Bye-Bye, Black Sheep

by Ayelet Waldman

  Peter frowned thoughtfully. “So what you’re saying is that what was once considered crazy is now just normal.”

  “Exactly. If you don’t do those things you’re crazy. A cautious and decent parent would never let her child do sports without pads and helmets or walk to school alone. You wouldn’t, would you?”

  We were standing in the ballroom and we both looked over at the pile of bicycles, scooters, and skateboards in the corner. Arrayed next to them were helmets, wrist guards and kneepads.

  “You see,” I said. “We’ve all turned into poor Paul Scofield’s mother. What happened to him, by the way?”

  “Paul? He was a huge pot dealer in college. Another guy from our class went to Humboldt State up in northern California. He used to send Paul a package every month. Paul’s mother never asked where he got the money for his car; she just made him buy a Volvo.”

  I looked over at Ruby, who was snapping on her helmet as she straddled her pink and purple bicycle. “Jeez,” I said.

  Peter said, “I don’t think he kept it up in medical school, though.”

  “Medical school?”

  “Yeah, last I heard he was doing a psychiatry residency in New York City.”

  “It’s nice he could keep the same job, more or less.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Drug distribution,” I said. “Helping people alter their consciousness. Back then it was pot, now it’s Prozac.”

  Twenty-seven

  TWO days later I heard from Detective Sherman.

  “Sylvester Waters,” he said. “That’s your man, I think. Unless there are two pimps operating out of the Figueroa Street corridor named Sylvester.”

  “Do you have a physical description?” I asked. I was at work in Al’s garage, trying to put together my hours for the month so Chiki could prepare the bills.

  “Black, forty-one years old, six foot four. A glass left eye.”

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “I’ll look at him for those old cases you sent me. But I have bad news for you on Violetta Spees.”

  “What?”

  “Sylvester Waters was in county serving a thirty-day drug possession sentence on the day she was killed.”

  I put my head in my hands. I had been so sure he was the one. “Are you sure? Could there be any mistake?”

  “Don’t think so,” Detective Sherman said. “I mean, I’ve heard of guys arrested in a case of mistaken identity, and even made to do someone else’s time, but it’s not real common.”

  I must have groaned out loud because the detective said, “If you want I can arrest him on an assault and battery charge. You’ve got a witness, right?”

  “I don’t want to put her in the position of having to give a statement. And even if he gets convicted, a judge isn’t going to sentence him to any time for grabbing me.”

  “You never know.”

  “No,” I said. “But you’ll look at him for those old murders?”

  The detective said, “Yeah, I’ll dig around a little. It’s going to come down to finding a witness. I’ve got to at least find someone who can connect him with one or the other of the victims. Someone who can verify if he was pimping for them.”

  “That’s not going to be easy.”

  “Nope. Especially since the murders were so long ago. Finding someone around who remembers these women is going to be hard. It’s not a lifestyle known for its longevity. But cold cases are all I do. It’s hardly a unique problem for this unit to be dealing with.”

  I thanked the detective. In all my dealings with the LAPD I had never come across a cop so helpful, so friendly, and so untroubled by the fact that I was a private investigator. As a rule the police do not like the members of our profession. They resent our intrusion. This is true even in the cases where a sheriff’s department will contract out an investigation to a private firm, which happens not infrequently. But Detective Sherman seemed to suffer from none of these biases. Perhaps he recognized in me something of a kindred spirit. We both had a little bit of the pit bull in us. Like me, he was unable to give up on a case or a problem until he’d seen it through to the bitter end.

  Al and Chiki looked at me expectantly. They were almost as frustrated as I was when I told them we were back at square one. I think Al had been looking forward to me wrapping this up and moving on to something a little more lucrative.

  I turned back to my white board and crossed Sylvester’s name off. I’d already drawn a thick line through Baby Richard.

  “Now what?” Chiki said.

