Murder Plays House (6 page)

My attempts to balance work and home kind of went downhill from there. Thus I found myself, six years later, working only a few hours a week, and paying more in late fines to my son’s preschool than the monthly tuition—they billed me ten bucks for every ten minutes I was late to pick the little guy up. Extortion, if you ask me.

Peter succumbed to the children’s entreaties and agreed to drive them to school. Actually, I think what got him out of the house wasn’t really a burst of paternal devotion, but rather the realization that it was Wednesday, and if he ran the morning carpool he could make it to Golden Apple as soon as it opened and be the first uber-geek in line to buy the brand new Promethea and Top Ten.

I took a more languid shower than usual—three minutes rather than thirty seconds—and called Al while I was getting dressed.

“So?” I said my voice slightly muffled by the oversized T-shirt I was pulling over my head.

“So what?” he answered.

“So did you see the body?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Typical sex crime. At least that’s what it looks like now.”

I shivered. “And what’s going on with the rats?”

He sighed.

“Are they still there?”

“Yup.”

“And?”

“And now it seems some of them are dead. At least it smells that way. We don’t know where they are, though. Maybe under the floor, or in the walls.”

I gagged, which made putting on lipstick something of a challenge. “No way I’m showing up, Al.”

“So what else is new?”

I felt a flash of defensive indignation, but the truth was, he was right. The days I actually made it in to work were dramatically outnumbered by the days I didn’t. Still, it wasn’t like I took any money out of his pocket. I billed the clients for the hours I worked. The very few hours I worked.

“Anyway, what have we got on today?”

Al sighed. “Barely more than nothing. Just that witness investigation out of Texas. The referral from that friend of yours from law school. I tracked down the address of the witness. He’s up by you. In Inglewood.”

One of my best friends from law school, Sandra Babcock, had become the terror of the Texas bar. She was an aggressive and talented defense lawyer, operating out of Houston. That made her something of an anomaly in a state where it often seems like most indigent defendants are represented by attorneys whose sole qualification for a career in criminal defense is their ability to catch a nap at counsel table. The appellate court for the Fifth District, perhaps because it understood that it would otherwise force two thirds of local counsel out of business, actually ruled that sleeping through trial does not qualify as ineffective assistance of counsel, a decision which has been a real boon for the hung over and narcoleptic members of the Texas bar, and something of an aggravation for Sandra, whose pro bono clients outnumber her paying ones three or four to one.

She had called a week before, asking for help on a case. One of her clients, a young woman, had been fingered by a
DEA informant who claimed to have passed her three kilos of cocaine for processing into crack. The defendant, a twenty-one-year-old college student, had insisted that she was in Los Angeles visiting family at the time the deal was supposed to have gone down. Sandra had called and asked us to track down the family members with whom she was staying and get witness statements from them. She was hoping that the statements would help in her motion to dismiss the charges. Meanwhile, because it was Texas, the poor kid was rotting in jail, bail not being something the judge felt obligated to provide to an African-American in a drug case, no matter how patently false the charges.

“Why don’t I do it?” I said. “There’s no reason for you to schlep all the way up here, and, anyway, who knows when or if we’ll get paid for this case.” Sandra would bill the government for our time, but if she were to receive reimbursement at all, it wouldn’t be for a good long while.

“Okay,” Al said. “You’re better at chatting up regular folk, anyway.” That certainly is true. There’s no one like Al for getting the lowlifes to spill their guts, but somehow his skills often fail him when confronted with decent, law-abiding citizens. I think the truth is that after twenty-five years on the force, Al just has a hard time believing that there’s any such thing as an honest person. My years as a public defender certainly infected me with this cynicism, and it has been more than validated by my experiences sticking my nose into private investigations. I’ve seen some pretty straight-seeming people do some pretty awful things. Still, unlike my partner, my belief in the fundamental integrity of at least some members of the human race has not gasped its final breath. Who knows how long that will last?

