“And you don’t know how much money?”
“Sylvester knows,” Jackie said. “She was waving it around so much, he found out she had it and took it away from her.”
“All of it?”
“Oh, he probably left her a little, you know. Just to keep her from going crazy,” Jackie said.
I looked at M&M. “Do you know what happened with the money?”
She nodded. “He took it. But he said he’d buy her some new clothes with it, so she should be quiet. She was real upset, though. She cried hard.”
“When was that?”
“The day before she died. She didn’t even want to work that night, she was so upset. But Sylvester made her. It was lucky she bought all that stuff off of Baby Richard, because Sylvester never found it, and it made her feel a lot better.”
“Hey,” Jackie said. “You gonna buy us some more coffee?”
“Jackie,” I replied, “I’m going to buy you anything you want.”
Thirty-three
THE next morning I drove right from dropping the older kids off to Corentine’s house. She answered the door wearing a pale pink robe and a pair of quilted slippers at least two sizes too large for her feet. When she saw me, her hands lifted to her hair. It was wrapped tightly around her head in a dark brown nylon scarf.
“Oh my,” she said. “I’m not even dressed.”
“I’m sorry, Corentine. But I have to talk to you. Can I come in?”
“What a pretty little baby,” she said. She didn’t open the door.
“Please, Corentine.”
She looked back over her shoulder into the house. “I don’t usually like to have visitors before I get the house fixed up a bit.”
“Please,” I said.
She sighed. “Just understand that I haven’t done my housework yet. I was going to get to it right now.”
The house was no messier than any house with children on a school-day morning—laundry spilled out of a plastic basket in the front hall, shoes tumbled haphazardly in the middle of the floor, and the remains of breakfast on the kitchen table. It looked, in fact, a lot better than the house I’d left behind me that morning. I put Sadie down in the living room. She had fallen asleep in her car seat and I didn’t want her to wake up. Corentine began clearing dishes and putting away the milk and the boxes of cereal.
“I usually cook a hot meal for breakfast,” she said. “I don’t like to let them go out with just cereal in their stomachs, but I been a little tired.”
“You should see what my kids eat. Half the time I can’t even get them to eat a bowl of cereal.”
“Oh, you’ve got to make them sit until they eat. They can’t concentrate in school if they don’t have a nice breakfast warming them up. I tell that to mine all the time. It’s just too hard to pay attention to the teacher with your stomach rumbling, and lunchtime is a long time away.”
She turned on the water and began scrubbing the dishes. I took up a dishtowel and started drying. She smiled at me. “I’m not even going to tell you that you don’t need to do that,” she said, “because I know you will no matter what I say.”
“Corentine,” I said as I wiped the plastic cereal bowls dry. “Did you talk to Violetta before she died? After that Sunday dinner when you had to ask her to leave?”
Corentine sighed heavily and wiped her forehead with the back of one soapy hand. She left a spot of foam on her forehead and I leaned over and blotted it gently with the towel.
“Thank you, honey,” she said. “Lord this house is a mess.” She stood with her hands in the warm soapy water, not washing the dishes, just holding them still under the bubbles.
“Here, let me,” I said. I put my hands in the water next to hers and gently but quickly washed the remaining dishes. Then I drained the water out of the sink. She held her hands out obediently as I rinsed them and my own.
She allowed me to lead her to the table and sat down. I poured her a cup of coffee and she sat, her hands cupped around the mug. I made short work of the countertops. I found a broom behind the door and swept the floor. I glanced over my shoulder to see if she would protest as I went into the living room to clean up the children’s toys and shoes, but she didn’t, just stared into the cooling coffee in her cup. After the living room was in order I quickly made the beds, smoothing the covers and doing my best at hospital corners. Within twenty minutes I’d done more house cleaning in Corentine’s apartment than I’d done in my own house since my kids were born.
I dumped out Corentine’s now-cold coffee and poured her a fresh cup.
“Oh my,” she said. “Oh my. I just sat here and let you clean my house?” She sounded befuddled and dismayed.
“Corentine,” I said. “Did you talk to your daughter before she died?”
She sighed and lifted the cup to her lips. Her teeth clacked against the rim and she set it down again. “Yes,” she said, finally. “Yes, I talked to my baby.”
“What happened?” I asked gently.
“It was bad.”
“You can tell me.”
“I didn’t help her.”
“You tried. I know you tried. You spent your whole life trying to help your daughter.”
“Not that time.”
“Please, Corentine. Please tell me what happened.”
She sighed heavily. She tried again to drink from her mug, and this time succeeded in taking a tremulous sip. “It was the day before she died. She called about this time of day, maybe a little later. I know it was still morning, because I wasn’t done getting the house to rights. Violetta wanted to talk to Vashon, but of course he was at school. I said, ‘Girl, it’s a school day. Your baby’s in math class right now.’ But I don’t think she even knew the time of day. She kept talking about how she going to get him a Game Boy. She going to buy me a new pair of my orthopedic shoes. Talking such foolishness. Those shoes cost one hundred and twenty dollars. When did Violetta ever have that kind of money? For a little while I just let her go on and on, making those promises. I remember I was sweeping the floor, and I just put the phone on speaker and let her talk about that Game Boy and my shoes. And all sorts a other things she was going to buy Vashon and me. When I was done sweeping, that’s when I did it.” Corentine bit her lip.
