Cop Town (22 page)

“Baaaah!”

Finally, the door. Kate was careful not to open it too wide. From the frying pan into the fire. Wanda Clack was sitting on the bench loading up her utility belt. She saw Kate and let out a “Baaah!”

Kate plastered on her smile, held up her hands in surrender. She didn’t know how much longer she could do this. She was dying inside.

Wanda said, “Lookit you with your uniform. I’d have to think twice before I called you a man.”

“Thank you very much.” Kate smoothed down the shirt, which was still blousy. She’d asked Mary Jane to leave more room than usual.

“You get that Jew to do it?” Wanda laughed. “He didn’t poke you with his horns?”

Kate knew better than to tell the truth about herself. The last thing she needed was another mark against her.

The door opened. Maggie slid in. She raised her eyebrows, seemingly surprised that Kate was here.

Kate felt her leg being slapped.

“Lend me a hoof, Sheep.” Wanda held out her hand. Kate didn’t know what to do but to help leverage her up. Wanda gave a loud groan as she stood. The equipment around her belt creaked. “Well, I gotta say, after what happened yesterday, none of us thought you’d show up again.”

Kate tried for jocularity. “Surprise!”

“You said it.” Wanda winked at her before she edged like a crab out the door.

Kate smiled at Maggie, but she was busy dialing the combination on her locker. “Good morning.”

Maggie yanked open the lock. “How’d you get home last night?”

“Spare key.”

“Magnetic box under the wheel well?”

“How did you know?”

She tossed Kate her purse. “That’s what the victim usually tells me when I’m taking a stolen car report.”

Kate held her purse to her chest. Could she leave? Would it be that easy? Could she just turn around and leave?

Maggie asked, “You get a lock or do you need to use mine again?”

At least Kate had done one thing right today. She held up the lock she’d taken from her father’s suitcase.

Maggie studied the lock with great disapproval. Still, she opened a locker three down from her own. Number eight, right beside the curtain the colored girls had put up.

“Thank you.” Kate didn’t really need anything from her purse, but she opened it anyway as she walked across the room. Everything was in
there—makeup, gum, a few tampons, some change that she shouldn’t let float around. She unbuckled her wallet. She checked the cash compartment, but not for her money. Her wedding photo rested among the bills.

Patrick was dressed in a dark blue suit and tie. His hair was neatly combed. Kate was wearing a white knee-length dress with a peplum that fluttered loosely around her hips. She remembered her pearls kept catching on the light shirring at the sweetheart neckline.

They had been married at the courthouse by a judge and not by a priest at the Cathedral of Christ the King, which was why Patrick’s parents had not attended the ceremony. Kate had always assumed that she was agnostic like her parents; which fact still didn’t allow them entrance into the gentile country club. She’d gone to temple as a child because it made her Oma happy. She’d gone to bar mitzvahs for the camaraderie and cake. She enjoyed an occasional Shabbat and preferred Christmas to Hanukkah, but there was no way in hell she would dishonor what had happened to her family by getting married in a Catholic church.

“Everything in there?” Maggie asked.

Kate looked up.

“I didn’t take your money.”

“I didn’t think you had.” Kate closed the wallet and shoved it back into her purse.

“You’re with me again today.” Maggie rested her hand on her revolver. “Is that a problem?”

“I’m delighted.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If you want lunch, take some cash with you. Lipstick is okay, but nothing dark. You got your notebook and pen?”

Kate tapped her breast pocket.

“Did you turn in your reports?”

“First thing.”

“Get your citation book. We’re skipping roll call today.” She slammed her locker closed. “Meet me on the back stairs in five minutes.”

Kate gathered she was not supposed to ask for details. “Yes, ma’am.”

Maggie slipped out the door. No one else came in. Kate had never been alone in the locker room before. She glanced at the area behind the
curtain, wondering just what was back there. More lockers, she saw. There was a stack of Negro magazines at the end of their bench. A small table with a glass vase was tucked into the corner. There was only a single flower, a daisy, but it looked fresh.

Something bumped against the door and Kate nearly jumped out of her skin. She didn’t know which would be worse—being here when the colored girls came or being late meeting Maggie on the stairs.

She took some cash from her wallet and pocketed her lipstick, which was absolutely too dark but what was Maggie going to do, arrest her?

Kate put the lipstick back in her purse.

