The Long Good Boy (26 page)

“I went inside to see if you was there,” Chi Chi said, blowing smoke at me as usual. “I mean, when I got back from my pee, I saw the car. So I thought you might need me to keep Vinnie busy.”

“Very thoughtful of you,” I told her. “So what's the deal, he just stop by to pick up a side of pork for the holiday, a little change of pace from eating fowl?”

Had Mulrooney found the stash? Of course he had, proving once again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I wondered if he'd found it that day, the day he'd died, if he'd been down with the underground refrigeration, down with the rats, when another rat caught him, a bigger rat, coming down the ladder before he had the chance to get back upstairs.

I'd thought Vinnie had something to do with the shooter. Was I wrong? Had it been Vinnie after all? But if it had, why was he still there? Why wasn't he in jail?

There could be only one reason. I thought about all those notes I'd read in Keller's files. The hookers were not the only ones adept at rewriting history, making up whatever bullshit seemed to serve their needs at the moment.

Suddenly the cold I'd felt crawling around the old refrigerator system, picking my way through a nest of rats, was gone. I felt myself heat up. I began to sweat.

“Guess we don't need you on the job anymore,” Chi Chi said, both of us being sarcastic now, both of us scared out of our minds, me more than ever now that I knew what I was into. “I guess the po-lice will be putting their best men on this any minute now, solving the crime in no time flat.” She leaned toward me, her breath a medley of alcohol, tobacco, and something with an almost feral odor. She took a step back and nearly fell off her shoes, tapping at her near-white hair when she'd steadied herself.

“Yeah. Fine. Let's get out of here now, okay?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

We walked back to the corner, moving around to keep warm.

“What are you doing here tonight, Chi Chi? It's so dangerous. I thought I told you—”

She hiked that broad shoulder again. “You don't tell me what to do. Devon, he tell me what to do. 'Sides, it's always dangerous.”

“No. Well, yes. But not like now.”

She lifted the end of the boa, as if she'd just noticed it.

“This Rosalinda's?”

“Yeah.”

“How'd you get the blood off of it?”

“I washed it.”

“No shit.” News to her, you could wash something dirty and get it clean.

“No shit.”

“What you wearing it for?”

“Luck,” I told her.

“The kind of luck that thing's been bringing, you don't want even a little piece of that.”

“That aside, Chi Chi, you have to go home. It's no good being out here now. It's too hot.”

“I gots to—”

“No. You don't. You can't. It's—”

And there was LaDonna, crossing the street, tall and slender and ever so ladylike in pink. Should be Prima Donna.

Had Frances been lying to me? Or herself?

“Okay,” I said, “I have to talk to LaDonna. How about you go to Florent, wait for us there. Get yourself a steak or something.” I pulled a twenty out of my pocket and held it out to her.

“Steak's not what I need,” she said. “What I need, they don't have none of at Florent.”

Had he given her cash this time? Or had he stiffed her altogether?

A car pulled up, stopping first in the middle of the street to check out LaDonna, have some polite conversation with her about fees, then when that didn't work out for one reason or another, pulling over to the curb right in front of us. Without so much as a wave good-bye, Chi Chi opened the door and jumped in. She and the john seemed to be arguing for a minute. He pointed at me. Chi Chi shook her head. Then she leaned toward him, whispering in his ear, and the car took off, revealing LaDonna. She stepped carefully up onto the curb, not wanting to slip on a hunk of fat or a greasy bone and take a fall.

“Time to have a little talk,” I said, stuffing the twenty back into my pocket.

She pulled a pack of Camels, offered me one, and when I declined, tapped hers and placed it between her lips, dead center, pouting around it. I watched her pull out one of those colorful, disposable lighters, fire up her smoke, inhale, blow two rings off to my right, a lady with nothing but time.

“Sure, hon. What kind of talk you got in mind?” she asked, not looking at me, gazing toward Fourteenth Street, hoping for traffic.

The wind blew by us, making a funny sound, whistling in the dark. Something rustled in one of the cans of bones left out the morning before and not yet picked up. I wrapped the boa once more around my neck, which turned out to be as effective as trying to keep warm by wearing an extra Band-Aid or nail polish.

