City of Saviors, page 5
Bernice scratched her scalp. “Joe ain’t got nothin’ to do with this. He’s my emotional support.”
Shifty-eyed Bernice. In the movie, she’d be “Crackhead Number Two.” Been clean for three whole days now, she’d boast, chest puffed out, chin high.
“When can I get my stuff?” she asked me again.
My mouth opened, but no words came—spiking past the stink of dead and old were the aromas of sandalwood, vanilla, and soap. Zach Fletcher. Bile burned up my throat, and I swallowed to force the acid back to my stomach. I turned away from Bernice and her friend to search for those puppy-brown eyes, that flawless smile, those bloodstained scrubs.
“Soon,” Colin said, since I’d been rendered speechless. “We’re still looking. As you know, it’s a bit of a challenge finding anything in there.”
She waggled her head. “Oh yeah, but if y’all need my help—”
“Glad you said that.” He handed her a business card. “Did Officer Fitzgerald take your fingerprints yet?”
She shook her head. “I don’t trust him.”
“You trust me?” I asked, coming out of my trance.
She nodded. “You don’t look like I’m gon’ see you on YouTube next week.”
“Thank you, Ms. Parrish,” I said with a smile. “Can you come to the station tomorrow so that we can cross it off our to-do list?”
“Tomorrow sounds good.” Her eyes shifted to the space between my shoulder and Eugene Washington’s house.
“You’ll have to come down anyway,” I said, “once we find—”
“I said that tomorrow’s good.” Her eyes widened and she gave a slight head shake.
“Once you find what?” Joe asked her.
Bernice waved a dismissive hand. “Just something Gene left me.”
Joe cracked a grin. “What he leave?”
Colin pointed to Joe. “So do you know Eugene Washington?”
“Met him a coupla times,” the man said. “That fool need to clean up some, but he cool.”
“You see him recently?” Colin asked.
Joe’s Adam’s apple bobbed behind his razor-bumped skin. “Naw. Ain’t no reason I need to see him.”
He had just lied, but I let it slide. My scalp was tightening, and the colors around me had paled, then glinted mirror-bright. My mouth filled with thick, prevomit saliva. I needed to move. “Bernice, we’ll see you tomorrow.” Then, I hurried toward the dusty pink bungalow on the right side of Washington’s property.
Colin said something else to Bernice and Joe, and then he hustled to join me. “That’s it? ‘See you tomorrow’? You didn’t wanna—?”
“Right now, in this heat, no. I didn’t wanna. You must be tired from talking so damned much.” A vise clenched my lungs, making me take shallow breaths. I searched the eaves of the pink house. “No camera.” I pivoted in the opposite direction, passing the Washington house again and stopping at the white-and-blue Spanish-style.
“No cameras here, either,” Colin said, his eyes on the eaves. “Think the houses across the street have anything?”
The houses across the street included a McMansion in its last stages of construction and a deserted-looking 1950s-era cracker box with a weedy lawn, peeling paint, and a year’s worth of supermarket circulars stuck into the iron security door.
“No, don’t think so.” I didn’t want to walk over there, not with my need to upchuck intensifying with each step I took.
Bernice Parrish, her eyes as wild as a spooked horse’s, hustled in our direction. “Hey, detectives. I’m gonna get on out of here.”
“Somethin’ wrong?” Colin asked.
She pointed at an ancient gray Astrovan now parking near the barrier tape.
The van’s back passenger door slid open, and a young black woman wearing BluBlockers and a vibrant yellow-and-blue dashiki dress climbed from the backseat. An older woman wearing a pearl-gray skirt set and clutching a lacy hankie as big as a sail climbed from behind the van’s steering wheel. A third woman, chubby and sporting the prettiest gray dreadlocks I’ve ever seen, left the front passenger seat. She held a tambourine and joined the others on the sidewalk.
“Them fortune tellers is here,” Bernice Parrish whispered. “Some people at church say they’re prophetesses, but I ain’t about all that. Neither is the bishop, and he kicked ’em to the curb.”
