Jazz Funeral

That would require positive action, and Hamson Brocato never took positive action, oh no.” She was off again. Anger may have felt better to her than grief.
    But this Mason thing was food for thought. “Did Ham have a will?”
    “I don’t know. Why? Probably not, why would he?”
    Right, why would he? A man who couldn’t even be bothered to get a divorce wasn’t going to make a will. It was funny, Mason had used the same word Ti-Belle had—wimpy. But Mason was no wimp. Why hadn’t she taken care of the divorce?
    Ti-Belle’s thoughts were still on marriage. “Look, I’m not the kind of woman who just wants to get married. It isn’t my thing, maybe never will be. I’ve got a career going. I thought Ham was going with me, maybe as my manager. I used to think we’d work as a team, but I was starting to think it just wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t. Probably shouldn’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, it turned out his main talent was schmoozing.” She spoke with the sadder-but-wiser air of someone who’s learned the hard way.
    Skip thought she’d learned everything she was going to learn from Ti-Belle. It was time to play the bad cop. “Ti-Belle, I checked all flights out of here for a week. And I checked with Mr. Jarvis Grablow in Chicago. You didn’t go anywhere.”
    The beautiful face registered disbelief and then panic. It was probably about to be replaced by anger, and if Ti-Belle was as volatile as she seemed, she might attack. Skip got ready. But the human volcano had burned itself out. She fell back in her chair, defeated. “Oh, shit!”
    Skip breathed a sigh of relief. “Where were you?”
    “Oh, fuck!”
    “You didn’t really think you were going to get away with it, did you? With a shaky alibi like that?”
    “Get away with what? I didn’t kill Ham, for Christ’s sake. I was with a man, okay? Ham got to me. He wore me down. I needed some …” She sniffled a bit “… some self-esteem from somewhere. He wasn’t around, he was putting everything into JazzFest, I was frustrated, I felt like our relationship was coming apart….”
    “You don’t have to make excuses to me.”
    She made a face that was like a funny little half smile. “I guess I was really talking to Ham. Do you have any idea how awful I feel? I was in bed with somebody else while he was getting killed!” Loud voice again. Mad at herself—or a good actor. “I might have saved him, do you realize that? If I’d have only been here.”
    She raced out of the room, Skip following. But she was only getting a tissue. She came back dabbing and patting at her face. “Actually, I feel better. I really do. I couldn’t talk to anybody else about this, might as well be a stranger.”
    Skip smiled, momentarily the good cop. She said, “Who was the guy?”
    “The guy? I have to tell you that?”
    “Either that or get a lawyer fast.”
    “Shit!” She thought it over. “Okay—it was Johnny Murphy. My drummer.”

CHAPTER NINE
    As she shut the door behind the damn cop, Ti-Belle threw her Kleenex at it. But that wasn’t good enough, so she went back in the living room and threw each of the sofa cushions across the room.
    “Shit!
    “Fuck!
    “Shitfire!
    “Motherfucker!”
    The pilows didn’t make any noise, so she picked up a little ceramic box—ugly thing Ham wouldn’t let her deep-six—and threw it against the wall. “Goddamn, motherfucker!”
    To her disappointment, it only hit the wall and fell to the carpet. There was a good thwack, but no satisfying shatter.
    “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn!” She hated the cop, she hated herself, and she couldn’t believe the goddamn motherfucking stupid mess she was in. About the only person whose ass she didn’t currently despise was Johnny Murphy.
    She went into her bedroom, thinking as always how much she hated the colorless, boring, unbelievably ordinary cover on the bed. God, it was going to be good to pick her own things. Was she crazy to have lived with a man who wouldn’t even let her get a goddamn new bedspread?
    But there’d been good things. There certainly had. And lots of them.
    She dialed Johnny Murphy for the fiftieth time that day, but goddamn! No answer again. She spoke to the robot: “Johnny, it’s Ti-Belle. I need you real, real bad. Please call me the minute you hear this, I don’t care how stoned you are or who you got with you. This is an emergency, you hear me?”
    What to do now? Oh, shit, what? The tears started coming again, just as they had