The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series) Page 8

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, maybe you didn’t know we don’t use last names. In the program? But Tom and I went to lunch after a meeting and he paid with a credit card.” She sat back, looking embarrassed. “I peeked.”

  “Lunch. So it was a daytime meeting. Do you remember which one?”

  “That was Al-Anon, I think. At the Perrier Club—that’s a place where a lot of the meetings are held. Anyway, I know I saw him at lots of meetings. And I’m not sure where I saw Linda Lee. I never talked to her—I just know her face.”

  “So Tom went to Al-Anon.”

  “He did, but I’m starting to think I’m not really explaining myself very well. He probably went to lots of meetings.”

  “How many?”

  “Well, I usually go to two or three a day.”

  Joe couldn’t control a snort. “Two or three a day! What else do you do?”

  The heretofore meek Mary Shoemaker straightened her back and said with dignity, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I was just surprised, that’s all. Do you know of any other friends Tom had?”

  She thought for a moment. “No, I really don’t. When I said I saw him a lot, I didn’t mean I talked to him a lot. But one day I was really impressed with his share and I told him so. And that’s how we ended up having lunch. I kind of think he was a loner. A real nice man, though.”

  “And you’re sure the program was where you saw Linda Lee?”

  Once again she gave it her full attention. Finally, she said, “I don’t go anywhere else except the grocery store and to take my kids to school.”

  Before she left she gave them a list of her favorite meetings and past favorites—eleven in all.

  And then Skip got on the phone.

  In an hour, after many misunderstandings, well-meanings, and speakings at cross-purposes, she had information that made her heart sink. She watched Cappello’s face fall as she reported.

  “These things are called anonymous because they are. You don’t sign up for membership, you don’t pay dues, and as Shoemaker said, you use only your first name. Needless to say, they don’t exactly call the roll. They do pass around a phone list, so you can get in touch with Susie Q. across the room if you need someone to talk to. But of course that’s voluntary, like everything else. Nobody has to get on it.”

  “Murder Anonymous,” said Cappello, looking as if her mother’d just died.

  “Yeah. You just walk in and you say ‘I’m John and I’m codependent,’ or maybe you don’t. Some people never share at all.” Seeing her puzzled look, Skip said, “Sharing means talking. But you don’t have to do it. So say you want to find some lonely people to kill. You saw Mary Shoemaker. From what I gather, these things are full of people like her—nothing and nobody in their lives, and nothing to do except go to meetings. They’re like churches used to be; or market day in small towns. I don’t know—they’re a whole social phenomenon.

  “So say you want a good place to find somebody to kill—somebody who couldn’t be connected with you because you don’t even know their last name, and nobody knows your name at all. Do you walk in and say, ‘I’m the Axeman and I’m homicidal’? What you do is walk in on a roomful of sitting ducks. And then you walk in on another roomful of them. I hate to say it, Sylvia, but you know how many of these things there are in New Orleans? Hundreds. There’s more than a hundred Al-Anon meetings and four hundred and five AA meetings alone. So that’s about five hundred. So far I’ve unearthed eleven programs besides those two main ones, but there may be more. Lots of the programs don’t even have permanent phone numbers, so I couldn’t find out yet how many there are.”

  Cappello sighed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’ve got more bad news. I sort of remember a long time ago my friend Alison Gaillard advised me once to go to AA because that’s where you met all the best guys. I thought she was kidding.”

  “Shit!”

  “Well, I called her back.”

  Alison had said, “Skippy, honey, that was years ago. You don’t have to go to AA to meet guys. Everybody’s doing Coda this year.”

  “Including you?”

  “Why should I? I’m married.”

  Cappello said “Shit!” again. “You mean we’re talking about a bunch of neurotics cruising each other?”

  “Hey,” said Skip, “our first thought was a bar, remember?”

  “Yeah, but if it’s that kind of deal, how do you explain Tom Mabus?”

