The lieutenant looked at me a moment before asking, “How do you know there wasn’t a reason?”
I blinked. “Well, there’s no sign of robbery. Her cart’s still here, everything’s in it, including her wallet, her DL, and sixteen dollars.”
“Maybe the doer was expecting more of a take?”
“She had a jacket,” I said, and watched Kincaid’s dark eyes widen a touch. “I know her, Loot. Used to buy dogs from her on the way in to work.”
“You live in Belleville,” he said, probably thinking I must pass five or six similar carts that weren’t out of the way like this one. I decided not to respond. He moved on to other matters, asking me about the need for all the manpower. I embarrassed myself by saying the first twenty-four hours after a murder was the best time to catch the doer.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” he said. “Are you good for this, Dandridge? Is there anything about your relationship with the vic I should be aware of?”
“I didn’t have a relationship, Lieutenant. I just bought hot dogs from her.”
He gazed at me a few more seconds, then got into his Crown Vic and drove off. The golfers walked up. Jerry Trevino was a few inches shorter but must have had forty pounds on me. He spent every off-hour in the gym, trying to compensate for his lack of height. Albert Woods used to delight in people telling him he looked like Denzel Washington. But in the last few years, he had taken up golf, started wearing only clothing with a Nike Swoosh on it and talking about how he was distantly related to Tiger Woods. Few of us believed him.
“We did what canvas we could,” Trevino said. “This hour, this weather, not much more than a couple of homeless.”
“Couldn’t you and Park have handled this one?” Woods asked.
“Park’s got the flu,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. January.”
I thanked them for their help and let them get on home.
I looked down at Kayla’s body again. I tried to hear her laugh, but all I could hear was the rain.
THE CRIME-SCENE TECHS had found nothing at the scene. They said there were so many prints on the hot-dog cart, it’d be impossible to get through them all. I had originally argued to lift any and all regardless of how many but came to my senses quickly. I spent hours at the corner of Delmar and Jefferson, asking every passerby if they knew the girl who worked the hot-dog cart there. I took down the name and address of anyone who said yes, mostly city workers and a few businessmen.
I ran every person who said they’d bought dogs from Kayla through the system. Nothing jumped out at me, but that didn’t mean one of them hadn’t killed her. I wanted to bring each one of them in, put them in the box, and make them talk. Lieutenant Kincaid nixed that idea — told me they weren’t suspects simply because they admitted to buying a hot dog from the victim. I knew that. Kincaid suggested that if I really felt the need to speak with all of them, I should go to them, do some casual interviews.
Roland Park showed up around eight on the second night, carrying a box of Kleenex. Said he was feeling better. I brought him up to speed on the case. He blew his nose and said, “Booking some OT, sporto?” referring to the fact that I had been working right through the day shift.
“I didn’t put in for it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just never occurred to me.”
Roland squinted his Korean-American eyes at me and laughed, which turned into a cough. “So where are we?”
“Nowhere. I’m about to head over for the autopsy. Want to come?”
“Nah. My stomach ain’t ready for a young girl’s autopsy. Where are we on the Rickards thing?”
Rickards was the name of a shooting victim we had caught a couple of nights before. A young kid from England, he’d gotten into a beef with a bartender who refused to serve him and, in the ensuing brawl, wound up with a bullet in his head. Though there were more than a dozen witnesses, no one saw the shooter. It was one of three active cases when I caught Kayla’s murder.
“Supposedly the bartender’s sister is back in town,” I said.
“You go to the cut, I’ll work the sister,” Roland said, then sneezed three times.
I nodded and left.
The medical examiner told me that Kayla Lightfoot was killed with a serrated blade, not unlike certain steak knives. Approximately four and a half inches long. She managed to find some microscopic filings from the blade that had lodged inside Kayla as the killer twisted and turned the knife.
The ME went on to say that the killer was most likely right-handed, had grabbed Kayla from behind, and had stuck her in her right side, between her kidney and oblique muscles.
The ME continued, but I didn’t hear the rest. I was staring at Kayla — now laid out on a stainless-steel table, her eyes closed.
I was glad she was missing this.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “I’ll find him,” I whispered.
“What was that?” the ME asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and walked out.