She quickly figured out why Maggie had disapproved of the suitcase lock. The shackle barely fit through the slot in the locker door. She had to force it closed. The tiny key could easily slip out of her pocket. Kate felt certain she’d feel it. Her hips were black and blue from the Kel-Lite and nightstick beating into her yesterday afternoon. She was shocked she’d managed to get to sleep last night.

Of course, she had been shocked by a lot of things last night, none more so than the mind-blowing thirty seconds it had taken for her to finish what Philip Van Zandt had started. She’d never had a man touch her down there before. Patrick thought it was kinky that time they did it standing up in the foyer.

“Dear Patrick,” she silently composed in her head. “Thank you for your last letter. I have been very busy myself. I met a colorful pimp yesterday morning. I watched a whore get tortured. I helped resolve a dispute over a sandwich. I let a near-stranger finger me in my mother’s kitchen. Hope you are not the same …”

The door opened. Kate panicked. The colored girls were here. There were four of them. They glared at her. She put her head down and tried for a quick exit. They didn’t make it easy. They crowded together so that she had to push her way through.

“Sorry … sorry …,” Kate apologized. They were worse than the men. Her hat was tipped. Her shoulders were bumped like she was traveling through a car wash. A foot came out to trip her. She barely managed to stumble into the outer room.

“Baaah!” a fat cop screamed in her face.

Kate’s good humor was spent for the morning. She had no idea where the back stairs were, but she assumed “back” meant to the rear of the room. There was an exit sign over a door. Kate made her way toward it. The going was easier. Most everyone was taking their seat for roll call. She wasn’t sure how this would work. If Kate wasn’t checked in by the duty officer, did that mean she wasn’t technically working?

“What took so long?” Maggie stood at the bottom of a set of large marble stairs. She didn’t seem to expect an answer. “Come on.”

There was nothing to do but follow her up the stairs. Kate concentrated on her feet as she climbed. Her shoes were still slipping even though she was wearing two pairs of her father’s socks. Her hat kept falling down over her eyes. She bumped it up. It slid back down. She bumped it up again.

Maggie said, “You’re allowed to take off your hat.”

Maggie’s hat was still on, so Kate left hers in place. “Is your brother all right?”

“Look up.”

“What?” Kate looked up. She was one step away from running straight into a towering black woman. There were two of them standing at the top of the stairs. They had identical uniforms and identical tightly shaved Afros. Their name badges read
DELROY
and
WATSON
. They stared openly at Kate.

Delroy said, “She sure is white as a sheep.”

“Uh-huh.” Watson nodded in agreement. “You’d think she’d’a learned after yesterday to look where she’s going.” She reached out with one hand and knocked the hat off Kate’s head.

Maggie grabbed Kate’s arm to keep her from retrieving her hat.

“Listen up, Sheep.” Delroy used a pointed finger to explain, “You look left, you look right, you look up, you look down.”

Watson finished, “You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around.”

They both clapped.

“That’s what it’s all about.”

They both laughed, but Watson kept her eyes zeroed in on Kate. “We ain’t jokin’ here, White Sheep. You gotta know everything around you all the time. That’s the only way you’re gonna stay alive. You feel me?”

“I feel you,” Kate mumbled, sounding like the whitest Jew who had ever taken a wrong turn out of Buckhead.

“She
feels
me,” Delroy told her partner. “You hear that?”

Watson tried to imitate Kate’s accent. “I feel you, lovey.”

Delroy went for a Thurston Howell. “Thank you, ma’dear. Might I
feel
you later after we share some cocktails at the club?”

“We don’t have time for this.” Maggie nodded toward a closed door. She let Delroy and Watson go ahead of them. Then she nodded for Kate to retrieve her hat.

Kate did as she was told, offering a cheerful “You’re full of nods this morning.”

Maggie was already in the room, which was another storage closet. This one was actually used for storage. Metal shelves contained pens, folders, staples, notepads.

Maggie nodded for Kate to shut the door. As usual, Kate did as she was told. She had to assume there was a reason Maggie had been so tight-lipped about meeting these women. The curtain in the dressing room wasn’t the only thing that separated the colored girls from the whites.

Delroy asked, “We gonna do this in front of the Sheep?”

“She won’t talk,” Maggie said, which Kate took as a compliment. “I need a favor.”

