“This…woman who found my daughter. Who is she?”
“She’s a prostitute. Has been for a number of years. The woman is called…everybody knows her by a nickname. I actually don’t know her real name, but I’ll know by the morning. We have her in lock-up for the night, sobering her up. She’s, ah, she’s a drinker. An alcoholic, probably. She’s a bit of a fixture in that, uh…scene. Been around a long time.”
Misery nodded again, this time like she was formally ending our interview. I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out, thinking, what kind of goddamn shit-heap town has the cops kowtowing to the civilians like we’re the ones under investi- gation? By rights I should have stood up five minutes ago and told her, respectfully but firmly, that this was official police business and she had no right to ask for details. Ask? Excuse me, demand details, like she demanded obedience from everyone else who worked for her or cozied up to her or otherwise entered the dense gravitational pull of the great Misericordiae Greenhill. Then I remembered that this was a goddamn shit-heap town and I was a junior dick in my second year at Homicide, fifth year in total, who didn’t have a thousandth of her power and influence. So I kept my head down and my mouth shut, feeling equally ashamed of doing both.
“Thank you, Detective,” she said. “I won’t bother you again. But I needed to know the bare facts of the matter. It was imper- ative, for some reason.” She turned and fixed me with that unnerving stare, and I hopped to my feet like a dog pleading for a treat.
Misericordiae continued, “I always knew this moment would come. This, you calling in the middle of the night, or someone like you. Madeleine… Madeleine was a good girl but she careered through her life, powered by a misguided sense of rebellion. She wanted to punish me, I presume, or irritate me, or do whatever it is that defiant daughters generally do to hurt their mothers. Whatever it took.” She smiled ruefully and drained her brandy. “Well, my dear, you’ve succeeded. Good night, Detective. Ileana will show you out.”
With that Misery glided past me and swept out the door like a wisp of dark smoke. Ileana, the silent butler with the impassive face, had done that little trick of hers again, moving about so silently that I didn’t notice she was there until I heard her cough behind my shoulder. She held a hand towards the open door. A discreet dismissal, but a dismissal nonetheless. I was so relieved to have made it through that ordeal that I didn’t care enough to feel insulted. I didn’t even mind so much that I’d have to turn around and come right back there in about 12 hours to find out Madeleine’s movements earlier that day.
I drove straight home, listening to a jazz station on the car radio. Sure, it’s a cliché—the wiped-out cop, in the middle of the night, driving through the dark streets with clarinets and cymbals in her ears, a smoke in her mouth and a fresh murder on her hands. All it was missing was the rain. But hey, I never said I was original. Besides, I’m a sucker for the classic stuff. I drove home and slalomed the car to a halt outside my apartment block, stuck the police parking permit on the dashboard and staggered inside. I was half-asleep by the time the elevator stopped at my floor, and two-thirds of the way there by the time I’d undressed and washed my mouth out with Listerine. Oral hygiene could wait. That call to Odette could wait. Everything in the world could wait until I got some sleep.
I flopped onto the bed and fell into an embrace with Morpheus in record time. Like I said at the beginning, it had been a long night.
Chapter 3
Rose
I READ this line somewhere once, “Patience—hard to keep it, ’cause it comes and goes.” Patience: never one of my strong suits, and the next morning I found myself putting a severe strain on what little reserves of the stuff I had. Patience: I could almost physically feel it oozing away, out the soles of my feet and falling in tears from my eyes, seeping into the cracks in the tiled floor of the station interview room. Patience, my ass: you try to have some when you’re dragging information out of a half-demented old soak like Poison Rose, when you’re struggling to force cohesion and sense onto illogical ramblings. I feel sorry for women like her, truly—I wish the world didn’t drive them hard into the arms of obliteration. But sympathy doesn’t help me in my work, and work I had to do.
