The Case of the Sin City Sister (14 page)

“We just got here from New Mexico,” Eve volunteered. “We’ve been worried about Dorisanne. We haven’t heard from her in a couple of weeks, and so we came down here to make sure she’s okay.”

She waited. The door in front of her was still only slightly opened.

“She’s been gone all week,” the woman responded. “I ain’t seen her in about a week.”

There was a voice from behind the woman, a man’s voice, asking who she was talking to.

She yelled back, “There’s some people here looking for Dorisanne!”

The man said something in reply, but Eve couldn’t make it out. Abruptly, the door closed. Eve turned to Daniel, who stood watching. She was about to knock when the door opened completely and the woman came out onto the landing very quickly and closed the door behind her.

She was wearing a thin robe that was open and barely covering a skimpy one-piece outfit. It was gold and studded with sequins. Her blond hair was in curlers and she had on a pair of large fuzzy slippers. She had long red fingernails and dark red lips that had
stained the end of the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her makeup appeared fresh, and Eve assumed she was getting ready for work.

“Dorisanne and Robbie left last week. It seemed like they were in a hurry. She told me they were going on a trip and would be back soon and not to let anybody in their place.” The woman took out the cigarette and blew a puff of smoke above Eve’s head and looked nervously toward the door behind her.

“She didn’t tell you where they were going?” Daniel wanted to know.

The woman looked up at him. She seemed to be studying him. “I’ve seen you here before,” she said. “You’re the cop that worked with Dorisanne’s old man.”

“I’m Daniel,” he introduced himself.

She didn’t respond but rather eyed him suspiciously. She took another drag from her cigarette and gave a slight nod.

The man’s voice yelled from inside the apartment. “Pauline! Where you at?”

She jumped. “Look, I got to go. I ain’t supposed to be talking to no cops,” she said and turned back to her apartment.

Eve caught her by the arm. “Is there anything else you know?” She knew she sounded a little desperate.

Pauline pulled her arm away and shook her head. “Just a trip, they said.” And she opened the door and headed back inside, leaving Daniel and Eve standing at the closed door.

TWENTY-TWO

“Let’s go get something to eat,” Daniel suggested.

Eve glanced once more at her sister’s locked apartment and the one next door, feeling torn about wanting to try to have a longer conversation with Pauline. She blew out a breath, chose not to knock once more on the neighbor’s door, and followed him down the stairs to the car. They got in and he started the engine. They both sat watching the building.

“She knows more than what she’s saying,” Eve finally said, shaking her head.

“Yeah, well, I don’t think we’ll hear anything else while her boyfriend is in there.” He pulled out of the parking place and stopped at the end of the driveway and looked in both directions before pulling out onto the street. “Did you see the bruise under her eye?” he asked.

“Yeah, and the ones on her arms,” she answered, thinking about the blue-black marks covered with a thick layer of makeup
on her face and the other ones forming a kind of chain around both wrists. Eve had noticed them when she took the drags off her cigarette, the sleeves of the robe dropping away for a clear view of the wounds.

Eve pulled at her seat belt, stretched out her legs, and slid down a bit in the passenger’s seat. “We have a lot of abused women come to the convent. I guess since we’re right off the highway, we’re an easy place to get to. We usually try to bandage them up and get them to the hospital or the shelter, but sometimes they stay with us for a while.” She shook her head. “When we offer to call the police, most of them ask us not to.”

“Yeah, even when we’re called, a lot of the women don’t want to file a report. Of course, now New Mexico has an ordinance in place that if the police are called to a domestic dispute, somebody’s getting in the backseat of a cruiser. We’re taking somebody to jail. It’s helped a lot, but still, in the end, usually the victims won’t follow through.” He tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

“How can a woman stay in a relationship like that, especially in this day and time where there are more options for victims?” She crossed herself as she thought about the girls who showed up and left the monastery. “I just don’t understand,” Eve confessed.

“Well, most people don’t,” Daniel explained. “But once you get in a relationship like that, it’s really hard to get out. It’s like the women get stuck or their brains freeze. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve seen more women stay with the guys who beat them up than I’ve seen leave.” He paused, seemed to be thinking. “Sometimes if there are children or somebody else gets beat up, they’ll find what it takes to leave, but even then . . .” His voice trailed off.

Eve thought about the women who arrived at Our Lady of Guadalupe in the middle of the night. The calls she had received from somebody at the front gate, the women standing there, begging to be let in, claiming that they were running from a husband or a boyfriend that everyone at the convent hoped hadn’t followed them to Pecos.

Since she had been in community there, she had probably opened that gate after midnight a hundred times, sometimes even to the same women over and over. She had tried talking them into going to a shelter or getting them a bus ticket to go somewhere to be with family, but most of them would nurse their wounds for a day or two, and then, before one of the sisters or monks could meet with them to discuss their options and make a plan of action, they would leave. Secretly, during a worship time or when most everyone was sleeping, they’d sneak away without any of the help they needed. They would exit in the dark of night in the very same way they had arrived.

