Jazz Funeral

that ought to be park land, it would create parking problems, and it would cost too much. So Ham had failed to muster support from the Jazz and Heritage Foundation, which ran the festival. It was a bitter blow, but certain commercial interests needed hardly any convincing at all to pump money into it, and so he had started the Second Line Square Foundation, which was currently in the process of whomping up support.
    Steve’s video—to be shown to civic groups and potential backers, would be snippets of JazzFest interspersed with interviews supporting Ham’s position—the Tower Records folks, for instance, telling the home folks how many European tourists come in to buy tapes of their beloved New Orleans music, how they beg to know where they can go hear it. There’d be statistics, numbers, every kind of educational rah-rah, all softened by the stuff that soothes the savage breast.
    Ham lived in Old Metairie, what passed for a suburb in New Orleans. Folks who moved there from Uptown were sometimes wept over, practically kissed good-bye and packed off with a team of huskies. Yet, if you took the expressway, it was about a ten- minute drive from downtown. Ham hadn’t actually crossed the line into Jefferson Parish—he was in the five-street transition area “near the cemeteries,” where you could get both the suburban safety of Metairie and the social correctness of a New Orleans address.
    As they tooled down Metairie Road, past the landmark cemeteries, Steve said, “Okay, tell me what to expect.”
    “Lots of food. Jambalaya, crawfish pie—”
    “What else? Who’ll be there?”
    “Big names in music. And the creme de la creme, I’ll bet. I don’t really know because it’s the first time he’s done this, but it’s predictable when you think about it. He’s probably invited everybody in town who’s got money, and he’ll lure them here with celebrities. All the musicians he can get—and that’ll be plenty.”
    “Rub elbows with Ti-Belle Thiebaud and eat five pounds of crawfish.”
    “Well, we know she’ll come. Aaron Neville’s not such a sure thing.”
    “Aaron Neville! You’re kidding!”
    “Hey, baby, have you forgotten where you are? Aaron Neville, Alan Toussaint, Wynton Marsalis—it could all happen.”
    “Holy shit.”
    “There’s even rumbling about Nick Anglime.”
    “Oh, sure.”
    “Well, it’s not all that farfetched. He’s moved to New Orleans. To Audubon Place.”
    “Sometimes I wonder about you, Detective. Do you ever check out any of these rumors?”
    “What rumors?”
    He guffawed. “What rumors! I come to this town every four months maybe, and I never get here that there’s not some new story about a different celebrity who’s moved here.”
    “Well, Allison Gaillard’s husband’s cousin, who just moved to town, lives next door to the realtor who sold him the house.” She watched him double over. He’d have been on the car floor if not for his seat belt. Skip didn’t see what was so funny.
    “I don’t get it,” she said.
    “If you only knew how many of those stories I’ve heard.”
    “Okay. Fifty bucks says Anglime shows.”
    “Hell, no. Dinner at Arnaud’s.”
    “Done.” It was a bet you couldn’t really lose, or she might not have made it. She was aware there was truth to what he was saying. Those sorts of rumors did fly—sometimes you were even shown the building that some movie star had just bought from someone your boss’s wife’s sister knew really well. But somehow the star was never seen around town, and eventually you saw somebody else watering the flowers at the house and knew you’d once again fallen for urban folklore.
    So far she hadn’t heard of an Anglime sighting. And if there’d been one, the word would be out. Even Skip, who had barely been born in his heyday, knew “the American Mick.” She liked his stuff, along with Dylan’s and the genuine Mick’s. She thought she’d have done well in the sixties. The music was good and people swore all the time. It was a decade with rebel appeal, and she was nothing if not a rebel—sometimes to the despair of the New Orleans Police Department.
    “Somehow,” said Steve, “I didn’t picture Ham in this setting.”
    It was a gracious neighborhood, dignified without being stuffy —too many kids for that sort of thing. The trees were grown, the ivy trained. The houses were several decades instead of several centuries old.
    “Why not?”
    He thought a minute. “Oh, hell,