Nobody's Child (The Jeri Howard Series Book 5)

by Janet Dawson

  The magic mirror, my niece had called it, the mirror that opened onto the lower level men’s lounge. All Emory had to do was go up the stairs to the main floor and he had a clear exit, out the box office entrance onto Twenty-first Street, or through the Grand Lobby to Broadway.

  He reached the cross corridor, moved to the right, just a few steps ahead of me. I saw him go left again, into the shorter tunnel that led to the mirrored door. He pulled it open. I followed him into the lighted and carpeted lower lounge. In my peripheral vision I saw the startled face of the man tending the bar in the corner of the lounge, just as Emory made a U-turn and headed up the staircase.

  As I raced up the stairs, the noise level told me that the doors to the auditorium had opened. People streamed toward the exits, some of them heading down the stairs to the rest rooms. At the top of the stairs Emory nearly went to the right, toward Twenty-first Street. But I saw him hesitate, his path blocked by the crush of theater patrons moving toward that exit. He angled left instead, and I knew he was heading for the Grand Lobby.

  I dodged a woman who was walking downstairs toward the rest rooms and made the turn myself. He was just a few feet in front of me, moving for the Christmas tree in the middle of the lobby. The tree was surrounded on all four sides by tables where theatergoers, two and three deep, were buying souvenirs.

  The Grand Lobby was clogged with people now. Emory plowed into a well-dressed older couple, and the woman cried out. The man angrily reached for Emory, but the stagehand dodged in another direction, still making his way toward Broadway. The opaque glass doors were open now, to allow people to stream out of the theater, and I was determined not to let Emory get out to the street.

  Suddenly his forward progress halted. Three little girls in frilly dresses danced in front of him, their arms linked, their moving figures strung out in an uneven line across the green and gold carpet. Emory’s head twirled, seeking another route. Before he could, I caught up with him, grabbing his arm.

  He swung at me, his right hand clipping my chin. I hung onto him as a woman next to me screamed and someone else shouted for one of the security guards. Now the people in the Grand Lobby receded toward the black marble walls like the tide moving off a beach.

  Emory twisted in my grasp, a grim light burning in his blue eyes. He reached for my throat, and now his strong stagehand’s fingers were clamped on my windpipe, as they must have done with Maureen. I kicked him hard in the knee and the pressure released slightly. We pirouetted together in a travesty of a pas de deux, back toward the Christmas tree and the tables where the volunteers selling merchandise scrambled out of the way.

  Emory was trying to push me back over the nearest table, but I managed to shift my trajectory. We crashed sideways into the table. My side hurt like hell but at least the fall caused Emory to loosen his grip on my throat. I kicked his legs out from under him and pounced, twisting his arm behind his back as the Paramount’s security guards and several ushers converged on us from two directions.

  It was evident from the faces of the security people that a knockdown fight in the middle of the Grand Lobby wasn’t their usual round of entertainment. I heard a siren screaming closer and closer and figured someone had had the presence of mind to call the police. The siren stopped and a couple of uniformed Oakland cops rushed into the lobby, ready for action. Thank God it was someone I knew.

  “Murder suspect,” I croaked, looking up at a patrolman named Alvarez. “Oakland Homicide. Sergeant Vernon.” I felt my adrenaline rush dissipate, tired now, ready to let the police sort out everything.

  As Alvarez and his partner hauled Emory and me to our feet my eyes were caught by the metal letters above the front doors. Funny, I hadn’t noticed it before, with all my recent tours of the Paramount. I read the legend, then I laughed out loud. The people gathered around me in the Grand Lobby looked at me as though I’d taken leave of my senses.

  The letters spelled out “Always the Best Show in Town.”

  Forty-five

  ON THE MORNING OF CHRISTMAS EVE, I GOT UP early and drove to Berkeley. I stopped at a coffeehouse on Telegraph and bought two large lattes. Then I walked around the corner to People’s Park.

