Prayers For Rain

7

I called Devin again, woke him up.

“Any luck with Ms. Diaz?”

“None. Chicks, man, you know?”

“I can’t get Detectives Thomas or Stapleton to return my calls.”

“Stapleton was one of Doyle’s golden boys, that’s why.”

“Ah.”

“You could see Hoffa having coffee in a diner, and Stapleton wouldn’t take your call.”

“Thomas?”

“She’s less predictable. And she’s working solo today.”

“Lucky me.”

“Yeah, well, you Micks. What can I say? Hang on. Let me find out where she is.”

I waited two or three minutes, and then he came back on the line. “You owe me, or do I even have to mention that?”

“It’s a given,” I said.

“It’s always a given.” Devin sighed. “Detective Thomas is working a death-by-stupidity in Back Bay. Go to the alley between Newbury and Comm Ave. ”

“Cross blocks?”

“ Dartmouth and Exeter. Don’t fuck with her. She’s hard-core, man. Eat you, spit you out, and never even break her stride.”

Detective Joella Thomas stepped out of the alley at the Dartmouth Street end and crab-walked under some crime scene tape, stripping off a pair of latex gloves as she went. As she slid out from under the other side of the yellow tape, she straightened from her crouch and snapped one glove clear of her fingertips, shook the white talc off her ebony skin. She called to a guy sitting on the bumper of the forensics van.

“Larry, he’s yours now.”

Larry didn’t even look up from his sports page. “He still dead?”

“Getting more so.” Joella pulled off the other glove, noticed me standing beside her, but kept her gaze on Larry.

“He tell you anything?” Larry turned a page of the paper.

Joella Thomas rolled a Life Saver from side to side in her mouth and nodded. “Said the ‘afterlife’?”

“Yeah?”

“Ain’t nothing but a house party.”

“Good news. I’ll tell the wife.” Larry closed his paper, tossed it into the van behind him. “Fucking Sox, Detective, you know what I’m saying?”

Joella Thomas shrugged. “I’m a hockey fan.”

“Fucking Bruins, then, too.” Larry turned his back to us and foraged in the forensics van.

Joella Thomas started to turn away, then seemed to remember my presence. She rolled her head back slowly in my direction, looked at me through the dusky gold lenses of her rimless sunglasses. “What?”

“Detective Thomas?” I proffered my hand.

She gave the fingers a quick squeeze and squared her shoulders so that she was facing me.

“Patrick Kenzie. Devin Amronklin may have mentioned me.”

She cocked her head and I heard the Life Saver rattle against a back tooth. “Couldn’t come by the station, Mr. Kenzie?”

“I thought I’d speed things up.”

She placed her hands in the pockets of her suit jacket, leaned back on her heels. “Don’t like being in a police station since you brought down a cop, that it, Mr. Kenzie?”

“The cells do seem that much closer.”

“Uh-huh.” She stepped back as Larry and two other forensics cops walked between us.

“Detective,” I said, “I’m real sorry an investigation of mine led to the arrest of a fellow-”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Joella Thomas waved a long hand in front of my face. “Don’t care about him, Mr. Kenzie. He was old school, old boy network.” She turned toward the curb. “I look old school to you?”

“Anything but.”

Joella Thomas was a slim six feet tall. She wore an olive double-breasted suit over a black T-shirt. Her gold shield hung from black nylon cord around her neck and matched the gold of the three hoop earrings in her left earlobe. The right lobe was as bare and smooth as her shaven head.

As we stood on the sidewalk, the deepening heat and morning dew rose off the pavement in a fine mist. It was early Sunday morning and the yuppies’ Krups coffeemakers were probably just beginning to percolate, the dog walkers just arriving at the doors.

Joella stripped off a twist of foil on her roll of Life Savers and removed one. “Mint?”

She extended the roll and I took one.

“Thanks.”

She placed the roll back in the pocket of her suit jacket. She looked back in the alley, then up at the roof.

I followed her gaze. “Jumper?”

