Jazz Funeral (10 page)

At Country Day you reached the main building, a stately columned affair, by means of a circular drive, and when you entered, you were in a paneled living room. Coming through the big double doors, Skip stood for a second, taking it in. Eventually she decided to walk toward the sign that said “Headmaster’s Secretary.”

Country Day prided itself on developing a high level of social skill in its students, and the members of the administration proved excellent exemplars to learn from. Despite the trappings, stuffiness apparently wasn’t the style here. The very mention of Melody’s name brought concerned murmurings and instant efficient activity.

Skip was given the headmaster’s study for her interviews, and in five minutes was closeted with one Sharon Sougeron, Melody’s faculty adviser. In the brief time she had to study her surroundings, she realized she could have entered blindfolded, asked herself the question, “How will this room look?” and described it perfectly. The Uptown decorator, whoever she was, had struck again. Two wing chairs faced a leather sofa; the tables were shiny dark wood, the lamps brass, the prints Audubon, the walls paneled. A room in the same impeccable taste as a basic black dress, and every bit as daring. Ah, but the magnolia’s a nice touch, she thought, as a gust of lush scent wafted through the window.

Sougeron was thirty-fiveish and a little on the plump side, with dark curly hair, worn short, and white, delicate skin. Between the curls and the curves and the pearly skin, she was the very picture of Southern womanhood, dressed in a white silk blouse and navy skirt, accessorized with chunky jewelry.

She wore a wedding ring, and Skip had no doubt she was heterosexual, yet as soon as she opened her mouth, the word “butch” came instantly to mind. It was something in her voice and her manner that all the makeup and jewelry in the world couldn’t hide. She taught English, the principal had said, but Skip would have guessed gym.

Her voice was brusque and dismissive, the voice of someone who had more important things to do, and Skip wondered if it was always that way, with her husband, for instance, in tender moments.

Sougeron, of course, was well-aware that Melody was missing—she’d talked to Patty and George no fewer than three times on Wednesday, the day before. Whatever she’d said, she seemed to be regretting it.

“How could I know, how was I supposed to know? I just figured Melody’d run away—typical unhappy teenager. I wasn’t even very sympathetic.”

“How could you know that, Ms. Sougeron? Are you saying you know something that’s made you change your mind?”

“Well, something’s happened to her, it’s obvious. Her brother gets killed and she goes missing? It can’t be coincidence.”

“I expect you know Melody pretty well. Can you give me a sense of her? If I met her, whom would I meet?”

“Well, if you could get past the attitude, she might be a pretty nice kid. But nobody’s ever been able to.”

“She’s a troublemaker, is she?”

“No.” She thought about it. “No, I wouldn’t say that. I guess boys are mostly troublemakers; girls are just twits.” Skip wondered if Sougeron would define the term. She waited.

“Melody’s like a black cloud most of the time—a sullen, sour little girl.” Sougeron held her elbows and shivered deliberately, as if shaking Melody off. “And when she’s not sullen, she’s bitchy and disrespectful.”

“How’s that?”

The teacher shrugged. “It’s nothing you can put your finger on. It’s just her attitude. Oh, well, wait—there is something you can pin down. She cuts class and she lies.”

“Lies? About what?”

She shrugged again, obviously hating to be put on the spot. “About everything.”

“Everything?”

“Whether she did her homework. Where she was yesterday when she wasn’t in class. Everything.”

“Do you have any idea how she gets along with her parents?”

“Only a mother could love her, I’ll tell you that.”

“You don’t know anything specific?”

“She’s a behavior problem. What does that tell you?”

“I don’t know. What does it tell you?”

“She’s probably as much a problem for them as she is for me.”

“How about her brother? Did she ever talk about him?”

Sougeron shook her head. “She didn’t talk to me about anything. Spoke only when spoken to, and then with reluctance.”

“Okay. She cuts class, she’s got an attitude—how does she manage to stay in school here?”

“Well, believe it or not, she’s usually a pretty good student—but if she doesn’t like the subject, you can’t get her to do beans. And she’s a very good musician, most people think, but I’m no judge of all that. She can write, though. She’s not a bad poet at all.”

“A poet? She wrote poems?” Skip’s heart started beating faster. If ever there was a window to the soul, surely it was a teenager’s poetry.

