Read Online Big Easy Bonanza by Julie Smith, Tony Dunbar - Free Book Online

out, lost her baby fat, and felt like Sheena of the Jungle. She’d never lost that old sense of unfairness, though now it had evolved into what she thought of as a sense of justice. She saw a lot of crime as she went about her daily rounds and when one day she stopped a mugging as if by reflex, her life changed. She was headed down Fifth Street toward the Examiner when a teenage kid tried to shove an old lady to the pavement and take her purse. Before she knew she was doing it, Skip had her bike on the sidewalk, her body between the kid and the victim. That wasn’t enough for her either—she “detained” the kid, as the cops said, till they got there.
    After that she began to dream of being a cop. Literally to dream, at night, when her defenses were down. And then she daydreamed as well, and soon she was obsessed with it. She knew the place she had to do it was New Orleans. She was still very young and she wouldn’t yet have put it this way (wouldn’t understand it for years), but this was her final revenge against her parents and against the whole stinking crowd they ran with.
    They would hate her for it. And yet how could they hate a responsible daughter on the side of law and order? They couldn’t in good conscience—they’d have to hate themselves as well. It would be a perfect way of thumbing her nose at the whole damn social order. If she hadn’t understood their rules, too bad—she was going to make some rules of her own.
    She was only dimly aware of the revenge factor in her decision. On the surface she saw nothing but constructive value in it. She saw it as a way finally to fit into her hometown, to find out something about it besides the latest gossip in that tiny social group that had so puzzled Steve Steinman by its smallness. She saw it also as an adventure. She would go to neighborhoods she was barely aware of and truly meet the people, the real people, the yats and the ethnics. Best of all she would have power at last, in her own hometown. She would be someone other than Dr. Langdon’s daughter.
    She forgot the unfortunate fact that she wasn’t going to fit in anywhere—certainly not with the old crowd and decidedly not with her fellow cops either. If she’d felt like an alien before, that was just practice for some of the deepest, truest loneliness she could ever have imagined.
    In some ways she did have power. She truly loved her job, and liked—more than anyone could have told her—the sensation of being good at it. For the first time ever, she was accomplishing something, learning something, finding her existence worthwhile and exhilarating. Yet in her personal life she was utterly powerless.
    Tricia Lattimore, who also hadn’t fit in, was now a social worker in New York. Skip’s only friend was Jimmy Dee Scoggin, her gay, fifty-year-old, hopelessly criminal lawyer landlord. (Unless you counted Tennessee Williams. Lately she’d been reading no one else, and Tennessee was helping her get through.) So was Jimmy Dee—partly with controlled substances and partly with outrageous anecdotes. At the moment Jimmy Dee was out with his usual coterie of young studs and amusingly aging drag queens. Which left Skip on her balcony, crying into her gin and tonic.
    She was thinking of finding some nice, juicy worms to eat, when the phone rang. “Skippy? It’s Marcelle.”
    “Marcelle!” Of all people.
    “Skippy, I’m so miserable. I know you haven’t been with the police department very long, but I was just wondering—is there a Chinaman’s chance you might work on Daddy’s case?”
    “Actually, I think there is. Is there something I can help you with?” She hoped she didn’t sound too eager.
    “I don’t know.” Marcelle started to cry. “It all seems so hopeless.”
    “You know I’ll do everything I can for you.”
    “Skippy, can you tell me something? You saw Dolly, didn’t you? What did she look like?”
    “Look like? I’m not sure what you mean?”
    “I mean, I know she was