Bye-Bye, Black Sheep

by Ayelet Waldman

  “Where’s Thomas tonight?” I asked.

  “He’s working. Like I said, he’s a resident. He’s on call more than he’s off.”

  I nodded. “When was the next time you saw Violetta after you asked her to leave your house?”

  “I saw her here, at Mama’s house. She’d turn up every couple of months, looking for money, or a place to sleep. She knew Mama had a soft heart and wouldn’t turn her away.”

  Heavenly said, “She did try to clean up every once in a while. Every six months or so she’d get clean. Once a couple of years ago she was clean for almost a month. But she’d always end up going back on the street. Sometimes she’d still be clean when she went back to work. She’d say she could be out there and not use, but once she hit the streets, we knew it would be over soon.”

  “Do any of you know the names of her friends, maybe women who knew her from the corner? Women who might have been out there with her on the night she was killed?”

  Corentine said, “There was one girl she told me about once, a white girl. Violetta said she’d been in the movies. We were watching that movie, what’s it called? With Julia Roberts. I can’t remember it. But Violetta said this girl she knew was in the movie. We found her, too. We went back and forth on the VCR and we found her. She was a pretty girl, blond hair. Real nice looking. So sad to think she could have been a movie star and she ended up out there, doing that.”

  “Do you remember her name?”

  “One of those names that starts with Mary. Mary something. Mary Elizabeth? Mary Alice? Like that.”

  I jotted down the details in my notebook. If the girl was still hanging out on Figueroa it wasn’t going to be that hard to find her. The white prostitutes tended to congregate in other areas, like Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. A white girl in South Central was going to be easy enough to track down.

  “What about boyfriends, or regular clients? Heavenly told me she didn’t know anything about Vashon’s father, but do any of you?”

  Corentine said, “She wouldn’t tell us any of that. She knew how I felt about it. And Chantelle, too.”

  I turned to Ronnie. “What about you? Other than Deiondré, do you know any men your sister saw?”

  “Huh?” he said. During the course of our conversation, he’d slowly shifted his chair around to face the television. Now, his attention was focused on SpongeBob SquarePants, not on my questions.

  “Can you stop watching that for five minutes, please?” Heavenly snapped. “She wants to know if you know any of Violetta’s boyfriends.”

  “We don’t have cable TV in the dorm,” Ronnie said sheepishly. “Um, I don’t know. She saw boys from the neighborhood way back when, but once she got turned out, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me about it, and I sure didn’t ask.”

  I closed my notebook. “Well,” I said. “You’ve given me a couple of leads to follow up on. Did you tell the police any of this back when they were investigating her murder?”

  “They never asked,” Corentine said.

  Seven

  RUBY and I got home to find Peter giving Sadie and Isaac their bath. Sadie was sitting in her little bath seat, her fat thighs jammed through the leg openings. She splashed with her hands, delighted with the sound of her palms slapping against the surface of the water. Isaac was lying with the back of his head submerged and his bony, bent knees poking up. I could not help but contrast my three children, so cosseted and spoiled, with Heavenly’s nieces and nephews, their mothers horribly dead, their grandmother’s and aunts’ love and concern and their own obvious intelligence the only thing protecting them. Things were so easy for me and mine, and so very difficult for them.

  I knelt down next to the tub. As I looked at my babies I wondered, how old were little boys when they began demanding protection from their mothers’ gaze? It seemed so impossible to imagine. I’d grown him inside of me, created him. These toes I nibbled on, the knees poking up from the water, didn’t they belong to me? Isaac dunked his head again, striking out with his legs and catching me in the stomach. The air escaped from my lungs in a rush, making it dramatically clear that this little person was asserting dominion over his own body, that it was separate from me, and belonged to him alone.

  “Isaac!” I said. “Watch your feet.”

  I opened the bath seat and pulled my little round baby out onto a towel in my lap. Sadie was still entirely mine. When I held her it was sometimes hard to remember where I ended and she began. She smiled her huge two-teethed grin and ducked her head, searching for my breast.

  “No nursing in the bathroom!” Isaac announced.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Just because.”

  I wrapped my free arm around him to give him some of the attention he resented being directed toward his baby sister, and distracted the baby by kissing the soft folds of her neck. She giggled and wiggled in my lap like a slippery little seal.

  “Oh, she’s so delicious!” I said, squeezing her fat behind. “Yum!”

  Peter said, “I know, she’s like a little round cream puff. You want to gobble her up.”

  “And him, too,” I said, pretending to gnaw on Isaac’s arm while he giggled.

  Peter and I had time to exchange just a few more cannibalistic comments, before I felt a sudden warmth on my lap.

  I rose to my feet. “Your little cream puff just peed on me.”

  Before becoming a mother I would never have imagined how imperturbable I would become, even in the face of bodily effluvia. By now it takes more than a little pee on my clothes to gross me out.

