Murder Inside the Beltway (8 page)

She’d indulged his obsession for most of the evening, which didn’t mean always agreeing with him. At one point at Chief Ike’s, she said that it distressed her as a white woman without prejudice to be viewed with suspicion by blacks simply because she was white.

He came back with, “Maybe your prejudice shows in other ways.”

Now, hackles up, she challenged him to explain.

He tried to deliver his message casually so as to not fan the flames. “Maybe you think I’m with you because I want to be with a white woman. You know the old cliché—”

Her angry eyes and tight lips stopped him in mid-sentence. There was a moment when she considered throwing her drink in his face. Instead, she left the club, leaving him to extend his hand and call after her.

He came out of the shower and dialed her number. “Mary, are you there? Are you there? Please pick up if you’re there. It’s Matt. Look, I’m sorry about last night. I said things I shouldn’t have and I apologize. I never should have had that last drink and… and I’m sorry. See you at work.”

She was cold to him when they met up at MPD, but not terminally, and Hatcher’s arrival curtailed any further discussion.

“Here’s the drill,” Hatcher said, still wearing his sunglasses. The headache hadn’t gone despite the glasses and a mouthful of Tylenol. “Mary and I will talk to the congressman at eleven. Matt, I want you to run down this Mickey Mouse broad and see what you can get from her.” He glanced at Mary. “You’ve got a dirty mind, kid,” he said. “I didn’t mean what you think I meant.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“We’ll meet back here at four,” Hatcher said. “The deceased’s father is arriving this afternoon. Got it?”

On the way to the parking lot where they’d checked out two unmarked vehicles, Matt whispered to Mary, “I called this morning and left a message. I’m sorry about last night and—”

“What the hell are you two doing?” Hatcher growled. “Making a date?”

Mary and Matt’s eyes met as they prepared to climb into different cars. Her tiny smile buoyed him.

Before leaving headquarters, Matt ran a computer check on Micki Simmons. Like Rosalie Curzon, she lived in Adams Morgan. He drove to her apartment building and called her number on his cell. A sweet, sexy, southern-tinged recorded voice said, “I’m not available at the moment, but I do want to talk to you. Please call again soon.”

He left a message saying who he was, and included a phone number at which he could be reached.

Matt sat in his car and watched people come and go from the apartment building. After a half hour, boredom set in. He pulled the printout he’d run at headquarters. Micki Simmons: According to the sheet, she was thirty-one years old, although a photograph taken when she’d been booked a few years earlier showed what appeared to be a woman older than that. But that was a booking photograph, usually less flattering than even driver’s license and passport photos. Natural redhead? Hard to tell, but probably not. Nice features, a little swollen from crying. Getting booked often brought out the tears.

She was born in South Carolina and came to D.C. six years ago. Aside from a few busts for prostitution, one as a result of a sting while working for an escort service, she had no further criminal record, not even a parking ticket. As he studied her photo, he read into it a vulnerable woman, her eyes sad and looking for something in her life that she’d probably never find. Hatcher would consider such an analysis to be naïve, even stupid.

He forced Hatcher from his mind, got out of the car, and walked to the building’s entrance, where he scanned the tenant list next to call buttons. Her apartment was number 9-C. He pressed the button and heard it sound in the apartment. No voice responded through the small speaker.

An older woman pushed through the door.

“Excuse me,” Jackson said.

She eyed him suspiciously.

“I’m looking for Ms. Simmons.”

The way she said, “I don’t know her,” coupled with the disgusted look on her face, told him that she did.

“Do you know if she’s away?” he asked.

“I hope so,” the woman said, and left.

He was about to return to the car and go back to headquarters when the door to the building opened and Micki Simmons exited. She wore a scarf over her head, and carried a suitcase.

“Ms. Simmons?” Jackson said.

She stopped and glared at him.

“Can we talk for a minute? I’m—”

She walked away.

“Whoa,” he said, catching up with her and blocking her path. He fumbled for his detective’s badge and displayed it. “I’m Matt Jackson, detective, MPD. I’d like to speak with you.”

