“What are we trying to find from all of this?” Josephine asked.
“Alibis,” he answered. “As far as anyone knows, there has never been an actual eyewitness to any of these killings. But maybe there’s something in here”—he pointed to the huge volume of paperwork—“that belies that, stuff the cops didn’t want the public to know.”
“That’s always been one of the reasons the police have given for not being able to solve this,” she said.
He nodded. “No one’s ever seen the killer—assuming it isn’t Marvin. The closest so far is this friend of the latest victim’s who saw Marvin in the parking lot some time around the time of the killings.” He shook his head at the volume of material they had to go through. “Let’s have at it. I’ll start with the most recent, you go back to the beginning. Highlight everything that seems pertinent, anything that could cast suspicion on Marvin’s involvement, any areas of similarity that seem strange. At the end of the day we’ll compare notes.”
After lunch Josephine went to the Auto Club and got the largest map of the city they had. She took that to a custom photography store and had it blown up ten times. The finished product was twelve feet square. She pinned the gargantuan map up on the wall outside their office and stuck pushpins into the locations where each of the murders had taken place, numbering them in the order they had happened.
The day was dying. Wyatt had a crick in his back from sitting hunched over at his desk reading the police material. He had also reread Dwayne’s grand jury testimony and Violet Waleska’s police statement and identification. After that he had worked his way backward in the police reports of the previous murders. Dwayne’s testimony, in contrasting and comparing it with the police reports, was compelling and convincing. In instance after instance he had given the grand jury information that only someone with direct and in-depth knowledge about the murders could have known. Even small details—the color of a victim’s shoe, the brand of cigarettes she was carrying in her purse—were in both his testimony and the police reports.
“There is so much damn detail in this stuff,” he remarked to Josephine. “How in the world could Marvin have remembered all this minutiae?”
“But what if Marvin really is the killer,” she countered. “I’m talking hypothetically, of course, but if he was he could be completely obsessed about them. He could remember every single detail. The killer might even have kept a journal, so he could read about it and relive it. I’ve read about those things happening.”
“Marvin doesn’t strike me as a diarist,” Wyatt said with a frown. “He’s functionally illiterate. But it’s something we should explore,” he added, not wanting to dampen her enthusiasm. “Good thinking.”
“Thanks.” She could feel the blush, still on her neck and jaw.
“Which reminds me—we’re going to have to have him examined by a psychologist. And we should check to see if there are any outstanding IQ tests, other measures of his intelligence, especially his memory. Get hold of his school files.”
“I’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”
They stood looking at the map. The pushpins, although not clustered, were all located in the same section of town. Wyatt ran his finger along the line of pins from top to bottom.
“Hooker alley,” he said. “It’s a big area, but not that big in comparison to the city as a whole. Here’s another avenue to explore: check the arrest records of the women who were killed and see if there are any pimps attached to them. Or any johns, although they weren’t listing the johns until recently. Maybe more than one of them had the same pimp. That would be a big break.”
“Don’t you think the police would have investigated the pimps pretty thoroughly?” she asked.
“I’m not thinking of them as suspects. Sources of information. Did any of the victims have regulars who might have been a customer with another one of them, that kind of thing.” He stretched, massaging the small of his back. He’d love to get a run in tonight, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had other things to do that took precedence.
“Tomorrow you’re going to start making a list,” he instructed her. “Every witness the police interviewed. Every name in those police reports. We need to find out if any of them have something to say that isn’t in these records.” He paused. “We also have to find out if any of them are going to come forward and testify that they saw Marvin around when this shit was happening.”
“That would be awful,” she said with a shudder.
“Yep, it would. But better we hear it as soon as possible than get blindsided with it in the middle of the trial.” He got his briefcase and suit coat from his office. “Don’t work too late. I’ll see you in the morning.” He started to leave. “One more thing. Have a locksmith in here tomorrow morning. I want this floor to be secure, as much as is possible. And order a couple safes, so we can lock up the critical stuff.”
“A tad paranoid, are we?” she chided him.
“Damn straight.” He shrugged into his coat. “Don’t work too late, and have fun this evening.”
He wondered if she had a boyfriend. She hadn’t mentioned one, but they hadn’t known each other very long. He realized that there was a tiny seed of jealousy about thinking that she might. That he was a married man—happily married, despite the recent problems—should mean he had no right to think that. But he did anyway. Human nature.
“You, too,” she answered. “Are you going home now?”
“No.” Earlier, he had called home to let Moira know he’d be working late. She hadn’t called back. “I have something to attend to outside the office.”
WYATT KNEW THE CITY—he’d grown up in it; and although he’d gone away for college, law school, the service, and a few jobs early in his career, he had lived here most of his life. But he didn’t know this part of it, where he was driving now. Even as a kid and young man, when he’d gone to jazz clubs in black areas, he hadn’t been in locations like this.