  After the kids were safely down for the night, their stories read, Sadie done nursing, Isaac finished with his nightly round-robin of requests—water, pee, water, pee—I stood in my bathrobe in front of my closet. What was appropriate attire for a midnight visit to a neighborhood known for gang violence and prostitution? Does one dress up to interview hookers, or is the casual look more appropriate? I didn’t want to stand out too much, but then again I didn’t want to be mistaken for a working girl. I decided on jeans and a black sweater, and pulled my hair back into a severe ponytail.

  Peter was in his dungeon, sprawled in his desk chair with his feet up on the vaulting horse, his laptop balanced on his lap.

  “Where are you going?” he said when I handed him the baby monitor.

  “The thing is,” I replied, “people like us tend to think the South Side is more dangerous than it really is. We hear ‘South Central’ and we get all freaked out. But really, what goes on there is primarily drugs and prostitution, and those are victimless crimes.”

  Peter opened his mouth but I rushed on.

  “I know what you’re going to say, but I can’t bring Al. I have to talk to hookers. Streetwalkers. There’s just no way any of them will talk to Al. You know he oozes a cop vibe. He even freaks you out, and the worst crime you ever committed was smoking a little pot when you were in college. The hookers will take one look at him and shut down. They’re much more likely to talk to me if I’m on my own.”

  Peter once again tried to speak, but I didn’t let him.

  “I’ll be careful. I won’t take any unnecessary risks. I won’t even get out of my car unless I have to.”

  He sat up slowly, his legs dropping to the floor with a thud. “Do you have your cell phone?” he said.

  “Of course.” On my way out the door I picked up the cell phone I had nearly forgotten. I also shoved a hundred dollars in cash into my pocket, so that I’d have something to hand over if things got ugly.

  Eight

  ON Figueroa Street, cars pulled to the curb, waved down with a flick of a long-nailed hand. The women tottered over on high heels with torn straps, skirts rising up thighs. They ducked their heads into the windows of the cars for a moment and then either slipped inside or stalked away with a toss of false curls. I sat in my car watching this desperate cotillion, partners changing, passed from hand to hand. When confronted with the grim reality, my nonchalance soured. I wasn’t exactly afra
id. I was anxious. I was, oddly, embarrassed. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to pull my own car forward under the streetlights. When I did, a tall woman with acne-roughened skin and a long red wig leaned into the open car window. When she saw me, the sultry look disappeared from her face like a light being switched off. “I don’t do girls,” she said, and waved me on.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said. “A white girl, Mary something?”

  “Do I look like the missing persons bureau?” she said. She banged the roof of my car and moved on to wave down someone else, someone whose needs were more easily assuaged.

  Another woman popped her head in. Her face was a Picasso painting of angles, her mouth off-center, one eye bruised and closed shut, the other opened so wide the yellowish white around her iris glowed in the glare of the street lamps.

  “What you looking for?” she said. “Forty dollars and you can get whatever you want.”

  I repeated my request. Did she know Mary? She did not, but she knew of only one white girl who worked that corner. For twenty dollars she’d tell me where to find her.

  I sized up the woman’s face, her bruises, her disheveled hair, slept on and long uncombed. “I’ll give you five,” I said. I pulled out the bill and held it in my hand. “Where is she?”

  “Up about two blocks, by the taco truck. She’ll be there with Baby Richard. She stays by him now.”

  “Who’s Baby Richard?”

  “Oh, girl. Everybody knows Baby Richard. He’s the little fat man. You can’t miss Baby Richard.”

  I held the bill out toward her and she reached a greedy hand into the car. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” I asked.

  She snatched the bill and ran clumsily away, limping up the block on one broken heel.

  I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in my informant, but I also didn’t have anywhere else to look. I drove up the block until I spotted a taco truck pulled into a strip mall parking lot. There were half a dozen women leaning against the truck, sipping coffee or eating burritos in quick, greedy bites. Two men sat on the back of a bus bench, their feet up on the seat. Another stood in the lot, yelling up into the face of a blond-haired woman. This man stood no more than five feet tall, but his girth was as much as his height, his vast belly made all the larger by his orange down jacket. It was warm out, probably no less than sixty-five degrees, and he was bundled up as though it were ski season. Baby Richard. It had to be him. And the blonde he was berating was Violetta’s friend. She was the only white person there.

  I pulled into the lot, took a deep breath, and opened my car door. The eyes of the crowd immediately slid my way, appraising me. One of the men slipped off the bus bench and sauntered away down the street.

  “We don’t need your condoms or your safe sex lectures, girl. You just get on back in your car and get out of here,” Baby Richard said. He was in charge of this parking lot, and he wanted me to know it.

  “My name is Juliet Applebaum,” I said as I approached. “Violetta Spees’s family hired me to find out what happened to her. I’m hoping you might be able to help me.”

  The round ball of a man stared contemptuously at my proffered hand. I held it out for another few seconds. Finally, he took it. His palm was soft and smooth, a hand unused to manual labor.

  “You know who I am?” he said.

  “Baby Richard.” I turned to his companion. “Are you Violetta’s friend, Mary?”

  “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” Baby Richard said and laughed loudly. The man remaining on the bus bench laughed, too. The women did not.

