Stone Cribs: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  She spread the butter on her toast. The bread was already growing cold. The butter wasn’t melting. “I would have mentioned Truman’s name. They wouldn’t have bothered us then.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to tell him anything about this.” I sat down across from her. “Do you really think you would have used his name with some white emergency-room doctor?”

  Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I just keep going over it and over it in my head. I keep thinking I could have done something for her.”

  “You did. You took her in, and you tried to get her help. There’s not much else we can do for other people.”

  Marvella sighed, and shook her head as if she didn’t believe me.

  “Does Valentina have health insurance?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marvella said.

  “I think we might want to find out before we start haggling over her bills.”

  Marvella dabbed a spoonful of jam onto the toast, and spread that around as if she were making designs instead of breakfast. It almost seemed like she hadn’t heard me.

  “I feel awkward asking you this after the way I behaved lately,” she said, “but I’d like to hire you, if you let me.”

  I leaned back in my chair. I hadn’t expected her to say that. “Hire me? For what?”

  “I want to find the guy who did this to her.” She pushed the plate away.

  “The rapist?”

  Her breath caught, then she shook her head. “The so-called doctor. The one who cut her up.”

  I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup. “Let the police handle it, Marvella.”

  She shook her head. “That’s just it, Bill. They won’t. If this guy’s smart, and most of them are, he’s paying protection. No one’ll get him.”

  “What about Truman?”

  She looked down at her nails again. “Truman needs to stay out of this.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Truman’s not exactly rational when it comes to Val,” Marvella said.

  I didn’t like how that sounded. “Not exactly rational. What does that mean?”

  “It means he probably won’t arrest the guy.” Marvella grabbed her plate and pulled it close again. But she still didn’t eat the toast. Instead, she took a piece, and started tearing off the crust. “I think there’s been enough tragedy this week, don’t you?”

  Johnson would kill the man? Somehow that didn’t surprise me. I’d seen Johnson’s willingness to take the law into his own hands before.

  “I don’t know what I can do,” I said. “I can’t arrest the guy if I find him.”

  “No,” Marvella said, “but you can give me his name.”

  “Why would I do that?” I asked.

  “So that I can tell people to avoid him.” She leaned over the chair and grabbed her purse. After she flicked the clasp open, she reached inside and removed two pieces of paper.

  She slid them across the table to me.

  I took them. On both pages, Marvella had written a series of names and addresses.

  She bit her lower lip, then seemed to realize what she was doing and stopped. “I run kind of an informal clearing house,” she said. “I tell women who to go to and who to stay away from.”

  “Women who want abortions?”

  Marvella nodded.

  “How come I didn’t know about this?” I asked.

  “You never needed me, Bill,” she said, with a bit of a smile. “Seriously, though, it’s not something I broadcast.”

  “Then how do women know who to call?”

  She shredded more toast, only this time, she ate one of the pieces. “Some don’t,” she said. “But a lot of people know about me, women who’ve come to me before, relatives, a lot of nurses, and doctors who won’t do the surgery themselves, but need someone to recommend. I’ve been doing this for long time.”

  “Why you?” I asked.

  She shrugged, not meeting my gaze. “It just kinda happened that way.”

  “You get paid for this?” I asked.

  “God, no,” she said. “Somebody just needs to keep track.”

  I frowned, still staring at the papers. I hadn’t seen a long stream of women coming to Marvella’s door. I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  But would I have, really? I wasn’t even sure what I would have been looking for.

  She got up, as if she couldn’t sit any longer, and walked to the stove. “Mind if I have some coffee?”

  “Help yourself,” I said. “There’s sugar on the counter and cream in the fridge.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and grabbed a cup from the cupboard. She used to know her way around my kitchen pretty well, back when I had her sit for Jimmy. I had forgotten that, too.

  “You know,” I said, “you don’t have to hire me for this. Just wait until Valentina wakes up.”

  “If.” Marvella’s voice was small.

  “You don’t think she’ll make it?”

  Marvella shook her head. “They’re not telling me everything,” she said. “They’re talking to Truman, even though I keep telling them not to. But an infection’s set in, and she’s got an awful fever. I’ve seen this before, Bill. Most women don’t make it. Especially after the surgery.”

  She brought the coffee back to the table and sat down. Her magnificent eyes were wet with tears. The water had gathered in her mascara, but hadn’t fallen to her cheeks yet, making her eyes glisten darkly.

  “I’ve known Val since we were little kids,” she said. “We’ve been best friends our whole lives. Truman met her at my house when we were all little, and he followed her around like a puppy dog, even then, and I never understood it. I mean, she could think circles around him.”

  “Truman never struck me as dumb,” I said.

  “He’s not,” Marvella said. “He’s just not book-smart, if you know what I mean. She always had a book in her hand. Still does, and she reads them faster than anyone I know. She also reads French and Spanish, and a couple other languages that I can’t remember. She’s brilliant.”

  “What was it then?” I asked. “He became captain of the football team and she was homecoming queen?”