  I turned to my columns. Tricks, Boyfriends, Coworkers, Family. I was right back where I started. The Tricks category was where I was most likely to find Violetta’s murderer, and the one category I had no real way of really exploring. I looked down the other lists. My eye settled on a name. Ronnie.

  “Now I go to San Diego,” I said.

  Twenty-eight

  IT took us six hours to drive to San Diego from Los Angeles, about three times what it would have taken me on my own. On my own, I would not have had to stop three times for bathroom breaks, another for a clothes change, another to buy a new audio book, another for a mid-morning meal, and half a dozen times for vomiting false alarms. On my own, I would not have insisted on staying in a hotel equidistant from Legoland and the San Diego Zoo.

  It was while I was on my knees in the back of the minivan, trying to breathe through my nose as I sprayed Febreze over the vomit spattered seats, that I really regretted my idea that we turn my trip to interview Ronnie into a brief family vacation.

  “The lines will be shorter if we go midweek,” I had said to Peter. “We haven’t gone on a family vacation in ages, since before Sadie was born. In a few years we won’t be able to pull them out of school without worrying that they’ll miss something important.”

  So there we were, waiting in line for half an hour to get strapped onto something that looked like an elaborate, brightly colored sawhorse. Everything in Legoland was brightly colored; it was a cacophony of primary colors, true blues and screaming reds, yellows brighter than the sun and greens so verdant they made AstroTurf look pale by comparison.

  “Do you really think this is a good idea, Isaac?” I said. “You couldn’t keep your French fries down in the car, why do you think you’ll be able to keep from throwing up on a roller coaster?”

  “It’s not a roller coaster,” he said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “It’s connected at the top, not the bottom.”

  “It’s just a different kind of roller coaster.”

  Peter said, “He’ll be fine, it’s barely a ride. It’s nowhere near as scary as Thunder Mountain, right, Isaac?”

  “It’s not the scary part I’m worrying about,” I said.

  By then we were at the front of the line and the kids and Peter were being strapped in. I moved aside to let the couple behind us go, but I think they’d been listening to our conversation.

  “No thanks,” the young man said. “We’ll wait for the next one.”

  Another father too far behind us to hear our nausea-related conversation pushed forward. I moved out of the line to the exit rail, pushing Sadie along in her stroller. She stared up at the web of rails, enraptured. I suddenly remembered something I’d read about a man getting hit on the head and killed by a shoe dropped from a roller coaster, or maybe it was a leg sticking out. Something like that. I moved Sadie to a safe distance from the ride.

  “Look, sweetie,” I said. “Lego horsies.”

  Isaac looked only a little green when he disembarked, and Ruby was positively beaming.

  We spent the next few hours in a mad rush of Lego, hopping from Lego boats to Lego cars to Lego animals, taking the kids’ pictures next to Lego people, eating crappy fast food out of Lego-shaped boxes.

  Finally, when they had ridden on every ride and scrambled across every bridge, I tapped Peter on the shoulder. “Honey,” I said. “If I don’t see an earth tone in about two minutes, my head is going to ex
plode.”

  Over their vigorous protests, we hustled the team into the car, but not before caving in and buying a pile of the same Lego sets we could have bought at one of the dozens of toy stores within a few miles of our house. We made our way through rush hour traffic to our hotel, and within a couple of hours I had Sadie asleep in her portacrib, and Ruby and Isaac bathed, in their pajamas, and tucked side by side into a double bed watching a movie on SpectraVision that they’d only seen half a dozen times before. Peter was on the floor with the Lego sets, trying to build a space station without looking at the directions.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if you followed the little book?” I said.

  “The whole point is to figure out how to do it. If they tell you then it isn’t any fun. They didn’t have instruction manuals and Lego sets when I was a kid. They gave you a box of blocks and you did it yourself.”

  I made my voice sound like that of a crotchety old man. “Back in my day,” I quivered, “we used to whittle our Lego pieces out of wood all by ourselves.”

