And When She Was Good, page 15
“It’s horrible, of course. It’s not what one expects, not in that neighborhood.”
“Not for the everyday resident, but maybe not so surprising for a whore.”
She flinches at the term. Still, no question has been asked. There is nothing for her to say.
“A whore,” he repeats. “That’s a nasty business. Nasty things happen.”
“Was she killed by a client?” Tyner is allowed to speak as he wishes.
“You’d think so, right? I mean, that’s how it works in the movies. Some guy’s got a fetish, he goes around killing prostitutes. But let me tell you, those guys, they are not going to the high-end ladies.” Heloise feels a bizarre flash of validation to hear her own theory supported. “And this lady wasn’t supposed to be seeing customers, being under indictment and all.”
“Right,” Tyner says. “But she had a black book.”
“You need to stop thinking that newspapers get stuff right,” Jolson says, not unkindly. “There was no black book, not really. She had a coded list of customers. We broke it pretty easy. The most ordinary guys you could imagine. No senators, no bigwigs.”
Bigwigs? Heloise has never heard someone use that term in earnest.
“I’m not saying these guys didn’t care about being found out. They were shitting bricks, but it was all about their wives and bosses and neighbors, you know? The ones we talked to—they have alibis or it’s just not plausible. I mean, you cannot imagine these guys carrying off something like this. Trust me, they would have confessed. They confessed to everything. I felt more like a priest than a detective.”
Silence. What is there to say? Heloise feels as if she can pinpoint the exact location of her heart. It is like a pigeon caught in a chimney, flapping its wings, desperate to get out, blind in the darkness.
“What do you want from my client, Detective?”
“A show of emotion, at the very least. You know her, right?”
Tyner has to poke Heloise. She hasn’t registered Jolson’s comment as a question. “I don’t think so.”
Jolson pushes a photo across the desk. Now it’s the living version of the woman as she appeared in her last court appearance. Thin, dark eyes—Heloise shakes her head, happily sincere. She has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Does she look familiar to you in this photo?” The next one is a Polaroid of two women—the wraithlike, coked-up Bettina, eyes enormous, her arm around a juicier version of the dead woman, making out in a halfhearted way. But that’s Shelley, not Michelle Smith. A brief favorite of Val’s long ago. Lord, Heloise hasn’t thought about her in, well, forever.
Heloise has been so sure of her absolute innocence in whatever matter was at hand that she hasn’t asked Tyner what to do if asked about something she doesn’t wish to discuss. She has to make a split-second decision. She goes to her default. She lies.
“No,” she says.
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.” Michelle Smith. A different name, and she looks so different. She hasn’t aged well at all. Funny, she got so thin and Bettina got so plump—
“You have something in common.”
Heloise wonders if she is going to throw up, and if she can plead food poisoning if she does. “Really?”
“She’s on the visitors list for a convicted killer named Valentine Day Deluca.”
Don’t say his full name, she wants to warn automatically. Instead she allows herself to furrow her brow as if she’s trying to be a good Girl Scout, put together these connections.
“You are, too.”
She is so well trained she won’t even affirm this until Tyner makes eye contact and nods.
“Yes, I am.”
“Why?”
“Because I visit him.”
“I mean, why do you visit him?”
“I knew him.”
“Were you one of his whores?”
“I was his girlfriend.” It’s hard not to say this without laughing. Still, they can’t prove she was a prostitute. She was never arrested, not even once. The closest she came was the time she shoplifted the home pregnancy kit. And she knows Tom won’t give her up, to anyone, not even to another cop. “His work life—I admit I turned a blind eye, tried to ignore what was right in front of me.”
“He’s a pretty bad guy. How did a nice lady like you ever become involved with him?”
“I was very young when I came to Baltimore. Also very broke and very desperate. I didn’t have the best taste in companions. Val’s arrest set me straight, made me see that I needed to get out and start over.”
“Why do you still visit him?”
“I was under the impression he didn’t have anyone. Now I know different.” Why was Shelley visiting him?
“But you didn’t know her?”
“I might have met her, but it was a very long time ago and I don’t remember much about her.”
“And the other woman in the photo?”
She shrugs as if she doesn’t even understand the question.
“Did you know her?”
“I don’t think so, no.” She’s still trying to process the fact that Shelley is the Suburban Madam. Shelley is on Val’s visiting list. That’s the only reason Heloise is here. This so-called detective doesn’t have an inkling what she does. Yet.
And then her brain adds, Shelley was murdered.
“It’s a weird thing about the photo,” Jolson says. “It was on the seat beside her, in the car. Like it mattered. If it had been a suicide, it would be sentimental. But we never thought it was a suicide. And you know what? I don’t think whoever did it wanted us to think it was a suicide. The person who killed her—this is either someone excessively stupid or someone who just doesn’t give a shit that we know it’s a murder. It was almost like he—or she—was offering us a little cover by putting her in the car, giving us some lead time. Very deliberate. So why would this person leave the photo there?”
Heloise maintains eye contact, unafraid to let Jolson see her disdain. Her complete lack of interest, which is not the same thing as disinterest. Why the fuck would I know, asshole?