“I was at your mom's house today,” I said.

“Aren't we the little detective.”

“We are.”

“And with no foreplay, Rachel? You're acting like them now?” She hooked a thumb toward Fourteenth Street. “You just go right for the crotch, don't leave a girl no pride at all.”

“I'm tired of the games. Your games almost got me killed.”

“Well, almost don't count. Ask Jasmine.”

“I can't. I can't ask her anything at all. Besides, I'm not sure she could have told me anything. I think you're the one I should have been speaking to.”

“Shoot.” Turning over one large hand, the palm pale except for the dark lines that crisscrossed it, that curved around her big thumb, almost touching her wrist. She wore a bracelet of beads in various shades of pink, one as dark as her nail lacquer, the others in lighter shades, one clear, one white, for contrast.

“Frances says you work at Saks. She says you're a buyer. Cosmetics. She says you couldn't make Thanksgiving dinner because you're in Paris, on a buying trip.”

“She's a lousy cook,” she said. “The turkey's always dry. The yams are too sweet. And she drinks too goddamn much.”

“Like your dad?”

“Where'd you get that?”

“I'm the little detective, aren't I?”

“The mistaken little detective. It wasn't like that at all.”

“Okay. He was sober as a—”

“My mom's okay. Just weak.”

“She couldn't stand up to your dad?”

LaDonna inhaled, blew smoke out of her nose, looked down at me and my theories.

“When he threw you out?”

LaDonna laughed. “What do you think you know, little detective?” She put a big hand on each pink cheek and talked in a falsetto voice. “The beatings started when he caught me in her bra once. They continued, getting worse, after he found me walking around in her shoes or playing with the Barbie doll I kept hidden under my mattress. The slimmest excuse to smack it out of me was enough for him. He was eclectic about his instruments of torture, too. A broom. The truck he gave me that I decorated with nail-polish flowers. Pink ones. A frying pan. Still hot. Frances cleaned up the grease without saying a word. I understood what ‘enabling' was long before I ever heard the word. Is that it? Is that what you think happened, that it was a classic case of rejection and abuse? Well, think again, little one. It wasn't like that at all.”

“What was it like?”

“Where's your head, asking me that? Don't you know what goes on in the world, you live in a cocoon or something?”

“I was hoping—”

“Yeah. We're all hoping. Look around you, woman. Every single person out here is hoping.”

“What?”

“That our parents would accept us as we are. Did yours?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again when I realized it was a rhetorical question, my sister's favorite kind because it allowed her monologue to continue uninterrupted.

“He was a law-abiding man, a good man, except he couldn't find it in his heart to …” LaDonna looked away and sighed. “Most of the time,” whispering now, “he made believe I wasn't there. I would rather he had hit me. Maybe I even took Barbie into the living room just so I could get something from my old man. Something's always better than nothing.”

She inhaled on the cigarette and blew the smoke off to the side again.

“And this job, LaDonna—why was I hired?”

LaDonna looked up at the nearly black sky. A car came around the corner from a few blocks away but stopped at Thirteenth Street. I heard the door open and close, the car coming closer, passing where we stood. I saw a tear streaking its way through the pancake makeup on LaDonna's left cheek, making a small black trail of mascara as it moved slowly toward her chin.

“Look. He was still my dad. Even that last day.”

“What happened then?”

“He held his gun to my head. He said if he ever saw me in a dress again, his face would be the last thing I'd ever see. No—that's not what he said. We're talking now, right?”

I nodded.

“There was no gun. He was holding my hand and crying. He said I could change if I wanted to.” She wiped under one eye with her pointer. “Well, honey, don't you know. I'm saving up for just that very thing.” Loud.

She pitched her cigarette into the street and lit another.

“He said if I wouldn't, not couldn't, wouldn't be a man, I should get the hell out and never come back because if I did, he'd shoot me dead. He meant it, too. When my dad wrapped his mind around something, he was like a pit bull.” She turned to Dash. “No offense.”

“But you still wanted to know who did him?”

She nodded. “Maybe he didn't do any of those things, Rachel. Maybe I'm just another lying junkie. Maybe I just left, that's all.”

