Natasha shuddered. She felt giddy, almost frightened. She didn’t want to think about such things. She didn’t want to remember the past. She wanted the past to stay right where she’d left it.
After a little while she walked out of the kitchen and stood in the hallway. She watched her daughter through the half-open doorway of her room. Shuddered when she saw that doll sitting right in front of her, as if the two of them were watching TV together.
All smashed to hell, isn’t it? Natasha thought, and in thinking this she remembered how her life had been with Darryl King all those years before. How much she had loved him. How much she had believed that he was the one, the only one, the single most important thing that had ever happened to her. And then later, when he became someone else. She remembered his attitude, his arrogance, the way his life had started coming apart at the seams.
This is the Big H baby! This is the junk, you know? This is my skag, my horse, my thunder . . . I do this shit, or it does me. Who the fuck cares?
I’m not doin’ no crack here, sugar. I got my 24-7, my bad rock, my candy, my chemical . . . I got fat bags, french fries, some gravel and hardball . . . I got hotcakes, jelly beans, prime time, rockstar, sleet, sugarblock and tornado . . .
I got the whole fucking world in my pocket, baby. Should try this shit, you know? This shit gon’ make you hot!
And how he would kick off sometimes, his world-has-done-me-wrong thing.
Tell you what the world thinks about people like us? People like us don’t give a damn what it takes. We take what we need. Rob everyone blind. Steal from our own grandmothers. Fuck you mo’fucker. Fuck you! That’s who they think we are, and that’s who we’re gonna be!
How many times had Natasha thought about giving up that life? She’d thought about it all the time . . . especially when Chloe told her that someone had called her a crack whore.
What’s a crack whore, Mommy?
No-one should be called a crack whore when they’re five years old.
The truth? Ultimately Darryl King had not been the truth. However much Natasha might have loved him, and however misguided that love might have been, she knew that his vision of the world was not how it was. She did not live like an animal. She did not live in filth and shit, in squalid rooms piled high with stolen TVs and PS2s and greasy takeout cartons. Not everywhere was damp; not everywhere smelled like urine and baby puke and people dying. The corridors of her project building did not echo with the phlegm-spittle hacking rasp of tuberculoid grandfathers, the cries of unwanted newborns with colic. Perhaps, because she came from here, she was loathed and despised and undesirable, just as Darryl would have had her believe. But she did not believe it. Not all the time.
She had a nine-year-old daughter. Her name was Chloe. She was not unwashed or unwanted. She was not named Delicia or Lakeisha or Shenayne-LeQuanda ...
Chloe’s father was dead. His name was Darryl King. He was crazy, but Natasha had loved him - desperately, unconditionally at first, and then when it all went bad she had continued to love him for the hope that it could somehow become what it had once been. Natasha Joyce had loved Darryl King enough to give him a child and then, later, when it all turned bad, to sit with him through the blood pressure, the sweating, the nausea and hyperventilation, the hypersensitivity, the tactile hallucinations, the images of bugs burrowing under his skin, the euphoria, the paranoia, the depression and exultation, the panic, the psychosis, the seizures . . .
Loved him enough to try everything she could to stop him taking drugs.
But the power of his addiction had been far greater than any love or loyalty he had possessed. He’d taken everything they had, everything they didn’t.
One time Darryl left them; hadn’t come back for two days.
Natasha had known that one day he would leave and never return.
Natasha Joyce knew that life was just a matter of escaping what you did not want, trying to hold on to what you did. You kept trying, or you accepted what people thought you were and decided you could not change.
Darryl had done that: he’d become what other people thought he should be. A loser. A lowlife. A crackhead nigger.
This had brought it all back to her. A face had looked right back at her from the front page of the Post. Natasha didn’t want it to be the same woman who’d come looking for Darryl, smartly dressed, ever-so-polite, beside her the nervous sidekick - chewing gum, saying nothing, giving her twenty bucks for Chloe when he left. Natasha had figured them for cops, but they were not. The woman had done all the talking. Seemed decent. Scared though. She’d said her name. Natasha could not now recall what it was, but she knew for sure that it hadn’t been Catherine Sheridan. And now some crazy guy, a guy they named the Ribbon Killer, had murdered her. They said it was his fourth victim. One thing Natasha Joyce knew for sure. Knew that crazy guy was going to be white.
