“When?” Gianna asked, cutting off the explanation. If she was going to do it, it didn’t really matter why.
“Let’s give her another thirty-six to forty-eight hours to stabilize,” the doctor advised.
Gianna gave the doctor her card and promised to be available whenever she was needed.
They watched the doctor’s departing back, all crisp, white efficiency, and Gianna had to release her irritation with the woman as she acknowledged the similarity of their jobs. The doctor had responded exactly as Gianna did when she had to question witnesses or victims: With calm, unwavering, unemotional efficiency. The doctor was good at her job and Gianna appreciated it. Eric, however, had reached no such place of acceptance.
“This shit is really getting on my nerves,” he snarled. “I’m fuckin’ sick and tired of hoodlum sons of bitches thinking they can do any goddamn thing they please and get away with it!”
“Well, pal, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Just listen to this,” Gianna said without a trace of sympathy in her voice, as she told him what she’d learned from Sergeant Marx of the Fairfax County police.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mimi hated it when the phone rang in the middle of the night. She’d experimented over the years with having a listed phone number so sources could call her at home when necessary. But then she began to receive more and more crank calls, so she unlisted the number again. As a result, her phone seldom rang past eleven or eleven-thirty at night—her friends knew better. She opened one eye and stared numbly at the red digital read-out. Just past one in the morning.
“Hello,” she growled into the phone, picking it up on its third ring.
“Is that you, Newspaper Lady?” came a shaky, frightened voice. There was so much fear in the voice that Mimi knew it was Baby only because no one else called her Newspaper Lady.
“What’s the trouble, Baby?”
“They killed another girl and I saw ‘em! They threw this knife at her and killed her and I saw ‘em! What should I do?”
“Tell me where you are, Baby.” Mimi had switched on the light and grabbed the pen and pad she always kept on the table beside her bed. She wrote down an address just west of Thomas Circle, where she’d first met Baby, and the explicit instructions Baby was giving her: There was a one-way alley that ran beside a Methodist Church on the east side of Twelfth Street. Enter the alley going the wrong way—Baby was adamant on that point—and drive slowly through to the opposite end and Baby would appear.
“What kinda car you got, Newspaper Lady?”
“A red Karmann Ghia,” Mimi responded without thinking.
“A red what?” Baby challenged, in her almost normal tone of voice. “What the hell kinda car is that?”
“If you see a red convertible come through the alley and you don’t know what kind of car it is, assume it’s me,” Mimi snapped, and slammed down the phone.
She dressed in record time, grabbed her tape recorder, notepad and pen, and, one foot out of the door of her bedroom, had a thought that sent her scurrying back to the closet, from which she grabbed a nylon windbreaker, a pair of jeans, and a baseball cap.
Eva Mae Harris was a licensed practical nurse. She’d worked for twenty-six years at D.C. General Hospital but had grown weary of the back-breaking, unrewarding work. With her last child out of the house, she’d decided to retire from the hospital and begin private duty nursing. It didn’t pay as well and there were no benefits, but with a full pension and no children to feed, the money was enough. Besides, she had Fred’s pension check, too.
Eva Mae took care of a woman in Georgetown, a stroke victim. She was supposed to get off duty at eleven-thirty when the woman’s son was due home, but the boy never returned home on time. Treated Eva Mae like she was the maid, like she would stay there until he decided to come home, whenever that was. And because Eva Mae was a good nurse, she did always stay. Tonight the boy stumbled in the door at half past midnight, making Eva Mae more grateful than she already was that neither of her children had ever given her a moment’s trouble, despite the fact that they were raised in what some people considered the ghetto, and not in ritzy Georgetown. And so it was that Eva Mae Harris arrived home at almost one-fifteen in the morning to find a prostitute on her front steps, a big knife sticking out of her chest. Ever the nurse, Eva Mae felt for the carotid artery in the woman’s neck and determined that she was dead, though she hadn’t been for long; she was still quite warm. Then she said a quick prayer for the woman’s soul, stepped over her body, went into the house, and called the police.