  It was raining, as it had been the night before, a steady curtain that grayed the sky and wreathed the Berkeley hills in mist. The Catholic ladies and their white van had already been here, dispensing breakfast. Near the trees on the other side of the park and the volleyball courts, I saw small groups of Berkeley’s homeless people clustered together, trying to stay out of the rain as they ate the food that had been given to them.

  I found Rio hugging the wall of one of the buildings that backed onto the park, standing by himself as he polished off a pastry. When he had finished, he wiped his hands on the dark green pants he wore and surveyed me with dark disinterested eyes.

  “You looking for me?” he asked.

  “Among others,” I said.

  I handed one coffee container to Rio. He muttered his thanks, peeled back a portion of the lid, and took a sip. Then he held the cup close to his chest with both hands, as though seeking its warmth.

  “You’re lucky you found me. I’m heading north later on.”

  “Back up to Garberville?”

  “Not that far. I plan to spend Christmas with my sister. What do you want to talk about now?”

  “The guy you saw driving a green Honda. His name’s Emory Marland. He killed Maureen.” Rain blew into my face. I shifted position and adjusted the brim of my hat.

  Rio nodded slowly as he raised the coffee to his lips. “I thought it might be him. Didn’t know for sure. But there was something about him, you know.”

  “I’m not exactly sure why he did it,” I said. I took a sip from my coffee, thinking of what Sid had told me last night. They’d found Maureen’s bank book in Emory’s apartment but I didn’t think her death had anything to do with money. “He seemed to be obsessed by her.”

  I had a hunch Emory’s obsession with Maureen dated from the party, when Maureen had been raped by Stuart and his friends, if not before. Maureen had probably trusted him. After all, she’d known him in school, and he was the person who took her home that night. I guessed in his eyes that gave her some sort of obligation to him. Sid told me Emory kept saying Maureen wasn’t allowed to leave, not without his permission. After all, she owed him, didn’t she? Even her life, I thought grimly.

  “Some people don’t need a reason.” Rio shrugged, his words echoing my thoughts. “She was going back up to Sonoma County. Maybe he didn’t want her to leave.”

  “I still don’t know where Maureen’s little girl is,” I told Rio, staring into his inscrutable eyes. “But you do.”

  The homeless man stared back at me. Then I saw what might have been a smile curl his lips. He straightened, looming over me.

  “It happened like this,” he said. “After Maureen and me got the kid away from the housekeeper, we came up here and spent the night in the park. It had rained the day before, the ground was still damp, but that morning was Indian summery. Bright and crisp. I’m not sure which day it was. I lose track.” He shrugged. “Most of the time it’s not important what day it is.”

  Rio sipped his coffee. “I had plans to go up to Garberville. That was about the time my buddy up there started losing the fight with the cancer. And I needed to get another stash of weed. So I told Maureen she and Dyese could hitch a ride with me and my friend. Terry, the guy you talked to.”

  “Terry never said anything about that.”

  “I made him promise not to,” Rio said. “He was gonna pick me up, like he always does, at the corner of Bancroft and Shattuck, that afternoon at two. I figured it wouldn’t be any trouble for us to swing over to Sebastopol, drop Maureen and the kid off at that farm. That was the plan, anyway.” He stopped and took another hit from the coffee.

  “Maureen said she had something she had to do, and could she leave the kid with me for a couple of hours. No problem, I said. I’m not going anywhere. Just so you
meet me at the corner of Bancroft and Shattuck at two, ready to go. So she left Dyese and her stuff here. It was before noon, maybe eleven. I watched her walk up to College Avenue. She caught the 51 bus to Oakland. She must have been going to see this guy that killed her. You say he had her bank book. Could be she wanted to get it back from him. Or that she just had to tell him she was going.”

  Rio scowled. “So here I am in People’s Park with this kid. I scored us some lunch, changed the kid’s diaper, and hauled her downtown to connect with Terry. He was there at two o’clock, right on schedule. But I made him wait. He went off to make some phone calls, said we had to get on the road by three at the latest. The 51 comes back down Bancroft on the Berkeley run. I stood on that corner nearly an hour, watching people get off buses, with the kid getting crankier by the minute.” He shook his head. “Maureen never showed up.”