  “I was homecoming queen,” Marvella said, “and proud of it, I might add. Val thought it was the stupidest thing in the world. ‘Why would you want people to reward you for being pretty?’ she asked me once. ‘As if it’s something you can control. And it’ll just go away when you get older. But you can control how much you learn and how you put that learning to good use.’”

  This didn’t sound like a woman who had gone to a back-alley abortionist and worked as a legal secretary. I was intrigued, in spite of myself.

  “I wish you’d met her then, Bill. I mean you would’ve—ah, hell.” Marvella shook her head. “She would have liked you. You and all these books.”

  She swept her hand toward the small bookshelf we had bought when Jimmy started going to Grace Kirkland’s class after school. I had picked out most of the books, and had been happy about it. I had missed my own collection, which I had left in Memphis.

  Then she sighed. I wondered if she knew that she was talking about Valentina half in the present tense and half in the past.

  I hoped that wasn’t prophetic.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If she’s got so much promise—”

  “Why did she marry Truman?”

  “Actually, I was going to ask how she ended up as a legal secretary.”

  Marvella sighed. “I don’t know exactly. She had this dream, you know? She was going to be a doctor. She was doing so well, too. She graduated college with some high honor—I can’t keep that stuff straight, but it was cool, you know?”

  I nodded, just to let her know I was paying attention.

  “And then she applies to all the medical schools in Illinois. Get this, Bill. She graduates at the top of her class. She takes the track you’re supposed to take for medicine.”

  “Pre-med,” I said.

  “Yeah, t
hat,” Marvella said. “She does all the applying stuff, and they get to the interview. Some places turn her down flat, but some guy at one of the schools—it might even have been the University of Chicago—says, ‘What’s the point? You’re just going to get rejected somewhere else down the line. You’ve got two strikes going in. You’re a woman and you’re a Negro. Even if you graduate, what makes you think anyone will hire you?’”

  I winced. I knew what that felt like. I had heard the male version of that speech a few times in my life. Mostly, I let the speech run off me, but every once in a while, it made me so angry that I wanted to hurt someone.

  “There are black doctors,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Marvella said. “But there was no convincing Val that she could be one of them. That’s the problem with our Val. She’s not a fighter. I think she just gave up and got married. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  “But she also got divorced. You’re not supposed to do that,” I said.

  Marvella nodded. “It was a bad marriage. I don’t think she ever really loved him. And I think he always knew, because he got more possessive and controlling as the marriage went on. She couldn’t even come see me by herself without him getting all upset.”

  “So she left,” I said.

  “I wish it had been that simple.” Marvella got up and poured herself some more coffee. “You know, not to make excuses for my cousin or anything, but being a black cop in this city is probably one of the worst jobs anyone can have. You get shit from the white members of the force who still call you a nigger and treat you like one, and then the folks you’re trying to protect—all of us—assume you’re a traitor for working with the cops, who we all know are the enemy. You can’t win.”

  I nodded. I had seen that time and time again. And I even saw the effect it had on Johnson. It made him want to go around the system too many times to make me comfortable.

  “So he’s in this awful marriage, and he has this terrible job, and you know, he had all this promise. He was a football star once, and everybody thought he’d do great things.”

  “Like they thought Valentina would,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Most people didn’t notice Val. I did. My sister Paulette did, and a few professors. But nobody else. I think that was Val’s biggest problem, her ability to disappear. I think if she had been as tough as I am, she might never have gotten some of those talks.”

  “Or she might have ignored them.”

  Marvella nodded as she sat back down. “Anyway, Truman gets this case—this is around the time of the Watts riots in L.A., and things are really ugly here, and he’s doing stuff he still won’t tell me what it is, and one day, Val files for divorce. She couldn’t stand his anger—not that he hurt her, he was just furious all the time at other stuff—and before Truman even knows what’s really going on, he’s single again, and she won’t let him anywhere near her.”

  “But she stayed friends with you,” I said.

  “The worst of it is that I don’t think Truman knows what went wrong.” Marvella set her coffee cup down. “He’s still possessive and jealous and insane about her. I don’t know if you’d call it love. But you heard him last night. He refuses to acknowledge the divorce.”

  “Why hasn’t she left town?” I asked.

  “Friends, job, family,” Marvella said. “I don’t think she’s been anywhere other than Wisconsin or Indiana on vacation. She’s a timid thing most of the time. She doesn’t strike off on her own. That’s why she could be discouraged. If I could give her some spine, I would’ve long ago. I got plenty to spare.”

  I smiled. “You do.”

  She didn’t smile back. “It’s not fair what happened to her. I mean, if it should’ve happened to anyone, it should’ve been me. I’m the one who goes to all the places they warn you about. I’ve slept with the wrong men. I’ve lived the kind of life that my mother would’ve called trashy. Val’s been a good girl, and the one time she tried to do something different than what she was taught, she got slapped down.”

  Marvella’s voice wobbled. She wiped at her eyes with the tip of her little finger.

