South by Southeast (35 page)

But neither dog came right away. When the whimpering was twinned—and Mother was sure Dunja was crying out, too—she felt alarm. Her dogs never cried. Why should they? Since her illness, she'd had the door installed for them in the kitchen so they could come and go without her. And the pain in their whimpers was palpable, mirroring the pain in her own cracked bones where her cancer was eating her.

“Dunja! Dragona!” she called sharply, and the dogs came toward her in the dark, moving slowly. Mother reached over to turn on her lamp at her bedside, but it only clicked. Was the bulb burned out again? She'd told those stupid boys that she needed her lamp working at all times, since it was the only one she could reach. The hallway light was out, too, so the only light in her room was the pale blue glow of her television.

Dragona's cold nose touched her wrist as the dog pushed her muzzle toward her. Dragona whimpered again, a sound to break a mother's heart. Mother rubbed the soft ball of fur at the top of the dog's head. She heard Dunja not far behind, but he didn't join his sister beside her. She heard his collar as he flopped to the floor.

“What's wrong, my sweet?” she said in Serbian. “What's happened?”

Then it came to her. Both of the dogs had been poisoned!

Mother forgot Dragona and reached under her pillow for her favorite .22 she had brought with her from Kosovo after she helped her husband, Bogdan, flee to Subotica during the Kosovo war. She had killed half a dozen men in her lifetime; her first had been the German soldier who tried to rape her during World War II, when killing still made her cry.

But her little gun was gone. How could that be?

No light. Her dogs poisoned. No gun.

Mother felt a stab of fear but also an excitement that had been absent for too long. This was something new. Unexpected.

A sound came from the hallway, a man's shoe scraping across her tile.

“Who's there?” she called to her doorway. “Who dares enter my house?”

She had collected many enemies. With all of the publicity and photos of her circulating because of that silly Tennyson, her visitor might be from Kosovo, Moscow, New York, Las Vegas, or someone in Los Angeles who felt cheated or wronged. Some of the girls who had worked for her had been too stupid to count their money properly and perhaps held grudges. Mother didn't know why someone hid in the shadows of her home, but she knew what it meant.

Where was that gun? She reached farther behind her pillow, surprised that her heart could still dance with such panic.

Her hand brushed something hard, but then a telltale
clank
told her that she'd knocked the gun behind her headboard to the floor. Her coordination was no longer reliable. Mother let out a sour laugh. Yes, this had always been her quarrel with God since the day the Germans killed her parents—God Almighty held a grudge against her and had never played fair for a day.

A man's voice said something beyond her doorway, so softly that she couldn't make out the hurried words, a kind of strange recitation. She could barely hear the voice over her dogs' unified suffering.

The man mumbled again.

“What?” Mother called.

That voice! Something about that voice . . .

Mother's heart withered in her frantic chest, more grief than fear. Could it be . . . ? Her medications played tricks on her ears, but she thought she heard him. Why was he back? How had she wronged him? Mother was not easily fooled, but he had fooled her.

Perhaps he had fooled everyone.

MY CELL PHONE
rang at five in the morning. I'd gotten a new phone and number, so only a handful of people had it. The caller ID identified the caller as LAPD.

My heart jumped. Maybe Escobar's body had been found. Maybe another prostitute had been murdered. I was so anxious I nearly dropped the phone.

“This is Tennyson,” I said.

“It's Nelson.”

Nelson wouldn't call me so early about anything small. “What is it, Nelson? Escobar?”

April sat up beside me.

A long pause. I'd caught Nelson off guard. “What about Escobar?”

“If it's not Escobar, why are you calling me this early?”

“I need you to get to RHD,” Nelson said. RHD was the department's Robbery-Homicide Division. “I need you here in one hour, by 6:00
A.M.
If you're not here, I'll send a team to bring you in and get a search warrant, just like old times.”

April turned on the lamp, which made me wince from the
light. She stared at me with concern, and I could only shrug. Four years ago, Nelson had torn up my house trying to build a case against me after a friend was murdered. The memory still pissed me off.

“What's going on?”

“I'm calling you as a courtesy,” Nelson said. “The alternative is you get pulled out of your house in front of the cameras. Merry Christmas, you stupid SOB. I'm doing you a favor.”

“At least tell me what it's about.”

“Antonija Obradovic,” Nelson said, pronouncing the name slowly. And badly.

“Who the hell is that?”

“Mother.”

I closed my eyes.
Shit.
April put a concerned hand on my shoulder.

“Man, come on,” I said. “If you have a case, why do you need me?”

Nelson didn't answer me.

“This is bullshit, Nelson. She's eighty-three. She has cancer. Why you wanna try to strong-arm me to testify against a sick old lady?”

“You don't need to testify against her,” Nelson said. “She's dead.”

I heard him, but my next word was a reflex. “What?”

Nelson's voice wound away in a long tunnel. “Six
A.M.
sharp, Hardwick,” Nelson said. “Don't make me sorry I did it the polite way. I'm only doing it for Preach.”

As my mind crept to wakefulness, I felt more nerves than grief. How had Mother died? I wouldn't be invited to RHD if Mother had succumbed to her cancer. I was tangled in it.

