George Pelecanos - DC Noir

That weekend I dug out the doll Dani had found. It was in even worse shape than Juanita. It had been loved hard, if you could call that kind of treatment love. Some people did. The doll’s head hung at an angle that would have killed a human baby, and if there were a Doll Social Services they’d want to know who’d tried to open up Baby’s belly with a screwdriver and where her missing leg had gotten to. I flipped the switch on her back — she was supposed to cry, probably, or say — but nothing happened. A piece of crap like that wasn’t worth wasting a couple of good batteries on. I had enough baby noise in my life already.

If Juanita wanted a baby, I thought, she could at least have one in decent shape. When Dave took the kids to the park for the usual Sunday afternoon run — “I’m going to run ’em like dogs,” he told me, “tire ’em out good” — I rummaged through the plastic bins of discarded toys in the basement. Sure enough, there was a baby doll in one of them, a chubby thing in a onesie with stains all down the front from Dani’s attempts to feed it pureed peas. Dani had moved on to other things — horses, Barbies, getting her little brother into trouble. The doll’s blue eyes looked a little crazy now, and it was a couple shades lighter than Juanita’s, but at least it had all its appendages.

I took it over to the group house — I’d never had cause to venture up those steps — and knocked hard enough to be heard over the TV that was always on. The day caregiver, one of a rotating 24/7 crew whose names I never learned, answered the door. He was a beat-up-looking guy in his fifties who wore the same shapeless clothes as his charges. If you spent enough time around people like that you couldn’t help picking up a few of their habits.

He looked ticked off when I told him what I wanted, but he shouted Juanita’s name into the dim interior of the house anyway. From one of the upstairs rooms I heard a radio playing salsa and wondered if it was WHFS, the indie radio station I’d listened to growing up. It had gone Latin a few months ago. I didn’t listen to the radio much anymore, but I missed that station. It was the soundtrack of my youth.

Juanita came down the stairs like a ghost. She grabbed the doll from my arms, held it out a little distance from her, and gazed into its crazy eyes as if she saw the very truth of heaven there.

“Nut job,” the caretaker said under his breath.

I thanked him anyway and left Juanita alone with Baby.

I had a bad dream that night, the kind that makes you wake yourself up just to stop it. But when I was fully awake I couldn’t remember what had scared me. I sat up in bed and listened — no noise at all from the children’s rooms. I listened for the teenagers but they had all gone home. It was almost 5 o’clock. A mockingbird sang his morning warm-ups in the park across the street. Dave breathed next to me, the intake and outtake of his breath regular as waves along a quiet beach. The only noise from the street was a bus that groaned its way to a halt at the four-way stop on our corner, then heaved itself into motion again and was gone.

The noise reminded me — trash day. The trucks would be coming through before it got much lighter, and as usual Dave had forgotten to put the can out the night before. I shrugged on my bathrobe and felt my way down the stairs to the back door.

I’d just pulled the can out from its spot next to the garage when I saw her. She lay face down in the little walkway that cut between the rental storage units across the alley. Someone had dragged her behind the chain-link fence to die.

She had on that ratty parka, the green of it dark where it had absorbed some of the blood. I couldn’t see where it all came from, just that there was a lot of it spread out around the body, dark and congealed into wrinkles like the skin on a cup of chocolate pudding.

“Mommy?” All of a sudden Dani was standing next to me, eyes full of sleep. I didn’t have time to stop her from seeing what lay there — I hadn’t heard her follow me out the door. She was pointing at an object half-covered by Juanita’s body. “Mommy, is that my doll’s leg?”

“Don’t tell them you gave it to her.” Dave sat at the kitchen table with a cup of black coffee between his large hands. He never drank his coffee black. That’s how I knew it was serious — as if a body in the alley hadn’t told me that already. “You’re asking for trouble.”

“Trouble is finding a woman shot dead in the alley behind my house.”

“They don’t have to know it came from you.” Family life had brought out the conservative, don’t-make-waves side of Dave. It wasn’t my favorite thing about him. “What possessed you, anyway? You hate those people.”

“I don’t hate them. I just worry about the kids.”

The cops were still out back doing whatever cops do when they have a murder scene on their hands. It only looked like they were standing around shooting the shit with cups of coffee in their hands. They’d sat me down at my own kitchen table and taken a statement, then gone over it again to make sure I had my story straight. There wasn’t much to tell, after all.

“Haven’t had a bag lady in a while,” one of them, a fat little guy whose belly kept trying to bust out of his uniform, said to his partner. I liked the partner — he’d kept himself trim and he had nice manners for a cop. “Little long in the tooth to be playing with dolls.”

“She wasn’t a bag lady,” I said. “She lived down the block.”

The fat one laughed in a way that really soured me on him. “Different kind of bag lady, lady.” He pushed his hat back on his head. His hair could have stood a couple of good latherings with industrial shampoo. “Know what a mule is?”

The Thin Man saved me the trouble. “She ran drugs for a cripple who works the territory east of here.”

“East of the sun,” I said. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just some old story I used to read as a kid, a story about a girl who has to find her one true love east of the sun and west of the moon. “Over at the New Dragon. The Wheelchair Bandit — that’s what the neighborhood listserv calls him.”

“Nice neighbors you have.” Fatty picked a dark speck out of his teeth.

“Sometimes they try to cut a deal on the side and make a little extra cash,” Thin Man said. “They’re not real smart, these people.”

When they finished with me, they went out in the alley and walked up and down, making notes in those pads they carry around. I watched them for a while and that’s when I realized I hadn’t said anything about the doll. They’d found most of its parts spread through the alley. If I hadn’t mentioned it to Dave first, I probably would have gone straight out and told Thin Man, who had parked himself against the patrol car that blocked the alley. He was making more notes. Notes about splatter patterns and exit wounds and time of death. Notes about the grisly end of a woman whose worst crime, as far as I’d ever known, had been to try and bum cigarettes off people who didn’t have them. What was she doing with scum like the Bandit? She was probably too crazy to know what she’d gotten mixed up in. All she’d wanted was a baby of her own.

“Think of the kids,” Dave said. We’d been sitting there while. His coffee must have gotten cold by then, but he didn’t even complain like he usually would. “You want them to get dragged into this? You want Dani on the stand telling a courtroom full of people how her mother gave her toys away to the drug dealer down the block? The cops have all the information they need.”

I couldn’t see how any lawyer in his right mind would put a four-year-old on the stand to tell a story about a doll, but I let Dave talk me out of what I knew I ought to do. He had a way of making certain things seem unnecessary, like you’d be a damn fool to hassle yourself.