Big Easy Bonanza

suicides—of unidentified black females in the last week?”
    “Negative.”
    “Damn!”
    “Your mystery woman?”
    “Well, she never came home. I thought I might as well see if maybe she couldn’t walk.”
    “Can’t help you, I’m afraid. We know everyone who bought it this week. Now last week, that might be another matter—”
    “Can we check?”
    He pulled out a folder, went through it, and handed her two pieces of paper. “Here you are. Jane and Jill Doe.”
    One had been found on the street a week or so ago, dead of a head injury, probably mugged. She was about sixty. The other had been pulled out of the river, strangled, about a month ago. The coroner estimated her age as somewhere between twenty and twenty-five.
    “Shit.”
    “No luck?”
    “Yeah, luck. The young one’s somebody I better look at. You don’t have her, do you?”
    “Jill? No. I think Silverman and Schlosser got her. But they’re gone for the day.” He threw her another piece of paper. “Here’s something might interest you.”
    Skip skimmed it quickly. It was the autopsy report on Tolliver. The cause of death had turned out to be the advertised drug overdose, but the coroner had found something else.
    “His brain was spongy? Does this mean what I think it does?”
    Tarantino nodded smugly. “Uh-huh. He was a walking dead man. The thing he had—Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, it’s called—kills you in a few months. A year at the most. He knew he had it too—there’s a drug called Klonopin they use to treat it. He was on it.”
    “Jesus. This doesn’t seem to you to shed a new light on things?”
    “You mean, like he had nothing to lose by checking out? So he might have done it to protect somebody else?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Well, let me tell you a little about this disease. It’s very rare, but not that difficult to diagnose. The less serious symptoms are strange little muscle twitches and another funny thing—an exaggerated startle reaction.”
    “A what?”
    “You know, like you startle easily. Also anxiety, fatigue, headaches, weakness, dizziness, stiffness of the limbs—”
    “Everything in the book.”
    “I was saving the best for last. The thing’s a dementia, like Alzheimer’s. The serious symptoms are memory loss, impaired judgment, personality change, and this thing that goes by a real technical name—’unusual behavior.’ ”
    “Oh, shit.”
    “Yeah, like maybe you might dress up like Dolly Parton and shoot your best friend. Would you call that usual behavior? Duby’s out of his mind with delight.”
    Skip said nothing.
    “This was a very messy homicide, didn’t you notice? One of the town’s most prominent citizens mowed down on a city street. Not your average tavern stabbing. The brass wanted the thing to get unmessy real bad. And your friend Tolliver was gentleman enough to oblige.”
    “Tolliver or whoever killed him.”
    “Whoever killed him? Gimme a break. You know how many pills he took? Look at that thing again. About fifty, all different kinds. And there weren’t any signs of force anywhere in his place. Uh-uh, babe. He did himself.”
    “I better get to the morgue. And thanks. It’s really nice to have somebody treat me as if I might not be an ax murderer.”
    “Ahhh, Frank’ll be fine. He just needs time, that’s all.”
    Jill Doe had the light skin and red hair Skip was looking for, but it was hard to imagine she had ever been beautiful. She must have floated a few days before she’d been pulled out. She looked ugly—very ugly—but mostly she looked pathetic and sad and in an odd way, innocent, as dead people always did to Skip. Or the ones she saw in the morgue did, without their mortuary beauty makeovers. Whatever hardness or meanness LaBelle had learned in her meager life was unlearned, unimportant when life left the body. Now it was just a body—not bad, not good; not pretty, not ugly; not smart, not dumb; simply there, lying perfectly still.
    Skip wanted to bring her back to life. She never saw a corpse that didn’t make her feel that way. She wondered if that was sick.
    She told a friendly coroner’s deputy she thought she could ID the corpse, had him give her a set of prints and went back to the office, to Latent Prints. She left the set and went home, too edgy to sit and wait. She wanted to be alone to think.
    They’d told her half an hour. She’d been home ten minutes—still had five to go—when Steve called.
    “Hello,