It's Not a Pretty Sight (14 page)

“For how long? When did she start?”

Singer thought about it. “I’d say I took her on around the first of the year. In January. If you need the exact date, I can look it up for you …”

Gunner shook his head. He had his notebook out again, and made a brief entry in it before asking, “Can you give me a rough idea of what her duties were? Was it secretarial work, or …”

“It was mostly secretarial work, yes. Some dictation, some file keeping. Things like that. But she had to do some work in the field, too.”

“In the field?”

“Yes. Very often, Mr. Gunner, the women who need our help here at Sisterhood House can’t come to us directly, for a variety of reasons. So we try to come to them. To their homes, their places of employment … wherever they suggest. That’s working in the field.”

“I see.”

“Nina didn’t do very much of that on her own. Mostly she just went along with me, when I thought it might be wise to go with someone. But there were occasions when she went by herself. Not many, but a few.”

“Anything memorable about any of them? Any ugly confrontations with a husband or boyfriend, something like that?”

“I imagine she had a few of those, certainly. We all do, sooner or later. Coming to the rescue of battered women can be a dangerous business, Mr. Gunner. Especially if you’re alone.”

“But nothing specific comes to mind?”

“Involving Nina? No.” Singer shook her head. “Nothing I can recall at this moment, anyway.”

“Would Nina have told you if something like that had happened to her, do you think? Or might she have just kept it to herself?”

“That’s hard to say. If it shook her up badly enough, she would have mentioned it to me, I’m sure. But if not … she might not have said a word. Because she didn’t like to appear incapable of handling the job, you see. She was always worried I’d decide it was too much for her and let her go.”

“What about her friends? Would she have told her friends, if she didn’t feel comfortable telling you?”

“You mean, her friends here at Sisterhood?”

“Yes.”

“Again, that’s hard for me to say. You’d have to ask her friends.”

“And her friends here were …?”

“Well, Nina had quite a few friends here, of course. She got along well with everybody. But if you’re talking about who she was particularly close to, I’d have to say only two people come to mind: Shirley Causwell and Angela Glass. Of all the women she knew here, I’d say she spent the most time with them.”

Gunner put Causwell’s name down in his book, wondering two things at once: why Mimi Hillman hadn’t mentioned Causwell earlier, and why Singer wasn’t mentioning someone else right now.

“What about Trini Serrano?” he asked.

“Trini? What about her?”

It seemed to Gunner that she had stiffened, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Mimi says she and Nina were friends as well.”

“Oh. Well. I suppose they were, yes.” She started playing absently with a pencil on her desk. “But when you asked me about Nina’s friends … I assumed you were talking about her friends among the
residents
here. And Trim’s not a resident, she’s just a frequent guest of ours. Or was, up until recently.”

“By ‘guest,’ what do you mean?”

“Well, she’s a photographer. A photojournalist, actually. She specializes in documentary photographs of abuse victims and their abusers, she’s made an entire career out of it. Perhaps you’ve seen her work in
Time
magazine, or
Life.
”

Gunner shrugged, unable to say whether he had or not.

“She’s also a major activist for the cause. She’s published several books on the subject, and is widely known on the lecture circuit. She’s welcomed in homes like ours all over the country, but as she lives right here in Los Angeles, she’s been spending the majority of her time here with us.”

“But she doesn’t stay here anymore. Is that what I heard you say?”

“That’s correct. We won’t be seeing Trini here anymore.”

“And why is that?”

She glanced at the pencil her hands were still fiddling with, then looked up again. “I don’t really know. She just decided to stop coming by.”

“She what?”

“She just stopped coming by. I suspect she just became too busy to come anymore, that’s all. It was surprising she was able to make time for us as long as she did, really.”

There was nothing wrong with what she was saying—or how she was saying it—but Gunner didn’t believe her. He didn’t know why. He just had the sense that nothing would make her happier than to see him check these questions about Trini off in his little notebook and never ask them again.

He didn’t oblige her.