“What? What did you do?”
She shrugged her heavy, rounded shoulders. “I told her she couldn’t call me no more. I never said that to her before.” She rubbed her eyes. “Oh dear Lord.”
“She was high, wasn’t she? You didn’t want her calling like that.”
She nodded. “I told her she couldn’t call or come by no more. I told her that if she wanted to see her baby again she’d have to go into a real program. Lord help me, I told my poor girl that what she did to Ronnie was so evil, I wouldn’t even let her talk to Vashon no more unless she got herself into a program.” Corentine’s mouth twisted miserably.
“I think you did the right thing,” I said. “I mean, I know it probably doesn’t mean much; why should you care what I think? But I’ve spent a long time representing drug users in court, and I can tell you that you don’t do them any favors by making it easy for them to take advantage of you. You made it clear to your daughter that you would be there for her if she ever wanted to stop using. You told her you’d help her if she got into a program. That’s more than a lot of people would have done considering all she’d put you through.”
“I let her down.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I didn’t help her.”
“She didn’t want to be helped.”
“But she did! She did want to be helped. She called me again, the next day, the day she died, saying she didn’t want to be out on the street no more and could she come home. I was stone cold. I told her that I meant what I said. I said she couldn’t cross my threshold until after she’d been through rehab. I said I didn’t believe her. And I told her what she did to her little brother made me sick.” Corentine sobbed suddenly and put her face in her hands.
Corentine nodded, her face still hidden.
“Corentine, please. Please help me figure out what happened that night. Violetta called Ronnie to apologize, and then what happened?”
She raised her face. “The last words my baby girl heard from my mouth were angry words. Hateful words. Do you know what that feels like? She thought I didn’t love her no more. She thought she couldn’t come home no more. She died thinking her own mama didn’t love her.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is! It is true. She never knew that Ronnie called and told me about her apology. She never knew that I called up Chantelle and said that I was going to let her come home and that Thomas would need to find some real good program for her.”
“You called Chantelle?”
“Yes.”
“To tell her what exactly?”
“What I told you. That Violetta was finally serious about the rehab, and that Thomas should find her a good place.”
“What did Chantelle say?”
“Oh, you know. She was worried that Violetta wouldn’t really do it, that she was just making promises. You got to understand, my girls used to be real close. They were closer even than twins. Chantelle just loved her sister. And Violetta, she broke Chantelle’s heart over and over again. Chantelle tried to argue with me, but I said ‘Look, we got to give Violetta another chance. Family is family and I only got two daughters left now.’ Well, three, with Heavenly, but you know what I mean.”
“And did she agree?”
“Of course she did. Thomas is a good man, and he promised once before to pay for Violetta to go into rehab.”
“Did you try to call Violetta? Did you try to tell her that she could come home?”
Corentine started to cry, her tears running down the swells of her smooth, round cheeks. “I left her a message. The day she died I left her a message on her voice mail. I said, ‘Violetta, baby, come on home.’ I left her a message,” she wept. “And I don’t know, I don’t know if she got it. I don’t know if she died knowing she was welcome in my house.”
“I’m sure she did,” I said. “I’m sure she knew that. She always knew that.”
Thirty-four
I wanted to see Chantelle and Thomas together, because I wanted to put him on the spot, to see if he was as smooth and unflappable in front of his wife as he was when she wasn’t there. I called the cell phone number Heavenly gave me for Chantelle when the case first began.
“My shift ends at two,” she said. “You can come over after that. Thomas will be home. It’s his day off.”
Having dumped Sadie on a grumbling Peter, I had no children with me when I walked up the steps to Chantelle and Thomas’s impeccable house. Their front door was flanked by tubs of pink geraniums and the tiny front garden was a patch of bright green grass surrounded on all four sides by a row of miniature rosebushes, also pink.
Chantelle answered the door, still wearing her pink flowered scrubs. She clearly liked the color.
“Come in,” she said.
The living room into which she led me had a cream-colored leather sectional sofa, silk flowers in cut glass vases on the end tables, and a fifty-inch flat-screen television dominating one wall. Chantelle left me alone on the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. It was clear that I was not meant to follow. A moment later she came out holding a tray with a coffeepot and a matching sugar bowl and creamer. She poured me a cup of coffee. She offered a plate of butter cookies, but I declined. She did not pour coffee for herself or for Thomas, who arrived a moment later, wearing jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. His feet were bare, and I caught Chantelle giving them a disapproving glance.
“I just had a few things I wanted to verify,” I said.
They looked at each other, and then at me.
I continued. “Before Violetta was killed, someone gave her a large sum of money. Probably over a thousand dollars. Do either of you know anything about that?”
Neither of them looked surprised, but neither answered me.
I waited.
