Deadly Lullaby (23 page)

Ovando gets moving right away, his fingers hovering just seconds over the keyboard before they spring to life. Even as shaky as he is, it is apparent this guy is good at what he does. He strokes the keyboard as if playing his coda on a piano, his finale, his head swaying to the hushed click of the keys as he looks back and forth from the computer screen to the slips of paper I placed to his left. Chief bends down to peer over Ovando's right shoulder to make sure he is not emailing for help, watching the virtual windows open and close on the screen as Ovando taps in passwords and account numbers, makes the transfer and moves on to another account. He repeats this maybe a dozen times before he looks up, his eyes jangly and even more bloodshot than before. He hangs his head, gasping for breath as he speaks. “All right, it's done.” He looks up. “You gonna kill me now?”

I pat his shoulder. “Now, now, relax, Errol, relax. Nobody is getting killed here. Mr. Alvarez is not that kind of man.”

This is not a true statement.

Ovando knows this. “Uh-huh,” he says, “right.” He digs his face into the crook of his arm to clear the tears from his eyes, hunches his shoulders defensively, clenches his fists, and begins to mumble a prayer of contrition.

I text three asterisks to Carmelita, who has her laptop with her in the parking lot.

I then text a preprogrammed message to my banker in the Cayman Islands, telling him the transfer is on the way.

“Relax, Errol. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. We have a bit of a wait now.”

“What were you and Sonita up to the last two weeks?”

Deer in the headlights.

Monique Lefler's eyes shift to the digital recorder resting on the coffee table, then jerk away from it. She looks at her father, Terry Lee, who sits stoically on the edge of the sofa next to her wearing shorts and a polo shirt, his hands clasped tightly between his legs.

Up close and personal, Monique's even more beautiful than the pictures Terry Lee gave me yesterday. Tall and physically mature, her gold-streaked black hair is straight and piled up in a modish bouffant, her Blasian features highlighted by her Asiatic black eyes; her eyes are made up nicely, and would be otherworldly if not bloodshot from having just wept for her dead friend. Overall, she has the look of someone professionally maintained: Her mocha skin is salon-facial flawless, and she's dressed to kill in a skintight brown tee with gold sequined stars across the front, equally tight designer jeans, and stacked brown eel-skin sandals, all expensive. Her fingernails and toenails are manicured and painted gold metal flake with wavy streaks of tiny faux diamonds on every other one, and her diamond earrings are anything but tiny or faux; each weigh at least a carat, and her matching necklace and bracelet also represent serious weight. Her perfume is nothing short of exquisite, and has established such a presence in the room that I've considered asking it to wait outside while I talk to its friend.

We're all three in Terry Lee's living room, father and daughter sitting next to each other on the leather couch, me sitting to their right in the cushy leather side chair. The voicemail Terry Lee left earlier informed me that Monique had come home this morning in response to his request, and he claimed she wanted to talk to me about Sonita. You wouldn't know she was willing to talk to anyone about anything from her quiet demeanor. She showed her only real emotion when I first mentioned Sonita's murder, emitting a sob or two before she clammed again after I started explaining my role in the investigation. Her discomfort unsettled the atmosphere in the room from the beginning, and she hasn't helped matters by refusing to answer the first substantive question I've put to her. In an effort to clear the air I say, “Monique, would you be more comfortable talking to me without your father present?”

“Yeah,” she says, breathing a small sigh of relief. She puts her hand over Terry Lee's, looks at her feet. “Sorry, Daddy-o.”

Smiling weakly, he pats her hand. “That's all right, baby. I'm not sure I want to listen to the tales you have to tell anyhow.” He stands, says, “I'll be on the patio.” On his way to the back door he brushes his hand across my shoulder and says, “Take care that my daughter doesn't get hurt for talking to you—understand?”

“You have my word,” I say.

Monique was sitting on the edge of the sofa, her posture ramrod straight; now, with her father out of her hair, she falls back, crosses her legs, and digs in her purse, coming out with a slim cigarette and gold lighter. She fires up; blowing smoke, she says, “Thanks.”

I nod. “When I met with your father yesterday, he told me he suspected that you and Sonita were working in the escort industry. Is that true?”

“ ‘Workin' in the escort industry,' ” she says with the slightest smile. “That's a nice way of puttin' it. Daddy-o's new piece of tail said I was
whorin'
when she answered his phone last week.”