“Michelle Smith is connected to Valentine Deluca,” Jolson says. “So are you. I’m not sure anyone expected us to figure that out. But maybe they did and you’re supposed to be able to tell us who the other woman is. What do you think, Heloise?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m not very good at things like this. That’s why I’m not a detective.”
“But as a concerned citizen—”
“I’m not,” she says.
“You’re not?”
Well, that had come out wrong.
“I’m very sorry someone has been murdered,” she says. “I wish I could help. But I know nothing about Michelle Smith.”
“Didn’t even know she was visiting the man you visited?”
“I had no clue.” She’s being honest there.
“There’s nothing you want to tell me?”
She has stood to go, figuring it’s the one thing she can do that Tyner can’t.
“No, no. Come to think of it, there is one more thing.” Tyner has grabbed her elbow, his grip almost painful, but she won’t stop talking. “I would hope that this woman’s professional life wouldn’t blind you to the fact that there could be other people who wanted to kill her, for other reasons. I’m afraid all you see is a dead prostitute.”
“And what do you see?”
“A dead woman.”
But also: a woman sitting on Val’s lap the night he shot Martin, whispering in his ear, consoling him. Shelley. Yet it was meaningless. He never cared about Shelley.
So why was she on his visitors list? Why did someone leave a photograph of Shelley with Bettina?
“A dead woman,” she repeats. “It’s tragic, and I hope you figure out what happened, but I really don’t see how I can be of any help. I’m afraid this is nothing more than a coincidence.”
Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s mother. That’s what she’d said to the snooty woman in the Starbucks, the one who wanted Heloise to disavow the Suburban Madam when she was a stranger to her.
And now she has done exactly that.
2000
You got fat,” Val said.
“A little.”
“I never would have let you run yourself down that way.”
“Anxiety eating. I was so worried—”
“And now you’re fat and I’m in prison for life, so all the eating in the world didn’t solve a thing, did it?”
“No.” She hung her head as if ashamed, but she was relieved that Val believed her puffy body was the result of bad eating habits.
Scott had been born only seven weeks ago, on the final day of the year. “Oh, look,” the nurse said. “He showed up in time to give you a tax deduction. How considerate.”
It had been a long, hard labor, almost thirty-six hours, complicated by the fact that Hector decided to die in the middle of it, almost as if he were giving up his place in line to his grandson. Beth, forced to choose between life and death in a way almost no one ever is, not really, decided she’d rather be at Hector’s bedside. Helen understood. Sort of. She even believed that it was probably the best choice, a dying man’s final hours over a baby’s seeming infinite number to come.
Besides, Beth might as well get used to not seeing Scott, because Heloise didn’t intend for her mother to spend any time with him at all, once she was cleared by the doctors to head back to Baltimore.
Considerate, the nurse had said, and Scott was that. Ten pounds at birth, he began sleeping through the night before he was a month old. But the delivery hurt. Lord, it hurt. Heloise had believed there was no new pain or indignity that could be visited on her body at this point in her life. Men had pretty much punished every inch of it over the years, but here were completely new sensations. Perhaps there were always new pains, fresh injuries that one couldn’t imagine.
But this was the only pain that brought joy. Pure, uncomplicated, terrifying joy. She would show her mother how it was done, what a woman was supposed to be to her child. And the first step of that was to cut her mother completely out of her life.
Val’s case went to the jury about a week after Heloise brought Scott home. They deliberated for three days, which his lawyer thought a good sign. But the jurors returned a guilty verdict, and he was given the death penalty. The news jolted her. She realized she didn’t want Val to die. She just wanted him to stay inside forever and ever.
The news jolted Val, too. He was furious, but his anger had nowhere to go. George I was in prison, somewhere on the Eastern Shore. That didn’t mean he was safe from Val’s wrath, or so Val said, but there would be no face-to-face retribution. The confidential informant had died in the autumn, as Tom had promised. Bettina, the fake informant to the fake informant, was long gone, almost certainly dead from her own bad habits. Still, Val focused angrily on her. How could she have known where he had hidden the gun? She was an idiot. Had Helen ever noticed her looking for anything in the garden?
She almost started to say, But it wasn’t in the garden—it was in a copse of trees at the edge of the property. She could no longer remember if that information had been shared, discussed. Would she know that? Should she know that?
“Stupid people make discoveries all the time,” she offered instead. “They just don’t see the bigger picture. That’s what makes them stupid.”
He liked this answer. It fit with Val’s sense of himself—a smart person who saw the big picture and the tiny details. No one had outwitted him. He had just been unlucky.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked Helen.
“Figure out a way to make a living.” She remembered that Val thought she’d been doing that all along. “I’m not cut out for the street life, Val. I’m just not. I stayed independent, thinking you would be free, but now—” She shrugged. She noticed a dampness in her bra and prayed that she wouldn’t spurt breast milk in front of Val. She had fed Scott before she left her mother’s house, pumped in a truck-stop restroom. She hunched over, as if ashamed of her body.
