ONCE we had retrieved his gun, Al walked me to my car, despite my assurances that I could get myself down to the end of the block just fine. He ignored me, which is what he tends to do when I’m trying to prove a point that he thinks is silly.
I got in the driver’s seat and turned the ignition on. Then I noticed that Al was still standing outside of my car. I rolled down the window. “It’s bugging you, too, huh?” I said.
“I hate that crap,” Al said. “That kind of shoddy police work.”
“You think if she’d been a white girl they would have treated the case differently?”
He shrugged. “Are you asking me if they would have investigated more thoroughly if she’d been a white hooker instead of a black one? I think the fact that she was a prostitute was why they gave it such low priority, but yeah, I think they would have made at least a symbolic effort for a white girl.”
Al’s feelings about race are unambiguous. Jeanelle is African-American, and Al is the father of two mixed-race daughters. He’s seen racism directed at his family and at himself because of his family, and he doesn’t have a lot of patience with it.
“What do you want to do?” I knew what I wanted to do. I was hoping he’d agree.
“Call the brother . . . er . . . the sister, and tell her we’ll put a few hours into the case. We might as well see what we can turn up.”
“I sort of told her we would give her a sliding scale rate.”
He sighed. “Just do me a favor and don’t tell Jeanelle. She’s been so happy about us finally turning a real profit.”
“I’m not going to tell Jeanelle. I’m not the one who can’t keep a secret from Jeanelle.”
Al said, “Should I run Henry Spees through the NCIC?” The federal public defender’s investigative department has access to National Crime Information Center, a database of all offender records. Al’s old colleagues in the office run names for us when we need them to.
I frowned. We had no business checking on the criminal record of our client. The alleged criminal record. “Yeah, you might as well,” I said. “Just in case there’s anything there we should know about.”
He patted the roof of my car as if it were a pony he was sending on its way, and I headed off. I had barely enough time to make it down to Westminster to get Sadie before the kids had to be picked up from school. Sometimes it felt like I would only just get myself situated at my desk and it would already be carpool time again. And then there was the famous day that I got a flat tire in front of Isaac’s preschool, and by the time the auto club showed up and changed it for me, it was time to pick the kid up again. Now that was a productive day.
After my swing through the city, I went home and fobbed the kids off on Peter. He was looking a little dazed but I figured they’d liven him up soon enough. Peter works at night, after the kids go to bed. He routinely starts at around ten or so, and by three in the morning I can usually count on him to be back in bed. The night before, he was still working when I got up with Sadie at six, and I had to force him to turn off the computer and go sleep.
“Take them to the park,” I said. “I just nursed Sadie so she should be good for a few hours.”
“Can we ride our scooters?” I heard Isaac asking as I took my laptop into our cavernous living room.
“Put your helmet on,” Peter called after Isaac. “And your knee pads and wrist guards.”
I called Heavenly. Grateful we had agreed to help her, she offered to gather her family together so I could interview them. I would have preferred to see them one by one, but I couldn’t refuse her offer of a traditional Sunday dinner at her mother’s house.
“And you should bring your baby,” Heavenly said. “My mother’s got the magic touch.”
I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t be forced to do that. It’s hard enough to do a decent witness interview without a baby latched on to the breast. Not that I haven’t done it before. I’ve done pretty much everything with a baby on the boob. Witness interviews, grocery shopping, online banking. I’ve even perfected a maneuver I call midflight refueling, where I nurse the baby while she’s in her carseat and I’m sitting next to her, safely strapped into my own seatbelt. I haven’t figured out how to do that when I’m the driver, though. But if I ever do, that’s when I’ll be totally liberated.
After I hung up the phone I did a web search. I was hoping to turn up some information on Violetta’s murder. No such luck. I found some local crime reports of the discovery of the bodies of African-American female murder victims, but they were all old cases. There wasn’t much I could do before meeting her family and seeing if any of them had more information than Heavenly. And of course, I was going to have to do what the police should have done and head over to Figueroa and Eighty-fourth some night soon, to see what the other girls on the corner could tell me. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
The prospect of telling my husband that I was planning on ambling around one of the worst areas of Los Angeles after dark was not a pleasant one. Peter is in many ways the embodiment of the kind of egalitarian companion my girlfriends and I all imagined we would marry. He cooks, he’s a great father, he’s supportive of my career. But he does have his failings, and one of them is a level of anxiety not so much about what I do as about my methods. He gets overprotective, like some kind of Arthurian knight. He thinks I put myself in the line of fire too easily, an accusation that I would consider unfair had I not once been shot while investigating a case. (It was just a leg wound, and had I not been pregnant, it wouldn’t have been any big deal.) His gallantry is very sweet and romantic, and I know it’s justified by my occasional irresponsibility, but what he doesn’t understand is that doing this job well inevitably requires taking a certain amount of risk. I try to be reasonable about the risks I take and I’m careful about my children. They accompany me sometimes—I’ve even been known to use them as distraction, or a way to soften up a potential witness—but I would never put them in danger.
Anyway, it wasn’t like I was planning on going into a war zone.