“He told me yesterday you two didn't get along.”

“And
that
is a nice way of puttin' that,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “We actually hate each other's guts.” She smokes while gazing around the living room, finally says, “This house got awful little when Marla moved in, the bitch. I couldn't take seein' her around my dad, so I split. I needed money to live—right?—and with my parents havin'
worked
in the
escort industry,
I already knew how to make it on the internet.”

“You put up an escort ad on the web.”

“Right.”

“And Sonita joined you and put up one of her own.”

She nods, smokes. “She left because she hates”—she hesitates, corrects herself—“
hated
her Uncle Khang. He hit her.”

“Hit her?”

She nods. “With a belt. When she ditched school—which was, like, always—or got stoned—which was really, like,
al-ways
—or did other shit he didn't like, he'd lose it and hit her with a belt. My girl Sunny don't take
that
stuff, now, and when—”

“ ‘Sunny,' ” I say, “is that what you called Sonita, S-U-N-N-Y?”

She smiles. “Sometimes, yeah. That's what she decided to use as her business name, like when she was
workin' in the escort industry.
”

I finally acknowledge her verbal jab with a smile.

Monique says, “Sunny like sunshine, which fit her, 'cause she was so happy all the time. She wasn't happy around Khang, though, and when I told her what I was doin', she wanted to do it with me. So”—a shrug—“I said, ‘Fine, c'mon, girl, let's party.' ”

“Where have you two stayed the last few weeks?”

“Hotels,” she says. “Nice ones, too. Sometimes we hung together at night, dependin' on how business was runnin'. We most always saw each other durin' the day when business was slow—not always, but usually.”

“Did you see her the day she died?”

She smokes, looks away.

“Monique?” I say.

She stubs out her smoke in the crystal ashtray on the coffee table that contains four other lipstick-stained butts, all hers. “Could you turn that recorder off? It makes me nervous.”

“I'd rather keep it on so we have an accurate record of what's said.”

She turns her wrist upward to examine it like she's checking the time on a watch. There's no watch there, only a gold bracelet. “I'm thinkin' I won't say nothin' if you keep that damn thing on.”

Concealing as much frustration as I can, I punch it off.

“Thanks,” she says, smiling at the point she just scored. “About that day…To tell you the truth, me and Sunny'd been drinkin' a lot of cognac, and was pretty stoned, too.”

“Stoned on what?”

“Rock and weed,” she says, digging in her purse for another cigarette. “We'd had a room for a couple'a nights at the Four Seasons—in the Hills, you know—a kickin' suite that a customer paid up through a couple nights for me. We'd hung out all day, just partyin' and waitin' for the calls to come in.” She taps out another smoke and lights it, places her left arm across her abdomen and props her right elbow on top of that to facilitate smoking. “We'd almost burned through all the rock, and I had a in-call customer comin' over. Sonita said she'd take a cab over to MacArthur to score us some more for the next day—score more rock, right?”

“I'm with you.”

She nods. “Right before she left, she got a call from a regular, and she told him they could meet up at MacArthur, on Sixth, where a couple'a our dealers usually hung, then they could go on from there.” She looks away and backhands a tear that just leaked from her right eye, sniffles, and her voice breaks. “Then she left and—and I didn't see her again after that.”

I give her a few seconds to compose herself, then ask, “What time was that?”

Sniffling, coughing, she shrugs. “I dunno, late. It was dark, maybe around nine, ten. I think probably closer to ten, 'cause my customer was supposed to be there at ten thirty and I was gettin' up for it—excited, turned on, you know.”

Yeah, I know. “Who was this regular customer Sonita had agreed to meet up with at MacArthur?”

She stares at the space over my head as if fixated on a hovering UFO, and finally looks me in the eye as if surprised I'm still there. “Am I gonna have to say all this, like, in court?”

“Probably not, Monique. Most cases never go to trial because prosecutors offer the defendants good deals to plead guilty.” This is true; at least it's true across the broad spectrum of all types of criminal cases. The fact is that the stakes are so high in murder raps that both defendants and prosecutors push them to trial much more often than others.

My half-truth doesn't have its intended effect. “You can't guarantee me I won't have to go to court, though, can you?”

“Why are you worried about having to appear in court?” As if I don't know.

Monique takes a long draw on her cigarette, the smoke curling about her face as she studies me. “ 'Cause I think this customer or Khang might'a had somethin' to do with killin' my girl, and they're bad men.”

