“Three.”
“How is it? The family life?”
She glanced over at him and glared. Her blouse ruffled and billowed. “It’s the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to me. One part joy, one part chaos. Highly recommended.” He sensed little or no sarcasm in her.
“Married?”
“Once upon a time. Only it didn’t work out that way-like the fairy tales, I mean.”
The palms of his hands went damp; he felt nervous.
“Are you flirting with me, Dartelli?” She looked over and grinned.
“What?” he asked incredulously. “No,” he answered lamely.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, well.”
They turned right and drove into the heart of the north end. They rolled up their windows and Abby turned on the air, and Dart checked to make sure all the doors were locked. White people rarely entered the north or south end-not without a blue uniform-and the residents of the projects rarely ventured into the downtown core. If the gangs crossed north to south, there was bloodshed. Three separate cities co-existed poorly, side by side. The police refereed.
“Do you like ice cream?” she asked him.
This question was so far from his thoughts, Dartelli took a moment to answer. “Who doesn’t like ice cream?”
“What flavor?” She added, “And don’t say vanilla.”
“Vanilla.”
“Damn it all.”
“I can be a major disappointment,” he apologized.
“Yeah? And you think you’re alone in that?”
“Meaning?”
She smiled that self-contented smile of hers and angled her head toward the air-conditioning vent, enjoying the cold breeze. She addressed the windshield. “Chocolate frozen yogurt with raspberry sauce.”
“Maybe I am flirting,” he announced honestly.
“We’re only talking about ice cream. Rest easy.” A few blocks later, she asked, “What was Ginny’s flavor?”
“Mint chip.”
“I hate mint chip,” she proclaimed.
“Yeah, me too,” he said, grinning.
“I kinda figured that,” she said. “Just by the way you said it.”
Passing the Bellevue Square projects it occurred to Dartelli that these kinds of living conditions did not belong in a city in central Connecticut, in the United States of America. It seemed unimaginable that this kind of barren wasteland of urban decay could be but a scant few minutes from the city’s revitalized downtown. Bellevue Square looked so much like a prison that it wasn’t too surprising that many of its teen residents ended up in one. Decrepit, shell-shocked buildings; storefronts boarded up with graffiti encrusted plywood; sidewalk curbs ankle deep in litter. And not an aluminum can in sight.
Blacks and Hispanics attempted to stay cool on front stoops, curbs, and perched in open windows. A wasteland, like something from a futuristic novel. Dart took this all personally. The system had failed miserably. To drive through the projects was to experience total despair. He felt it in the pit of his stomach.
“Park it where we can keep an eye on it,” Dart suggested as they neared the address.
“Point taken.”
If the car were identified as belonging to two white people, it had a life expectancy of about ten minutes. Only the stenciled announcement POLICE, which Abby placed on the dash, offered them any hope of returning to the vehicle and finding it driveable. And that was no guarantee.
Abigail Lang and Joe Dart climbed a cement staircase under the glare of a bare sixty-watt bulb, along a plaster wall scarred from an endless stream of furniture being moved up and down these flights.
Entering the apartment, Dartelli pulled off his jacket and unfastened his collar button and reached for his handkerchief to mop his forehead.
Lewellan Page was a twelve-year-old black girl, wiry thin and bug-eyed, with small budding breasts stabbing at her tight T-shirt. Dart met eyes with her, smiled at her, but faced with a cold, expressionless stare, immediately saw her not as a child but as a victim. Abby clearly saw this too.
On the drive over, having never met her, never seen her in person, a very savvy Abigail Lang had described Lewellan Page down to her long, sinewy legs and high cheekbones-this because she fit so perfectly the description of Gerry Law’s former victims. Realizing that there were at least another dozen Lewellan Pages in and around this same neighborhood filled Dart with a sadness that manifested itself inside of him as a painful silence. No longer a child. Not yet a woman. Lewellan Page blinked up at him with something like terror in her eyes: Perhaps to her all men were Gerald Lawrence.
The girl took a chair at a black enamel kitchen table. Her mother was still at work, which was awkward for Dart, because they couldn’t use anything the girl said without her mother’s advance permission to interview her. She said she did not have a father, which hurt Dart: She did not know the difference between having and knowing. Her brother was out on the streets somewhere. The one-bedroom apartment was immaculately clean, though spare of furnishings. The small green couch and gray overstuffed chair in the claustrophobic sitting room were trained on a television. The pillow and folded blanket indicated that someone slept on the couch-probably the brother, who no doubt came and went. The apartment door had four heavy-duty locks on it and a police bar. The kitchen window near the fire escape had been boarded up and three pieces of wide metal strapping bolted to the inside.
One look at her living conditions, this young girl home alone, and it was not difficult to imagine the befriending tactics of a Gerald Lawrence. As the three of them began to skirt the inquiry, Lang expertly creating a rapport with the girl, Dart was struck by the girl’s maturity, and it occurred to him that Kowalski was wrong to distrust her statement because of age.
Prompted for what she had seen, Lewellan was forthright, showing Abby and Dart how, from her kitchen window, a person could see down into both the dirt parking area behind Lawrence’s Battles Street tenement, and a pair of windows that she claimed belonged to the dead man’s apartment.
“Did you know Gerry Law, Lewellan?” Abby asked.
The girl looked down at the chipped linoleum floor and nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, “I did.”
“And did you like him?”
The girl shrugged, but she was clearly uncomfortable, even frightened.
“Did he like you?” Abby asked, accustomed to such questioning, though Dart felt squeamish.
“Sort of,” the girl answered.
Dart did not want to be here for this. He wondered why he had bothered to come here at all, why Abby had dragged him into this, and he thought that maybe it was emotional punishment, a way to insure that he would not take a way out, not drop the suicides the way he felt tempted to. A few weeks and both David Stapleton and Gerald Lawrence would be little more than a pair of files collecting dust in the records room.
Abby’s eyes flashed darkly at Dart. She seemed to read his thoughts, and she did not approve. You’re not going anywhere, they said. Help me out here!
“Tell us what you saw,” Dart requested gently. He did not want any more of her case history. He did not want confirmation that this small girl had been locked up with Gerald Lawrence for even an afternoon. Dart reached for his collar and realized he had already unbuttoned it; he sucked for air, suddenly claustrophobic.
The girl’s large brown eyes begged at Dart, and yet she was scared of him. “It was some old car. Blue, maybe. Gray.” She shrugged. She was bone thin. Much too pretty. Too real for Joe Dart at the moment. He wanted out of there. “Old, you know. Come around back here and park. Big man get out. White man, you know. He go up the back stairs there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the outside.
Dart moved to the window. He didn’t want to hear this. He said, “It was late. It would have been dark.”
“No, not dark. The light come out of them windows down there. It’s plenty bright enough.” She studied Dart. “You think I be lying, same as that other man,” she said, referring to Kowalski.