Night Songs

by Penny Mickelbury

  The only benefit to being a lieutenant as far as she was concerned was being the boss: She was head of the three year-old Hate Crimes Unit. Seven of Washington’s finest—including herself—bore the responsibility of bringing to justice those who would violate the legal and civil rights of persons based on race, religion or sexual orientation. But hate was big business in D.C., as well as in most of America, much too big for six dedicated but grossly over-worked cops to contain. So, bucking the established order and incurring its wrath, she frequently joined her team in the street investigating crimes of hatred. And because she did, she usually was late submitting the paperwork required of those who held the rank of lieutenant and above, of those elevated to the level of “white shirt,” which separated the high-ranking cops from the rank and file who wore blue shirts. Not that she often wore the shirt or the uniform. She had it on today because she’d been summoned to testify before a committee of the City Council. She put a stopper in the feeling of anger and frustration that such appearances always generated and returned to her seat behind the desk and the crime report on the computer screen.

  She looked up at the sound of a knock at her door. Familiar with the modus operandi of the chief and of her boss, she waited for the door to open and for one of them to stick his head in. When instead there came a second knock, she frowned and called out, “Come on in.” The door opened to admit an attractive woman of about thirty-five wearing a well-cut, form-fitting cranberry knit dress, and, pinned to the collar, the ID badge of the civilian employee of the Police Department.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Lieutenant, but I knew you were still here and I need to talk to you.”

  “Have a seat.” Gianna gestured to the leather armchair at the corner of her desk and watched the woman approach, watched her make up her mind even as she sat down that she would, in fact, say what she’d come to say.

  “I’m sorry I don’t know how to pronounce your name. I’ve heard it said but I just don’t remember.”

  Gianna laughed easily, putting the woman immediately at ease.

  “Not to worry—the chief can’t pronounce it either and I’ve known him for twenty years. What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Gwen Thomas and I work in records, which doesn’t have anything to do with why I’m here...” She stopped, stared down at her perfectly manicured nails which were the same color as her dress, took a deep breath, and continued. “I’ve read about you, about your cases, and I hear people in the building talk about you. They say you’re one of the real people.”

  Gianna didn’t speak but held the woman’s dark, sad eyes with her own calm, clear, hazel ones and waited.

  “My sister got killed two months ago. She was a hooker and a drug addict. Not one of your upstanding citizens, I know, but she was my sister and she was murdered and she didn’t deserve to die. Not like she did.” Overcome now by emotion and struggling to control the tears that formed and dripped, she stopped again, staring again at the hands folded tightly in her lap.

  “Did you come to me because you don’t think the police are handling the investigation properly?” In D.C., as in other big cities, poor people, and especially poor people of color, believed they got short shrift from an over-burdened justice system, and they quite often were correct. Perhaps Gwen Thomas thought that her proximity to the department might get better results.

  “Didn’t you say once that crimes against women were hate crimes, too, just like crimes against Jews or Black people or gay people?” She was in control now, pain replaced by anger, and Gianna knew this was no bullshit visit by a disgruntled citizen.

  “Yes, I said that.” She leaned across the desk, closing the distance to Gwen Thomas.

  “My sister was killed because she was a woman. Because she was a hooker. Three more were killed, just like she was—”

  “What do you mean, just like she was?” Gianna asked, and she knew deep within herself that the answer would spell trouble.

  “Somebody threw a knife at her. A big hunting knife, not a kitchen knife. Threw it in her chest.”

  Gianna’s heart raced, her stomach dropped and her brain buzzed as she visualized the words.

  “You’re telling me that four women—all prostitutes—have been killed by hunting knives thrown into them?” Gianna wasn’t easily or often surprised so she didn’t cover it well, or recover from it quickly, and Gwen Thomas misunderstood.

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you and if you don’t believe me you can ask those stupid mother fuckers in Homicide!”

  “I believe you, Miss Thomas.” And, Gianna thought, I also know which stupid mother fuckers in Homicide you mean. “I also fully understand your anger. But I need for you to very calmly tell me everything you know about these murders, beginning with your sister’s murder.”

  The murdered Andrea Thomas had begun life as a good girl: graduated from high school and secretarial school, got married, got a job, had a baby. Smoked crack. Once. To experiment. A year later, at the age of twenty-five, she was out on the street selling her body to support her habit. In rare moments of lucidity she professed her love for her husband and child and family and pledged to restore her life. But Gwen Thomas didn’t know of anyone who had successfully kicked crack and she didn’t expect her baby sister to be the exception to the rule.

  “I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for her to change. I used to drive by places where I knew she hung out, just to make sure she had clothes and food. I didn’t like her life but it wasn’t my place to judge her. She was my baby sister and I loved her.” About a month ago, Gwen Thomas said, she began searching for her sister in all her known haunts. Nobody had seen Andrea. Nobody knew anything. Three or four nights a week she searched, becoming more and more worried and frightened. Finally, standing at the mouth of an alley under a high intensity street light designed to deter crime, she held up a twenty dollar bill and promised it to the first person who told her where to find Andrea. An hour later she was on the grounds of D.C. General Hospital, in the shadow of the city jail, at the morgue, identifying Jane Doe 23-1993 as Andrea Thomas Willoughby, who’d been there for three weeks, waiting to be identified and claimed.