Mimi turned left on Twelfth Street and crawled down the block until she saw the Grace Methodist Church. She saw the alley beside the church, and she saw the one-way arrow pointing out. Mimi made the illegal turn into the alley, following Baby’s instructions, and crept slowly forward into the darkness. She passed the church, crossed an intersecting alley, and was approaching the back of a grocery store when she saw a shadow move. A wave of apprehension shot through her. She had no damn business creeping through some alley in the middle of the night in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city! The shadow loomed larger and Mimi saw Baby step from a concealed doorway. Mimi reached over and unlocked the car door so that it was open when the car drew abreast of Baby, who scampered in, slammed the door, and yelled at Mimi, “Let’s get the fuck outta here!”
Mimi put the car in gear and roared through the alley and out onto Eleventh Street. Fear replaced by adrenaline, she was trying to convince Baby to show her where the dead woman was and Baby was steadfastly refusing. Suddenly, there was the combined wail of half a dozen sirens and within seconds, police cruisers and ambulances were converging from every direction. Mimi looked around for Gianna’s car, assuming that all the activity had to do with what Baby had witnessed less than an hour earlier. Instead of heeding Baby’s exhortations to get the hell out of the area, Mimi followed the ambulance. Baby threatened to get out of the car and take a taxi home and Mimi, making a choice, turned a corner and left all the activity behind. She knew where to find the cops. She did not know where to find Baby.
Gianna picked up her phone in the middle of the second ring and sounded wide awake, even though it was two o’clock in the morning. She wrote down the address of the house where the hooker with the knife in her chest had died and cursed herself for not following her impulse to move Tony and Alice to a different location. She stood in the steaming shower a couple of minutes longer than usual because she was, she realized, exhausted. She didn’t remember the last night she’d had more than five hours sleep. And at this rate...
Mimi was surprised, though pleased, that Baby not only didn’t balk at changing into the jacket and jeans that Mimi offered her, but praised Mimi for being smart enough to consider that Baby would require a change of clothes, given the circumstances and the time of morning. Mimi marveled at the ease and speed with which Baby effected the change in the front seat of the tiny car—she shimmied out of the skin-tight body suit and into the jeans in a matter of seconds, but not before Mimi noticed how rail-thin she was. Baby kept on her tank top and added Mimi’s jacket, zipping it all the way up. Finally she yanked off the voluminous platinum wig to reveal the close-cut Afro and again Mimi took note of the fact that this woman was little more than a child. And tonight, a frightened child. She popped the baseball cap backwards on her head and turned to Mimi.
“So what kinda car did you say this was?”
“A Karmann Ghia. That’s a Volkswagen.”
“Bullshit,” drawled Baby. “I ain’t ever seen no Volkswagen that looked like this car.”
“That’s because they stopped making it before you were born,” Mimi snapped at her. “Now stop maligning my car.”
“What’s maligning mean?” Baby asked in that guileless tone.
“Means derogatory,” Mimi said and caught herself in time to try to fix the error. “Means negative, it means saying bad things.”
“I didn’t say nothin’ maligning about your car. I just
said I hadn’t never seen one like it,” she said smugly, pleased with her casual use of a new word.
“And you won’t see any more like it. It’s very rare.”
“Does that mean it’s worth a lot of money?”
“I’ve been offered a lot of money for it,” Mimi boasted.
“So, why don’t you sell it and buy a nice car?”
“Baby, that’s maligning,” Mimi said wearily, pulling up to a parking meter in front of the Connecticut Avenue Diner.
Baby ordered waffles, sausage, eggs, orange juice and milk. Mimi asked for coffee and returned with defiance the look she got from across the table. She was damned if she’d justify her dietary habits to a smart-mouthed nineteen-year old who had the temerity to malign her prized classic automobile.
“Tell me what happened tonight, Baby.”