  “Maybe he saw something—like Linda Lee with the Axeman. Anyway, yes to cruising, but that’s not exactly the whole story. I gave Cindy Lou a call too. Want to know what she said?”

  “Yeah, from the horse’s mouth—in half an hour. Get the whole team together.”

  Cindy Lou brought books with her—books with names like Codependent No More! and Beyond Codependency. She also brought some by John Bradshaw, including the ones Skip had seen in Linda Lee’s apartment.

  When Joe had brought everyone up to date on Mary Shoemaker, he let Skip take over.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we are talking large. We are talking the biggest thing since VCRs—maybe since the great god television itself. If you aren’t addictive, then you’re almost certainly codependent, and if you aren’t codependent, you’re nobody.”

  “Be there or be square,” said Hodges.

  “Well, not exactly. It’s not like you’ve got any choice about it. See, the people who write these books say ninety-six percent of the population’s codependent. They don’t say who the other four percent are, but you can bet you haven’t met them and aren’t likely to. They’re basically saying we’re a very unhealthy society and a lot of the things we hold up as real great qualities are sick, sick, sick. So people go to these meetings to unlearn everything they learned as kids.”

  Cappello said, “I thought therapists were the chic thing.”

  “This stuff’s free.” Cindy Lou looked around the room. “Anybody in here codependent?”

  O’Rourke snorted. “I don’t even know any alcoholics.”

  “You don’t have to know any alcoholics. That’s a big misunderstanding about this whole deal. You can be codependent as hell even if you live alone and don’t form relationships or friendships. It’s a dumb word, ‘codependent.’ Doesn’t work, really. But the reason I asked that was just to see something. These groups are anonymous, and I don’t want to blow anyone’s anonymity, but I’m willing to bet there’s somebody in here who’s been to at least one meeting of one of these things, maybe who goes regularly.”

  “I’m Adam,” said Abasolo, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “I was in Alateen,” said Cappello quietly. “I still go to ACOA—that’s Adult Children of Alcoholics.”

  Cindy Lou nodded. “Just about everybody’s got some kind of contact with them. I bet somebody else in here’s got a relative who’s hooked on Al-Anon.”

  O’Rourke said, “You got it. My ex-wife. And she’s as bitchy as ever.”

  “Well, now, that’s an interesting point you bring up. One of the objects of the exercise, reduced to simplest terms, is to quit being too nice to people. Look here.” She opened one of the books she’d brought, turned a few pages. “What do you see?”

  “Looks like lists.”

  “That’s right. Lists of characteristics that make you co-dependent. You read this stuff, you see why they say just about everybody’s got the bug—anything you can name, especially anything that’s common behavior in America, is probably here. Listen to this—page eighty-nine: ‘Codependents tend to blame themselves for everything.’ Two pages later: ‘Codependents frequently blame other people for their problems.’ Here’s two right together: They tend to be ‘extremely responsible,’ or ‘extremely irresponsible.’ ”

  Hodges whistled. “Kind of slips through your fingers, doesn’t it?”

  But O’Rourke was interested. “What does that have to do with being too nice?”

  And Sk
ip blurted, “Is it about anything or is it just a bunch of words?”

  “It is about something. These people tend to get a little obsessive—and they’d be the first to admit that obsessiveness is a sure sign of codependency—but basically they’re onto something. They have all these lists of different ways you can react to being codependent, but as far as I can figure out, the bottom line’s this: If you’re codependent, you’re minding everybody’s business but your own.”

  “Sheee-it,” said Abasolo.

  “Yeah?” said Cindy Lou. “You ever feel like you’re the only one in your district doing any work? Maybe you can’t figure out why all these old guys twice your age don’t get half as much work done as you do. You worry about that at all? Spend any time thinking of ways to make them shape up? The codependency folks talk about being obsessed with controlling other people’s behavior.”

  He reddened.

  “Maybe you’re codependent, baby. Besides being an alcoholic.”