And that’s if they were the same people. Looked like her. Like. That was all. Lots of people looked like other people.
It was intuition that told her. Intuition, a gut feeling, whatever the hell it was called . . .
Chloe had seen the face in the paper and hadn’t hesitated.
Natasha looked at her daughter, and she thought Gotta get you out of here, girl. Gotta get you outta here whatever it costs. You’re not gonna have the life I’ve had. Not my life, nor Darryl’s, nor the life those scared white folks in Georgetown think you deserve. Gonna do whatever has to be done.
Something like that. Kind of thought she’d had before, but this time she felt it with a sense of certainty, a sense of urgency, a sense of importance.
Thought of Darryl again; thought Darryl - whoever the fuck you were, whatever the hell you were into, whoever the hell you might or might not have known . . . your daughter, our daughter, deserves better than this . . . What d’you reckon, Darryl, you fucked-up, smashed-to-pieces, crackhead loser black asshole motherfucker? Oh God, Darryl, I don’t know that I could have loved you more. Tried everything. Gave everything I had to give while I watched you fall apart. And afterwards I made believe I could forget it all. Didn’t want to know what happened. Pretended that all this shit was behind us, but it wasn’t, and it isn’t now, and it’s true that all the things you never faced will somehow find you . . .
And then she glanced once more at the Post, and thought Damn bitch. Why d’you have to go get yourself murdered by some crazy motherfucker.
Natasha felt she couldn’t wait to see if scared Miss Antrobus called the cops and told tales. She figured that Miss Mulatto-What a friend we have in Jesus-interfering-bitch was just that kind of woman, and thus Natasha knew she would have to make the call herself. Tell them that maybe she knew something.
Natasha Joyce was twenty-nine years old. Chloe’s father had been dead for a little more than five years. What little life he’d had she’d watched disappear effortlessly through a hypodermic needle. Now the police would come again. If Miss Antrobus made the call then they would come over and see her. They would want to know how Chloe had known the woman’s face in the newspaper. Natasha had never been able to lie. She would tell them that someone had come down to the projects to speak with Darryl King. Then they would want to know what Darryl King had been involved in, how he’d known this dead woman. Natasha would say that she wasn’t sure it was the same woman. They would see it in her eyes, how afraid she was of becoming involved in this. Natasha hadn’t wanted to know then, and she didn’t want to know now. But something inside told her that understanding any part of what had happened back then would make her feel better. Not because it would be good news, because after Darryl started doing heroin nothing had ever been good news, but because it might bring a degree of closure. It had been a fucked-up time, a really fucked-up time, but it had been part of her life. Part of her life that had given her Chloe, and for no other reason it made sense to understand. Why? Because then she might be able to tell Chloe the truth. When Chloe was old enough to understand, she might be able to look her in the eye and tell her that her father wasn’t a complete waste of life. That he was somebody. That he did at least one good thing. Maybe these people had been good people. Maybe they’d been trying to help Darryl. Or maybe he’d been helping them. Maybe he was even trying to get out of the life and these people had been doing something that could make it happen.
Or maybe it was all shit.
Maybe they were nothing but smart-suit bigshot smack dealers from Capitol Hill come down to slum it with the niggers. And then the woman had gotten herself killed. This Catherine Sheridan. And if it was the same woman who’d come looking for Darryl, then maybe the guy that came with her had murdered her. Maybe they’d argued about some deal and he’d beaten the shit out of her and choked her. Maybe he’d murdered the other three first, or he’d murdered her like the first three to make everyone think it was this Ribbon Killer . . .
That would have been a smart move, Natasha thought.
She knew she would have to call the cops, have to tell them who she was and where she lived, that the dead woman in the newspaper had come to see Darryl King five years before, that there might be a connection . . .
Have to tell them that Darryl King went missing and wound up dead, and even now she still did not know what happened.