“How long has it been since she stopped coming around?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“When was her last visit here? Last week, last month …”

“Oh. We last saw her about two weeks ago, maybe. Give or take a day or two.”

“And Nina went home when?”

“Nina? Nina went home last month some time. Around the eighteenth or nineteenth, something like that. Why—”

“I was wondering if there was any connection. Between the time Nina went home, and the time Trini lost interest in coming by the house here.”

Singer paused before answering, as if she’d been dreading the question. “Why should there be a connection?”

The black man shrugged innocently. “No reason. I was just wondering.” He kept his eyes on her a while, then said, “If Trini stopped coming by about two weeks ago, and Nina went back home around the eighteenth of February …”

“Yes?”

“Then there would have been about a week in between the two events. Correct?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“That just a coincidence, you think?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what else it could have been. The two things were totally unrelated.”

“Trini had no objection to Nina’s going home? She wasn’t disappointed or upset by it in any way?”

“Any more than any of the rest of us were, you mean? No. She wasn’t.”

“You
were unhappy to see Nina leave?”

“Me? Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“Do you mind if I ask why?”

“Because I thought her timing was bad. We all did. Nina had just served her husband with papers two weeks before, and here she was going back home where he could reach her, before he’d had any real time to cool off. It was suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“That’s right. It was suicide. She should have stayed with us here another week, at least, and I told her thats. But …”

“But she left anyway.”

“She wasn’t afraid of Michael anymore, she said. She’d learned so much here, become so much stronger …” She shook her head wistfully at the sheer depth of the dead woman’s foolishness. “There was just no talking her out of it. She’d made lip her mind she was going home, and she went. She had that right.”

“You sound more than a little angry at her,” Gunner said.

Singer eyed him evenly, determined not to rush her reply. “Working here is not all that different from working in a drug rehabilitation center, Mr. Gunner. The disappointments, the heartbreak are the same. You take a wounded, addictive human being under your wing and nurse her back to health. You educate, encourage, and empower her, until her self-esteem is once more intact. And then you send her back out into the world and watch her destroy herself all over again. In the exact same manner. Just like
that.
” She snapped her fingers. “Like she’s on a string he just has to pull …” She nodded her head. “Yes, it makes me angry. It makes me very angry, sometimes. I wouldn’t be human if it didn’t.”

She looked off to her left at the clock on the wall, being careful to make sure Gunner noticed the gesture. Either tired of answering questions, or afraid of the direction they were taking.

“Tell me about Nina’s enemies,” Gunner said, refusing to take the hint.

“Her enemies?”

“Is that too strong a word, ‘enemies’? Okay, how about ‘people she didn’t get along with’? There must have been a few of those.”

“Here? I’m afraid not. Nina had
words
with some people from time to time, certainly. She had words with me, on occasion. But—”

“What kind of words? Words about politics, religion, racen …? What?”

The look on Singer’s face told him he’d just hit on something else she had hoped would not enter into their discussion.

“You and she had words about
race.
Is that it?”

“Not Nina and I, no. But …” Singer was having difficulty making her mouth move. “There was a woman here who used to … use a certain word that Nina didn’t care for. And she and Nina would get into it about it every now and then.”

“A word for black people.”

“Yes.”

Gunner didn’t ask her which word it was; he had seen Nina go ballistic at the mere utterance of the word “nigger” too many times to ever forget the effect it had on her.

“Who was this woman?” he asked Singer instead.

“She’s not here anymore. She left in late January.”

“What was her name?”

“Agnes. Agnes Felker.”

“If I wanted to talk to Ms. Felker, would you know where I could find her?”

“I suppose so. Her address is in our files. But why would you want to talk to her?”

“Because it sounds like it would be stupid of me not to. Not all bigots are murderers, of course, but—”

“Bigots? Agnes wasn’t a bigot,” Singer said.

“No?”

“No. She couldn’t have been. Agnes is a black woman herself, Mr. Gunner. If using that word she’s so fond of makes her a bigot, she’s the strangest one I’ve ever seen.”

Now Gunner was the one who couldn’t get his mouth to move.