  “I thought she ODed, but when this morgue person told me, almost by accident, that she was found with this big knife sticking out of her chest, I damn near peed on myself. Last time Andrea was rational enough to have a normal conversation, which was back in April, she told me that her good friend Sandra King had just gotten killed that same way. And then at the funeral last week—at Andrea’s funeral—another girl told me the same thing happened to two other girls.” Gwen Thomas seemed to be reliving the moment that she realized her sister’s death was but one thread in a larger fabric.

  “My sister did some wrong things in her life, Lieutenant, but if the people she hurt the most still loved her, no damn body had the right to kill her.”

  And with that, Gwen Thomas shook hands with the woman she believed would avenge her sister’s murder, and returned to the computer terminal where she searched out citizens with overdue parking tickets and sent them notices explaining that the original fine had now doubled or tripled, leaving Lt. Maglione staring at her own computer terminal but seeing large knives protruding from the bodies of women hated because they used their bodies to bring pleasure to those who hated them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mimi Patterson stepped off the wonderfully air conditioned Metro Bus and into the miserable, muggy, mid-day heat at Thomas Circle and walked north up 13th Street to P Street, then east toward 9th Street. In less than a block she was the only woman walking the street whose profession that activity was not. Not that there was any danger of confusion: Even in her midriff-baring T-shirt, tight Levis, and leather sandals, she wore too many clothes to be mistaken for a professional. She strolled casually, noticing how dramatically—and how quickly—the block changed from the beautifully landscaped circle with General Thomas (she didn’t remember who he was or why he had his own monument) astride his bronze mare
at 13th Street, to the grungy, scraggly section four blocks away at 9th Street.

  Mimi hoped that her attire and her demeanor would mark her as a neighborhood resident—trendy, upwardly mobile—and not as the newspaper reporter that she was, in search of what she felt was a potentially big story involving prostitutes. She refused to remind herself that she really didn’t know what kind of story she was chasing, because the two women who’d been stringing her along for months with the promise of something big had disappeared from their regular beats. She knew that prostitutes worked specific areas, like drug dealers, and she knew she was in the wrong neighborhood. What she didn’t know was how to find somebody who apparently didn’t want to be found since hookers didn’t leave forwarding addresses. And she almost succeeded in convincing herself that it wasn’t really so wild a shot to think that women who worked one side of town might be acquainted with women from another side.

  As she strolled, she became aware of a car inching along beside her. She stopped and turned to face the vehicle, and the automatic window on the passenger side slid down to give her a good look at the overweight, middle-aged man in dark glasses who leaned over and spoke casually, almost too casually.

  “Wanna party?”

  “What?” she said, so genuinely confused that the full implication of his meaning—and the anger it roused in her—didn’t kick in immediately. And when it did, she was too astounded to reply, so she reached into her back pocket and extracted a small pen and notepad and walked to the rear of the car and wrote down the number of the Virginia license plate. Must have been the day for slow responses because she’d written the entire number before he slammed his foot on the accelerator and screeched off down the block, leaving an impressive amount of rubber on the hot pavement.

  “You slimy son of a bitch!” she yelled at the disappearing car. “You piece of shit bastard!” But her anger disappeared as fast the object of it, and Mimi was left holding something that resembled hatred. She knew there was no logical reason or way to mistake her for a prostitute; but there was also no mistaking her Blackness. And the white man saw a Black woman and reached what for him was a logical conclusion. She hated him and people like him and all the forces of evil and ugly that had conspired over time to allow him to think he had the right to make such an assumption about her. And she hated the circumstances that had brought her to this location in search of women—most of whom would certainly be black—about whom she would make a similar assumption. And for a moment all feeling drained from her and she took a few deep breaths to restore herself, leaving behind the bitter bile of hatred, reclaiming only what she needed to get her job done.

  She scanned the block hoping, praying to recognize one of the women she knew from pervious interviews; but when she recognized no one, she looked for a woman she thought it safe to approach. The combination of crack, AIDS, and a harsh economy, made prostitutes a generally unfriendly and unapproachable group, unless of course money was involved. Her newspaper’s policy absolutely forbade paying for information, but many investigative reporters weren’t beyond passing a buck or two to a good source. Just a way of saying thanks. So Mimi dug in her pocket and extracted several bills. She had, she knew, the covert attention of at least three women. Making a quick but informed judgment, she walked briskly up to a woman who stood slightly apart from two others and leaned against the bus stop.

  “I’m not a cop, I’m a newspaper reporter,” she said, the money clearly visible in her hand, speaking quietly so only the woman would hear, “and the only thing I want from you is help finding some friends. Okay?” Mimi waited. Only the woman’s eyes moved, from Mimi’s face to the money in her hand.

