Death Never Sleeps

 

                         Chapter One

 

Detective James Timothy “Big Jim” Donegan leaned forward and peered into the wood chipper. His flashlight penetrated about three feet down the chute and stopped at the point where the victim’s thighs disappeared into the blades.

“Never was built to do a load like this,” the Parks & Rec guy muttered, shaking his head at the misuse of his equipment. A piece of masking tape with the inked name, “Woody,” was pasted to his hard-hat’s brim. “See, this is a model 900. She’s only supposed to be used for brush and branches and stuff like that. This lady,” Woody waved idly at the torso protruding from the hopper, “she would need at least a model 1200 to, you know . . . .” Woody shrugged and looked back at Big Jim.

“To completely grind her up?” Big Jim suggested. Woody gave him an uneasy nod.

“Yeah, well, you know, the right tool for the right job,” Woody muttered and stuck his head down into the chute. After a brief pause he frowned and turned back to Big Jim. “Boy, she’s stuck in there real good.”

“How hard is it going to be for us to get her out once the Coroner is finished?”

Woody tilted his head to one side then glanced over at his toolbox.

“I can try putting this guy in reverse. If that doesn’t work I’m gonna have to disconnect the belt.” Woody reached for the start button but Big Jim grabbed his wrist.

“The Coroner has to examine the body first. He’ll give you the go-ahead when he’s ready.”

Woody looked anxiously around. “Which one is him? I got a crew waiting on this guy.” Woody patted the chipper’s sheet metal side and elicited a dull thump.

“He’s on his way. Take a break and I’ll let you know when he gets here.”

Woody gave the protruding torso a final, nervous glance then wandered back to his truck.

Big Jim gazed past the milling uniforms and spectators stretched out behind the yellow tape. The sycamores at the edge of the park had begun to bud out with pale green shoots. The jacarandas were even farther along though it would be a couple of months before they gowned themselves with purple blossoms. A raven, scenting fresh meat, cawed at the cops from high in an old black oak.

Needing to find some distraction from the awful scene, Big Jim imagined flowers and flapping leaves and children at play, and smiled. Life was too short, he reminded himself, to abandon beauty, even on a day like this. Especially on a day like this.

“We’re going to need a crew to sift the remains.” Big Jim snapped back to the present and saw his partner pointing at the mound of chopped meat and bone in front of the chipper. “If the killer had any sense he sent her purse through the blades ahead of her.”

“What’s your take on this, Chris?” Big Jim asked.

Chris Hunter knew that the question was a test. Everything Big Jim did was intended to teach him something. Sometimes it was about being a cop. More often it was about life in general, a subject that Chris found perpetually confusing. Guns, forensics, computers, software, forms, reports, laws, rules — all of those things he could master without breaking a sweat. He was comfortable with rules and regulations. More than comfortable. The truth was that he required them for the world to make any sense to him. It was people who confused him. Why they did what they did was a mystery that Chris Hunter feared he would never solve.

He looked again at the body, the gray skin, the eyes so clouded that their color was almost gone.

“Prostitute,” Chris began, answering Big Jim’s question, “early to mid-twenties, former heroin addict, not speed, central or eastern European ancestry, possibly Romanian, maybe a little farther east. She’s been in the U.S. less than three years so I’d guess that she’s maybe twenty-two or so. Strangled to death before he put her into the machine.”

Big Jim cocked his head a little to one side and Chris realized that he had surprised his mentor.

“Run it down for me,” Big Jim ordered.

Chris couldn’t completely stop himself from giving Big Jim a brief smile.

“The marks on her throat and the petechial hemorrhaging say ‘strangulation’ loud and clear. A ligature of some kind. We’ll have to wait until the bruises fully develop to get a better idea of the size and type.

“The tracks on her arms say ‘smack’ but they’re three to six months old so it looks like she’d recently gotten herself clean. The teeth don’t show any signs of meth. The hair is auburn and her eyes were gray, so that pretty much rules out Hispanic. She’s got high cheekbones and facial dimensions that are typical of Slavic ancestry. She’s cut the tips out of her bra so her nipples show through her blouse so, again, hooker. When I looked in her mouth I saw Eastern-European dental work on one of the back molars. Most of the pimps around here keep their girls hooked so they’re easier to control but this one looks like she was in pretty decent shape so she hasn’t been in the trade for more than a year or two.”

“Why do you figure she was in her early twenties?”

“The eyes,” Chris said, glancing at the corpse. “The skin is still smooth and tight. The Life ages a woman real fast. By twenty-seven or eight they’re already developing crow’s feet and bags, which she doesn’t have.”