“What happened? I just saw her—”

“We know,” Nelson said. “You argued with her, an eyewitness said. Take a shower, get dressed, and bring your ass to RHD. You'll be here a while.”

“This is harassment, Nelson. Why would I kill Mother?”

“You tell me,” Nelson said, and hung up.

I hadn't told April that I'd gone with Chela to see our old madam. I never planned to keep it from her, but I hadn't found the right moment to tell the story. As April walked with me up the steps to the Robbery-Homicide Division, I knew I'd put it off too long. She'd insisted on coming to the police station with me, but she was mad enough to avoid my eyes. Maybe she wanted to judge my new chaos up close before she cut me loose again. I was sad that Mother was dead, but April was a bigger worry.

“This is Nelson's vendetta,” I told her. “There's no way he has evidence against me.”

“Maybe you should have brought your lawyer, Tennyson.”

“This is a dance he likes to do with me every couple of years. I'm not worried.”

That's how simple I thought it was.

On April's advice, I had shaved for the first time in three days and found a suit to wear. I didn't look as if I'd been asleep the hour before, much less as if I'd spent my night killing anyone.

When Nelson met me in the hall, he gave April a scathing look, wondering why she didn't know better. April's father had been Nelson's college mentor at Florida A&M, I remembered, and he had tried to warn April away from me before. Small world.

“I'll be right here, baby,” April said, and kissed me for the department to see.

“Jesus, leave that girl alone,” Nelson said to me as he walked me down the hall. He didn't pull on me, but he walked closer than I liked.

Three detectives waited in the gray interrogation room. When the door closed behind Nelson and me, I felt as if I was in jail already.

“I have to Mirandize,” Nelson said before I'd taken my seat. Handcuffs
clanked
.

“What?” I said. My thoughts crawled.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Nelson began in a drone, and he recited my Miranda rights in a puff of breath. “Do you understand these rights?”

“I'm under arrest?” I said.

When Nelson grabbed my arm, I wanted to snatch it away, but I could only go limp. Four detectives were ready to subdue me. Cold metal was clamped around my wrist. Nelson sat me roughly in the chair and chained the handcuffs to the center ring under the tabletop.

“This is beneath you,” I told Nelson.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” said a burly detective, pushing his thick, square-jawed face in front of mine. Like every Bad Cop I'd ever met, he looked as if he wanted ten minutes alone with me. “What were you doing at Antonija Obradovic's house?”

None of the reasons I'd gone to Mother's house was any of their business.

“Are your ears working, Tennyson?” Nelson said.

“Just tell me what happened,” I said to Nelson. “Why are you coming at me like this?”

“Answer my goddamned question,” Bad Cop said.

Someone slid an eight-by-ten photo toward me, and I glanced down.

Mother's bedroom in full color. Mother was nude, a sack of bones bent face-first over a portable toilet near her bed. I flinched away from the photo. My stomach hurt suddenly. I felt sick. I tugged at my handcuffs, ready to go home. The photo reminded me that I had just talked to Mother and kissed her forehead. Her skin was still warm to me.

“God,” I said.

“Back to my question,” Bad Cop said.

“Holy God.” Someone had murdered Mother savagely. I had assumed her killing had been execution-style, antiseptic, the way she herself might have done it. An old debt she owed someone. This was different. Worse.

“You do remember seeing her?” Nelson said. “Arguing with her?”

“I wasn't arguing,” I said. “She was yelling at me. She blamed me for dragging her name into the press.”

“And then you killed her . . . why?” Bad Cop said. “What were you protecting?”

“Did she threaten you?” A soft-spoken detective addressed me for the first time.

A second photo appeared beside the first; the two dogs were dead, too, splayed across Mother's carpeted bedroom floor, practically side-by-side.

“Our witness,” Nelson said, “says you told him you hated Mother's dogs.”

“Why'd you do her, Tennyson?” Bad Cop said. “And the dogs? Why all the anger?”

I looked away from the dead dogs. I had to remind myself I wasn't having a nightmare.

Nelson came closer to me. “Something to do with Chela?”

“Your little teenage girlfriend?” Bad Cop said. “We can haul her sweet little ass in here, too. Sit her down in cuffs. She was at Mother's with you.” He gave a thin, hard smile. “I hear she might enjoy a nice cavity search.”

Anger twitched my face. The room faded to white. “She's my daughter, asshole.”

“That's Preach's granddaughter,” Nelson cautioned his colleague. “Have some respect.” I appreciated the gesture, but if Nelson was the Good Cop, I was in trouble.

“I'm guessing she has a colorful history with Mother,” Bad Cop
said to me. “A love-hate relationship, just like you. What do you think?”

For the first time, I remembered the note I'd found in my mailbox:
Night-night, Mommy.
Had someone deliberately left me that note to telegraph Mother's death? To show me that I was being set up as a suspect? It seemed too great a coincidence. The bulldozer that had destroyed my previous life was working on my new one, too. The room spun.

“I need to talk to my lawyer,” I said.

The cops groaned theatrically, complaining among themselves, calling me names.

“Pussy.”

“Bitch.”

“Why do you need a lawyer, crybaby?” one said. “Guilty people need lawyers.”

Nelson hushed his colleagues and opened the door to let them out. “Give me a minute with him,” Nelson said.