Night Songs

by Penny Mickelbury

  Gianna laughed all the way back to her office, the image of Officer Alice Long—Long Legs—in six-inch flaming red spike heels running after and catching an eight-year old boy as clear in her mind as the shock on the child’s face when the hooker outran him, caught him, and then smacked him. She stopped laughing when another image crowded in: that of Officer Tony Watkins soaked in gasoline and a breath away from a lighted match.

  It had taken Mimi a full week to locate Beverly’s friend in the school system’s administrative office, and then to get her on the phone long enough to arrange a meeting. That she fully understood the hectic beginning of the school year did nothing to lessen her growing impatience with the need to break some new ground in her investigation of the disappearance and death of Starry Knight and Shelley Kelley and the other women who were Baby’s friends. She would have to break new ground or yield to the ever-increasing pressure of her editors to accept other assignments.

  Tyler was still pushing for her to look into the proliferation of the white supremacists groups, and she was still adamantly refusing, citing not only the potential for danger to herself as a Black woman, but her absolute lack of interest in the subject. The editor who was technically her boss, when Mimi wasn’t circumventing him to work with Tyler, was pushing an illegal aliens story. Mimi had responded that she’d be happy to investigate why the government seemed to have one set of laws governing the entry of immigrants from Europe and Asia, and another philosophy altogether when the arrival of people from the Caribbean and South and Central American was the issue...people who were called aliens, and not immigrants. She had pissed off her editor in a big way with her attitude: “Those Haitians and Salvadorans are busting their asses cleaning hotel rooms and washing dishes for minimum wage and you want me to watch the INS bust their asses for lack of a green card? Want me to tell you who the real criminals are?”

  She was skating on thin ice and she knew it. There were only so many stories swimming around in the pond at any one time, and she’d have to haul one of them out in a big hurry if she was to keep her hotshot status. She was convinced that story of the dead hookers was a big, big fish swimming in deep water; but until McCreedy’s visit, she’d been fishing without bait. Now she had their names—their real names—and the belief that at least a couple of them had to have been D.C. natives. Yes, young women flocked to Washington from small towns and cities in Virginia and Maryland, and from other southern states and, for any number of reasons, ended up prostituting themselves. But the odds were better than good that a couple of them began and ended their lives right here, and public school records would tell her that.

  Convincing Beverly’s friend to do a records search proved to be almost as daunting as a conversation with Baby. First, Mimi had to convince the woman that she did not want the academic or any other personal records of any of the women. Then, when she had explained in detail the nature of the story, she had to convince the woman that no story she wrote would cast the D.C. public schools in a negative light: of course the school system couldn’t be faulted for the lives its former students chose for themselves. All Mimi wanted, she explained with all the patience remaining to her, was an address, the name of a parent, a social security number, anything that would help her track down Sandra King and Stella Pearson. Yes, she understood that people moved, but perhaps a neighbor would remember and have a forwarding address. And no, Mimi would not reveal the name of her source, would not even indicate a contact with the school system. Finally, Mimi persuaded the woman to call her with the information in three days. Then, to rid herself of the pent-up frustration from dealing with the schools administrator, she walked the mile and a half to Police Headquarters. A couple of Vice guys she’d worked stories with for years might help, and unless they were in court, she expected that they’d be hunched over their desks completing paperwork that never seemed to end.

  She called from the pay phone on the ground floor of the building. Some cops didn’t want to be seen talking to her, a fact of life which pissed her off no end but which she’d learned to accept. The problem stemmed from a series of articles she’d written two years ago exposing a cell of rogue cops who’d designated themselves judge, jury and executioner in a misguided effort to rid the streets of drug dealers. Mimi, thus, was viewed as the enemy by those cops who believed that any word against anybody in blue was the equivalent of a declaration of war.

  “Ernie, this is Montgomery Patterson.”

  “Yo, Patterson. Who’re you puttin’ the sting to today?”

