ask.
Sondra shrugs. “Beats me. I don’t know who she was before or where she came from or why. It don’t matter much, you know?”
“Can you think of any reason why she was killed?”
A flash of anger. “Yeah. Because there are weird assholes in this world, and she went off with one of them.”
Sondra has very little information to provide, no matter how much we prod. She thinks Rosalie came from the Midwest, though that is just a guess, and she thinks she might have run away from a family with money, because she knew all about nice clothes, even though she didn’t have any.
We show Sondra pictures of the other victims, with the faint hope she’ll recognize them as somehow being connected to Rosalie. She does not, and we’re about to conclude this interview when a car pulls up. A guy gets out and strides purposefully toward us. If central casting needed a pimp, this is who they would send for. He’s got the car, the clothes, the attitude, the whole package.
“They bothering you, Sondra?”
Sondra’s demeanor changes instantly; her fear of this man is palpable. “They ain’t bothering me, Rick. We just talking.”
Rick smiles briefly. “Oh, you just talking? I thought you supposed to be just working.”
What happens next goes by so fast that it seems surreal. Rick slaps Sondra across the face, and she falls back. Then Laurie grabs Rick and spins him around and down face-first onto the hood of his car. He screams in pain, and I see blood spurting onto the hood from the place where his intact nose used to be.
He tries to get up, but Laurie has his arm behind him in what looks like a wrestling hold. She slams his head down again, and he moans in agony. Then she actually opens her handbag and takes out a pair of handcuffs, cuffing him behind his back.
Finally, I spring into action, albeit verbal action. “Holy shit,” I say. My comment seems to have little effect on events as they are unfolding.
Sondra is crying softly, but Laurie and Rick are paying just as little attention to her as they are to me. Laurie takes out her cell phone and calls a friend on the force, asking that officers be sent down to make an arrest. Then she takes Rick’s car keys and drops them down a sewer.
Rick attempts some kind of talking noise, but his exact words are lost as they fail to navigate through the blood and smashed teeth. Laurie makes the reasonable assumption that what he was going to say was not conciliatory in nature, and smacks him hard in the back of his head.
She leans over until her mouth is maybe an inch from Rick’s ear. “I’m going to have some people check on Sondra every week, and if anything bad happens to her, anything at all—if she gets hit by lightning or catches a cold—I’m going to think it’s your fault. And compared to what will happen then, tonight will seem like a day at the beach. You understand?”
Rick mumbles something that sounds like “Miskshbelflk.” I assume that’s pimp-talk for “Yes, crazy lady, I understand real well. Please don’t smash my face again.”
The police show up and take Rick off to face assault and various other charges that they and Laurie will dream up. They don’t seem terribly concerned by his injuries, and as an officer of the court, I assure them that Rick sustained those injuries while resisting a citizen’s arrest.
After they’ve gone, Laurie turns to Sondra. “Do you want out of this?” she asks. “You can do better.”
Sondra laughs a short laugh, as if the idea is ridiculous. “Where am I gonna go?”
“That’s the easy part,” says Laurie. “The hard part is wanting to.”
“I’ll be okay,” she says.
I take out my card and hand it to her. “If you’re not, call me,” I say. “Next time I won’t be so easy on him.”
Sondra goes off, and Laurie and I head back to the car. “I didn’t know you still carry handcuffs,” I say, grinning like an idiot.
“I figured if I told you, you’d grin like an idiot.”
“You got any more of them?” I ask, since the first pair went off with Rick.
“I do, but I only use them in the pursuit of truth and justice.”
“Oh,” I say. “Damn.”
• • • • •
DR. JANET CARLSON must be the best-looking coroner in the United States. It’s ironic, because she had to have been voted “Least Likely to Hang Out with Dead