“What if she didn’t get into the business until she was in her mid-twenties and she’s been a working girl for only a couple of years?”

“No,” Chris said, shaking his head, “they won’t bring over anyone older than twenty or so. Fresh girls are the moneymakers. If you start with someone in their mid-twenties they’ve only got a year or two of good earning power left before the Life wears them out so much that they get sent down to second string. It’s like the NFL not wanting a quarterback over thirty-five.” Chris froze when he saw Big Jim’s frown. Had he said the wrong thing, again? Chris replayed it over in his head and tried to figure out where he had made his mistake. Did football teams hire quarterbacks who were over thirty-five? How old was Drew Breeze?

“Good job, Chris,” Big Jim said after a little pause and gave his partner an encouraging nod. Chris instantly smiled back, pleased that he had not let Big Jim down after all. “So, Chris, any idea who she worked for?”

“According to Vice, Johnny-Boy Watkins is running the girls from here down to just this side of The Beach.” Big Jim’s face clouded upon hearing Johnny-Boy’s name.

“She looks a little rich for Johnny-Boy and the word is that he gets most of his girls out of Thailand via the Philippines. I would figure Gregor Rostov for someone like her.”

“No, his girls mostly work out-call in Montclair, Ardenwood and High Oak. They usually don’t get this far south in The Valley.”

“She could have been grabbed up in High Oak and brought down here to be dumped,” Big Jim said, half-seriously, half to make Chris lay out the steps in his logic.

“She was strangled before he put her into the chipper and it rained two days ago. If he’d driven her over the lawn we would have seen tire tracks. That means he either carried her or she walked. If he was big enough to carry her then her weight added to his would have left impressions in the grass and there aren’t any, so she walked in and he killed her here.”

“He still could have grabbed her up in High Oak or maybe Hidden Valley and driven her down here, couldn’t he?”

Chris frowned, struggling to put his thoughts into words. “We’re a fifteen minute drive from High Oak. She’s been on the job for a couple of years and if she got into a John’s car up there and he tried to drive her all the way down here she would’ve been kicking and screaming most of the way.”

“Maybe she was.”

Chris shook his head. “Her nails weren’t broken and there’s no bruising on her wrists and no tape residue. She didn’t put up a fight and she wasn’t tied up. She met him here in the park. That means she was either freelancing or she was one of Johnny-Boy’s girls.” Chris looked at Big Jim expectantly.

“I can’t argue with that,” Big Jim said, giving Chris a little smile. “So, OK, what’s our next move?”

“We have the uniforms canvas the area, and after the Coroner finishes with the body we have a talk with Johnny-Boy Watkins.”

“Did you put some pictures of her on your phone?”

“First thing.”

“All right, we’ll interview Johnny-Boy after lunch. Otherwise he’ll piss me off so much it’ll ruin my appetite. . . . There’s the Coroner. Broken nails or no broken nails, make sure he bags her hands. I’ll tell Woody that we’re almost ready to get her out of that contraption.”

After one last glance at what used to be a young woman and now was only a drugged, brutalized, exploited and murdered corpse, Big Jim ambled toward the Parks’ Department truck and tried to think happier thoughts.

  

                             Chapter Two

 

 

The Department had switched from Crown Vics to Chevy Malibus and, as usual, Chris drove so that Big Jim could scan the sidewalks for gang-bangers, druggies, hookers, pimps, lookouts, dealers, parolees and other persons of interest, not so much to bust them as to keep up on who was doing what to whom.

“See that kid with the red hair?” Big Jim pointed to a beefy guy in his early twenties carrying a bag of groceries. Chris took his eyes off the traffic for a quick glance.

“Who’s he?”

“He used to boost cars for a bunch of crooks operating out of a warehouse near the Port. Now he’s the cook at Salciccio’s.”

“The bar on Western?”

“They serve food too. He’s studying to become a pastry chef. He makes one hell of an Alsatian apple pie.”

Chris didn’t know what to say. Big Jim was always coming up with stuff like that, oddball comments out of the blue. Chris knew that Big Jim was getting at something but he didn’t know what. It wouldn’t do him any good to ask. He knew that Big Jim wanted him to figure it out on his own. Half the time Chris felt as if he was a contestant in a game-show with Big Jim tallying the score.

“How do you know him?” Chris asked.

“His name’s Terry Connelly. I collared him sliding a Slim Jim into a 500S over in Ardenwood. I was visiting a lady friend and practically tripped over him on the way back to my car. He could’ve run but he didn’t. He just looked at my tin and held up his hands. He could’ve taken a swing at me with the Slim Jim and maybe done some damage. I sure as hell didn’t have any backup. As I was busting him I was thinking, ‘Hey, Jim, what are you getting yourself into here?’“

“But, he just gave up?”