  “Did you know Violetta Spees?” I asked the blonde.

  She glanced over at Baby Richard as if requesting permission to speak. He shrugged.

  “Yes,” she said. “Violetta and I were friends.”

  “Would you be willing to talk to me a little about her? I’m not a police officer. I don’t work for the government. I work for her sister, and her mother.” That was stretching the truth a little; Heavenly had hired us, not Corentine, but I wanted to remind Mary and her keeper that Violetta had a mother who was grieving for her. “We could go get a cup of coffee, or something to eat.”

  “You all can get a cup of coffee right here,” Baby Richard said. He motioned to the truck. He wasn’t going to let this girl out of his sight.

  “Okay,” I said. “Mary? Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Mary Margaret,” she said. “But you can call me M&M. That’s what people call me. I mean, out here.”

  I went up to the taco truck and ordered coffee for myself and for Mary Margaret. Then I turned to the other women who were standing around staring at us. “Can I buy you all some coffee?” I said.

  Ten minutes later everyone was drinking something hot, Baby Richard was busy working on a platter of carnitas, and I was out seventeen dollars. The other women crowded around Mary Margaret and me, pushing their way into our conversation. Most of them had known Violetta. Only one, new to the corner, hadn’t met her.

  “Were any of you here on the night she was killed?” I asked. “Do you remember seeing her?”

  “Of course we was here,” a woman in a skintight, purple velour minidress said. “Where we gonna be?”

  “Did you see anything? Did you see who Violetta picked up that night?”

  The women looked at one another. Mary Margaret looked down at her sandal. She bent down and peeled a flake of gold toenail polish off her big toe.

  I said, “Please tell me what you saw. For Violetta’s sake. I promise I’m not with the police.”

  The woman in purple said, “You damn straight you not the police. The police was never here. You think they care about a dead black ho?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “The police didn’t investigate and Violetta’s family is looking for some answers. They want justice for her.”

  “Justice?” one of the other women spat out. “Get real, little girl. You be giving out justice? You?”

  “What happened the night Violetta died?” I said, turning to Mary Margaret. “What happened to her?”

  A woman who had until now been silently peeling up the rolled paper edge of her coffee cup, spoke up. Her voice was deep and angry and she kicked the ground with one high-booted foot. “Same thing as happened to Niesha, and Teeny, and that other girl, the one with the braids.”

  “What?” I said.

  Mary Margaret said, “Violetta got taken by that man, that same man.”

  “What man?”

  The purple dress woman crumpled her coffee cup in her hand and said, “There’s a man been taking girls off Figueroa Street for years. We all know he’s here. Every year or so, sometimes every six months, some girl turns up dead. Raped and killed. It’s the same man who does it. We know it is. We’ve known for years.”

  I felt suddenly cold out there in the dark. “Are you saying there’s a serial killer killing prostitutes?”

  The woman in the tall boots waggled her head. “You ask yourself, what would the cops be doing if every six months some white girl from Beverly Hills got snatched?”

  “I saw him once,” Mary Margaret said, her voice low.

  “You saw him?”

  She nodded. “A year, year and a half ago, maybe? The night that girl Teeny got killed. I saw his face. I even talked to him before she did, but he didn’t want me.” She shuddered. “I saw her get in his car. She never came back out after that ride. Three days later they found her body in a Dumpster.”

  “Did you tell this to the police?”

  She shrugged. “They didn’t ask.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to be out here?” I asked her. “He knows you know what he looks like.”

  Baby Richard smiled, his teeth black with beans. “She don’t need to be afraid. She’s got me to protect her now, don’t you baby?”

  “He doesn’t take white girls,” Mary Margaret said.

  Nine

  IT was too late to call Al that night, and in the morning Ruby and Isaac w
ere buzzing around me like a couple of wasps. I didn’t want to talk about any of this in front of them. I was bursting with it by the time I got in to the office.

  “You’re trying to tell me that there’s a serial killer on the loose in Los Angeles?” Al said.

  “Yes.”

  “Juliet, you realize that’s crazy, don’t you?” He shook his head and returned to his coffee and his files.

  “Why? Why is it crazy? Because we haven’t heard about it? Because he doesn’t have a nickname like the Hillside Strangler or the Night Stalker? We haven’t heard about it because he’s killing black prostitutes on Figueroa Street and nobody cares.” I leaned across Al’s desk and covered the document he was looking at with my hand. “Al, those women are scared. They know something is going on. They gave me the names of murder victims.” I opened my notebook. “There was a woman named Teeny who was killed about eighteen months ago. And another named Niesha something. They think she was from Compton. She died in 2002. There are others, too.”

  “Do you know how many murders there are every year on Figueroa Street?”

  “No, I don’t know how many, and neither do you. Neither does anybody else. Do you know why? Because no one bothers to count them. I’m going to see that Detective Jarin again, and I’m going to tell him about this killer. If that moron had been doing his job in the first place he would have known about these cases. If he’d tried at all, Jarin probably could have found the killer years ago, before the monster even got his hands on Violetta.”