Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Read online

  “Juliet,” Al said. “Miss Heavenly has been waiting for you.”

  I passed Sadie from my hip to Chiki’s waiting arms and extended my hand. The woman’s chartreuse acrylic nails added a good two inches to what were already vast hands and, as my palm disappeared into hers, I felt like a miniature schnauzer giving a paw to her mistress. The woman’s handshake was firm, but not bone-crushing. She was clearly adept at restraining the force of her grip. I looked up from her hand to her face. It was covered with a thick layer of creamy foundation, fluttery false eyelashes, and eye shadow that precisely matched the sparkling green of her nails. I’m embarrassed to say that it was only at that moment, as I was staring at the theatrical makeup applied with a clearly practiced hand, that I realized that Miss Heavenly was a man. Or had been, at one point in her life.

  “I’m Juliet Applebaum,” I said. “How can I help you?”

  Sadie squawked and I turned to Chiki. “Will you take her to Jeanelle for me?”

  A few months before, when it became clear that Sadie was no longer going to sit quietly in her bouncy seat while I worked, I had confronted the dilemma of every working mother: What was I going to do about childcare? Most days I worked only during the hours that the older kids were at school, but I still needed someone to watch Sadie between carpools if I was going to get anything done. I had a couple of disastrous interviews with nannies sent over by a nanny search service. One woman informed me that she required a scent-free environment and would only work for me if I removed all products with fragrances—including, but not limited to, detergent, soap, and cleaning supplies—from my house, my baby, and my person. This was a somewhat ironic request, as this particular nanny applicant might have been scent-free, but she was sure as shooting not odor-free. Another prospective nanny took one look at my house and my three children, one of whom was, at the time, busily trying to resuscitate a dead pet banana slug named Francisco, and declined the job. Taking pity on me and on her husband’s fledgling business, Al’s wife, Jeanelle, had offered to help out a few hours a day. I’d resisted at first, worried about taking advantage of her, but she genuinely seemed to enjoy Sadie’s company. I’d also offered pay her, which she graciously declined, informing me gently that I could not afford her.

  Chiki disappeared into the house with Sadie and I turned back to my guest. She was adjusting the collar of her ruffled blouse and I noticed that her cleavage swelled seductively in the gap of the plunging neckline. The skin of her chest was the smooth, clear brown of maple syrup, darker and more lustrous than her face under all the makeup. She noticed my gaze and smiled.

  “Oh, they’re real, honey,” she said. “I grew these girls all by myself.” She cupped her breasts with her hands. I heard a strangled groan and turned to Al. He was fairly purple with embarrassment.

  “Why don’t I take Miss Heavenly inside the house,” I said. “We’ll talk in the living room, and you can get on with the Fanswatler search.” We had an assignment from a film studio to work on a movie called The Amazing Adventures of Arthur Fanswatler. Unfortunately, an actual person named Arthur Fanswatler had come to light, a docent at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. With a name this bizarre, the studio can protect itself from litigation by tracking down three or more people who share the name, thus putting it in the realm of the unusual but not unique. We were being paid a fee of ten thousand dollars to track down two more Arthur Fanswatlers.

  “No, you stay here,” Al said. “I’ll work inside.” He took off through the door leading to the house.

  Miss Heavenly shook her head. “He’s not one for the ladies, now, is he?”

  I considered explaining to her that my partner is a traditional libertarian, and thus believes wholeheartedly in an individual’s right to choose to behave and dress in any manner he or she pleases. Moreover, he’s a conspiracy theorist with an arsenal that rivals that of David Koresh, and a long history of militia activity, so he not only believes in her right to be who she is, but would go to battle to protect it. But he’s an old-fashioned, macho kind of guy, and however much he pontificates about individual liberty, a hulking transvestite in a skintight leather skirt and Diana Ross wig is just going to freak him out.

  I shrugged. “So, what can I do for you?”

  “You know my cousin, Pauline. She goes by Sister Pauline.”

  “Of course I do.” A few months before I had worked on a case where Sister Pauline played a role. “How is she doing?”

  “Oh, she’s good. She’s doing real good with the baby and all.”

  “That’s great. I’m so glad.”

  “She told me what you did for her, and when she found out about my little sister she said, ‘You just go on and see Juliet. She’ll help you out.’ So here I am.”

  I settled myself behind my desk and woke up my laptop. “What’s going on with your sister?” I said as I opened a blank screen and began typing.

  “She was killed.”

  My fingers paused over the keyboard. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  She blinked a few times. Waterproof or not, that much mascara would not have survived tears, and she knew it. “I want you to find the man who did it.”

  “Miss Heavenly,” I began.

  “Oh, you can just call me Heavenly. It’s your friend who kept calling me Miss. My name is just Heavenly. One word, no last name. Like Cher and Madonna.”

  “Heavenly,” I said, “Al and I don’t really investigate murders. That’s a job for the police. I can help you in your dealings with the police, give you advice and that kind of thing, but I can’t do the investigation for them.”