  Skip hid her smile with a hand. She’d liked Cindy Lou that morning, but her attitude was deepening to something approaching worship.

  Cindy Lou went on with her lecture. “That’s why I say it’s the bottom line. Everybody’s got that one. In this society, we’re all busy taking up the slack for everybody else, sometimes just with our own secret knowledge that we’re superior, like Adam over there; sometimes we mind their business to the point where we’re trying to guess what they want next and give it to them before they even know.”

  With a jolt, Skip remembered Curtis Ogletree, Linda Lee’s landlord.

  “I’ve heard this crap before and it makes me sick,” said Abasolo. “Recovery spillover, I call it. AA meetings are getting so they’re full of assholes mouthing all that garbage, nattering on about their fathers and mothers, telling their boring dreams, carrying on about their damn ‘recovery’—I hate that word, ‘recovery.’ I’m a drunk, I’m not a recovering drunk, and I’m goddamn sick and tired of having my meetings co-opted. See, they come from all these other programs for any goddamn thing you’re ‘addicted’ to. Sex Anonymous; Emotions Anonymous. Jesus! I almost died of my addiction and it pisses me off to hear the word trivialized.”

  “A not uncommon AA view,” said Cindy Lou, completely unfazed. “The steps were formed for dealing with substance addiction and are now being applied to the theory I was just describing, plus a lot of ifly-sounding non-substance ‘addictions,’ like work, shopping, and food. Can you be addicted to food? AA people have their doubts it’s the same thing. However, like it or not, some two hundred other groups have adopted the AA model. Nationwide, there are from two million to twenty million people in the recovery movement, depending on how you count.”

  “Well, look, Dr. Wootten,” said O’Rourke. “I’m sure this is all very interesting, but aren’t you here to advise us about the Axeman? Are you saying his psychological profile’s ‘codependent’? If ninety-six percent of the population’s codependent, do we really need an ‘expert’ to come in here and tell us he’s just like everybody else?”

  “Oh, that wasn’t about the Axeman. That was about communication. I just taught you people a new language you’re going to be needing. Now I’m going to teach you one more thing. You go into a twelve-step program, you better be ready to turn over your problems to a higher power. And that’s what I’m going to do now.”

  Joe laughed. “I don’t think they mean lieutenants, Cindy Lou.”

  “Well, I do. And when you’re done with my problems, you can do my laundry.”

  He turned to the others. “Okay, we’ve finally got a link between the two victims, and frankly, we haven’t got another damn thing. Officer Langdon’s been on the phone all afternoon and here’s the deal. There are at least thirteen twelve-step programs in this town and hundreds of meetings—well over five hundred, maybe more like a thousand. Only one member from each meeting—the intergroup representative— is known to the larger organization. And because of the tradition of anonymity, the program people won’t tell us who any of them are. Even if we could get a court order for the information, we’d then have several hundred people to interview who would know only the people in their own groups by first names and wouldn’t even tell us those.”

  “Because of the tradition of anonymity,” said O’Rourke, sounding disgusted.

  “So we’re going to go to the meetings and look at the phone lists for any Toms and Linda Lees.”

  “You gotta be kidding!”

  “Right, Frank, I’m making a great big joke. Now tell me what you want to do instead.”

  O’Rourke said nothing.

  “Anybody else got any better ideas?”

  “Okay, I appreciate the fact that it’s going to be time-consuming and may lead nowhere, but it’s the only place we’ve got to go and we’re going there.” He went back to his original lecture. “So far as Langdon can tell, neither Mabus nor Strickland was a drinker. And Mary Shoemaker doesn’t go to AA, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, or Gamblers Anonymous. She does go to Tough Love, which is a parents’ group, but neither Tom nor Linda Lee had children or teenagers. So for now, we’re going to skip those programs and concentrate on the others.

