“Fuckin’ bitch!”
“GUN!”
People screamed and scattered and Gianna was glad. Crowd disbursement, for whatever reason, was crowd control in a situation like this. Since she didn’t hold out any hope for an eyewitness to the murder of young Tosh, the fewer people on the street right now, the better, especially given the nature of the hostilities that permeated the crowd. And the homogenous nature of it, Gianna thought, for she could barely distinguish between the armed, foul-mouthed man, now handcuffed and being hustled to the back seat of a squad car, and the women he’d taunted. All wore corn-rowed hair, oversized sports jerseys, butt-hugging baggy pants, and untied shoes, yet the man hated the women. Why? Because they looked like him? Because that threatened him? Because they took women he thought should belong to him? And what did the women feel? Did they hate the man? Gianna couldn’t rationalize that: Why would a person emulate the person who hated her?
“Hey! Hey officer! I bet he shot her! Check his gun! I bet he’s the one!”
A current of angry hostility re-ignited and coursed through the crowd along with the vocal speculation: Had the arrested man really killed the woman carried away in the Medical Examiner’s van just a short time ago? That much coincidence was much too good to be true and Gianna didn’t give it much credence. She also didn’t waste any time wondering how anybody in the crowd knew that Tosh had been shot. The police hadn’t and wouldn’t reveal that information, but a good number of these spectators probably knew a bullet wound when they saw one.
“Lock him up anyway,” somebody else in the crowd yelled out. “He’s the one who shot at us in The Snatch line a couple of months ago!”
Good to know, Gianna thought, and worth a follow-up, though probably impossible to prove. Still, it would allow the cops to hold onto him for a couple of days while tests were run on the weapon. Gianna signaled for her team. “We need to get the rest of these people out of here. Start asking for names, addresses, and phone numbers, places of employment, parole status.”
Less than a dozen people remained at the police barricade after the questioning began. Two of them, Gianna noticed, were older, and she thought them probably residents rather than by-standers. They would be good contacts to have, especially since they didn’t balk at giving their personal information. Those who wouldn’t do so evaporated, as Gianna knew they would. And her team would fan out, too, up and down the block, into the stores and alleys and side streets, checking license plates, whatever it took to convince the potential trouble-makers that this scene was shut down for the night. She stifled a yawn and looked at her watch, not understanding why anyone would need convincing to go home and go to bed.
Her cell phone chirped. Eric, calling from the Metro parking lot with the name and address of their murder victim: Natasha Hilliard, 29, of the 3000-block of Horatio Road in northwest D.C. Gianna knew exactly where that was—a quiet cul-de-sac of town houses and condominiums, jogging distance to Rock Creek Park. She knew because she and Mimi had looked at house there a couple of months ago, finding it a bit sterile for their tastes, but, she thought, it was a perfect fit for the owner of the expensive watch and the Ivy League class ring and the Mercedes Benz, and totally antithetical to the boy-clad Tosh now en route to the morgue a world away in Southeast Washington.
CHAPTER FOUR
Whoever said, “Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it,” certainly knew and understood one of life’s major truths. What Mimi Patterson didn’t understand was why people, herself included, didn’t heed the warning before the fact instead of afterward. Maybe because people, herself included, thought of it merely as an axiom, folk wisdom. Something to be repeated ominously while wearing a wry grin, but not to be obeyed, like the admonition not to speak ill of the dead or to look both ways before crossing.
Mimi had asked for—demanded—a respite from her investigative journalist duties. She was sick and tired of corrupt politicians and government bureaucrats. She was even sicker and tireder of spending her time exposing them, getting them fired or sent to jail. It didn’t seem to matter. Every expose seemed to produce a new crop of the stupid, greedy bastards instead of serving as a warning to mend their evil, cheating, lying ways. So, when her editors finally realized that she really would quit if they didn’t let her do something else for a change, she’d been thrilled. Actually, she’d been more relieved than thrilled. That would have been winning the battle and losing the war...or some other piece of folk wisdom. True, she really would have quit, but she had no idea what else she’d do. She’d been a newspaper reporter her entire life. Well, at least since finishing college, and in truth, she didn’t want to do anything else. She just wanted to do it differently. So now, instead of being an investigative political reporter on the local desk, she was a profiles reporter on the national desk. That meant she got to travel around the country writing on a wide variety of topics. True, graft and corruption still reared their hydra-heads, but at least now she wasn’t eating a steady diet of monster food.
