“My investigation has moved away from him specifically to finding out what, exactly, happened to some of the other girls who knew him.”
“You think he hurt them too?”
I knew he had. But I wasn’t going to say that. “I think he might have. And as you know, events like this are hard with family around you. Some of the other girls don’t have your kind of support.”
A tear worked its way out of her bad eye.
“If I can find out what his system was,” I said, “then maybe I can establish a timeline, and check on some of the other girls.”
“What other girls?” she asked. “Karen?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No one has said anything about her, except you. Does she have family who would look for her?”
Lacey frowned, then shook her head once. “I think her mom ran off. Her dad—I don’t know. I didn’t like her, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention.”
Then her face flooded with color. It made her bruises stand out.
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, if she’s hurt—”
“We don’t know if she’s hurt or just fine. I’m just writing down names right now of girls who were seen with him,” I said.
Lacey bit her lower lip, then winced. “Okay. I don’t know a lot about her.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You might not know a lot about any of the girls I’m going to ask you about. It’s okay.”
She nodded, then smoothed one hand over her hair, as if calming herself.
“Did you see Karen in school after she was with Voss?”
Lacey shook her head. “She skipped a lot though. I never looked for her. I don’t remember seeing her.”
That was probably as good as we’d get. I would work my way back around to the skipping.
“So,” I said, “how long between the day you met Voss and him running into you outside of school?”
Her frown deepened. She leaned back against the pillow, her hands finally calm. “I met him after you took us to that house. But I’m not sure exactly when after.”
I took them to the Panther death house on December 7. School ended for the semester on December 19.
“So you met him the week before school let out for Christmas vacation,” I said.
She nodded.
“Do you remember the day of the week?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her lips were pressed together, almost as if talking about this was as bad as having it happen all over again.
“And then you saw him…?”
“I was Christmas shopping with some of my friends,” she said. “Down on 71st. We took the ‘L.’”
“Was he on the ‘L’?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see him. We were having a good time. Giggling, and stuff. We…”
Her voice trailed off, almost as though the idea of having fun was too much for her.
“He saw you and bought you things,” I said.
“He came into that bookstore Daddy likes so much.”
“The Claiborne Bookstore?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I was trying to find something for Daddy, and then Clyde showed up and asked me if I was a big reader.”
“And you said?”
“I was doing Christmas shopping. He didn’t ask who it was for. I didn’t tell him.” That color in her cheeks grew darker. “I didn’t want to think about Daddy just then.”
“So you didn’t mention your father,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything about my family and stuff. I…” She closed her eyes, then shook her head. “I wanted Clyde to think I was older.”
She opened her eyes and looked down.
I thought about offering words of comfort, then figured it would be more comforting for her if I got through this list of questions quickly.
“Did he take you out that day?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I was with my friends.”
“Did he meet them?” I asked.
“No!” she said. And then she faced me. “He didn’t go after any of them, did he?”
“I don’t know who you were with,” I said. “Were they all in school this week?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then he didn’t go after any of them.”
She let out a gasp of relief and leaned back on the pillows.
“You were the only one in the bookstore?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I told him I was with friends and he said that was cool. He asked me if I could meet him on that Monday at that deli, you know. The Golden Skillet. He’d help me finish shopping. I said that was really nice.”
I kept myself perfectly rigid. I hated thinking about this. But I made myself focus. The Golden Skillet was on 71st, just like the bookstore was. They weren’t far from each other.
“Did you go?”
“Me and Lillibeth,” Lacey said. “I brought her along. He seemed kinda mad about that, but he bought us lunch. Then he gave me a present and told me not to open it until later.”
Lacey had tried to be smart. She had done her very best.
“I know Lillibeth is okay,” she said, angling herself so that she could see me better. “I know she is. She was here. She wanted to know what happened, and Mom answered her. Mom says I got hurt real bad and we aren’t going to talk about it. But Lillibeth is my best friend.”
And suddenly we were in waters that were extremely unfamiliar to me. “I think you get to decide who to tell,” I said. “But if you’re worried about it, talk to Marvella. She’s been here too, right?”
“This morning, with Mom. They’re talking about some stupid group I should join.”
“It’s for healing,” I said.
“It sounds like dumb grown-up stuff,” she said.
I smiled. I could almost hear myself say the same thing at her age. “Yeah, it probably does. But dumb grown-up stuff has a point when grown-up bad things happen to you.”
She picked up the dog and squeezed it. In her pink and white jacket, clutching the stuffed animal, she looked nothing like the pretty young woman who had accidentally lured an asshole.
“Are we done?” she asked.
“Not quite,” I said. “Just a few more questions.”
Actually, most of them, but I didn’t tell her that.
“What did you do with the present?” I asked.
