Jazz Funeral

boarded-up houses. They go in and sleep. They call them squats. Then there’s a bunch of cheap hotels—one that’s kind of famous. Know who William Burroughs is? They say he used to score junk there.”
    Joe was getting impatient. “How about a list of their bars, hotels, known hangouts?”
    “Hey, there’s other stuff. There’s facilities, you know. Covenant House. And a church where they hand out vouchers for mattresses. You can check all those places too. Other than that”— he turned his palms up—”all you can do is sit on balconies.”
    Joe and Skip spoke together: “Sit on balconies?”
    “Well, it’s not good police work, but it’s what I tell the parents to do. You just watch the crowds up there where you can see them and they can’t see you. ‘Cause if you walk into one of the kids’ bars — and I don’t even mean the chicken-hawk scenes, I mean the ones with the punked-out wackos and the game machines—they ain’t gonna roll out the red carpet.”
    When he had left, Joe said, “Okay, what’s our strategy?”
    “Find Melody,” said Cappello. “She’s all we’ve got, she’s almost certainly the key, and she might be in danger.”
    “Skip?”
    “Yeah.” She bit her pencil. “Yeah. It’s the danger part that’s getting to me. Obviously, Carlson just assumed she ran away. But we don’t know that. Maybe she caught the killer in the act and he killed her too. Or took her somewhere to think about it. Maybe he’s crazy enough to ask the family for ransom.”
    “It worries me too,” said Joe. “And of course there’s that other nasty possibility.”
    “Little sis did him?” said Cappello. “What for?”
    “How do I know? She thinks she’s a singer, right? Maybe he wouldn’t let her sing at JazzFest. Skip, you need any help? For the routine stuff?”
    She shook her head. “I’ve got it covered.”
    The routine stuff. Might as well get on it. She had good friends at VCD. She phoned her buddy Vic De Sandro, who said he’d start on it right away. She called the Brocatos and suggested they have flyers made up. And then she asked the computer for criminal records: Ti-Belle’s, Ariel’s, George’s, Patty’s. And Ham’s, for good measure.
    Everyone was clean. Next, alibis. George had been at work, Patty at home alone, then at the Rosenbaums’—two blocks from Ham’s—then back home. Ariel had been at work, and once, about three in the afternoon, at Ham’s house. Patty and Ariel weren’t exactly out of the question. And George probably wasn’t either. It wasn’t worth pursuing now, but she wondered if George could really account for every hour of his afternoon. Had he been alone in his private office at all that day? She wondered if there was any trouble between father and son—if she found any, that was soon enough to check.
    At the moment, she wasn’t interested in any of these three. She’d saved Ti-Belle for last because everything about her begged to be scrutinized—her sudden rise from obscurity after hooking up with one of the city’s most influential music mavens, for instance; the continuing fights with Ham; and most of all, the way she’d been late to her own party.
    Skip called Chicago first—Ti-Belle hadn’t been to see Jarvis Grablow. Then she called a friend who worked at an airline. The friend wasn’t supposed to, but he could pull up a list of passenger names for every flight out of New Orleans on a given day. Ti-Belle had said “a three-day trip,” so the friend checked both Monday and Tuesday. Ti-Belle hadn’t gone anywhere. Now, that was worth pursuing.
    But first, an all-purpose investigative call that could save hours and hours of snail’s pace bumbling—to Allison Gaillard, long-lost Kappa sister with whom Skip had recently reconnected. Allison was a true belle who knew everything there was to know about how to get people to look at you and then how to keep them looking—a mistress of the Southern arts. She was someone with whom Skip hadn’t had the first thing in common when they’d been at Newcomb together (ever so briefly, before Skip flunked out). But for some reason, after Skip had gone off to Ole Miss, and then to San Francisco, and then had come back reinvented as a police officer, Allison had taken her on as a project. Skip didn’t get it, she was just grateful, because Allison knew everything about everyone; and what she didn’t know, she could find out in five minutes.
    “Skip Langdon calling Gossip