Mean Woman Blues

provided little solace. Skip felt as if she’d been kicked. How the hell was she supposed to think about cemetery angels when the devil himself was eavesdropping on her?
    I’ve got to do something,
she thought.
I can’t just let it lie.
    An idea came to her:
Why don’t I just work the case as if I’m assigned to it? In my off-hours, say?
    It was time, and she knew it. She’d let herself feel safe for too long. Why, she couldn’t have said, except that she so desperately wanted to live a normal life. And because she didn’t know what else to do. In reality, her safety was as fragile as a thread and had been for two years.
    Maybe
, she thought,
there’s nothing you really can do. Maybe it’s like owning a house in the French Quarter. You whack away at it for a while, rebuilding and painting and fluffing and buffing, and then you lie down exhausted; next thing you know you have termites.
    I have termites of the lifestyle.
    She doodled on a yellow pad, stars and spirals that came out of nowhere. And she wrote:
What would I do if I were working the case?
    The answer was obvious: Go see Bettina.
    Bettina Starnes, her name was, but she wasn’t in the phone book.
    Okay, fine. Maybe she was still on probation.
    She was, and her probation officer had her address, in New Orleans East. After work, Skip drove out there, just to get a gander, maybe check out the neighborhood, see if it looked like Bettina had a sugar daddy.
    But if Bettina was still in contact with Jacomine, it sure wasn’t for material reasons. She lived in a rundown brick fourplex, poorly maintained and badly built to begin with, one of six or eight in a small, under-financed development. One of the four apartments was boarded up.
    Bettina was a smallish, youngish, plumpish woman, African-American with a round face that wasn’t really pretty but managed somehow to be so downright pleasant you just couldn’t imagine her involved with a bunch of thugs and murderers, no matter how sheeplike their clothing. She had frustrated Skip and the feds— and certainly the D.A.’s office— when she was arrested shortly after giving birth.
    Surely, Skip thought at the time, she didn’t know what she was doing. How
could
she have believed the vicious claptrap that came out of Jacomine’s mouth? She couldn’t possibly have a violent bone in her body.
    But everyone did, according to Cindy Lou Wootten, the police psychologist. She’d evaluated Bettina and pronounced her a woman who practiced the fine art of manipulation the way a doctor practices medicine.
    Damn, she was good— as her freedom attested.
    She met Skip at the door in surgical scrubs, fuschia in color, an ear-to-ear smile showing slightly buck teeth, her baby on her right hip.
    With her left hand nails painted a pearl-white, she reached out and grabbed Skip’s elbow, the best handshake she could manage with the baby in her arms. Skip was grateful for the encumbrance, reasonably sure the woman would have tried for a hug if she’d had her hands free.
    “Detective Langdon! How’ve you
been
?”
    “Just fine, Bettina. Mind if I come in?”
    “You’re always welcome. You know that, baby.” Baby! To the detective who’d tried to pop her for murder. She spoke in the soft maternal voice of a favorite aunt, a voice that wrapped around you like a comforter. It had to be half the reason she was free today.
    Bettina stepped aside to let Skip in, revealing a living room so Spartan Bettina might have been a Shaker instead of an evangelical fanatic. There was a greenish square of carpet on the floor, probably a remnant. A wooden settee and a hard wooden chair that matched it were the only furniture, except for a couple of ancient end tables, undoubtedly found at a thrift store. The chair sported a yellow pillow large enough to fit on the seat.
    Two or three toys were scattered on the green rug, certainly not the exuberant litter one might expect in the home of a working mother with a child under two. Not a single picture hung on the walls.
    The place was stifling. Bettina said, “Sorry it’s so hot in here. AC broke; they never did fix it.”
    Bettina put the child down and pointed to a narrow hall, evidently opening out to a bedroom. At any rate, Skip could hear electronic murmurs coming from that direction. “Go watch television, darlin’. Go on, now.”
    The boy bounced on rubbery knees, raising his arms to be picked up. When his mother failed to respond, he began to make little whiny noises,