She cocked her head and sneered, “Yeah, I’m sure you would. Maybe another time.”

He shifted his position to prevent her from advancing toward the curb, where a taxi had pulled up.

“Get out of my way,” she said.

“Look,” Jackson said, “either you agree to talk with me now, or I slap cuffs on you and we do it at headquarters. Your call. It’s about your friend Rosalie Curzon.”

“I never would have guessed,” she said. “That’s my cab waiting.”

“After we talk, I’ll drop you wherever you want. But first we talk.”

Until this point she’d been all toughness and challenge, not a hint of any southern accent or charm. Then, as though she’d received an instant Dixie transplant, she sighed, lowered her suitcase to the pavement, and said in a softer voice, “Ah suppose ah don’t have any choice, do ah?”

Jackson smiled. “No, ma’am, I suppose you don’t.”

She looked around. A middle-aged couple came from the building and didn’t try to hide their interest in what was going on.

“Can we go somewhere?” she asked.

“Your apartment?”

“No, ah don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“My apartment?” Jackson said.

It was her first hint of a smile. “Are you sure you’re a cop?”

“Want to see the badge again? Look, tell you what, we’ll go to my apartment. It’s in Adams Morgan, only a couple of blocks from here.” He pointed to his car. “That’s mine. I make good coffee, the real thing. When we’re through, I’ll drive you wherever it is you want to go.”

She chewed her cheek.

“By the way, where
were
you going?”

“Home. All right. But if I answer your questions, I’m free to go?”

“That’s right, unless you confess to killing your friend. Then—”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

They dismissed the taxi, whose driver was visibly miffed, placed her suitcase in the trunk of Jackson’s car, and drove the short distance to his apartment.

“You live here alone?” she asked.

“Yeah. I mean, sometimes my girlfriend stays but—”

“It’s so neat.”

He laughed. “I like order around me. Must mean I have a disorderly brain. At least that’s what a professor of mine claimed about externally neat people.”

“You went to college?” she said, going to a window and looking down at the street. In her experience, cops weren’t college-educated.

“Uh-huh,” he said from the kitchen, where he readied the coffeemaker. When he returned to the living room, she’d removed her raincoat and settled on the couch, her shoes on the floor in front of her. She wore a white sleeveless sweater that was too tight across her sizable bosom, and jeans that were also too tight. This was a woman who would fight a weight problem as she aged, he thought. But that was in the future. Right now, she was a tall, solidly built woman who looked as though she spent considerable time in a gym, maybe even lifting weights. The most striking thing about her was a mane of copper hair.

“Coffee will be ready in a minute,” he said, pulling up a yellow director’s chair.

She spread her arms. “So, go ahead and ask your questions.”

He pulled a slender notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket, removed the jacket, hung it over a matching chair, and resumed his seat. “I suppose I can start by asking why you were leaving D.C. and going home. Home is South Carolina?”

“How did you know that?”

“Your, ah, your sheet.”

She winced. “Pretty sad, huh, a nice southern girl like me having a rap sheet?”

“We all make mistakes.”

“It wasn’t a mistake. It’s what I chose to do with my life, at least for part of it.”

“Prostitution.”

She nodded.

“I’m not judging you, Ms. Simmons.”

“Good. You can call me Micki.”

“Okay, Micki, and I’m Matt.”

“Micki and Matt,” she said with a laugh. “Sounds like a TV sitcom.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

An expression crossed her face. “I can’t believe Rosalie is dead.”

“Tell me about her, Micki.”

She shrugged and wiped a single teardrop from her cheek. “We were friends, that’s all.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“The agency.”

“Which agency?”

“Beltway Escorts. I’m sure that’s on my rap sheet, too.”

“Yeah, it is. You both worked there for a while?”

“We both worked there for too long. More than one day is too long as far as I’m concerned.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The slob that runs it.”

His raised eyebrows said that he wanted the name.

“Billy McMahon,” she said. Jackson noted it. “He’s a low-class bastard.”

“He why you were leaving D.C.?”

“It’s time I left,” she said. Her laugh was sardonic. “Ah came here because I thought living in the city would be neat, you know? Small-town girl makes it big. Jesus, what a dope I was.”

