The Axeman's Jazz

problem. As an army marches on its stomach, New Orleans staggers on its liver. If every cop in Louisiana were set end to end on a cat’s cradle of a bar tour, they still couldn’t cover the territory.
    “Bars,” she said. “But selectively. Maybe she had a favorite near where she lived. Also, I could hit other places in her neighborhood. The corner store, stuff like that.”
    Joe shook his head. “And hope somebody just happened to see her talking to the murderer? I hate to say it, but I don’t see it being very productive. What do you think, Sergeant?”
    Cappello shrugged. “Try the neighbors again. That’s all I can think of.”
    “Okay. I’ll do it tonight.” But it didn’t feel like enough. Not by a long shot.
    Still, it was a good night to be a cop, to have any assignment at all. She had a great excuse for cutting short her brother’s engagement party.
    Later, driving to Commander’s Palace in a silk dress—as tarted up as she ever got—she thought about what Joe had said when she’d told him that: “You don’t want to go? Why not just skip the whole thing?”
    He had seemed genuinely puzzled. Would a normal person do that, she wondered? Her relations with her family were so abnormal she didn’t have the least idea. Her dad hadn’t spoken to her since she enrolled in the academy. Her mother, whose lifetime ambition was to achieve greater and greater social prominence, preferably through her children, had virtually no use for her either. And her brother Conrad was a joke.
    New Orleans was a city rife with types, losers, and weirdos, and Conrad didn’t fit in—he was a misplaced, latter-day Sammy Glick, clawing his way to who-knew-what in a milieu where ambition was considered almost embarrassing. Skip knew perfectly well he had about as much interest in her as in one of the roaches that skittered over her kitchen counters—and as much regard for her. She returned the sentiment.
    And yet he’d had to invite her; her mother’d felt obligated to phone and beg her to come; and Skip had known there was no choice. Otherwise it wouldn’t look right. The bride-to-be might ask ticklish questions. The Langdons wouldn’t look normal.
    She wondered what the hell “normal” really was. And why she was helping Conrad with his own egregious social-climbing—she had every idea that’s what the engagement was all about.
    She was doing it because she couldn’t bear too much more familial disapproval, she thought. Did anyone ever grow up?
    Joe must have—he hadn’t seen why she couldn’t just cash out of the whole sordid affair. But surely that wasn’t the usual thing in the South. You did what you did because things had always been done that way and because someone else wanted you to. Not because there was any point in hell in it.
    She took a deep breath.
    Come on, you wouldn’t be a cop if that were true.
    She answered herself: It isn’t always true, just too often for comfort.
    Ah, comfort. What about that one? Where did you go to find that one? Out in the stratosphere, she supposed, where “normal” lived. She wasn’t going to find it here tonight.
    It was a small party—just her family and the bride’s—which was going to make it interesting. Her dad really couldn’t ignore her without drawing attention to himself, which would brand him the odd man out in front of people he wanted to impress. The Whites were from Baton Rouge, but they were related to the Gilliats, a very important family, the one that Conrad no doubt thought he was marrying into. He had met his betrothed at their house.
    Skip’s mother had told her Camille had some kind of job at the Gilliats’ shipping company, but Skip hardly expected her to rise to CEO. Within two years, she’d bet, Camille would be a permanently retired shipping exec and full-time mommy with a wandering eye.
    The rest were already seated. That was good. She waved the gentlemen back down when they made to stand, which relieved her father of the dreadful responsibility of a duty kiss. To smooth things over, she babbled.
    “So sorry I’m late—I can only stay for a drink. We got a very strange case today and I have to work.”
    “What do you do, Skip?” asked Mrs. White.
    Oh, no—Conrad hadn’t briefed them. She saw her father flush, her mother’s fingers tighten on her glass.
    Camille said, “She’s a homicide detective—can you believe it? Skippy, you just can’t know how I’ve been dying to meet you—we’ve never had