Big Easy Bonanza

you’ve got the right job for it.”
    “I know. I just hate writing traffic tickets.”
    “Well, go to it, baby. How can I help you?”
    “I hear Chauncey was seeing somebody.”
    “Seeing somebody?” He sounded puzzled. “You mean besides his secretary?”
    “I don’t know. For all I know he was seeing a cast of thousands.
Was
he seeing his secretary?”
    “Sure. At least he was a few years back. Villere girl. Estelle, maybe. Yeah—Estelle Villere. Black girl. You know the old saying.”
    “Right. Hot, black, and sweet.” (The saying, which had always turned Skip’s stomach, compared the preferred New Orleans woman to the local coffee preference.)
    “My daddy told me about her and Chauncey—he and Chauncey were asshole buddies, you know. Daddy’s pretty broken up about the whole thing—Chauncey getting killed.”
    “We all are, I guess. Listen, you’re a pal, Jo Jo. I’ll return the favor sometime.”
    She looked up Estelle Villere in the phone book and came up blank. She was making another glass of instant iced tea, dying to decide who to try next—Teetsie Delegal or SuSu Sims—when Alison phoned.
    “Rumors-R-Us reporting in.”
    “I knew you’d come through.”
    “I’d have come through quite awhile ago, but you were on your silly phone.”
    “I got something too. Estelle Villere, right?”
    “Boy, are you behind. She was number three.”
    “Of how many?”
    “Oh, only four. Every one of them his secretary.”
    “No!” Skip was shocked at the need to control that such a thing implied.
    “That was his MO. I don’t know whether he fucked them first and then made them his personal serfs, or whether he hired them and then exercised
droit du seigneur
. Listen, I gotta thank you for this. I never knew this stuff. I guess sometimes you forget to gossip about people twice your age. Even experienced gossips.”
    Skip laughed in spite of herself. She hadn’t had the least idea Alison even knew the word ‘serf’ much less
droit du seigneur
. “What about number four? And what happened to the other three?”
    “Let me look at my notes. Okay, the first one’s name was Nancy—I couldn’t get the last name on short notice, but if you give me more time—”
    “It may not be necessary. What became of her?”
    “She got fired. And shortly after, married a nice young man who had previously been on his way up at the Carrollton Bank. Soon after that,
he
was fired. Now, Officer Langdon, can you see a connection there?”
    “I can smell one, anyway. Number two?”
    “Her name was Heidi. Miss Heidi Jones from Lafayette. She only lasted a year. Found herself a better job working for some guy over at Shell.”
    “And we can only speculate on how she auditioned for it.”
    “Naughty, naughty, Skippy. You are one of the last living genuine characters—you know that?”
    “How about the lovely Estelle?”
    “Now, she was around for a while—five years or more. She was practically an institution. And she
was
lovely too. Black—did you hear that part? Real light-skinned, I heard, about six feet tall, and mostly leg. They say guys used to make appointments with Chauncey just to drop by and get a gander. Stelly, they called her. She was famous. And guess what? All of a sudden she wasn’t there anymore. No one knows a thing about what happened to her—all Chauncey would say was, ‘She’s not with the bank anymore.’ Even to his closest friends. He had to use Kelly girls till he found a replacement.”
    Skip felt her scalp prickle. Stelly would have been the woman Marcelle saw—“beautiful” and “light-skinned” wasn’t much of a description, but Marcelle’s woman fit it too.
    “Skippy?” said Alison. “You still there?”
    “I’m here. I’m speechless, that’s all. When somebody dies, things come out that you can’t imagine, don’t they?”
    “It’s a can of worms, all right.” Alison didn’t sound the least disturbed by it. “Anyway, number four’s Sheree Izaguirre.”
    “Izaguirre? She doesn’t sound black.”
    “Should she be?”
    “I don’t know.” Skip felt confused. She supposed she’d begun thinking of Chauncey as having the prototypical preferences of Jo Jo’s old saying.
    “Well, anyhow, that’s the rundown. You want Sheree’s address?”
    “My God, Alison, I’ve got to hand it to you.”
    “See? I’m not the dingbat you think I am.”
    Skip was glad they weren’t speaking face-to-face, because she was dead sure she was blushing. She