  “Not stinging today, Ernie, just searching. I’m downstairs. I need to talk to you. You coming to me or do you want me to come there up?”

  “Hell no! I don’t need to be caught talking to you. Meet me downstairs in the cafeteria.”

  Mimi walked down the stairs to the basement, resenting like hell his treatment of her, even though she suspected his ill humor was due in equal parts to overwork and to his not wanting to be identified as a reporter’s source.

  Nobody she knew ate the food in the Police Department cafeteria. Because, Mimi was convinced, it wasn’t really food. No matter when she had been here—and granted it wasn’t a regular occurrence—whatever was being served looked exactly like was being served the time before. She observed that the people eating looked like visitors to the building—they looked like lawyers or relatives or perps—they did not look like cops or parole officers or people who worked in the building. She studied a bottle of apple juice that claimed to be one hundred percent pure and free and from preservatives, decided to trust it, and was paying the cashier when Ernie walked in. He joined her at the front of the line, also by-passing the food at the steam table, paid for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and followed her to a table in the far corner of the room.

  Ernie looked worse than when she last saw him. He smoked, drank and ate too much, and was now at least fifty pounds overweight. She couldn’t imagine him running down a perp. His neck and chins crowded his shirt collar and the loosened tie. His face showed scratches and the missed places from his shave that morning. Stringy blond hair refused to stay out of his eyes, no matter how often he pushed it away.

  “You look like shit, Ernie.”

  “Fuck you, Patterson. I got too much work to do to take shit from you. Whaddya want?”

  “How’s Ralph?” Mimi refused to be intimidated by Ernie. She’d tell him what she wanted when she felt like it.

  “Tryin’ to decide whether or not he’s glad he ain’t dead. Caught a bullet about a month back. Messed his insides all to hell. Poor bastard never will have a normal shit again.”

  Ralph and Ernie had been partners for over a decade and Mimi now understood at least part of the reason for Ernie’s appearance. Not only was Ernie carrying the grief of having a partner downed, he was probably carrying a big load of guilt as well. Mimi would bet that Ernie had been close enough to Ralph to have caught a bullet as well, and knew that it could have been his insides instead of Ralph’s that had been rearranged.

  “I’m really sorry, Ernie. Give him my regards.”

  “Thanks, Patterson. I will. Now. Whaddya want?”

  Mimi began to tell him what she knew about the murdered prostitutes but he stopped her before she got very far. “We ain’t got ‘em no more. That pushy broad in Hate Crimes has ‘em. Some cockamamie bullshit about it bein’ a hate crime to off some junkie hookers.” Ernie drained his cup and pushed back his chair.

  Mimi’s brain was reeling from hearing Gianna described as a pushy broad, while at the same time trying to figure a way to keep Ernie from rushing off. “But you had ‘em at one time, right?” she queried hastily.

  “A couple of ‘em.”

  “Sandra King and Stella Pearson?”

  “Sandra King and Andrea Thomas. I remember the Thomas broad ‘cause she was a Jane Doe for a lotta weeks. And that’s all I remember, Patterson. I gotta go.”

  Ernie finished his doughnut, wiped his mouth with his hand, and heaved his bulk out of the chair and lum
bered across the room. He stopped halfway to the door, turned, and came back to loom over her, a scowl etching the hangover in his face.

  “I don’t know why I’m bothering to help you out on this one, Patterson. But just so you get it right, they weren’t knifed. Not in the way you mean it.”

  “How many ways are there, Ernie?”

  “Well, if you’re a modern day Daniel Boone, you throw a six inch hunting knife into the heart from a moving car.” Then Ernie turned and retraced his steps, this time getting all the way to and out of the door.

  A six-inch hunting knife. And, if she was adding correctly, five victims now, instead of four.

