“What, Jose?”
“Ruby should have been with her.”
“Who’s Ruby?”
“Her lover supposedly, though you can’t prove it by me,” Jose said. “Guess where she was last night while Joyce was being brutalized in a dark alley?”
Mimi settled herself more comfortably into the hard wooden chair and crossed her legs. Getting this story out of Jose was going to take time. Good thing she had a reliable source at George Washington University Hospital who didn’t mind being disturbed by a reporter on Sunday. Good thing Carolyn Warshawski wasn’t the kind of editor who’d break all her knuckles for not having a story this Sunday evening, because there would be no story today. But next weekend? She’d make Carolyn one happy editor next weekend. She already was planning what she’d say to her boss tomorrow morning to clear the way for that to happen.
CHAPTER SIX
“I don’t want you in my house, now get away from my goddamn door!”
Gianna didn’t blink or budge but Linda Lopez flipped the safety off her Glock “Joyce Brown asked me to come here. When she asks me to leave, I will,” Gianna said calmly, hoping it would rub off on the woman blocking the door.
“You’ll leave when I tell you to or I’ll kick your ass down those steps.” The woman glowering at her in the doorway took a menacing step in her direction and Gianna was trying to decide on a course of action when she heard somebody speak from within the house.
“I asked her to come, Ruby. I want her here.”
“Well I don’t.”
“Then leave, like you always do. Go back wherever you were Saturday night.” Joyce Brown somehow managed to move Ruby aside and took her place in the door way. She wore a beautiful silk dressing gown and matching slippers and she looked like hell. “Come in, Lieutenant,” she said, her bruised, swollen lips barely able to form the words. She saw Linda behind Gianna, Glock in hand, and nodded her in, too, unfazed by the weapon. Ruby closed the door and followed them.
“Shouldn’t you be in the hospital, Miss Brown?” Gianna asked.
“Probably,” Joyce answered, leading the way slowly and painfully down a narrow hallway with a polished, hardwood floor and white walls covered with framed photographs. The hall led, like the typical row house, through the center of the structure. Joyce turned right, into the living room, narrow but bright because of the floor-to-ceiling bay window. The sofa bed was open and Joyce lay back down on it, groaning with the effort. “But if all I’m gonna do is hurt and cry, I’d just as soon hurt and cry at home, in my own bed. At least I don’t have to worry who hears me.”
“Can I do anything to help?” Gianna asked, seriously concerned about the woman’s well-being, emotional as well as physical.
“Catch the bastards who did this to me.”
“You had no business out there! If you’d been home, nothin’ like this would ’a happened.” Ruby’s face was scrunched up in equal parts anger and sorrow and her mouth quivered. She was a thin woman, and older than Gianna had first thought, closer to forty than thirty. She wore a pale blue, long sleeved oxford shirt and jeans and leather slippers. She had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, neither of which she’d had a moment ago at the door. Gianna looked from her to Joyce, then sat down in the armchair at the foot of the sofa bed. Linda assertively took a chair opposite.
“What did happen out there, Miss Brown?”
“Can’t you see what happened?” Ruby unleashed her anger again. “Why you got to make her say it all over again? Why she got to talk about it? Why you can’t just leave it alone?” Ruby demanded.
“Because I don’t know what happened and Miss Brown is the only person, other than her attackers, who can tell me, and the sooner I know, the sooner we can do something about it.” Gianna, her arms resting on her knees, leaned toward Joyce Brown. Her clear, hazel eyes, direct and unwavering, met and held the other woman’s. The Maglione gaze was well known among victims and witnesses; it was comforting and reassuring. It spoke to them: Talk to me. It’s all right. To perps, the message was different but it was just as clear: You’d better start talking right now. And they usually did.