She’d arrived back in D.C. from Los Angeles on a plane that was due in at 6:30 a.m. but which was almost three hours late. So, instead of going home to dump her bag and change clothes, she’d come directly to work. Big mistake. She couldn’t stop yawning, she was hungry, she was tired, and the editor was hovering over her like a mother hen over a chic. If he could, he’d sit on her until her story hatched. Her story was a three-parter on the changing nature of the California population. Nobody had known or remembered or cared that Mimi was a California native when the story was assigned, and she hadn’t mentioned it. She’d been gone long enough to feel like an outsider. She couldn’t have realized how much of one she’d feel by the time her three-week odyssey was over. The California population had indeed changed. The majority of the people who lived in the Golden State not only hadn’t been born there, they hadn’t even been born in America. So here she was writing a different kind of story, which was exactly what she’d wanted, yet feeling more depressed than if she’d been writing the ten thousandth story of graft and corruption in high places, and enjoying it a lot more. These would, she knew, be good stories.
“So, how’re you coming?”
Mimi turned to find the editor standing behind her. Again. The third time in the last ninety minutes. “So, what do you think about the first two parts of the story, Bill?” She’d started writing while still on the road, so moved and motivated was she by what she was learning, and she’d written a good bit more during the four hours spent in the airport departure lounge waiting to board the plane. Depressed as it made her, what she’d learned during her sojourn was compelling and informative and she’d met some fascinating people. Immigrants from every corner of the globe still arrived in America every day seeking to grab hold of the brass ring, hope and awe alive in their eyes. That they were changing America as she knew it perhaps was to be expected; after all, didn’t the first immigrant wave of a hundred years ago change that America?
“It’s just that I’d really like to have all three parts before I start to read. You know, for continuity’s sake.” Bill gave her the kind of half-smile that meant his patience was wearing thin.
“Ah, yes. Continuity,” Mimi repeated, giving Bill the kind of smile that was mostly grimace and meant her already lousy mood was disintegrating rapidly. “I’ve heard of it. I think it’s mostly overrated.” She was saved from the rude follow-up that was forming in her brain by the ringing of her desk phone. She looked up at the editor, the message as clear as if the words had been spoken, and he strolled away. Mimi had to give Ol’ Bill points for cool. Her former editor, the Weasel, would have stalked off, his anger an ugly aura sprouting from him like Medusa hair. Mimi picked up the receiver, hoping Gianna would be on the other end. What she got was security telling her she had a visitor in the lobby. On a Saturday?
She stood up and stretched. She hadn’t asked who the visitor was and didn’t care. It was an excuse to get out of the newsroom for a while, maybe even to go outsi
de, walk to the corner for Chinese food. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. She stuffed some money and her cell phone into her pockets and strolled across the football-field sized newsroom. Even though it was Saturday morning, half the desks were occupied. It wouldn’t get sparse until dinner time.
The elevator ride down was fast because it was Saturday. The other departments of the paper, unlike the news department, worked Monday through Friday, but the area of the lobby near the circulation and classified advertising desk was crowded, as usual. Mimi looked around for a familiar face and was headed to the security desk when she heard, instead, a familiar voice.
“Hey, Newslaper Lady!”
