Mean Woman Blues

prosecuted, and I didn’t know they were out of jail till I saw one of them in our studio tonight. Now, this man’s from Phoenix, and he turns up in Texas.
Last
thing I wanted was my wife in the same building with him so I saw you and I just… lost it. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”
    She wasn’t sure. On the one hand, it sure wasn’t a reason to call her a whore. On the other hand, this was Mr. Right, the man she’d loved unequivocally before tonight. She’d be a fool to kiss her marriage good-bye without even hearing him out. “I think,” she said carefully, “I need the details.”
    He looked so relieved she almost wanted to hug him. He even chuckled. “Well. At least you aren’t throwing me out.” He reached out to her, still guarded, she put her hand in his. “Come on. Let’s go home. Details at eleven.”
    She let him take her home and tuck her into bed with more ice and plenty of aspirin, and a thousand more apologies. She was glad to have been talked into this, glad not to have to wake up contemplating a second divorce before her twenty-seventh birthday.
    Sometime in the night the aspirin wore off. She woke up moaning, disoriented. She was still in pain, but a different sort, like menstrual cramps. And something else was wrong. “David!” She shook him. “David, turn on the light.”
    He reached his lamp and blinked in the glare. “Why? What’s wrong?”
    “I feel… wet.” She threw off the covers. The bed was soaked with her blood.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    Skip and Shellmire spent the day on a wild goose chase, driving to the state penitentiary at Angola. Daniel Jacomine (the big prize) refused to talk to them, but two former followers agreed, including Potter Menard. Skip held high hopes for Menard, and, indeed, seeing him was gratifying in its way. He’d turned on Jacomine, done a complete one-eighty. That was the gratifying part. But he couldn’t tell them a single thing about where his former leader was now. The other guy was still loyal to Jacomine and, it appeared, had only agreed to see Skip so he could threaten to kill her when he got out. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a loss.
    Skip was so disheartened Shellmire took her to dinner when they got back to New Orleans, a dinner that included several glasses of wine and a lot more obsessing. “Bettina next?” Shellmire suggested.
    “Nah, I think we’ve already milked that one, unless we could get a search warrant. But we sure don’t have probable cause. I think Rosemarie’s our best bet. She’s got money, and I’m betting he’s not going to leave her alone as long as he thinks he can get some. Maybe he had to pay for that botched hit on me. Could be he’s run out of thugs who’ll work for free. Why don’t we go to Dallas?”
    Shellmire set down his glass. “Yeah. Let’s try for tomorrow afternoon; spend the morning going over past cases, see if we can dredge up anybody else, figure out if we overlooked anything.”
    “Or anybody,” Skip said. But she couldn’t help feeling discouraged. “I brought a lot of stuff home. I’ll work on that, and you can work at your office. We can meet at the airport.”
    He signaled for the bill. “I’ll see if we can get a flight around three. Give us plenty of time to get to the airport.”
    “Sounds good.”
    She got home shortly after ten and felt a little shiver when she heard LeDoux’s message on her voicemail. “You had a call from an Isaac James. Said to tell you he used to be the White Monk. A weirdo, am I right?”
    Skip had to laugh. One of her favorite weirdos. You couldn’t forget the White Monk even if he weren’t the son of your worst enemy. She wondered briefly if his father had been in contact with him.
Not likely
, she thought, but hope sprang eternal. More likely, he was calling to commiserate about Angelgate.
    She got ready to write down his phone number, but it wasn’t on the message. Oh, well, she probably had it somewhere.
    She looked it up and gave him a quick call but got only his voicemail. She found that even though chances were about ninety percent that Jacomine wouldn’t contact his son, couldn’t possibly access his voicemail, she was a little queasy about leaving her home number. She put Isaac’s number by the phone, to remind herself to call him first thing in the morning.
    But she was tired from the trip to Angola and slept later than she’d intended. He’d evidently already left the house by the time she called. Despite