Habit of Fear (8 page)

“Would you like to do me a little favor, Friend Julie? Then I does one for you like …”

“Like what?”

“The fuzz done busted me again, and my pimp say he won’t pay no more fines. He say I don’t run fast enough, but I can’t run no faster.”

“How much is the fine?”

“I don’t know till I goes before the judge, the different judges say different. I bet they don’t say more’n fifty dollars seeing it’s you and knowing …”

Knowing,
Julie thought, the key word. Knowing what May Weems might be able to contribute to the apprehension of the men who attacked Julie Hayes. “Where are you?”

“They taking me to a holding pen—like I was a pig or something, so’s they can deliver me first thing tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll find you,” Julie said. She hung up the phone and sat a moment thinking back to her last encounter with May Weems—and her pimp. He affected the bad speech of the comic Stepin Fetchit back in the days when blacks were colored people or Negroes. She wondered if May imitated him. She wasn’t very bright. Only cunning and pathetic. But smart enough to have avoided saying just what she’d do for Julie to return the favor.

Detective Russo, aware of the arrest—he might even have arranged it, Julie thought—tracked May Weems to the old Fifth Precinct stationhouse in Chinatown. He put Julie in touch with the desk sergeant, and she was able to learn from him that May Weems would go before Criminal Court Judge Arbiter in the morning.

M
ISERY DIDN’T LOVE COMPANY
in that courtroom. The early arrivals were concerned spectators, who chose to sit far apart from one another. A few were young, but most were not. They were working women, most of them, and most of those were black. They were losing half a day’s pay to be in court, or half their sleep if they worked by night. They had dressed to look respectable, able to cope with the son or daughter on whose behalf they’d come. The bailiff waited at attention; there was activity at the lawyers’ tables; the court stenographers were ready. The judge was in his chambers.

Prisoners began to arrive with their arraignment officers; they congregated at the rear of the room, a scruffy mix of anger and bravura, looking only sidewise to see if there was anyone in court for them. Their lawyers, mostly court assigned, drifted in through a side door chatting with one another, ignoring the clients with whom they would in their own good time make contact.

“Friend Julie!” The woman waved.

Julie waved back. She hadn’t recognized her on arrival. May Weems presently pointed her out to a sallow young man Julie was sure would smell of mothballs. After a few words with his client he came to Julie, introduced himself and offered a limp hand. He reeked of shaving lotion. Mothballs would have been better. He sat down beside her and asked how high she could go if he could get his client off with a fine and suspended sentence.

“Fifty bucks,” Julie said.

He groaned and shook his head as though that wasn’t going to do it. Then: “Is she telling the truth about being a witness in a rape case?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll try, Friend Julie,” he drawled.

Julie glowered at him for the familiarity. Rape, the great equalizer.

Sniveling kids and arrogant punks went with state-paid lawyers before the bench of Judge Arbiter, every one of them a mother’s son. Not a father in sight. One of the few professions Julie had not at one time or another made a run for was the law. She had no regrets that morning.

May Weems was called and charged with 240-37, loitering for purposes of prostitution. Her attorney asked if he might approach the bench. The black girl waited, her only curiosity a glance Julie’s way to be sure she was still there. May wore tight orange pants and yellow boots. Her black T-shirt hung limp as though she had shrunk within it. No one seemed to have dressed up for court. Tatters and naked parts that showed their scars. A lot of scars. But if she were a judge, Julie thought, she would demand clean clothes as part of the court’s decorum. She heard mention of her name, and then May’s lawyer beckoned her to come to the bench.

“Hi, Friend Julie.” May Weems wore heavy makeup, but the eyes framed in mascara were as dead as buttons.

The judge frowned at the black girl and turned to Julie. “I understand you’ve tried to help this woman before.” Julie was surprised that May would have mentioned it.

“If you can find a way to get her off the streets, you’ll be doing society a service. And you might save her life. I’m fining the defendant twenty-five dollars … if that’s satisfactory to her. …” He glanced at May’s lawyer, making the mandated query, and with hardly a pause added: “Case dismissed.”