“It didn’t take me long to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“That he wanted it to be over. I could tell that he didn’t want to be a thief anymore.”

“You could just tell? How?”

Big Jim knew that Chris wanted a set of clear, simple rules, some mechanism that could be used to disassemble events into their component parts,  neat and clean — ‘This means this. That means that.’ But people aren’t black and white. They aren’t Star Trek’s Mr. Spock running some emotionless computer program behind their eyes. Big Jim sighed and tried to figure out how to put what he knew into words that Chris could understand.

“Just for a second I saw it on his face,” Big Jim began, “surrender, like a guy who gets up every morning expecting to be collared and is relieved when it finally happens, when the running and hiding is finally over. As soon as I flashed my badge the kid slouched. His shoulders slumped. He let his arms hang loose and he dropped the Slim Jim without me having to tell him to. You watch a guy’s hands and you’ll always know if he’s going to fight you. A man’s face can lie but not his shoulders or his hands, or his feet for that matter. That’s when I knew that some part of the kid had been waiting for an excuse to get out of that life.”

“And you were that excuse?” Chris asked, glancing briefly at Big Jim before pulling a left on Congress Avenue.

“I knew I could be that reason, if I handled it right.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Here’s the thing, Chris. People who are doing what they want to be doing are competitors. Businessmen, car thieves, politicians, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to fight back against anyone who tries to stop them. You can’t give those people an inch or they’ll run right over you. But when a guy wants to give it up, that’s when you’ve got a chance to turn him around. Some cops will tell you that the way to do that is to crush him into the dirt and then you’ll own him.”

“Some cops like Teddy Joy you mean.”

“I’m not mentioning any names but, yeah, assholes like Teddy Joy. Let me tell you something, Chris — people will always do more for you out of love than out of fear. You see a guy who’s down, who you can really help — I don’t mean some scumbag loser who wants you to give him a free ride, but somebody who can still be saved — you do what you can for him and he’ll remember that and, maybe, someday he’ll help you. What goes around, comes around. People will surprise you. They will.”

That was one of Big Jim’s favorite sayings: People will surprise you. Chris had heard it a hundred times and he still didn’t really understand it. Peoplealways surprised him. Practically everything people did was a surprise to him. They were illogical and irrational, ruled by their emotions and their self-destructive needs and obsessions. But saying that wasn’t going to get him any closer to figuring out the lesson that Big Jim was trying to teach him.

“So, you helped this Terry Connelly? How? Did you let him go?”

“What would he have learned if I had done that?” Big Jim almost laughed. “People never value stuff they get for free. They have to earn it for themselves for it to mean anything. So, no, I didn’t let him go. I locked him up.”

Then what was the lesson? Chris wondered. Don’t give a criminal a free pass? No, he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Chris stayed silent and after a moment, Big Jim continued on his own.

“I thought about turning him, making him my CI, but I didn’t think the kid’s heart was in it anymore. He would have screwed it up and maybe gotten himself shot or dead. Anyway, I went to the arraignment the next morning and I asked the Deputy D.A. to let him out on an OR, then I bought him a hamburger and talked to him. I just asked him what he would do with his life if he got the chance to change things.”

“And he told you he wanted to be a pastry chef?”

“No, he told me that he liked to cook. I asked Sonny Salciccio to give Terry a job in his kitchen and see if he had any talent. It turned out that he was pretty good at it.” Big Jim turned back to the window and studied the faces drifting past. “He’s a good kid, Terry. He just needed a chance to turn his life around, to do the right thing. It’s always the right time to do the right thing,” Big Jim said, recalling a famous quote from Martin Luther King.

Big Jim was silent and for thirty seconds Chris tried to figure out the point of the story, the lesson that Big Jim was trying to teach him. He evaluated and discarded two or three theories before settling on one — You need to have a generous heart. He wanted to ask Big Jim if that was it, but Big Jim wouldn’t have answered. It didn’t work that way. Chris knew that he had to figure it out on his own as best he could.

Chris turned onto Speedway and approached the Naughty Lady bar where Johnny-Boy Watkins ran his string of girls. Big Jim watched the street but if he could have read Chris’ mind he would have smiled, pleased that his partner had figured out the point of the story after all.