Baby had turned her fourth trick of the night and, in need of a fix, had wandered off the strip and into the covert protection of somebody’s back yard where she’d sat down close to the chain link fence, between two of the city’s large, green garbage bins. Nothing was on her mind but cooking her fix. And when that was done and the drugs injected, nothing at all was on her mind, not for nice, long, oblivious while. She could never have told a soul, had one asked, how long her nod had lasted, but she was aware that she was coming out of it when she heard a woman’s voice—one of her kind of women—call out a casual, ‘Hey, Sugah.’ There was no vocal reply, but a vehicle engine revved. By this time, Baby had struggled to her feet and was wobbling out of the yard. She saw a black truck, one of those cute, sporty ones, with the top off. Four men inside. The she saw the woman walking toward the men. The one of the men, in the front, stood up and raised his arm, as if to wave to the woman. But there was something else...something sailing in the air...and suddenly the woman was on the ground. Baby heard another sound—a scream—close to her, too close, so close it hurt her ears. The sound reverberated in her ears. Then the man who was still standing up in the truck turned around and said something, loud words. Then the two men in the back of the cute truck stood up and they were all pointing...pointing...at her! Suddenly the truck was backing up rapidly. Baby ran. Or rather, she turned and moved as quickly as she was able, under the circumstances. She ducked into an alley, ran about half way through it, and slithered into an abandoned garage. She could hear the engine of the truck whining as the driver gunned it through the alley. It went fast by the garage where she hid and she instantly slid out and ran out of the mouth of the alley, on to a side street and up the block to a small bodega that she knew had a pay phone inside. The owner, a Jamaican woman, reached under the counter when Baby rushed in, then released the weapon and withdrew her hand when she recognized that the sudden opening of the door did not, this time, mean danger. She knew Baby and many of the other girls who worked the block; but more than that, she understood them. She understood because for the first several, struggling years of her life in America, she’d had to sell her body in order to live.
“What’s wrong wit’ you, Girl? You look like you just seen the devil.” The woman had stared intently at the door, as if expecting the devil or some other form of evil to follow Baby.
Baby smacked a dollar on the counter. “Gimme some change, Alva, I gotta make a phone call. Quick!” Baby had snatched up the coins and rushed to the back of the store toward the beer case, to the corner where the phone was. And she remained there until she caught her breath. When she left the store, she made sure it was with her normal grin in place and her casual wave to Alva with the now-familiar admonition not to let the bastards get her down.
Mimi watched and listened as Baby ate and talked, and noticed that Baby didn’t flinch when Mimi directed the waitress to bring more waffles, juice and milk.
“So I know they saw me,” Baby said, finishing her story and her meal. “But they think we all look alike anyway, so I ain’t really worried. Besides, I saw them, too, so if they fuck with me, you can put ‘em in the newspaper, right?”
“Does that mean you can identify them, Baby?” Mimi refused to allow herself to be hopeful. Just coming out of a nod, Baby wouldn’t have recognized her own mother.
“Naw. All white boys look alike to me, just like we all look alike to them. But I know the tag number of that truck.”
Mimi’s surprise was all over her face. “You know the license number of the black Jeep?”
“I just said so, didn’t I?” Baby was getting testy. “And I seen on TV that you can find out who they are if you have the tag number. So you can just tell ‘em to leave me alone.”
Mimi fished her notepad and pen out of her pocket and slid it across the table to Baby, asking her to write down the tag number. Mimi didn’t want any possibility of a mistake. Baby would write it as she remembered it. But to Mimi’s surprise, she recoiled from the pen and pad and a sullen look replaced the smug look that had been on her face.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” Mimi asked with concern.
“Nothin’,” Baby replied shortly.
“I only asked you to write it because I didn’t want to make a mistake,” Mimi began to explain, but Baby cut her off.
“If you write it like I tell you, won’t be no mistake.”
“All right,” Mimi said, reaching for the offending items. She opened the pad and held the pen poised and ready.
Baby squeezed her eyes shut. “The numbers was seven, seven, nine,” she said slowly. “And the other part was like my name.” She sat with her eyes tightly shut, brow wrinkled in concentration.
“What do you mean, like your name?” Mimi was confused.
