handwriting at once, tipped the bellhop a dollar, and immediately tore open the flap of the envelope.
A key was inside the envelope.
The accompanying notes in her grandmother's hand, read:
My darling Priscilla,
Go to locker number 136 at the Rendell Road Bus Terminal. your loving grandmother,
Svetlana.
Priscilla went to the phone, picked up the receiver, and dialed the front desk.
"This is Priscilla Stetson" she told an assistant manager. "A letter was just delivered to me?"
"Yes, Miss Stetson?"
"Can you tell me who left it at the desk?"
"A tall blond man."
"Did he give you his name?"
"No, he just said to be certain it was sent up to your suite. Sort of."
"What do you mean sort of." "Well, he had a very heavy accent." "What kind of accent?" "I have no idea."
"Thank you," Priscilla said, and hung up.
"What the hell is this?" she asked aloud. "A spy movie?"
The white man who approached Jamal the moment he came out of his building was named Curly Joe Simms,
and he ran a book up here in Diamondback. Jamal knew him because every now and then he would have a girl for a horse, so to speak, asking Curly Joe to put two bills on a nag as an even swap for an hour with one of his girls. Jamal never ran more than two girls at a time. And nobody underage, thanks. He knew they escalated from a class-A misdimeanor to a class-D felony if:i person promoted "prostitution activity by two or more prostitutes" or "profited from prostitution of a less than nineteen years old." He figured a judge go easier on him if he didn't have say, five, six girls in his stable, ha ha. Anyway, even two girls were a handful, and to tell the truth, he got tired of them soon and was always on the lookout for fresh talent.
Curly Joe was bald, of course, and he wore earmuffs on this frighteningly cold morning, hands in the pockets of a brown woolen coat buttoned over green muffler, his eyes watery, his nose red. He had not been waiting for Jamal, but when he spotted him coming out of his building, he walked right over.
Janm, he said. "It's me."
Jamal recognized him at once, and figured he was looking for a piece of ass.
"How you doin, man?" he said. "Good, how you been?" "I'm survivin," Jamal said.
"Cold as a fuckin witch's tit, ain't it?"
"Cold," Jamal agreed.
"Was that your girl last night?" Curly Joe asked.
"Got herself juked on St. Sab's?"
"Yeah," Jamal said cautiously.
"I thought I recognized her from that time."
"Yeah."
"What a shame, huh?"
"Yeah."
"How'd she get all the way down there?"
Jamal looked at him.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Cause I seen her up here not long before," Curly Joe said.
"What do you mean?" Jamal asked again.
"Musta been six or so in the morning. I was in the diner havin a coffee. She got out of a taxi."
Jamal waited.
"You know Richie Cooper?"
"I know him," Jamal said.
"She went off with him and three young kids who were pissing in the gutter. I seen them from the diner."
He had finally passed out, and they were dragging him into the bathroom where they had filled the tub with water. Not passed out entirely cold, but so sklonked he couldn't walk or even stand, didn't know what the hell was happening to him, just kept waving one arm in the air like a symphony conductor except that he was singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" as they dragged him across the floor by the ankles. Something fell out of his pocket, the switchblade knife he'd threatened them with earlier tonight. Richard the First stooped to pick it up, jammed it in the pocket of his own jacket. He was sweating heavily. They were about to kill someone, but this had to be done. The girl had been an accident, but this was murder, but it had to be done. They all knew that. The three Richards now as one.
They were
Richard acting in concert, dragging yet another Richard into the bathroom where the tub full of water waited.
The water looked brownish, this city. Richard the Third was the strongest of them, he grabbed black Richard under the arms, while the two each grabbed a leg. "One... two . . three," they said, and they hoisted him off the floor and swung him into the tub.
"Hey!" he yelled.
Too late.
Jamal knew Richard as a dope dealer pulled down what, five, six bills a day, maybe a thou when business was good and the cotton was high. Used to be in trade together many a moon back, before Jamal tipped to the fact that dealing was a hazardous occupation whereas living off the sweat and toil of the female persuasion was less strenuous and nowhere near as dangerous.
What puzzled Jamal now was what Yolande had been doing with Richard and three white dudes at six this morning, directly after she'd phoned to say she was on the way home. Had Richard decided to do a little freelance pimping on his own? In which case he had to be taught about territorial imperative and not stepping on a fellow entrepreneur's toes. Or had Yolande and Richard decided to share an early morning breakfast with the three honkies? In which case, what had happened to the red patent-leather handbag containing--by Yolande's own admission on the phone." close to two thousand dollars?
Teaching Richard a lesson was no longer necessary now that Yolande was dead.
Recovering that handbag with the money in it was of prime importance, however, and it was the memory of that bag and anticipation of what was in that bag that propelled Jamal up the steps two at a time to Richard's third-floor apartment.
The time was three minutes to noon.
He started fighting the minute they threw him in the tub. He didn't know how to swim and the first thing that entered his mind was that he had somehow fallen into a swimming pool and was going to drown.
Only the second half of this supposition was true.
Jamal was thinking if Richard didn't hand that bag over the minute he asked for it, he was going to beat him senseless.
No cyanosis.
No bruises on the galea of the scalp.
No punctate hemorrhages in the conjunctivae.
And now no dark red fluid blood in the heart, or excess serous fluid in the lungs.
Ergo, no suffocation.
Considering the way she had bled, Blaney wondered if the girl had died from a botched abortion.
If the Pro-Lifers--a hypocritical designation if ever he'd heard one, and don't send me letters, he thought ........ had scared her away from seeking help at any of the city's legal clinics, perhaps she'd found a back-alley butcher to do the job or, worse yet, maybe
she'd tried to do it herself. Too many women attempted tearing the fetal membrane release the amniotic fluid, thereby causing contractions and expulsion of the fetus. Then whatever long thin object they could find, not just a coat hanger depicted in the Pro-Choice propaganda and don't you write to me, either, he thought but also umbrella ribs and knitting needles.
Blaney was a doctor.
He felt the best and only place to perform a gynecological procedure was in a hospital.
Period.
By a trained physician.
Period.
But here in the silence of the morgue, there were moral or religious judgments to be made, no agendas to be met.
There was only search and discovery. How had the girl died? Period.
Blaney found no fetus, nor any fetal parts, in the girl's genital tract or peritoneal cavity. Moreover, he had measured the thickness, length and width of the uterus, the density of the uterine wall, the length of the uterine cavity, the circumference of both the internal and external vaginal openings, and the length of the lower part of the uterus, he found no indication that the girl had been pregnant before her death. Nor was there any indication that the vaginal vault had been accidentally punctured while she'd been seeking to abort herself, unsurprising in that there had been nothing to abort.