Big Easy Bonanza

certainly had underestimated Alison. After getting the address and hanging up—and finally getting the iced tea—she tried to think whom Alison had suddenly reminded her of and realized it was her mother.
    Elizabeth Langdon was Liza to her friends, but her own daughter thought of her as Dizzy Lizzie. Lizzie didn’t seem to Skip to have a thought in her head except where she wanted to be invited next and how to make it happen. Her conversation—calculated always to please, never to offend—consisted solely of social pleasantries.
    There was certainly a low cunning in her mother’s machinations, but that wasn’t the part that made Skip compare Alison with her. Liza’s climbing agenda naturally included charity work, and this was what she did well. Put her in charge of an event and the same woman who couldn’t have done her own laundry suddenly assumed the personality of a general.
    Skip opened her closet. She wasn’t used to being a plain-clothes cop, but the garments there certainly looked perfectly chosen for one. There was the gray suit she’d had on earlier, a beige skirt, blue silk blouse, two more pairs of jeans, some sweaters for winter and blouses for summer, and a pair of black gabardine slacks that her mother had found on sale and bought for her. These she chose now, along with a tan sweater and navy blazer. Plain clothes she had. Very plain.
    Sheree Izaguirre lived off Veteran’s Highway, in the kind of ticky-tacky apartment house she could have found in any city in the country. Skip supposed the pool was the drawing card—or maybe it was the anonymity, since Sheree was seeing a married man. She wondered if Chauncey had paid for the apartment—had even chosen it himself.
    The woman who answered the door was petite, like Bitty, and she had something else of Bitty about her—a childlike vulnerable quality, tiny shoulders that begged for a protecting arm. She was around thirty, Skip guessed, and had dark skin—nicely tanned, most likely, from weekends around the pool—but she wasn’t black. Her short curly hair was tousled, as if she’d been lying down. She wore a gray sweatsuit. A simple gold bracelet—one she doubtless always wore, that Chauncey had probably given her—emphasized the fragility of her right wrist. Her face was swollen from crying.
    “Yes?”
    “Sheree Izaguirre? I’m Skip Langdon from the police department. “ She showed her badge.
    “Yes?” said the woman again.
    “I’m here about Chauncey St. Amant. I wonder if we could talk a few minutes.”
    “Come in.” Sheree Izaguirre stepped aside, looking puzzled. Pulling a tissue from a box sitting on an antique footlocker that served as a coffee table, she blew her nose. “I’m a little upset,” she said. “Sit down.”
    Skip sat on a sectional sofa too big for the room and covered with tan plaid Herculon. On the floor was beige carpeting, and at the windows hung dark blue drapes in a fabric that looked plasticized and probably was—curtains chosen by a landlord. Outside, the lights of the city were beginning to come on. Over Skip’s head dangled a spider plant in a macramé plant hanger. A framed Jazzfest poster hung on the wall. Except for the old trunk, the furniture looked as if it had been bought from the floor of a department store—and rather hurriedly, by someone who was bored by shopping. The only discordant item in the room was a toy truck lying on its side in a comer.
    Sheree sat down in a pine rocking chair with an orange cushion in the seat. Surveying the room quickly with wide, dark eyes, she twitched restlessly. “It’s getting late,” she said, and popped up again. She closed the curtains, turned on a table lamp.
    Skip said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Izaguirre. I’ve known Mr. St. Amant all my life. My father was his doctor—maybe you know him.”
    “What’d you say your name was?”
    “Skip Langdon. My father’s Don Langdon. I think he and Chauncey had lunch now and then.”
    “Doctor Don. Sure.”
    “We’ll all miss Chauncey.” Skip smiled, let a beat pass. “There’s no easy way to talk about a murder, I guess, so let me just start in the middle. I came to see you because you saw Chauncey every day, you know who else saw him, you know who phoned him. Right now we’re all asking ourselves the same question. ‘Who’d want to kill Chauncey St. Amant?’ ”
    Sheree Izaguirre smiled through her pain. “I know I am.”
    “You’re in a better position to know than most