“Songs, mostly.”

“What about?”

“Oh, you know. Love and beauty. Sadness. As if a kid that age could have a clue.”

“Sadness? Can you remember any specifics? Do you have any of her work?”

“No, I don’t save their work, I give it back to them. And I don’t really remember what she wrote about. She’s got a way with words, that’s all. But she’s not so brilliant anything stuck in my mind.” She stood. “Anything else?”

Skip looked up, surprised. For a moment she’d almost forgotten the other woman, her mind occupied with trying to form a picture of the sullen, defiant teenager Sougeron had described. She hadn’t yet gotten to the meat of the interview. “A few things.”

Sougeron remained standing.

“Does she use drugs?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Well, does she hang out with kids who do?”

“Officer, this is a private school. Kids who use drugs are asked to leave.”

In the unlikely event anyone finds out about it.

“Who does she hang out with?”

“Her best friend’s a girl named Blair Rosenbaum. And she’s got a boyfriend named Flip Phillips.”

“Anyone else?”

“Maybe the kids she plays music with. Joel Boucree’s one of them, I don’t know the other.”

“Okay. Thanks for your help.”

The school counselor was next, a sixtyish man who liked his gumbo and his fried catfish, judging by his shape. He was short, with a reddish neck, white moustache, and bushy white hair worn slightly long for New Orleans.

“Mr. Nicolai, I’m Skip Langdon.”

“Matthew,” he said with a broad smile, and Skip suddenly had the feeling he was very good at his job. He was somebody who could probably put the kids at ease and convince them he was on their side.

“I was hoping you could tell me a little about Melody Brocato.”

“Where she is, you mean. Lord, I wish I knew.”

“Any ideas?”

He spread his arms. “Not really. All her little buddies are present and accounted for. I’ve already asked them if they know, of course.”

He recited the usual list—Blair, the two musicians, and Flip.

“I just talked to Melody’s homeroom teacher. I gather Melody’s a difficult kid.”

“Well, I guess it’s all in the perspective.”

Skip waited, sensed a favorite theory about to pop out.

“If Ms. Sougeron’s trying to ram English and history down their throats, it’s only natural some of ‘em are going to choke. The ones who do are probably the ones she calls ‘difficult.’ That’s the reason I quit the classroom—I hate trying to make ‘em do something they don’t want to do. I just like to talk to ‘em—listen to ‘em. That way I haven’t got a program, and that means they can’t sabotage my program if they don’t happen to feel like conformin’. Whole different perspective. You see?”

“So you figure you see a different side of Melody than Ms. Sougeron did.”

“Oh, indubitably.” Skip had noticed the studied way he dropped his final g’s; now she was starting to think it must really cramp his style not to be able to smoke a pipe while pontificating. “I see an extremely creative young woman there.”

“Ms. Sougeron said she writes good poetry.”

“She’s famous for it. The teachers pass it around it’s so good.” He rocked back and forth, as if he did have a pipe. “What’d Ms. Sougeron say? That Melody’s sullen? Uncooperative? Something like that?”

“Matter of fact, yes.”

“Well, what you got here is an exceptionally bright young lady. Bright but not that crazy about school. Her teacher says sullen, but I’d say restless comes closer to it. If somebody put a gun to my head and made me pick the most gifted student in the school, she’d be in the running. Might be the one. ‘Course it’s hard to know till twenty years later when they’ve done it or failed to do it, whatever it is, but I’d say Melody’s got a fightin’ chance to be the one that does it. Most people’d probably pick one of the boys—a jock with all A’s, somethin’ like that, but they haven’t been around as long as I have. Kids like that either get tired of being perfect—in which case they become drunks—or they keep on doin’ it. Turn into pediatricians who work for the homeless on weekends, that kind of thing.”

Skip was fascinated in spite of herself. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Why, nothin’, of course, but they’re still just bein’ good little boys. Don’t ever develop any real sense of self, who they are. And they don’t really …” He paused here. “… achieve, if you will. In a grand sense. Pediatricians might help a lot of local kids, even save a lot of lives, but a kid like Melody’d be more likely to find the cure for cancer.”

“She’s that smart.”

