“You never knew her,” I said. “This wasn’t normal.”
“Nothing’s normal,” Joella Thomas said.
“You find out where she lived her last two months?”
She shook her head. “Some landlord will call it in when he needs to rent the apartment.”
“Until then?”
“Until then, she’s dead. She don’t mind the delay.”
I rolled my eyes.
She rolled hers back at me. She leaned forward in her chair and studied me with those ghostly irises.
“Let me ask you something.”
“Sure,” I said.
“With all due respect, because you seem like a good guy.”
“Shoot.”
“You met Karen Nichols, what, once?”
“Once, yeah.”
“And you believe me when I say she killed herself, all alone, no help?”
“I do.”
“So, Mr. Kenzie, why in the hell do you care what happened to her before she offed herself?”
I sat back in my chair. “You ever feel like you screwed up and want to make things right?”
“Sure.”
“Karen Nichols,” I said, “left a message on my answering machine four months ago. She asked me to call her back. I didn’t.”
“So?”
“So the reason I didn’t wasn’t good enough.”
She slipped on her sunglasses, then allowed them to slide down the bridge of her nose. She peered over the tops of the rims at me. “And you think you’re so cool-do I got this?-that if you’d just returned her call, she’d be alive today?”
“No. I think I owe her a little for blowing her off for a bad reason.”
She stared at me, her mouth slightly open.
“You think I’m nuts.”
“I think you’re nuts. She was a grown woman. She-”
“Her fiancé gets hit by a car. Was that an accident?”
She nodded. “I checked. There were forty-six people around him when he tripped and they all say that’s what happened-he tripped. A patrol car was parked a block away on Atlantic and Congress. It moved on the sound of impact, reached the scene roughly twelve seconds after the accident. The guy whose car hit Wetterau was a tourist, name of Steven Kearns. He was so devastated, he still sends flowers to Wetterau’s hospital bed every day.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why’d Karen Nichols fall completely apart-lose her job, her apartment?”
“Hallmarks of depression,” Joella Thomas said. “You get so locked into your own funk, you forget your responsibilities to the real world.”
A pair of middle-aged women with matching Versace sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads paused near our table, trays in hand, and looked around for an open seat. One of them glanced at my near-empty cup of coffee and Joella’s crumbs and sighed loudly.
“Nice sigh,” Joella said. “Come from practice?”
The woman seemed not to have heard her. She looked at her friend. Her friend sighed.
“It’s catching,” I said.
One woman said to the other, “I find certain behaviors inappropriate, don’t you?”
Joella gave me a big smile. “‘Inappropriate,’” she said. “They want to call me a coon, so they say ‘inappropriate’ instead. Fits their self-image.” She turned her head up at the women, who looked everywhere but at us. “Don’t it?”
The women sighed some more.
“Mmm,” Joella said as if they’d confirmed something. “Shall we go?” She stood.
I looked at her crumbs and teacup, my coffee cup.
“Leave it,” she said. “The sisters here will get it.” She caught the eye of the first sigher. “Ain’t that right, honey?”
The woman looked back toward the counter.
“Yeah,” Joella Thomas said with a broad smile, “that’s right. Girl power, Mr. Kenzie, it’s a beautiful thing.”
When we reached the street, the women were still standing by the table, holding their trays, waiting for valet service apparently, practicing their sighs.
We walked a bit, the morning breeze smelling of jasmine, the street beginning to fill with people juggling armloads of Sunday newspaper with white bags of coffee and muffins, cups of juice.
“Why’d she hire you in the first place?” Joella said.
“She was being stalked.”
“You dealt with the stalker?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think he got the message?”
“I did at the time.” I stopped and she stopped with me. “Detective, was Karen Nichols raped or assaulted in the months before she died?”
Joella Thomas searched my face for something-hints of dementia possibly, the fever of a man on a self-destructive quest.
“If she was,” she said, “would you go after her stalker again?”
“No.”
“Really? What would you do?”
“I’d relay my information to an officer of the law.”
She smiled broadly, a stunning flash of some of the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. “Uh-huh.”
“Really.”
She nodded to herself. “The answer is no. She wasn’t raped or assaulted, to the best of my knowledge.”
“Okay.”
“But, Mr. Kenzie?”
“Yeah.”
“And if what I’m about to tell you leaks to the press, I’ll destroy you.”
“Understood.”
“I mean, annihilate you.”
“Got it.”
She stuffed her hands in her pockets, leaned her tall frame back against a lamppost. “So you don’t think I’m just a chummy cop, blabs away to every PI in the city, that guy you took down on the force last year?”
I waited.
“He didn’t like women cops and he sure as hell didn’t like black women cops, and if you did stand up for yourself, he told everyone you were a lesbian. When you took him down, there was a lot of reshuffling in the department and I got transferred out of his department and into Homicide.”
“Where you belonged.”
“Which I deserved . So, let’s just say what I’m about to pass on to you is a little payback. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Your dead friend was picked up twice for solicitation in Springfield.”
“She was hooking?”
She nodded. “She was a prostitute, Mr. Kenzie, yeah.”
8
Karen Nichols’s mother and stepfather, Carrie and Christopher Dawe, lived in Weston in a sprawling colonial replica of Jefferson’s Monticello. It sat on a street of similarly sprawling homes with lawns the size of Vancouver that glistened with dew from gently hissing sprinklers. I’d taken the Porsche and had it waxed and washed before I arrived, and I’d dressed in the sort of casual summer attire the kids on 90210 seemed to favor-a light cashmere vest over a spanking new white T-shirt, Ralph Lauren khakis, and tan loafers. The getup would have gotten my ass kicked in maybe three or four seconds if I’d walked down Dorchester Ave., but out here, it seemed to be de rigueur. If I’d only had the five-hundred-dollar shades and wasn’t Irish, someone probably would have invited me to play golf. But that’s Weston for you-it didn’t get to be the priciest suburb of a pricey city without having some standards.