Big Easy Bonanza

his life and it could finally have gotten to him, but that was the hardest of all to swallow. Okay, she was prejudiced—she couldn’t stand the little bastard. But who could? Frankly, he just wasn’t lovable.
    Not to you maybe, but what if you’d seen him grow up, watched him go through all the tortures of childhood and adolescence—which must have been considerable in that household. You might have more compassion for him. You might see, not Henry the grown-up brat, but Henry the brave four-year-old struggling valiantly against vast and terrifying odds.
    Forget it, only a mother could love him.
    Well, all right, maybe a mother or an uncle. So for the sake of argument, say the elegant Tolliver really fell in love with the egregious Henry. How about this disinheriting business? Pretty baroque. Tolliver wasn’t poor and exploitive, after Henry for his imagined future fortune. He was wealthy enough so that he and Henry could have lived perfectly comfortably without a dime of St. Amant money. (Besides which, there must be Mayhew money under Bitty’s control.) And why should Tolliver leave a note saying he was in love with Bitty if he wasn’t?
    Looking at it with a more or less cool head (the sort you got from more or less sitting still), Henry had a much better motive than Tolliver. He was the one who had reason to hate Chauncey, and indeed to do him in for personal profit. And he was the one who had gone to truly astonishing lengths to get her off the case. What did she have that was scaring him? Some shard of unsuspected evidence, some overheard gobbet of conversation that could unravel the whole thing? Why the hell wouldn’t it come into consciousness?
    It would if I could sit still long enough to meditate.
    If Henry had been attacking her, then it hadn’t been LaBelle, which blew the notion that she had been in town all along.
    Where on earth does LeBelle fit in?
Okay. Really think about it. Did she kill Chauncey?
    If so, she would have had to have a key to Tolliver’s. Now there was a thought. Maybe she could have got one. As a prostitute, she always went to the trick’s house or hotel—Calvin Hogue had been very specific about that, and so had Hinky Hebert. Perhaps she had serviced Tolliver and lifted a key.
    But what was her motive? Revenge? She certainly had reason to get even. But it seemed to Skip that blackmail would be a better plan—why not cash in, better late than never, on what she’d missed out on? Sheree Izaguirre had seen Chauncey throw her out on her ear. Perhaps she had come into his office to blackmail him and he’d refused. And then she’d given it a second try at his house, where Marcelle saw her. He didn’t pay, so LaBelle killed him.
    No good. Exposure would have made much more sense and would probably have been more satisfying. And anyway, if LaBelle killed Chauncey, why on earth would
Tolliver
confess to it?
    Hélène is dead. Marcelle…
    Hold it, here. She was actually getting an idea.
    Suppose Hélène did kill Chauncey, which caused Marcelle, who loved her father, to kill
her
, and Tolliver to kill himself to protect Marcelle? Perhaps, as a matter of fact, he was really in love with Marcelle, not Bitty or Henry at all.
    Oh, that’s too silly.
    Maybe, but he sure as hell must have been in love with one of them, and offhand, Marcelle seemed the most palatable of the lot.
    The longer Skip sat and waited to fall into a creative meditation, the more she became aware of her changing physical condition. The illness she had pleaded that morning was leaving her body as if she’d just bathed in the healing waters of Lourdes.
    Tarantino and O’Rourke were both still in the office, having a last cup of coffee and chewing the fat about something—basketball, she thought.
    “Look who it is,” said Joe. “Surprise about Tolliver Albert, huh?”
    “You aren’t kidding. Hi, Frank.”
    He gave her a barely perceptible nod—not quite rude, but not civil either.
    “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me. I know you’re going through a hard time.”
    “What do you know, bitch?” He got up with a great scraping of his chair and left, not even saying good-bye to Joe.
    Skip said, “I don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me the story on him. They all know it Uptown.”
    Joe shrugged his meaty shoulders. “He’s a proud guy. What can I do you for?”
    “It’s written all over me, huh?”
    He shrugged again. “Just a guess.”
    “Have we had any murders—or even