Bye-Bye, Black Sheep

by Ayelet Waldman

  “And your wife? How does she use her will?”

  He laughed. “To get me to do what she wants. What else?”

  His laugh was a low-pitched rumble, deep and unabashedly sexy. Now it was my turn to shift uncomfortably in my seat.

  I plowed on. “Ronnie and Heavenly both told me that on occasion Violetta acted in inappropriate ways with them. Sexually inappropriate ways. Did she ever do anything like that with you?”

  He made a disgusted face. “She knew better than to try. Even if she hadn’t been a prostitute with heaven only knows what venereal diseases, I would never have tolerated it for a minute.”

  “But she never did try?”

  He shrugged. “She flirted, I suppose. All you women flirt, don’t you?”

  I thought I was doing a pretty remarkable job of not flirting. “She never offered you sex or tried to touch you?”

  “No,” he said. “I suppose even Violetta knew better than to cross her sister like that. Besides, she knew she wasn’t my type.”

  “What is your type?” I should have clamped my hands over my mouth before I let those words out.

  He smiled and closed one eye in a slow, almost languid wink.

  Thirty-one

  ON my way out of the hospital I noticed the woman who had originally directed me to the waiting area. She was sitting at the nurses’ station, talking to two other nurses. I walked over and stood there a moment until they noticed me.

  “Yes, can I help you?” she asked, her tone as hostile as it had been when I first asked where I could find Chantelle’s husband. “Did you take care of your ‘personal business’ with Dr. Green?” She used both her fingers and her voice to put the words “personal business” in quotation marks. One of the other nurses, a round Filipina woman with hair dyed a shade of red very close to my own, snickered. The other nurse rolled her eyes.

  “I work for his sister-in-law,” I said.

  The first woman narrowed her eyes. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Dr. Green was kind enough to help his sister-in-law and me out with some urgent family business.”

  She snorted. “Well, I don’t doubt that. He’s a ‘kind’ man.” Again in quotation marks, although this time without the help of her fingers.

  The third nurse, a petite African-American woman with close-cropped hair and a series of small hoop earrings running from her earlobes halfway up her ears, said, “She’s not his type, anyway. She’s probably already graduated from high school.”

  The other nurses laughed.

  I leaned my elbows on the counter and said, “Does the handsome Dr. Green have a little problem with young girls?” I modulated my voice to match theirs, light and teasing, with more than a tang of bitterness.

  The nurse with my red hair suddenly seemed to realize that they’d been talking out of school. “Oh no. He doesn’t go with girls. Not like that. No little girls. Just. . .”

  “Young women?”

  “Very young women,” the nurse with all the earrings said.

  The nurse who had started this all in the first place said, “Enough. We’re bad. We talk too much. Is there anything else you need?”

  I rocked back on my heels. “Okay,” I said. “Listen, I’m an investigator, and now you’ve given me the impression that Dr. Green is some kind of pedophile. So why don’t you tell me exactly what’s going on. Because I can’t imagine you want me to go back to work thinking that, do you?”

  They exchanged a glance and then the Filipina nurse said, “We’re just teasing, you know? He never goes after real young girls. Just the medical students. To us they seem young, but they’re not children. They’re, what?” She turned to her coworkers. “They’re like twenty-two, twenty-three years old, right?”

  “At least,” the first nurse said.

  The nurse with the earrings motioned me closer. “Look, we didn’t mean to get Dr. Green in trouble. He’s not a pedophile. It’s just that when a fine brother like him cheats on his wife, it bothers us. But don’t get the wrong idea. He’s not a criminal or anything. Those girls are all adults.”

  I lowered my voice. “I understand. Is he seeing anyone in particular?”

  She shook her head. “Now, that’s none of my business.” It was a little late for that, and she had the grace to look embarrassed at her sudden discretion.

  The first nurse said, “All we’re saying is that every once in a while Dr. Green gets a thing going with one of the medical students. It’s not so unusual, you know? It happens.” She took the arm of the red-haired nurse and pulled her away. As they walked down the hall the first nurse shook her head and looked down at her computer screen, getting back to her work.

  I turned to walk to the elevator bank but she called out, “Excuse me.”

  I looked back at her. “We were just talking,” she said. “We didn’t mean anything by it.” Her voice had completely lost its ring of bitter humor. She just sounded worried, and embarrassed that they had allowed themselves to be so indiscrete.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  But was it? I wondered. I had no idea whether he was just a flirt, or if he was actually involved with the young med students of whom the nurses were so suspicious. And more importantly, I had no idea what this meant for the purposes of my case.

  I decided to call Heavenly. In the background I could hear music playing. “Kind of Blue?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I always listen to Miles when I’m feeling low.”

  “You’re feeling low tonight?” I hated the idea of bringing her even lower, but perhaps that was better than ruining a joyful mood.

  “I was just thinking about my sisters, and my brothers, too. How hard things were for all of them, how hard my mother tried to save them.”

  “What do you think will happen when your brothers get out of prison?” I asked.

