Mean Woman Blues

And now that she thought of it, Abasolo had said he was appointing her for her publicity value. That meant her name was going to be in the paper again. That was going to play hell with the sting idea.
    “I’ve got it,” LeDoux said. “Let Hagerty do Magazine
and
the French Quarter. But we’ll double-dip. I’ll go in offering what she’s looking for. Then, if anybody bites on that, we can haul them in for questioning.”
    Skip sighed. “Done deal. I’ll do the phones and computer stuff. What else?”
    Hagerty bit her lip. “I suppose we could pick certain cemeteries and do some kind of surveillance.”
    She was shouted down by Skip and LeDoux. “What if we pick the wrong ones?”
    “Well, how about if we just took a day and visited the main cemeteries where the looting’s going on— Lafayette 1 and Lake Lawn Metairie, for instance; St Louis 1 and 2; maybe St. Roch— and see what it looks like there, what hours the thieves can work, if they can get in at night, what sections offer the best pickings? We might even be able to figure out where they’re going to hit next I mean, if two rows are completely looted, and the next hasn’t been touched, stands to reason…”
    “Great idea!” Skip said. “And we can talk to the groundskeepers, anybody we see, and give them our numbers in case they see anything. Want to do it tomorrow?”
    “You got it.”
    Skip went back to her office, thinking to call every antique store in L.A., Atlanta, and Charleston. But first she called Abasolo. “You haven’t told the press about this task force thing, have you?”
    “I’m going to tomorrow. Why?”
    “Has it occurred to you it’s like saying, ‘Hey, hens, the fox is on the way’?”
    “Work around it, Langdon. The chief wants it.”
    “Let’s just hope the bad guys are real dumb.”
    “Or can’t read.”
    But success didn’t hinge on either of those things, and she knew it. It was all about how convincing Hagerty and LeDoux could be— and how greedy the thieves were.
    She worked on her Atlanta calls for the rest of the afternoon, to no avail; nobody had seen anyone offering merchandise of the sort she described, or at least no one was admitting it.
    She left feeling discouraged and frustrated, not an uncommon state of mind for her lately. She was looking forward to a soothing evening with Steve. He’d invited her over for dinner, and she figured he’d make something special. She was his first official dinner guest in his new house.
    But first she stopped off at hers, to metamorphose from cop to guest. As she approached, she could hear voices in the courtyard. Angel, the kids’ adorable black-and-white mutt, stormed the gate, barking as if Skip were a horde of barbarians. “Hey, Ange, it’s only me,” she said and watched the little dog change from a furious harpy into a wriggling love worm. For the first time that day, she started to relax. “Yeah, you love me, don’t you? Why can’t Napoleon be like you?”
    She’d never understood what Steve and the shepherd saw in each other.
    But they had history: Back when Kenny first came to live with his uncle, he had a period of wetting the bed. Figuring he needed a friend, Steve found the dog and brought him to Kenny without consulting Jimmy Dee, whereupon Napoleon tried to attack not only Skip but also Dee-Dee and Sheila’s boyfriend, Emery. Dee-Dee took him back to the pound, and Steve adopted him once again, for himself, earning a place in Kenny’s heart forever. The shepherd had since settled down a bit, but he still loved only two humans: Steve and Kenny.
    As she approached the courtyard, Jimmy Dee held up a martini glass. “Cocktail for the lady?” He and Layne were having a jolly old time. Even Kenny was there, trying to teach Angel some kind of trick.
    “No, thanks. I’m going over to Steve’s.”
    “There’s a law against a pre-drink drink?”
    Skip laughed. “There probably ought to be,” she said and entered her refurbished slave quarters.
    She stepped in the shower and washed off the office dust. Re-dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and sandals, she felt a hundred percent better. Here, in her own world behind the walls, megalomaniac killers seemed a million miles away. Jimmy Dee produced some white wine. “Come on. Sit a minute.”
    “Oh, what the hell. Steve’s cooking; he won’t care.”
    Kenny lit up as she plopped into a chair. “Hey, Aunt Skip, watch this. Up, Angel. Up.”
    The dog jumped up to his chest, turned around in