Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“Right,” Hadley said. He was walking down the hall, and I was following. “But why’d you tell Jerod to put all that in his statement?”

“She set these events in motion,” I said.

“So she ran her mouth,” Hadley said. “That’s not against the law. We can’t charge her with anything.”

“No, we can’t,” I said. “But I’m going to check out a motor-pool car and go talk to her.”

We stopped in front of the coffee machine, and Hadley filled a paper cup to the rim. He looked at me and raised an eyebrow in invitation. I shook my head, No, thanks.

“Good idea,” Hadley said. “But why a motor-pool car?”

“My Nova is back at the building Ruiz lived in,” I explained. “I rode over here with you.”

I’d been so numb from finding out what happened to Cicero that I hadn’t even thought of my car as we’d left; I would have climbed into a spaceship if that was what Hadley had led me to.

“Right,” Hadley said. “Wait a minute, then, and I’ll go talk to the girlfriend with you.”

I shook my head in negation. “Sooner is better,” I said. “You’ve still got to look over Jerod’s statement and get him processed in at the jail.”

At the motorpool, I signed out a nondescript, well-maintained mid-size sedan, dark blue. It reminded me of something that Gray Diaz would drive. I shot it up the ramp a little faster than necessary, and two administrators, crossing the garage in rippling trench coats over their suits, looked at me with disapproval.

I’d decided what to do with Ghislaine. I was going to bring her down to the station and find out what she knew about the whereabouts of her boyfriend, Marc. But first we were going to make a little detour to the medical examiner’s office.

I’d warned her that if she threatened again to give up Cicero, I’d put her in prison. It had been an empty threat. Now she’d done worse than report Cicero to the police, and my hands were tied. She’d done nothing chargeable, as Hadley had said. But I could do this: I could make Ghislaine look at Cicero, make her see the end result of her actions in a stainless-steel drawer.

The girl who opened the doorat Ghislaine’s apartment looked like her country cousin: a little shorter, a little heavier, with hair that was as white as corn silk, and small, apprehensive blue eyes. She was braless under a V-necked white T-shirt, her pale legs in cutoffs, barefoot. Behind her issued the mindless noise of a television talk show.

“I’m here to see Ghislaine,” I said.

“She’s not here,” the girl said.

“You don’t mind if I come in and verify that, do you?” I took out my shield. Her eyes widened fractionally, and she stepped backward. “I was just feeding the baby,” she said as I came in.

“Shadrick?” I said.

She shook her head. “My baby. Shad’s with Ghislaine.”

A six-month-old infant, dressed in fuzzy, androgynous yellow, sat in a high chair on the border between kitchen and living room, linoleum and carpet.

“Did Ghislaine do something wrong?”

Yes. “No,” I said. “I need to ask her some questions. She’s a material witness.”

I moved toward a short half-hallway, like the one in Cicero ’s apartment. The bathroom didn’t take long to check out. A ghost of steam hung in the air from an afternoon shower, and creams and cosmetics cluttered the sink. There was no one behind the rippled, frosted glass of the shower door.

In the first bedroom, the bed was unmade, but not so much that I couldn’t see the giant, yellow face of Tweety bird on the rumpled comforter. On the wall was a Packers pennant, and below that bookshelves with no books on them except high school yearbooks. Model horses lined two of the shelves in their entirety, and a stuffed dog lounged on its side on a third shelf. I’d come to an apartment inhabited by children.

“That’s my room,” the girl said.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

“Lisette,” she said.

Another improbable Gallic name. Lisette’s heritage, as evinced by her looks, seemed to be pure Saxon; I didn’t think she was French.

“Are you and Ghislaine related?” I asked.

Lisette shook her head. “Just roommates.”

I moved on to the last bedroom.

Ghislaine, I was guessing, was a year or two older than her roommate. It showed in her room, more feminine than childlike. Ghislaine’s bed was made up, a pale-pink eyelet comforter pulled taut with cheap lace-trimmed throw pillows carefully arranged, and Ghislaine’s toys were more expensive: an MP3 player, a cell-phone charger, a row of CDs. The closet door was open, and inside I saw leather coats and party dresses. A bulletin board like Marlinchen Hennessy’s showed photos of Ghislaine, mostly with boys or Shadrick, rarely other girls.

Lisette was still watching me from the doorway. “Which one of these boys is Marc?” I asked.

“None of them,” she said. “He didn’t do things like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Get his picture taken with Gish,” Lisette said. “Or act like a boyfriend. He was too cool for that.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Lisette nodded. “Gish loans him the keys to her car, so he can go to these parties he doesn’t even take her to. He leaves his laundry here for her to take to the Laundromat, and his clothes smell like other girls’ perfume.”

“How does Ghislaine take that?”

“She just keeps trying harder to please him. She bitches to me, but never to Marc. And when I tell her, ‘So dump him,’ she does a complete turnaround.”

“Like what?”

“She’ll say, ‘He’s changing. I know he really cares about me, inside.’ Ghislaine thinks that because he gives her stuff. But it isn’t anything he cares about, just things he steals. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out.” Lisette rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Gish won’t quit him. She keeps trying to think of something else she can do, to impress him.”

Right. Then she did think of something, something really good, and all it cost was Cicero ’s life.

“Was Marc here today?” I asked.

Lisette shook her head.

“Thanks,” I said.

A more impartial observer than I would stand in the doorway to Ghislaine’s bedroom and look at the pretty objects she surrounded herself with, the sweet pastels, and mistake these things as signs of her innocence and harmlessness. They’d see a girl barely out of her teens, who liked pretty things and clothes and shopping, who kept her room with its Target-brand furnishings in perfect order, and they’d wish her well. They’d say it was Marc’s fault she was so desperate to please him; they’d say it was society’s fault that girls her age gave and gave to the boys around them, provided them with sex and money and support and got nothing back, until they were desperate.

I’d thought all these things too, when I’d first met her. I’d dismissed Shiloh ’s opinion of her as grounded in his streak of judgmentalism. I’d been taken in by her chatter and her infectious warmth, and not recognized something malignant as a tumor that grew underneath it.

The truth was, Ghislaine’s love of pretty things and nice clothes was at the heart of her malice. She wanted what she wanted, and if other people were hurt in the getting of those things, that wasn’t real to her. Because they weren’t real to her. Shadrick was, it seemed, and so was Marc. Everyone else was a resource to be used. Like Lydia, who she’d sold to the Narcotics task force. Like me, whose name she’d used to get out of a shoplifting bust. Like Cicero.

At the front door, Lisette realized her indiscretion. “Listen,” she said, “you aren’t going to tell Ghislaine what I told you about Marc, are you?”