Senator Love (6 page)

"Somethin changed. She wouldn't tell us much. Even
when she came home on holidays she told us nuthin about her life except that
she still had the same job and she was happy. But we both knew, mah husban and
I, that somethin had changed. Parents know their children. Wasn't that she was
morose or unhappy. Not moody. She was quieter, like she feared sayin much to
us. Betta always confahded. That was what made us think that somethin was being
hidden from us. Oh we asked if she had any boyfriends. Mah husban worried more
about that than anythin. She just smahled over that one, but she told us nothin
and treated us as if we didn't have a raht to ask." She paused, shook her
head then looked away and stared into space. "So we went up thayah to see
for owah selves." The woman paused and cleared her throat. Then she saw
that Fiona's cup was empty.

"May ah offer you moh?" she asked. Fiona
declined, worried that the interruption might inhibit the woman's story. It
didn't.

"We came up thayah without tellin Betta. It was a
Sunday, ah remembah. We had her address. She told us she was livin with some
girls in an apahtment on Capitol Hill." She shook her head. "We
didn't expect to fahnd what we did. She was livin in one of them townhouses
that had been converted to apahtments. She was sure surprahzed to see us. Not
too happy, I can tell you. In fact, she was downraht mad, accusin us of spahin
on her. The surprahz was owas, I can assure you. We saw no sahns of girlfriends
and the place looked more expensive than she could afford. We had words and it
was apparent that Betta wanted us to leave and we did." She shrugged and
was silent, forcing Fiona to prod her.

"What did you and your husband think?"

"We may be small-town folks, but we are not uneducated
and naive." She drew herself up stiffly in the chair. "Somebodah was
helpin her pay for that."

"Did you confront her with that accusation?"

"We did. She told us to mahn our own business. Oh, she
had become arrogant. While we wuh thayah she got a phone call and we heard
words between huh and whoever it was. They're jes leavin, she told the person.
And we had the impression that the person on the othah end was none too happy
with the revahlation that Betta's parents had come to visit."

"Did you have any idea who that might be?"

She shook her head.

"Any intuitive ideas?"

Mrs. Taylor shot her a look of sudden disdain.

"We had ahdees." She was obviously having
difficulty fighting off her reluctance.

"Like what?" Fiona pressed, but gently.

"She was involved with a waht man."

The woman said it flatly, but the accusatory passion was
unmistakable. This, to Mrs. Taylor, was the real sin of the situation. Fiona
knew that she would not explain this further. It was simply a fact of her
existence. Born on the edge, she had made her choice and that choice was
irrevocable for her and her progeny to the end of time.

"You had evidence of this?"

"None but what we knew to be true in owah hahts."

Fiona detested that kind of decree of truth without proof.
Intuition was merely speculation. Many an injustice had been perpetrated by
such self-induced fantasies. A hunch was not necessarily truth, although it was
sometimes true. This was, however, not the time to debate the issue.

"Did you confront her with this?" Fiona asked.

"Mah husban was a man of deep prahd. He felt that
Betta had betrayed owah trust in her. We just stohmed outta thayah. Ah do admit
ah was also very upset."

"What happened after that?"

"Mah husban determined not to have nothin to do with
her. You have to undahstan. She was his little girl, the apple of his ah, and
she had betrayed him. We had no illusions. She was involved with a waht man.
Bein kept by him in a stahl that she could not afford. She was his
mistress." Her lips curled in disgust. "This was not the way she was
brought up." She was, it was obvious, having difficulty mustering the heat
of the old indignance, but she tried gamely to keep the pose for appearance's
sake. Only her sad grey-blue eyes broadcast her defeat.

"You didn't try to contact her?" Fiona asked. She
could tell that Mrs. Taylor was coming to the end of the line, unable to keep
the illusion of postponement going for much longer.

"Mah husban fohbid it."

"Did Betty try to contact you?"

Her lips trembled. She was having increasing difficulty
keeping herself under control.

"She did trah. But..." The woman swallowed and
turned away. From the movement of her back Fiona could see she was taking deep
breaths, determined not to fall apart. When she spoke, her voice was raspy.
"Unda any circumstances, a lack of communication is nevah the raht
course." The rebuke was meant for herself. "Add that to prahd and you
have a disasta. Aftah a few weeks of trahin, and confrontin owah rejection, she
gave up."

"But you did report her as missing?"

"Mah husban had a heart attack and died soon aftah.
She had a raht to know that." The dike finally burst and tears ran over
the rims of her eyes, down her cheeks. She used a napkin to blot them.