  “We’ve got a list of the ones Shoemaker likes and a promise from her not to blow anyone’s cover, so we’re going to start out with Mary’s Greatest Hits. And Langdon found out Mabus was off only on Thursday and Friday nights. So we’re going to concentrate specially on the Thursday and Friday meetings. But we know he went to daytime ones as well, and Strickland could have gone any night of the week, so we’ll try to cover everything we can.

  “This is Thursday and it’s four o’clock. Some meetings are right after work and some are later—I want everybody in here to go to two tonight, and then we’ll see where we are. Here are the lists and the assignments.”

  O’Rourke said, “Are we undercover, or what?”

  “To the extent you can be—because of the anonymity tradition some of these people may balk if you say who you are. But we all know how small this town is. You may run into somebody you know, but remember, even policemen have a right to go to these things. You’re there because you’re Frank and you’re codependent, so far as anybody knows, but don’t ‘share’; keep a low profile. Remember, no one knows about the twelve-step connection except the Axeman, so there’s no reason for anyone else to suspect anything, therefore no reason for gossip to get around.”

  They began picking up their things. Cindy Lou walked over to O’Rourke and stood very close. She said, “Frank, can I ask you something? Is it women you hate, or black people?”

  O’Rourke reddened, for once apparently at a loss.

  EIGHT

  SKIP HAD ASKED for Overeaters Anonymous, partly because she was intrigued and partly because she thought if she already had it, O’Rourke wouldn’t make jokes about how she ought to. He hadn’t either, but that was probably because he had a new target in Cindy Lou. His excuse for hating Skip had been that she was from Uptown, and maybe he had really thought it was true, but now it seemed more as if he simply had a chip on his shoulder where women were concerned.

  And Cindy Lou could handle him. Delighted to have you aboard, Cindy Lou.

  She looked forward to the OA meeting—maybe it would be like Weight Watchers, which she’d already done with semi-success. She liked to be around overweight people, especially women—most women she knew in New Orleans were so damn slender. She didn’t know if it was in the genes or the result of constant secret dieting. Their tiny bones and fluttery mannerisms made her feel like an ostrich in a flock of finches.

  Skip was six feet tall and had never been thin, had thought of herself as fat for years. Green eyes and a head-turning mop of curly brown hair were all she had, according to Langdon family mythology (and Conrad had some unflattering things to say about the hair). But she’d gotten in shape before she joined the police department and now she was “Juno-esque” if you listened to Jimmy Dee. In her own opinion she could still stand to lose a
few pounds—twenty, maybe.

  The meeting was in a church and she was almost late. They hadn’t started yet, but it looked as if most of the chairs were filled. Strangely, there weren’t all that many fat people here, a notable exception being the guy in the small chair in the back…. Good God! A four-hundred-pounder. On the other hand, quite a few people looked as if they were recovering away to nothing.

  Quickly she sat on the floor, more or less behind one of the chairs, devoutly wishing the person in it were fat, because the last person in the world she wanted to see was sitting across the room. Her mother. She was talking to the woman next to her, her face in profile, and Skip didn’t think she’d been spotted yet, but she would be; the group wasn’t nearly large enough to hide in.

  Her mother! It wasn’t her day.

  A woman who seemed to be the leader said her name was Leslie, she was a compulsive overeater, and it was time to begin. Then followed a complicated ritual—the reading of the steps, the traditions, a sort of welcome or statement of purpose—in all, quite a few more documents than Skip had any interest in. And there was the Serenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  Skip found herself fidgeting, slightly embarrassed, hostile. She had wondered if it would be like a cult and found that it was exactly as she imagined one would be—the silly rituals, the rapt faces of the true believers, the utter lack of humor, the deep sense of purpose. Her skin crawled.

  “I’m really grateful for the opportunity to lead the meeting this week,” said Leslie, “because of something that happened to me this week. But I want to go back farther than that. I was a thin little girl, and everybody always told me how pretty I was, and then I got chubby when I was about nine or ten, and then they didn’t talk like that anymore. They said I had beautiful skin or beautiful eyes and I knew that was all they could think of to say because I wasn’t beautiful anymore.”