Mrs. Mills said, “So what do you think of my wonderful idea?”
“Idea?” said Simon and Dorothea together.
“I knew you weren’t listening. Let me read it again.” She looked at her paper. “The museum will be pleased to issue the reward to Mr. Judson, but because at today’s rate, one hundred dollars would be considerably more, the board will take this into consideration.”
“Splendid!” Dorothea’s light glowed.
“I really...” Simon was fighting sadness and happiness both. “...don’t want a reward.”
“Of course you want a reward,” said Dorothea and Mrs. Mills together. Mrs. Mills added, “Now about a place to keep the napkin ring.” She got up and began to walk about the room.
“Simon,” said Dorothea quickly, “that wrought-iron table you used for your paints — go to it.” He did and stood looking at it; never again would he dip his brush there and argue with her and be sassy and get scolded. “Just beside the shepherdess there’s a black lacquer box from China. Lettie gave it to me.”
“This?” He picked it up.
“What?” Mrs. Mills turned, then came toward him, all smiles. “I gave her that. Do you think she’d like to keep the ring in it?”
“I know she would.” Simon dropped it in the box. Dorothea was drifting toward her painting. He said imploringly, “Volanda is coming. I wish you could see her.”
“I did,” said Mrs. Mills. “Remember, this afternoon? Lovely girl.”
“Is this she?” Dorothea was looking at the door. Volanda stood there and Simon knew at once what had happened. She ran to him, crying, and they clung together.
Mrs. Mills said, “Uncle Willie?”
Volanda nodded and Simon lifted her chin so she was looking full over his shoulder at the painting.
Dorothea said, “If she’s this lovely when she’s sad, she must be radiant when she’s happy. Thank you, Simon,” her voice was growing fainter, “thank you... thank you... and Merry Christmas!”
Mrs. Mills said, “You know, it’s funny. A minute ago I had the impression that the painting of Dorothea looked, well, faded. Now it seems to be quite itself again. It must be the light.”
A Good Shooting
by O’Neil De Noux
The body lay in the street next to a beat-up green Ford Escort, a heavy-set man in a gray T-shirt and jeans, a blue steel semiautomatic pistol lying two feet from his right hand. Detective John Raven Beau, standing in his shirt sleeves on the neutral ground along the center of St. Charles Avenue, loosened his crimson tie with its geometric design that wasn’t a geometric design at all. A closer look would reveal the small white circles were actually human skulls. Went with the territory, working Homicide.
Beau waited for a streetcar to pass, tucking his leather-bound notebook under his left arm and watching the curious faces peering out at the crime scene as the green and brown electric car clanked by, heading downtown. Beau at six-two, a lean one-eighty pounds, was thirty. He was a square-jawed man with dark brown hair and light brown eyes beneath a hooded brow. His sharp nose gave him a hawklike appearance. On his right hip sat his 9mm Beretta Model 92-F, snug in its black canvas holster, his gold star-and-crescent New Orleans Police badge clipped to his belt above the left front pocket of his dark blue suit pants.
The crime scene encompassed the uptown-riverside intersection of St. Charles and Burdette Street, including the corner drugstore and the body in the street. Beau’s sergeant, Jodie Kintyre, stood alongside the drugstore with a young patrol officer. Jodie, five-seven, a sleek one-ten, wore her yellow-blonde hair in a long pageboy cut. Her dark green skirt-suit brought out the color in her catlike hazel eyes, which she blinked at Beau as he stepped up.
“This is Frank Willard,” she said, nodding to the patrol officer whose dark brown face shimmered with perspiration on this typically humid summer afternoon. Willard was twenty-two and stood five-nine, with a thick-bodied wrestler’s build.
She gave Beau the rundown in quick sentences. Willard responded to a Signal 64, an armed robbery, at the drugstore and caught the robber on the way out. There was an exchange of gunshots. The robber missed. Willard didn’t.
“We have six eyewitnesses inside.” Jodie nodded at the drugstore. “Snowood’s taking statements. Stay with Willard till the lab’s done with him and take him to the Bureau.” She tapped Willard on the shoulder. “Don’t talk to anyone but me and Detective Beau here until we take your statement.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Call me Sergeant or Detective Kintyre or Jodie, just not ma’am.” She hurried off to join the crime scene technician who’d just arrived with his camera and brown evidence case. Beau smiled to himself. At thirty-six, Jodie was getting sensitive when anyone called her ma’am, unless it was a little kid.
Willard looked up at Beau and said, “Hope the old woman’s gonna be all right.”
“Hope you’re not talking about Jodie.”
“From inside. Behind the counter. Robber pistol-whipped her. Lotta blood.”
Jesus!
“What did your sergeant mean, till they’re done with me?”
“They’ll secure your weapon, then swab your hands for a neutron activation test to determine if you fired a firearm. Perpetrator too. That’s it.”
Willard leaned back against the brick wall of the drugstore and let out a long breath. He looked so damn young to Beau, who tried reassuring him. “I know what you’re going through, man. I’ve been through it. More than once.”
Willard turned his dark brown eyes to Beau and said, “I feel sick.”
“Don’t throw up on me.”
“No, not like that.” Willard closed his eyes. “I just feel like... jelly inside.”
“Not like in the movies, is it? Shoot a man and stand over him making wisecracks. You feel crappy, even when you do it right.” Beau watched Willard breathing heavily. “Relax. It looks like a good shooting.”
“I don’t know how he missed me. Face to face like that.” He gasped as if struggling to breathe. “We should teach how to duck and shoot at the range. I was duckin’, man.”
Beau faced him and said, “Relax. Save it for your statement. Now breathe normally.”
Willard nodded and started controlling his breathing. His eyes opened after a minute. “What’s your name again?”
“Beau.”
“As in John Raven Beau?”
Even rookies heard of me, Beau thought. It wasn’t a satisfying thought.
Willard’s eyes changed, a recognition maybe, a bonding maybe, standing with John Raven Beau, the half-Sioux, half-Cajun cop who always got his man, one way or the other. Beau was sure Willard thought he’d killed a dozen men at least, when the number was three, exactly. All good shootings. Justifiable homicides, declared by separate grand juries.
A streetcar heading uptown stopped and Beau automatically checked out who came off: a teen girl in white polo shirt and red shorts, a teen boy in green T-shirt and khaki pants, and a redheaded woman, late twenties, wearing blue nurse’s scrubs and white tennis shoes. Beau watched her stand motionless, staring at the crime scene as the streetcar pulled away.
She remained frozen in place, just staring at the body in the street.
Beau stepped away from the drugstore and flagged down a passing patrol car. Must have been a slow day in the Second District with all the cop cars passing, drawn to the scene like moths to a light bulb. The cop leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window so Beau could lean in and ask, “Could you park your unit over there to block the view of the body from the streetcar?”
“Sure,” the eager cop said, pulling into the intersection, hitting his blue lights. His name tag read BERTUCCI. Another rookie.