May Weems could have found her way to the court clerk’s office blindfolded. Julie got a receipt for her twenty-five dollars.

“He’d’ve wanted more if I was to pay,” May said as they waited outside the Criminal Court building, Julie trying to flag a cab. “When you ain’t got no money, that’s when it costs you.”

“How about the favor you’re going to do for me?” Julie asked.

“I intends to. The police say this old street person, did I know them? Did I know where they goes? I ain’t going to say till I finds out why. And then I only say I try and find out. … Julie, honey, I sure glad them wasn’t black men what attacked you.”

A cab pulled up and discharged a passenger. Julie pushed May Weems in ahead of her. “Tell the driver where we’re going.”

“Make him go up the West Side and let us out when I say when.”

Julie directed the cabdriver. Then to May: “This old street person—man or woman?”

“I swear she half and half. She not right in the head either. But I knowed she must be who the fuzz was talking about. Missy Glass. She say she try to get me in where she stay sometime, but they say, ‘No, thank you. We don’t take no ‘hoes.’”

Julie was moved to touch the girl’s hand. May drew it away, reminding Julie of her own problem these days with touching. She said, “You’re all right, May. You’ve still got pride in people, so why don’t you have some in yourself?”

“I ain’t people. I’s a whore.”

Julie said nothing more. She knew as well as Judge Arbiter how very nearly hopeless it was to preach a straight gospel to May Weems.

They were approaching Twentieth Street on Eighth Avenue when May said they could walk from there. While Julie was paying the cab fare, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, May pull down the shirt to display a naked shoulder. A reflex of the profession, for by the time Julie emerged from the cab, both shoulders were again covered. They walked along a street that if not as full of grace as it had been in the nineteenth century, wore an air of respectability. Fleetingly, Julie thought of what it might be like to restore a brownstone and furnish an apartment in it for herself.

“This here,” May said.

They approached a church within sight of the abandoned elevated tracks. May explained that they were going to a refuge provided by the Saint Vincent de Paul Sisters of Charity. At a side entrance to the church basement she rang the bell and gave Julie instructions: “You be the one and ask for Missy Glass.”

“How do you know she’s here?”

May pulled up by a couple of inches her hammered-down look. “Sometimes I takes her home when she don’t know the way.”

A chubby red-cheeked nun in a blue uniform and wearing a large crucifix on her breast opened the door to them. Julie asked to see Miss Glass.

“Missy’s in the back room working,” the nun said and led the way. She asked Julie if she worked for the city.

“No. It’s a personal matter. Missy Glass may have witnessed something that happened to me.”

“Something bad,” May added enthusiastically.

They walked through a curtained dormitory, a dozen cots made up uniformly, and came to a recreation room—a television set and faded garden furniture, a table with a coffee urn and magazines. Only one person was present, a gaunt, stooped creature who could indeed have been taken for a man or woman. She wore men’s slacks and shoes, and she was sorting what Julie presently saw to be pieces of broken glass on an old pool table.

“Visitors, Missy Glass,” the nun called out with a good-news air.

The woman straightened up as far as she could, to some three-quarters of what was once her normal height. Her hair was gray and brown shag. Her smile was shy, her teeth bad, her eyes furtive.

The nun approached the table and said of a laid-out assortment of glass fragments, “Aren’t these pretty?” She explained to Julie that a woman who made jewelry gave a day a week to the mission. “Missy is very good.” As though praising a child.

And Missy seemed hardly able to bear the praise, turning her head away, the color rising to her slack and wrinkled cheeks. The smell of the woman remind Julie of mushrooms.

When the nun left them, May Weems said, “This here the lady you seen getting in the trailer. Remember, Missy Glass?”

Julie stiffened. “Please, May, don’t tell her what she saw. Let her tell us. … Would you please, Miss Glass … Missy? Do you remember? It was a Sunday morning. Very quiet. Did you hear anything unusual before you saw me?”

May burst in again. “She don’t hear good, but she hear something.”

“Can’t you be quiet, May?”

The woman looked surprised or alarmed by their exchange.

