Bye-Bye, Black Sheep

by Ayelet Waldman

  “What?” I said.

  “Report never came back. Oh well,” he shrugged. “Not much we could do with it, anyway.”

  “Any bruises or marks on her?” Al asked. “Abrasions that might indicate assault?”

  “None,” the detective said. “And her clothes weren’t torn.”

  “He could have forced her to take off her clothes,” I said.

  “And then put them back on her once she was dead? Doubtful,” Jarin said.

  “He could have killed her after she was dressed.”

  The detective snapped the file closed. “Anyway, that’s it,” he said. “Not much more I can tell you.”

  “Didn’t you interview any witnesses? Any of the other women who were working her corner? Maybe someone saw her get into a car that night.”

  He rose to his feet. “We did our investigation. There were no witnesses. At least none willing to talk. Now, I’ve got to get back to work. I’ve got a pile of live cases on my desk that need my attention.”

  Five

  ONCE we had retrieved his gun, Al walked me to my car, despite my assurances that I could get myself down to the end of the block just fine. He ignored me, which is what he tends to do when I’m trying to prove a point that he thinks is silly.

  I got in the driver’s seat and turned the ignition on. Then I noticed that Al was still standing outside of my car. I rolled down the window. “It’s bugging you, too, huh?” I said.

  “I hate that crap,” Al said. “That kind of shoddy police work.”

  “You think if she’d been a white girl they would have treated the case differently?”

  He shrugged. “Are you asking me if they would have investigated more thoroughly if she’d been a white hooker instead of a black one? I think the fact that she was a prostitute was why they gave it such low priority, but yeah, I think they would have made at least a symbolic effort for a white girl.”

  Al’s feelings about race are unambiguous. Jeanelle is African-American, and Al is the father of two mixed-race daughters. He’s seen racism directed at his family and at himself because of his family, and he doesn’t have a lot of patience with it.

  “What do you want to do?” I knew what I wanted to do. I was hoping he’d agree.

  “Call the brother . . . er . . . the sister, and tell her we’ll put a few hours into the case. We might as well see what we can turn up.”

  “I sort of told her we would give her a sliding scale rate.”

  He sighed. “Just do me a favor and don’t tell Jeanelle. She’s been so happy about us finally turning a real profit.”

  “I’m not going to tell Jeanelle. I’m not the one who can’t keep a secret from Jeanelle.”

  Al said, “Should I run Henry Spees through the NCIC?” The federal public defender’s investigative department has access to National Crime Information Center, a database of all offender records. Al’s old colleagues in the office run names for us when we need them to.

  I frowned. We had no business checking on the criminal record of our client. The alleged criminal record. “Yeah, you might as well,” I said. “Just in case there’s anything there we should know about.”

  He patted the roof of my car as if it were a pony he was sending on its way, and I headed off. I had barely enough time to make it down to Westminster to get Sadie before the kids had to be picked up from school. Sometimes it felt like I would only just get myself situated at my desk and it would already be carpool time again. And then there was the famous day that I got a flat tire in front of Isaac’s preschool, and by the time the auto club showed up and changed it for me, it was time to pick the kid up again. Now that was a productive day.

  After my swing through the city, I went home and fobbed the kids off on Peter. He was looking a little dazed but I figured they’d liven him up soon enough. Peter works at night, after the kids go to bed. He routinely starts at around ten or so, and by three in the morning I can usually count on him to be back in bed. The night before, he was still working when I got up with Sadie at six, and I had to force him to turn off the computer and go sleep.

  “Take them to the park,” I said. “I just nursed Sadie so she should be good for a few hours.”

  “Can we ride our scooters?” I heard Isaac asking as I took my laptop into our cavernous living room.

  “Put your helmet on,” Peter called after Isaac. “And your knee pads and wrist guards.”

  I called Heavenly. Grateful we had agreed to help her, she offered to gather her family together so I could interview them. I would have preferred to see them one by one, but I couldn’t refuse her offer of a traditional Sunday dinner at her mother’s house.

  “And you should bring your baby,” Heavenly said. “My mother’s got the magic touch.”