  “I just don’t know. They’ll be older men by then, but it’s hard for a black man with no education to get work even when he doesn’t have a prison record. And with a record, who’s going to hire them? Who’s going to give them a chance?” She sighed, and then seemed to shake herself. “Anyway, that’s not what you’re calling me about. What’s going on? Have you found out anything new?”

  I paused, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel for a moment. I was talking on my car speakerphone while I drove home. “No,” I said finally. “Not really. I just have a question for you. Do you think it’s at all possible that your brother-in-law and Violetta might have been having an affair? Or that something might have been going on between them?”

  She gave a bark of horrified laughter. “Thomas? You’ve got to be kidding me, girl. Have you met Thomas?”

  “I met him tonight. I paid a visit to the hospital.”

  “So you know that my brother-in-law is a very handsome man. He’s a doctor. He doesn’t have much money now, but he will have plenty when he finishes his residency. The last person in world he would look at would be someone like Violetta. And he loves Chantelle. They’ve been together for something like ten years. He’d never do something like that.”

  “Not even in a moment of weakness? If Violetta made a play for him, like what she did to you?”

  “No. Never. His reaction would be the same as mine was. He’d have thrown her out on her narrow behind.”

  I mulled this over for a moment as I turned into the street that wound up through the canyon to my house. When I’d asked Thomas himself, he had expressed profound disgust at the idea, and he neither seemed to be protesting too much nor covering up anything. Still, Heavenly’s argument about his love for Chantelle seemed to mean little given what I’d heard from the nurses.

  “Heavenly,” I said. “I found out something tonight about Thomas. I feel awful telling you this, and I certainly don’t want you to tell Chantelle, but the nurses at the hospital where Thomas works told me he has a reputation for . . . well . . . getting involved with medical students. It’s certainly possible that they were just
passing along false rumors, but I wonder if that changes your mind about the possibility of something having happened between him and Violetta.”

  She sighed. “Women do not understand this kind of thing. Honestly, sometimes I’m glad I was born a man. It gives me perspective that the rest of you just do not have. I never said I don’t think Thomas fools around. Hell, he’s a man. Men are dogs, don’t you know that yet? And he’s a good-looking man. Of course he fools around. That’s what men do. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t fool around with Violetta. I loved my sister, but I know what she was. She was a drug-addicted prostitute. She was a crack ho. Thomas would never have touched her, if for no other reason than because he would have been afraid of catching something from her. And Thomas loves Chantelle. He wouldn’t hurt her by being with her sister. Now, is that love going to last forever? I don’t know. You can never know. I was the first one to tell my sister that she should get something in writing before she went and put that man through medical school, because I know men. I know that just because he loves you now doesn’t mean that ten years from now, he won’t trade you in for a newer, younger model. But whatever Thomas is doing or not doing, I can tell you for sure, he never did anything with Violetta.”

  By now I had arrived home and was parked in my driveway. “Okay, I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “Heavenly, we’re getting close to the time when we have to concede defeat. I’m not sure there’s much more I can do and I don’t want to waste any more of your money. The answer to who killed Violetta most likely lies in a some trick she picked up that night. If that’s the case, then the kind of search that could lead to the discovery of the murderer is something I don’t have the resources to accomplish. I can try to encourage the police to do a dragnet, I can try to encourage them to at the very least put an officer out there for a few weeks to run every license plate looking for men with histories of violence, but frankly, I don’t have a lot of faith that the cops will agree to do it or that even if they did they would come up with anything. That’s why I haven’t tried to do that kind of thing myself. It’s like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. It’s been six months. The chances of that man coming back again, the chances of them spotting him, the chances that there will be any evidence, are not high. We have the DNA, but it’s possible that came from someone else entirely.”

  Heavenly’s voice was thick with tears. She suddenly sounded a lot more like what she must have before her sex change. “So now what?”

  I sat silently, considering her question. “Let’s sleep on things and talk again tomorrow,” I said.

  After she hung up the phone I still didn’t get out of the car. I sat there in the dark, thinking about my failure. I tried to remind myself that I had accomplished something tremendously important in this case, perhaps the most important thing I’d achieved in my entire career. I’d forced the police to revisit an entire group of cases, and that had resulted in the arrest of a man who would have gone on killing for a very long time. I’d been part of saving the lives of any number of women. Shouldn’t my failure to find Violetta’s murderer pale in comparison to that?

  I restarted the engine, and pulled the car out of the driveway. I had to give it one more shot. Just one. Then I would let it go.

  Thirty-two

  MY cell phone rang almost immediately. “Where are you going?” Peter said. “I heard your car in the driveway, and then you pulled out again. What’s going on?”

  “I’m going to Figueroa Street.”

  “Goddamnit, Juliet. You promised you wouldn’t go back there.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near Sylvester, I promise. I’m just going to the taco truck. This is the last time, I promise. I have to, Peter. Before I quit this case I have to be sure that I’ve done everything I can.”

  Peter knows me like no one else does. He can hear the slightest change in the timbre of my voice; he knows what I’m feeling, sometimes before I do.

  “Stay in the car, okay?” he said. “Don’t get out. Just pull in the parking lot, and ask whoever you want to talk to to get in the car with you. And if you see that Sylvester guy, swear to me that you’ll book the hell out of there as fast as you can.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “And keep your phone on. I’m going to sit on the line with you.”