Rose had been transported from Silberling Street by Officers Browne and Mulqueen earlier that morning. They looked bright- eyed and wide awake, which was impressive considering they hadn’t been to bed all night. Good work by two good young women—I’d keep an eye on them. Rose had sobered up by now, this being half-ten, though I don’t know if boozehounds like her ever get truly sober. The alcohol stays in their system, doesn’t it? Like mushed-in layers of grime on a window, maybe. One swish of a wet cloth isn’t going to help you see clearly. Now she was sober and violently hungover. I had the weirdest sense that she might actually have been more lucid if she was still drunk, but it was too late for that; I wasn’t going to throw her a fifth of Wild Turkey at this stage.
I yawned deeply, took another large slug of coffee and said, “One more time, okay? Let’s go through it one more time, make some sense out of all this. Then you can go home or do whatever you want to do.”
Rose nodded herself, slipped a cigarette out of her purse, a bejeweled thing that looked big enough to hold a small dog but small enough to hold most of the remnants of her broken-down life: smokes, make-up, some cash, maybe a change of underwear, probably a bottle of something as quick as she got out of here. She said, “Okay, little miss. You want to know, so Rose will tell you. I hit the streets about nine, which is a bit earlier than my usual time but I’m behind on my rent so I need the extra money. Nothing doing on Bolo or the Zig-Zag. Hours I spent there— nothing doing. Couple of wealthy dames cruising Bolo but none of ’em looked like they’d be interested in a…” Rose smiled sardonically. “…mature lady of professional experience like me. Real chicken-hawks, the lot of ’em. Only after the young stuff.”
She was referring to Hera City’s two main red-light areas: Bolo Street (specifically, the far south end of it), a broad thoroughfare which cut diagonally through the city for four full miles; and the Zig-Zag, a crowded, chaotic, haphazard collection of slummy buildings, spread over about 35 blocks, which housed brothels, strip joints, gambling dens, sweatshops and God knew what else. Supposedly there was even an opium den in the Zig-Zag, though I wasn’t sure I believed that. Could have just been urban legend. The unofficial skinny had it run by a Chinese clan, a wizened old crone and her beautiful triplet daughters, but that sounds a little too good to be true…or too bad, depending which side you’re coming from.
I said, “Please, if we could get to the point. You discovering the girl’s body. I don’t want to rush you, just, you know.”
Rose sighed and said, “Anyway, being in dire straits and needing a trick something awful, old Rose finally shuffled off to the docks. It’s dangerous there but what the fuck. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. You know I got stabbed there once? Years ago. Right under the heart. I’m lucky to be alive. ‘Lucky to be alive’, she sang. La, la, la, la, lucky to be alive.”
Christ on a bike. You see what I mean about patience?
“She was floating on the top. Of the water, you know, out about 20 or 30 feet or something from the wharf. The one where all the real big ships come in? And I’d had a lousy night. Just one trick, this butch bitch who wanted to play rough. I said, ‘No damn way, sister, Rose doesn’t truck with your kinda trick.’ Y’see, I’m a poet, too.”
She began laughing but it quickly disintegrated into a hacking cough, a real lung-wrenching, body-lifting spectacular. I let Rose get her breath, bring her system back to her approxi- mation of normal.
Eventually she said, “Met her about a hunnerd yards back the street. Nah, more. Hunnerd an’ 50. We fell into one of those old alleyways. She was insistent at first, but sort of nervous, too. Guess it was her first time with a pro, I don’t know. Kept pushing up against me, breathing right into my ear. Something hard in her pocket, too. It was really digging into
me, ya know? I said, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket?’ She laughed real hard and got this funny kinda…tender kinda look on her face then. She stroked my hair and goes, ‘You’re funny, buttercup. I like you.’ That’s what she called me—fuckin’ buttercup! Can you believe it?”
Lah-dee-dah. I needed another cup of Joe. I excused myself— Rose didn’t look like she cared either way—and exited the interview room. It led onto a corridor: to the left, the office of Chief of Detectives Ann Etienne, to the right, the main office in the Detectives Division building, which was where most of the dicks had their desks and which led, in turn, to the muster room, front desk, holding cells and admin offices. I went right. The place was buzzing even though it was still pretty early; I guess crime is a 24-hour gig, so ours is too. A couple of the women looked up and nodded hello, or smiled over as I passed. A few stood around the coffee-maker, shooting the shit, killing time, delaying the start of their working day. These gals were Vice, for sure—I could tell by the hairstyles alone. They each had a trendy ’do: two wore a sort of feather-cut, one a long bob with a severe fringe.