Eve thought about one girl, Trina, who came to the religious community at least three times one year, each time more bruised, each time requiring more care, the abuse growing more and more severe. Several of the sisters and even Brother Oliver had tried to talk her out of going back to her abusive boyfriend, promised her a place to stay, help in finding work, money, anything to keep her away from the man who beat her. But Trina would always go back. Finally, Sister Mary Edith had discovered Trina’s name in the obituaries. She had taken her last beating. She had been killed.

“Wait a minute.” Eve spoke up, trying to shake the memory of Trina from her thoughts.

Daniel quickly turned in her direction.

“You don’t think Robbie beats Dorisanne, do you?”

Daniel glanced back at the road and didn’t respond right away. Eve could see that he was driving slowly and carefully back to the center of town.

She waited, hoping for some confirmation that her sister wasn’t another statistic, wasn’t in a domestic abuse situation, wasn’t like her neighbor Pauline and spending her evenings trying to cover up the wounds and scars. She closed her eyes and then felt Daniel’s hand on her shoulder. She looked up.

“I don’t think so,” he finally replied. “I’ve seen them together, and she doesn’t seem afraid of him. She doesn’t have that look in her eye that you usually see.” He pulled his hand away and shook his head. “The look that Pauline had when the guy from the back of the apartment yelled her name. You saw that, right?”

Eve nodded.

“But I’ll be honest,” he continued. “There’s really no profile for an abuser. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been surprised by the men I’ve brought in and even more surprised by their victims. So I can’t really say for sure,” he said. “But I don’t think he’s threatened her or hurt her. I don’t think he’s made her go with him. I just think he’s in money trouble again, and she’s taken off with Robbie for her own safety.”

Eve agreed. At least what Daniel was saying felt like some reassurance. And yet, even as she felt some comfort in Daniel’s opinion, when she thought about it, it didn’t really seem to matter at this point whether Dorisanne was in a physically abusive relationship with her husband or not. Because even if he didn’t beat her, it
certainly seemed as if he had brought her into something dangerous, some kind of unsafe situation; and whether he meant it to be this way or not, he had put his wife at risk. Eve didn’t know the details, but it appeared as if he was responsible for her quick departure from their home and her lack of contact with her neighbors or her family. She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.

For the first time since she’d actually begun to worry about her sister, Eve felt a sudden rush of anxiety, her hands starting to sweat. She wished it wasn’t so, but her intuitions had been correct: Something was terribly wrong with Dorisanne.

She reached up and removed the rosary from the rearview mirror and began reciting the familiar prayer: “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

TWENTY-THREE

They stopped at a diner on the edge of the Strip, a place Daniel knew and liked. They ordered their meals and sat in silence. Eve was at a loss. She realized she didn’t know anything about Dorisanne’s life in Las Vegas, and without any knowledge of Dorisanne’s friends or hangouts, she had no suggestions as to where they might search for her sister. At least Daniel knew where she lived and how to get to her place of work, but it was feeling like they were quickly coming to a dead end.

“We can go to the Rio when we’re finished eating,” Daniel said. He seemed to read Eve’s thoughts. “Or I can drop you off at the hotel if you don’t want to go,” he added. “It’s late. I don’t mind going by myself.”

“No, I’d like to go,” she responded. She shook her head. “But I doubt anybody there has anything new to add to the fact that she’s been gone a week. The guys I talked to on the phone didn’t seem to know much more about where she might be.” She stirred some sugar into the cup of coffee the waitress brought. She took a sip.

“She might have called,” Daniel suggested. “She might have called her boss again to tell him exactly when she’d be back. You never know.”

Eve could tell that he was trying to sound encouraging, and she smiled at her friend. “You’re right,” she agreed. “We don’t know until we ask.”

Eve watched as a few more customers entered the restaurant. A young woman wearing a warm-up suit came in by herself, but with lots of makeup and her hair teased and sprayed, it didn’t appear as if she had just come from the gym. Eve assumed she was either going to or coming from work at a casino or bar. She sat alone on a stool at the end of the counter, ordered something from the waitress as they chatted like old friends, and then she pulled out her phone and appeared to make a call.

Eve glanced away.

“I feel awful that I don’t know where Dorisanne could be,” she confessed. “I don’t know her friends. I don’t know her daily routine, whom she trusted, or where she went for dinner.” She looked back over at the woman sitting alone. “Now that we’ve gotten to this place where she’s lived for more than a decade, I realize I know nothing about her life.” She shook her head and glanced out the window. The streets and sidewalks were full of cars and people. “I’ve never visited her here, not once.”

“You’ve sort of been busy,” Daniel commented.

Eve turned to him. “I should have come to see her place,” she said. “She tried to get me to come out here, and I always found a reason not to come.”

“You’re here now,” Daniel said.

“It’s a little late.”

He shrugged. “I’d say it’s the most important time.”

“I don’t know anything about what she does, where she might be.”

“There’s no need to beat yourself up about that,” Daniel responded. “Most adults don’t know much about the lives of their siblings. I mean, unless you live in the same town. And even then, sisters don’t always know all the details of each other’s lives. That’s the way it is for most people.” He reached for the sugar and poured two packs into his glass of iced tea. He stirred it and took a long swallow.

“You still close to Thomas?” she asked, remembering that Daniel had a younger brother living in Texas. She had met him on several occasions when he came to visit.