  I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t be forced to do that. It’s hard enough to do a decent witness interview without a baby latched on to the breast. Not that I haven’t done it before. I’ve done pretty much everything with a baby on the boob. Witness interviews, grocery shopping, online banking. I’ve even perfected a maneuver I call midflight refueling, where I nurse the baby while she’s in her carseat and I’m sitting next to her, safely strapped into my own seatbelt. I haven’t figured out how to do that when I’m the driver, though. But if I ever do, that’s when I’ll be totally liberated.

  After I hung up the phone I did a web search. I was hoping to turn up some information on Violetta’s murder. No such luck. I found some local crime reports of the discovery of the bodies of African-American female murder victims, but they were all old cases. There wasn’t much I could do before meeting her family and seeing if any of them had more information than Heavenly. And of course, I was going to have to do what the police should have done and head over to Figueroa and Eighty-fourth some night soon, to see what the other girls on the corner could tell me. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

  The prospect of telling my husband that I was planning on ambling around one of the worst areas of Los Angeles after dark was not a pleasant one. Peter is in many ways the embodiment of the kind of egalitarian companion my girlfriends and I all imagined we would marry. He cooks, he’s a great father, he’s supportive of my career. But he does have his failings, and one of them is a level of anxiety not so much about what I do as about my methods. He gets overprotective, like some kind of Arthurian knight. He thinks I put myself in the line of fire too easily, an accusation that I would consider unfair had I not once been shot while investigating a case. (It was just a leg wound, and had I not been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been any big deal.) His gallantry is very sweet and romantic, and I know it’s justified by my occasional irresponsibility, but what he doesn’t understand is that doing this job well inevitably requires taking a certain amount of risk. I try to be reasonable about the risks I take and I’m careful about my children. They accompany me sometimes—I’ve even been known to use them as distraction, or a way to soften up a potential witness—but I would never put them in danger.

  Anyway, it wasn’t like I was planning on going into a war zone.

  Six

  CORENTINE Spees lived in the Thurgood Marshall Houses on Slausen. She’d lived most of her adult life in housing projects, and this one was certainly the best. She had a two-bedroom unit, which meant that the children were all piled into one room, but Heavenly had bought them a couple of bunk beds for Christmas a few years ago, so it wasn’t too uncomfortable. There was a playground on the property that the children liked to play in; Corentine said if Vashon had his way he’d spend all his time watching the men and older boys playing basketball. She didn’t like to let the little ones out on their own, not since the grandchild of a neighbor had been the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting. The gunmen had been aiming for one of the basketball players, but their aim was poor and they sprayed the swing set. The poor little thing had been shot right through the throat, Corentine told me. Seven years old and dead before she hit the ground.

  Still, this was a better place to live t
han many, and Annette’s girls were doing well in school. The older one, Tamika, was even in an after-school program for gifted children, the same program in which her uncle Ronnie had done so well. After the arrest of her oldest son—who’d been staying with her—on drug charges, Corentine had worried that the housing authority would take away her eligibility and toss her and the children out into the street, as they are permitted to do when one member of a family is involved in a drug crime. But so far that hadn’t happened.

  I was in the kitchen, mashing potatoes and chatting with Corentine and her daughter, Chantelle Green. They’d assigned me this task, I imagine, because it was the least likely for me to screw up. While I pounded away at the potatoes, working in the stick of margarine and handful of salt Corentine had tossed in the bowl, I asked them about their family and their lives. Corentine was a heavy woman, with small hands and a smooth, unlined face. She danced around her kitchen with a light-footed grace that belied her size. She wore her hair high and natural, tied back from her face and neck by a band of brightly woven fabric. She appeared to be of some indeterminate middle age, as young as fifty or as old as sixty-five. She had two gold teeth in the back of her mouth that flashed when she laughed.

  Chantelle was a younger, thinner version of her mother. The same almond-shaped brown eyes, kewpie-doll lips, and skin the color of polished cherrywood, deep golden brown with just a hint of auburn. She had long hair, ironed straight. It hung in a stiff sheet, curling under precisely at her shoulders. Her hands, slicing the ham into neat rounds, were larger than her mother’s, more like Heavenly’s, long-fingered and capable. A nurse’s hands.