Not what she was expecting but not at all unwelcome. Mimi gave Baby Doll a warm smile of greeting and meant it. The ex-hooker and ex-junkie was using her given name these days—Marlene Jefferson—but she and Mimi still called each other by the names they’d each answered to when they’d met during a dark, ugly time when prostitutes were the targets of roaming serial killers. Two of Mimi’s sources had been victims of the killers and Baby Doll had witnessed one of the murders. Gianna’s Hate Crimes Unit had fought for the right to work the cases as crimes against women, and she’d won because Vice and Homicide didn’t want them anyway since the victims were just some junkie hookers. Out of that dark, ugly time had grown a true friendship between the reporter and the young woman.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Mimi said, forcing a hug on Baby Doll, who still recoiled from that kind of human contact, and who, despite more than a year of clean living and healthy eating, still was little more than skin and bones.
“You callin’ me a rat?”
“I’m calling you a sight for sore eyes. To what do I owe the honor of a visit from Miss Marlene Jefferson herself?”
Baby Doll grinned widely at the use of her proper name. “I’m glad you know you honored,” she said with an affected air which made them both giggle.
“You look good, Baby,” Mimi said. Free of the garish costume of the professional street walker, Baby Doll had grown her hair long and now wore the same kind of short, tight skirts and short, tight shirts that every other girl her age wore, and she looked like a pretty young girl and not like a hooker. “And don’t take this the wrong way, but what are you doing here? How did you know I’d be here on Saturday?”
Baby Doll gave her the same kind of smile Bill had given her, this one tinged with pity. “‘Cause you always at work. Saturday, Sunday, day time, night time, don’t make no diff’rence.”
“I must stop being so predictable.”
“What’s that mean, ‘predictable’?” The question reminded Mimi of one of the things she liked most about Baby: She was inquisitive in the extreme, especially where language was concerned. It also was one of Baby’s traits that most annoyed her: Once she gained possession of a new word, she used it to exasperation.
“It means,” Mimi said, “that people know what you’re going to do before you do it because you do the same thing, the same way, all the time.”
Baby nodded. “That’s you, all right: Predictable. And you need a haircut.”
Mimi cut her a look that had no effect whatsoever. A waste of a good scowl, she thought, then said, “You have time to join me for lunch? I’m going across the street to the Chinese place.”
“Sure,” Baby Doll said, falling in beside Mimi as they exited the building. “I ain’t had nothin’ to eat since breakfast but you, bein’ so predictable, you prob’ly didn’t even have breakfast, I’ll bet.”
“For your information, I was on a plane this morning coming back from Los Angeles, and no, I didn’t have breakfast because I never eat what’s served on airplanes, which, these days, isn’t much at all.”
“What’s in Los Angeles?
“The story I was working on,” Mimi said. “And my favorite aunt and uncle.” They stopped at the corner to wait for the light. “That’s my home town.”
Baby Doll gave her a truly wondering look. “You from California? For real? I didn’t know that!”
Crossing the street and reaching the restaurant prevented Mimi from asking Baby Doll why the surprise. The lunch crunch was over which meant that even though the place was full, a table, way in the back of the dining room was available. Their waiter, a hip young guy with spiky hair, dragon tattoos up his arms, and rings in both ears, put water, chopsticks, a tea pot, and napkins on the table. His look was ultra hip but his manners were old school. He smiled and bowed at Mimi. “Same as always, Miss Patterson?”
Mimi nodded. “But she’ll probably want a menu.”
“Maybe not,” Baby said huffily. “What are you having?”
“Mu shu vegetable, and you won’t like it,” Mimi said, remembering Baby Doll’s revulsion at the mere notion of vegetarianism.
“What will I like then, since you’re so smart?”
Mimi could have smacked herself. She’d forgotten that Baby couldn’t read well enough yet to navigate a Chinese restaurant menu; that a couple of years ago she couldn’t read at all. “You like chicken, right? How about orange chicken. That’s Gianna’s favorite.”
“Does it taste orange?”
Mimi shrugged and looked up at the waiter, who nodded.
“OK. Orange chicken,” Baby Doll said to him. “And shrimp fried rice. And a fork. I can’t eat with no sticks. And tea.”