She shook her head. “Faller. Went on the roof to shoot up during a party. Sat on the edge, spiked, and looked up at the stars.” She pantomimed someone leaning too far back. “Must have seen a comet.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Joella Thomas tore off a piece of her scone and dipped it in her oversize mug of tea before sliding it onto her tongue. “So you want to know about Karen Nichols.”

“Yup.”

She chewed, then swallowed a sip of tea. “You worried she was pushed?”

“Was she?”

“Nope.” She sat back in her chair, watched an old man toss small pieces of bread to some pigeons outside. The old man’s face was pinched and small and his nose was hooked so that he looked a lot like the birds he fed. We were in Jorge’s Cafe de Jose, a block from the crime scene. Jorge’s served nine different types of scones, a variety of fifteen muffins, squares of tofu, and seemed to have cornered the market on bran.

Joella Thomas said, “It was suicide.” She shrugged. “It was clean-death by gravity. No signs of struggle, no scuff marks from other shoes anywhere near the place she jumped from. Hell, it doesn’t get any cleaner.”

“And her suicide made sense?”

“In what way?”

“She’d been melancholy over the boyfriend’s accident, et cetera?”

“One assumes.”

“And that would be enough?”

“Oh, I see what you’re getting at.” She nodded, then shook her head. “Look, suicides? They rarely make sense. Tell you something else, most people who do it don’t leave a note. Maybe ten percent. The rest, they just off themselves, leave everyone wondering.”

“There must be a common thread or two.”

“Between victims?” Another sip of tea, another shake of the head. “All of them, obviously, are depressed. But who isn’t? Do you wake up every day thinking, Wow, it certainly is just super to be alive?”

I chuckled and shook my head.

“Didn’t think so. Neither do I. How about your past?”

“Huh?”

“Your past.” She waved a spoon in my direction, then stirred her tea. “You completely settled with everything that’s ever happened to you in your past, or are there some things-things you don’t talk about-that bug you, make you wince when you think about them twenty years later?”

I considered the question. Once, when I was very young-six or seven-and I’d just taken several swats of my father’s belt, I walked into the bedroom I shared with my sister, saw her kneeling by her dolls, and punched her in the back of the head as hard as I could. The look on her face-shock, fear, but also a sudden weary resignation-was a look that drove itself into my brain like a nail. Even now, more than twenty-five years later, her nine-year-old face jumped out at me in a Back Bay coffee shop and I felt a wave of shame so total it threatened to crumple me in its clenched fist.

And that was just one memory. The list was long, accrued over a lifetime of mistakes and bad judgment and impulse.

“I can see it in your face,” Joella Thomas said. “You got pieces of your past you’ll never be reconciled with.”

“You?”

She nodded. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned back in her chair, looked up at the ceiling fan above us, exhaled loudly. “Oh, yeah,” she said again. “The thing is, we all do. We all carry our past and we all mess up our present and we all have days we don’t see much point struggling on toward our future. Suicides are just people who commit. They say, ‘More of this? The hell with that. Time to get off the bus.’ And most times you never even know what straw it was that broke their back. I’ve seen some that, I mean, seemed to make no sense. A young mother in Brighton last year? All accounts, loved her husband, her kids, her dog. Had a great job. Great relationship with her parents. No money worries. So, all right, she’s the bridesmaid in her best friend’s wedding. After the wedding, she goes home, hangs herself in the bathroom, still wearing that ugly chiffon dress. Now, was it something about the wedding that got to her? Was she secretly in love with the groom? Or maybe the bride? Or did she remember her own wedding and all the hopes she’d had, and while watching her friends exchange vows, she was forced to face how cold and unlike her fantasy her own marriage was? Or did she suddenly just get tired of living this long-ass life?” Joella gave me a slow roll of her shoulders. “I don’t know. No one does. I can tell you that not one person who knew her-not one-saw it coming.”

My coffee had cooled, but I took a sip anyway.

“Mr. Kenzie,” Joella Thomas said, “Karen Nichols killed herself. That’s not debatable. You waste your time looking for why-what good’s that going to do?”

“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.”