Jazz Funeral (24 page)

There was only one thing about the brilliant, beautiful Cindy Lou—she fell for all the wrong guys and was perfectly cheerful about it. If it had been anyone else, she would have suggested therapy. But she seemed more or less to enjoy the melodrama in her own life. Skip didn’t get it; she was just glad she had Steve Steinman—she wanted no part of the dorks Cindy Lou brought around.

As usual, the sight of her friend made Skip feel dowdy and cowlike. Just a hair bigger than petite—and quite tiny of waist and hips—Cindy Lou arrived in chamois-colored linen walking shorts with matching jacket and immaculate white linen tank top. Skip was wearing black cotton slacks with a pink T-shirt—functional, that was about it.
Oh, well,
she thought,
it wouldn’t matter if I had the good outfit. Everybody’d still look at her.

“After lunch I thought I’d go terrorize a witness—probably bring her back for questioning. Care to join me?”

“Always a pleasure.”

“Let’s take my car.”

“You’re not going to terrorize my favorite Cajun singer, are you?”

“Afraid so. Why—is she also your favorite suspect?”

“It’s nearly always the wife or girlfriend—you know that. But hell, I don’t know anything about this mess. Fill me in.”

Skip told her on the ride over. As they stood in line for soft-shell crab po’ boys, she got ready for opinions—Cindy Lou always had plenty.

But she wasn’t her usual bantering self. She was very solemn, very focused. “You’ve got to find Melody. That kid’s in a heap of shit.”

“Tell me about it.” Skip was slightly abrupt, angry to be told once more what she already knew. It was hot and her hair felt damp.

Cindy Lou said, “You think she did it?”

“What’s the motive? Everybody says she and Ham were so damn close and loving.”

“So what does that tell you?”

“Too close maybe. He tries something with her, she goes nuts and stabs him.”

“Uh-uh, I don’t think so. A sixteen-year-old kid is nearly grown. If he was a sicko, he’d have done it earlier.”

“Maybe he did and she got tired of it.”

“The wineglasses bother me.”

“Oh, give me a break. Anybody’d who’d screw their little sister wouldn’t draw the line at giving her alcohol.”

“They might. People are funny, you know? But I don’t know—the glasses just have an adult feel to them. Like two people were talking and one of them said the wrong thing.”

“Betrayal.”

“Yeah.”

“Couldn’t that work for Melody too? Like maybe he said he was going to marry Ti-Belle and she got jealous? Or she wanted her band to play at JazzFest and he said no? Something like that?”

Cindy Lou shrugged. “Let’s face it, there are only four choices—either she did it, she didn’t do it but she’s afraid she’ll be accused of it, or she saw something; and she ran away.”

“Well, if we believe Andy Fike, she wasn’t kidnapped. What’s the fourth choice?”

“A variation. She was seen seeing something and she’s being pursued. In which case, she could have been caught by now. Any way you slice it, she’s in a heap of shit.”

Skip felt panic rising inside her. Yet she was helpless to do anything other than what she’d been ordered to do.

“Who do you like best?” Cindy Lou said.

“Ti-Belle, I guess. Just because she’s lying. But I can’t see a motive for her either. If she wanted to be with Nick, why not just leave Ham?”

“You know the answer to that—the classic crime of passion. They’re having a friendly talk over a civilized glass of wine and he says, ‘Okay, get out of here, you Cajun slut. I never loved you anyhow—you dye your hair and give a lousy blow job.’”

Skip laughed. “‘And not only that, but you can’t sing.’ That’s when she uses the knife—forget the blow job.”

“Now you got it. That’s the sort of stuff people kill over.” Cindy Lou took a big bite out of her sandwich. “You know, we haven’t got a damn thing like this in Detroit.”

“Must be why you’re here. Certainly can’t be the weather.”

“You know why I’m here, honey. ‘Cause the average law-abiding southerner has a criminal streak two yards wider than any mob boss Detroit ever spawned.”

“Listen. There’s something I think I need to tell you. The fact that the kid left on her own volition—and I guess we really think she did—doesn’t bode too well for her state of mind. We know for a fact her boyfriend dumped her for her best friend—there’s two big losses. Next she either kills her brother or sees him killed—big loss number three (even if she killed him), and number four if someone she trusts did. Then there’s the fear—either of the law or the murderer—which is also going to contribute to depression. And there’s the fact that she’s currently homeless and probably penniless. She probably feels like she doesn’t have a friend in the world.”