“Did you have any jobs here besides turning tricks?”

“Sure. Lousy ones, low pay, long hours. That’s why…”

“That’s why turning tricks appealed. Money.”

“Why else do it?”

“I don’t know. Tell me about Rosalie.”

“She was great. Man, she had a sense of what was going on and how things went down. She made me look like the naïve jerk that I am.”

“Did she like the life?” Micki’s expression was quizzical. “Prostitution,” Jackson clarified.

She sat back and blew a stream of air at a red strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead. “She hated it as much as I did,” she said, “only she knew how to make it work. How do I say it?—She was worldly. I guess that’s the way to say it. She knew how to make the most out of a bad situation.”

His immediate thought was of the video recorder and tapes found in Rosalie Curzon’s apartment. Was that what the woman seated across from him was referring to, her dead friend’s ability to “make the most out of a bad situation”? He almost brought it up but thought better of it. Instead, he said, “Tell me more about the escort service and this guy McMahon.”

Her expression was worth a hundred words. “Billy McMahon is a creep. Maybe you should talk to him about Rosalie’s murder.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. When Rosalie decided to leave the agency and go solo, she encouraged me to go with her. I did. Billy never forgave her. Not only did I walk away along with her, he accused her of taking clients with her, lots of them. He said she promised them better service at lower prices if they’d come directly to her instead of booking through the agency. He threatened to kill her.”

“Literally?”

“That’s right.” She leaned forward, a sense of urgency in her voice. “Hey, look, don’t tell him I told you this. Right? I mean, I think the guy is capable of anything.”

“Including murder.”

She sat back, closed her eyes, and nodded.

He dropped the pad on the table and stood. “I forgot about the coffee,” he said, and went to the kitchen. He returned carrying two steaming mugs on a tray, along with sugar and a pint container of half-and-half. He placed it on the table.

“Do you have Sweet’n Low?” she asked.

He brought it from the kitchen.

“You won’t tell Billy what I told you,” she repeated.

“No need to. Did you and Rosalie share clients? I mean, did you pass them back and forth between you?”

“Sometimes. If Rosalie was away, or I was, we’d suggest that one of our clients see the other if they were upset or didn’t have much time. But we didn’t do that much, just now and then.”

“We’re looking for Rosalie’s killer,” Jackson said. “Chances are that it was one of her johns. Can you give me some names of men you sent to her when you were away?”

She shook her head with conviction. “I would never do that,” she said solemnly.

“Even if it might help solve the murder of your friend?”

She looked down and thought before responding. “Ah don’t think it’s right to just name a bunch’a names and have them dragged through the dirt. If you know somebody who you think did it, and if I know that person, then I might talk about it. But ah don’t want to be sending you on some wild-goose chase that’ll hurt people for no good reason.”

He silently agreed with her, although he knew he shouldn’t. Hatcher certainly wouldn’t have bought her rationale. So what if a bunch of men were embarrassed at having bought the services of a prostitute? Chances were, they had those who would be deeply hurt by knowing of the infidelity. Was it more unsavory to have paid for sex rather than having fallen into an affair with a neighbor or office colleague? It didn’t really matter. Hurt was hurt, regardless of its genesis.

“Where in Carolina did you grow up?” he asked.

“A little town outside of Sumter. You have any more questions?” she asked, slipping her feet into her shoes.

“I’m sure I’ll have more, Micki, but none at the moment.”

“That’s good.” She stood and picked up her raincoat. “Hey, how did you know about me?”

“Somebody in the neighborhood told me that you and Rosalie were friends.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You get to ask questions but I can’t?”

“Yeah, that’s the way it works. Sorry.”

“Stinks.”

He slipped into his jacket and held the raincoat for her. “How are you traveling to South Carolina?” he asked.

“Train.”

“Okay. I’ll drop you at the station. I need to know how to reach you in South Carolina. We may want to have you come back to D.C.”

She pouted, but wrote down an address and phone number in Sumter.

“What will you do about your apartment?” he asked as they left his place and went to where he’d parked the car.