Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  She had showered and changed clothes and had managed to down a cup of coffee before her meeting with the chief. She’d dearly have loved a workout, but she’d settle for more coffee and something to eat. The coffee was easy. She poured herself another cup from the pot she’d made before her meeting with the chief. Food was another matter. She shared Mimi’s feelings about eating anything from the department cafeteria, including what dropped from the metal hooks in the vending machines on the first floor, but there wasn’t enough time to go out for anything and be back in time for her morning meeting with the Unit. Dammit, if she hadn’t had to listen to the chief rant and rave for the better part of an hour...

  “Come in!” she called out in response to the rapid-fire rapping at her door and Eric charged in, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep but bristling with the energy of newly-discovered information to impart. She noticed, not for the first time, that the stubble on his unshaven face produced hair much darker that the bright red hair on his head; but she also noticed for the very first time a few white hairs sprinkled among the dark, reddish brown ones. She waved him toward the couch and as he sank down, she poured him a cup of coffee, remembering how young they were when they’d met and become instant friends at the police academy. Aware, owing to the white in his beard and to the silver strands in her own auburn hair, of how many years ago that was.

  “Sandra Mitchell,” he said stifling a yawn and accepting the mug of coffee from her. “We found her car a block from the bar. Big, shiny, brand new Cadillac.”

  “Do we know where she lives?” Sandra Mitchell had been dead for a little more than seventy-two hours. Getting inside her residence, gaining access to the details of her personal, intimate life, was crucial, and every lapsed minute literally could mean the difference between apprehending her murderer and not. Gianna knew Eric knew this, knew that he was talking about the car because that was all he had to talk about at the moment. But she had to ask, just as she had to feel the disappointment at the answer she knew was coming.

  He was shaking his head. “It’s still got New York tags, but we’re getting close. The canvass turned up three people who’d seen the car recently, all of ‘em ex-New Yorkers who notice things like New York tags, and the parking enforcement agent who wrote three tickets on it since Thursday night for being parked in a Residential Permit Zone. He thinks the car lives near East Capitol and Eighth.” He drained his cup and stood up.

  “By the way, I heard from my friend in Maryland, the one who took a look inside Ellie Litton’s house for me? Empty as a church on Monday. The way he pieced it together, a week after her body was found, a moving van showed up and cleaned out the place, didn’t even leave a dust ball. So, yeah, we’ve gotta find Sandy’s place ASAP.”

  “And I know you will, Eric. But first, my friend, you’ll go home and get yourself cleaned up, maybe get a nap.”

  “I’m all right, Anna.”

  “But you look like crap. Go on, I’ll hold down the fort until you get back.” She walked to the door with him.

  He opened the door to leave, and then turned to look back at her, making no effort to smother the yawn that stretched his face. “And you look marvelous, as always.”

  “Thanks pal,” Gianna said, stifling her own yawn as she closed the door behind him.

  She poured herself another cup of coffee and dropped into the chair behind the desk, back aching with the motion. She doubted that she looked marvelous, but she knew first hand how much difference a hot shower and clean clothes could make after a long night of work. Eric wouldn’t sleep, she knew, but he’d shower, shave and change and eat, and return feeling renewed, and she needed him feeling renewed, because there would be no rest until they knew everything there was to know about Sandra Mitchell, Ellie Litton, and Millicent Cartcher. And until they found out who Sandy and Ellie and Millie had in common—because Gianna was convinced that the three women were lured to the Washington, D.C. area by the same person. Knowing who that was would lead them to the identities of the three Jane Does, the other victims.