  “Oh Mama,” she said, as she deftly carved the meat. “You’d just be so sad if you saw her.” She had been telling her mother about bumping into an old friend from high school who as a girl had been in Chantelle’s honors programs and on the cheerleading squad with her. Chantelle had met her at the hospital in the waiting room outside the WIC program. “She had at least five children with her, Mama. Five.”

  “Maybe she was watching her sister’s babies.”

  Chantelle shook her head. “They were all her spitting image. Five children. And on WIC. Probably welfare, too.”

  “There’s no shame in that, girl. Sometimes a person needs a little hand up, that’s all.”

  “Oh Mama. You know she was a smart girl. She could have been anything she wanted. She could have gone to college. At one time she even said she was going to be a nurse like me. It’s just a shame to see her like that. Her hair all nappy under a rag. Five children.”

  “You about done cutting up that ham?” Corentine said.

  Heavenly, despite having adopted the gender of her sister, had not shed certain accustomed roles. She was not in the kitchen helping us put dinner on the table. Rather, she sat in the living room watching television with the children and her brother Ronnie, who had come up from San Diego especially to meet me. I imagine that there are some privileges of being a man, most notably the right to be served rather than to serve, that are difficult to sacrifice, even once one has changed an ill-suited body into one more appropriate to what’s inside.

  “Mama,” Ruby said. “I’m hungry.”

  I turned to hush my daughter. Despite Heavenly’s invitation, I had left the baby behind. Ruby had whined to join me, however, and I’d finally agreed. When we first arrived, Corentine and I had sent Vashon and Ruby into the children’s room to play. They were close in age, and we figured they’d make easy enough companions. To Vashon’s disgust, Ruby had soon enough rejected his boy toys and busied herself with the stuffed animals that Monisha, the younger of the two girls, kept on her bottom bunk. At twelve, Monisha was still young enough to be willing to play with Ruby, and the two of them had entertained themselves happily enough for a little while, before they got bored and joined the others in front of the TV.

  “It’ll just be another minute, baby,” Corentine said. “Why don’t you go tell everyone to wash their hands and come to the table.”

  Over dinner, with the children present, we limited ourselves to benign topics of conversation. The family told me about Violetta, but they talked of happier days, before they’d lost her to drugs and the street.

  “She was such a good baby,” Corentine said. “The easiest of all y’all. She never cried, never fussed. Even when she was a little girl she was so easygoing, such a quiet girl. Not like you two,” she said, pointing at Chantelle and Heavenly. “Y’all were like a couple of cats, fighting over everything. You’d scratch each other so bad you’d draw blood.”

  At this Ruby looked up, a forkful of creamed corn halfway to her lips. I could almost see the little wheels in her head turning. Blood! Now that’s something I haven’t managed. I’ve hit my brother, kicked him, even bitten him, but I’ve never succeeded in drawing blood.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said to her.

  She popped the corn into her mouth and gave me a yellow-toothed smile.

  “She loved her boy,” Heavenly said. “Vashon, I want you to remember that your mama loved you.” Chantelle and Corentine nodded in agreement. Heavenly continued, “Why don’t you tell Juliet what you remember about your mama?”

  Vashon shrugged, his face bent over his plate.

  “Go on, baby,” his grandmother said. “You can tell about the time when Violetta was living with us and she got you that big birthday cake. It had all your favorite monsters from that movie on it. Remember that?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Sure you do, honey,” Heavenly said. “It was just this year, when you turned seven. Sure you remember.”

  “I don’t remember it,” he said.

  Corentine said, “You do. Sure you do. Your mama was home for almost two weeks. She was doing so well, remember? She was looking for a job, and she went down to the welfare office to see about taking some classes in computers or something. Remember that? You were so proud of her.”

  “I don’t remember nothing!” Vashon said, flinging his chair away from the table. “I don’t remember her one little bit!” He threw down his fork and ran out of the room to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  “Oh,” Corentine murmured, her plump face collapsing, suddenly showing all her years.