Inglewood is one those strange Los Angeles neighborhoods whose benign, even charming, appearance belies its
frightening crime statistics. Little cottages flanked by palm trees and jacaranda bushes nestle on small squares of lawn. There are bicycles leaning against porch steps, and kids playing hopscotch and basketball on the sidewalks. It’s only at second glance that you notice the metal bars on the windows and doors, and realize that there are few if any older people sitting out on their porches, even in the warmth of a Los Angeles winter morning. They are bolted and barred in their houses, too afraid of flying bullets and warring children to risk the sun-dappled streets. The young people are out, congregating on the corners, leaning against the broken streetlights and staring at the passing cars with eyes vacant of any expression other than vague menace.

In my years at the public defender’s office I’d represented many boys like these. And they
were
boys, still in their teens, although they had lived through enough violence and fear for men twice their ages. It had taken me many hours to get through to these young men, to convince them that I, a white woman from a background so dissimilar to their own that it might have been another country, another era, another world, would represent them not just honestly, but passionately. I’m ashamed to say that many of them never believed me. The ones to whom I got through weren’t necessarily those who ended up being acquitted. Like most public defenders, I had relatively few of those—my clients were pretty much always guilty of the bank robberies and drug deals with which they’d been charged. Every so often, however, I made one of them understand that I cared about him, that I knew that underneath the tough hoodlum he presented to the world was a young boy with the same fears and dreams as any other boy, from any other neighborhood, including my own. Those guys stayed in touch with me, writing me long letters from prison, occasionally bragging
of their successes in getting their GEDs, or maintaining contact with their girlfriends and children. Many if not most of them ended up back in prison after their releases, but every once in a while there was one who turned his life around. I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe I was the cause of the transformation, but I knew it didn’t hurt that somewhere in the system he had met someone who took the time to care about him.

I pulled up in front of a small pink house set back from the street. The owners had given up the fight against crab grass and LA drought, and had ripped up their lawn, laid down cement, and painted the whole thing an almost ironic shade of grass green. They’d done their best with window boxes of nasturtiums and geraniums, and there were a few bright blooms poking out from behind the wrought-iron bars covering the windows. An ancient and impeccably maintained Lincoln Continental hunkered down in the driveway, its fins casting sharp shadows across the flat, emerald pseudo-lawn.

I pulled into the driveway behind the Lincoln, careful not to get too close to the highly polished rear bumper. I flipped down my mirror, applied some modest, girly pink lipstick, and buttoned my white cardigan up to the neck. Different witnesses respond to different things, and I’m always careful to look the part—whatever that might be. Given the tidy house, window boxes, and thirty year old car, I was betting that the house contained an elderly couple who would be most likely to confide in a nicely but unassumingly turned out matron. And I was right.

The door was answered by a woman in her late seventies, wearing a flowered dress and a cotton sweater that was the twin of my own. Her sparse white hair was arranged carefully on her head, not quite concealing the mahogany sheen of her
scalp, and she had an ironed pink handkerchief tucked into her sleeve. The only affront to the impeccably maintained order of her person was the puffy, veined ankles protruding from a pair of pale blue terrycloth slippers. She had crushed down the backs of the slippers, and her heels hung, cracked and swollen, over the edges. I wriggled my toes as best I could in my too-tight Joan and David navy blue pumps. At this stage of my pregnancy, my feet looked more like those of this old woman than I cared to contemplate.

“Hello,” I said, extending my hand. “My name is Juliet Applebaum, and I work for your niece, Lara.”

The woman shook my hand firmly and moved aside to let me in. “Yvette Kennedy. Very pleased to make your acquaintance. My sister told me that someone might be coming to talk about her poor child. You come on in.”

She led me into the front room, a small neat parlor with carpeting the precise color of the cement lawn. I perched on the edge of a pale pink sofa, marveling at how long it had been since I’d felt the sticky tug of clear vinyl slip-covers beneath my thighs. The only seat in the tidy room not thus protected was a taupe Barcalounger whose cracked pleather seemed not to warrant defense against assault by the human behind. Or, perhaps, it was simply that the recliner had never been empty long enough to allow it to be wrapped in protective sheeting. The old man ensconced in its depths appeared to have been there for the last two or three decades.