This was urban hell. Block after block featured boarded-up storefronts covered with spray-painted graffiti, most of it gang-related, or closed-up businesses with heavy metal grates pulled down over them to prevent vandalism and theft. The people on the streets looked like they had nowhere else in the world to go. Not even drug dealers or hookers were hanging around this part of town. You saw it on these reality TV shows, cops busting junkies and dealers and hookers, people living in rat-infested tenements, but it didn’t quite seem real, it felt staged somehow, a relic from some other America. It wasn’t just his city—it was every urban area. Even the great garden spots, like San Francisco. New Orleans, he knew from having recently been there, was now considered one of the most dangerous cities in the country.
He didn’t see one single white face.
The street he was on, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (he knew of at least three other cities with large black populations that had a King Boulevard), was the main artery of this part of the city. It ran for miles. He checked his directions to make sure he was going the right direction. He was—it was longer than he had realized it would be. It was a huge area, a city within a city.
The housing project comprised several six-story brick-and-concrete buildings. The project, Sullivan Houses, was named after the congressman who had gotten the funding. Thirty-some years old, it was built at the height of the Great Society and had been obsolete from the day it was finished.
Wyatt had done some research on the area. It had the highest incidence of violent crimes in the city, a statistic it had owned for over a decade. Less than twenty percent of the kids raised in the Sullivan Houses graduated from high school, and of that select group only a handful went to college. There was one player currently in the NBA, one in the NFL, and two playing big-league baseball from these projects. They must have had strong wills, Wyatt thought, to make it through here without succumbing to the endless temptations. He wondered if there had ever been a doctor, or an engineer. Or a lawyer.
Several blocks before Wyatt reached his destinat
ion he saw the buildings rising up out of the pink-tinted smog that was caused by smoke and chemical waste coming from the refineries across the river. Even with his car windows rolled up and the air-conditioning on, he could smell the air—acrid, tear-inducing.
Wyatt turned off King Boulevard and drove into Sullivan Houses. The interior of the project was more depressing than the outside world surrounding it. The streets were riddled with potholes, many the size of small craters. There had been no attempt to fill them in, even temporarily, the way the city customarily took care of the pothole problem. Large piles of trash lined the sidewalks, everything from discarded furniture to large plastic garbage bags that were ripped, overflowing the battered garbage cans. Rats the size of small cats darted in and out of the garbage piles. The sanitation department didn’t put a high priority on a maintenance schedule, he thought as he looked at the scene with repulsion. Or maybe they simply didn’t come in here until they absolutely had to.
He had been looking forward to this visit, from an outsider’s abstract point of view. Now that he was actually here, he hoped he hadn’t made a bad decision. There was danger on these streets—you could feel it exuding right out of the asphalt.
The streets in the project were lettered A to L, and the buildings were numbered from 100, each section a different hundred number. Jonnie Rae and her family lived on Avenue E, building 522, apartment 5G. Marvin had lived there, too, until a few weeks ago.
Jonnie Rae’s two youngest children were outside their building, waiting for him. As he slowly drove down the street toward them they spotted his car (which he had described earlier, over the phone) and waved their arms, jumping up and down and pointing excitedly to a parking place right in front that they had been saving for him.
He parked and got out, locking the door with the remote alarm. A crowd started gathering. Kids, teenagers, adults. It was dinnertime or later, people were in their homes and outside, watching some white man get out of his Jaguar.
He couldn’t help it—he felt nervous. He assumed that the people who lived here never saw a white face in their neighborhood, except for a cop or a welfare worker. He tried to act cool, nonchalant, but he didn’t feel it. In his entire life he had never set foot in a housing project, although there were dozens of them situated all over the poor sections of the city. The closest he’d come was driving by them on a freeway, looking down, with his windows up and the doors locked.
You wanted to try something new in your life, you’ve got it, he thought to himself.
“Don’t be using that alarm,” a man’s voice said behind him.
He turned. One of the young men who had been standing at the back of the courtroom during Marvin’s arraignment came out of the crowd and walked toward him. Strutted would be a more accurate description of the way he moved, Wyatt thought. Or swaggered. This was his territory and he walked the walk.
Wyatt looked at the man as he approached. He wasn’t the one who had worn the expensive Ralph Lauren threads. Instead of the fancy leather jacket he’d worn in the courtroom, he was now casual, in T-shirt, sagging pants, and new Air Jordans. He was wearing a hairnet over his head, and over that a bandanna signifying what Wyatt assumed were his gang colors. He looked about Marvin’s age, eighteen going on forever.
“Kids’ll set that off before you can turn your back,” the young man explained. “I’m Louis,” he said. “Friend of Marvin’s.” He didn’t offer to shake hands.
Despite Louis’s tough demeanor, Wyatt couldn’t help but think of him as a kid. His daughter wasn’t much younger, as he’d observed in contrasting her with Marvin, and he still thought of her as a kid—she had called him “Daddy” a few days ago. He’d have to watch that he didn’t say “kid” out loud.
“Kill that sucker,” Louis said, meaning the alarm. “Your wheels are safe here, man. You’re Marvin’s lawyer. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with your car.”
Wyatt did as he was told.
A beeper went off on Louis’s belt. Louis looked at it, took a cell phone out of his pocket, punched in some numbers. “Yeah?” He listened for a minute, his face scrunching into an angry frown. “Hey, fuck him. Let him buy—” He realized that Wyatt was standing right next to him, but disregarded him. “—his product some other place.” As he punched some new numbers into his phone he turned to Marvin. “Go with her,” he said dismissively, pointing to Marvin’s sister. He walked away, talking low on the cell phone.