  The truth was that though Al and I had investigated more than our share of murders, and had a clearance rate as good or better than the LAPD homicide squad, murder cases were just not what we looked to get involved in. We had an entirely different kind of caseload. We did mitigation investigations for defense attorneys, researching a defendant’s history and family to find evidence to prevent the jury from imposing a death sentence. We did insurance investigations, and we had a lucrative contract with an attorney to various Hollywood stars, keeping the messes his clients made for themselves from turning into real disasters. Now we were doing our first job for a film studio. That was the kind of work we needed to stay in business—corporate clients, law firms, no emotional attachment, and the bills paid on time.

  A murder investigation requires sophisticated investigative tools. Fingerprints, DNA, and crime-scene analysis are just the beginning. Access to crime-scene photographs and the postmortem report is almost always necessary to resolve a case, as is access to the witnesses. Homicides are most often solved by a sophisticated examination and assessment of the physical evidence, including DNA markings, ballistics reports, and hair and fiber analyses (although these last are iffy at best. Many a person has gone to jail or even faced execution based on a faulty hair analysis.) We just don’t have the resources for that, and there are only so many favors Al can call in from the guys he used to work with in the LAPD.

  “The police haven’t helped us,” Heavenly said. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward in her chair, splaying her large hands out on my desk. “My baby sister was killed six months ago, and the police have done nothing.” Her voice shook. “Nothing, you hear? They can’t be bothered with her. My mother saw the detectives once, when they came by the house to tell her Violetta was dead. I’ve been calling the case officer for months. When he deigns to return my calls, he has nothing to say.”

  I frowned. If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s a story about police incompetence or negligence. It just burns me up. “What’s the case officer’s name?” I said.

  She reached into her green faux crocodile purse, pulled out a worn and bent business card, and handed it to me. I took the card and put it on our brand-new copy machine. I made two copies, one for me and one for Al.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, despite the fact that my better instincts were telling me to avoid this case like the plague.
I’ve never done a very good job of paying attention to those little voices in my head. “I’m not sure I can help you, but the least I can do is give this Detective . . .” I glanced down at the card. “Detective Jarin a call, and see what’s going on with their investigation.”

  “Thank you so much,” Heavenly said, and now she did tear up. She raised her face to the ceiling to keep the tears from spilling and, grabbing a tissue from the box on my desk, began dabbing at her eyes.

  I said, “I’m going to need to hear about Violetta. If you can bear it, tell me as many details of the crime as you know.”

  The story Heavenly told was sordid and sad. Her younger sister, the youngest girl in a family of seven siblings, had slipped into a life of drug use and prostitution. “She wasn’t the first of my sisters to go that way,” Heavenly said. “We had it hard growing up. There was never any money in our house, and I think this seemed like easy money to them. My older sister Annette was on the streets for years before she died of AIDS. I have two brothers in prison, one for cocaine and one for jacking a car.”

  “Wow,” I said, for lack of anything better.

  “But my other sister Chantelle, she’s an RN and her husband’s a doctor. He’s doing a surgical residency at UCLA. My youngest brother, Ronnie, he’s a senior at UC San Diego. He wants to go into computers. Chantelle, Ronnie, and I, we came out all right.”

  My face must have betrayed something because she shook her head at me, obviously disappointed. “You don’t think I’m all right?”

  “No, no, of course I do,” I stammered. “I mean, I think you’re just fine.”

  “I’ll have you know that I have a good job, a steady boyfriend, I own my own home, as well as two rental properties, and I’m supporting not just myself and my mother, but Ronnie, too. I have paid every dime of that boy’s tuition. Not to mention supporting Annette’s two girls and Violetta’s son, Vashon. The children live with my mother, but I’m the one who pays everyone’s bills.”

  By now I was blushing furiously. “I apologize. I didn’t mean anything. Really I didn’t.”

  She shifted in her chair, not so easily mollified.

  “Tell me more about Violetta,” I said. “First of all, what was her last name?”

  “Spees.”

  “Where did she live?”

  “Wherever she could. With me or my mother when she was clean, and in SROs on the South Side when she was using, which was most of the time. Even when she was gone, I’d put twenty dollars a month on her cell phone, just so she could call us every once in a while. So we’d know she was okay.” She began blinking again, determined not to risk her makeup.

  “Would you write your mother’s phone number and address down here for me?” I pushed a small pad of paper across the desk. “And yours, too, so I know where to reach you.”

  After she returned it to me I glanced at it. Her mother’s name was Corentine Spees. Heavenly’s address was in West Hollywood, not too far from my old house in Hancock Park.

  “Do you know anything about who Violetta’s friends were? Who she hung around with?”

  She shrugged. “No. I know she worked Figueroa, at Eighty-fourth Street. That was her corner. If I needed to see her I could always find her there.”

  I made quick notes on my laptop. That grim area of South Central Los Angeles, with its hot-sheet motels and prostitutes vying with drug dealers for space on the street corners, was a place that the rest of the city did its best to pretend wasn’t there, ignoring the violence and misery, recalling its existence only when it spilled past the designated borders.

  “Can you tell me a little about her murder?” I said.