Joyce sighed deeply and the tears swimming around in her eyes spilled out. Her pretty, round face was puffy and discolored by the beating she’d suffered, and the tears tracked into the welts and bruises. She wiped her face and winced. “Ruby’s right about one thing: I shouldn’t have gone there. To the Panther. It’s nothin’ but a dive. But I had to get outta here. I wasn’t thinkin’ what could happen, you know? And I know better! That’s what’s hurting me as much as the rest of it: That I know better. I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
Gianna moved herself from the chair to the bed and grabbed the box of tissues, pulling out a few. She gave them to Joyce then looked at Ruby. “Would you get a bowl with some ice cubes and water and a cloth, please?”
Ruby hesitated briefly, then left the room. Linda exhaled and took out her notebook and tape recorder, which she turned on and put on the bed beside Joyce, who started talking. She was upset, she said, because Ruby had promised to come straight home after her shift at the UPS loading dock and take her to dinner and a movie. A rare Saturday night out since Joyce herself usually worked Saturday nights on the switchboard at the hotline at Metro GALCO. “She should’ve been here by quarter to nine at the latest. I must have called her cell phone six or seven times, but it was turned off. She still wasn’t here by eleven so I left.” And went to the Pink Panther and sat at the bar alone and drank Canadian Club on the rocks until she calmed down.
Then, Gianna thought, a woman wounded in spirit and dulled by too much alcohol after a couple of hours in a bar decides to walk the four blocks home to clear her head instead of calling for a taxi. Four of some of D.C.’s roughest blocks. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do, but then Joyce Brown already knew that, better than Gianna ever could or would.
Ruby returned with a heavy ceramic bowl of cold water and a brand new linen dish towel. She put the bowl on the floor, dipped the towel in it, then wrung it out and placed it gently on Joyce’s face. She repeated the action three times while Gianna and Linda watched. The puffiness around the wounded woman’s eyes and cheeks seemed diminished. Joyce said it felt better and she thanked her partner. “It’s time for me to take those pills. Can you get ‘em, please? I left ‘em in the kitchen when I should ‘a brought ‘em in here.”
Ruby gave a grudging nod and left the room again and Joyce quickly related the details of the rape. Quickly and clinically and unemotionally. Until she had to repeat what the men said as they raped her. “They called me a dyke and a lesbo and unnatural and they said I ought to be dead. I look like every other woman out there. I had on a skirt and a blouse and some sandals. How they know what I am unless they were in there with me?” She broke then, and began to cry. Gianna dipped the towel in the icy water, told Joyce to lie down, and put the towel to her face.
Ruby returned with the pills and glass of water. “Is she asleep?”
Gianna shook her head. “Emotional. Frightened. Guilty.”
“She ain’t got nothin’ to be guilty about. I’m the one should be guilty. It’s my fault. I said it was hers but that’s a lie. It’s my fault and if I could do last night all over again, I swear to God I would.”
Then Ruby was crying but Gianna was finding it difficult to conjure up any sympathy for her. She looked at Joyce, deathly still, the towel still covering her face, and felt nothing but anger toward Ruby. Gianna stood and picked up the tape recorder and put it in her bag.
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I don’t mean to run y’all off. I know you just tryin’ to help, just tryin’ to do your job.”
Gianna turned to look at Ruby, to study her, and what she saw drained away some of the anger she felt. “Can I give you my card, Ruby, and will you call me when she’s better able to talk?”
Ruby sniffled and wiped her face on her sleeve. “Yes you can, and yes I will.” She took the card and read it, then looked at Gianna
through her tears. “Hate Crimes Unit. What—?” The answer presented itself before she finished asking the question. “They did this to her ‘cause she’s gay. Oh my Lord. Oh my dear Lord.”
Gianna and Linda made their way back down the hallway to the front door, Ruby following. Gianna stopped in the doorway. “If either one of you needs anything, please call. And Ruby? Lay off the booze, OK? It’s too early in the day to be drinking, and Joyce needs you. She can’t get through this alone.”
“She might be better off alone,” Linda said when they were in the car. “What a jerk! She’s smoking and drinking like she’s the one in pain.”
