Big Easy Bonanza

intercept Dolly as she came out? Not a chance. You couldn’t run two steps in that mess, couldn’t walk, couldn’t do anything but fight for your life. By now some of the other cops had their nightsticks drawn, and Skip knew she had to use hers too.
    For a moment fear shivered through her body. This was a mob. Somebody was going to get hurt. And then anger replaced the fear. Goddammit, these people were assholes. They were trying to kill her. Especially the self-important bastard with the camera. He was going to take her out, and ten little kids as well. Nightstick horizontal, she gave him a good shove and he had the gall to look surprised.
    “Get back, dammit!”
    He stared at her as if he hadn’t heard. “But Dolly…”
    “Back!”
    The crowd closed in and he nearly lost his balance. Skip lost valuable seconds trying to keep him from going down. And then it was her against the mob. All she remembered afterward was pushing with all her strength, pushing till her arms hurt, for about a week and a half.
    She later realized it had probably been no more than ten minutes. And then she was summoned to the float, where the Monarch of Mirth was laid out as if on a bier, his bloody mask beside him, a round hole in the royal temple.
    Sergeant Pitre started to speak, but Skip interrupted. “Dolly Parton!” she blurted, causing her fellow cops to stare as if she were delirious.
    She pulled herself together. “A woman dressed like Dolly Parton shot him. From that balcony.”
    As she pointed to the balcony, a second-story one on the river side of the avenue, she thought about the implications of its ownership—it was Tolliver Albert’s. Albert was “Uncle Tolliver” to the St. Amant family and practically a member of it—Chauncey and Bitty’s best friend. He was an antique dealer, a charming bachelor in his fifties much favored as an extra man at Uptown dinner parties. A social fixture. And yet someone dressed as Dolly Parton had stood on his balcony and shot Chauncey. “I saw it happen,” she said.
    “You saw the shooting?” Pitre’s voice was belligerent, as if he weren’t willing to bestow the exalted status of star witness on a rookie female.
    Quickly, Skip sketched out what she’d seen. Pitre barked orders, dispatching other officers to the Dolly chase. “It’s Tolliver Albert’s place,” said Skip. “He’ll be at the Boston Club.”
    “Unless he’s Dolly.”
    “The St. Amants’ll be there too.” Eventually the parade would have gone down Canal Street and stopped at the club, where the whole family would have been in the reviewing stand, and where Rex would have toasted his queen—if Chauncey hadn’t been murdered. As it was, Mardi Gras was stopped in its tracks.
    “I know where they’ll be, Officer Post-deb. You’re a friend of the family, right?”
    Skip nodded, though she wasn’t, really. She was just an old acquaintance, the daughter of their doctor, someone they probably thought of as often as they thought about their coat-rack. True, she’d gone through McGehee’s and Newcomb with Marcelle, had even been a bridesmaid at her brief marriage to Lionel Gaudet, but that was only because Lionel was her cousin. They weren’t friends—Marcelle lived on her trust fund, lunching a lot and playing tennis; she interested Skip about as much as a stale beignet.
    By now emergency vehicles were starting to arrive. Pitre held up a finger, commandeered one of the squad cars, and beckoned Skip to get in with him. “Come on. We’re going to inform the next of kin.”
    Normally homicide would do that—they must have thought Pitre could get there faster than they could. Pitre was obviously too intimidated to go alone to a place where half the swells in New Orleans would be gathered. Skip was sure he meant her to do all the work, and she relished the idea. She had never fit in with the Uptown crowd—at least not in her own mind—but Pitre didn’t have to know that. After that post-deb remark, she was going to enjoy humiliating him by doing this job and doing it right. Even as she vowed revenge on Pitre, it came to her exactly what the job would entail; that Chauncey St. Amant was actually dead. She’d seen the murder, but she couldn’t quite take in the dead part. This must be what shock is like, she thought—a kind of numbness that pushes tragedy out of your head.
    The crowds on the parade route were thicker than Southern flattery, but Prytania, a block from St. Charles, was a ghost