“My name is Marlene Jefferson. The other part was like that. Like Michael Jackson, like Michael Jordan. You know?” Baby managed to sound both plaintive and patronizing at the same time.
Mimi stumbled over the concept for a moment before realization dawned. “You mean M-J, like your initials? Those were the letters in the license plate?”
“Ain’t that what I just said?” Baby Doll snarled.
Mimi’s patience snapped and she was on the verge of an acid retort when she suddenly understood the reason for Baby’s elaborate charade: The child could not read. Mimi’s admiration for the Baby Doll increased another several points, and she again cursed the scourge that was drugs. Marlene Jefferson is, she told herself, too beautiful, too smart, and too young, to be usurped by the evil that is heroin.
Both Mimi and Baby were silent on the drive downtown. Baby would tell Mimi only that she lived somewhere off Thirteenth Street in the Columbia Heights section of town. So when Mimi crossed the intersection of Park Road and Thirteenth Street, Baby told her to pull over. She opened the door and got out of the car, making sure to claim her wig and her wardrobe.
“I’ll wash your clothes and give ‘em back to you.”
“I’m worried about you, Baby, not some old blue jeans.”
“Don’t worry ‘bout me, Newspaper Lady. You find them boys, you won’t have to worry ‘bout me.” Baby was her offhand self again. She shut the car door firmly, then leaned in. “I really ‘preciate you comin’ to pick me up. I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Will you call me tomorrow, just to let me know you’re all right?” Mimi was loathe not to have a way to find this girl.
“I told you. Don’t worry ‘bout me,” Baby said, and strolled off into the darkness.
Mimi sat there for several more moments, her brain on overload. The license number that Baby had given her was incomplete: it was missing the third letter. Maryland tags carried three letters and three numbers. Baby either didn’t remember or, more likely, did not know how to recognize, the third letter. But that problem was easily solved. Any law enforcement agency could ID that vehicle knowing its make and model and five of the six license numbers. Her other problem was not so easily solved. She had a source who’d just witnessed a murder. Baby might not be familiar with her responsibility to report that information to the police, but Mimi certainly was. And suppose she reported it. Then what? Tell
the police that her eyewitness was a heroin-addicted prostitute who’d just finished shooting up in an alley? And as preposterous as the entire scenario was, what would Gianna say if she discovered that Mimi had withheld information about a capital crime, a felony murder? Being a reporter, protecting the sanctity of a source, that was one thing. Obstructing justice, that was quite another. Mimi buried her head in her hands.
Every eye in the Think Tank was bloodshot and bleary, and beneath every reddened eye was a heavy piece of luggage. Kenny, who didn’t drink, looked hung-over. Lynda and Bobby looked flat, as if someone had let all the air out of them. Tony and Tim both looked just plain mean, though Gianna knew they had different reasons for the scowls on their faces; and Tim’s was made worse by the fact that he’d gotten a new, short haircut that emphasized the angles of his face. Alice looked distraught. And Eric wore a look of pure disgust. Gianna knew she looked every bit as hellish as any one of the others because she felt, in total, like they all looked.
“I am one useless piece of shit.” Tony slammed the table with his hand, sloshing coffee out of his cup.
“You’re not any good to me feeling sorry for yourself, Tony,” Gianna said dispassionately.
“I’m not any good to anybody, especially to that girl lying over there in the morgue with that fuckin’ knife in her heart.”
Bobby, Kenny, Tim and Lynda all shifted their attention to Tony, and Gianna saw their feelings shift as well. He was no longer just an interloper but a dedicated cop who was earning their respect.
“Nothing you could have done, Tony. Either of you. She wasn’t killed at your stakeout.” If anyone is at fault, Gianna continued to herself, it’s me. I should have moved you. Dammit! I should have moved you.
“I did see something, Lieutenant,” Alice said quietly, and the focus shifted to her. “A black Jeep Wrangler. But a different one. At least one with different license plates, with Maryland instead of Virginia places, because I swear to God that it was the same Jeep.”
Night Songs Page 14