which was why she was alone in the room at 11 P.M. She spoke with many a hesitation and pause, always telling the truth, yet never sounding truthful. That’s how good a liar Heloise was. She could make the truth sound like a lie, a lie sound like the truth.
Still, her version was strong enough to keep police from charging him. After all, there was no physical evidence in his car and they had only two letters from the plate. Witnesses did make mistakes, even witnesses as articulate and positive as the wholesome young GW student. That was when Heloise told Bill she was prepared to recant everything, go to the police and confess that she had lied to cover up for a longtime client.
“I’ll tell them it was all made up, that I did it as a favor to you, unless you promise to leave me alone from now on.” They were meeting in the Starbucks on Dupont Circle again, but the beautiful girl had the day off. That, or she had moved on.
“But then they’ll know you’re a whore.”
“A whore who can provide your alibi.”
“I didn’t do anything.” His voice was whiny, put-upon. Then again, he was being framed for a crime he didn’t commit, so his petulance was earned.
“I heard there’s a police witness who picked you out of the lineup, put you at the scene. And once I out myself as a whore-well, then it’s an established fact that you traffic in whores. That’s not going to play very well for you. In fact, I’ll tell the police that you wanted me to do something that I didn’t want to do, an act so degrading and hideous I can’t even speak of it, and we argued and you went slamming out of the room, angry and frustrated. Maybe that poor dead girl paid the price for your aggression and hostility.”
He very quickly came to see it her way. He muttered and complained, but once he left the Starbucks, she was sure she would never see him again. Not even back in the suburbs, for she had signed Scott up for travel soccer, having ascertained that Bill Carroll’s son was not skilled enough to make the more competitive league. It was a lot more time, but then-she had always had time for Scott. She had set up her life so she was always there for her son. If there was a better gig for a single mother, she had yet to figure it out.
Her only regret was the dead girl. Heloise’s debts to the dead seemed like bad karma, mounting up in a way that would have to be rectified one day. There had been that boy Val had killed for no crime greater than laughing at his given name-Valery. She had told the boy, a drug dealer, Val’s big secret and the boy had let it slip, so Val killed him. Killed him, then driven off in the boy’s car, just because it was there and he could, but it was the theft of the car that made it a death penalty crime in Maryland. And even as Heloise had soothed Val and carted shoeboxes of money to various lawyers, skimming as much as she had dared, she was giving Brad the information they needed to lock him up forever. She had used a dead boy to create a new life for herself, and she had never looked back.
And now there was this anonymous girl, someone not much different from herself, whose death remained unsolved. If it had been Baltimore, Heloise could have leaned on Brad a little, pressed to know what leads the department had. But it was D.C. and she had no connections there, not in law enforcement, and Congress’s relationship with the city was notoriously rocky. The Women’s Full Employment Network offered a reward for any information leading to an arrest in the case, but nothing came of it.
Finally, there were all those little deaths, as the French called them, all those sighing, depleted men, slumping back against the bed-or the carpet, or the chair, or the bathtub-temporarily sated, briefly safe, for there was no one more harmless than a man who had just orgasmed. Even Val had been safe for a few minutes in the aftermath. How many men had there been now, after eight years with Val and nine years on her own? She did not want to count. She left her work at the office, and when she came home, she stood in her son’s doorway and watched him sleep, grateful to have found her one true love.
PART II. OTHER CITIES, NOT MY OWN
PONY GIRL
She was looking for trouble and she was definitely going to find it. What was the girl thinking when she got dressed this morning? When she decided-days, weeks, maybe even months ago-that this was how she wanted to go out on Mardi Gras day? And not just out, but all the way up to the interstate and Ernie K-Doe’s, where this kind of costume didn’t play. There were skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians and baby dolls, but it wasn’t a place where you saw a lot of people going for sexy or clever. That kind of thing was for back in the Quarter, maybe outside Cafe Brasil. It’s hard to find a line to cross on Mardi Gras day, much less cross it, but this girl had gone and done it. In all my years-I was nineteen then, but a hard nineteen-I’d seen only one more disturbing sight on a Mardi Gras day and that was a white boy who took a Magic Marker, a thick one, and stuck it through a piercing in his earlobe. Nothing more to his costume than that, a Magic Marker through his ear, street clothes, and a wild gaze. Even in the middle of a crowd, people granted him some distance, let me tell you.
The Mardi Gras I’m talking about now, this was three years ago, the year that people were saying that customs mattered, that we had to hold tight to our traditions. Big Chief Tootie Montana was still alive then, and he had called for the skeletons and the baby dolls to make a showing, and there was a pretty good turnout. But it wasn’t true old school, with the skeletons going to people’s houses and waking up children in their beds, telling them to do their homework and listen to their mamas. Once upon a time, the skeletons were fierce, coming in with old bones from the butcher’s shop, shaking the bloody hanks at sleeping children. Man, you do that to one of these kids today, he’s as like to come up with a gun, blow the skeleton back into the grave. Legends lose their steam, like everything else. What scared people once won’t scare them now.
Back to the girl. Everybody’s eyes kept going back to that girl. She was long and slinky, in a champagne- colored body stocking. And if it had been just the body stocking, if she had decided to be Eve to some boy’s Adam, glued a few leaves to the right parts, she wouldn’t have been so…disrupting. Funny how that goes, how pretending to be naked can be less inflaming than dressing up like something that’s not supposed to be sexy at all. No, this one, she had a pair of pointy ears high in her blond hair, which was pulled back in a ponytail. She had pale white- and-beige cowboy boots, the daintiest things you ever seen, and-this was what made me fear for her-a real tail of horsehair pinned to the end of her spine, swishing back and forth as she danced. Swish. Swish. Swish. And although she was skinny by my standards, she managed the trick of being skinny with curves, so that tail jutted out just so. Swish. Swish. Swish. I watched her, and I watched all the other men watching her, and I did not see how anyone could keep her safe if she stayed there, dancing into the night.
Back in school, when they lectured us on the straight and narrow, they told us that rape is a crime of violence. They told us that a woman isn’t looking for something just because she goes out in high heels and a halter and a skirt that barely covers her. Or in a champagne-colored body stocking with a tail affixed. They told us that rape has nothing to do with sex. But sitting in Ernie K-Doe’s, drinking a Heineken, I couldn’t help but wonder if rape started as sex and then moved to violence when sex was denied. Look at me, look at me, look at me, the tail seemed to sing as it twitched back and forth. Yet Pony Girl’s downcast eyes, refusing to make eye contact even with her dancing partner, a plump cowgirl in a big red hat, sent a different message. Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t touch me. You do that to a dog with a steak, he bites you, and nobody says that’s the dog’s fault.
Yeah, I wanted her as much as anyone there. But I feared for her even more than I wanted her, saw where the night was going and wished I could protect her. Where she was from, she was probably used to getting away with such behavior. Maybe she would get away with it here, too, if only because she was such an obvious outsider. Not a capital-T tourist, not some college girl from Tallahassee or Birmingham who had gotten tired of showing her titties on Bourbon Street and needed a new thrill. But a tourist in these parts, the kind of girl who was so full of herself that she thought she always controlled things. She was counting on folks to be rational, which was a pretty big count on Mardi Gras day. People do odd things, especially when they’s masked.
I saw a man I knew only as Big Roy cross the threshold. Like most of us, he hadn’t bothered with a costume, but he could have come as a frog without much trouble. He had the face for it-pop eyes, wide, flat mouth. Big Roy was almost as wide as he was tall, but he wasn’t fat. I saw him looking at Pony Girl, long and hard, and I decided I
