I let my hand with the gun drop. Everything Selima had said made sense, now that I thought about it. “That’s why you’re so shaken up,” I said thoughtfully. “You think Nikki’s in some kind of trouble.”
“I think Nikki’s in trouble,” said Selima, “but that’s not why I’m so rabbity. Marîd, Devi’s dead. She’s been murdered, too.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. Yasmin gave a loud gasp; she uttered another superstitious formula — “far from you” — to protect us from the evil that had just been mentioned. I felt weariness, as if I’d overdosed on shocking news and just couldn’t work up the proper reaction. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “let me guess: just like Tami. Burn marks, bruises around her wrists, jammed coming and going, strangled, and her throat cut. And you think someone’s out to get all three of you, and you’re next.”
I was astonished by her reply. “No, you’re wrong. I found her lying in her bed, almost like she was peacefully asleep. She’d been shot, Marîd, with an old-fashioned gun, the kind that used metal bullets. There was a bullet hole exactly centered on her caste mark. No signs of a fight or anything. Nothing disturbed in her apartment. Just Devi, part of her face blown away, a lot of blood splattered on the bedclothes and the walls. I threw up. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those old weapons were so bloody and, well, brutal.” This from a woman who’d slashed enough faces in her time. “I’ll bet no one’s been shot with a bullet in fifty years.” Selima evidently didn’t know about my Russian, whatever his name had been; dead bodies didn’t cause much scandal and gossip in the Budayeen; they weren’t all that rare. Corpses were more of an inconvenience than anything else. Getting large quantities of bloodstains out of nice silk or cashmere is a tedious job.
“Have you called Okking yet?” I asked.
Selima nodded. “It wasn’t his shift. Sergeant Hanar came and asked all the questions. I wish it’d been Okking instead.”
I knew what she meant. Hajjar was the kind of cop I think of when I think of “cop.” He walked around as if he had a cork up his ass, looking for petty rowdies to blast into grand mal seizures. He had a particular hard-on for Arabs who were inattentive to their spiritual duties: people like me and almost everyone else in the Budayeen.
I put the gun back in Yasmin’s bag. My mood had changed entirely; now suddenly, and for the first time, I felt sympathy for Selima. Yasmin put her hand on Selima’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. “I’ll make some coffee,” I said. I looked at the last Black Widow Sister. “Or would you rather have tea?”
She was grateful for our kindness, and our company, too, I think. “Tea, thank you,” she said. She had begun to calm down.
I put the kettle on to boil. “So just tell me one thing: why did the three of you work out your kinks on my body the other day?”
“Allah have mercy on me,” said Selima. She took a folded scrap of paper from her bag and brought it to me. “This is Nikki’s usual handwriting, but it’s obvious she was in a terrible hurry.” The words were written in English, scrawled quickly on the back of an envelope.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Selima glanced at me and quickly looked back down at the paper. “It says, ‘Help. Hurry. Marîd.’ That’s why we did what we did. We misunderstood. We thought you were responsible for whatever trouble she was in. Now I know that you had done her the service of negotiating her release from that pig Abdoulaye, and that she owed you money. She wanted us to let you know that she needed help, but didn’t have time to write anything more. She was probably lucky just to scribble this down.”
I thought about the beating they’d given me; the hours of unconsciousness; the pain I’d suffered and still suffered; the long, nightmarish wait at the hospital; the anger I’d felt toward Nikki; the thousand kiam it had cost me. I added all that up and tried to cancel it. I couldn’t. I still felt an unaccustomed rage inside me, but now it seemed I had no one to vent it on. I looked at Selima. “Just forget it,” I said.
Selima wasn’t moved. I thought she’d meet me halfway at least, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. “It isn’t all right, you know,” she reminded me. “I’m still worried about Nikki.”
“The letter she wrote might be true, after all,” I said, pouring tea into three cups. “Those clues you mentioned, they might all have some innocent explanation.” I didn’t believe a word of it, even as I said it. It was only to make Selima feel better.
She took her cup of tea and held it. “I don’t know what to do now,” she said.
“It may be some crazy trick is after all three of you,” Yasmin suggested. “Maybe you ought to hide out for a while.”
“I thought of that,” Selima said. Yasmin’s theory didn’t sound likely to me: Tamiko and Devi had been killed in such completely different ways. Of course, that didn’t rule out the possibility of a creative murderer. Despite all the old cop truisms about a criminal’s modus operandi, there wasn’t a reason in the world why a killer couldn’t use two offbeat techniques. I kept quiet about this, too.
“You could stay in my apartment,” said Yasmin. “I could stay here with Marîd.” Both Selima and I were startled by Yasmin’s offer.
“That’s good of you to offer,” said Selima. “I’ll think about it, sugar, but there are a couple of other things I want to try. I’ll let you know.”
“You’ll be all right if you just keep your eyes open,” I said. “Don’t do any business for a few days, don’t mix with strangers.” Selima nodded. She handed me her tea, which she hadn’t even tasted.
“I have to go,” she said. “I hope everything is straight now between us.”
“You have more important things to worry about, Selima,” I said. “We’ve never been very close before. In a morbid way, maybe we’ll end up better friends because of this.”
“The price has been high,” she said. That was all too true. Selima started to say something else, then stopped. She turned and went to the door, let herself out, and closed the door quietly behind her.
I stood by the stove with three cups of tea. “You want one of these?” I asked.
“No,” said Yasmin.
“Neither do I.” I dumped the tea into the sink.
“There’s either one mighty twisted bastard out there killing people,” mused Yasmin, “or what’s worse, two different motherfuckers working the same side of the street. I’m almost afraid to go to work.”
I sat down beside her and stroked her perfumed hair. “You’ll be all right at work. Just listen to what I told Selima: don’t pick up any trick you don’t already know. Stay here with me instead of going home alone.”