 

                        Chapter Three

 

 

When the Naughty Lady’s front door opened Johnny-Boy Watkins squinted into the glare, then frowned. Johnny-Boy didn’t like cops, any cops, and he especially didn’t like Irish cops, and most of all he disliked this particular Irish cop, Big Jim Donegan. Big Jim. What the hell kind of name was that? The guy was only five feet eleven, though he did look like he had a barrel stuffed inside his chest and he had long arms and hands like catcher’s mitts. With a thatch of gray hair going white, pink skin, and pale blue eyes, to Johnny-Boy Big Jim looked like Teddy Kennedy’s long-lost brother.

Johnny-Boy took a long sip from the Venti his bottom girl had just brought him and stared a hole through Donegan and his punk-ass partner. Crap, the guy looked like some motorcycle cop just off the Highway Patrol. Could he be any more white-bread?

“Hi, Johnny-Boy. Mind if we sit down?” Big Jim said, already sliding into the booth. Chris Hunter pulled a chair from a nearby table. Johnny-Boy waved his hand as if giving permission for what Big Jim had already done.

“Deeeetective. What can I do for you this fine day?” Johnny-Boy drawled.

“We’re here about one of your girls, Johnny,” Big Jim said.

“Which one? There are so many fine ladies who want to spend time with me I can’t hardly keep track of them all.”

“The one you’re missing,” Big Jim told him.

“Missing? How can you tell? Women don’t punch no time clock. They come. They go.” Johnny-Boy shrugged as if talking about the weather.

“The one who went out last night and didn’t come back,” Chris snapped. “Reddish-brown hair, gray eyes, Romanian, Albanian, Polish.” Johnny-Boy pursed his lips as if deep in thought then gave his head a little shake.

“That’s OK, Johnny. We’ll just bring the wagon down here and pick up all your girls and take them down to the station for questioning. Sooner or later one of them will give us a name. Of course, you’re going to lose a day’s production, but you’ve got plenty of money, don’t you? Losing a day’s business is no problem for you, right?”

Johnny-Boy pretended to be lost in thought, then suddenly smiled. “Oh, maybe you mean, oh, what’s her name, Darja? Yeah, that’s it, Darja Novoriska, or Novorska or Nov-something-ska. Pretty girl. She’s crazy about me. She calls me Daddy Sugar, ‘cause I’m so sweet to her.”

Big Jim struggled to keep his face blank but Johnny-Boy was pleased to see the detective’s cheeks pink up. Fuck you, cop! he thought.

“Yeah, that Darja, she just can’t get enough of me. ‘Course, she’s got to wait her turn. There’s only so much of me to go around, if you know what I’m saying.”

“When—” Chris began but Johnny Boy cut him off.

“You had me confused there for a minute with that stuff about Albania. She ain’t from anywhere around there. She’s from, oh what’s that place, Rus-something? No, Belarus, that’s it. Belarus. Anyway, what about her? Did she do something wrong?” Johnny-Boy tried to look worried but was unable to keep a smile off his face.

“Yeah, she did something wrong,” Chris snapped. “She got herself dead.”

“Dead? What are you talking about?”

“When’s the last time you saw Ms. Novoriska, Johnny-Boy?”

“Why are you asking me? Why would I kill her?”

“Off the top of my head I can think of at least five reasons,” Chris replied, leaning forward. “Maybe she held out part of the take. Maybe she tried to quit the business. Maybe she disrespected you. Maybe she got so sick she couldn’t work anymore. Maybe she started talking to one of your competitors. There are lots of reasons why a man like you would kill a girl like her. Maybe you just got so drugged up you flipped out and killed her for the fun of it.”

“That’s crazy! A man don’t kill the goose that’s laying them golden eggs.” Johnny-Boy licked his lips and turned back to Big Jim. “You know I’m just a businessman. These girls, they need a job. The economy’s in the toilet. They can’t find no work and I put bread on their table. I don’t kill them. I help them.”

“I stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago, Johnny, so give it a rest and tell me when was the last time you saw her.”

Johnny-Boy closed his eyes then opened them and blinked. “Last night, right around eight or so. I cruised on by her spot and she was right there, doing her thing.”

“What spot?”

“On Grandy, near the corner, just down from the Chicken King. Guys get off work and stop in there for dinner and then they maybe want a little something, something before they go home.”

“And that was it, eight o’clock? You didn’t check back on her? You didn’t count her take at the end of the night?”

“I was busy last night. I got done checking on the girls and then I went over to Freddie’s. He had some suckers there who liked to mix blow and poker. I took three grand off ‘em. I gave Freddie his cut and then I went home.”

“What time was that?”

“Two-thirty, three. Hey, I barely got here before you all showed up. I was fixin’ to check the receipts after I got me some breakfast.”

“You’re a trusting guy, Johnny,” Big Jim said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?

