The Axeman's Jazz

minute.” She finally seemed to get it. “You suspect someone in the group.”
    Skip shook her head. “We don’t have a suspect yet. We just want to talk to everybody who was there. Ask them if they know anything.”
Do I have to spell it out for you?
    She was caught between her innate cop’s need not to tell one fact more than she had to and her need to be polite enough to get Di to help her. She couldn’t come back tomorrow. Di was going to hate her before she left.
    Di looked at the phone list. “I know all these people. The new black man is named Jim—he came to my party with the musician. The man who delivered my flowers was there too—Adam. The cute one. That’s two more.”
    “How about the short guy in the corner?”
    “The one with the glasses? Oh, the other one. With the chipped tooth. I think his name’s Chuck.”
    “You wouldn’t know his last name, would you?”
    Di shook her head.
    Tediously, laboriously, Skip brought up every face she could remember, and most of them Di was able to connect with a name on the phone list. The others she knew only by first names.
    But this is only a first shot, Skip thought. We’ll get them. Eventually, we’ll get them all. If it matters.
    She had a feeling the Axeman was someone she already knew.
    “You’ve been a big help, Di. Now I wonder if we could talk about your criminal record.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You’re Jacqueline Breaux, aren’t you?”
    She looked alarmed. “How do you know that?”
    “I know that, and I know you have a criminal record.”
    Tears came, but Di was quiet. She seemed to have spent her passion a moment ago. “I thought that was in the past,” she said at last. “Excuse me a moment.”
    She found a box of tissues, plucked one, and sniffled. “You think I abused my own kids and now I’ve killed a child?”
    “You choked a child, Di.”
    “I didn’t!”
    “You pleaded guilty to it.”
    “Could I ask you something? How do you think I live?” Her voice was alive with indignation, challenge. She was no longer the victim, but her own champion, full of self-righteous fury.
    Oh, boy, thought Skip. She said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “I have no visible means of support. I was convicted of abusing my child. Do you really think that eighteen years later I’m still getting alimony from the husband who had every reason to divorce me? Don’t you wonder how I can afford this apartment? Living like this? Do you think I knock over gas stations, or what?”
    “Well? What?”
    “I’m being paid off, that’s what. If you don’t believe me, look up the court records of our divorce. They’ll show you something you won’t believe. I got custody of the kids. Me. The supposed abuser. My husband didn’t contest it. You know why? Because that was part of the deal too.”
    She picked up a candle and began to play with it. Skip had the feeling she was an ex-smoker, would have smoked a cigarette a decade or so ago. “I knew he was rough with the kids. I just didn’t know how rough. Remember my share? I had a rough childhood too. I didn’t know what was normal. I just didn’t know.” She blew the candle out, lit it again. “I did know he choked Bennett. I caught him, and I stopped it, but I didn’t know it had gone so far. It was just one of the things he did that I didn’t like. I was always stopping him and he was always telling me I was spoiling the kids, I was too soft on them, they were already ‘rotten as mud.’ That was his phrase, ‘rotten as mud.’ That’s what he said about a couple of little kids who’d been beaten. Beaten and other things. I never saw the marks on Bennett. Not till the police got there. A neighbor noticed and called them.”
    Her voice was strong, getting stronger. “Do you know who I was married to? Walt Hindman. Do you know him?” She scanned Skip’s face for a reaction.
    “Everybody knows the Hindmans.”
    “Walt Hindman wasn’t about to get hauled into court for child abuse. So it was all nicely hushed up. I pleaded guilty and it was the best deal I ever made. He got out of my life and out of my kids’—and in addition to everything else paid all our shrink bills for the next ten years. I got generous child support and an annuity for the rest of my life. And he put both the kids through college.” For a moment her face grew soft. “He didn’t mean to be a bad father.” She caught herself. “Listen to me, making excuses for him. He was an animal, I