  “Very funny. Don’t you have somewhere to go?”

  I leaned over and kissed him on the neck, digging my fingers in his side and tickling him.

  “Stop it!” he shouted, laughing.

  “Be quiet, Daddy!” Ruby said. “You’re interrupting our movie.”

  “Yeah, you’re interrupting their movie,” I said, tickling him again. He batted my hand away.

  I left them to their television and their toys and set off for Ronnie’s dorm. He was not expecting me. I had not wanted to ask either Corentine or Heavenly for Ronnie’s address, partly because I was worried that they would alert Ronnie to my visit, and partly because I knew they would be angry with me for pursuing this line of inquiry. I don’t know how Chiki found the address (surely not on the computer) but he gave me a dorm name, a room number, and directions from the hotel.

  What I didn’t have was Ronnie. He wasn’t in his room, his door was locked, and his hall was empty. I walked from room to room until I found a door through which I could hear the thumping beat of hip hop music. I knocked, and when that had no result, pounded on the door. A young white man with blond floppy hair opened the door. He was shirtless, his baggy pants hanging off the bones of his pelvis and revealing three inches of plaid boxer shorts. His right shoulder was covered by a tattoo, a geometric face vaguely reminiscent of the Maori masks I remember seeing in a movie set in New Zealand.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  Over the blare of the music I asked if he knew where Ronnie Spees might be at this hour of the evening.

  “Ronnie? He’s at his girlfriend’s. He, like, never sleeps here no more.”

  “Do you know where his girlfriend lives?” I said.

  “Two floors down, at the end of the hall, last room before the bathrooms.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Audrey, Audrey something.”

  I made my way downstairs. I’d entered the dorm behind two young women who unlocked the door and then, surely violating dorm rules, held it open for me. The door to Ronnie’s girlfriend’s hall was also locked, but another pleasant and careless young woman held the door for me.

  “Which room is Audrey’s?” I asked the girl who let me in.

  She pointed me down the hall. There was music coming from this room also, so loud that the cheap plywood door trembled in the doorframe. I knocked and moments later Ronnie opened the door.

  “Does nobody at UC San Diego wear a shirt?” I asked. Ronnie had no tattoos, but there was a gold ring piercing his nipple. I must have stared at it because he fingered it gently, wincing.

  “Me and Audrey got these the other day. Don’t tell my mom, okay? She’ll freak.”

  “I never would. Doesn’t it hurt?”

  He shrugged. “It’s supposed to stop after a few days.”

  What, I wondered, would Ruby be piercing once she reached this age?

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  He looked over his shoulder as if evaluating something in the room, then he held the door open for me.

  Audrey looked about twelve years old. She was a wisp of a thing, skinny and short, with bitten nails painted an aggressive black. Her eyes were outlined in kohl, her eyebrow and nose were pierced with gold rings much thicker than the one through Ronnie’s, and presumably her own, nipple. She was also blond, with skin so pale it seemed almost translucent. She was sitting on her bed, her knees bent and her scrawny arms wrapped around them.

  “You must be Audrey,” I said. “I’m Juliet. I’m a private detective.” I turned to Ronnie. “Does she know about Violetta?”

  He nodded. “Audrey and me got no secrets.”

  “I’m investigating Violetta’s murder. Ronnie’s sister Heavenly hired me.”

  Audrey nodded and glanced at her boyfriend. He scratched idly at the line of hair leading from his belly button into the top of his pants.

  “Something going on at home?” Ronnie asked. He pulled over a desk chair and motioned for me to sit down. When I did, he stretched out on the bed next to Audrey, and she curled up against him.

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “My husband and I decided to take the kids on a vacation to San Diego. Legoland today and the zoo tomorrow. While I’m down here I thought I might take the opportunity to talk to you without your family around.”

  I glanced down at Audrey who was tracing one bitten nail in wide circles around Ronnie’s nipple. He followed my gaze and grabbed her hand with his.

  “Not now, baby,” he said.