“It means that most pimps watch their girls real close,” Chris broke in. “They strip them down at the end of the night to make sure that they haven’t held out a twenty here or there, maybe slipped a bill into their boots or someplace more intimate. And you’re telling us that you just let them all finish their shifts and go on home? This is the first time I’ve heard of a pimp operating on the Honor System.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just the kind of guy I am. I trust my ladies.” Johnny-Boy thrust out his chin. “That’s why they love me so much.”

“Yeah, we’ll keep that in mind. Where’d Darja live?” Big Jim demanded.

Johnny-Boy paused for a moment then noticed Big Jim’s shoulders starting to bunch up and said: “420 Wilsonia, top floor, number 509. Her and another girl.”

Chris made a note of the address then stood when Big Jim slid out of the booth.

“Aren’t you gonna tell me not to leave town?” Johnny-Boy taunted.

“If you killed her you’d better leave town because you won’t like how this is going to go down if I come for you.”

“Hey, I’m no killer!”

“We both know that’s a lie, Johnny,” Big Jim said in a quiet voice.

“You ain’t got no right to talk that way to me!”

“Meli Orencia.” Johnny pulled back as if struck. “You remember her. She did something to piss you off and you cut her. You cut her so bad that she bled to death. You murdered her.”

“Somebody cut her. It wasn’t me. And she wasn’t murdered. She had that disease, hemo—something, from all them drugs she was taking so her bleeding to death wasn’t no murder. It was an accident.”

“It was murder as far as I’m concerned,” Big Jim said, leaning over until his face was five inches from Johnny-Boy’s nose.

“If you think I killed her, then why don’t you arrest me?”

“I haven’t arrested you, Johnny, because, so far, I don’t have enough evidence to make it stick.” Johnny-Boy smirked. “And,” Big Jim continued, “because I’m still controlling myself. You’d better hope I don’t decide that you killed Darja too because if I do then my self-control might just snap, and if that happens, you won’t need to worry about me arresting you. They’ll find you in an alley someplace all cut up and bled out just like Meli, another terrible accident.”

“You can’t fucking scare me.”

“You should be scared of me after what I saw happened to Darja.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What happened to her?”

“Oh, now you care? Now you want to know how she died?”

“Sure I want to know. She was one of my girls.”

“Wood chipper.” Big Jim said it like a curse.

“Wood chipper? What’s that mean? You sayin’ somebody put her in a wood chipper?”

“After they strangled her. You know anything about that? You got any experience with wood chippers, Johnny?”

“Shit, no! I don’t know nothing about no wood chippers. What do I look like, a lumberjack?”

“That’s interesting because our killer, he didn’t know anything about them either. He screwed it all up. That’s why we’ve still got half her body down in the morgue.”

“Half her body? Jesus!”

Big Jim headed for the door and Chris trailed behind. Just before leaving Chris took a last look at Johnny-Boy and tried to figure out if he was really surprised about what had happened to Darja or if he was just faking it. Could he have actually strangled one of his girls and shoved her body into a wood chipper? Hell, yes, Chris decided.

 

                            Chapter Four

 

 

Wilsonia Avenue was populated with a hodgepodge of brick and stone-faced buildings four to ten stories tall, scarred, slumping and stained with age. Most had been built between the advent of the electric light and the beginning of World War II and none had aged well. Big Jim felt as if he was looking at the architectural equivalent of an old folk’s home, the inhabitants forgotten, tired, and sagging, but still not yet quite ready to let go of life.

“There it is, on the right,” Big Jim said and Chris pulled the Malibu in behind a dented Civic that seemed as weary as the building in front of which it was parked. At one time the entrance might have had a lock but those days were long gone and the front door opened with only a rattling squeak.

“509,” Big Jim said, checking his notes.

“I remember. We’ll get our exercise today.” Chris headed for the stairs just beyond a vandalized bank of mailboxes. “Before 1952 the building code didn’t require elevators in apartment houses under six stories,” Chris said, half over his shoulder. Big Jim followed behind and secretly prayed that he wouldn’t have to ask Chris to stop halfway up so that he could catch his breath. “That’s why so many of the buildings around here are five stories high.” Big Jim ignored Chris and concentrated on the stairs in front of him. As they passed the third floor Big Jim began to breathe through his mouth.

“How do you suppose they get a refrigerator up to the top floor?” Chris asked, if anything seeming to accelerate his pace. “In Amsterdam, they have piers sticking out from the roofs with a block and tackle on the end so that they can hoist furniture up to the top floor. There’s nothing like that in this building.”

