Detective Skip Langdon, New Orleans PD, lived in the thick of the French Quarter and figured she was probably the only cop in the parish who did. Cops, she'd observed, were suburbanites at heart, like most of the folks in the Third District, to which she'd been recently assigned.

After working homicide, it sometimes seemed to Skip that the Third was only technically in the city. There was a housing project, but a smallish one. Most folks lived in nice subdivisions by the lake and on the manicured streets of Gentilly (which also had a tough side, but everything is relative).

When "decentralization" came, homicide detectives became "gen dicks," or general detectives, and in the Third there weren't that many homicides anyway.

Yet Skip was staring down at a corpse in a part of Gentilly that has streets so nasty-neat you want to call a graffiti artist just to get comfortable. The Spanish-style house looked as if it had run away from Florida. The corpse had a hole in its chest.

Ironic, she thought. This is one of those neighborhoods where it just doesn't happen-according to the residents.

The body on the living room floor was that of a woman somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty, tall and thin, with long, elegant legs poking out of a pair of plaid cotton shorts, which she had paired with a white T-shirt. She wore no shoes. She had golden-blond shoulder-length hair, and Skip's first thought was that she was beautiful. Yet Skip hadn't really looked at the face, had merely taken in the facts of death and woman and young.

Neither Skip nor her sergeant, Adam Abasolo, was in a hurry to call an ambulance, as the massive quantity of blood on the beige wall-to-wall was congealed and nearly brown. The woman's body was dead-white, showing that what blood she still had in her had had time to pool on the other side of her body. Officially, neither Skip nor Abasolo could pronounce her, but they knew dead when they saw it. Skip took time to look at the woman closely. "Omigod-I know her. She's my neighbor."
"Since when did you move to Gentilly?" Abasolo sounded genuinely puzzled.
Wildly, Skip glanced around. 'Well, I guess she does live here. I always assumed.... I mean, she's such a French Quarter type."
"Who is she, Skip?"
"She goes by Franny Futura. Damn! I'm going to miss her."

She knew she would feel Franny's death nearly as intensely as if she'd been a friend. Franny was a French Quarter character, as much a fixture in Skip's life and the lives of her neighbors as Jackson Square itself, where Franny read the tarot.

Tarot readers had recently become at least as prominent as the artists and musicians who hung at the Square. There must have been twenty of them at least, and they all knew they had only a minute to catch the eye of a strolling tourist. Thus the man with the purple hair had a sign proclaiming he was a member of Mensa; Hubba-Bubba wore a red cloak and sequined gold headdress (and weighed close to a quarter of a ton); the Mystic Begeleh was a dachshund who spoke through his human companion; and Starlady's tulle-trimmed hat was probably more than two feet across.
You had to be colorful to get noticed in that crowd.

And Franny had been. She'd somehow hit on a mix of the retro, the futuristic and the outrageous that made you giggle whether you wanted to or not. Her garments, clearly meant to simulate some imagined space-suit fabric, were silver. But instead of being fashioned into a little mini number suitable for Princess Leia, they were eminently ladylike (if you didn't count the plunging neckline). The top was a simple sleeveless blouse, plunging as mentioned, and tucked into a tight calf-length skirt to form an outfit that, with hat and gloves, would have been smart.

Franny didn't disappoint. The gloves, also silver, were shirred and pearl-buttoned. They had cut-out fingers that allowed her to lay out the cards.

But the hat was what made the ouffit. About half the diameter of Starlady's, it was a flat silver disk with a wigwam-shaped knob on top. Can you picture it? A perfect, stylized fifties flying saucer perched atop her perfect golden pageboy. She was so tall and thin and elegant, some said she was a drag queen.

Now she was queen of nothing.

Abasolo called the crime lab and the coroner while Skip surveyed the house. She couldn't touch anything yet, but she could look.

And the house will speak to me, she thought. It will give up Franny's secrets. Houses had a way of doing that. A full liquor cabinet, for instance, spoke volumes next to a shelf of twelve-step books.

The first thing she noticed was that Franny had spent bucks here-or someone had. Except for the body on the floor and a water stain where the roof had leaked, the living room looked pretty good. Over the carpet there was a small Belgian-made oriental rug, and there was new, decent furniture, the kind that comes in a set-ordinary, but presentable. The other rooms were furnished more or less with odds and ends. A bit haphazard, Skip thought. But for someone who made a living in flying-saucer drag, it wasn't shabby.

She wondered whether Franny had lived here alone or if she had been married or really was a drag queen. Skip prowled the rooms, trying to get a feel for the woman.

From what she could gather at a cursory glance, no one else lived here. And there was nothing masculine anywhere, nothing to suggest Franny lived with a man. Birth-control pills and tampons testified that she wasn't one. But Skip would know a lot more after the crime lab had done its work.

Abasolo had come with her just for backup and had a meeting scheduled. He left when the coroner arrived.