“Mr. Kennedy,” the old woman said, gently, waking the man from his slumber. He startled, and wiped the corner of his mouth with one large hand. His fingers were smooth and bloated, twisted with age and arthritis. Nothing could hide, however, the massive expanse of palm, and it was clear that this had once, a long, long time ago, been a very powerful man. “We have a visitor.”

He looked at me, and then at his wife. “Mrs. Kennedy?” he asked. His voice was deep and hoarse, but time and sleep had rendered it more of a purr than a growl.

“It’s about Etta Jean’s girl. You know.”

He grunted and pushed a bar on the side of his chair. The leg rest swung down, and the back moved upright. He put his hands on his knees and turned his attention to me. He rubbed his gnarled fist across his cinnamon-colored cheek and said, “A gross miscarriage of justice, is what that is.”

“I agree, sir,” I said.

“I marched with Dr. King in Selma,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d have told me then that forty years later we’d be looking at this kind of thing, I would have gone on home. Not bothered missing a day’s work.”

“Now you just stop, Mr. Kennedy,” his wife interrupted. “One has nothing to do with the other.”

He sighed loudly, and shook his head.

“Mr. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy,” I said. “Your niece Lara claims she was here visiting you in August of this year. Is that true?”

“It surely is,” the old woman says.

“Are you positive about the date?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” her husband replied.

“Really?” I asked. Most people don’t remember dates and times with quite this certitude.

The woman nodded, her stiff hair bobbing with the vigorous motion of her head. “There’s no mistaking it. Mr. Kennedy is a deacon at our church, First African Methodist, over on Thirty-Seventh Avenue. Lara was with us during the summer baptisms. She came to the Lord, she did. Blessed be his name.”

“Amen,” her husband said, so loudly it made me jump.

This was about as good as I could ever have hoped. Better even. Nothing like a baptism for an alibi to turn a case around.

“Would you like to see the photographs?” Mrs. Kennedy asked.

I nodded, and to my delight soon found myself leafing through an envelope of pictures clearly stamped with the date and time. There was a series of photos of white-clad young people being dipped backwards into something that looked a lot like the birthing tubs I’d seen advertised for rent in the back of
Mothering Magazine.
Maybe those tubs doubled as baptismal fonts when they weren’t being used by natural-minded home-birthers.

“That’s Etta Jean’s girl, right there,” Mrs. Kennedy said, pointing a finger at a rail-thin girl whose robes hung loosely on her gaunt frame.

My complacent glee at the sureness of an acquittal ebbed. Lara had the telltale, hollow-cheeked, brittle-haired look of a crack addict. Her aunt must have noticed my dismay, because she clicked her tongue.

“She looks bad in this picture, I know,” she said.

I didn’t deny it.

“By the end of her time with us, she was much improved. Much. Isn’t that so, Mr. Kennedy?”

Her husband nodded vigorously. “Indeed. That is the truth. She got off that plane, I didn’t think she’d be able to walk to the car. Honestly I didn’t. But she got back on it a few months later with a spring in her step. Yes she did.”

“Was she . . .” I paused, not wanted to insult this sweet older couple. But there was no getting around it, Sandra had hired me to do a job, and do it I must. “Was she using drugs, do you think?”

“No! Of course not,” Mrs. Kennedy said sharply.

“Now Mrs. Kennedy, you calm down,” her husband said. “You can see why she would ask. Of course you can.” He turned to me. “It wasn’t the drugs got that girl. She was making her own self sick, no help from any drugs.”

“What do you mean?”

“My sister sent her to us because Lara had been making herself ill,” her aunt interrupted. “She’d put her finger down her throat, to make herself vomit.”

“She was bulimic?” I asked.

“Yes, she was,” Mr. Kennedy said. “And that Etta Jean was at the end of her rope. Never could control the girl. You know that’s true,” he admonished his wife, who had opened her mouth to object. “Never could do a thing with her. Well, we took that girl in, brought her to the Lord, and she kept her food down fine. Yes, she did.”