“Then maybe you have to figure out a way not to take it so much to heart. Not to let the fears infect the rest of your life.”
Peter knew as well as I did how impossible that would be for me. One of my worst failings as a public defender was that I got too wrapped up in my cases, in my clients. Against them was levied the enormous power of the government—police, prosecutors, even judges. The United States versus one lone man. I couldn’t let them face that all by themselves, so I threw myself into defending them. Sometimes I worried that a cooler head, a less invested one, might have done the job better. I had victories, I won cases, but I also made enemies of the prosecutors, railing against what I saw as their imposition of injustice. I even got thrown out of the courtroom once. The only reason the judge didn’t hold me in contempt was because I was ten days away from my due date and looked like a whiskey barrel with feet.
“I’ll try,” I said, nestling my head against Peter’s chest.
“Okay.”
“That’s all I can promise.”
“You know, Juliet. The world is a lot safer a place than you think it is.”
“No it isn’t,” I said. “You’re just foolishly optimistic, that’s your problem.”
“Maybe you’re foolishly pessimistic, have you ever considered that?”
“I’m a realist.”
He sighed and kissed the top of my head.
Sixteen
AL, Chiki, and I stood staring at the white board on which I’d written a list of every possible suspect, likely or unlikely, in Violetta’s murder. It was a depressingly short list, and at the same time nearly infinite. I’d divided the list into categories, and the very first, the category in which we were most likely to find the murderer, I called Tricks. Under that, in a different color pen, I’d written Unknown. Under Boyfriends I had three names. The first was Deiondré. Then there was Vashon’s father—I’d connected that one to the Tricks category with a dotted line. The final one was Baby Richard. I put a red question mark after Baby Richard’s name, because, after all, I didn’t know if Violetta had had a romantic relationship with him. I didn’t even know if she worked for him or for another pimp.
I had a category titled Family, because it never makes sense to ignore the family of a murder victim. I’d written everybody’s name in that column, including Vashon, Tamika, and Monisha, just for the sake of completeness.
We stared at the board for a minute, and then I said, “Wait a second,” and added another category: Coworkers.
“Coworkers?” Al said, doubtfully.
I wrote in Mary Margaret’s name, and “Purple Dress Hooker.” I left room for other names as I learned them.
The three of us continued to stare at the board.
Chiki said, “I like how you used different colors. That’s just what I was hoping you’d do when I bought that multipack of dry erase markers. It looks real organized.”
“Thanks,” I said.
We stared some more.
“Don’t expect me to go making rainbow charts of my cases,” Al said.
“Nobody expects that,” I said.
“Although it would probably organize your thinking,” Chiki said. “The color coding can be real helpful. Like the way I tagged the different folders on your computer desktop. You like that, don’t you?”
“Don’t touch the computer, Chiki,” I said, for perhaps the thousandth time. As one of the conditions of his supervised release, Chiki was barred from all contact with computers. However, getting his hands away from a keyboard was harder than getting Ruby and Isaac to stop bickering. They might not do it in front of you, but as soon as your back was turned, they were right back at it. Al and I had been trying to get this supervised release condition lifted so that Chiki could do his job, or even move on to one that made better use of his proficiency at writing and deciphering computer code, but the probation department and the court were unwilling to listen to reason. How they expected a person to survive, let alone find work, in this day and age without computer access, was beyond me.
“Where are you going to start?” Al asked me after we’d had plenty of time both to appreciate my arts and crafts project and to assimilate the true hopelessness of our task.
“Deiondré, Baby Richard, and the hookers,” I said. “At least I know who they are.”
Seventeen
BACK I went to the Thurgood Marshall projects. Before I paid a visit to Deiondré, I stopped by Corentine’s house. I’d picked up a few little presents for the kids—a couple of young adult novels for Tamika, two kissing teddy bears for Monisha, and a Vote or Die T-shirt for Vashon. They were at school, of course, but I gave the things to Corentine, along with the lemon meringue pie I’d bought from Al and Janelle’s neighbor, Millie, a sweet old lady who supplemented her pension and social security checks by baking for her friends. I had a standing order with her for a pie every week, and although I knew Peter would be furious that I’d given away dessert—especially on an evening when we were expecting company—I didn’t like to come by Corentine’s house empty-handed.