AFTER MY THIRD day with almost no sleep, after I had requested that Lieutenant Kincaid put me back on day shift, after Roland Park and I had a shouting match in the middle of the squad room over my wanting to go to every restaurant in St. Louis and check what type of steak knives they use, I was sitting in the lieutenant’s office. He stared at me, palming his Ozzie Smith autographed baseball, the ink fading from the constant rubbing by his waxy brown fingers.
“You need to come correct, Dandridge.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He set the baseball down and leaned forward. “Were you sleeping with this girl? This Lightfoot?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you doing anything with her? Was she doing anything with you? To you? Hot dogs and blow jobs to start the day?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what the hell is it? Your partner says you’re ignoring your other cases, you two are fighting in the squad room, you’re spending fifteen hours a day on this thing and not putting in for any OT. Something ain’t right.”
I looked out his window. Down on the street was a hot-dog vendor closing up for the night. “I met her back around Thanksgiving. Nothing between us. No sex, nothing. She was just . . .” I searched my mind for the right words. “She was just decent. Not a jaded bone in her body.”
“And a tight little body she had,” Kincaid said, letting me know he didn’t believe there was nothing going on. “You need to put this case in the proper order and the proper perspective. Innocent girls get killed in this city every day. Sometimes we put them down, sometimes we don’t.
“You got the shit luck that night and caught one that can’t be put down.” He picked up the baseball again. “Don’t let it consume you. You’ve had a nice, solid clearance rate since I’ve been here. One of the better ones. But we all get these now and then. The ones we have to just chalk up to ‘shit happens.’
“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 shoplif
ting. 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.
Shawna asked, “Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you know why?”
Why?
In my years as a detective, I’d come to learn that why was overrated. How plus why equals who is an old and outdated theory of police work. I learned long ago that why doesn’t matter.
“VERY LIKELY” WAS the answer the ME gave me about the knife from Shawna’s trailer. I literally ran up the steps of the station, took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevators, and burst into the Homicide squad room.
“I got her!” I yelled to Roland Park.
“Who?”
“Kayla Lightfoot’s murderer.”
My partner’s face dropped. He shared a glance with the golfers. Kincaid stepped out of his office when he heard me yell. They all just stared at me.
I held up the baggy containing the knife. “The murder weapon,” I proclaimed. “Her fucking aunt did it.”
“Why?” asked Roland.
“Why? I have no idea why. Who cares? I’ve got her drunk, hooking ass.” I bounced over to Kincaid. “Lieutenant, I want t
o bring the bitch in, put her in the box, and break her. She did it. She had the knife sitting right there in the sink!”
“The medical examiner called me, Detective,” Kincaid said, his voice quiet and slow. “Said she told you it was a likely match based on type of blade, but the filings didn’t necessarily match up.”
“‘Very likely’ is what she said. ‘Very.’ And the filings — there could be any number of reasons why they don’t match.”
“Like it ain’t the right blade,” Roland said.
“Detective Dandridge,” Kincaid said. “Step into my office.”
Kincaid picked up his baseball but didn’t sit down. When I closed the door, he said, “Look in that mirror.”
He had a small mirror on the back of his door. I looked.
“Yeah?”
“What do you see?”
“Lieutenant, we don’t have time for this. We gotta grab up — ”
“I see a burned-out cop. Look at your eyes. You haven’t slept in how long? You haven’t shaved since God knows when, which, by the way, is a departmental infraction.”
“I’ll sleep when I put this one down.”
“You’ll sleep today. I’m suspending you for a week.”
“What? You can’t. I’ve got the fucking murder weapon.”
“I’ll have Park and the golfers run it down. Question the aunt. If anything’s there, we’ll bring her in.”
“No, they’ll fuck it up. They don’t care about her.”
“About who?”
“Kayla!”
That was it. I put myself in the jackpot with that line. Maybe I could have talked my way out of the suspension before that.
I CALLED ROLAND Park’s cell phone every day from my house. After three days, he returned my call.
“Got some interesting news for you, sporto,” he said.
“You nailed her.”
“No. The aunt’s got a pretty solid alibi for the night of the murder. She was doing what she does best. But one of her johns, this guy who was renting the apartment to the vic, seems as though he had a little extracurricular whatnot going on with your honey. Me and Woods figure maybe he snatched one of Auntie’s steak knives from her place at some point. Sound good?”