Colin chortled. “Like, they tell the future and see the future?”
But Bernice had already scurried toward a blue Saturn, soup pennies be damned.
“Maybe Mr. Washington promised them a toaster oven,” Colin said.
I cocked my head. “They don’t look like witches to me. Kinda remind me of the vendors at farmer’s markets on the weekends. The ladies selling homemade bath oils and aloe vera plants.”
The three women smiled at us. “Are you the officers in charge?” Lace Hankie shouted.
Colin and I considered each other, grinned, shrugged—here we go—then sauntered over to the trio. As we came closer, BluBlockers said, “The detective and the chief join us today.”
Someone smelled of maple syrup. Another woman smelled of cinnamon and cloves. Grand Slam at Denny’s instead of hair of troll, eye of newt.
I introduced Colin and myself, then said, “And you are . . . ?”
“Dorothea Tennyson,” Lace Hankie responded. Her gold eye shadow shimmered in the sunlight.
“I’m Idell Messere,” Gray Dreads said. “So pleased to meet you.”
BluBlockers didn’t speak. Instead, she cocked her head.
“May I have your name, ma’am?” I asked her.
“Ssh,” Dorothea Tennyson said to me, finger to her lips.
“She’s . . .” Idell Messere studied the young woman.
“She’s, what?” Colin asked. “Mute or deaf or . . . ?”
“She’s receiving a word from the Lord,” Lace Hankie explained.
Colin eyed me. I waggled my eyebrows and waited.
“What is it, sister?” Gray Dreads asked, lightly tapping the face of the tambourine.
I glanced at my wristwatch. “If you all would like us to come back—”
“Then the king promoted Daniel,” BluBlockers said.
“And gave him many great gifts,” Dorothea Tennyson said.
“And he made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon,” Idell Messere completed, still tapping that tambourine.
And then, the trio sang, “If I can help somebody as I travel along, if I can help somebody with a word or song . . .” A joyous song, one that made onlookers standing on the sidewalks smile.
What a wretched day. A day of dirt and death, and now, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs. Damn it all to hell.
After the two-minute song ended, after everyone listening clapped, Colin said, “We still need her name.”
“Ebony Quinn,” the young woman said.
I grit my teeth, then scribbled her name alongside the others. “You ladies knew Eugene Washington, I’m guessing.”
“Yes,” Dorothea Tennyson said as she twisted the tail of the hankie around her wrist. “And we’ve come—”
“To bless the body.” Idell Messere pulled out a bottle of amber-colored liquid from the pocket of her caftan and handed it to Dorothea Tennyson.
“You’re a little late,” I said. “The coroner took him about twenty minutes ago.”
All three women smiled.
“Did he now?” Dorothea Tennyson said. Then, she turned away from me. She lifted her arms, the bottle in one hand and the lace hankie in the other.
I squinted at her, but said to the other two, “Is there something we should know about Mr. Washington? Or about . . . anyone? Anything hard and not . . . prediction.”
Idell and Ebony smiled at each other. “Someone’s told you about us,” the older woman said.
Dorothea sang, “Soon as my feet strike Zion, lay down my heavy burden—”
“We are not witches,” Idell said with a warm smile. “Men like Solomon Tate want to control us—”
“And he cannot control us,” Ebony said. “He cannot control his young wife—”
“He cannot control himself,” Dorothea said. “Never could. And what do all men do—?”
“To women they cannot control?” Ebony asked.
Dorothea continued to sing. “And we gonna live on forever, we gonna live on forever—”
Idell started pounding the tambourine. Ebony regarded me from behind sunglasses suited for older people. “You’d be seen as a witch,” she said to me. “You are seen as a witch when you only seek the truth.”
My face burned. “Is there—?”
“Will you let them control you?” Ebony asked me.
What the hell is going on here? “No one’s controlling—”
“May we bless the house?” the young woman asked.
“Something is wrong here,” Dorothea said, now finished with her song.
“Something has been wrong here for a very long time,” Idell said.
“May we bless the house?” Ebony asked again.