“I just trying to help. Them men don’t mean her no good either, Friend Julie, but she don’t know that. I’s the one makes her stay here and do her glass.”

Julie said, “May, do
you
know the men?”

“Seem like I ought to. I knows a lot of Johns that part of town.”

Missy Glass was looking at Julie surreptitiously. The large, strange eyes, which made her expression seem one of continual surprise, fled when Julie tried to hold them with her own gaze.

“Tell her how they whistle at you, Missy. Like you was a dog,” May said.

The woman puckered her lips and gave a short, rather sweet repetitive whistle.

“Where were they when they whistled at you?” Julie asked.

“In the doorway.” Her voice was low, barely audible.

“Before that,” May coached, “they was in the car and stopped.”

The woman turned to her and said, as though unsure, “Were those the same men?”

“You say to me it the same whistle.”

“They wanted to know what I was looking for. Pieces of glass, I told them, pieces of pretty colored glass.”

“Had you been to that same place before?” Julie asked.

“It was one of my best places.”

“They say to her they got lots of nice glass they wants to show her. Right, Missy?”

So, Julie reasoned, if they were neighborhood youths, they would have seen her before and they would have scouted the trailers for one that suited their purpose.

“Lots of lovely glass.” The woman articulated the words carefully. She had good speech, but there was a vagueness to the inflection, as though the words had taken shape in her mind well before she was able to voice them.

The intimate memory of that scene inside the trailer came back to Julie with shocking immediacy. Anger followed, outrage at the degradation, the inhumanity intended in the assault upon this unfortunate creature. It was an anger she had not been able to summon on her own behalf.

May Weems kept trying to prime Missy Glass. Julie said, “Please, May, let’s both be quiet and let Missy tell us in her own way everything that happened that Sunday.”

“But nothing happened,” the woman said.

And May Weems said, “See. Tell her about the baby, Missy.”

But Missy, it seemed, was still one step behind. “I explained to them that unless I could collect the glass myself, it wasn’t right for me. It has to weather and refine.” She took up a piece and nested it in the palm of her hand to show Julie: a deep, clear blue. The arthritic fingers were curled like question marks.

“The baby,” May nudged again.

“I could hear it crying in the trailer and one of the men came out to me and asked if I knew how to take care of a baby. Babies don’t like me. I said it would cry even more if it saw me, and it did keep on crying. So I moved further away—where there was hardly any glass at all.”

Enter Julie Hayes, Julie thought, who knows everything about babies. “What did the men look like, Missy? Say the one who came and spoke to you about the baby.” They couldn’t have been wearing masks then, certainly not while one of them was driving the car.

“I didn’t look. I always turn away when people I don’t know speak to me.”

“But what could you see without looking?” Julie persisted. “You know, like out of the corner of your eye.”

“He limped as though he was lame. And his red hair hung down over one cheek.”

“Red?”

“Yes …”

“And his eyes—what color were they?”

She shook her head. She simply had not looked until he had turned away.

“How old would you say?”

Again she shook her head, and Julie thought she would learn more questioning May Weems about what Missy had told her. But first: “Where were you, Missy, when they stopped the car and spoke to you?”

“I was working my way from the street. I had my back to them.”

“When they whistled?”

She nodded.

“Did they speak from the car?”

“One of them called to me, ‘Whatcha doing, honey?’ I didn’t answer.”

“Did you see what kind of car they were driving?”

“A small car—like an egg.”

A Volkswagen, Julie would say. “What color was it?”

“It wasn’t any color.”

“Did you see them enter the trailer?”

“They couldn’t get the door open at first. That’s when one of them came and asked me what I was looking for. When he went back, the door was open.”

“Did you see the baby?”

Missy Glass just stared, that surprised look on her face. Then she said, “The baby stopped crying when the woman came and they helped her into the trailer.”

“Yeah,” Julie said and let it pass. “Did you see anybody leave the trailer, Missy?”

She shook her head. “I went away then. I thought they might be watching me. I had some very good glass I didn’t want stolen from me.”

Julie turned to May Weems. “When did you two get together to talk all this over?”