A scared, helpless, powerless, guilt-ridden cheat is what Ruby was, Gianna thought, not simply a jerk, but she definitely was in pain. “Let’s drive by the Pink Panther, then from there to The Snatch. I want to see these neighborhoods in the light of day and on a weekday instead of a weekend night.”
What they looked like in the daylight was what they looked like at night: Rough, ugly, dangerous terrain, no place for a woman to be walking alone. Any kind of woman. Not Tosh and not Joyce, not even a woman with a gun who knew how to use it. Though the Pink Panther’s geography was, Gianna noted, a bit more stable than that of The Snatch. There were more residential structures here, and no vacant lots, and more different kinds of business—a dry cleaners and tailor, a little grocery store, a cafe, a storefront church, and two liquor stores. A night club and two liquor stores within two blocks. What the hell were they thinking in the Business Permits office to approve such a thing? Just four blocks away, where Joyce and Ruby lived, was all residential. Pretty, well-kept houses, home to decent working people. Why should there be two liquor stores and a night club in their neighborhood?
“There was a time when the police department and citizen groups worked together on things like that. I don’t know what happened and we don’t have time to talk about it, Maglione. O’Connell should be here any moment now. If he’s smart.”
The Chief of Police was up on the balls of his feet and pacing, his shiny black shoes reflecting the royal blue of the plush carpet in his office. The stars and bars on his jacket and shirt glittered, and the creases in his pants were razor-sharp. He wore his uniform every day, proud of it and the job he did. His hands were stuffed deep into his pockets, jiggling the change. Gianna knew him long enough and well enough to know the action meant that he was barely containing his fury. She also knew not to say anything else, so she crossed her legs, folded her hands in her lap, and waited. She too, was in uniform this Monday, a rare enough occurrence these days that he’d known when she appeared at his office door eleven hours earlier that something was up, and when she told him what it was, he’d sat looking a her for a full minute before speaking. Now they were waiting for Inspector Frank O’Connell to arrive for the six o’clock meeting the Chief had ordered him to attend. Gianna looked at her watch. It was one minute after.
The phone on the Chief’s desk buzzed but instead of answering it, he charged across the room to the door and swung it open. Frank O’Connell removed his hat and stepped in. “Come in, Frank. You know Lieutenant Maglione.”
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” O’Connell said, barely covering his surprise at finding her seated in one of the two arm chairs adjacent to the big desk in the center of the room as the lie rolled easily out of his mouth.
“We’ve met several times,” Gianna said, deliberately flouting protocol by keeping her seat in the presence of a superior officer. She kept her eyes on the Chief.
He stood behind his desk. He opened a folder, looked down at it, closed it, and looked up at O’Connell.
“Tell me about The Snatch and the Pink Panther, Frank. About your problems with those places in the last few months.”
The color drained from O’Connell’s face, leaving a red patch high on each cheek. “What’s this all about, Ben?”
The Chief came from behind his desk like a cannonball. “What did you call me?”
O’Connell, in the process of lowering himself into the other armchair, stumbled backward, away from his boss. He raised his palms protectively. “What is this? What’s going on here?” He kept back-pedaling as the Chief kept coming at him. “I don’t know what you want, Chief.”
“I want you to tell me about problems having to do with places called the Pink Panther and The Snatch. They’re night clubs. Gay night clubs. One of ‘em’s on Harley and the other’s on Lander. Both in your command last time I checked. How many incidents at that Snatch place, Frank?”
“None...nothing...no incidents...”
“So explain that meeting you had with the owners on May the eleventh with Miss Delores Phillips and Miss Darlene Phillips. You remember that meeting. You kept ‘em standing in the hallway.”
If he paled any more O’Connell would either faint or disappear. He looked at Gianna. “What’s this all about, Maglione?”
Gianna, legs still crossed, hands still folded, kept her eyes on the Chief, which is what O’Connell should have been doing. He didn’t see the folder aimed at his head until it hit him, sending its contents flying.
“What the fuck!” he yelled.