With his heart pounding, Big Jim sucked in a lung-full of air and, head down, half-staggered into the fifth-floor hallway.

“You OK, Jim?” Chris asked. Normally a pale pink, from the neck up the skin on Big Jim’s face now looked like he had spent the last half hour exposed to the desert sun.

“I’m fine,” Big Jim rasped, his voice tired and thin.

Chris started to speak, then stopped himself. One of the things Chris had learned from Big Jim was that what he thought he said and what other people heard him say were often, usually, two different things. Like planning a chess match three moves ahead, Big Jim had taught Chris to think through his comments before speaking.

Do you need to rest? No, that might sound as if Chris thought Big Jim was too frail to do his job. You should exercise more — No, that sounded as if he thought that Big Jim needed his advice about how to live his life. That would be presumptuous and wrong. In fact, it was Chris who, daily, required Big Jim’s advice.

Big Jim took a few more deep breaths, then shrugged and gave Chris a little smile.

“Not used to all those stairs,” Big Jim wheezed then walked past Chris on rubber legs.

Number 509 was halfway down the scuffed hall. The smell of overcooked peppers and garlic and stale cigarettes clung to the walls. Big Jim knocked politely, not the way most cops did, pounding with the meat of their fists and shouting, “Metro Police! Open up!” but more like the pizza guy, almost softly, hoping that the other tenants wouldn’t hear him, peek through their doors and then rob him on his way down the stairs.

The peephole went momentarily dark and Big Jim held up his badge. “Darja’s been in an accident,” Big Jim said. “I need to talk with you for a couple of minutes. Please open the door.”

The silence lasted about three seconds then the peephole brightened and they heard the clatter of the lock being turned. The door opened four inches on a chain and a small, brown face peered through the gap. Big Jim opened the flap on his case and held out his picture ID.

“Ma’am,” Big Jim began, “I’m Detective James Donegan and this is my partner, Detective Christopher Hunter.” Chris held up his own ID as Big Jim had taught him on their first day as partners. Big Jim looked at the strip of face and tried to work up an encouraging smile. “May we please come in so that we can talk with you about your friend?”

The single brown eye oscillated from Big Jim’s face to his badge and then back again. Finally, she closed the door, and after a second’s pause, removed the chain. The girl stood back against the wall and watched them enter her living room then quickly pushed the door shut and re-set the lock.

The walls were a faded gray and studded with scratches and holes. Posters of bands, none of whom either detective recognized, covered half the space. Picasso Shark? Aztecka Blue? A white-plastic crucifix with gold trim was nailed to the strip of wall between two grimy windows. A stuffed black and white dog with button eyes and a lolling, red tongue guarded one end of the orange couch.

“May we sit down?”

The girl nodded and then sat at the couch’s far end, the dog clutched protectively to her chest. She was brown and small and could have been any age between sixteen and twenty-five depending on how she dressed and the depth of her makeup. Chris figured that the pervs preferred the sixteen-year-old version.

“May I ask your name?”

The girl stared at Big Jim for a second then spoke.

“Fatima Contal.”

“Darja Novoriska is your roommate?”

“Novorska,” Fatima corrected him. Chris made a note in his pad.

“How long have you and Ms. Novorska been roommates?”

Fatima shrugged. “Six months?” She said it as a question more than an answer.

“Do you both work for Johnny-Boy Watkins.”

Fatima tensed up and looked away.

“We’re not from Vice. We don’t care about your job. We just need your help about Darja.”

“Why? Are you going to arrest her? Is that what this is all about?”

“No, we’re not going to arrest her. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Ms. Novorska is dead. She—”

Fatima’s mouth opened in a little “O” then she buried her head and began to sob into the stuffed-dog’s fur. They waited a few seconds and Chris looked at Big Jim for guidance. He knew that in situations like this they were supposed to give a person a moment but he never knew how long. Big Jim just sat there until Fatima finally sniffled and looked up on her own. Big Jim pulled a tissue from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.

“Someone hurt Darja, Ms. Contal, and it’s our duty to find that person and make them pay for what they did to her. Will you help us?”

“I don’t know anything about it. What do you expect me to do?”

“Who were Darja’s friends? Who knew her? We think that whoever hurt Darja may have known her.” Chris looked up from his pad. What? The evidence pointed to some freak John, or Johnny-Boy, not some boyfriend or whatever. Obviously, Big Jim was lying in the hope that they might learn something useful. Chris wasn’t comfortable with lying. Lies weren’t single things but rather were a part of a larger story, a component in a web of facts. When you shoved a lie into that web it warped everything else, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and the more you lied the harder it became to hide the distortions.