“Oh, how lovely, Juliet,” Corentine said. “Did you bake this yourself?”
It would have been nice to take the credit for having slaved away in the kitchen, but not even I could lie so blatantly. “No, I’m afraid I wouldn’t even know how to begin to bake a pie.”
“I could teach you. It’s easy as pie!” She laughed at her own joke. “Come on in. We’ll have us some coffee and a slice of this beautiful pie.”
She poured two cups of coffee, added a dollop of mocha-flavored nondairy creamer and two teaspoons of sugar to each, and handed mine over along with a thick wedge of the trembling yellow and white pie.
“Mm,” I said, taking a bite.
“It’s good,” she said. “I do mine on a graham cracker crust, but this is nice, too. Bad for my sugars, but nice.”
“Your sugars?”
“I have the diabetes.”
“Oh no! And I brought pie.”
“Don’t you worry. Alls I need to do is test my sugars and see if I need to fix my medicines a little. It’s nothing.”
I let the meringue dissolve on my tongue. Corentine Spees was an easy woman to be quiet with. There was something both soft and grounded about her presence. She neither demanded nor expected to be entertained with conversation; it was enough to share a companionable cup of sweet coffee and listen to the click of our forks on the plate. When we were done I picked up the plates and brought them to the sink.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said. “You’re a guest in this house.”
“I like to help,” I said.
Corentine heaved herself up from her chair. When she was sitting her bulk seemed to settle, a kind of immutable mass. As soon as she was standing she became light on her feet. She moved quickly, her fingers darting through the contents of a box she took down from above the fridge.
“Let me show you some pictures of Violetta. She came to Sunday dinner the week before she died, and Heavenly had just bought herself a digital camera. She took all these pictures and then she printed them out in her office. Just like that. Didn’t have to pay for them or nothing.” Corentine found an envelope embossed with the name of Heavenly’s orthodonist employers. She pulled out a small stack of photographs. “I know there’s at least a couple with Violetta in them.” As she leafed through them she smiled. “Look at that Monisha being silly with her auntie’s shoes.”
Monisha was caught midstride, tottering on a pair of long silver sandals. Violetta had big feet, not that much smaller than the sister who had started out a man.
Corentine said, “Here’s Violetta, but it’s a bad one. Look at her behind her boy.”
Violetta sat on the sofa, with her hand extended in front of her face toward the camera, and her body bent as if trying to duck behind the boy who sat next to her. Only the creased palm of her hand and the backs of her long fingers tipped with pointed nails were in focus. Vashon, however was facing the camera, his mo
uth open in a wide grin, laughter pushing his cheekbones so high they turned his eyes into merry slits. The glee in his face was palpable enough to melt the paper the photograph was printed on.
That was the first time the case made me cry. I looked at Violetta’s little boy sitting next to his mother, full of joy, breathless with excitement at the feel of her body next to his, and my eyes filled.
“He loved her so much, that poor child,” Corentine said. “He just loved her like the daisies love the sun.”
It was the perfect simile. When I saw this boy his face was closed, a knot of pain and anger. Here, he was like a flower blossoming, open and easy.
“This is a good picture of Violetta.” Corentine handed me a photograph of Violetta and Chantelle. They sat at the table next to each other, each wearing an identical and practiced smile on her perfect rosebud of a mouth. Violetta’s hair was done up in braids with long, ragged extensions. Her eyes were smaller and set deeper than her sister’s. The most striking contrast between the two was their skin. Chantelle’s was like smooth satin, rich and bright under the hanging lamp. Violetta’s face was pitted, her color flat as though it had a wash of gray over it. A raw-looking scar, bright pink against her skin, lifted up her right eyebrow. She looked much older than Chantelle, much older than her twenty-four years.