Marvin’s sister and brother led him inside her building, which had a broken lock on the front door. There was an elevator off to the side with a Not Working sign taped to the front. It was an old sign.
He followed the little girl and boy up three flights of stairs. Cooking smells, predominantly the smell of grease frying, came from behind the closed doors. They mixed with the funky stench of urine and vomit, odors that had been soaking in for decades. Most of the lightbulbs in the stairway were out. Roaches as big as his thumb scurried along the floorboards, and there were rat holes and piles of rat droppings everywhere. He was careful to watch where he stepped, especially when he saw discarded drug paraphernalia—needles and crack vials—on a landing. Halfway up the stairs there were some discarded condoms. The kids walked by them as if they didn’t exist.
The small apartment was stuffed with mismatched furniture and bric-a-brac. Old copies of Ebony and TV Guide were piled in one corner. The television in front of the sofa was on to Wheel of Fortune. From off in the kitchen came the aroma of fried chicken.
Jonnie Rae came bustling out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. As he reached out to shake her hand, a horrible thought went through his mind: Aunt Jemima pancake syrup.
You prick, he thought. You ugly bastard. Underneath it all you really are a latent bigot. That he had thought that almost made him sick to his stomach. And as all those feelings and emotions roiled inside him he understood with a wonderful clarity that what he had embarked on was going to be more than a change in the way he did his job. It was going to be a sea change in how he looked at the world, and dealt with it. No matter what else happened to him, he was going to make sure of that.
At the same time, he had to laugh at himself. Judge not, etc. He’d been coming down on Moira, judging her so moralistically. Who was he to judge anyone?
Jonnie Rae had no idea what was going on inside his head. “This is an honor,” she gushed, obviously nervous, “you driving all the way down here, a man with a busy schedule like you must have.”
“I was happy to do it,” he said, realizing that he actually was, and at the same time being washed with guilt from those spontaneous shitty thoughts he’d had. “I appreciate you inviting me into your home.”
“No trouble at all. Least I can do, you driving all the way down here this time of the night. You sit down and make yourself comfortable. You want something cold to drink?”
“Yes.” The apartment was hot and closed-in; he was already beginning to sweat under his arms. He sat on the center of the couch. The little boy plopped down next to him. On the screen, Vanna White was turning some letters.
“You like this show?” the boy asked.
“I’ve never seen it,” Wyatt replied. “I don’t watch much television,” he explained.
“It’s a bitchin’ show. You can win all kinds of shit, money and shit like that. I’d like to get on that show.”
The little girl brought him a green-colored drink with some ice cubes in a Jurassic Park glass. She sat on the other side of him. “You like this?” she asked him.
“What is it?”
“Kool-Aid. Lemon-lime, my favorite.”
He took a sip. It was sweet, almost to the point of gagging. “It’s good,” he said.
“I put in extra sugar.”
He took another sip, set the glass down.
“You gonna do good by my brother?” the girl asked.
“I’m going to try,” he answered.
“That’s good, ’cause he needs some smart man helping him. He’s too dumb t
o help his own self.”
The little girl, whose name was Toni (named after Toni Morrison, the famous writer, Jonnie Rae informed him proudly), turned to her mother. “Can I show him my drawings?” she asked.
“Ask him.”
“Can I show you my drawings?” she asked Wyatt.
“Sure,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
Toni ran out of the room, coming back a moment later with a loose-leaf notebook, which she set on the sofa next to Wyatt. Slowly, she turned the pages.
The book was filled with colored-pencil, drawings, all taken from her everyday life. There were drawings of the street outside, drawings of her school (he knew it was a school because it said “school” in big block letters on top), drawings of her mother, her sister and brothers. There were several drawings of Marvin, looking like a fierce urban warrior.
“These are excellent,” Wyatt exclaimed as he looked at them. He meant it; and he was surprised. “I’ll bet you’re the best artist in your class.”
“We don’t have art in my school,” she said.
“They don’t have art in her school ’cause people were stealing the supplies,” Jonnie Rae said, her voice rich in anger. “They don’t have music or sports, either. They don’t have nothing for these kids. No after-school programs, either, then they complain that the kids get into trouble. They don’t have nothing to do but get in trouble.”
He nodded. This life was so far away from his as to be incomprehensible. “How did you learn to draw so well?” he asked the girl, changing the subject.
She shrugged and giggled. “I just did.”
“You know,” he said to Jonnie Rae, “there are art classes at the museum on Saturdays for children. They’re free,” he added. “I’m sure they would welcome Toni.”
“I work Saturdays. I don’t have time to cart them around.”
He sat alone with Jonnie Rae in the small living room. She had sent the kids outside to play in the warm evening air. “Don’t be leaving this block!” she yelled at them as they ran down the stairway. “You play where I can keep an eye on you out the window.” To Wyatt, she explained: “This whole place is crawling with drug dealers and gangbangers and they all carry guns. People get shot around here for no good reason.”
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