Mean Woman Blues

unpacked duffel, as instructed. Terri had practically no furniture, and what she had appeared to have been picked up at garage sales. Her protestations of poverty were no joke. However, she did have a VCR, a gift, she’d explained, from her parents. Skip found the tape under a pouf of soiled clothing, popped it into the machine, and settled on the double mattress that evidently served both as bed and daybed. It had a faded purple cover on it, along with a collection of mismatched throw pillows.
    The show’s theme music came up, David Wright was introduced. Skip braced herself— and let out her breath with disappointment. No way that nice-looking man could be Errol Jacomine, who looked like a weasel at best. She felt cheated.
    She had to be missing something. Maybe it was something Terri said in the interview. She turned up the volume.
    “Hello, I’m David Wright,” said the star, “and tonight we have an extremely relevant show, relevant to each of us who has a bank account, that is. And that’s all of us, isn’t it?” The audience applauded. “I mean, if we’re lucky enough.” He spoke the last part with modesty and sympathy, not ridicule.
    Terri was right: His accent was slightly British, nothing at all like Errol Jacomine’s redneck twang. The man was actually somewhat likable. She wouldn’t go so far as “charismatic,” but she wasn’t repelled by him, and that alone indicated he wasn’t Jacomine.
    She took a good look at the man’s neck— Jacomine’s neck was stringy and sinewy, old before its time. Could you change a person’s neck?
    She knew the answer to that: Sure you could. This guy’s neck didn’t look anything like Jacomine’s. Did anything else? Yes! The widow’s peak. Jacomine had worn his hair combed to the side, evidently to tame it; had hidden the birthmark, though anyone who looked closely could see it.
    Mr. Right wore his hair combed back, so that it looked luxuriant. And it was gray. Jacomine’s hadn’t been; could he have dyed his hair?
Certainly
, she thought, or, more likely, he could have let it go natural. But that didn’t prove anything.
    She watched the way the man moved his jaw— kind of clipped and impatient. She saw the
shut-up
look that popped into his eyes when the attention went to Terri. But hell, he was a TV personality; that was what they were like.
    She paused the machine, got up to get herself a drink of water, and when she looked again, she saw something. What, she wasn’t exactly sure, just something that made her go alert again. A gesture?
Maybe
, she thought.
    She closed her eyes and listened, and the more she listened, the more she was sure she’d heard the voice before. A person could change his accent but he couldn’t really change his voice.
    She started to get excited. There were plenty of Jacomine recordings; she could get voiceprint analysis.
Stop, fool
, she said to herself.
Voiceprint, hell! If that’s Jacomine, he just put out a contract on his son. You’ve got to move faster than that.
    Mr. Right was saying, “Now you probably think your bank is there to serve you. But, after hearing about Ms. Whittaker’s problem, we looked into it a little bit. And ladies and gentlemen, serving you is about as far as you can get from the whole story. Yes, indeed, these pillars of the financial community have bigger fish to fry by far. Oh, yes, much much bigger fish to fry.”
    Skip froze. She’d heard that before, that voice, saying those words. “Bigger fish to fry” was one of Jacomine’s favorite expressions. She stopped the tape, rewound, and listened again with her eyes closed.
    Her scalp prickled. It was Jacomine.
    * * *
    She called Shellmire. “Turner, Where are you?”
    “I’m back at my office.”
    “Anything new?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Well, I’ve got something. I’m bringing you a tape.”
    She sped to FBI headquarters, once again managing not to get a ticket. She played the tape for Shellmire, watching him watch Mr. Right. She saw him go through what she’d experienced, moving from utter disbelief to wary alertness to excitement. It wasn’t the fish phrase that did it to him, it was a growing familiarity. “See the way he shrugs? Kind of bucking his head up first? I always thought he did that when he was lying— a ‘tell,’ you know what I mean?”
    Skip nodded, surprised she’d never noticed.
    “I’m going to go get some more tapes.”
    He brought an armload of tapes of Jacomine, being interviewed, giving