Val gave her an appraising look. “You doing as well as you used to?”
“No.” That was honest at least.
“You ought to consider moving into the management side of things.”
“You mean—” They had never used the word “pimp.” Val found it undignified. Not to mention incomplete. He had a lot of operations going. His hospitality business—his term—was only one facet. Again, his term.
“You mean do what you did?”
“No, that’s the wrong model for you. How are you going to offer protection? Or intimidate anyone? If you tried to run a straightforward business like mine, the girls would end up ripping you off because there would be no downside to it.”
“I’m not soft.”
“No, you’re not. But you don’t scare people either. Anyway, I’ve been thinking. I have a lot of time to think. You know this Amazon.com?”
She was surprised he did. Why would Val know about a bookstore, much less an online enterprise? He knew almost nothing about computers.
“A guy in here, he told me about it. The business model was really simple. They started with books because they’re portable, easy to ship, never spoil. But now they’re moving into all sorts of things. They got an auction site, they’re selling CDs now. They’re going to sell everything one day.”
She couldn’t follow his train of thought.
“It’s the future,” he said. “And it’s perfect for escort services. I’ll show you how to do it—in exchange for a share.” A beat. “A big share. A forever share.”
“Why do you need money?”
“Because I’m not going to be in here forever.” Val had high hopes for his appeal, too high in almost everyone’s opinion. Only Helen would be unsurprised when he got his death penalty knocked down to life. Unsurprised and strangely relieved.
At the time Helen didn’t even own a computer. She couldn’t begin to understand how she would set up a Web site, generate traffic to a site without risk. She and Val agreed that she should apprentice herself to someone who was beginning to make use of these tools—then steal every idea and customer she could.
Her unwitting mentor called herself Madame Dundee. She worked out of a Catonsville storefront that did psychic readings. That was clever, Helen had to give her that. Madame Dundee’s Web site asked all sorts of questions about “love”: Have you met your true love? What will she look like? How will you know her? The use of the feminine pronouns should have been a tip-off; men do not go to psychics asking questions about love. Men who contacted the service were asked to come in for a reading. Madame Dundee had a special tarot deck, featuring photographs of her girls. She laid out the cards in the traditional format, and the gentleman indicated which card was to his liking. He picked a girl and a service.
“Aw, the Queen of Cups,” she might say, “and the Hanged Man. Yes, I see a big love in your future.”
The man, if he was a return customer, would then be ushered into a lounge behind the parlor, meet his girl, and go upstairs. It was an all-cash business, which made it easier for the girls to earn extra behind Madame Dundee’s back. Helen was not one of the more popular ones, not at first, which was new and humbling for her. Val encouraged her not to brood on the problem but to address it as she would a bad evaluation from a boss. What could she do better?
She lost her pregnancy weight and used her earnings to improve herself as she could. Her teeth had never been properly cared for. She got them whitened but decided against veneers. The idea of taking one’s real teeth down to stubs to make them look healthy—the paradox gave her chills. She began getting regular facials, expensive treatments for her skin. Her skin was her business, her business was her skin. If she had been motivated by sheer vanity alone, she never would have taken the time, much less the money, to do these things. But one had to reinvest capital. Helen put her money into herself and waited, knowing that her time would come.
Madame Dundee was busted, eventually. She made the mistake of not reporting the bulk of her income, thinking her all-cash enterprise would protect her. Helen, meanwhile, was dutifully filing quarterly taxes, claiming she was employed as a freelance masseuse. She didn’t report all her income, but she reported most of it.
“Proving someone is having money for sex is hard,” Val counseled her. “But mail fraud, income-tax evasion—those things are easier to prove and carry real time. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be greedy.”
With Madame Dundee busted, it was time for Helen to make her move. She was ready now. Val agreed. But she didn’t want to do it as Madame Dundee had, maintaining a physical space. It was too much of a risk. It was also too much overhead. But she also would never conduct business in her home, not with Scott there. She needed to use hotels, or have clients who could afford them.
“This is what you do,” Val told her. He had ideas about everything. She leaned her head toward the glass, eager to absorb what he knew. Unconsciously he mirrored her posture, and their foreheads inclined toward each other, only the glass between them. Val was not in prison, Helen told herself, because he was stupid about business. He was here because had lost his temper over something silly and inconsequential. Men and their stupid pride. If Helen had picked up a gun every time her pride had been wounded, she would have killed half a dozen or so people by now. Bam-bam, Daddy. Bam-bam, Barbara Lewis, and here’s a volley of shots for your horrible sons, who yell at me in the street. (She would spare the youngest, Meghan, who was too polite or too scared to taunt her.) Bam, Billy, and maybe Billy’s mother, too. Bam, Bettina, for trying to beat her up that time, and Bam for every girl who thought she could displace Helen as Val’s favorite.
Bam, Val.
But she had as good as killed him when she put him here. Did that make it hypocritical to take his advice, to let him instruct her in how to set up her own illegal enterprise?
Probably. But if there were no hypocrisy in the world, there wouldn’t be any prostitutes.