  Heavenly seemed to steel herself. “They found her body dumped in an alley. She was beat up bad. The medical examiner said she died of a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  “You saw the autopsy report? Do you have it?”

  Heavenly shook her head. “The funeral director told me. I think he thought it would be a comfort to me to know that she was unconscious when she died. And I think he wanted to explain why she looked . . . well, why he couldn’t make her look better. Her head was sort of. . .” Heavenly paused and pressed her fingertips to the corners of her eyes. “The side of her face . . . I thought he should have been able to do a better job with that.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “That must have made everything that much worse.”

  Heavenly reacted the way I do when I’m upset and someone is sympathetic. She started to cry.

  “Damn it,” she said. “I was not planning on breaking down in here.”

  “You lost your sister in a horrible way. Of course it makes you cry. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about her before we talk any more about what happened to her. You said she had a son?”

  Heavenly nodded. “Vashon. He’s seven years old. He’s a good boy, a little wild. He misses his mama. You know.”

  “Was he living with her when she died?”

  “No, he’s been with our mother since he was born. Violetta was on the street when she had him. She did her best to clean up while she was pregnant, but it was hard for her. She couldn’t get into a drug treatment program; she tried, but we couldn’t find one that would accept a pregnant woman. She was a fighter, Violetta, and she fought her urges for Vashon’s sake. She did the best she could.”

  “Do you know who Vashon’s father is?”

  Heavenly gave a short, cynical bark of laughter. “Honey, I told you, Violetta worked the streets. Only the Lord in heaven knows who that boy’s father is. I’ll tell you what, though, I’d put my money on him being a white man. Vashon’s a cup of coffee with a good-sized dollop of cream.”

  “Was Violetta seeing anybody else that you know of?”

  Heavenly shrugged.

  “What drugs was she using?”

  “What drugs wasn’t she using? She smoked crack. And when she had some money, she shot dope, too. She did meth once in a while, although I don’t think it was her favorite. Vi always said crank was a white man’s high.”

  Heavenly had collected herself, her eyes were dry, and I wished I didn’t have to go back to asking about Violetta’s murder, but there was no way around it. I put my laptop to one side, not wanting to be staring at my computer screen, taking notes like some unsympathetic stenographer. “Heavenly, I’m so sorry to ask this, but can you tell me if Violetta was sexually assaulted before she was killed?”

  “They wouldn’t say so for sure, only that they found evidence of sexual contact.” Heavenly shook her head, angrily. “I know she was raped. If some little white girl had been found tossed behind a Dumpster on Santa Monica Boulevard the cops wouldn’t dare suggest it was anything but rape.”

  If some little white girl had been tossed behind a Dumpster on Santa Monica Boulevard you can be sure it would have been front-page news in the L.A. Times and the top story on the local news. I wouldn’t have been hearing about it for the first time today.

  “Did the police have any suspects at the time, anyone they were looking at?”

  Heavenly shrugged. “The most I could get out of the detective was that they were operating on the assumption that it was a trick who killed her.”

  “Did she keep any kind of a record of her regular clients?” I didn’t have high hopes for this. She was a streetwalker, not a thousand-dollar-a-night prostitute with a BlackBerry and an answering service. I was guessing that her regulars knew what corner to find her on, and if she was busy when they pulled up, they either called over another girl, or waited ten minutes until Violetta was free.

  Heavenly just shook her head.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give the detective a call. See what’s going on with the investigation at this point. At the very least I can try to light a fire under him.”

  Heavenly reached for her crocodile purse and unsnapped it. “How does this work?” she asked. “Do I pay you by the hour or is it a flat fee?”

  I held up my hand to stop her. “No, no. I’m not going to take your money just to
call the detective. Depending on what I find out, we can decide what Al and I can do for you, if there’s any point to hiring us. We’ll talk about money then. We usually take a small retainer against the ultimate fee, and after that we bill by the hour.” I handed her the rate sheet that Jeanelle had designed for Al and me once she realized that our approach to charging our client billing wasn’t exactly what she could have wished. It was printed on fine stock in fourteen-point font. Big enough not to miss the point. It cost money to hire us. A lot of money. I could pretty much imagine what Jeanelle would say when she found out that I had promised a client an hour or two of free work.

  “Those are our normal rates,” I said. “But there’s some flexibility there.” Jeanelle was going to kill me.

  Heavenly unfolded herself from the chair and rose to her feet. In her four-inch heels she was a good six and a half feet tall. The oily curls of her wig just missed the hanging light fixture in the middle of our ceiling, and at just over five feet tall I barely came up to her artfully displayed bosom. She had a perfect view of the brown roots of my red hair.

  Once again my hand was swallowed up by her huge one. I watched as she walked out the door and marveled at the smoothness of her step in her spike heels. I have a weakness for shoes, one that I have been known to indulge. My own closet has more than its share of stilettos in various hues. However, I’ve never done more than mince in my shoes. I wondered how many years of practice it took to acquire such a confident stride.

  Three

  AFTER Heavenly left, Al stuck his head into the garage. “All clear?” he said. At my nod he and Chiki came back in and resumed their seats.