“Years ago, she was staying at my apartment. I used to let her stay there a lot, when she was tired of being out on the street. I was usually smart; I’d lock up my purse and my jewelry. But one night, I had a date and it didn’t go so well. I came home really upset and I drew myself a hot bath. I took my earrings and necklace off and left them out on my dresser. I soaked in the bathtub for a good long time, and when I came out I saw she’d taken the earrings and the necklace, too. They were a matched set, twenty-four karat gold, with little ruby chips. I loved those, and she knew it. They were the first real jewelry I ever bought for myself. Violetta came home about four in the morning, her arms all shot up. She’d traded my jewelry for heroin.”
My laundry lay in an unfolded pile, and I sat down, unable to do anything but listen.
Heavenly continued, “I started yelling, cussing her out. And she tried to tell me I was too stressed out, and then she offered . . . well, she offered to relieve my stress.”
“She tried to have sex with you?”
“I was a woman, living as a woman and all that, but it was before my final surgery. She offered to. Well. You know. With her mouth.”
“Oh. Wow. What did you do?”
“What did I do? What do you think I did? I threw her out. I was never much of a man, but I am a big, strong, powerful woman, and I just picked her up and tossed her right out on her ass.”
“When did you see her again after that? Things must have been incredibly difficult and awkward between you.”
“You know what? I don’t think she even remembered it. Next time I saw her was at my mother’s house maybe a month or so later. She acted like it had never happened. So I did the same thing. I never told anyone about it until just this minute.”
“Do you think she remembered but pretended that she didn’t?”
“I have no idea. Only the Lord knows what went on in my sister Violetta’s head.”
In our country, we like our victims to be pure. Children, innocents, those are the kinds of victims for whom we can work up compassion. Once we have anointed a victim, once we have verified her blamelessness and determined that she is worthy of our regard, our devotion to her memory and her cause burns with a white-hot intensity, at least until we are distracted by another equally pure casualty of misery. We rallied around children with AIDS, boys like Ryan White because we decided their diagnoses were a result of disease not behavior. But we could never bear to lend our support to the cause of gay men who caught the disease in the bathhouse or the bedroom. In describing the AIDS crisis, our newspapers actually used the words “innocent victims,” words that specifically excluded gay men and women like Annette Spees, whose death came at the hands of a dirty hypodermic needle. The same is true when a woman is raped. We demand that she be virginal, or at least modestly pure. We scrabble through her sexual history like squirrels foraging for nuts, searching for the evidence of promiscuity that will absolve our seven-foot basketball player or our group of rollicking fraternity boys. Only the rapes of innocents are free of this rapacious gossip-mongering.
I swore I would not be like this. I would not be like the police officers who ignored Violetta’s murder, led a perfunctory investigation, kept a file almost symbolic in its thinness, and then filed it away after a few brief months. I would not value Violetta’s life any less because she was a drug addict who sold sex so casually that she could thoughtlessly offer it to her own brothers. I swore that, like her family, I would cherish Violetta. I would fight against the pointlessness of her death more than she had fought for the quality of her own life.
As a public defender I represented the people society pushed aside, those who had been cast out as a threat and danger. It had come easily to me to see each of my clients as a person capable of affection, of transcending his crime and his criminality. Yes, my clients were almost always guilty, and some were guilty of heinous crimes, but without exception they touched my heart. There was the man guilty of a series of take-over bank robberies—armed with assault weapons he had stormed a bank, firing bullets over the heads of the tellers, emptying their drawers. He had once had a wife and son, and he took great interest in the baby I was carrying; he asked me every time we met how I was feeling, he pulled my chair out with shackled hands, and in the middle of his trial, leaned over and told me he thought I looked pale and should ask for a short break to rest. Another client remembered my due date from prison and sent a meticulously handcrafted card, a colored-pencil drawing of a clown holding a handful of balloons in the shape of letters, spelling out the words Welcome Ruby. Other clients asked me to check on their mothers, to make sure they were safe and healthy. Becoming a mother myself did not cause me to fear these men more. On the contrary, when Ruby was born I seemed to grow even more open, more able to realize that there was something to value in everyone, some light behind the dark of their eyes.
After I hung up the phone with Heavenly I made a pact with myself. I would serve Violetta’s memory in honor of that principle of fundamental human good. I would not let myself forget that Violetta’s son loved her so much that his smile burst the confines of his face, or that she loved him enough to try to go straight, again and again.
I thought of all those clients I had, and then, inevitably, I thought of Charles Towne. If it had fallen to me to represent him, would I have found any humanity in him? I don’t mean charm; I know that they’re often charming, these sociopathic serial killers. I am not asking whether his facile charisma would have succeeded in causing me to forget his crimes. I am asking whether I would have been able to see beyond his hideous deeds to something else within. I don’t know. I don’t even know if such a person possesses a fundamental humanity, or if these particular criminals, the Ted Bundys and the Charles Townes, if they alone of all I’ve stumbled across are hollow, nothing behind their eyes but the horror of their desires.