Natasha took the newspaper. She tore the front page off and dropped it in the sink. She took a lighter and set it on fire, watched it curl up into a black fall-leaf.
It burned from the edges inward - slowly, patiently, the smell of smoke bitter in her nostrils.
Last thing to go was the woman’s face, and the last part of her face was the cold and lifeless eyes, eyes that looked back at Natasha Joyce as if Natasha was somehow responsible for her death.
SIX
Robert Miller and Al Roth stood in a pizza parlor near the junction of M Street and Eleventh. Miller believed that Roth’s time would have been better spent recovering all files and reports from the previous three murders, but house calls and interviews always had to be conducted by two detectives. A corroborative system had to be established and maintained regardless.
The manager was young, no more than twenty-three or four. Pleasant face, honest-looking, fair hair cut neat. ‘Hey,’ he said, and smiled.
‘You’re Sam?’ Miller asked.
‘Yeah, I’m Sam.’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘You called earlier, yes?’
Miller showed his badge. ‘An order was made yesterday evening, somewhere around five forty-five, delivered to a house on Columbia around six.’
‘The dead woman, I know. I don’t know what to tell you. Delivery guy . . . Jesus, I don’t even know how you’d deal with something like that.’
‘You took the order yourself?’ Miller asked.
‘I did.’
‘And how did she sound to you?’
Sam frowned, shook his head. ‘She? No, it wasn’t a woman who placed the order. It was a man.’
Miller looked at Roth. ‘A man?’
‘Yes, definitely a man. No question about it. I took the details - stuffed crust, extra monterey jack, double mushroom, you know? I’m writing down the order. I ask the guy for his number, he gives me the number. I ask his name, he says “Catherine”. I say “What?” He laughs. He says “That’s who the pizza’s for. Catherine”. I say “Okay, for Catherine”. I read him back the order. He then repeats it back to me real slow. Made the conversation stick in my head, you know?’
‘Like he wanted you to remember the conversation?’
‘That’s what I’m thinking now. He wanted me to remember him.’
Miller looked at Roth. Everything that needed to be said was right there in Roth’s expression. Catherine Sheridan’s killer had called and ordered pizza. He had wanted her to be found immediately.
‘How did he sound?’ Miller asked Sam.
‘Sounded like Washington, you know? Nothing special. Just sounded like a regular guy. Maybe if I’d known I was gonna be asked about him I would have paid more attention.’
‘It’s okay, you did good. You kept the number he gave you?’
‘It’s on the order slip.’
‘You have that?’
Sam shuffled through things behind the counter, looked in two places, came back with a yellow paper the size of a playing card. ‘Here,’ he said, and handed it to Miller.
‘Can I keep this?’
‘Sure you can.’
Miller took the slip, glanced at it. ‘Three-one-five area code,’ he said. ‘We have a three-one-five area code in Washington? ’
Sam shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. Tell you the truth I didn’t even think about it when I wrote the number down. Saturday we’re so busy—’
‘It’s fine,’ Miller said. ‘We’ll check it out.’ He handed Sam one of his cards. ‘You think of anything else—’
‘Then I’ll call you,’ Sam interjected, smiling again like he was glad to be helpful.
‘Thanks,’ Miller said, and shook Sam’s hand.
‘No problem.’
Miller reached the door and paused. ‘One other question. About payment. Don’t you take card details over the phone?’
‘Sure, sometimes we do, but most of the deliveries are cash.’
‘And this was a cash order?’
‘Sure yes. It was just a regular order. Only thing about it was when he gave the woman’s name. Apart from that it was no different from any other call.’
‘Okay,’ Miller said. ‘Thanks for your time.’ He held up the yellow order slip. ‘And for this.’
Neither Miller nor Roth spoke during the brief walk back to the car.
Miller felt a quiet sense of certainty that anything resembling a normal life would now cease for the foreseeable future. Cease until they had someone, and only begin again if that someone was the someone. Always the way these things went.
Once they were in the car, he looked at the number printed across the top of the order slip. ‘I really don’t think this is a Washington area code,’ he said. ‘I think this is something else.’