Alone, Skip took care of the mopping up. And when the crime lab had finished, she assessed once more, now free to take in the details. By now she already knew, from Franny's driver's license, that the victim's true name was Frances Reynaud and that she did indeed live at this address.

Skip opened closets and drawers. All the clothes were women's, many with designer labels. There were no photos anywhere. Not much attention had been paid to the kitchen. Oddly, there were cheap plates but plenty of Waterford glasses. Clearly, Franny was a person who entertained only for cocktails-or at least had done so once. Skip had the impression of someone who'd invite a friend over, realize she had no glasses, would go down to Adler's, buy out half the store, then hop over to Hurwitz-Mintz for an instant living room. The place looked as if Franny had bought fast, without shopping much, just gathering things she thought she ought to have

And that she could suddenly afford, Skip thought.

There were only a few books, mostly coffee-table tomes about New Orleans, and one or two paperbacks. The paperbacks, curiously, were both about Marie Laveau, the nineteenth-century voodoo queen. Skip was startled. She hadn't seen candles, an altar, anything except the tarot cards to suggest an interest in the occult. A voodooist would have a much funkier house, littered with the bits and pieces of a complicated system of worship. So Franny probably hadn't been a devotee, and from the looks of her bookcase, she didn't care much for history, either. Still, many people, including Skip herself, were fascinated by Marie Laveau. She opened one of the books and began leafing through.

A drawing caught her eye, a picture of Marie fixing a white woman's hair, and remembered that the priestess had also been a hairdresser. It was said she was so good at divination because she already knew everyone's secrets. What woman doesn't talk to her hairdresser?

Turning the page, Skip saw that a paragraph to that effect had been highlighted. Her scalp prickled. It's also true, she thought, that if you're having your tarot read, you probably tell more secrets than you're told.

It certainly gave Skip something to think about. Something that made her look around for a few household records. Sure enough, in the closet was a file box containing a file marked simply HOUSE. The deed had been filed there, along with copies of Franny's original offer, the seller's counteroffer and the final contract. All the documents listed Franny as the buyer. If she had a sugar daddy, he'd given her cash.

But Skip was betting she didn't.

Next, she found an address book, which she leafed through. Most of the names were those of women. She moved on to an appointment book and saw that Franny had had quite a few repeat clients. Three names-Roz Bordelon, Holly Mayfair and Mona Spindel-appeared about once a month. Actually, looking more carefully, she saw that Spindel had stopped getting readings awhile ago but had been back within the last week.

Skip checked the phone book. Uh-huh, there she was. Or rather, there they were-Charles and Mona Spindel, on Philip Street. That meant a husband, a nice home in the garden district and, for Skip, an idea that was growing.

She was remembering something a psychiatrist, a particularly witty one, had once said to her at a cocktail party. "I keep hoping," he said, "that someday Hamlet's going to walk through that door. But no. It's always Othello-day after day after day."

"Relationship problems?" Skip had laughed, figuring he exaggerated, but perhaps psychiatry and the cards had a lot in common. It certainly suggested a way Franny could have come by the house with all its nice new Waterford crystal.

Then she found Franny's savings-account book, and there, plain as day, was what she needed. No big deposits at all in the last week or so-in fact, just a few bucks in the bank. But plenty of deposits in the previous two years, plainly marked with the initials "M.S." There were also past-due bills. Franny had needed a new roof and hadn't had the wherewithal to pay for it.

Skip's hunch was growing so strong, she was impatient to play it, but first she canvassed the neighbors and learned that two or three had heard the shot but thought it was something else. Better yet, one had noticed a woman visiting Franny two nights before.

Skip couldn't wait to get to Franny's colleagues on the Square. As it happened, Skip had friends on the psychic circuit, as did nearly everybody in the French Quarter, which is only about thirteen blocks in area. But what a thirteen blocks! Novelist Walker Percy once said there were "more nuns and naked ladies" in New Orleans than anywhere else, but Skip was pretty sure he meant her neighborhood alone. The Quarter had everything else as well, and Starlady, as it happened, lived around the corner from her.

The astrologer liked to get to the Square about mid-afternoon, usually after a visit to the library. She was hooked on detective fiction, and there was a lot of dead time between customers.

None of the regulars were at their tables except the self-proclaimed Goddess of Jackson Square, who was wearing peacock feathers today. Skip got a Lucky Dog and went down to the levee for a river break.

By the time she returned, Starlady was there; having indeed been to the library, she was poring over a Marcia Muller novel as if there were no tomorrow. She made her living, however, betting that there was, and she routinely tapped into it via a thoroughly up-to-date astrology program installed in her laptop, which she kept at the ready in case a customer interrupted her reading.