Twenty-one
IT was easier to pull a rap sheet on Baby Richard than you might have expected, given that I had no idea what his real name was. Al didn’t even have to call in a favor from a friend in Vice. We found Baby Richard on the web. Or, rather, Chiki found him on the web. Not that he was using the computer. Of course he wasn’t, because that would have violated the conditions of his supervised release.
Let’s just say someone found Baby Richard. Someone pulled up a site that listed the credits to a documentary on HBO, a documentary on the lives of pimps. That same someone went to the video store, and watched this hour-long documentary and found not just Baby Richard’s name, but a thirty-second clip of him walking up the red carpet to some kind of pimps’ ball, wearing a purple hat with an ostrich feather and a matching full-length purple fur coat. A subtitle flashed with the name “Joaquin ‘Baby Richard’ St. Pierre.”
“His name can’t possibly be Joaquin St. Pierre,” I said. “Why would anyone named Joaquin St. Pierre be called Baby Richard?”
“I ran it,” Chiki said. He handed me a faxed printout. Joaquin St. Pierre had a pimping and pandering arrest record dating back more than ten years. There was one assault arrest on his record that had not resulted in a conviction, and a few minor drug possession raps, one of which had landed him sixty days in county.
“It must be him,” I said. “Man, how the mighty have fallen. From a pimps’ ball in a purple fur coat to a taco truck on Figueroa Street.”
“You go where the business is,” Chiki said. “If he’s running enough Figueroa Street girls he’s probably taking home more money than you are.”
“That’s hardly saying much,” Al said from across the room. Jeanelle had gone over the billable hours last night, and she had not been happy. Al and I split the expenses for the agency, and we each took home what was left of our hourly rate. It didn’t really cost him when my billables were down, but it made Jeanelle tense. She wanted to see the business in her garage earning some real money, probably because she wanted us to get the hell out of there and into an office of our own. Although why she imagined we’d ever leave now that the
garage came with free childcare, I don’t know.
“I don’t get the whole pimp thing,” I said. “I know they supposedly bail the women out of jail and provide protection, but it still seems like the women are getting a seriously bum deal. These guys,” I waved at the television set. “They’re walking around in sequins and plumes, driving Bentleys, for God’s sake. Violetta barely earned enough to keep herself in dope, and M&M doesn’t look like she’s bought a new pair of shoes in years. And it’s not like the pimps are doing such a great job of protecting the women. Baby Richard and the rest of them didn’t keep the prostitutes on the corridor from getting picked off like fish in a barrel. Why don’t the women just team up and do for each other what the pimps are supposedly doing for them? They could have, like, a cooperative.”
“Hey, Norma Rae,” Al said. “You going to go talk to this guy tonight, or what?”
I shrugged. “I guess so. Although what am I going to ask? ‘Hey, Baby Richard, do you mind telling me if you killed Violetta? Did you bang her across the head because she wasn’t earning, or was it something else?’”
That’s not exactly what I said, although what I came up with was hardly less ridiculous. That night I found him in his usual place, by the taco truck.
“What you doing?” he called out when I pulled into the lot. “Running some kind a free meal program?” Baby Richard thought his jokes were far funnier than other people did. Now he leaned over, wheezing with laughter, slapping the side of one of his thick thighs.
There were half a dozen women standing in the parking lot, and they rushed over to me as soon as I got out of my car. My old friend was back in her purple dress and this time she wrapped me in her arms and pulled my face right into the fabric. Her dress was rough against my cheek, and she smelled so strongly of a musky, sharp perfume that my nose ached.
“You did good,” she said when she finally let me go.
The other women pressed in closer, nodding. “We know they caught that man because of you,” another said.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It was that cop in cold cases who did it all. And you all. You’re responsible for catching the guy far more than I am. I just told the cop what you said. He was the one who sent the cases over for DNA testing and found the match.”
“We know you made them do it,” the woman in the purple dress said. “We know that if you hadn’t come they wouldn’t have looked at what happened to Teeny. It took a rich white woman to start shouting before they would do anything. We know that, and we’re grateful to you.”
“Thank you,” I said, finally. I felt uncomfortable taking credit for having solved the series of murders. All I had done, after all, was ask someone to look. But she was right, of course. It took someone who looked like me to make the cops open their eyes.
“The thing is,” I said, “Charles Towne didn’t kill Violetta. There was no DNA match for her, and she was bludgeoned, hit in the head. I’m still looking for the man who killed her.”
The women looked surprised, and then one of them shrugged. “Probably just a crazy trick,” she said. They nodded and began to drift away, back to the taco truck, the dingy, white sun around which their world revolved.
I bought my usual round. By this time even the men hanging out with Baby Richard expected a free cup of coffee. M&M walked up just as I was paying. She pulled a roll of bills out of her bra and handed them to Baby Richard. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him lick his fat thumb and count the bills, ostentatiously slowly. When he was done he raised an eyebrow.
“That’s all,” she said.
He didn’t speak, just frowned.
“He didn’t want anything else.”
“Your job is to make him want it,” he said. He added the money to the thick wad he pulled out of his pocket. Then he reached one arm around M&M and brought her close to him. His head reached no higher than her neck. He ducked his chin and kissed her gently on the swell of one breast. “You know how to do that, don’t you, baby?” he said. Then he bit her.
