Big Easy Bonanza

the best shot.
    The men left Skip with Marcelle while they looked around, came back to report that nothing had been disturbed. “Mrs. Gaudet, where can we drop you?”
    “I’d like to go home to change, please. Before I go to my mother’s.”
    They took Skip back to police headquarters, questioned her for an hour, and left her exhausted. Exhausted and feeling cheated. She would have given anything to be O’Rourke or Tarantino today.
    Lieutenant Duby called her in. “I’ve had a request from Chief McDermott. He wants to use you as a sort of special investigator on this. You’ve been detailed to homicide for the rest of the week.”
    Skip clasped her hands in her lap, as her mother had taught her to do more than twenty years ago. She
couldn’
t have heard what she thought she had. She said nothing.
    “The chief wants you to go and do what Uptown girls do—do you understand?”
    Skip did. They wanted her to spy.
    “Cooperate with O’Rourke and Tarantino, okay? And report to me. Any questions?”
    “Starting now?”
    “Tomorrow.”
    She was still on parade routes. “I’d better get back to work.”
    “Langdon, what time did you report this morning?”
    “Five o’clock.”
    “You’re a casualty, officer. Go home.”
    Feeling only slightly guilty, she left his office, pondering the mysterious ways of Comus, Momus, and Proteus, the gods of Carnival. She’d become a cop to escape the Uptown crowd and now the very thing she’d hated most all her life—her tenuous place in it—was going to help her in her new life. She was going to do work hardly any rookie ever did, and all because she was an Uptown girl. Yet for once it wasn’t because of her family’s influence. Oddly, it was because of Skip herself; because she had expertise no other rookie had. The irony of it made her head spin.
    Duby called her back. “You’ve got a phone call.”
    “Here?”
    “Obviously here, officer. You’re detailed here. Take it in homicide.”
    The detective bureau was divided into crimes against property and crimes against persons. You had to go through property crimes to get to the room homicide shared with robbery. It was roughly the size of an amphitheater and decorated with a single picture—a poster of a snake crawling on a naked woman. Homicide’s desks were clustered neatly at one end of the room, Robbery’s at the other. There was no one at either end.
    Shrugging, Skip chose a desk at random and asked for her call. “Officer Langdon? About time. This is Dolly.”
    It was a man’s voice. Skip wondered how in hell she could get a trace when she was the only one in the whole place. No way that she knew of.
    “I saw you,” she said. “Did you see me?”
    “You didn’t see me, honey. I was shit-faced over at Maidie Blanc’s.”
    Skip sighed and stopped worrying about the trace. “Cookie Lamoreaux. Très amusant.”
    “Awful about Chauncey. I heard you saw it.”
    “Word travels fast.”
    “Actually, I had the inside track. I’ve got a houseguest saw it too. Old buddy from California here to do a film on Mardi Gras.”
    “Oh, that asshole.”
    “Hey, he speaks well of you. Says you saved his ass.”
    “He nearly cost me mine.”
    “He’s got something for you.”
    “I’ve got something for him too.”
    “I’m putting him on, okay? I said I’d make the introductions.”
    “Hi,” said a new voice, quite a pleasant one—a little businesslike, but a little friendly too. “This is Steve Steinman. I saw your name tag and Cookie said he knew you. Weird, huh? I didn’t know it was such a small town.”
    “In some ways it’s a village.” (Some ways that she hated like tarantulas.)
    “Thanks for helping me today.”
    “No problem. It’s my job.”
    “Listen, I think I got film of the thing. I thought maybe you could tell me who to show it to. The names of the investigating officers.”
    Skip’s ears started to ring. “You’ve got it on film? The murder?”
    “I’m not sure yet. It’s being developed. I won’t get it till ten o’clock or so.”
    “Tonight?”
    “Uh-huh. Should I just drop it by the cop shop?”
    “It’ll be a madhouse around here. Why don’t you bring it by my house? I’ll take it in first thing in the morning.”
    Sure. After she’d watched it six or eight times.
    “Why not? Cookie says you’re okay. Says you’re the only cop in town he’d trust.”
    “He was drunk when he said that, right?”
    “Guess so, come to think of it.”
    “That’s