Fatima tightened her stranglehold on the cloth dog and looked nervously around the room.

“Me, I was her friend, nobody else. Most of the time she worked. We have to pay our debt. The only people Darja knew were Johnny-Boy and her clients.”

Clients, Chris thought, but said nothing aloud.

“Were any of her clients giving her a hard time? Were any of them rough with her?”

“No, she didn’t go in for that. If a guy got rough she would tell Johnny-Boy and he would make them stop.”

“Take a moment and see if you can think of anyone who liked Darja too much. Maybe somebody who was obsessed with her or followed her but couldn’t afford to pay her.”

Fatima looked forlornly around the room and Chris followed her eyes. The furniture was cheap and well-worn but the apartment was clean, no dishes in the sink, no clothes on the floor. A small vase in the center of the kitchen table held three red, cloth roses on plastic stems. Fatima wore a clean, pink Hello Kitty t-shirt with short sleeves. Her arms had old track marks, like Darja’s, but nothing fresher than six months or so. 

Fatima looked back at Big Jim and shook her head. “No, everybody liked Darja. She was a good person.” Chris couldn’t tell if she was lying or not.

“What about Johnny-Boy? He told us that the last time he saw Darja was around eight last night, that she was on her corner. Do you know if that’s right? Could he have seen her after that?”

Fatima blinked and for a moment seemed deep in thought, then shook her head. Jim was sure that something was off here but he couldn’t tell what.

“Did Darja have any problems with Johnny-Boy? Is there any reason that Johnny-Boy might have wanted to hurt her?”

“What happened to Darja? You said that she was in an accident. How did she die?”

Chris started to open his mouth but a quick glance from Big Jim silenced him and the words “wood chipper” died in his throat. An instant later Chris’ face reddened when he realized how stupid a response that would have been. I should stick to dealing with computers, Chris thought. They don’t have feelings.

“She was strangled,” Big Jim told Fatima in a soft voice.

“Someone choked her?”

“No. We think he used a rope or something like that.”

Fatima’s eyes lost their focus and she stared blindly past Big Jim’s head.

“It wasn’t Johnny-Boy,” she said a moment later, pursing her lips.

“Why not?”

“When Johnny-Boy wants to hurt one of us he uses a knife. He likes to cut.” Fatima pulled up the hem of her t-shirt halfway to her breasts and displayed a six-inch scar. “He said that this was because I was holding out on him and that he had to teach me a lesson.”

Big Jim stared at the scar and his face hardened. Gone were the twinkling blue eyes and merry smile, replaced in an instant with a soldier’s glare.

“It wasn’t true. That’s just what Johnny-Boy told people. He really cut me because I got Darja off the junk. I had stopped shooting up before we got together and I helped Darja get clean too. Johnny-Boy didn’t like that. Drugs are one of the ways he hangs on to us. He knew that if Darja got clean that she might get ideas about leaving.”

“But you got her clean anyway,” Big Jim said.

Fatima nodded then, silently, began to cry.

“Was Darja going to leave Johnny-Boy?” Big Jim asked softly.

Fatima sniffled and dried her cheeks with another of Big Jim’s tissues.

“We both were,” she said at last. “Darja talked to a counselor at the Freedom Woman’s Center. We were saving up so that we could get a place together where Johnny-Boy couldn’t find us. Fay, that’s the counselor, said we could stay at the Center for two weeks while we looked for another place, that they would help us find one and get moved in and help us get regular jobs. We were almost there!” Fatima said in a sob and Big Jim handed her another tissue. “Two more weeks, only two more weeks and we would have been gone!”

“Did Johnny-Boy know you were leaving?” Big Jim asked almost in a whisper.

Fatima shook her head. “No, no one knew, just Fay.”

Big Jim looked past Chris at the tiny kitchen then through the open doorway to the primly made double bed, then back to Fatima.

“Pack your stuff,” he ordered. “You’re leaving. Right now. We’ll take you to the Woman’s Center.”

“I can’t go alone, not without Darja.”

“You have to, for your own safety.”

Fatima sat frozen on the couch, the little dog crushed against her chest.

“What time are you supposed to show up for work?”

“I’ve got to be on my corner by six, to get the guys on their way home from work.”

Big Jim looked at his watch. “It’s two-thirty. We’ve got plenty of time. Start packing.”

“I, I can’t.”

“You can and you will,” Big Jim ordered and took hold of her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. “I’m not going to have another dead girl on my hands. You’re done with Johnny-Boy! Get in there and start packing!”

Fatima slowly pulled her gaze from Big Jim’s pink face, then nodded and headed for the bedroom.