“All the same,” he said finally, “I’d better have a talk with her. Just to see how deep her problems with Nina really ran.”

Singer shrugged. “Of course. I’ll give Ginger instructions to provide you with whatever information you need.” She glanced up at the clock again. “Will there be anything else, Mr. Gunner? Or—”

She was interrupted by a loud, baleful cry, the latest and most insistent of several she and Gunner had been trying to talk over for some time now. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere just outside the building’s perimeter.

“What in heaven’s name …?” Singer said.

“It sounds like somebody calling out for someone named Sidney,” Gunner said.

Recognition lit up Singer’s face. “Oh, no.
No
!”

The next thing Gunner knew, he was sitting in her office all alone.

“Don’t come any closer,” Leo Cagle said.

He was on the outside of the fence, and Gunner was on the inside, but Gunner did as he was told, anyway. The gun in Cagle’s left hand had a lot to do with that.

“Is she coming out?” the baby-faced white man asked, tears streaming down the rosy red flesh of both cheeks.

“She” was Sydney Cagle, Leo’s wife. And the answer was no, she wasn’t coming out. She didn’t care how loudly he screamed her name, or threatened to commit suicide out there on the sidewalk for all the world to see; she and Leo were through, and she had no intention of leaving the building to talk to him. Which was fine by Wendy Singer. Leo had a gun, and Singer felt that men with guns were best disarmed by officers of the law, not the men’s ex-wives. Even when they were relative teddy bears like Leo Cagle. She wanted to call the police.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gunner had said.

The downside to calling the cops, he told Singer and Leo’s disaffected, pleasingly plump ex-wife Sydney, was that the very sight of a black-and-white
could
set him off. If somebody else had a talk with him first, maybe he’d lose interest and just go away, without hurting himself or anyone else. It was worth a try, wasn’t it?

Singer thanked him for volunteering his services and walked him to the door. Sydney didn’t even get up out of her chair.

So here Gunner was now, standing less than ten feet away from the distraught Mr. Cagle, trying to determine how serious the white man was about doing himself harm. And how he would take the news that his ex didn’t care if he blew his brains out or not, she just wanted to be left alone. Forever.

“She’s afraid to come out,” Gunner said, starting things off right with a lie. “It’s the gun. She said if you gave it to
me
—”

“I’m not going to hurt her! The gun’s for me, not her!
Sydney
!”

“Come on, Leo. Take it easy. Let’s talk about this for a moment …”

Cagle put the nose of the revolver to his head, shaking like a leaf. Gunner had seen his kind before. The fool who’d just learned the hard way that a woman never says good-bye until she’s already gone. “That’s what I’m
trying
to do, talk,” Cagle said. “But not with you. I didn’t come here to talk to
you.
I came here to talk to Sydney!”

“I understand that, but—”

“Who the hell are you, anyway? Security?”

“No, I’m—”

The white man was suddenly sobbing, both eyes squeezed tightly shut. “You do everything right. Everything they ask you to do. And it’s still not enough …”

He was starting to get some attention on the street. That was bad. Too many onlookers around could make him panic, push him straight over the edge.

Gunner didn’t know what to say to the man.

“I don’t understand,” Cagle said, opening his eyes again. His gun was still pressed against his left temple, though he didn’t seem to notice.

“Nobody understands, Leo,” Gunner said. He really felt sorry for the poor bastard.

“I haven’t put a hand on her for four years. Four years! But she won’t forgive me. No matter how I try to make it up to her. No matter what I do to change …” His voice trailed off. “It’s just never enough.”

Gunner took a couple of steps toward him.

“Being a good man’s supposed to count for something, isn’t it? Isn’t being a good man supposed to
count
for something?”

And just like that, he was angry now, glowering and spitting like a man possessed. Gunner could see that the hammer on his revolver was cocked to fire.

“Give me the gun, Leo,” the black man said, thinking how easy it would have been to just let the cops handle this, if he hadn’t had such a big mouth.

“You bust your ass to become what they want! You make every single sacrifice!”