Corentine stroked the photograph with her finger. “She looks tired in this picture. That night I put her to work mashing potatoes, just like you did when you come to dinner. She said to me right out, ‘Mama, I tired. I so, so tired.’ She told me she wanted to go to sleep in her old room and sleep for a hundred years. She said, ‘I’m a sleep and wake up a whole new person.’”
“Did she stay that night?”
Corentine stuck out her lower jaw and sucked her upper lip into her mouth. She knotted her brow. Then she shook her head. “God help me, I put her out. I put her out into that dark night.”
With a full-throated wail, she collapsed, heavy as stone, into my arms. I staggered backward; she must have weighed over two hundred pounds, far too much for me. It took all my strength to lower her into her chair. She beat her fists on the table. I hugged her and she wrapped her massive arms around my waist. We were like that for a long time, long enough for me to grow conscious of the weight of her pulling at my hips. Finally, she took a dish towel off the table and blew her nose into it.
“Oh Lord, look at me. Crying like a baby. I can’t even imagine what Heavenly would say, she saw me like this with you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “You’ve probably been so busy being strong for the children that you haven’t had a chance to let yourself just have a good cry.”
“I’m just going to go fix my face,” she said. A few moments later she was back, her lips colored mauve, her eyes red but dry.
“Corentine,” I said tentatively. “Would you tell me what you meant when you said you put her out? Did she ask if she could stay?”
She nodded. “She just come to dinner that day, knocked on the door at four o’clock. Before that it was two months since I seen her. She would call on that cell phone Heavenly gave her, but she didn’t come over for two months. Then she just walked in so easy. Like she been coming every week.”
“How often did she call?”
“Sometimes every night, sometimes not for weeks. She forgot all about us when she was on that crack, or when she was shooting the heroin. She liked to talk to Vashon when she been drinking, though, and if she didn’t sound too bad I’d give him the phone. He’d tell her all about his teachers and his homework. I’d have to take the phone away if she got to crying, because that made him real sad.”
“Was she on anything when she came that Sunday night?”
“No, she was clean. She told me she been clean for two days. But Thomas, that’s Chantelle’s husband—you didn’t meet him because he was working the night you come over. Thomas, he brought some beer and she drank some of that. She didn’t get drunk, just happy and silly at first, and then all sad, like she does. She asked me could she come home. First I said ‘Yes, of course you can. You know you can always come home.’ But then she drank another of Thomas’s beers, and she started looking drunk, all off her feet. She got silly with Ronnie, and I said, ‘That’s it. You can’t be in my house and be drinking and using drugs. You get on out now.’ And that’s the last time I saw her. That’s the last time I saw my baby.” She started crying again, tears running over her plump cheeks and pooling in the creases of her neck.
“What do you mean, she got silly with Ronnie?”
Corentine pressed her mouth into a thin line. “Just silly. Drunk silly. Wasn’t nothing, but I didn’t like it. Not in my house.”
Try as I did, I could not get her to define the word silly with more particularity. It was obvious that it made her too uncomfortable. She got up and started bustling around the kitchen, washing the dishes we’d dirtied with our treat. I could tell she was finished talking, that she felt she’d said too much already.
Eighteen
MY visit to Deiondré was far less emotional than my hour with Corentine. I found him sitting on the front steps of his town house, smoking a cigarette and drinking a tall can of malt liquor. He held his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, the way I remember boys doing when we were in junior high school, hanging out behind Friendly’s and doing our best to look cool while we coughed up lungs full of mentholated smoke. Deiondré had a shaved head and a pronounced ridge across the top of his skull, as though the plates of his skull had not closed quite right when he was a baby, but instead had overlapped each other.
“Deiondré?” I said.
“That’s me.”
“Do you mind if I have a seat?” I said, motioning to the steps where he sat.
He gave me a look of exaggerated surprise, and then shrugged and shifted over. His legs splayed out in front of him, knees spread wide and bright white sneakers lolling.