  I pictured him, this tall hulking homeless man left standing on a corner in downtown Berkeley with a two-year-old kid on his hands. “So you took her north.”

  “Couldn’t leave her on the damn corner. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Where, Rio? To Garberville?” He didn’t respond. “Damn it, Rio, I have to know where Dyese is.”

  “Why? Maybe she’s better off where she is.” His mouth tightened. “Maureen’s old lady doesn’t want her. Nobody wants her. She’ll wind up in some damn foster home.”

  I looked into his impassive face. Then I took a deep breath. “Did you ever have sex with Maureen?”

  Now I got a response. He glowered at me. “That’s none of your damn business.”

  “Rio, Maureen was HIV-positive.”

  The import of what I was saying showed in his eyes. His mouth twisted. “So that’s why you were asking about IV drugs.” He sighed heavily and shook his head again. “I never saw her use them. Never saw tracks. She must have got it the old-fashioned way. Sex.” He shrugged, masking whatever he was feeling. “We all gotta die sometime. Might as well be from loving someone.”

  “Even Dyese? There’s a good chance she’s HIV-positive. But we won’t know until she’s tested. She’s got to see a doctor, Rio. Tell me where she is.”

  “Well,” he said finally, drawing out the word. He finished the coffee in two large gulps. “I guess we need to go for a ride.”

  Rio’s younger sister Annie lived in Monte Rio, four miles west of Guerneville, on the Russian River in Sonoma County. He told me about her on the way north. Divorced, with three young children of her own, she was barely making it on her salary as a waitress, her ex-husband’s intermittent and inadequate child support, and what money her brother gave her. She didn’t ask where Rio got the money, and he didn’t tell her.

  “She keeps telling me to get a life,” Rio said. We had crossed the Russian River at Guerneville and now the highway snaked and curved along the banks of the river, meandering west toward the Pacific Ocean. Shrouded in trees and mist, in winter’s quiescence, the river showed no evidence of the way it looked in summer, when canoers plied its waters and people crowded the beaches. “She doesn’t understand. I have a life. This is it. Sometimes I think it’s a damn sight better than hers.”

  I gave him a sidelong glance but didn’t say anything more. We drove a few more miles with the rhythmic accompaniment of the windshield wipers, trying to keep up with the rain that spattered the glass. Then he told me to turn right. I pointed my Toyota up a twisting, rutted gravel road to a down-at-the-heels wood-frame house, in need of a new roof and another coat of yellow paint. Rio took his duffel bag from the back of my car and we walked toward the house.

  We entered the house through the kitchen, which smelled of cinnamon and onion. I saw two pumpkin pies cooling near the stove and a big pot of beans simmering on a back burner. Somewhere at the front of the house a television set was going at full blast. A dark-haired girl of about ten sat at the kitchen table, making a Christmas wreath, carefully cobbling it together with wire, pinecones, and bits of evergreen.

  “Wondered when you was gonna show up.” Annie fixed her brother with a look of disapproving but affectionate welcome. She was a tall skinny brunette in her mid-thirties, whose thin dark face, like that of Rio, showed a hint of Indian or Hispanic heritage. She had a tense look around her mouth and untidy hair that drooped to her shoulders.

  It looked as though she’d been assembling the ingredients for her turkey stuffing, chopping onions and celery to mix with the pan of corn bread on the counter. Now she rinsed her hands at the sink and wiped them dry on a dish towel. She stood on tiptoe and pecked Rio on his bearded cheek. Then she looked at me appraisingly.

  “Kids been asking about you. Wasn’t sure how you’d get here, but guess you hitched a ride.”

  “This is Jeri,” Rio told her, setting his bag on one of the kitchen chairs. “She’s come after Dyese.”

  Annie’s eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened as she bored a hole through me. “You her mother?”

  “Her mother’s dead.” I wondered how much Rio had told his sister when he showed up here in October with a stray child.

  “You from the welfare, then?”

