Jazz Funeral

you get home okay?”
    He looked insulted. “Sure.”
    “You’ll call if you hear from Melody?”
    “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I’ve got to.” He was atlas bearing the weight of the world; the kid was going to have wrinkles in more than his clothes before he was thirty. “Listen, I want to say something else about Melody. I was right about her coming to see Ti-Belle, wasn’t I?”
    “You sure were.”
    “She’ll come again on Sunday. When the Boucrees sing.”
    “Oh, yes. Joel’s her buddy.”
    “She just worships him is all.” Skip thought she caught a hint of jealousy in his voice.
    She went back to headquarters to check messages and do some catching up. There was a message, all right—a note from Frank O’Rourke, her least favorite sergeant. It was terse, arrogant, and utterly typical: “Report to me at once.”
    Why the fuck should I? came to mind, but it was almost instantly replaced by a nagging horror, a deep-seated dread.
    She grabbed up the note and went to Joe Tarantino’s office. He was talking on the phone, but motioned her in anyway. For five minutes she cooled her heels, mentally composing her letter of resignation if Joe told her what she thought he was going to tell her. He hung up the phone and said, “You’re as white as that paper you’re holding.”
    She said, “Am I permanently assigned to O’Rourke?”
    He sat back in his chair, lips together. “Damn, Skip. Cappello got hurt.”
    “Oh, shit.” She didn’t normally swear in the presence of superiors, but this was the “oh, shit” found in every black box of every crashed plane—the universal phrase of pilots about to grow wings.
    “A suspect pushed her down a flight of stairs.” He paused. “Hurt her back real bad—looks like it’s going to be about six months.”
    “Oh, shit,” she said again. It must have happened so fast; it could happen to anyone—worse could.
    “I know how you feel about O’Rourke. Listen, I wouldn’t have done this if I had a choice.”
    She nodded. “Thanks, Lieutenant. I know you wouldn’t.” She knew he’d already said too much. He’d more or less apologized for assigning her to O’Rourke, even though that was his privilege. He wasn’t going to say any more, and he certainly wasn’t going to back down.
    She went to find her tormentor. “Langdon. Where the hell have you been?” He got up and led her to an interview room, bellowing as they walked.
    “At the fairgrounds. Seeing Ti-Belle Thiebaud.”
    “What for, may I ask?”
    “Trying to find out where she was at the time of the murder.”
    “And did you?”
    “I got her alibi. That’s all.”
    “Did it check out?”
    “I just got back. Haven’t checked it yet.”
    “Check it.”
    She thought she’d scream. But he wasn’t nearly done and she knew it.
    “Run down the case for me, Langdon. What have you done, what are your plans?”
    Feeling like a child in the principal’s office, she did, ending with her afternoon with Flip.
    “The kid’s out there, goddammit.”
    “Why goddammit? We know she’s not dead, and we know what she looks like.”
    “Why the fuck don’t we have her?”
    “I think there’s a good chance she’ll contact this Richard. I’m going over there now.”
    “Langdon. Have you checked Thiebaud’s police record?”
    An unbelievably condescending question. “Of course.”
    “How about the other suspects?”
    “Who are the suspects?”
    “You tell me, Langdon—you’re the officer on the damn case.”
    She took a breath, trying to control her anger. “The parents, the uncles, the cousins, the assistant, the girlfriend, and Melody.”
    “Forget the uncles and cousins. This is a crime of passion, Langdon. Who probably did it? Just speaking statistically?”
    “The girlfriend, but—”
    “So who’re you going to work on, Langdon?”
    This was ridiculous. She’d just told him she’d been working on Ti-Belle. “Look,” she said. “She’s got an alibi and no motive.”
    “You don’t know whether she had a damn motive, do you? Maybe Ham said he was porking the assistant, and the Cajun stabbed him. And you haven’t checked the alibi, you just told me that.”
    “Actually, I’ve checked it with the guy she said she was with. I was just going to do a little more work on it.”
    “What work?”
    “Ask the servants.”
    “Who’s the guy?”
    “Nick Anglime.”
    “Nick Anglime.” O’Rourke rocked back in his chair. His face took on such a look of smug contempt, she wanted