  “Do you know Shelley Kelley or Starry Knight?” Mimi waited again and again the woman remained motionless.

  “I’m going to drop this money—it’s about fifteen dollars—in the front yard of the last house on this block. You ask around and find Shelly and Starry for me and there’s another twenty in it for you. I’ll wait for you on the bench at the Thomas Circle bus stop this same time next week.”

  This time Mimi didn’t wait for the woman’s response. She turned and walked back the way she came, casually, calmly, until she reached the corner. Then she stumbled and reached out to grab a spike of the wrought iron fence that enclosed the front yard of the last house on the block to steady herself.

  The two prostitutes who Mimi had passed up watched her turn south at 13th Street and disappear. Fourteen-year old Sweet Meat strolled over to her fifteen-year old pal, Marilyn Monroe, and blew cigarette smoke into his face. He choked, slapped her lightly, and they both moved nearer to Baby Doll who was nineteen but looked at least twice that.

  “What the hell did she want?” Sweet said sullenly.

  “Who the hell is she?” demanded Marilyn. Baby didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she straightened her voluminous wig, smoothed her skirt, checked her seams, moistened her lips.

  “They’ll let anybody outta the Police Academy these days.”

  “That pitiful chile ‘sposed to be a cop?” Marilyn was both incredulous and suspicious. “Didn’t look like no cop to me. Clothes too clean for her to be undercover. And she don’t walk like no cop.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time. I asked you what did she want.” Sweet was now hostile as well as sullen, which had no effect at all on Baby who held advanced degrees in hostile and sullen from the Graduate School of Hard Knocks. She was busy formulating a plan in that part of her mind still left functioning by the heroin to which she’d been addicted since she was fourteen, a plan for retrieving the money lying in the front yard of the last house on the block without being noticed by Sweet and Marilyn.

  “She asked me if I knew some people. Two girls work over on the Northeast side. Said she couldn’t find ‘em over there and thought they might be over here. Show you how stupid she is. Over here on the Northwest side lookin’ for somebody from ‘cross town.” And Baby flung her mass of Diana Ross-like hair at the very thought.

  “How come you didn’t tell her something, anything,” whined Sweet in an abrupt change of mood. “That way you coulda got the money.”

  “I stopped talkin’ to the police when I was thirteen. Don’t never say nothin’ to ‘em, don’t care how much money they offer.” Baby looked up into the cloudless sky. “Time for me to go home and get some rest. See y’all tonight.” And she followed in Mimi’s steps.

  “She can be a real bitch sometimes,” said Marilyn, and the two of them strolled east on P Street. Had they gone the opposite way, had they followed Baby, they would have seen her drop her purse just before reaching the corner, exactly at the place where Mimi had stumbled just moments before.

  *****

  “What is wrong with you guys?” Lieutenant Maglione was comfortable voicing her frustration with her superior officers, though she wished it were unnecessary. She held the lowest rank of any police official in the room, was one of only three women, and was weary of having the same old discussions and arguments. The Captains, Inspectors, Deputy Chiefs, and Assistant Chiefs at the table kept their eyes respectfully on her though she detected some uneasy shifting.

  “Why can’t you accept crimes against women as hate crimes?” She pointed to the statistical crime report that lay before each of them, the innocuous-appearing quarterly document that rubbed their collective noses in the truth that the cops were losing the war against crime in D.C.

  “Four women are dead. Prostitutes. Knife wound to the chest, thrown—thrown mind you—from a passing car.” She leaned back in her chair and pointed to Assistant Chief Ron Hampton. “If all the victims were Black and killed in the same way, you’d accept it as a hate crime.” Then she turned to Inspector Mark Seltzer, head of Internal Affairs. “If they were all Jewish you’d accept it as a hate crime.” She spread her hands flat out before her on the table and looked directly into the chief’s eyes, intentionally avoiding eye contact with the one man present whom she knew to be homosexual. “If they wer
e all homosexual, you’d all agree it was a hate crime. But they’re all women. And not your version of nice women at that, and so you all just shrug your shoulders.”

  “That’s not fair, Maglione, or correct.”

  She returned the steady, direct gaze of the chief of police, the man who’d been her mentor since her days at the training academy, and who still butchered her name with his hard, anglicized pronunciation of the soft Italian sounds. Half a dozen years as chief had done nothing to curb his overdrive energy, to lessen his intensity. He always complained that now he spent his time going to lunches and dinners and giving speeches instead of catching criminals, but he was every bit as tough now as when he was head of Homicide and later head of the Criminal Investigations Division. He was, and would always be, a street cop.

  The chief continued, “You’re here at this meeting because some of us have questions about how to handle this case and we wanted you—”

  She grinned at him, shaking her head. “I’m here at this meeting because I heard rumblings about some knife-throwing Daniel Boone killer of women and I badgered the hell out of Vincenzo until he gave me the deep and skinny and then I bullied my way in here.” Homicide chief Vince Pelligrino winced, eyes tightly shut, hands over his ears, vainly attempting to obliterate what he knew was coming.