  “That’s crazy, Peter.”

  “I don’t care if it’s crazy. It’ll make me feel better.”

  “Okay.”

  When I got to the taco truck I said, “I’m going to turn the volume down so they won’t be able to hear the static and realize that the phone is on. Just don’t talk, okay?”

  “Fine.”

  I pulled into the parking lot and up next to the truck. Baby Richard was in his usual spot on the bench. As I rolled down my window I saw Jackie getting out of a car that had just pulled up to the curb in front of Baby Richard. She blew a kiss to the driver of the car and handed her nephew something. M&M was sitting next to Baby Richard.

  “Hey, Mary Margaret,” I called.

  She looked up from the donut she was eating. She seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see me.

  “Want to get warm?” I said. It was a cool night, an edge of damp in the air. The morning fog was rolling in early.

  She glanced over at Baby Richard. He shrugged. “Okay,” she said. She hopped up into the passenger seat and wrinkled her nose. What did it mean when a Figueroa Street prostitute was disturbed by the odor in my minivan?

  “One of my kids got sick in the backseat yesterday,” I said.

  “My daughter gets real carsick,” she said. “She’s got to ride in the front or else she just pukes her guts up.”

  I decided that a lecture on the danger of allowing a small child to ride in the front seat would be lost on her.

  “Hey!” Jackie called, knocking on my window. “Open the door.”

  I pushed the automatic door button and it glided open.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said. “I seen that on TV.” She got in the car and scraped the food wrappings, stuffed animals and Uno cards from the seat onto the floor. “Close that door now, I’m freezing. Juliet, you owe me a buck twenty five.”

  “What? Why?”

  She held up her coffee cup. I laughed and pulled two dollars out of the armrest where I kept my change and small bills. “Here,” I said. “Now you owe me. You want me to pay for yours, M&M?”

  M&M shook her head. “S’okay Baby Richard bought it for me.”

  “Whew,” Jackie said. “Like my ol’ auntie Florene used to say, it smells like a sack o’ granddaddies in here.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Isaac gets carsick.”

  “So,” Jackie said. “What you doing down here again? You looking for Sylvester, maybe beat his sorry ass?” She cackled. Clearly Baby Richard’s sense of humor was an inherited trait.

  “No,” I said. “I’m just tying up some loose ends on Violetta’s case. I wanted to make sure there was nothing else you remembered from the night she was killed. Can you think of anything? Anything at all?”

  M&M shook her head. “It was just a regular night, you know?”

  “And you’re sure you can’t remember who picked her up?”

  She shook her head. “She had a couple of dates early in the night, and then we got some coffee over here and went back out on the corner. We stood out for a while, and then I had a date. She was gone when I got back.”

  “And you, Jackie? Do you remember seeing anything?”

  Jackie blew on her coffee and shook her head. “It was just a night, you know? Like every night. I don’t even remember seeing her much. Next thing I heard she was dead.”

  “Did you guys know Annette?”

  “Sure we did,” Jackie said. “Sure we did, Lord rest her soul. I got an AIDS test after she died. Just to be sure, you know? It was negative. I’m clean as they come. But I never touch needles. Annette, she used needles all the time.”

  “What about you, M&M?” I asked.


  “I knew her,” she said. “She was real sweet. She used to help me and Violetta out at the beginning. You know, show us stuff. Like Jackie does.”

  Jackie smiled proudly. “I’m a real mother hen to the young girls. Teach them how to get what’s they due. All that.”

  “Do you remember when Annette died? Violetta’s brother-in-law came to get her for the funeral. Did either of you see him?”

  Jackie hooted. “Sure I did. Mm-mm.” She licked her lips.

  “I didn’t see him,” M&M said. “But I know he was real generous with Violetta. He gave her money sometimes, and didn’t ask nothing about what she was going to use it for.”

  “When did he give her money? When Annette died?”

  M&M shrugged. “Yeah, then again a couple of days before Violetta died. He came down here like he did that other time when Annette died, but this time he didn’t take Violetta away with him. She just sat in his car with him for a little while, and when she came out she told me he gave her a lot of money.”

  “How much?” I felt a rising excitement.

  Jackie said, “Enough that she bought five hundred dollars worth of dope from Baby Richard. And not junk, either. The really nice stuff. The kind he keeps for hisself She was flying on that dope until the night she died.”

  “She didn’t just buy dope with it,” M&M said. “Violetta gave me back two hundred dollars she owed me, and she was planning on buying her son a Game Boy. She was going to give it to him the next time she saw him. She was going to buy her mama some real nice new shoes. Her mama wears these special shoes, because her feet are like fat, but small. Like a weird size, and they hurt her real bad. I heard Violetta tell her mama that she was going to buy her a new pair of shoes.”

  “When was that?”

  M&M shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess the day after she got the money? The day before she died, I think.”

  “Mary Margaret, did Violetta tell you why Thomas gave her the money?”

  She shook her head. “She just said he was trying to play her, but he was messing with the wrong girl. That’s all she said.”