Mimi pointed to the teapot. The waiter smiled again, this time directly at Baby, collected the menus, and walked away. Baby Doll picked up the pot and poured tea for both of them, and then dumped four packets of sugar into hers.
“It’s a wonder you don’t weight two hundred pounds, the way you eat.”
“I got metabolism,” Baby said smugly, enjoying possession of yet another new word. “That’s what Adrienne said.”
Adrienne Lightfoot ran the Washington Center for Spiritual Awareness, a non-sectarian organization that had made its mark working with street prostitutes to help them avoid AIDS. Adrienne and the Center had been helpful to Gianna and the Hate Crimes Unit during the prostitute murders, reaching out to women who normally would have had nothing to do with cops no matter what the danger. Adrienne had, of course, refused to give Mimi the reporter the time of day, but Mimi liked her anyway. “How is Adrienne?” Mimi asked.
Baby Doll turned up the tiny tea cup and drained it, licked her lips, and reached for the tea pot. “Chinese make the best tea,” she said. “Did you know that? And they got green tea, too. That’s my favorite. They serve it at the Center, and Adrienne’s fine. She got me a job, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Where? Doing what?” What job could she do that didn’t require minimal reading skills, Mimi wondered?
Baby sugared her tea. “You know that adult education school over by the park? Well, I’m the new janitor. They pay me and they let me go to school for free! I thought I was too old but Adrienne says you’re never too old to learn, and that’s the truth ‘cause you ought to see some of the people in that school! Old enough to be my grandparents, some of ‘em.” Baby got quiet and reflective. “That’s admirable, don’t you think? For somebody to try to learn to read and write at that age. That’s what Adrienne called it: Admirable. It means doing something that people admire and respect.”
“I think it’s admirable that you’re going back to school, Miss Jefferson.”
Baby Doll, shocked speechless by the praise, was saved from formulating a reply by the arrival of the food, and she wasted no time digging in, after first saying of Mimi’s Mu Shu vegetable dish, “I wouldn’t eat anything that looked like that.” And she got busy piling chicken and fried rice on to her plate.
The first time Mimi had seen her eat was at a diner on Connecticut Avenue. Baby Doll was still working the streets at the time and Mimi, trying to work her as a source, had assumed that Baby’s appetite was either drug-induced or taking advantage of having somebody else pay for the meal. They’d dined together a few times since and it always was the same: Baby ate, as Mimi’s father w
ould say, like she had a hollow left leg. And a high-speed metabolism.
“So I guess you being on a plane from California is why your girlfriend was out in the street lookin’ at dead bodies in the middle of the night,” Baby said, and smirked as Mimi first choked, then shot her an evil look. “What’s wrong, you think I don’t know that cop is your girlfriend?”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“What don’t make sense?” Baby stopped shoveling food in her face long enough to reach into her pocket and pull out a card, which she slapped on the table before reclaiming her fork. “That’s her, right? Your girlfriend?”
Mimi pulled the card toward her. Sure as shit, Gianna’s full name, rank and designation as head of the Hate Crimes Unit. “I take it you were on the scene of a murder that might be a hate crime?” Mimi asked, deflecting the question about her relationship with Gianna and striving to gain some control over the conversation.
“Not me, my girlfriend.” Baby actually put down her fork and looked squarely at Mimi, totally oblivious to Mimi’s surprise at the revelation that she had a girlfriend. “You remember that time when us girls were getting killed, right?”
Mimi put down her chopsticks and gave Baby Doll her full attention. “Of course I do. I’ll never forget it.”
Baby’s face took on a strange, slack look that worried Mimi, until she began to talk. “That time feels like it was way back a long time ago, like it was somebody else’s life, you know? I don’t hardly ever think about it these days. I don’t like to remember, you know what I’m saying? I like to think I always had a regular job and regular clothes and enough food to eat and a nice place to live, like I was a regular person. Then something happens like last night...”
Mimi reached across the table with both hands and took both of Baby Doll’s hands and squeezed them tightly. “What happened last night?”
“This girl got killed.”
“A friend of yours?”
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