It’s funny, but for some reason, the detectives in different sections seem to gravitate towards a specific look, particularly when it comes to hair. Unless someone is working undercover, we all have to wear at least smart casual, if not an actual suit, while we’re on the job. So a civilian wouldn’t necessarily know a Homicide dick from Narcotics or Vice or Robbery or Lady Godiva herself. But we could usually tell each other apart because of the hairstyles. It was nothing official or premeditated, just the different directions the dames of the Detectives Division had taken. It was the way it was because it was the way it was. Vice, like I say, tended to be up with the fashions of the time; maybe it helped them fit in better in that milieu. Narcotics girls often had longer hair, plaited or woven into a bun, worn high on the head. We used to joke that prolonged exposure to those wicked, wicked drugs had made them apathetic and slatternly, too whacked-out to get a proper haircut. Robbery, almost to a woman, had shoulder-length hair in a neat ponytail. They were that bit more gung-ho than the rest of us. And as for Homicide? Sort of a mix, though many of us liked it short.
I resisted getting a crop for a few years—I’m very small with quite delicate features, and used to worry that it would make me look babyish, too much like a little girl playing make-believe in a big girl’s world. I kept it to my shoulders, layered with a long fringe, until one night when a suspected felon, this big bruiser with arms like sides of beef, used my black hair to swing my face around to her waiting fist (which was the size of half a side of beef ). When I woke up, I took the scissors to it myself and have kept it cropped ever since.
The patrol officers, of course, get stuck with a hideously unflattering uniform and have to hide their hair under a cap. You can bundle it up with pins or hair-grips if you want, but most of them just get it cropped and to hell with it. We’ve all been there. It grows back.
I strolled to the coffee machine and the three women moved to allow me access. One of them, Littlestone, I’d been talking to earlier. She’d filled me in on Rose, her real name, her background. Born Rosemary Manning, aged 47 or 49 or 51, nobody seemed to know for sure; lived in one of the shittier apartment blocks in one of the shittier streets in the east side sprawl. I noted down the address though it was likely that Rose would be gone from there, or kicked out, within a few weeks. That’s usually how it was at the more wretched end of the prosti- tution racket in this city. Transient women, directionless, with little to keep them steady or hold them in place. Poison Rose had been a hooker, Littlestone estimated, for over two decades. Before her time on that beat but her predecessors reckoned they knew Rose. Apparently as Rosemary Manning she’d been a teacher, languages or literature, something refined like that. Steady job, steady life, until something came along in her mid- twenties to knock her flat on her ass. Cue going off the rails, cue desperation, cue an abiding, poisoned romance with the bottle and turning tricks to pay for it. There were rumors of a child, probably unsubstantiated. Rumors she’d once killed a trick in self-defence, a little more likely.
I pushed down the lever and hot, bitter coffee belched into my mug, a few drops splashing my hand. The mug was a silly old thing, squat and wide with a picture of a clown on the side. Like most everyone else I had a mortal dread of clowns, but it had been a gift from Odette, one of the last things she gave me. She’d picked it up for chump change in a flea-market on…I forget the street. One of the side-streets off Pasiphaë Prospect, I think. (This formed the main east-west axis of Hera; in other words, the horizontal to Bolo Street’s vertical, though not quite at right angles.) Odette told me the street name but I forget it now. I guess she was right about me never paying attention.
Littlestone tapped me out of my reverie by saying, “Y’gettin’ anywhere in there?”
“With her? Rose?” “Yeah. Any joy?”
I shook some sugar into my coffee and replied, “Nah. Not so far. Bits and pieces. She remembers things but it’s all messed up in her head, you know? Her memories don’t come forward the way ours do. Even memories from last night. I mean, she thinks 20 years ago and yesterday took place ’round about the same time.”
