    “I’m sorry