  “Could we go somewhere to talk?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Like I said, Audrey and me got no secrets.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. “Well, what I was hoping to talk about was Violetta’s last evening at your mother’s house. When she . . .” I paused. “When you two argued. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather do that in private?”

  He looked up, sharply. Then he leaped gracefully up off the bed. “I’ll be right back, baby. I got to talk to this lady for a little while.”

  Audrey’s face collapsed in an expression of woe so exaggerated that for a moment I wondered if it was even real. Ronnie picked up a T-shirt off a pile on the floor and pulled it over his head. He leaned down and kissed her lingeringly on the lips. For a moment she wrapped her arms around his neck and lifted her body up toward him, but then he loosened them and she dropped back down on the bed. It was only when Ronnie and I were outside the dormitory and walking across the quad to a coffee shop that I realized I had not heard the girl utter a single word.

  I paid for my cup of tea and for Ronnie’s mocha with extra whipped cream. I was buying a lot of coffee for people on this case. I wished I had thought to keep track of my receipts. Jeanelle would have liked it if I could have billed Heavenly for expenses.

  We took our drinks over to a small table some distance from where the other students were sitting chatting or hunched over schoolbooks and laptops.

  “Heavenly and your mother told me that Violetta made a pass at you,” I said. No point in beating around the bush.

  He winced. “Nah. She didn’t make a pass. She just. . . you know.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “She just put her hands on me. You know,” he motioned vaguely in the direction of his crotch. The light was dim, but I was fairly sure he was blushing.

  “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”

  “Sounds like you know.”

  “I know what your mother and Heavenly said. I don’t know what you saw or felt.”

  He rubbed his face with his hand and then took a sip of his drink, leaving a delicate white mustache of whipped cream. I fought the urge to wipe it off with my napkin.

  “We were watching TV, and she started talking about how there was no room for her on the couch. Then she sat down on my lap. She started like, wiggling, you know? Like she was trying to get comfortable. She asked me do I like that, and then she reached down and just. . . you know . . . grabbed me. I j
umped right up and yelled at her to stop it. She fell on the floor. First Mama got all crazy at me, hollering, ‘Why you hurt your sister like that?’ But when I said what Violetta had done, Mama tossed her out.”

  “Had she ever done anything like that before?”

  He shrugged.

  “She had done it before?”

  “Not like that, no. That was the first time she, like, grabbed me right there. But she used to make jokes, you know? How big a man I was getting to be, whether I was getting any, that kind of thing.”

  “Did she do that kind of thing a lot?”

  He shrugged again. “When she wasn’t using or drinking, she’d be real sweet. She’d treat me no different than Chantelle does. Or even Heavenly. But Violetta could get real silly when she was high.”

  There was that word again. Silly.

  “Was that the last time you saw her?”

  He nodded.

  “And the last time you talked to her?”

  “No, she called me the next day. She was all crying, you know? Talking about how sad she was, and how sorry. She asked me to call Mama and tell her that she had apologized.”

  “And did you?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I called and just said, you know, Violetta called me and she’s real sorry about what happened yesterday. That’s it.”

  “Do you know if your mother talked to her after that?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I think she did. She said she would, anyway.”

  “Your mother said she was planning on calling Violetta?”

  “Yeah, my mother told me she was going to call Violetta and tell her that if she was really sorry, and if she promised to behave, she could come home, and Mama would try to help her get into rehab.”

  Poor Corentine, one more time opening up her heart and her home to her daughter, unable to close the door on the hope that Violetta would somehow manage to turn her life around. The eternal belief of a mother in the possibility of her child.

  “Had you ever seen Violetta behave this way with anyone else?”

  Ronnie laughed derisively. “My sister Violetta was a ho. She behaved that way with everybody. Even before she turned out, she’d be throwing herself at people. It didn’t matter, as long as she thought she could get the drugs out of somebody, she’d push herself on him no matter who he was.”