“You know what the fuck, you sorry bastard. Or maybe you don’t, and that’s worse. Tell me you don’t know about the woman murdered half a block from The Snatch on Friday night or the one gang-raped half a block from the Panther on Saturday night.” The Chief was up on his toes in O’Connell’s face, his fists granite balls at his sides. He’d been a Golden Globe boxer in his youth and still worked out with the bag several times a month. If he hit Frank O’Connell he’d damn near kill him.
O’Connell backed up some more. “I haven’t had a chance to look at the weekend stats, but I will as soon as I get back to Command, Chief, and I’ll call you right away with that information.”
“You’re not going back to Command. As of this moment you’re officially on administrative leave with pay, and I’m looking for a way to take your money, O’Connell. You’re a disgrace.”
“On her word? You’re doing this to me on her word?”
“I’m doing this to you on your record. You’ve violated at least half a dozen Departmental rules and three of my own directives. Lieutenant Maglione should have been notified at the first hint of trouble at both those night clubs, but because she wasn’t, we got a rape and a murder on our hands and I’m putting that right on your head. Do not go back to Mid-Town. Eddie Davis has already taken over. You are to go directly to Administration and sign the paperwork, then you go to Operations where you report to Deputy Chief House until further notice.”
O’Connell’s face went from white to purple. “Mildred House! That bitch! She’s a dyke just like this one!”
The gut punch was so sharp and so fast that O’Connell was down on his hands and knees before he fully understood what had happened to him. The Chief stood over him as he struggled, first to catch his breath, then to stand. Neither man spoke. O’Connell stood, swaying, waiting. When he realized that the Chief had nothing else to say, he moved toward the door in daze, not all the fuzziness in his head due to blow to his solar plexus. He stopped, stooped, and picked up his hat, his progress slow and halting. “I deserve a chance to talk about this, to tell my side.”
“That’s what Administrative Hearings are for. Get outta here.”
“You hit me! You can’t get away with that.”
The Chief visibly relaxed. He took his hands out of his pockets and perched his butt on the edge of his desk and actually grinned at O’Connell. “You gonna ask Maglione here to be your witness to that? Besides, Frank, everybody in the whole damn Department knows that if I’d really hit you, you’d still be laid out in the middle of the floor with a broken jaw, spitting teeth. Now get outta my office.”
O’Connell had enough sense left not to slam the door on his way out though Gianna almost wished he had. Something was needed to dissipate the charged air in the room. “Inspector Davis will be good for that Command,” Gianna offered.
“I know that, Maglione. That’s why I put him there.”
“Yes, sir.”
He got to his feet and walked around a bit, coming to stop beside her chair. “You did the right thing, coming to me with this.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again.
“But that’s not how it’s going to smell when it hits the fan.”
“I know, Chief, but like you said, it was the right thing to do.”
“You anywhere on those crimes?”
She shook her head. “Too early.”
He was furious again. “Too damn late you mean! Shit’s been brewing for months around those places and if you’d known about it you could’ve put some people in there and maybe kept that woman from being brutalized like that, kept that kid from getting killed.” He opened and closed his fists. “Twenty-nine years old and dead forever and for nothin’! I could break O’Connell’s neck.”
“I could help you.”
He gave her a look as sharp as her comment. “What else you got on your mind, Maglione?”
She was grateful that she had Frank O’Connell to rail at, to share the blame, but sharing the blame didn’t lessen her burden. She said, “I’m wondering whether we shouldn’t hand off the rape to Sex Crimes and concentrate our efforts on the Hilliard murder. We can’t work them both effectively.”
He shook his head. “Nobody can work those cases better than your people, Maglione, and you know that. That woman, the rape victim, she called you on a Sunday afternoon, she didn’t call nine-one-one and ask for a Sex Crimes investigator. And didn’t she tell the ER doc that she didn’t trust cops? No, you’ve already got her in hand and I won’t risk losing her trust and confidence.”
Darkness Descending Page 10