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She had gotten the best genes from both parents—Chauncey’s dark coloring and Bitty’s Phidian profile. She’d married young and divorced early. She might not be Skip’s favorite conversationalist, but for all her pampered existence, she was a gentle enough soul.
    “Skippy, it’s political, don’t you think? My daddy had enemies. Mother used to warn him all the time. ‘Chauncey, you shouldn’t be so outspoken. There’s a lot of nuts in the world.’ She was right, I guess. It’s got to be political, don’t you think, Skippy?”
    Skip didn’t know whether Marcelle spoke for the benefit of the dicks or whether she just didn’t mind talking in front of them. She said, “I just don’t know,” and wondered if it could be political.
    For the first time she started to think of the difference Chauncey St. Amant’s death would make in the political and cultural life of the city. It would be a huge loss. He had been a member of the Boston Club, which did not admit Jews, blacks, or women, but he had publicly spoken out against the club’s policy. That might seem a small thing to outsiders, but in the circles in which Chauncey moved, it was radical. It would probably have been his undoing if he hadn’t been the son-in-law of Haygood Mayhew. And that was just a tiny facet of his genuine commitment to civil rights.
    He was president of the Carrollton Bank, which had one of the best affirmative action policies of any large corporation in the city. It had black and female vice presidents, and minorities in plenty of other executive spots. And he was a prominent liberal Democrat who had helped elect the current black mayor, Furman Soniat. Lately there had been talk that he might run for office, possibly for the state senate, though Soniat was thinking of moving up himself.
    He was also a jazz buff and one of the founders of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. In addition, he had taken on several young musicians as his personal proteges, helping them find gigs and giving them what he called “artistic subsidies” when they needed them. Invariably his proteges had been black, and some of them had taken advantage of his generosity, spending the money on drugs and ending up in jail, which gave the racists in Chauncey’s crowd ammunition against his liberal civic ideas—ammunition of the sort that is whispered rather than aired in the press. But a couple of unfortunate incidents hadn’t stopped Chauncey on either front. He believed in civil rights and he believed in music, and he supported them. Not that he didn’t also support the symphony (in the years when there had been one) and the museum—he believed in the arts, period—but because New Orleans jazz was largely performed by black people, his love of it had been lumped with what, even in the high-toned Boston Club, was still called “nigger-lovin’ “ (by its cruder members, anyway).
    So Marcelle was right. He had lots of enemies. Racists and ultraconservatives who simply wanted to maintain the white male status quo. He’d had those for a long time. However, lately, as his political ambitions had come to the fore, he’d made enemies in his own political camp as well. Black politicians and ultraliberal whites who wanted to see Mayor Soniat in Baton Rouge had turned on him for attempting to split the liberal vote. He had political enemies, all right. But Skip wondered how any of them could get a key to Uncle Tolliver’s apartment.
    It was a famous apartment by New Orleans standards, having once been featured in Architectural Digest. It was slightly ornate for Skip’s taste, but given her current spartan living conditions, she gasped with pleasure on seeing it again. It had the twelve-foot windows that opened from the floor, fourteen-foot ceilings, and anachronistic fireplaces of almost every building in New Orleans; perfect surroundings for the antiques Tolliver collected so lovingly.
    He had painted the walls terra-cotta, a rich backdrop for the