  Gianna’s phone rang, her private line, and she snatched it up, the relief in her voice audible at the sound of Mimi’s voice, exhausted though it was. She said she’d had to fly into Baltimore-Washington International Airport, via Atlanta, in order to arrive in time for work. She would, she said, tell Gianna all about it later. Unless, of course, Gianna planned to work all night again. Gianna assured her that was not the case, and after agreeing where and when they’d meet later that evening, Gianna hung up feeling truly renewed. She had not wanted to admit to herself how really worried she’d been about Mimi. She wasn’t surprised that Mimi’s cell phone was either turned off or that the battery was dead. Mimi hated the telephone. She spent ninety percent of her working life on the phone, and as little time as possible on it when not working, but she was surprised that Mimi wouldn’t have known how worried she’d be.

  “Come in!” she snapped at whoever was knocking on her door as she looked at her watch. She stood up as the door opened and Alice Long entered. “I’m on my way down, Alice,” she said.

  “I need a moment, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind.”

  Gianna waved her in and into the chair beside her desk, and sat back down, instantly on alert. “What is it, Alice?”

  “One of those Jane Does, one of the Black women. I may have met her. I was reading through the crime scent and autopsy reports this morning and there’s mention of a kind of birth mark on one the women. A misshapen ear.”

  “I recall that,” Gianna said slowly, “though didn’t the ME call it more of a birth defect?” she asked, recalling the particulars of that autopsy report.

  Alice didn’t respond immediately, obviously very shaken by what she had discovered. It was one thing to be a cop, to be an observer and a chronicler of society’s evils, but it was something else entirely to have a personal relationship with that evil. To find the slightest familiarity within the uncensored and graphic language of an autopsy report would be disconcerting, to say the least. “I suppose that’s really what it was,” she replied quietly, the soft edges of her Southern accent the perfect resting place for the sorrow she obviously felt. “She’d had it cosmetically repaired, but if you looked real close, you could tell it wasn’t a normal ear. But you know the funny thing? Nobody would have noticed if she hadn’t called attention to it herself, either by telling people about it, or by trying to hide it. I guess when you live with a thing, it’s always noticeable to you.”

  Gianna allowed a moment for the weight of Alice’s words to settle before beginning her probe. “What was her name, Alice? Do you remember? Do you recall anything else about her? Where she lived?”

  “I only was in her company twice. I remember she was very nice and very shy, not really comfortable in a large group of people, even though she knew most of them. But she was very nice, with a sweet smile. A gentle person. And she always sat at a table with her face resting on her hand. So she could cover up her ear.”

  “Alice...”

  “I met her because she was from my hometown. There’s a group of us that keep in touch with the roots, so to speak, men and women, all ages. We laugh about how many queers that rich South Carolina soil produced. Most of us have been up here for years, came up to go to college or to the military and stayed, but Mabel had just gotten here. That was her name: Mabel. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a last name, but I can’t remember it. I’ll call some of the others and see if anybody knows if you want me to. They’ll want to know what happened since a couple of ‘em felt like they had to keep watch out for her.”

  Gianna walked around her desk to stand beside Alice, whose dark, lovely eyes were swimming with tears that Gianna knew the other cop would not let fall. “Somebody else can make those calls, Alice,” she said gently, placing a hand on the other woman’s shoulder.

  A tremor coursed through Alice’s body. Gianna felt it and resisted the impulse to move her hand. Instead, she applied gentle pressure, and Alice
calmed almost immediately. “That’s all right; I’ll do it, Lieutenant. They wouldn’t talk about a home girl to a stranger. Especially somebody like Mabel.”

  “What do you mean, ‘especially somebody like Mabel’? What about her was special?”

  All of the emotion Alice had worked to contain beneath the veneer of professionalism escaped in a sob of pure frustration. “She was a mess, Lieutenant! All she talked about was how much she hated that ear, and how much she hated that she was getting older, and how much she hated that she was heavy, and how she’d wasted her whole life, stuck in some country South Carolina town, waiting for somebody to love. She hadn’t had very much experience, if you know what I mean. She came up here because of some woman she hooked up with in one of those internet chat rooms. Hadn’t met the woman in person but once and hadn’t ever had sex with her. But she was in love! We tried to reason with her, but she wouldn’t listen. Said we’d understand when we were all old and fat like she was. When we were faced with a last chance at love. That’s what she called it, Lieutenant: A last chance at love. Isn’t that the saddest, most pitiful, craziest thing you ever heard?”