“And now you need to know who took away your chance that someday—”

“Wouldn't have happened. Not him.”

“One can hope.”

“I'm beyond all that.”

“No. You're not. You wouldn't have put up big bucks to hire me if you'd been reconciled to the fact that—”

“I wanted to know who did Rosalinda. Can't you understand that?”

“Hookers die. It's dangerous work. One got killed just last week, outside Grand Central Station. It happens.”

“Doesn't mean you don't want justice.”

I waited.

LaDonna stared.

“Whatever happened between us, that doesn't mean I forgot what he did for me, how he saved my life, took me in, fought to keep me. Lots of parents, lots of men, they can't adjust.” Eyes squeezed closed. “It makes them fucking insane.”

“Your mom?”

“She tells stories. It makes her feel better. About him, too, and what a big hero he was.”

I nodded.

“So you wanted to find out who killed Rosalinda?”

She nodded.

“And in the process, you hoped I'd find out who killed your father. In the process, there'd be justice for the man who saved your life.”

“Could be that was in the back of my mind.”

“Does Chi Chi know about him?”

She shook her head.

“And Jasmine? Did she?”

She shook her head again, a length of bronze hair coming loose, arcing down one side.

“But you knew then, before sending me in there, that this was police business, that it had to do with a murdered cop, and you didn't think to take me aside and—”

“I knew you'd find out. I heard you were good at what you do. I had faith in you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Look, Rachel, I was in no position to tell you. And if I had, then what? Would you still have taken the case, sent yourself poking into police business?” But then she wasn't looking at me anymore. She was looking behind me, her mouth open.

“Shit,” she said. “Shit.” A look of panic in her eyes.

I turned, but whatever we might have done, it was much too late. The car she hadn't noticed sooner had already stopped, the front doors sticking out sideways like elephant ears, the driver and the passenger already heading our way, fast, too fast, I thought, the bigger one heading for LaDonna. The short, mean-looking one, eyes as dark and dead as the creature who was now standing up on his haunches on top of the can of bones, came straight for me.

“What?” I asked. “Gay bashers?” Hoping they'd think twice with Dashiell here.

“Worse,” she said through her teeth. “Look at their fucking shoes, Rachel. Didn't you learn anything here?”

33

His Big Nose Was Right in My Face

“You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer any questions. Do you understand?”

“Cut that out. You're hurting my arm.”

“I'll take that as a yes. Anything you do say may be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand?”

“Sure, sure. Just take it easy, okay?”

For a moment, nothing happened. He was my height, but wide as a door, his hair shaved to within a quarter of an inch, his skin dark and oily, as if he were made of the grease beneath our feet. Eye to eye, neither of us saying a word, he looked me up and down slowly and carefully, reaching toward me, the look on his face making me try to pull back but his other hand, his thick fingers tight around my upper arm, preventing me from doing anything but stumbling on my red platform stilettos, my ankle turning over. He pulled the boa loose and ran his fingertips over my neck.

“Had it shaved?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your Adam's apple.”

“Look, Officer, I'm not really—”

“That's detective, sister.” The esses whistled through the space between his upper teeth, teeth as big and white as Chiclets. “I see you've started the treatment. Or are these as fake as the rest of you?” He slid his hand inside my skimpy leopard halter top and pinched one of my nipples, hard.

“Ooow. Are you out of your—”

This time I never saw his hand move. I only felt the shock as he hit me across the cheek, tasted the blood from biting my tongue, felt the incredible heat on one side of my face, as if he'd held a torch to it and set it on fire. For a moment, I saw two of him, the mouths moving, no sound coming out. Then I heard wild barking and the sound of the chain he'd attached to the signpost nearest his unmarked car with a set of handcuffs, then made me hook to Dashiell's collar. His eyes hard as granite, his gun drawn, telling me to chain him up or he'd take care of him, my choice. I'd opened Dashiell's collar, slipped it through one of the huge links, and buckled it back on. The detective had pulled me away after I'd done it, yanking me backward, Dashiell's eyes following me, full of confusion at first, then betrayal, not understanding how I could be the one who'd stopped him from doing his job, who'd made it so he couldn't hang on to his self-respect.