"Where did you think she went?"

"As far away from us as possible," she whispered,
again managing control. "The police speculated that she had just run off.
Her clothes were gone. She had not shown up to work. People called from the
committee and such wonderin weah she was, but that stopped soon enough. The
police said it frequently happens to a young girl in the big city. She'd be
back, they told me."

The light had changed in the room. Shadows were deepening,
but Mrs. Taylor made no move to put on the lights. In the darkness, there was
no mistaking her race. She was a woman who knew who she was, who clearly
understood her racial predicament. Fiona waited through the long silence, but
it was apparent that nothing more was to be offered before the burning question
was answered.

"Weah is mah baby?" Mrs. Taylor asked.

"I think she's dead," Fiona said, not meaning to
offer hope. "I'll need the name of her dentist."

She heard air expelled, as if it were a scream whose fury
could not find any way of exiting the woman. She could see the balled fists and
whitening knuckles and imagined the pain of her long night of guilt, which up
to then had been merely a prelude.

SHE AVOIDED the inevitable confrontation for most of the
day, spending her time in the office continuing to go over the open cases,
searching for overlooked leads. But her mind was elsewhere. Mrs. Taylor had
unnerved her.

Earlier she had phoned in the name of Betty Taylor's
dentist to Dr. Benton's office. Just procedure, she knew, feeling certain that
the dental records would confirm Betty's identity. But considering the obstacle
of the eggplant, she wanted the identification to be impeccable. In his present
mood, he would challenge her on every tiny detail.

She also called down to a friend in records who brought up
on the computer the details of the investigation. Wasn't much. They had treated
it routinely, assuming that the woman had run out on her job and went off to
find a new life somewhere else, a common occurrence among young people.

She looked toward the eggplant's office. He was berating
one of his men, tongue-whipping him.

"Man wants his numbers," Cates said.

"Law and order. The old bugaboo," Fiona muttered.
"Mayor's got a point, though. Better numbers in homicide will make him
look good. Show the voters, especially the blacks who bear the brunt of it,
that he's tough on crime. Not to mention that it's good money-raising fodder
for the whites who think one day the black menace will invade their protected
little compounds, guns blazing."

"Money and votes." Cates sighed.

"You're learning, pal."

Again she looked toward the eggplant's office. She felt
Cates watching her.

"I wouldn't," Cates warned, as if reading her
mind. She had told him of her visit to Mrs. Taylor. "Today is
Monday."

It was an anomaly. The eggplant looked forward to his
weekends, then returned on Monday, more often than not, gloomy and depressed.
His barometric pressure seemed directly related to how his wife, Loreen, had
treated him.

A pushy, domineering woman with antecedents that had deep
roots in old black money and influence in the community, Loreen made no bones
about disapproving her husband's present status and was forever prodding him to
be more aggressive in his pursuit of the police commissionership.

Since this was ultimately the decision of the Mayor, his
reelection was crucial to the eggplant and his wife's ambition. Hence the
tension. Boosting the homocide statistics had serious personal as well as
political connotations for Luther Greene.

"The press ignored it. No big deal. We've got it on
the books. It's not that we're covering up a crime," Cates reasoned.

"It needs work and, therefore, approval from our Lord
and Master," Fiona countered.

"So do these." he said, holding up the files.

She looked at Cates and shook her head.

"You're getting to be a real kiss-ass, Cates,"
she told him. An idea was emerging in her mind, a plan.

"Considering the manpower, he has a point about the
more recent cases," Cates said. "Murderers are walking around. The
streets are running with blood." He chuckled.

"This one's been walking around for twelve
years."

"Why so personal on this?" Cates asked, obviously
puzzled.

"Good question." She had been asking it herself.
She thought about it a moment, then felt the compulsion to articulate
something.

"She was expendable and she was dumped," Fiona
said. "Could be I'm offended by the constant drumbeat of female abuse.
Maybe I'm relating too much. I know it's a problem. But I don't want to stop
myself."

"Some things are out of your hands, Fi," Cates
said seriously. She knew he had no stomach for admonishing her, perhaps afraid
he might set off some Irish fireworks. All right, she was, as her father would
say, headstrong. Tame it, he had warned. She was working on it, she promised
him again and again.

"There's still a right and wrong," she said,
watching his face. "Could be that someone who thought she was white found
out she was really black and got very pissed off. As a black man doesn't that
fry your guts, Cates?"