“I understand you're afraid, but—”

“Mister Cop,
afraid
don't tell the story. I'm so scared I can't sleep.”

Nodding, I say, “Which is why you didn't talk to me until now.”

“Yeah, I almost split town. Daddy-o told me to talk to you first.”

“Monique, it says a lot about your character that you listened to him and didn't split, that you've decided to stand up for Sonita.”

This seems to make an impression on her. “I can't promise I won't split right after you leave. But I'll tell you what I know.”

“I'll act like you didn't tell me that. For now, tell me about that regular customer who called Sonita the night she died.”

Monique's a little more relaxed now that I've given her the impression she can skip out with my blessing, sitting and smoking as she talks. “The guy who called her that night really wasn't the customer. He was the customer's driver.”

“Did the driver always call Sonita to arrange the date?”

“Right.”

“Never the customer himself.”

“Not that I know of, right.”

“We'll talk about the customer in a minute. First, tell me what you know about the driver.”

“I only saw him one time, the first time he picked Sonita up. That first time he called her and said he wanted a in-call date, you know, where he comes to our place?”

“As opposed to an out-call date, where Sonita would go to his place.”

She shoots me a knowing look, as if recognizing me as a player in the call-girl game. “The first time he called we were in a two-room suite at the Hilton, the one by the airport on Century.” She smiles and her eyes mist over as if relishing better times. “You know, that was the first night Sonita's ad went live. I had mine up and goin' before I left home, but it took us another day or two to do hers. We were both kind of nervous back then. I mean, we'd both tricked before, sort of—on the streets outside bars, for fun more 'n anything—but now we were agreein' to meet men over the phone without bein' able to see 'em and size 'em up first. So we agreed to only have in-calls that day—no out-calls, right?—so we could have each other's back in case somethin' went wrong.”

“Good move.”

“Yeah, well, the good move didn't last all night. We had in-calls that whole day into the evenin' and it all went down real cool—nice guys, clean and respectable like, older men with money, no thugs or assholes. Then this dude calls in the evenin' and asks to come over. When he gets into the suite he said what he really wanted was for Sonita to go with him to his place. I was in my bedroom, peepin' at 'em in the living room through the door with it cracked, right? And she came back there and told me what he wanted.”

“Can you describe the man?”

She nods. “He was kind'a Middle Eastern, dark, stout, and good-lookin' like a tough guy; hard, you know, like he worked out.”

“Hair?”

“Short and kind'a spiked up with gel. He wore sunglasses, wraparounds, sports sunglasses.”

My pulse quickens. Minus the sunglasses, this closely matches the description Taquan gave me of the man he saw standing over Sonita's corpse. “He was wearing sunglasses at night?”

She waves her hand in the air as if that was no big deal. “A lot'a guys do that when they come in hotels to meet us.”

“Do you remember his clothes?”

She nods. “Casual but nice, maybe a leather jacket, maybe a sport coat, designer jeans maybe. He looked like he packed decent coin, which is what we in the
escort industry
always look for in a man.” A smile.

I smile back. “What did Sonita tell you when she came to your room?”

“She said she told him no at first, that they had to do their date in the hotel suite, but he talked her into it. He finally said he was just a driver, and the real customer was his boss. He said his boss was a big man in town who didn't go out in public very much, a rich man. He promised she'd be treated with respect—she said he said ‘respect' a lot, you know, to ease her mind, which is somethin' us that
work in the escort industry
like to hear.”

I nod, softly rolling my eyes as if say, “
All right, enough already with the escort industry jab,”
subtly urging her to continue.

“He offered her a thousand bucks, in advance, to go over to the man's place for a couple hours. She already had the cash with her when she came to my room—all fifties and hundies. She left it with me to hold on to, and I told her to tell the man she'd done that.”

“And she went with him.”

“Yeah, and when she got back later—after the session, right?—she said everything went down fine. She stayed almost all night and came back with, like, another thou or more in her purse.”

“The driver ever tell her his name?”

She shakes her head. “She prob'ly mentioned it, but I can't remember.”

“That could be real important, Monique. Think about it some more.”

A hurt expression. “I've already thought about it. I hear a lot of men's names, like twenty a day sometimes, and most of 'em are bullshit ones men make up. His name just didn't mean nothin' to me at the time.”