Crescent City Connection

* *
    For Skip, it had been a great weekend—she and Steve left Napoleon in Kenny’s capable hands and drove to Nottoway Plantation, where they spent Saturday night and damn near forgot about kids who shot each other and cops who did, too.
    They went hiking Sunday afternoon and arrived home exhausted. It was probably around five A.M. Monday morning when Napoleon started barking.
    Steve couldn’t be roused to reason with him. Skip tossed for an hour and finally got up. She was on the first watch anyway and had to be at work at eight. Might as well go in early and maybe leave a little early.
    She was the first in her platoon to arrive and, coincidentally, the one up for the next case.
    The others came in one by one—her sergeant first, Sylvia Cappello, and then the young guy named DeFusco, and Jerry Boudreaux and Charlie Dilzell and Adam Abasolo, also a sergeant, but not hers.
    The call came in at five after eight. Later they found out the dispatcher had lost it: “The chiefs been shot! The chiefs been shot!”
    Corinne, the secretary for Homicide, simply gave the call to Cappello, her face white, her lips drawn, but not losing it, not saying a word. Skip couldn’t hear what the dispatcher said; she was told later. Still, Corinne’s whiteness, her tension were enough—it was something bad. A policeman, Skip thought, her heart sinking. But she never thought of the chief.
    Cappello didn’t tell them till they were in the car. “The call’s at Chief Goodlett’s house. A man’s been shot there.”
    Jerry Boudreaux said it for all of them: “Oh, shit.”
    “Sylvia, goddammit. Is it the chief?”
    He hadn’t even been sworn in yet.
    “There were several calls. People said different things.”
    She didn’t speak again during the ride and, oddly, neither did anyone else except Charlie Dilzell, who seemingly out of the blue hollered out, “Fuck!” when they were nearly there. It was as if they were in awe of such a thing, as if it demanded silence out of respect.
    In Skip’s case, she was simply trying to hold it together, to assimilate the fact that Albert Goodlett, her friend and the only possible hope of a thoroughly decayed department, was really gone. In her heart she knew he was. Cappello was being circumspect, but it had to be that. And yet it couldn’t be; it was impossible.
    Goodlett lived in a modest neighborhood out in Gentilly. Everyone who lived there was outside. The street was choked with district cars.
    The chief’s car was in the driveway, and the chief was still sitting in it, the whole area closed off with yellow tape. The car had no rear windshield. The chief had an entrance wound in the back of his head and, as a result, no face left.
    Someone had apparently driven by and opened up with automatic gunfire. Or perhaps they had been parked, waiting for the chief to back out of his driveway.
    Skip was dazed, wondering how the hell she was going to function. Cappello didn’t even bother to take her aside. She said simply, “Langdon, I want you to handle this. You’ve got kind of a knack with heater cases.”
    Jerry Boudreaux said, “This ain’t no heater case. It’s a fuckin’ volcano.”
    Skip’s heart pounded. She wanted the case badly, almost as much as she didn’t want it.
    She sent the other detectives to canvass the neighbors and went in to see the widow, whom she knew slightly. The woman fell upon her chest as if they were best friends—any old port, Skip thought—and cried like a child. Skip’s eyes filled as well, and she choked up.
    I will be calm
, she chanted to herself. I
will not cry. I will be professional.
    A lot of officers might lose it in a case like this—it wasn’t your everyday homicide—but Skip couldn’t. She had once when she should have been cool—it had to do with the man she’d shot, Shavonne’s father—and that was how she ended up on leave. Cappello was sticking her neck out trusting her with this one. For right now, she couldn’t afford to show emotion. So she had to comfort the widow as best she could, hanging by a thread, yet appearing stoic as a statue.
    She just held the woman tight and mouthed the usual meaningless soothing sounds: “That’s right, Bernice—you’re okay, Bernice. Everything’s going to be okay.”
    The hell it was.
    “I’m going to catch this bastard,” she said. “And you’re going to help me, aren’t you? You feel like you can do that?”
    Bernice pulled out of Skip’s grasp. “He just walked out the