Delroy twisted her lips to the side. “Go on.”

“There’s a pimp I need to talk to. Name’s Sir She.”

“Sir She,” Delroy repeated. “Tranny pimp works outta CT?”

“You know him?”

“Heard of him,” Delroy said. “We’ve dealt with a coupla his girls. Got the shit kicked outta ’em for not turning in their money.”

Watson added, “He wears these white boots, got gold tips on ’em. Tore this one girl up so bad she won’t never pee straight again.”

“Where’s he live?” Maggie asked.

“He’s renting rooms in a boardinghouse off Huff.”

Maggie nodded for the umpteenth time. “Good. That’s what we got off a witness yesterday.” Kate noticed that Maggie didn’t volunteer how they had gotten the information from Violet. “Anything else?”

Delroy said, “Boardinghouse is run by a freaky Portuguese chick. Old as dirt, but I wouldn’t cross her.” She turned to her partner. “What’s the house number, eight-fifteen?”

“Eight-nineteen.” Watson wrinkled her nose. “Damn old biddy looks like she got spiders in her hair.”

Maggie asked, “Portuguese? What’s a white woman doing living in CT?”

“You crackers gonna let some damn foreigner live in your backyard?”

Delroy trotted out her snooty accent again. “She used to live up near the shopping mall, but the noise was atrocious!”

“Better,” Kate admitted. She’d really nailed the intonations.

Maggie held out her arm and physically pushed Kate out of the conversation. “Are any of them carrying?”

“Sir She don’t carry. The one you gotta worry about is the big-ass mother works for him. Fat as a whale. Crazy as a loon. Matter-fact, both of ’em are tetched, from what I hear. But the big one is just flat-out-mothah-fuckin-crazy, knowhattamean?”

Delroy gave Kate a meaningful look. “He’s got a thing about white women. Don’t like ’em. And that’s for real, Sheep.”

Watson looked at Kate, too. “He likes ’em good enough when he’s cutting ’em up. Keeps a switchblade on him. Pulls it out like magic and the next thing you know, half your face is hanging off the bone.”

Kate willed herself not to shudder.

Maggie asked, “But no guns?”

Watson shrugged. “I told you we ain’t never met the brothers. They’re new in town, been here maybe five, six months.”

Delroy said, “No time to bring a welcome basket, you dig?”

Watson said, “This is just shit we heard about him.”

Delroy added, “It’s good shit, but it’s still shit.”

“Okay.” Maggie crossed her arms over her chest. She waited.

Watson stared at Delroy. Delroy stared at Watson.

Watson said, “Sir She runs old whores off Whitehall.”

Delroy said, “That’s where Don Wesley got shot.”

“Where Lawson’s brother almost got shot, too,” Watson reminded her partner. “She must be looking for a gal saw something, maybe wants to see if she can get her to talk.”

“Girl won’t talk without the pimp’s okay.”

They both continued to stare at each other in silence. Finally, Delroy nodded. Watson nodded, too.

Delroy told Maggie, “Give us until lunchtime. We’ll make sure you got passage into CT after that. Straight to Huff and back. That’s all we can guarantee.”

“Deal.” Maggie didn’t offer her thanks. “What’ve you got for me?”

Watson was obviously prepared. “Black girl got raped two nights ago over in Midtown. All night long. Thirteen years old. Ended up in the Grady ER needing stitches. We think one of yours did it.”

“I’ve got a sister that age.” Maggie bumped Kate’s arm, indicating she should write this down. “You get a description?”

Watson answered, “Better than that. Name’s Lewis Windall Conroy the Third. Twenty-one years old. He’s a student over at Georgia Tech. Originally from Berwyn, Maryland, where my people tell me he’s already got one sexual assault complaint off a fourteen-year-old that his daddy took care of.”

Kate looked up. Maggie’s lips were parted. Kate had never seen her caught surprised.

Maggie asked, “He lose his clothes?”

“Why you ask that?”

Maggie didn’t answer.

Watson pulled a thick brown wallet out of her back pocket and handed it to Maggie. “Cocksucker musta been stoned outta his mind. His clothes were right there on the floor, but he grabbed her granddaddy’s raincoat and bugged out.”

Maggie flipped through to the license. She stared at the photograph. “Shit.”

Kate looked over her shoulder. The man was college-aged with a round face and wispy blond hair.