I wanted to see Chantelle and Thomas together, because I wanted to put him on the spot, to see if he was as smooth and unflappable in front of his wife as he was when she wasn’t there. I called the cell phone number Heavenly gave me for Chantelle when the case first began.
“My shift ends at two,” she said. “You can come over after that. Thomas will be home. It’s his day off.”
Having dumped Sadie on a grumbling Peter, I had no children with me when I walked up the steps to Chantelle and Thomas’s impeccable house. Their front door was flanked by tubs of pink geraniums and the tiny front garden was a patch of bright green grass surrounded on all four sides by a row of miniature rosebushes, also pink.
Chantelle answered the door, still wearing her pink flowered scrubs. She clearly liked the color.
“Come in,” she said.
The living room into which she led me had a cream-colored leather sectional sofa, silk flowers in cut glass vases on the end tables, and a fifty-inch flat-screen television dominating one wall. Chantelle left me alone on the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. It was clear that I was not meant to follow. A moment later she came out holding a tray with a coffeepot and a matching sugar bowl and creamer. She poured me a cup of coffee. She offered a plate of butter cookies, but I declined. She did not pour coffee for herself or for Thomas, who arrived a moment later, wearing jeans and a UCLA sweatshirt. His feet were bare, and I caught Chantelle giving them a disapproving glance.
“I just had a few things I wanted to verify,” I said.
They looked at each other, and then at me.
I continued. “Before Violetta was killed, someone gave her a large sum of money. Probably over a thousand dollars. Do either of you know anything about that?”
Neither of them looked surprised, but neither answered me.
I waited.
After a few moments I said, “Look, Thomas, I know you gave her the money. There were witnesses.” I didn’t elaborate that those witnesses were drug-addled prostitutes who would have exactly zero credibility in a court of law. I believed Jackie and M&M, and I was betting that their existence would at least be enough to convince Thomas to tell me the truth.
It was a good bet.
“Twenty-five hundred,” Thomas said. “It was twenty-five hundred dollars, not a thousand. We gave it to her. We gave it to her in return for promising to disappear, to leave her mother and the rest of the family alone once and for all.”
Chantelle was breathing quickly. A thin sheen of sweat stood out on her forehead. “You need to understand,” she said. “My sister Violetta did so much damage in her life. She hurt my mother over and over again. She hurt all of us. She was supposed to be my bridesmaid and she was too high to come to my wedding. And that wasn’t even the worst thing she did. She made advances to my little brother. She was an evil, evil person.”
I looked at Thomas, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Clearly, Chantelle didn’t know that he’d had to bribe Violetta with heroin money to get her to come home for her sister Annette’s funeral. If Chantelle had known about that she surely would have added it to the litany of Violetta’s crimes against the family.
Chantelle’s words tumbled out of her mouth. “She shot up here, in my house. She tortured that poor son of hers, showing up every couple of months and pretending she was ready to act like a mother to him. And Mama. She broke Mama’s heart over and over again. Every time she promised to get clean and then ended up back on the street, Mama would just die inside a little more. My mother has diabetes, did you know that? And high blood pressure. The cycle of hope and disappointment was killing her. I just knew if I didn’t do something Violetta was going to break Mama’s heart for good and for real. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So you paid her to go away.”
Thomas said, “After that awful scene where she got drunk and behaved so appallingly—in front of her son, I might add—Chantelle and I decided that enough was enough. I emptied our bank account and I went down to Violetta’s corner. I told her she could have it all, every last dime, as long as she promised never to show her face at home again. I told her she couldn’t call or write. She had to disappear.”
I looked from one of them to the other. Thomas sat easily in his chair, one arm thrown over the back, his long legs extended out before him and his bare feet crossed. Chantelle, however, was sitting on the edge of her matching armchair, her hands clasped, her face damp with sweat.
“But Violetta didn’t go away, did she?”
Thomas shook his head. “I guess she didn’t. Or she didn’t plan to.” He shrugged his shoulders ruefully. “Why we ever thought we could trust a drug addict’s word, I’ll never know. At her funeral we found out that the very next day—a day after taking every dime her sister and I had managed to save—she called up offering presents and asking to come home.”
I frowned. “At her funeral?”
He nodded. “I’m surprised my mother-in-law survived the funeral, if you want to know the truth. She was weeping over the casket, holding on to it like . . . like . . . well, like her child was inside. She was begging Violetta’s forgiveness for not letting her come home like she’d asked. It just about broke my heart to see that. It broke all our hearts. Everyone in that room.”
I stared at him. His face was wide open; sad and sorry. It’s so hard to tell if someone is lying. Was he telling the truth or was he just very smooth? Chantelle, however, was much easier to read. She sat knotting her fingers in her lap, her head tucked to her chest, her lips pinched into a tight line and her eyes nearly closed. Beads of sweat had sprung out on her hairline.
“Chantelle,” I said. “You knew about the call.”
She shook her head violently from side to side.
“You did. Corentine called you. She told you that she thought Violetta was serious now and that Thomas should find her a good, private rehab center. She told you she wanted you to pay for it.”
Chantelle shook her head again.
Thomas wrinkled his brow. “I think you must have your chronology confused. The first we heard about all that was after Violetta died.”
“Chantelle?” I said.
“I don’t remember,” she whispered. “I don’t remember.”
“Chantelle? Baby?” Thomas said. “What’s she talking about?”
I said, “Corentine told me she spoke to Chantelle, that she told her that Violetta had called and said she wanted to come home and try to get into rehab again. Corentine said she told Chantelle that this time she wanted Violetta to go into a better program, a private program, and that you would pay for it.”
“That’s not what happened,” he said firmly. “Corentine must be remembering wrong. Or you must have misunderstood.”
“Chantelle?” I said softly.
“Mama must be remembering wrong,” she said. She unknotted her hands and wiped the palms on her knees. “Or you must have misunderstood.”
“Thomas, do you mind telling me where you were the night Violetta was killed?” I said.
“Do I mind? Yes, I mind,” he said, his angry voice suddenly booming through the room. “Who the hell do you think you are to be asking me that kind of question?”
“He was working,” Chantelle said. “He was in surgery.”
“Were you?”
“That is no business of yours,” he said.
“Were you working, Thomas?” I repeated.
“I don’t owe you an explanation, but I have nothing to hide. I was on call the night Violetta was killed. I remember quite clearly. I had back-to-back appendectomies. I have a hospital full of witnesses who can attest to my whereabouts.”
Could he have had time to sneak out from the hospital and make it all the way to Figueroa Street? It seemed virtually impossible. What if someone went looking for him and he was nowhere to be found?
I looked at Chantelle. She was a tall woman, with large hands. Strong, capable, nurse’s hands.
“Where were you, Chantelle?” I said in a gentle voice. “Where were you on the night Violetta was killed?”
“I was working,” she said.
Thomas looked confused; his brows knitted together and his mouth open as if he were about to speak.
Chantelle repeated, “I was working.”
Thomas stared at his wife. “Be quiet, baby,” he said to her. “Don’t say anything else.” He stood up and pointed at me. “You, get out of this house. Get out right now.” He put his body between Chantelle’s and mine. “Go!” he shouted.
I left.