“Ow!” she screamed and pulled away. She swatted at his face with one of her hands and he easily ducked away from the blow. “Goddamnit,” she said. “You hurt me!”
He laughed and high-fived one of his buddies.
“Look at this,” she shrieked pulling away the collar of her shirt. “You left a mark. You marked me!”
“You damn right I marked you,” he said. “Next time you going do what you know you need to, or I’ll mark you more than that.”
She ran across the parking lot, tottering on her spiky heels. When she reached the taco truck I handed her a cup of milky, sugared coffee and a sweet roll. She took the food, sniffling.
I turned to Baby Richard. If I wasn’t afraid of him before, I was now. The casual glee he took in hurting M&M made my skin crawl, and made me fear that hurting me would cause him no less pleasure. My mouth felt dry and I took a long sip from the cup of coffee I had kept for myself. Then I walked over to the bus bench where he had resumed his seat.
“Baby Richard,” I said. “You wouldn’t mind talking to me for a few minutes, would you?”
He laughed his trademark high-pitched wheeze. “Sure thing. Come on and sit right by Baby Richard.” He shifted over on the bench, patting the seat next to him. I glanced at his thick thighs spreading across the seat.
“I’m fine right here,” I said.
He shrugged and laughed again. Then he waved the other two men away. They glided off in the direction of the women.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
“It’s about Violetta,” I said.
“What the hell else is new?”
“Excuse me?”
“That what you always come here to talk about.”
“Did Violetta work for you?” I asked.
“What you mean, did she work for me?”
“Was she one of your girls?”
“Was she one of your girls?” He mimicked me in a whiney falsetto so much like the one Deiondré had used that I was forced to confront the possibility that that was the way I really sounded. Then he laughed again, slapping his thighs with both hands.
I waited for his amusement to abate. “Was she?” I asked. “Her friend M&M is. I was wondering if she was, too.”
He looked me up and down, his eyebrow cocked as it had been when he was counting M&M’s earnings. Then he shrugged. “No,” he said. “She wasn’t one a mine.”
I tried to figure out if he was telling the truth.
“With a ho like Violetta,” Baby Richard continued, “you just don’t know what she going to do. She as like to shoot her money into her arm as give it where it belongs. She’s unreliable. I do not tolerate unreliability.”
“Are you saying you don’t let your girls use?”
He laughed his wheezy laugh. Clearly Baby Richard found me endlessly amusing. “Girl, every one of these hos use. What you think get them through they days? You think you be able to do what they do without a rock in a pipe or a needle in your arm?”
I stared at him, astonished at the perception he showed, and at his indifference to his role in all of it. “So why was Violetta different? Why wouldn’t you have wanted her?”
“Why you think my girls with me?” he asked, leaning back on the bench.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Protection?”
He shook his head in disgust. “Girl, you straight trippin’. It’s love. L-O-V-E. Every one a them loves me. They like to take care of me.” He held his hand out to me and I saw a wide ring set with a glittering diamond shoved onto his fat pinkie finger. The stone could not have been real; it would have been five or six carats if it were. But it sparkled, reflecting the light of the streetlamp. “They see me rollin’ with the bling, and they be proud. They love me, you understand?”
“They love you,” I repeated trying to keep the doubt from my voice. “And Violetta didn’t love you?”
“Violetta didn’t love nothing but the drugs. I can’t work with a girl who d
on’t love nothing.”
She loved her son, I thought. At least a little bit. Not enough, though. Clearly not enough.
“You go back to Eighty-fourth Street,” he said. “You see a man sitting in a ugly old Chevy, white with red interior. That’s Violetta’s pimp. That fool is as close as she come to having anybody.”
“What’s his name?” I said.
“Sylvester,” Baby Richard said. “But he gonna make you call him Sly.” Then he laughed again, long and hard. He was slapping his thighs and wiping away tears as I walked back to my car.
Twenty-two
“CAN you give me a ride?” M&M said. She was standing near my car door, shifting from foot to foot.
“Sure,” I said. “Where do you need to go?”
“I have to go check up on my daughter,” she said. “The woman who usually watches her at night is sick so I had to leave her home.”
“How old is she?” I said, opening the car door for her.
“Four.” She slipped into the passenger seat and slammed the door.
“Four?” I said when I got into my own seat. “You left a four-year-old home alone?”
“My neighbor listens for her,” she said defensively. “The walls are paper thin, she can hear Tiffany cough in her sleep. Nothing is going to happen to her. Anyway, I only ever leave her when I can’t drop her at the babysitter’s house.”
I shook my head. The last thing M&M was going to listen to was a lecture on proper parenting. And what was I going to do? Report her to the department of social services? Then what? The girl would be taken away from her mother and put into foster care, where her chances of suffering outright abuse were significantly higher. What was worse, occasional neglect or an increased chance of abuse? I wished I knew the answer to that.
As I drove down Figueroa, following M&M’s directions, I said, “Do you know Sly, Violetta’s pimp?”
“That creep. Yeah, I know him.”
“You don’t like him?”
“Nobody likes Sylvester,” she said. “He’s a pig.”
Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Page 11
