“I’ve been there, I know how much it sucks when the golfers are catching bunny after bunny, and you and Park keep catching these twisters.”
Kincaid went on to say, “If you need a break, a little time, let me know. But you’re too good, Dandridge, for me to let you go back to the day shift. It’ll all cycle around, but meantime you gotta work the dark like all of us.”
“I just need the days – I have to run down all the restaurants, restaurant-supply stores. I’m trying to track down this aunt of Kayla’s – ”
“First of all, Park told me about this restaurant goose chase. That’s bullshit, Detective. And second, who the hell is Kayla?”
“Kayla Lightfoot. The victim we’re sitting here talking about.”
He gave me another long look, then said, “Get back to work. And remember, you got people watching you now. Don’t fuck up.”
I FOUND KAYLA’S aunt living in a trailer park about twenty minutes north of the city. If it was the same Shawna Lightfoot, then she was about as different from Kayla as homicide is from shoplifting. A pop for prostitution, two for drunk driving, another for carrying a controlled substance.
Shawna Lightfoot was outside her trailer, stuffing a plastic trash bag into a metal can when I walked up. Despite the cold, she was in short shorts, sandals, and a severely faded long-sleeved T-shirt with the Harley-Davidson insignia on it. I showed her my shield, and she scoffed.
“That asshole Mooney give you a line of bullshit about me not checking in?” she said, then coughed. It was a nasty cough, a smoker’s cough, not a sickness cough.
“Who’s Mooney?” I asked.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “My fucking PO. Guy’s a stiff prick with the clap.”
This was the aunt that taught Kayla about Cannonball Adderley and Louis Armstrong?
I told her I didn’t know Mooney and wasn’t there for any parole violations. I said I was there about Kayla. The second she heard the name, her whole demeanor changed.
“Oh, God. Come inside.”
She led me into a double-wide that smelled of cheese, marijuana, and must. She grabbed an armful of laundry off a sofa that had lost its springs years ago. “Sit,” she said.
I took a seat on one of two bar stools next to a Formica counter that held a saucepan with remnants of macaroni and cheese, a few cans of beer, and a photo of Kayla next to her hot-dog cart. I picked up the photo without thinking. There was the face, the laughing eyes.
“She brought that to me this Christmas,” Shawna said, balancing on the edge of the dilapidated sofa. “Last time I saw her. Please tell me she’s not in trouble again.”
I stared at the photo. “Trouble?” I said distantly.
“Come on, don’t do the cop bullshit. Just tell me. Did she get fucked up again? Hurt herself? Crash a car? What?”
Finally, I managed to pull my eyes away from the picture and said, “Kayla was murdered five days ago.”
Shawna Lightfoot sank into the sofa. She didn’t cry or scream or say anything. She just sank. Physically. Emotionally.
“Do you know anyone who would want to do her harm?”
Shawna Lightfoot looked at me for what seemed like hours. Then she said, “You knew her, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know anyone who’d want to do her harm?”
“No.”
Shawna nodded, then wrapped her spindly arms around herself. She began to rock slowly.
I don’t know how long it was before I said, “Kayla told me you introduced her to jazz. Gave her that purple coat from L.L.Bean.”
“Lands’ End,” she corrected. “Found it at TJ Maxx.” A smile seemed to be fighting to make its way out of her mouth. “What else did she tell you?”
“She said you had a hang-up about your age.”
She laughed, and with it came tears. Lots of tears.
“I tried so hard. So hard to keep her from being like me. The last thing in the world I wanted was for her to end up like me.”
Over the next hour, Shawna Lightfoot told me about Kayla never knowing who her father was, about her mother – Shawna’s older sister – being a meth dealer and user who got Kayla drunk at age nine, gave her her first joint at ten, and, during one three-day meth binge, told twelve-year-old Kayla that if she didn’t get out of her house, she would kill her in her sleep.
Kayla ran off, was gone for months. Eventually, Shawna got a phone call – Kayla was in the hospital, having her stomach pumped of Jim Beam. Kayla had told the doctors that Shawna was her mother. That’s when Shawna took her in. Even though Shawna was a hooker and a drunk, she knew that her sister was worse, and she knew there was something special about Kayla. Something worth saving.
She told me how she had no idea how to raise a kid, so she watched movies to learn. Said that it seemed like the people who were the happiest in movies were always listening to jazz. Shawna had never heard jazz in her life. But she went to the library and checked out two jazz records. The Cannonball Adderley Quintet and Louis Armstrong.
“It was alphabetical, you know? I just grabbed the first two in the bin.”
That’s how one knows about Adderley but not Davis.
She told me she brought them home and played them for Kayla over and over. Kayla loved them. Stopped listening to other music. Just fell in love with the jazz. Said Kayla memorized the lyrics to every Armstrong song and would even sing along to Adderley’s instrumentals, making up her own lyrics.
“I still have them. I never took them back to the library. Sometimes I pull them out for kicks, you know? And I can still hear Kayla singing.”
“So, Kayla sobered up?” I asked, still not comprehending how the girl I’d met could have had the life being described.
“Oh, yeah. She just needed love. She had so much love inside her, she just needed it pulled out. I guess the movies were right – jazz makes you happy.”
“I think it was you, Shawna.”
She started to cry again.
I got her a beer from the fridge. As I closed the door, I glanced into the sink. Saw a serrated steak knife. Shawna was lost on the sofa. I pocketed the blade, keeping as much of my prints off it as possible.
I handed Shawna the beer. She said she hardly drank anymore. She had made such a point not to have alcohol around while Kayla lived there.
“When did she move out?”
“After she graduated high school. First one in our fucked-up family to do that!”
She told me how she had made Kayla go to school. Made her study. Told her she could go to college if she could get a scholarship. But Kayla didn’t want to go to college. When she graduated high school, she got a job. To pay back Shawna.
“Pay me back,” Shawna said. “Little did she know, I owed her.”
“I went to her address,” I said. “The little place over off Kings-highway. Talked to some neighbors. No one seemed to really know her.”
Shawna took a long pull from the bottle, wiped her eyes, and said, “Yeah, well, it ain’t the greatest area. But she was so proud of having a place. So proud of herself. You’re probably wondering how she could afford it, right? Outta high school, working a fucking hot-dog cart.”
I nodded. “The guy, the landlord, was a former customer of mine. Know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“He gave her a great deal. He lives right above, gave her rent at half-price, long as every now and then, he gets a freebie from me, you know? Kayla never knew.”
I nodded. “Did you and Kayla ever fight? Ever have problems?”
“No,” she said, taking another pull. “We were best friends. I mean, in the beginning, she got pissed now and then. Called me a hypocrite, you know? ’Cuz I wouldn’t let her do stuff I did. But once she got clean, we never had a problem. It was like having a daughter of my own. She was my daughter, more than she was my sister’s.”
I let her cry for a while. Thought about the blade in my pocket.