George Pelecanos (11 page)

Weirdly
enough, it was Juanita, not the teenagers, who freaked out. Like most of the
group house inmates she looked older than she probably was--hair gone gray years
before its time, half her teeth gone too, skin the color and texture of dried
apricots. What really got to me was how she liked to wear latex gloves, the
kind doctors put on for intimate exams. Lord knows where she got them, but they
didn't conjure up good associations.

One
morning I came out and found one inside out on the sidewalk in front of our
house. The fingers were still half-folded in on themselves, as though it had
been pulled off in a hurry. Juanita stood about ten feet away watching me.

It
was April, barely. March had come in colder than usual and stormed out again
without leaving much in the way of spring behind it, and the first days of
April struggled to catch up. I felt sorry for the flowers
who'd
pushed their way up expecting sunshine and mellow air and instead gotten the
dismal leftovers of a winter that wouldn't shake itself loose.

I
was in a hurry that morning, trying to get my daughter in the car. Ida had
stopped by to watch the baby for a few minutes; Dani was late for school
already, and it wasn't a day to linger out of doors. Juanita was out there
having the first smoke of the day, bundled up and shapeless in the ratty down
parka that had found its way to her through some dubious act of hand-me-down
charity. I gave her a good morning that was as cheerful as I could make it
under the circumstances.

"Man
keys.
Godababeedahl?"
She cleared a wad of phlegm out
of her throat--did she have to hawk it onto the sidewalk?--and looked at her
shoes, Chuck Taylor All Stars a size too small and almost worn through at the
toes. Without a full set of teeth she might as well have been speaking Chinese.
On a good day I caught every third or fourth word. She was gesturing now; her
arms windmilled furiously.
"Fur man.
Keys."

"No
cigs, Juanita." I shrugged as I got Dani buckled into her car seat. I didn't
like her getting too close to any of the group house residents. I had no reason
to think they were dangerous, but with people like that you might not know
until it was too late. "We don't smoke." I nodded in Dani's direction as if
that explained everything Juanita needed to know.

Her
hands dropped to her sides all of a sudden, as if her battery had run out. Then
she groped in her pocket for something that turned out to be a piece of paper.
It looked familiar. When she handed it to me I saw why. It was the note I'd
left in the alley in case the lost doll's owner came looking for it.

Juanita
handed me my own note and wrapped her arms around herself, the gesture of
someone cold or in need of comfort, and shook her head back and forth so hard
it looked very likely she was doing her damaged brain more harm.
"Babee.
Doll.
Man keys. Man keys!"

"We
didn't know it was your baby."

"I'm
a big girl!" Dani shouted from the backseat of our

"Not
you, honey." I hated myself a little every time I used the word "honey" with
one of my children, especially when I was in the kind of mood I was in this
morning. "She's talking about her baby."

"Baby
DOLL." The Ls of the last word hung in the cold air. Juanita gave me a big
gummy smile that looked more anxious than happy. I saw now why she kept her
arms wrapped around herself--she was shaking. "You get it back." Her head
bobbled forward and back, forward and back.
"Keys.
He
need
it."

"All
right," I said. She was more nuts than I'd thought. I made a mental note to
tell Dave to keep an extra-close eye on the kids when she was around. "Sure."

"You
get it, okay? Okay?" The arms were flailing again.

Dani
made a noise that might have been a giggle and might have been something closer
to fear. Kids always know when someone isn't right.

"I'll
try." I gave Dani's car seat straps one more tug, even though I knew they were
tight enough. She let out a howl of protest. "Sorry, honey. Mommy's finished."
Juanita watched us pull away from the curb, her mouth forming the same words
over and over.

That
weekend I dug out the doll Dani had found. It was in even worse shape than
Juanita. It had been loved hard, if you could call that kind of treatment love.
Some people did. The doll's head hung at an angle that would have killed a
human baby, and if there were a Doll Social Services they'd want to know who'd
tried to open up Baby's belly with a screwdriver and where her missing leg had
gotten to. I flipped the switch on her back--she was supposed to cry, probably,
or say--but nothing happened. A piece of crap like that wasn't worth wasting a
couple of good batteries on. I had enough baby noise in my life already.

If
Juanita wanted a baby, I thought, she could at least have one in decent shape.
When Dave took the kids to the park for the usual Sunday afternoon run--"I'm
going to run 'em like dogs," he told me, "
tire
'em out
good"--I rummaged through the plastic bins of discarded toys in the basement.
Sure enough, there was a baby doll in one of them, a chubby thing in
a
onesie with stains all down the front from Dani's attempts
to feed it pureed peas. Dani had moved on to other things--horses, Barbies,
getting her little brother into trouble. The doll's blue eyes looked a little
crazy now, and it was a couple shades lighter than Juanita's, but at least it
had all its appendages.

I
took it over to the group house--I'd never had cause to venture up those
steps--and knocked hard enough to be heard over the TV that was always on. The
day caregiver, one of a rotating 24/7 crew whose names I never learned,
answered the door. He was a beat-up-looking guy in his fifties who wore the
same shapeless clothes as his charges. If you spent enough time around people
like that you couldn't help picking up a few of their habits.

He
looked ticked off when I told him what I wanted, but he shouted Juanita's name
into the dim interior of the house anyway. From one of the upstairs rooms I
heard a radio playing salsa and wondered if it was WHFS, the indie radio
station I'd listened to growing up. It had gone Latin a few months ago. I
didn't listen to the radio much anymore, but I missed that station. It was the
soundtrack of my youth.

Juanita
came down the stairs like a ghost. She grabbed the doll from my arms, held it
out a little distance from her, and gazed into its crazy eyes as if she saw the
very truth of heaven there.

"Nut
job," the caretaker said under his breath.