  I shook my head. “I’m a private investigator. I work for her grandmother.” Each time I mentioned Naomi Smith, the words rang hollow. I hadn’t talked to her in days. I couldn’t be sure I still had a client, at least a paying one.

  This information raised Annie’s dark eyebrows a notch. “What the hell’s going on here?” She looked from me to her brother. “You didn’t tell me the kid had any other family. Especially family with enough money to hire a detective.”

  Rio didn’t explain. Instead he unzipped his duffel and pulled out a plastic sack that bulged at interesting angles. He winked at the girl, who had left off making her wreath and was now watching the grown-ups with interest

  “I got some stuff here needs wrapping, Lorrie. You think you can handle that without your mom and the boys finding out?”

  She pushed back her chair and stood up, reaching for the sack with a grin. “I sure can. I’m good at wrapping, Uncle Len.”

  “You go do that now,” he told her, jerking his chin in the direction of the living room. “I don’t trust those boys not to peek. Your mom either. I’d feel better if this stuff had paper on it and was under the tree quick.”

  Lorrie nodded conspiratorially and carried the sack down a hallway that I guessed led to the bedrooms. Now Rio looked at his sister. “Where’s the kid?”

  “In the living room,” Annie said, pointing at the open doorway through which I could see one end of a brown plaid sofa.

  I crossed the kitchen and stood in the doorway. In the corner at the other end of the sofa, a small pine tree had been festooned with a couple of strands of lights, a meager collection of glass balls and some homemade decorations, colorful construction paper loops, and popcorn chains made of popped kernels strung on thread. I saw a gray-and-brown striped tomcat sitting on the sofa arm, a blissed-out expression on his face as he gnawed at the popcorn. He’d already managed to pick clean several strands of the chain.

  Two boys, who were maybe six and eight, sat on the floor in front of the television. Behind me Annie yelled at them to turn down the volume. When they didn’t immediately comply, she crossed the threadbare carpet with a few brisk strides and lowered the volume herself. The cat ignored her and kept chewing.

  Then I saw Dyese, small and quiet, her curly black head visible through the branches of the Christmas tree. She wore a pale blue romper that looked as though it were a hand-me-down several times over, and a pair of socks that were no longer white. She was hunkered down in the space between the tree and the wall, her hands pulling at the shiny gold ribbon on top of a big box wrapped in bright red paper.

  “She’s been after that one since I stuck it under the tree,” Annie said, her short laugh containing both affection and exasperation. She knelt and picked up the little girl, carrying her back to the kitchen. Dyese scowled at this interruption and vocalized her desire to be back under the tree checki
ng out the goodies. The little girl’s nose was running. Annie pulled a tissue from a box on the kitchen counter and mopped away the moisture.

  “She’s had a cold the whole damn time,” Annie told us. “Maybe even an ear infection. My kids used to get them all the time.”

  “Did you take her to a doctor?” I asked, feeling cold inside.

  Annie looked at me as though I were insane. “I don’t have any health insurance. Don’t have enough money to take my own kids to a doctor, let alone this one. I use home remedies. So does the woman who takes care of ’em while I’m at work. And I make sure they get plenty of food and sleep. That’s the best I can do, unless it’s an emergency. How come this child’s grandmother hasn’t been taking care of her?”

  She looked at me with challenge in her eyes, as though she were afraid I’d criticize her. I wasn’t in any position to pass judgment. She struck me as a decent woman whose budget, charity, and coping skills had been stretched to the limit by the extra child her brother had dumped on her two months ago.

  “It’s a long and complicated story,” I said.

  Abruptly Annie thrust Dyese into my arms. The little girl was heavier than I expected. She twisted around to gaze at me hopefully.

  “Mama?”

  But I wasn’t the woman she was looking for, and her brown eyes became suspicious. She held out her arms to Annie, who folded her own arms across her chest and ignored the unspoken request.

  “I suppose you’ll be taking her to her grandmother,” she said.

  “To a hospital. She’s got to be tested for HIV.” My mind was already racing ahead to Children’s Hospital in Oakland and the antibody test that Dyese needed. I spoke without thinking of the effect my words might have on Annie.