I sat down, trying not to make a face at the stream of cigarette smoke he blew in my direction. The steps were wide, and I could put about two feet of space between us. I said, “So, Ronnie Spees said you’d talk to me about his sister.”
“Ronnie said that?”
More or less. “Yup,” I said. “I’m a private investigator and Heavenly hired me to find out who killed Violetta.”
He laughed. “You a private investigator? You one a Charlie’s angels?”
“I like to think of myself as more of a Jim Rockford kind of girl.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. What can you tell me about Violetta?”
He blew a smoke ring and then a straight stream right through it. “Henry Spees, he hired you?”
“You mean Heavenly, yes she did.”
“Heavenly,” he snorted with disgust. “I ain’t calling Henry Spees nothin’ but Henry Spees no matter how big his titties is.”
I turned slightly so I could see him. His thick neck was circled by a yellow-gold chain. The choker was so tight it wrinkled the skin above and below it. “So, Deiondré, Violetta went home with you the night of her son’s birthday party, right?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head at the very idea. “No, I ain’t take that nasty ho to my mom’s house. You crazy or something?”
“But you were with her that night?”
“I took her out in my car. That Violetta, she thought she was something, when all she was was a ho who’d do anything for a rock. Hell, she’d do pretty much anything for a forty!” He tipped his can at me and then took another gulp, smacking his lips loudly.
“What did you do with her?”
“I ain’t telling you.”
“Did you have sex with her?”
“I didn’t have sex with Violetta!” he said, making his voice prissy and high-pitched, in unfair imitation of mine. “She did her business, and like I said, I gave her a rock. We had us a transactional relationship.” He laughed loudly, and took another slug of his malt liquor. “A transactional relationship,” he said again, very
pleased with himself for coming up with the phrase.
“Was that night your only transaction?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes she’d call me. You know, ‘Deiondré, come take me out.’ If I had nothing better to do, I’d take her for a ride in my car.”
“Engage in another transaction?”
He cackled. “Now you know it, baby.”
“Did you see her the night she died?”
“What, you think I killed that ho? Please, I wouldn’t waste a bullet out my gun. Last time I saw her she was running out her mama’s house, all up in my face. ‘Deiondré, let me stay with you. Deiondré, take me somewheres.’” He shook his head. “Like I ever gonna let that ho in my house.”
“Was that the Sunday before she died?”
“I don’t know. It was a couple days later I heard she was dead. My moms, she went to the funeral and all.”
“Did you go to the funeral?”
“Nah,” he said, as if the very idea was absurd.
“Did you do what she asked that night? Did you take her somewhere? For a ride in your car?”
“No. I had my baby’s mama coming over that night. I didn’t need to go for no ride with no messed-up ho.”
Deiondré knew none of Violetta’s friends or clients, or at least would not admit to knowing any. He knew nothing of what happened to her after he wouldn’t let her inside his mother’s house that Wednesday before she died. After a while, he grew sick of my questions and said, “You want to come inside? You old, but you look pretty good. I wouldn’t let Violetta inside my house, but you can come right in if you want.”
“Thank you, Deiondré,” I said, getting to my feet. “It’s a tempting offer, but I’m afraid I’ll have to say no.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and lit another cigarette off the butt hanging from his lip.
Nineteen
THAT night all I wanted to do was mull over the case, but instead, I had to host a dinner party. This was the first real grown-up affair Peter and I had put on in our house in the months we’d been there, and as little as I wanted to, I had to stop thinking about the case and be charming to my friends. I had found a replacement pie for the one I’d given to Corentine, also lemon meringue, but far too perfectly formed to pass as homemade. Peter wasn’t fooled, but neither was he annoyed with me for giving away our pie. He’d been raised by his mother, after all, who subscribed to the notion that you shouldn’t show up anywhere empty-handed. Her idea of a hostess gift might be a Jell-O mold, a twenty-four-pack of Yodels, or a bottle of Night Train, but the principle was the same.
Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Page 9