I
thanked him anyway and left Juanita alone with Baby.

I
had a bad dream that night, the kind that makes you wake yourself up just to
stop it. But when I was fully awake I couldn't remember what had scared me. I
sat up in bed and listened--no noise at all from the children's rooms. I
listened for the teenagers but they had all gone home. It was almost 5 o'clock.
A mockingbird sang his morning warm-ups in the park across the street. Dave
breathed next to me, the intake and outtake of his breath regular as waves
along a quiet beach. The only noise from the street was a bus that groaned its
way to a halt at the four-way stop on our corner, then heaved itself into
motion again and was gone.

The
noise reminded me--trash day. The trucks would be coming through before it got
much lighter, and as usual Dave had forgotten to put the can out the night
before. I shrugged on my bathrobe and felt my way down the stairs to the back
door.

I'd
just pulled the can out from its spot next to the garage when I saw her. She
lay face down in the little walkway that cut between the rental storage units
across the alley. Someone had dragged her behind the chain-link fence to die.

She
had on that ratty parka, the green of it dark where it had absorbed some of the
blood. I couldn't see where it all came from, just that there was a lot of it
spread out around the body, dark and congealed into wrinkles like the skin on a
cup of chocolate pudding.

"Mommy?"
All of a sudden Dani was
standing next to me, eyes full of sleep. I didn't have time to stop her from
seeing what lay there--I hadn't heard her follow me out the door. She was
pointing at an object half-covered by Juanita's body. "Mommy, is that my doll's
leg?"

"Don't
tell them you gave it to her." Dave sat at the kitchen table with a cup of
black coffee between his large hands. He never drank his coffee black. That's
how I knew it was serious--as if a body in the alley hadn't told me that
already. "You're asking for trouble."

"Trouble
is finding a woman shot dead in the alley behind my house."

"They
don't have to know it came from you." Family life had brought out the
conservative, don't-make-waves side of Dave. It wasn't my favorite thing about
him. "What possessed you, anyway? You hate those people."

"I
don't hate them. I just worry about the kids."

The
cops were still out back doing whatever cops do when they have a murder scene
on their hands. It only looked like they were standing around shooting the shit
with cups of coffee in their hands. They'd sat me down at my own kitchen table
and taken a statement, then gone over it again to make sure I had my story
straight. There wasn't much to tell, after all.

"
Haven't had a bag lady
in a while," one of them, a fat
little guy whose belly kept trying to bust out of his uniform, said to his
partner. I liked the partner--he'd kept himself trim and he had nice manners for
a cop. "Little long in the tooth to be playing with dolls."

"She
wasn't a bag lady," I said. "She lived down the block."

The
fat one laughed in a way that really soured me on him.
"Different
kind of bag lady, lady."
He pushed his hat back on his head. His hair
could have stood a couple of good latherings with industrial shampoo. "Know
what a mule is?"

The
Thin Man saved me the trouble. "She ran drugs for a cripple who works the
territory east of here."

"East
of the sun," I said. I didn't mean anything by it. Just some old story I used
to read as a kid, a story about a girl who has to find her one true love east
of the sun and west of the moon. "Over at the New Dragon. The Wheelchair
Bandit--that's what the neighborhood listserv calls him."

"Nice
neighbors you have." Fatty picked a dark speck out of his teeth.

"Sometimes
they try to cut a deal on the side and make a little extra cash," Thin Man
said. "They're not real smart, these people."

When
they finished with me, they went out in the alley and walked up and down,
making notes in those pads they carry around. I watched them for a while and
that's when I realized I hadn't said anything about the doll. They'd found most
of its parts spread through the alley. If I hadn't mentioned it to Dave first,
I probably would have gone straight out and told Thin Man, who had parked
himself against the patrol car that blocked the alley. He was making more
notes.
Notes about splatter patterns and exit wounds and time
of death.
Notes about the grisly end of a woman whose
worst crime, as far as I'd ever known, had been to try and bum cigarettes off
people who didn't have them.
What was she doing with scum like the
Bandit? She was probably too crazy to know what she'd gotten mixed up in. All
she'd wanted was a baby of her own.

"Think
of the kids," Dave said. We'd been sitting there while. His coffee must have
gotten cold by then, but he didn't even complain like he usually would. "You
want them to get dragged into this? You want Dani on the stand telling a
courtroom full of people how her mother gave her toys away to the drug dealer
down the block? The cops have all the information they need."

I
couldn't see how any lawyer in his right mind would put a four-year-old on the
stand to tell a story about a doll, but I let Dave talk me out of what I knew I
ought to do. He had a way of making certain things seem unnecessary, like you'd
be a damn fool to hassle yourself.

It
wasn't a dream that woke me up that night. As I passed the doors to Dani and
Jack's rooms I heard the baby give out a creaking little sigh and settle
himself back to sleep. I went down to the basement and got out Juanita's first
doll, the one she'd never see again. I held it in my hands and tried to get the
head to stay straight, but it couldn't. When something gets that broken, you
can't fix it.

I
got a flathead screwdriver out of Dave's toolbox. I turned the doll over and
looked at the screws that held the doll's battery compartment shut. They were
almost stripped, but if I pressed hard enough into the metal groove I could
catch just enough traction to get them turning. You had to want it bad, though,
to get that job done. After I dug the last one out of its hole, I used the tip
of the flathead to jimmy the cover off. It popped out more easily than I was
expecting and the tip of the screwdriver slammed into what should have been a
battery--but whatever it was gave under the point.

In
the space where Baby's batteries should have been--and crammed inside her torso
and up into her poor dangling head--were plastic bags about the size of the
half-sand-wich-sized Ziplocs I used to pack up snacks in to take to the
playground. I didn't need to know the name of what was in these.