  Sad and crazy and pitiful, perhaps, Gianna thought, and almost certainly deadly.

  *****

  “You were supposed to be on R and R, Patterson, not digging up murders. And how did you get murder out of this anyway?” Tyler was not as excited as Mimi about the possibility that Millicent Cartcher and Ellie Litton were the tip of a very deep and dangerous iceberg. Her discovery that morning, sitting at her desk drinking juice and catching up on a week’s worth of papers, that Ellie Litton had been found murdered on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial was galvanizing; and while she dreaded having to call Sue and Kate with the news, and their friend, Sarah, who’d grown up with the murdered woman, the sense that she was on the brink of a major story was working its usual magic on her.

  “Surely you see the potential here, Tyler.” They were huddled at their usual spot in the hallway near the water cooler, she trying to capture his attention, he trying to escape back to his desk.

  “All you’ve got is two dead women, Patterson.”

  “Two dead lesbians, Tyler.”

  “Which means diddly. Lesbians get offed in this sick society like every other segment of the population, there being plenty of equal opportunity killers.” He stalked off and left her standing beside the water cooler.

  She returned to her desk and began sorting through the stack of mail that had accumulated during the week she was away, but her focus wandered until she accepted that delaying the inevitable would not make it more palatable. She considered whether to call Sue or Kate, since at this time of day she couldn’t speak to them both simultaneously. “Sure you can, Patterson.” The voice of disdain spoke to her and she made a conference call, getting both women on the line. Their grief was deep, mitigated only by their gratitude for Mimi’s immediate response. They brushed off her insistence that she’d done nothing more than read a week’s worth of newspapers that morning by noting that she cared enough to pay attention when they expressed concern about their missing friend. That was more than they’d expected and they were grateful. If Mimi wouldn’t mind, they’d appreciate it if she would keep them apprised of the results of the police investigation. She promised that she would, hung up, grabbed her purse, and rushed out of the newsroom.

  The young parking lot attendant muttered something that probably was profanity in Hindi when she showed up to claim her car. She’d been in the lot for only about three hours and he had expected her to be there for at least six more, so her car was against the wall, with four others in front of it. She gave him a nonchalant wave, signaling that she was in no hurry, and propped her butt on one of the concrete stanchions used to separate the monthly parkers from the daily cars. She immediately felt the cold dampness through her gabardine slacks and she shivered. She looked up at the sky. The pewter-colored clouds hung low and looked full. Winter was at hand. She raised the collar on her jacket as a light wind pushed through the parking lot and she wished that she’d dressed more warmly. Then she remembered that these were the clothes she’d worn home from Florida. No wonder she was cold; she was dressed for November in Florida, not November in D.C.

  She stood up, stuffed her hands into her pockets, and paced back and forth until the attendant brought her car. She apologized, gave him five dollars for his trouble, and roared out of the lot and into the mid-morning traffic, the new engine in the thirty-five year old Karmann Ghia easily allowing her to keep pace with the newer stuff on the road. Almost of its own volition, the little car headed east, across the northern border of town, toward the Washington Women’s Gym.

  She thought of Kate as she sat in traffic, watching a light turn yellow and then red for the third time, and wondered if there ever would come a time when she would miss spending a quarter of an hour to traverse a single block. Perhaps if she had no particular place to be and no particular time to be there, it wouldn’t matter how long it took. As it was, however, she was stealing time from the paper; and though she knew it was time well-spent, she didn’t want to waste the precious minutes sitting still, watching the light change. She should have, she thought, told the newsroom AA that she was going to be out for a while, but she’d checked in with her editor. Anyway, she wouldn’t be able to write a word in the condition she was in. And since she couldn’t go home and go to bed, a workout and a sauna would be the next most restorative thing she could do.

