The Axeman's Jazz

this thing for three days—don’t you think I thought of that?”
    “My. Aren’t we touchy.”
    “Sorry. I feel like a failure, that’s all.”
    He rolled over on his stomach. “Guess you need a vacation.”
    “I feel weird about that—I don’t even know if I can enjoy it.”
    The phone rang. Jimmy Dee answered and handed it over.
    It was Jim Hodges, another Homicide detective. “Bad news. Real bad news.”
    “Oh, shit. Another scarlet A.”
    “I just thought you’d want to know.”
    “Are you there now? I’m coming.”
    “Forget it, Skip. I got it handled.”
    “I’m not going to L.A.”
    “Hey, don’t be a martyr. I wouldn’t have called if I thought you were going to act crazy.”
    “Jim, you’ve got to give it to me, you owe me—I took one for you when your wife was in the hospital.”
    “Aren’t you looking at things a little bit backwards?” Nevertheless he gave her the address.
    “You didn’t want to go anyway,” said Jimmy Dee when she had hung up. He ruffled her hair and left with the slightly smug expression he got after smoking half a joint by himself.
    Steve hadn’t been home when she called, a good thing in a way—there wasn’t time to talk—but she ached to hear his voice even for a moment, to be reassured he’d be there when she could come.
    As she drove, she found him more and more on her mind. It was odd, she thought, that when she was on her way to him, all but on the plane, all she could think about was Linda Lee, and now that she had work to do, he wouldn’t leave her alone.
    Two patrol cars were parked in front of the tiny house off Elysian Fields, a house so badly in need of paint you could tell it in the dark.
    Every light in the living room was on, and Skip saw that Gottschalk from the crime lab was already at work. Hodges, a sad-looking black man, was shaking his head, looking even more miserable than usual. Skip had noticed that no matter how long some officers worked Homicide, they never got hardened. “The day I get used to it,” Joe had told her, “is the day I quit the department.”
    The corpse was crumpled near the far end of the room, not barely inside the door as before. There were two other important differences, the first almost mind-boggling, it seemed to Skip—the victim was a man.
    Even without sexual assault, she’d been so sure the killer was the sort of lunatic who preyed on women. And now she knew why she’d been reluctant to take her vacation—she’d known, deep down, that he’d do it again. But she’d imagined a kind of slaughter of the innocents—young women victims like Linda Lee without enough street-smarts not to talk to strangers.
    She was looking now at a man in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. Like Linda Lee, he’d been dead awhile. He had strangulation marks on his neck and a jagged cut on his arm. A knife lay on the living room floor, a brown stain on the blade. The second difference was the A on the wall—it wasn’t scarlet at all, but matched the stain on the knife.
    Even that wasn’t the weirdest part of the scene. Beside the body, as if the victim had dropped it when he was attacked, was a child’s teddy bear.
    That alarmed her. “Is there a kid here?” she blurted. Hodges said, “I had the same thought. Nobody home but Tom.”
    “Tom?”
    He inclined his head toward the floor. “That’s Tom Mabus, a waiter at the Orleans House. Had the same job for fifteen years, never missed a day.”
    “You know him?”
    “No, but I got you a witness. I had a bet with Cappello—she said you were going to want this one. So, okay, it’s yours. Since I owe you one. You must have some understanding boyfriend.”
    “Thanks, Jim.”
    He gave her an avuncular look:
You’l1 outgrow this eager-beaver stuff.
    “Where’s my witness?”
    “In one of the patrol cars, not feeling too good. He’s Tom’s boss.” He looked at his notes. “A Mr. Derek Brown. Tom didn’t show up for work; he investigated—found the body.” He laughed. “Don’t think he’s ever seen one before.”
    “Okay. Let me look around and then I’ll get to him. Are you out of here?”
    He looked almost regretful. “If you really want this turkey.”
    The furniture was old and dusty, smelled mildewy. Everything was shabby, poorly kept. The sheets on the unmade bed were gray. It looked like the house of a man who didn’t know how to take care of it, perhaps a man whose wife had recently died. Alternatively, maybe it was the home of a