I glimpsed my tiny reflection in the young woman’s glasses. “No. It’s a crime scene. Can’t let anyone on the property.”
None of the women were sweating even while wearing caftans, long skirts, and dashikis. Ebony held out her hand in my direction, then whispered, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
My kidneys pressed against my lower back, and I had the sudden urge to pee.
“He trusted when he shouldn’t have trusted,” Ebony said.
“Others trusted when they shouldn’t have trusted,” Idell said.
Dorothea pointed at me with her lace hankie. “You trust when you shouldn’t trust.”
The three women now held up hands, and together they said, “Do not trust anyone except for Him.”
“They will bury you in the ground,” Idell said.
“And reap your reward,” Dorothea said.
And then the women smiled at Colin.
He said, “What about me?”
“We have nothing for you,” Dorothea said.
He said, “Great. If you have anything . . . solid to add to this investigation . . .” He offered them his business card. “Unless you know my phone number already.”
Dorothea took the card. “The young man laughs because he’s young.” Then, she and her sisters moved past us. Once they took up staggered positions along the yellow tape, Dorothea sprinkled oil into her hankie and dabbed at the fence. She and Ebony sang as Idell played tambourine. How I got over, my soul looks back and wonders . . .
Onlookers—patrol cops, firemen, neighbors—snickered at the women and took pictures.
Colin slipped on his aviators. “I love this fuckin’ city.”
My head felt like it would soon have a heart attack. “Who trusted when he shouldn’t have trusted?”
“She’s talkin’ about Eugene Washington trusting Bernice.” Colin found his Tic Tacs container in his pants pocket, then dumped candies into his mouth. “Hocus pocus.”
“They’re right about something being wrong here,” I said.
“It don’t take three prophets to tell you that.”
You trust when you shouldn’t trust.
Whom should I not trust, I wanted to ask.
What do men do to women they can’t control?
Call them witches and burn them at the stake.
7
THE SUN HUNG LOW AS WE PREPARED TO ABANDON THE YELLOW CRAFTSMAN IN the middle of the block. Long shadows slanted from trees, cars, and pyramids of junk that sparkled like treasure. The three prophetesses trundled back to the Astrovan. Officer Fitzgerald blocked the front door with crime scene tape, then handed off the watch to a new pair of patrol cops. Without Washington’s mess, the neighborhood seemed pleasant enough. Big lawns, lots of impatiens and rosebushes, portable basketball hoops, and tricked-out RVs. So close to the chaos of Crenshaw Boulevard, and yet incredibly homey and hopeful.
I sat in the front seat of my Porsche with the air turned to MAX COOL. Four ibuprofen were now breaking down in my blood. Good times. I lifted the Motorola to my mouth and toggled the switch. “Wouldn’t be surprised if one of the neighbors killed him.”
Colin laughed. “He did screw up their property values with his towers of trash.” He sighed, then said, “We have to come back, don’t we?”
“Yeah, but not today.”
We had other things to do today. Like shower.
But the Bible verse Ebony Quinn had zapped me with—Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul—would not wash off me and disappear down the drain in the women’s locker room shower. No matter how hard my loofah gloves scrubbed, those words stuck to me like tar, staying with me as I trudged toward my desk.
The detective’s bureau of the Southwest Community Division reeked of sweat and sour bodies. Millions of foam cups and bottles of water and Gatorade littered every flat surface. The overworked air conditioner had quit on us back in July, and now, seated at my desk, ten fans droned from strategic spots at breezeways and windowsills.
Colin and I had combined our resources to purchase one of those high-fallutin’ fans that resembled a knife blade and made air so cold you longed to drink it. A bicycle lock kept our fancy fan secured to the leg of my desk . . . which had been bolted to the concrete beneath the worn blue carpet.
Even after my shower, I had failed to clean all the filth from beneath my fingernails. My teeth still crunched dirt and grit, and after blowing black gunk from my nose, the stink of cat piss and dead things lingered in my nostrils. My skin felt itchy even in an LAPD T-shirt and yoga pants. Two ice-cream sandwiches and a large bottled water had helped me move past the scene at the Washington property, and with pain eased by Advil, my pulse slowed, the sound around me muted, and I could think, I could plan, I could be present.