After a few moments I said, “Look, Thomas, I know you gave her the money. There were witnesses.” I didn’t elaborate that those witnesses were drug-addled prostitutes who would have exactly zero credibility in a court of law. I believed Jackie and M&M, and I was betting that their existence would at least be enough to convince Thomas to tell me the truth.
It was a good bet.
“Twenty-five hundred,” Thomas said. “It was twenty-five hundred dollars, not a thousand. We gave it to her. We gave it to her in return for promising to disappear, to leave her mother and the rest of the family alone once and for all.”
Chantelle was breathing quickly. A thin sheen of sweat stood out on her forehead. “You need to understand,” she said. “My sister Violetta did so much damage in her life. She hurt my mother over and over again. She hurt all of us. She was supposed to be my bridesmaid and she was too high to come to my wedding. And that wasn’t even the worst thing she did. She made advances to my little brother. She was an evil, evil person.”
I looked at Thomas, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Clearly, Chantelle didn’t know that he’d had to bribe Violetta with heroin money to get her to come home for her sister Annette’s funeral. If Chantelle had known about that she surely would have added it to the litany of Violetta’s crimes against the family.
Chantelle’s words tumbled out of her mouth. “She shot up here, in my house. She tortured that poor son of hers, showing up every couple of months and pretending she was ready to act like a mother to him. And Mama. She broke Mama’s heart over and over again. Every time she promised to get clean and then ended up back on the street, Mama would just die inside a little more. My mother has diabetes, did you know that? And high blood pressure. The cycle of hope and disappointment was killing her. I just knew if I didn’t do something Violetta was going to break Mama’s heart for good and for real. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So you paid her to go away.”
Thomas said, “After that awful scene where she got drunk and behaved so appallingly—in front of her son, I might add—Chantelle and I decided that enough was enough. I emptied our bank account and I went down to Violetta’s corner. I told her she could have it all, every last dime, as long as she promised never to show her face at home again. I told her she couldn’t call or write. She had to disappear.”
I looked from one of them to the other. Thomas sat easily in his chair, one arm thrown over the back, his long legs extended out before him and his bare feet crossed. Chantelle, however, was sitting on the edge of her matching armchair, her hands clasped, her face damp with sweat.
“But Violetta didn’t go away, did she?”
Thomas shook his head. “I guess she didn’t. Or she didn’t plan to.” He shrugged his shoulders ruefully. “Why we ever thought we could trust a drug addict’s word, I’ll never know. At her funeral we found out that the very next day—a day after taking every dime her sister and I had managed to save—she called up offering presents and asking to come home.”
I frowned. “At her funeral?”
He nodded. “I’m surprised my mother-in-law survived the funeral, if you want to know the truth. She was weeping over the casket, holding on to it like . . . like . . . well, like her child was inside. She was begging Violetta’s forgiveness for not letting her come home like she’d asked. It just about broke my heart to see that. It broke all our hearts. Everyone in that room.”
I stared at him. His face was wide open; sad and sorry. It’s so hard to tell if someone is lying. Was he telling the truth or was he just very smooth? Chantelle, however, was much easier to read. She sat knotting her fingers in her lap, her head tucked to her chest, her lips pinched into a tight line and her eyes nearly closed. Beads of sweat had sprung out on her hairline.
“Chantelle,” I said. “You knew about the call.”
She shook her head
violently from side to side.
“You did. Corentine called you. She told you that she thought Violetta was serious now and that Thomas should find her a good, private rehab center. She told you she wanted you to pay for it.”
Chantelle shook her head again.
Thomas wrinkled his brow. “I think you must have your chronology confused. The first we heard about all that was after Violetta died.”
“Chantelle?” I said.
“I don’t remember,” she whispered. “I don’t remember.”
“Chantelle? Baby?” Thomas said. “What’s she talking about?”
I said, “Corentine told me she spoke to Chantelle, that she told her that Violetta had called and said she wanted to come home and try to get into rehab again. Corentine said she told Chantelle that this time she wanted Violetta to go into a better program, a private program, and that you would pay for it.”
“That’s not what happened,” he said firmly. “Corentine must be remembering wrong. Or you must have misunderstood.”
“Chantelle?” I said softly.
“Mama must be remembering wrong,” she said. She unknotted her hands and wiped the palms on her knees. “Or you must have misunderstood.”
“Thomas, do you mind telling me where you were the night Violetta was killed?” I said.
“Do I mind? Yes, I mind,” he said, his angry voice suddenly booming through the room. “Who the hell do you think you are to be asking me that kind of question?”
“He was working,” Chantelle said. “He was in surgery.”
“Were you?”
“That is no business of yours,” he said.
“Were you working, Thomas?” I repeated.
“I don’t owe you an explanation, but I have nothing to hide. I was on call the night Violetta was killed. I remember quite clearly. I had back-to-back appendectomies. I have a hospital full of witnesses who can attest to my whereabouts.”
Could he have had time to sneak out from the hospital and make it all the way to Figueroa Street? It seemed virtually impossible. What if someone went looking for him and he was nowhere to be found?
Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Page 17