  Once she cleared the downtown gridlock, the cross-town journey was a pleasant one. She always enjoyed how, as the topography changed, so did the city’s energy, from downtown’s edgy pretentiousness to the collegiate atmosphere of Brookland near Catholic and Gallaudet Universities to the laid back, artsy feel of the northeast warehouse district, her ultimate destination. Because Washington was a relatively small city, relative to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or Philadelphia or Atlanta, traversing it was neither difficult nor particularly time consuming, even given the increasingly dense traffic. And because of its low-to-the-ground nature, it was possible to see quite a bit of the city on a northwest-to-northeast trip. Federal law forbade any structure from being taller than the Washington Monument; so while the city had achieved a certain horizontal density, tall buildings didn’t obliterate large chunks of the sight line. Thus, in addition to noticing that pedestrians were huddled into their coats and striding with purpose toward their destinations, signaling winter’s arrival, Mimi noticed also that Grand Opening sales were in progress in two new clothing boutiques and an electronics store, and that gasoline prices hadn’t dropped as low as predicted. She noticed how many of the trees were in full fall regalia, how bold their reds and oranges and yellows appeared against the dull, grey sky, and she was glad she was here in D.C. and not in Florida, where it was warm and sunny and the foliage was tropical and green.

  Once inside the gym she hurried to her locker and changed into tights and an exercise bra. She was rummaging around in her gym bag in search of an errant sock when three sweat-drenched, novice body builders burst noisily into the locker room. She didn’t know any of them well enough to speak to, though she’d noticed them in the last couple of months. She’d been a regular at this gym for half a dozen years now and until recently, afternoons by unspoken agreement belonged to the committed, serious body builders. The surging interest in physical health and well-being meant that more women now used the gym at all hours, which didn’t bother Mimi; the only thing that bothered her was having to wait to use the equipment and that had never happened during the afternoon. Yet. She found her sock and sat on the bench to put them on, aware of the conversation between the other women, but not really listening. Until she heard the words, “old dykes looking for love.” She tuned in to the conversation.

  “You better watch your mouth, Girl. One day you’re gonna be the old dyke somebody’s making fun of.”

  “I might get old, but I won’t be saggy and out of shape like them! And they got the nerve to ha
ve on spandex.”

  “You got nerve criticizing those women like that.”

  “Don’t forget she likes her women old.”

  “I like my women mature because mature women don’t say the kind of stupid things you just did.”

  “Stupid is how they look, stuffing their fat bodies into spandex.”

  Mimi, disgusted, had heard enough. She tied her shoes, slammed her locker door shut, and tried to put as much distance as quickly as possible between herself and people she hoped she’d never have to have direct contact with. She all but ran to the row of treadmills, stepped onto her favorite machine, and in less than a minute was running at full speed. She began to relax as she found her stride and her rhythm, and, taking a look around, she spied the women that no doubt had been the topic of such ugly conversation in the locker room. There were four of them, women she guessed were in their fifties, and none deserving of the awful assessment she’d overheard just moments earlier. They were alternating sets on the leg machines—presses, curls, squats and lifts. They worked slowly but methodically, getting the most out of each set of repetitions, though from a distance it seemed that the woman on the leg curl machine was struggling with too much weight. And at that precise moment, she let out a little squeal and dropped the bar. The weight bars clanged down hard, making a resonant, crashing sound. Mimi leapt off the treadmill mid-stride and reached the group of women at the same pace she’d been running.

  “Are you all right?” she asked the woman seated on the leg curl machine, surmising from the grimace on her face what the answer would be.

  “I think I pulled something,” the woman said.

  “Can you stand up?” Mimi asked, and stood aside while offering a hand of assistance as the woman slid herself sideways in the seat and then hopped to the floor. She limped for a few steps, then steadied and straightened.