The Axeman's Jazz

ONE
    NEW ORLEANS COULD wreck your liver and poison your blood. It could destroy you financially. It could shun you or embrace you, teach you tricks of the heart you thought Tennessee Williams was just kidding about. And in August it could break your spirit.
    It was the steady diet of cholesterol and alcohol that got your body, the oil glut that had hit the economy. The weather did the rest. If you could tolerate the heat and the damp, the lightning changes in the atmosphere, indeed, if you took to them, you could get addicted. If you didn’t, you didn’t belong.
    If you were one of those who did belong, you could know the fragile sweetness of love on a rainy morning, the feral taste of lust on a stormy afternoon, the randy restlessness that travels through the air with the scent of ozone.
    But sometimes in August, when the city had been a sauna for months, when the unmoving air seemed as toxic as that of Pluto, everything seemed to stink and so did everyone. And you couldn’t move.
    You couldn’t make a phone call, you couldn’t do your filing, you had no ambition, the simplest chore was too much.
    And that was with air conditioning.
    Skip Langdon wondered what kind of hellhole the city had been before it was invented.
    She had just come back from lunch and her ankles were swollen. Some said it was the salt in the seafood that did it, some said just the heat. She’d noticed it sure as hell didn’t happen in winter.
    But no problem. In two days she’d be out of here. A line from an old song—“California Dreamin’”—popped into her head. It was about winter, but it perfectly described her state of mind. In the Crescent City the bad season was summer. Though her head was full of sea breezes instead of smog, at the moment even L.A. in a smog alert seemed preferable to New Orleans in August. And Skip had a tolerance for the heat, almost liked it.
    She was aware that the fact that she’d be seeing her friend Steve Steinman probably played no small part in her wanderlust. She’d met him here at Mardi Gras and hadn’t seen him since. Would he be different on his own turf? Did he live in a sterile condo or a funky old house? (Whatever it was, it couldn’t be any worse than her studio on St. Philip Street.) Was he a good housekeeper? (She hated a man who wasn’t.)
    Was she really in love with him, or had they just gotten caught up in the moment? She felt absurdly adolescent about this vacation.
    Or at any rate, she supposed she did. She hadn’t dated in high school, had been too tall, too fat, too confused, and probably, to the other kids, too weird. Of course she’d been to Miggy’s and Icebreakers, sixth-grade dancing school and seventh-grade subscription dances—every McGehee’s girl had. But the “normal” course of events hadn’t materialized.
    She smiled—rather nastily—as she imagined how much that must have chagrined her social-climbing parents. It had so chagrined her at the time she hadn’t noticed the neat revenge in it. But in the end, they’d won—they’d worn her down to the point she’d agreed to make her debut. If they’d known she’d end up a cop, they probably would have saved their money.
    The phone jangled her out of her reverie and she saw that she’d doodled a pathetic paraphrase, “August is the cruelest month,” without realizing it.
    “Langdon. Homicide.”
    She might be semi-conscious, but she wasn’t dead yet. It still gave her a thrill to say that, to listen to herself proclaiming what she was, to feel she’d made it in her hometown. Informally, she was a detective now, and she had been for a month. Technically, she was still a patrol officer, since “detective” wasn’t a rank in the New Orleans department, just a description.
    At Mardi Gras, she’d been a rookie walking a beat (literally walking—VCD, the Vieux Carré District, was the only walking beat in town). A week later she’d almost resigned—and now here she was in Homicide. She still only half believed it.
    It was the desk officer on the phone. Some French Quarter apartment manager had had some kind of crazy suspicion about one of his tenants. Two guys from VCD had responded and found a body.
    That was bad. She was the only one in the office and her vacation started in two days. Her sergeant, Sylvia Cappello, had tried not to get her in too deep before she left—most homicides that weren’t solved in the first week didn’t get solved—but it looked as if the plan might have