“How much money do you have?” Big Jim asked Chris.

Hunter leafed through his wallet. “One-hundred sixty-three dollars and, oh . . . .”

“Forget the change. Give me a hundred.” Big Jim pulled out his own money clip and peeled off 10 twenties.

“Do you know where this Freedom Woman’s Center is?” Chris asked.

“I wish I didn’t.”

“Why? Is it a scam or something?”

“We had a case there, my old partner Frank Pignataro and me, a counselor, Pamalee Rhoades. She had a husband and two kids. We found her naked, in a ditch, half a mile from her house, shot eight times — feet, knees, vagina, elbows, and head, in that order. Whoever did it wanted her to suffer. We could tell from the blood pools that he took his time and let her bleed out. The head shot was to make sure she was never going home. The rest he did for fun.”

“Did you get the guy?”

Big Jim shook his head. “We were sure it was some husband or pimp getting even for Pamalee helping a woman get away from him, but we could never nail it down. There were a dozen guys who looked good for it, but we couldn’t tie it to any of them. My partner, he never got over it. For him, catching that case was like getting cancer.”

At the thunkof two suitcases hitting the floor Big Jim and Chris turned toward the bedroom. Fatima stood in the doorway dwarfed between two large bags.

“I’m taking Darja’s clothes. They won’t fit me but . . . but it doesn’t feel right to just leave them here, like she never existed.”

“Sure,” Chris said. “That’s OK. We’ll carry them.”

Big Jim stared at the huge bags and suddenly remembered the five flights of stairs. Clutching her purse and the cloth dog, Fatima followed them out.

 

                        *     *     *

 

After they parked at the Woman’s Center Chris glanced at Big Jim’s drawn face and pulled both the bags from the trunk. Jim walked Fatima to the front door.

“Here’s three hundred dollars,” he said, stuffing the bills into her hand. “And my card. I may need to talk with you again about Darja. I’m going to need you to call us before you move out of the Center so that we’ll know where you are. Will you do that?”

“Will you tell me if you find him, the man who killed her?”

“You still think it wasn’t Johnny-Boy?”

“No, he would have cut her. It gets him off. He likes to watch women bleed.”

Big Jim frowned and wondered if she was right about Johnny-Boy not being the murderer. Killers change their weapons all the time. The one constant is that they continue to kill.

“I’ll let you know when we find him.”

“Thank you.”

“You know not to let anyone who knows Johnny-Boy see you?”

“You’re telling me not to get high because if I do the dealers will turn me in to him.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“Don’t worry. If I did that, then all this, Darja, me, everything, would all be for nothing. I can’t let it be for nothing.” Fatima turned toward the door, then paused and turned back to Big Jim. “I didn’t tell you everything,” she whispered and looked around as if afraid someone might overhear.

“That’s all right. You can tell me now.”

“Johnny-Boy lied to you, about Darja working a corner,” Fatima said nervously. “He’s got a computer in the back of the bar, a website thing. He ran Darja’s dates from there.”

“Johnny-Boy was running some kind of an Internet escort service? Darja was a call girl?”

“She was so pretty,” Fatima whispered, on the verge of tears. “Johnny-Boy said it would be a waste to put her out on the street with the fifty-dollar whores . . . like me.”

“If I could get my hands on Johnny-Boy’s computer, would it have a list of all her . . . clients?” Big Jim asked, thinking aloud.

“You don’t have to.” Fatima pulled a small, black notebook from her purse and held it out. “She kept a list of her dates in here.” For a moment she held it tightly then, reluctantly, let go. “I was keeping it because . . . .” Fatima looked down at her empty hands.

Because you thought we were going to abandon you to Johnny-Boy’s hellish life, Big Jim realized and wondered what would have happened if he had not shown his humanity by giving her that little pile of rumpled twenties.

That trick-book, for a little while at least, would have meant Fatima’s survival without Johnny-Boy. Set up in a new apartment she could have called the men on that list and offered her body directly. She knew she wasn’t as pretty as Darja. She was no longer “fresh,” but men were men. If only half of them became regular customers, clients, she could have made enough money not to have to walk the street like a common whore. To Fatima this was not a simple address book. It was Freedom. It was priceless. And she had given it to Big Jim, trusting him to keep his promise, to use it to find Darja’s murderer. Like a passenger on a foundering ship, Fatima had handed Big Jim her life preserver and now she faced the menacing sea naked and alone.

With a sagging smile, Fatima suddenly turned and ran inside, passing Chris on his way out. Hunter gave Big Jim a questioning look.

“I ran out of Kleenex,” Big Jim said and headed for the car.