“What are you telling me, Cindy Lou?”

“I’m afraid she might be suicidal.”

An imaginary clock ticked louder every second. “I never even thought of that.”

“And by the way, I hope you’re not overlooking Andy Fike. Maybe he never saw Melody at all—just started that stuff to hide the fact he killed her and buried her in his courtyard.”

Melody was becoming a flesh-and-blood kid to Skip—it was as if she’d known her and was missing her. She was starting to feel panicky every time she thought of the girl on the streets alone. “Cindy Lou, stop! She’s only sixteen.”

“Well, you know how people are. No damn good.”

“God, you’re professional.”

“Honey, the more psychology I study, the less convinced I get that I’m ever going to understand the human animal.”

Skip was ready for a change of subject. She made her voice playful. “Well, that reminds me, Cindy Lou. Who’re you dating this week?”

Cindy Lou took the last bite of her sandwich. “Whoa, that was good! Well, this week is right, babe. I just broke up with a guy who couldn’t decide between me and this cute blond librarian. Male.”

Skip shivered. “Sounds dicey.”

“Oh, no problem. He wouldn’t sleep with either of us. He was into spiritual relationships.”

“You meditated together?”

“Breathed. He was into breathing. Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.”

“I do it a lot, actually. Sweet potato pone?”

Cindy Lou nodded, and they edged into the pone line. “This is different. You play music and trance out.”

“No drugs?”

“I’m telling you, girl—you get high. You get weird. I mean it.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but do you really need to get any weirder?”

Cindy Lou ignored that. “So anyway, now I’m going out with this musician.”

“Married?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Coked-up?”

“AA all the way.””

“Poor, then.”

“Well, let’s put it this way. He’s doing pretty damn well for the amount of experience he’s had. I think he’s got a future.”

“Uh-oh. I think I just got it. He’s young, right?”

“And gorgeous.”

“Okay, how young?”

“Twenty-six.” Cindy Lou was thirty-four.

“That’s not such a huge age difference.”

“Yeah, but he lives with his mama.”

“Well, gosh, Cindy Lou, big deal. You can always go to your place.” The truth was, he sounded a lot better than a lot of Cindy Lou’s bright ideas—especially if he was in AA. To be twenty-six and already done with addiction was a feat.

“Yeah, we could. But then his mama has to look after the kid.”

“He’s a single father?”

“Yeah. Cutest little boy—you should see him.”

“Okay, twenty-six, a single father, poor—”

“Well, look, none of that’s really the problem. The thing is, I met him through his mama.”

“Oh. She’s a friend of yours.”

“Well, not exactly. You know that program I’m in at Tulane? She’s my adviser.”

It was always that way. Cindy Lou collected men the way a kid picked up shells at the beach—utterly effortlessly. And all of them seriously flawed. Skip would have thought she simply wasn’t discriminating if she hadn’t seen the ones Cindy Lou dumped—the ones the average psychologist might have called “suitable.”

“Well, I would too,” Cindy Lou had said when Skip remarked upon it. “I just don’t like suitable men.”

Melody had walked right by a friend of her mother’s with no problem at all. So when she saw Chuckie Parsons, a kid from school who had a crush on her, she deliberately caught his eye and smiled seductively around the snoball she was working on. He actually looked around to see who she was smiling at. Of course, she wouldn’t have dared do it without the red shades, even with the makeup and hair and all, but even that might have been okay. Her eyes looked like something off of Cleopatra’s barge.

She would see people she knew at Ti-Belle’s set, she was sure of that, but she felt pretty confident. Meanwhile, she was waiting in the gospel tent, her perennial favorite.

Most of the groups were black and many came from high schools, schools Melody had never heard of. Some of the singing was incredibly good. All of it was fun. But the thing that fascinated Melody, the amazing thing that had struck her the first time Ham had taken her here when she was eight or nine, was the way some of these kids were really adults. The stars, that is.

