Mean Woman Blues

think carefully. What, exactly, did you say on that show?”
    “You think it had something to do with that?”
    “If he’d seen his father, and he thought you were in danger, it might have been something you said. Did you say anything about Jacomine?”
    She shrugged, as if the idea were preposterous. “No. Why would I?”
    “Anything about Isaac?”
    Terri closed her eyes again and thought. Finally she opened them and shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to remember what I said on and off the air.”
    “You talked about Isaac off the air?”
    “Just to the host. He interviewed me before the show.”
    “The host.”
    Terri nodded.
    “Was anyone else in the room?”
    “No. Why?”
    The back of Skip’s neck was beginning to prickle. It felt as if the temperature in the room had gone down twenty degrees. “What does the host look like?”
    “Oh! Handsome. Really attractive in an older-man kind of way. I mean, he grows on you. At first I thought he was kind of smarmy, but that’s just because he’s so nice. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever met that really has charisma, you know?”
    Skip was feeling chilled to the bone. “Terri. Could he be the man Isaac saw?”
    Terri did a literal double take. “David Wright? Are you kidding? No way. Jacomine’s a dried-up ratty-looking little turd who talks like a redneck— I saw him on TV a million times when he ran for mayor. David Wright’s educated; he has this really cultured voice, almost British. You can’t change the way you speak.”
    Skip was acutely disappointed. “I guess not.”
    “And believe me, there’s no physical resemblance whatsoever. I mean none. I told you, this guy’s really kind of cool. He has this very worldly gray hair and… I don’t know, nice clothes and a sort of TV
presence
. Jacomine had a weak chin, remember that?”
    “All too vividly.” She sighed. “Okay. Let’s start over. I want you to tell me every word of the conversation you had, both on- and off-camera.”
    Again, Terri closed her eyes. “Well, I told him about my troubles and my work, and how I have my own business.” She filled in the details, digressing briefly to complain that the host had stolen her lines. “He asked me if I had a boyfriend and… no, it wasn’t exactly that. He said, ‘I hope someone nice takes you out to dinner sometime.’ And I said my boyfriend was also a starving artist, so he cooked instead.”
    Skip couldn’t sit still any more. She stood up and pretended to stretch. “Did you say Isaac’s name?”
    “Let me think. Yeah. Yeah, I did. First name only, though. Isaac.”
    That would be enough
, Skip thought. An artist named Isaac.
    “And then he started asking me about Isaac.” She stopped talking. “Oh.”
    “What?”
    “Oh, shit. He made me tell him about Isaac’s art and define ‘outsider art’…
oh, shit!
I said The White Monk. I actually used that name. That would identify him, right?”
    “You’re sure you didn’t do that on the air?”
    “Positive because… oh, shit!”
    “What?”
    “The minute I said that phrase, he blew me off. Called Tracie, the producer, to come take me back to the green room.” She sat up straight and took handfuls of her hair in her hands. “Yes! And she was very taken aback. Asked him if everything was all right.”
    Skip’s mind was racing. This was it, had to be it. And yet…
    “All that’s suspicious as hell, right? The only thing is, he wasn’t Errol Jacomine. Absolutely wasn’t. That’s all there was to it. I mean, you’d have to see him to know what I mean.” She stopped dead. “Hey! Hey, you
can
see him. You absolutely can. I’ve got a tape of the show.”
    Skip was practically salivating. “Terri. I have to see that tape. I can’t overstress the importance. I need to see it now. I know you think you can’t leave Isaac…” She stopped, trying to find a delicate way to insist that Terri play the tape for her immediately.
    But Terri was shaking her head and rummaging in her backpack. “Oh, no problem. Why don’t I just give you the key, and you go to my place and watch it?”
    “You sure?” Skip said, holding out her hand for the key. But the question was a Southernism; if Terri’d changed her mind, she’d have grabbed the key out of her hand. “What’s your address?”
    Skip broke every traffic law on the books getting to Terri’s and nearly broke the door getting in, she was so impatient.
Poor kid
, she thought, rifling Terri’s