  “I’m not sure she’s got enough spine to make it through this,” Marvella said. “Surviving something like this, it takes strength. Val’s got too much brains and not enough guts. She might just think too hard and give up.”

  I thought about Valentina Wilson, the two times I had seen her. That first time, with her impish grin and her dry comment on her clothing, she had seemed petite and pretty and ever so bright. The second time, bleeding, dying, doing the best to save herself, she had seemed strong.

  “She did everything she could to survive,” I said. “That seems like guts to me.”

  Marvella shrugged and tried to clean her eyes again with that blackened finger. A tear hung off her eyelashes, and finally fell on her cheek, leaving a black-flecked trail through her foundation.

  I extended my hand. She took it.

  “I don’t want this to happen to anybody else,” Marvella said. “I’ve worked for years to make sure it doesn’t, and then Val….”

  She shook her head.

  “How come she didn’t come to you?” I asked.

  Marvella blinked. Another tear fell. “I don’t know, exactly. She didn’t tell anyone about any of it. The rape, the pregnancy. I think she was afraid I’d tell Truman.”

  “But she had to know the risk,” I said. Then I remembered what Marvella had told me. Valentina Wilson had been pre-med.

  “I hate to ask this,” I said, “but you don’t think she did this on her own?”

  “With a fucking coat-hanger?” Marvella snapped. “She’s not stupid, Bill. I told you that.”

  “But she had some training,” I said.

  “Enough to know better.” Then Marvella took a deep breath, as if she were rethinking her response. “If she had done it, her symptoms would have been different.”

  I nodded. My coffee had grown cold, but I took a drink anyway. Then I looked at the papers she had given me. “What are these?”

  “The first list,” Marvella said, “the ones with the stars, they’re the people I work with. I send women to them. They’re good folk, and I’m trusting you with their names. I know that Val didn’t go to any of them, because if she had, she wouldn’t have gotten in trouble.”

  “Abortions go wrong,” I said. “All surgery can go wrong.”

  Marvella nodded. “But these people, they take care of their own.”

  Like Dr. Jetten last night.

  “And the second list?”

  Marvella set her coffee cup down. “They’re the people I’d never send anyone to. The town butchers.”

  “I assume they pay protection,” I said.

  “Every last one of them.” She spoke with such anger that I knew she’d tried to shut them down.

  “Did Valentina know who they were?”

  Marvella shrugged. “She knew what I did, but she never asked me about the people I sent women to. I have no idea who she knew and who she didn’t.”

  “So this second list is my starting point,” I said.

  Marvella raised her gaze to mine. “You’re going to take the job then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Honestly, I can’t figure out how to start. I mean, who’s going to confess to butchering a woman?”

  “Oh, shit, I almost forgot.” Marvella wiped at her face, then reached into her purse again. “You’ll need these.”

  She handed me some photographs. Three of them were Polaroids. Two were graduation photos, and one was a snapshot. The snapshot was a good picture of Valentina. She was laughing.

  The others were photographs of women I had never seen before.

  “I’ve been thinking about this all night,” Marvella said. “One way this’ll work is if you tell these people you know me.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t expected that.

  “Like I said, a lot of people know what I do, and they know that I keep track of who does a good job a
nd who doesn’t,” she said. “Most of the people on the second list, they’re in this for the money. They know a good recommendation from me gives them more clients.”

  I set the photos on the lists.

  “What you do,” Marvella said, “is that you tell them that you work for me, and that you know that these women recently had good experiences with doctors I’m not familiar with. Then you show the pictures and ask which one that particular doctor worked on.”

  “These other women have had bad experiences?” I asked.

  Marvella nodded. “And I don’t know with who.”

  “Why would anyone who worked on Valentina tell me? Wouldn’t this doctor know he hurt her?”

  Marvella shook her head. “Most of her symptoms would show up later. Unless she called him for help, he probably has no idea where she is.”

  “And why wouldn’t any of these women know who operated on them?”

  “A lot of these doctors use fake names. They also move around. Many come to the woman’s apartment.”

  “But they’re paying protection,” I said. “They’re known to the police.”

  Marvella nodded.

  “How do women find them?” I asked.

  “It’s all word of mouth,” she said. “Sometimes a friend calls, sometimes you get a contact name who then calls the doctor for you, and sets up the meeting. It’s pretty elaborate.”

  I couldn’t imagine it, being operated on by someone whose name I didn’t know, in my own unsanitary apartment—a person I might not be able to find again.

  “If you already have a list of names,” I said, “why should I even try? I thought you just wanted to know who this was.”

  “Because,” she said. “I have a hunch the person who did this to Val is someone I don’t know.”

  “You want me to eliminate these suspects first?”

  “I want you to find the guy,” she said. “The other thing you can do is pretend to be the boyfriend of a woman in trouble, see who you can find. You’ll probably come up with names I haven’t heard of yet.”

  “This seems like a lot of work for no real payoff,” I said.

  Marvella glared at me. “Right now, that butcher is probably operating on some other poor unsuspecting woman. God knows how many he’s already killed.”