What would happen was that the star—it could be a girl or a boy—would step forward and perhaps speak first, say a few words for Jesus, sounding like a preacher, getting to do something completely adult, unlike anything in Melody’s experience any white kid ever got to do. Maybe the kid wouldn’t speak, maybe she’d just sing. Then she’d get the whole choir going, she’d be leading her own choir. She’d get the audience to join in, and here would be this crowd of people from all over the country, adults in every kind of job—blue collar, white collar, anything you could name—this incredibly disparate audience ranging from good churchgoing people, folks from the Seventh Ward, to sophisticated music-lovers who’d made the trek from California or New York—and a seventeen-year-old kid would have the audience in the palm of her hand. She’d have been taught everything she needed to know, the poise, the leadership, the musicianship, and she’d be an adult and a star.

Melody watched the New Orleans Spiritualettes, the Christianaires, and the Second Morning Star Mass Choir, then took off for Ti-Belle’s gig.

Ti-Belle looked fabulous. She had on a yellow dress with black polka dots, kind of a sheath thing, with a square neck—very retro, very Ti-Belle. Her long, gorgeous hair was platinum, stunning against her olive skin; it was parted on the side and usually fell over her eye, which meant she had to shake it back pretty often, and that was always dramatic. She was positively elegant in her raw skinniness. Melody was rhapsodic, just looking at her.

Then Ti-Belle began to talk about Ham.

Melody blinked tears. She should have realized this was coming. Ti-Belle was talking about their time together, how much he’d meant to her and to her career, her music, how easygoing he was, how patient, how everyone depended on him because he never got mad, he never got upset. Melody was struggling like hell not to cry. She truly couldn’t afford to ruin her makeup. She couldn’t cry—after all, Ti-Belle wasn’t crying.
And why not?
she wondered. What had she done to keep herself together?

Melody knew. She knew exactly what Ti-Belle had done. She had seen her do the same thing countless times—she’d stood in front of the mirror and practiced and practiced until she was perfect. Ti-Belle did not ad lib. No way was she going to get onstage without having it down pat, without knowing she could stay in one piece while saying it. Melody didn’t even know how many hours it might have taken; it could have taken all night, and Ti-Belle wouldn’t have flinched. She was a perfectionist.

She said now that her set was for Ham, that this first song in particular was dedicated to Ham, that it was what she had to do now. Then she sang a verse, a cappella, of “St. James Infirmary,” belting as if this was a talent contest and the winner got to be Madonna. She had changed the words slightly:

Let him go, let him go,

God bless him,

Wherever he may be.

I may search this wide world over;

I’ll not find a man like him.

Then the band came in and she sang the whole song. If there was a dry eye when she was done, it would have to have been the miserable orb of a person so insensitive he might as well be dead, Melody thought. She herself was openly bawling, having given up the fight to save her makeup. She didn’t dare take off her glasses, so they were thoroughly steamed up by the time the song was over. There being no choice now, Melody removed and dried them quickly, keeping her head down. But she was sure she needn’t have bothered. All eyes were on the utterly riveting Ti-Belle, who now broke the elegiac mood with a song of her own, one of Ham’s favorites, she said, called “Afternoon Delight.”

It was rollicking and bawdy and the folks loved it. From there on the performance soared into the stratosphere. Melody, so overcome only a few minutes before, was transported to a new level of ecstasy, a musical ecstasy, a fine, vibrating, physical pleasure that was like a drug high, only better. Or an orgasm. She hadn’t had one yet, but surely it couldn’t be better than this. She threw her hands high above her head, swung her hips, moved her feet, and boogied like she’d been born to it. And she had, she had, she
was
born for this—she knew, even in her trance, her zoned-out no-holds-barred ecstatic transport, that that was the title of a song she’d write soon, after she finished Ham’s song. It would be about music and what it meant to her, but not the creative process, just the physical, primitive sensation, the thing the cave people must have felt the first time one of them beat on a hollow tree and invented the drum.

She forgot all about Ham, all about everything except the music and the sun and the luxuriant pliancy of her own little body. She was singing, dancing, screaming, hands waving in the air, in seventh heaven, when all of a sudden she felt something. Eyes. She knew what eyes felt like. She could tell when a boy was looking at her in class and when someone in the next car was staring in the window. Someone was looking at her now.

Quickly her own eyes swept the crowd, and she saw who saw her. Someone who was moving toward her. Her nemesis. The last person she wanted to see, or expected to see. A person who shouldn’t be here if there were any logic left in the world. But there hadn’t been for four days now, and she couldn’t worry about it. She had to go.