Littlestone nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, hope I was of some help. And good luck, Auf der Maur. Anything else you need, you know where I am.”
“Yeah, thanks. What you gave me, it helped, for sure.”
We both went our separate ways, her to a desk in the furthest corner of the room—Vice had a little enclave over there—and me back to the interview room. I took a deep, calming, resolute breath and opened the door. Rose was staring at the smoke curling from her cigarette, following its fluid, erratic movement like she was gazing at a mysterious belly-dancer, a pale skinny girl, exotic and erotic, her limbs bare and her face forever obscured. I said to myself, Cut that crap out, Genie. Cut out the flights of fancy. Get over there and knock some facts out of this old broad.
I sat opposite her and snapped, “You were telling me about your one trick of last night. So go on. You wrapped up business and what then?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Ooh. Straight to it. Alright, little miss. What happened then was that she headed back towards town, on foot, and I carried on to the docks. Also on foot. Figured I might find a bit more action down there. Figured my luck was in! Ha ha ha!”
“And…?” I said, impatience palpable in my voice.
“And…” Her face dropped; something clouded her eyes. This wasn’t booze or madness, though—this was recollected memory. She was seeing Madeleine Greenhill’s dead body again. “I snuck in by the side gate. Security light’s busted out there, ain’t it? And those gals don’t give a shit about the likes of me, anyway. Toss
’em a 20 every few weeks and they turn the other way.” There was a long pause; I held my breath. “And you know the funniest goddamn thing? My eyesight’s shot to hell but I saw her the second I looked over there. That’s, what? 60, 70 yards away and she was lying flat in the water and I spotted her. ’S like I was meant to see her, don’t you think, Detective? I don’t believe in fortune or coincidence or any of that stuff, but I was meant to see Misericordiae Greenhill.”
“Madeleine. You saw Madeleine Greenhill.” “Yeah… You know who I mean.”
So she knew who the victim was. Someone must have blabbed in the lock-up. Provisionally knock off two gold stars from Browne and Mulqueen’s accounts.
“Go on, Rose.”
“I saw her. Saw that polka dot dress. I shuffled on over there and got up close to the edge. Saw her black hair, her face all mangled. She was floating, sort of bobbing with the waves. Her arms and legs out like that, you know?” She sprawled in her chair, four limbs spread-eagled stiffly. “I knew she was dead. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? Didn’t matter that her face was gone. You could tell.”
“Okay, so wrap it up. Did you see anyone else in the vicinity?”
“The vicinity?”
“The area. The docks. Did you see an
yone else?”
“Not down that far. There were people back up in the security shack, near the entrance, and I could hear shouts and noise from across the water, the other side. The pier over there. Women loading a boat or unloading it or something. But where I was, nah.”
“What did you do when you saw the body?”
“Walked back to the street, found a phone, called Josie Law,
told ’em where to find me, walked back to where the girl was still floating and waited for Josie. I had nearly a whole bottle for company.”
She cackled, an awful, depressing sound. I said, “You didn’t inform the on-site security guards?”
Rose snorted with derision. “Those clowns? They’re so dumb, they got trouble figuring out which shoe to fit which foot every morning. Listen, sister, I might pay those miserable cows their backhander when required, but I wouldn’t trust ’em to investigate a cereal packet.”
I smiled. “So you don’t think much of them, then?” “Now you get me, little miss.”
“And what made you make that call? I mean, you could have just left her. A woman in your…position. You don’t necessarily want to attract our attention.”
There was a flash in those bloodshot, watery eyes; an angry spark from the core of Rosemary Manning. “I’m a human being, ain’t I, godammit! Just ’cause I work as a whore. That’s all it is, work. Not the real me. I’m a human being and I got empathy like anyone else and when I saw that poor little girl floating there, dead…”
I hushed her with my hands and said, “Alright. Alright. I apologize for that question. It was unnecessary.” “Fuckin’-A unnecessary.”
That was about it for now, about all I was going to get, and I had things to do, calls to make, domineering old matriarchs to brace for information. I said, “Okay, Rose. You did great. You’re free to go.”
The Polka Dot Girl Page 3