Skip approached. "Good book?"
"Hey, Skip. Sit down and talk to me."
"You'll never get a customer that way."
"Oh, who needs one? I'm reading."
"Have you heard about Franny?" Starlady's lips arranged themselves into something Skip couldn't quite make out. "What happened?"
"Somebody shot her."
"Umph." The astrologer nodded her hugely hatted head, seemingly waiting for details.
"You don't seem too surprised."
"Something about her.. .1 don't know. Who ever heard of a psychic who takes checks?"
Skip laughed. "Why not? Because you know in advance if they're going to bounce."
"No, no. It's too commercial or something. I can't put my finger on it."
"You sound as if you think she was up to something."
"I guess I had a weird feeling about her." Starlady smiled and lifted an eyebrow. "She used to read at the Tea Leaf. Maybe they're like that there."

Skip supposed it was a psychic's privilege to be enigmatic. She bade farewell to her neighbor and made her way to the Tea Leaf Palace, an institution nearly as old as the Square itself. It's a storefront equipped with booths for tarot readers, some of whom have been there for years and enjoy a certain amount of local fame. If Franny had read there, she had worked among the elite of her ilk.

The woman at the counter wore flowing robes and a sequined scarf around a head of red curls, as if she'd stopped by a uniform store and picked up a gypsy suit. Skip stated her name and business. "I hear Franny used to work here," she began and waited a moment but got no response. "I was wondering if you could tell me a little about her."

The woman's jaw tightened. "I don't know anything about it."
"I didn't mean the murder. It's Franny herself I'm interested in. What sort of clients she liked to see, what her specialty was...."

The gypsy laughed, a sort of bray that sprayed saliva. 'Specialty! Honey, in this business, there's no such thing as a specialty. Only one question in the world. Client after client after client, they've got only one thing on their mind."
Bingo! Skip thought. Othello. 'Their relationship?" she asked. "The man-woman thing?"
"You'd think nobody in the world gave a damn for the stock market or ever got diagnosed with a fatal disease. It's love, love, love. Oh, well, it makes the world go round."
"Are any of these lovers already married?"
The woman brayed again. "Oh, all of em-to somebody else."
"Somehow I just had that feeling." Skip smiled. "I bet they're repeaters too."
To Skip's surprise, the gypsy smiled back. "Repeat offenders, you'd probably call 'em."
"So Franny must have had a pretty regular clientele."
The gypsy got a peculiar look on her face."Seemed to, but somebody didn't like her."
"The person who killed her, you mean."
"Oh." She turned pink, in sudden confusion. "No, I didn't mean that. I meant the person who got her fired."
Skip uttered one pregnant syllable: "Oh?"
"Never found out why. Just one day there future was a call, and then she was out of here."
"A call to whom?"
'The shop owner." She inclined her head toward a dapper man bent over a tarot layout. "Joseph."
In a thick accent Skip couldn't identify, Joseph informed her that personnel matters were confidential and that she was at worst tacky, at best tactless, for daring to bring up the subject.
"I gather," Skip said, "that you're not a citizen."
"You gather wrong."

"Evidently, you need filling in on the laws of the land. This is a murder case. I need your help. Do I make myself clear?" In fact, there wasn't much she could do if he didn't cooperate, but he crumbled fast. And the words he said were the ones she wanted to hear. Franny had been fired for blackmailing a customer: Mona Spindel.

Mona must have had a dalliance, confided the fact to her reader, and paid for the reading with a check, which gave Franny a name, address and all-important phone number. After that, Mona had kept on paying-until she got tired of it and ratted Franny out.

But Franny had made the mistake of messing with Mona again. Skip thought Franny would have done well to remember that uptown ladies were famous for packing pistols. She headed for Philip Street.

By evening she had the weapon, an I.D. from the neighbor who'd seen Franny's visitor, and Mona in a cell. A nice neat package, she thought. Except for a loose end that threatened to drive her crazy. She went back to the Square to demand answers.

Evening was Starlady's best time. She was reading by candlelight. "I've got a question," said Skip. "You didn't even seem rattled when I told you about Franny. How come you were so cool?"
"I expected it, of course. I did her chart a year ago."
"You're saying you predicted this?"
"Certainly. I warned her, in fact."
"Oh, come on"
Ask anyone on the Square. Everyone knew it was coming." She gave Skip her raised eyebrow. "What do you think we are, a bunch of quacks?"

About the author

Just living in New Orleans has been inspiring for Julie Smith. Her series protagonist is named Skip because "everyone in New Orleans has a nickname, and I chose one that sounded strong." The statement "It's always Othello" was actually made to her at a party. And some of the characters in "Always Othello" were inspired by her neighborhood's tarot readers, with whom she comes into contact almost daily.

Since 1982, Smith has published 15 novels, the latest of which is 82 Desire (Ballantine, 1998). She has a soft spot, though, for her first Skip Langdon novel, New Orleans Mourning, which won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1991. What do the cards hold for her future? A new novel is in the works, the author says, but as to its plot, only Starlady can foretell.