  Mimi left Police Headquarters with a headache. There was too much to balance and her brain wasn’t up to trying. She had to stifle an urge to pop in on Gianna. She didn’t like hearing her referred to negatively, and she wondered if that was the prevailing attitude among the cops, that she was a pushy broad. The sinking feeling at that prospect was joined by a momentary something that resembled sympathy for Gianna: Some asshole was killing women by throwing hunting knives into them from moving vehicles and Gianna had to find him in the face of hostile resentment from her own colleagues.

  And, of course, she was furious at once again having had Gianna shut all the doors to the case, meaning weeks of grunt work for Mimi with no promise at all of any payoff. No wonder she had a headache. It wasn’t normal to be in love with a woman, and feel sorry for her, all the while being furious at her. She jaywalked across the street to the Department of Motor Vehicles. A some-time source there might be willing to check and see if any of the women had a driver’s license.

  It took forty minutes to locate the guy, a supervisor in the Traffic Adjudication section, and another hour of sitting through hearings waiting for the lunch break, an hour during which she heard every excuse imaginable for why people failed to pay their traffic tickets. And after all the waiting, what she got was a possible maybe that he’d have time to run the names through the computer for her. That and a dark warning about violating the private rights of citizens. She checked her irritation at the civics lesson and gave him the list of three names she’d jotted down.

  “Andrea Thomas? What do you want with her?” The suspicion in his voice gave her a quick rush of adrenaline.

  “You know her?” Mimi kept the interest in her voice casual.

  “I know her sister. She works in records. What do you want with Andrea Thomas?”

  Mimi could sense that she was losing him, and she’d have to tell him something to keep him from backing off. “She was murdered. I’m just trying to collect some background information, something that might point to a reason.”

  “She was junkie and a hooker. Two good reasons right there. Some pimp or some john offed her. Who cares?”

  “I do,” Mimi said through clenched teeth, “if it’s the same pimp or john who offed her and a few others.”

  He shrugged, and said, “All the same to me,” and turned to walk away. Over his shoulder he called out, “You owe me one, Patterson.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Mimi muttered to herself, and, cursing bureaucrats with a new found vehemence, was about to head off when a thought struck her and she rushed down the hall to catch up with him, pushing through the crowd that always seemed to overwhelm the Motor Vehicles Department.

  “What’s her name,” Mimi panted when she caught up with him.

  “Whose name?” He looked at her as if at a crazed stranger.

  “The sister. The one who works in records.”

  “Gwen,” he said. “And you didn’t get that from me.”

  Mimi spent another two days looking for Gwen Thomas and when she found her, she almost regretted the effort. Over the years, during the course of her investigations, Mimi had encountered dozens of people who were afraid to talk to reporters, who didn’t like reporters, who resented reporters intruding into their lives. And on rare occasions she’d encountered someone like Gwen Thomas who quite simply had no respect for journalists and their work, and that was always hard to take. Mimi could honestly say that while she knew a hell of a lot of people for whom she had no respect—individuals she could call by name—with the exception of drug dealing, she couldn’t think of a single profession for which she had no respect.

  She’d asked around and had Gwen Thomas pointed out to her and had introduced herself and followed the woman outside on her lunch break.

  “I have nothing to say to you, Miss Patterson.” Gwen Thomas had brushed off Mimi’s approach with casual politeness and without a trace of anger or hostility.

  Mimi studied the woman. She was attractive and intelligent and the pain that crossed her face when Mimi mentioned Andrea’s name made it clear that she had loved her murdered sister.

  “It is possible, Miss Thomas, that your sister’s death was not an isolated incident.”

  Mimi watched the other woman’s expression closely to see how this information registered, but it was she who got the surprise when Gwen Thomas said, “I know that. So does Lieutenant Maglione. She’s the one you should be talking to anyway, not me.” And Gwen Thomas melted into the lunch-hour pedestrian traffic in front of the Municipal Center.