She gave me a perfect sideways teenage look, filled with annoyance and exasperation. “I opened it. It was a nightgown, like one Mom has. It was really pretty, but I couldn’t keep it. Daddy would’ve had conniptions. So I put it in the church basket.”
For the clothing drive. The nightgown was gone now. I probably didn’t need to see it. It had to have been lingerie. That told me more than enough about it—and would have told Lacey, too, had she been old enough to understand.
“What did Lillibeth think about him?” I asked.
“She said he was creepy. She said all old guys are creepy and they shouldn’t talk to little girls. I’m not a little girl, Uncle Bill.”
Lillibeth sounded like a sensible girl. I wished that Lacey had listened to her. But clearly, Lacey had heard the “little girl” comment as a criticism, which allowed her to ignore her friend’s sound advice.
“I know,” I said. “Did you see Voss again during the holidays?”
“No,” Lacey said. “But there was a note in the present. It said I should meet him at noon on Monday so he could take me to lunch.”
“And you went.”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice thick with tears.
“It’s all right, Lace,” I said. “He was nice to you. It’s hard to say no to people who are nice to you.”
“I thought, you know, I owed him. Because he gave me a present and I didn’t give him anything.”
I almost winced. That asshole had known how to manipulate little girls. Bastard.
“On Monday, did you apologize to him for not giving him something?” I asked.
She swal
lowed hard. It looked like she was swallowing back more tears. “He said it was okay. My company…was…enough.”
I had to look away just for a moment. I didn’t want Lacey to see the fury that crossed my face.
But I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “He was a manipulative bastard, Lace. He was using lines he’d practiced before.”
“Really?” she asked, her voice small.
“Really,” I said. “He’d tested them. He knew what worked.”
“So I’m dumb?”
“No,” I said. “This is called a con. It’s something that people do, like putting on a show, and it’s designed to trick you. I’ve fallen for cons.”
“You have, Uncle Bill?” She sounded incredulous, as if I couldn’t fall for anything.
“A lot when I was in the military,” I said. “I wasn’t happy, and I wanted to believe what people told me.”
“Yeah,” she said with obvious recognition. I wondered what was so bad about Franklin and Althea’s house. I hadn’t seen anything. Or maybe this was just what happened with teenagers. I hadn’t been the easiest kid to live with when I was a teenager. Sullen, unhappy, angry. I got out as soon as I could too—and my adoptive parents had been wonderful.
“So,” I said, “give me a picture of this con. What did you talk about on Monday at lunch?”
She squared her shoulders. Somehow calling what happened to her a con had given her strength she hadn’t had before.
“He wanted to know stuff. How old I was, stuff about my family, how my grades were. He said I was really pretty, and I could model for his company, but I couldn’t tell my folks until I had the job.”
She didn’t say that last as if it bothered her, and it should have. I had heard both Franklin and Althea warn their kids that anyone who told them to do something that they couldn’t confess to their folks was a bad person.
I had to ask her about that in a nonjudgmental way. It took me a moment to find the right words. “Did that bother you?”
“Kinda,” she said. “But I’d already told him I was in trouble for how I dressed, so I told myself I thought he was talking about that. We’d get the modeling thing done, I’d have a real job, and then Daddy would have to say yes.”
“You told Voss you were in trouble with your father?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What did you say, exactly?” I asked.
She ran her hand over the stuffed dog. “I said Daddy was really mad at me, and I didn’t talk to him much anymore. I tried to stay away from him as much as possible. I made him sound worse than he is, Uncle Bill. I don’t know how to tell him that.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
She gave me a different sideways glance, this one more eloquent than the one before. This one both thanked me for saying that and disbelieved my words at the same time.
“I actually thought about how to answer that question,” she said, and I could hear the regret. She’d been going over this part in her mind. This was where she blamed herself. “If I’d said that Daddy watches me like a hawk, I figured Clyde wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I figured he’d walk away, and he was so nice to me, Uncle Bill. I mean, he seemed nice. I mean, he seemed interested.”
She made his interest sound unusual. His niceness too. Had we stopped being nice to her? Stopped paying attention to her? Stopped being interested?
For the past year, Lacey had been getting the wrong kind of attention in the family. Dressing badly, asking to go to events that didn’t allow kids her age, mouthing off to her parents.
I hadn’t known her before she slipped into puberty. Had she been more like Mikie? The kind of girl who had been so good that no one noticed her?
“Is that wrong, Uncle Bill?” Lacey asked.
I wasn’t sure what she was referring to. “That he paid attention to you?” I asked, and censored the rest of the sentence which was, when the rest of us didn’t? “No, it’s not wrong. People pay attention for good and bad reasons.”
“Why did he come after me?” she asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said.
She focused on me for the first time in that conversation. “You mean, I caused it?”