“Not smart. This idn’t about smart. ‘Course smart helps, smart’s a big part of it, but face it. Detective, most all the kids here are smart. Country Day hasn’t got any real dummies. But we got some real conformists, and Melody’s not one of ‘em. She’s a romantic; a dreamer. No tellin’ what’s goin’ on under all those curls when she’s starin’ out the window, cheatin’ Ms. Sougeron out of one more perfect little English student. Twenty years from now Melody could be the graduate Ms. Sougeron invites to come back and talk to the new kids, inspire ‘em to go on to greatness like she did.”

“She’s a very good singer, I hear.”

He nodded. “Yep. That might be how she makes it. Voice idn’t that much, but somethin’ about her—she’s got …” He thought a minute. “Passion. That’s what it is. And man, can she sing the blues. Like she knows what she’s talkin’ about.”

Skip thought about it. If she’d had a voice, she could have sung the blues in high school too—what teenager couldn’t? She said, “As I remember, being sixteen is no root beer float.”

He leaned forward. “Look, the stuff that goes on in these kids’ homes’d curl your hair—best families in town and all that, but probably no different from what you’d get at Fortier or Warren Easton. That’s families. Imperfect.” He wrinkled his nose so thoroughly that Skip sensed what he wanted to say and didn’t dare.

She stared him right in the clever blue eye. “Fucked up.”

“As young Joel Boucree would say, ‘You got that right.’ In fact—” He stopped in mid-sentence, interrupting himself. “No, wait. Let’s talk about young Joel a minute. He’s a perfect example of the kind of kid Melody’s not. Near-perfect test scores. Extremely high IQ. Works like a demon. Scholarship student, in fact—one of only ten or twelve blacks in the whole school, I’m ashamed to say. Joel Boucree works his little butt off; if we had to vote, faculty and students, on ‘most likely to succeed,’ Joel’d probably win hands down, even though he idn’t much of a jock. But he hasn’t got any need to spend the next twenty years provin’ himself. People have been tellin’ him all his life who he is, and he’s real good at pleasin’ adults, so he probably likes what they say. All he’s got to do is live up to it. Now Melody’s not so good at pleasin’ adults—she’s probably got to make her mark, one way or another. You see what I mean?”

Skip wasn’t sure she did, but if she said so, she’d never get away. She said instead, “Does Melody strike you as more unhappy than any other melancholy teenager?”

He shrugged. “Probably not. Just more frustrated than most. Something’s bothering her, though. She probably ought to be in therapy.”

“Why do you say that?”

He thought about it. “I guess she just seems like she needs someone on her side.”

“I thought—” Skip stopped herself. That was the role she thought Ham had played. She rephrased: “Did she ever talk to you about her brother?”

“Yep. She’s crazy about him.”

“Do you know about any trouble between the two of them?”

Nicolai looked astonished, as if he’d just caught on to something important. “You think she murdered him.”

“He’s dead and she’s missing. So far I don’t think anything more than that.”

“Well, she didn’t kill her brother. She loves him more than anything on this earth.”

“She told you that? I didn’t realize the two of you were that close.” She hadn’t really thought that much about their relationship—it just didn’t seem to her the sort of thing a kid would tell a counselor.

“I’ve been around a long time. Some things you just know.”

Oh, great. How much of what you told me is true and how much is stuff you “just know”?

Clearly, Joel Boucree, Doug Leddy, and Flip Phillips were next on the agenda, but talking to kids was a delicate business. It usually required an adult witness and parental permission. Often, it was accomplished only after difficult negotiations. However, to her surprise, Skip found the principal almost unnaturally helpful. The Brocatos, apparently, had leaned on her.

The proposal was this—the principal herself, Mrs. Murray, would phone the kids’ parents and lean, in turn, on them, and she’d get Matthew Nicolai to sit in. In return Skip would do the interviews after school. Murray would hold Flip, but Skip would interview the boys in the band off campus, at a nearby garage where they practiced every Thursday afternoon.

Skip leaped at it—it would save tons of time and tears, and other things were pressing anyway. She headed toward an address on Burgundy, fairly near Esplanade, where she’d been told she’d find Andy Fike, Ham’s housecleaner.

It took Fike a good ten minutes to get to the door. Skip would have given up, but a neighbor urged her to keep trying: “Andy sleep a lot, and he sleep hard, but he in there.” The old lady cackled like it was the neighborhood joke.