  Mimi stood there, in the way of the hordes of people shuttling to and from lunch, thinking about how much more open she and Gianna had been with each other in recent weeks about their work. Gianna had told her all about the move into the Chief’s office, about the Black Men on Guard and the neo-Nazis, about giving the Gwertzman story to Tyler in the first place, about the undercover cop in six-inch red spike heels chasing and catching the eight-year old torcher. But Gianna would never, ever, share with her the real details of her work. Like the fact that hunting knives had been thrown at the victims from passing cars. And Mimi could only admit the truth: that she had no right to expect it.

  She sighed heavily and then, suddenly, brightened. The fact that Gianna was always several steps ahead of her on this story had given her the gut feeling that the hooker murder story was a big fish swimming in the deep water. What Ernie had just told her about the hunting knives confirmed it. Now all she needed to do was come up with enough solid facts to sell the story to the editors.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gianna called the Second District watch commander and left an urgent message for Alice and Tony: she needed to hear from them the moment they checked in, and she didn’t care what time it was. She left her home number and hung up, returning her focus to the report before her.

  The license check showed that the black Jeep Wrangler was registered to a member of the United States House of Representatives from Utah. If there was a mistake, Gianna wanted to know now.

  The license check also revealed outstanding parking tickets dating back three years totaling more than fifteen hundred dollars, most of which had become warrants for arrest. And that was just in D.C. She’d run a check in the morning, to determine whether Virginia or Maryland had anything. But first she wanted to double-check with Alice and Tony, though deep within her she knew there was no mistake. They weren’t the kind of cops to make mistakes. If they said that was the license number, then it was.

  And that meant that a member of Congress somehow was involved in the murders of nine prostitutes.

  She was in the Think Tank, where she spent most of her time these days. Because her reassignment relieved her of the pressure of giving speeches and compiling crime statistics and analytical reports, she was no longer confined to her office doing the work of an administrator. She stood, stretched, and walked over to the map that showed the locations where the nine victims had been found. Something puzzled her and she stood there several long minutes trying to figure out what. The phone rang and she looked over at it and saw that it was her private line. She looked up at the clock, relieved to see that she wasn’t late for her meeting with the Chief.

  “Lieutenant Maglione,” she answered.

  “I gotta go to a meeting with the mayor tonight, Maglione,” the Chief barked into the phone wit
hout preamble. “See me tomorrow at lunch time. I’ll order you one of those veggie burger things you like.”

  And she was left holding a dial tone, her mouth still forming the words to tell him that she needed to see him tonight, to tell him how much bigger the problem was, that it could reach all the way to the Congress of the United States. But he was gone. She returned to the map and traced with her finger the line that was New York Avenue, then the lines that were the streets that fed into Thomas Circle, then the lines that were the streets that fed into DuPont Circle—the areas of heaviest street prostitution and the areas were all the victims...and there was the answer.

  She looked at the nine red pins that signified the nine victims. Each pin was located two or three blocks away from the action strip, away from the main drag. The prostitutes were killed near the main drags, not on them. Did that mean that nine women had been lured away from the main drag an on to side streets? Or had they been just unlucky enough to get caught in an isolated situation?

  Gianna crossed to her desk and picked up the phone. As she waited for the number to connect she pulled the file on the black Jeep Wrangler toward her. She identified herself to the WASIS technician who answered, and gave him the access code that authorized her to solicit information from the Washington Area Shared Information System—a sophisticated computerized data bank of information on crime and criminals that combined the law enforcement efforts of D.C. and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The system contained every scrap of information contained in every report submitted during the investigation of every crime: every statement, every phone number and license number, every address, every date of birth of every person interviewed, and whether a suspect ever had been interviewed in connection with another crime in that jurisdiction. Because the WASIS information was so detailed and so invasive, a certain level of authority was required to access it. There were ten levels of authority that qualified. Gianna had eight levels of clearance. She gave the technician the license number of the Jeep and he advised her if WASIS had anything, she could expect it tomorrow afternoon.