You need more time.
In August, I’d returned to work after my car accident up in Bonner Park back in March, an accident that I’d caused by ramming a Toyota SUV into a parked truck as Zach Fletcher held a gun to my head, an accident that had ultimately saved my life and ended Zach Fletcher’s. Yes, I’d returned to light duty and spent a month working the warrants desk until I’d climbed, sprinted, jumped my way toward full medical clearance. Ignoring the pain that still existed just to return to my version of normal. And I’d succeeded until the heat wave from hell—in one-hundred-degree heat, the simple act of blinking took incredible effort, even for the able-bodied. And my body still needed . . .
More time.
But I didn’t have “more time.” “More time” meant going out on long-term disability. “More time” meant raising the eyebrows of my colleagues and superiors. It was already difficult to receive recognition for a job well done each time I closed a case. I’d be stupid to admit defeat, to admit weakness. Yeah: my body hurt, and certain smells made me freeze, and the sound of some men’s voices made me jump. Yeah: since March, I had avoided Bonner Park and the strip mall where Zach Fletcher had run a community medical clinic—and lured girls to their deaths. And yeah: I always switched lanes whenever a RAV4 drove too close to me.
Even while battling all these things, I did not have “more time.”
People needed me. Eugene Washington needed me. And I needed to track and uncover the person who had killed him just hours after he’d celebrated his birthday.
With his hands behind his damp head, Colin sat at his desk and squinted at me. He had changed out of his suit and taco-sauce-stained shirt for blue jeans and an LAPD polo. “You look better. You take something?”
I grinned. “Yep. A shower. You should try it sometimes. Warning: the soap may burn.”
He said, “Ha,” grabbed his steno pad, then rolled in his chair over to my desk.
My eyes watered, and I sneezed twice. “Geez, you use the whole bottle again?”
He blushed. “That house killed my sense of smell.”
I opened my binder—grit in the creases of the book—and swiped at the dusty pages. “It’s gonna be like a trip to the beach. I’m still gonna find dirt in my notebook six months from now.”
“I’ve been to some jacked-up places since I’ve lived in LA—”
“Like your desk and your apartment—”
“But that house?” Colin ran his fingers through his hair. Since arriving in Los Angeles a year ago, he had discovered hair-styling product—for the second consecutive day, he wore his hair weirdly mussed. “It takes a special kind of nut to live with fifty cats and a herd of cockroaches. How could he breathe?”
“Don’t know, but please stop disparaging our victim and his pets.”
He twirled his pen between his thumb and index finger. “No lie. You got PTSD from Zach Fletcher, and I got PTSD—”
I snatched the pen from between his fingers. “I don’t have PTSD.”
“PTSD” equaled “permanently disabled,” which equaled a future walking the beat between Macy’s and Wetzel’s Pretzels.
“Lou—” Colin said.
“I don’t. Shut up now.”
Colin shrugged. “Whatever you say, bro.”
“Shall we get on with detective-ing now?”
“Yep. Detective away.”
I handed him his pen, then sent my numb fingers to peck the keyboard.
The first picture of Eugene Washington blinked onto my monitor, courtesy of the DMV. Smiling for his driver’s license, his eyes crinkled in the corners. His salt-and-pepper beard had been trimmed, and his black-and-white dress shirt pressed.
The next three pictures showed a less joyful man, younger, more pepper than salt. Dead eyes. A scowl. He wore the orange jumpsuit sported by all those booked into police custody throughout Southern California.
“He got a jacket?” Colin asked.
“Yep. Let’s see . . .”
“Muchachos y muchachas!” Luke banged into the squad room. He wore the same sweaty brown suit he’d worn at Eugene Washington’s house.
“Where’s Pepe?” Colin asked.
Luke thumbed behind him. “Down in Evidence.” He grabbed a can of Raid bug spray from his desk drawer. “Critters in the car. Que asco.”