She knew it didn't, which was a problem for Cates. The fact
was that he did not have the inner sensibility of the oppressed black. He had
been born in Trinidad and had arrived in America as a teenager. By then, he had
a fixed view of himself in relation to the white world, determined that he was
an educated equal responsible for his own destiny, and let it go at that. For
this reason, he was, along with her, a white woman, considered an outsider by
his colleagues. She was merely reminding him of their alienation.

"Murder is beyond race, gender or nationality,"
he said, deliberately offering the warmed-over cliché. She got the point.

"All right, then," she said, springing the trap.
"What about simple partner loyalty. Are you going to let me go in there by
myself?"

He averted his eyes and she could see a nerve palpitating
in his jaw. Without looking at her he shook his head. A minute later they were
sitting in the eggplant's office.

Since she had been thinking about it all day, she was able
to encapsulate the information before the eggplant could raise a full head of angry
steam. He lit a panatela and blew a geyser of smoke into the already
cigar-smelly room. In the pause of the long puff and exhalation she followed
her plan.

"Somebody around here was incompetent a dozen years
ago," she said.

It stopped him short. Incompetent was always a wounding
word loaded with racial implications. The fact was that the level of competence
was much lower twelve years ago, statistically speaking. It was the time when
the racial balance was in flux, on the verge of moving to a black majority.
There were those that blamed it on the flux and others who ascribed more
bigoted motives.

"And your evidence for such an accusation?" the
eggplant asked, nostrils quivering with repressed anger.

"It was just a surface job. Nobody really showed any interest."

"Can you be more specific?"

"They did no investigation, made no attempt to go
beyond the obvious."

"And what would you have done?"

"I'd have talked to co-workers, former roommates, her
landlord."

"Why? Was there evidence of foul play?"

"Nobody ever looked."

"Why should they have?"

"Because she was a young beauty, living in a plush
apartment, obviously living above her means."

"And that would be grounds to assign manpower, spend
the taxpayers' money?" He puffed deeply on his cigar and the smoke came
out with his words. "Maybe she was a hooker. That would account for the
apartment."

She berated herself for her oversight. Worse, she had built
her case on Mrs. Taylor's intuition about Betty having a white lover, thereby
neglecting the obvious. The missed beat told him that she was vulnerable.

"You didn't check?"

"No, I didn't." She stole a look at Cates, who,
obviously seeing the debacle, turned away. "Christ, Chief. I was with her
mother yesterday." She paused and raised her hands in a cease-and-desist
gesture. "It was on my own time. Anyway, this was a good family. Her
mother was a proud woman. I told her what we had found."

"And the ID was positive?" the eggplant asked. He
was boring in on the obvious, magnifying the flaws.

"Except for the dental," she said defensively.
"The Medical Examiner will confirm. I'm sure of it." She looked up at
the eggplant's face. Was he intrigued? With him, it was impossible to tell.

"Suppose it doesn't check?" he asked.

"It has to."

The eggplant lowered his head and shook it in mock
disbelief.

"Now we're stuck with it," he said. She observed
the protocol and made no comment, knowing she had won a tiny victory.
"Pretty clever, FitzGerald." He offered a sneer, but she could tell
from his eyes that he was relieved that he had found a way to give his consent
without surrender. What was most maddening to her was her inability to lay down
a matrix of his logic system. He could feign stupidity with the best of them,
could pose as a hardhead, while all along he would be creating networks of
subtle new logic to test and challenge them. He seemed always to be probing,
forever challenging, playing the flunky, even the stereotypical black
incompetent to infuriate them, setting out decoys and red herrings to confuse
them, leading them through minefields where only he knew the path of safety.

"Does that imply that you want us to continue?"
she asked cautiously.

Despite the victory, she was annoyed at being bested. Her
plan was to unleash a nasty racial weapon to force his hand. The woman was
black, asshole. That's why they swept it under the rug. Twelve years ago, who
gave a shit about a missing black woman? Even black detectives were singing
whitey's tune.

"It implies," he said slowly, crushing the stub
of his panatela in his overflowing ashtray, "that we are also stuck with
the baggage of the past. There's lots out there who want to think we're
incompetent, a label far more politically damaging than merely showing lesser
homicide numbers." He lit another panatela. "We mustn't stand in the way
of identifying the lady. That certainly counts as official interest. If you get
my drift." Then he turned away, his attention now concentrated on some
paperwork on his desk.

As she and Cates left, she felt his gaze on her back.
Perhaps he was smiling as well. But she dared not turn back to find out.