“No. What I think, what I believe, is that he went after girls he got introduced to. He’d see how pretty they were, and decide if he wanted to go after them.”
God help me, I lied. I couldn’t let anything I learned make Lacey blame herself any more than she already was.
She pulled her bed jacket tighter, stretching some of the crochet work. “I only introduced him to Lillibeth. I didn’t tell him about anyone else, not even the friends I went shopping with.”
“Good,” I said, stuck now with my lie. It might help me move to my next group of questions. “And the first time you saw him was with Karen Frazier.”
She frowned. “I think so. I keep thinking maybe I saw him a couple of other times, though. I just didn’t pay attention.”
“With other girls?” I asked.
“I think, maybe, you know, before you and Daddy set up that whole after-school thing. I think maybe I saw him when I was waiting for someone to pick us up or for the bus. Maybe the bus.”
She sounded a lot more sure of herself than the “maybes” implied. She had seen him.
“Was he with other girls?”
“Probably,” she said.
“We set up the after-school ‘thing’ as you call it last April. So you saw him in the fall before that?”
“I think so,” she said. “I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. He was just some guy then.”
“And he was interested in girls who were older,” I said.
“Not my friends,” she said. And there was that certainty. She had seen him.
“Did you know Donna Loring or Wanda Nason?” I asked.
“I knew Donna,” she said. “She was funny. She’d make jokes after school and on the bus, and stuff. But Jonathan made me stay away from her. Her brother is in the Stones.”
“How did Jonathan know that?” I asked.
“Everybody knew that,” Lacey said. “She used to talk about how stupid the gang kids were and how they didn’t know the best thing to do was go to school and get a scholarship and become someone. She was gonna do that.”
Lacey’s frown grew.
“She’s one of the girls, right? One of the girls who was with Clyde?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“She talked to everybody,” Lacey said. “I don’t know if I saw her talking to him, but he probably listened to her. She always stood around after school while we were waiting for the bus. She was so pretty.”
Then Lacey swallowed.
“Tell me she’s okay,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I lied. “When did you last see her?”
Lacey shrugged. “She went away. I thought she got one of those Catholic school scholarships or something. You can test for that in the eighth grade and she was going to. She was going to do better than all of us forever and ever, that’s what she said.”
“And you believed her,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Lacey said. “You would have, too. She was great.”
Son of a bitch. Voss had picked his victims well. He targeted unhappy girls with ambition, girls who already knew their circumstances were challenging, and he promised he’d get them out of the neighborhood.
Judging from what little I knew about Donna Loring’s last days, he had gotten her out of the neighborhood. He just hadn’t told her he was sending her somewhere worse.
“I didn’t know someone named Wanda, though. Was she one of the girls he met?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Who else did you see him with?”
“That I remember?” Lacey said. “Just Karen.”
“When you saw Voss with Karen, Lace, was that during the school day?”
Lacey gave me a narrow look. “What do you mean?”
“Were you skipping? I promise I won’t tell yo
ur parents if you were.”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Lace, please.”
She sighed. “School’s so easy, Uncle Bill. I get straight As.”
“Without going to class,” I said.
“I go,” she said. “Just not every day. Why? I mean, there’s nothing to do, and most of the stuff is in books. I take the tests. I do better than almost anybody else. So I don’t always go to class. Sometimes we stand outside and smoke and talk.”
“You and your friends,” I said. “And girls like Donna Loring?”
“We’re the big kids now,” she said.
“You took their smoking spot,” I said.
“They went to high school. They don’t use it anymore.”
I nodded. That was the missing piece.
“Thank you for being honest.”
She tightened her hug around that dog. “Is that where he saw us first?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “But let’s see if we can figure that out. I have a list of names here that I got from the school, girls who stopped coming to school. There’s a bunch of reasons kids drop out, and I don’t expect you to know why. But if you know the girls, would you tell me? I’ll just read them—”
“No.” Althea was at the door. I wondered how long she’d been there. It couldn’t have been very long or Lacey wouldn’t have admitted to the smoking or the skipping.
Lacey looked terrified.
“We’re not talking about this anymore, William,” Althea said to me in a tone that she reserved for her misbehaving children. “You’ve done what you can. The man is no longer out there. We’re moving forward.”
“Althea,” I said.
“My daughter is going to concentrate on healing. She’s not going to think about other girls or what’s happening at that school. She’s going to get better, and you’re not going to drag her back there.”
My breath caught. Althea had been the one who wanted me to solve this. I didn’t say that, though. I didn’t want to contradict her in front of Lacey.
“I’m not taking her back to the school,” I said.
“I don’t mean physically,” Althea said. “I mean mentally. We need to get her to focus on life now, not what happened then. None of this is her fault, and she’s not going to pick over it like a new scab, all right?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. But Althea must have seen what was on my face anyway.
Street Justice: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 21