  Chantelle said, “Girls, why don’t you go into the kitchen and get yourself some dessert. Tamika, give everyone a piece of cake and take the girls into Nana’s bedroom. You can watch TV in there.”

  “Come on, Ruby,” Tamika said, extending a hand to my daughter to help her down from her chair. “We’ll get some coconut cake and watch a movie. Auntie Chantelle always brings a coconut cake and a video for us to watch.”

  After the girls were gone we sat in silence for a moment. Then Chantelle said, “He’s just grieving. He’s going to be all right.”

  “Sure he will,” Ronnie said. “That boy’ll be all right.”

  Corentine said, “I just don’t understand why he don’t remember her cake. He just loved that cake so much.” She pleated the tablecloth between her fingers.

  “He remembers it, Mama,” Heavenly said. “He remembers it just fine. He just can’t talk about it now.” She reached a long arm around her mother’s shoulders and squeezed.

  Chantelle clucked her tongue. “Mama, what he remembers about his birthday party is that after she gave him the cake, Violetta drank herself sick, threw up all over the bathroom, cleaned out your pocketbook, and then went off with Deiondré, that friend of Ronnie’s.”

  “He’s not my friend,” Ronnie said. “I just know him from the neighborhood. I didn’t even invite him. He just came by to say hey to Vashon on his birthday, and Violetta grabbed him up.”

  I took out my notebook. “Deiondré?” I asked. “What’s his last name?”

  “Freeman,” Ronnie said.

  “Do you know his address?”

  Corentine said, “His mother lives on the other side of the playground. I’m not sure what number, but Ronnie can show you.”

  “Do you th
ink he might know something about what Violetta’s life was like right before she died, who her friends were, that kind of thing?”

  Ronnie shook his head. “He doesn’t know nothing. She just went with him that once.”

  Heavenly said, “How do you know? I thought he wasn’t a friend of yours? Since when have you been keeping tabs on Deiondré Freeman?”

  Before this could turn into a full-fledged family squabble, I said, “I’ll just ask him a question or two. Just in case.” I hesitated. “I hope this won’t be too hard on you, but in order to do a proper investigation I’ll need to know as much about Violetta’s life on the street as possible. Heavenly already told me that she spent most of her time on Figueroa.”

  Chantelle said, “At Eighty-fourth Street. That was her regular corner. She worked it for years. Before Annette got sick they were there together, and then Violetta just kept on, even after seeing what happened to her own sister.”

  “Annette died of the AIDS,” Corentine said.

  “Yes, Heavenly told me,” I said. “Was she sick long before she died?”

  Her mother stuck out her lower lip and it glowed bright pink against her face. “The AIDS took Annette so fast. She just got the pneumonia and went right away.”

  Chantelle said, “If I had known she’d had it I would have made sure she got the triple cocktail. My husband, Thomas, is a resident at UCLA medical school. He could have gotten her into a clinic. But it happened too fast. One day she showed up here with the worst cold, coughing so hard she could barely breathe. Mama called Heavenly and me, and we took her right to the emergency room. But it was too late. Her body was so weak, it just couldn’t fight it. She passed that very night.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “A little over a year ago,” Heavenly said. “Just before Easter.”

  “And where was Violetta when all this was going on?”

  Chantelle said, “My husband went out that night and brought her home. She stayed with Thomas and me through the funeral. And that’s the last time I let her in my house.” She turned to her mother. “I’m sorry, Mama, but you know it’s true. She couldn’t stay off the drugs for her own sister’s funeral. I found her shooting up in my bathroom. In my bathroom. Thomas, he tried to convince her to check into a program; he said he would even pay for her to go to one of those nicer places. He’s such a good man. It’s not like we have the money for that kind of thing. But Violetta wouldn’t even talk about it. Thomas and I had no choice; we threw her out and told her she couldn’t come back.” By the time she finished talking, Chantelle’s face was flushed and a sheen of sweat stood out on her forehead. Her mother just stared down at the tablecloth.