Karen had signed her name in the lower right corner, and as Frank continued to look at the painting, he was surprised that it had not caught his attention earlier. Its colors were darker, its mood more somber; the portrait was vastly different from the ones that surrounded it. Instead of cheerful crowds and gay scenes, there was only the body of a little girl, and a face that seemed larger than the body. It was the face which drew him toward it now, very beautiful as Angelica certainly had been, but with a beauty that now seemed misplaced, misshapened, and which brooded over its own features rather than radiated from them. It was as if Angelica had already known that she would never be allowed to live out her life. Somehow, Karen had painted this knowledge into her sister’s face, a knowledge, Frank realized with a sudden, dreadful chill, that had, in fact, been Karen’s, and not her little sister’s at all.
8
Caleb Stone was sitting at his desk when Frank returned to the detective bullpen. Propped back in his chair, his large belly drooping over the thick black belt of his trousers, he looked like a god of misspent youth.
“Well, I beat on some doors for you,” he said dryly.
“Turn anything up?” Frank asked as he ambled up to Caleb’s desk.
“By the grace of God, I did,” Caleb said. “You ever work Vice, Frank?”
“No.”
“It’s an eye-opener, let me tell you. You walk around the streets, checking out this guy in a high-priced double-breasted suit. He’s got a sweet little wife in Ansley Park, and a son who’s doing just fine at Emory.” He smiled sadly. “Thing is, this is the same guy who likes to tie a woman to the bedstead once a month and beat the shit out of her.”
Frank turned away slightly. “What’d you turn up, Caleb?”
Caleb leaned back in his chair. “Well, when I was in Vice, I used to keep my eye on this little house on Glenwood. A guy people called Sancho used to run a string of whores out of it. One of them was named Beatrice, and dear God, Frank, she was the cutest little thing in the world.” He smiled, almost wistfully, as if his memory were turning faintly sweet. “Black as the ace of spades, and with a wild look in her eye. But goddamn was she cute.” Suddenly the sweetness fell away, and Caleb’s voice took on a dangerous edge. “Anyway, the guy in the suit, he used to pay the price once in a while and Beatrice would meet him at this cabin he had on Black Mountain. For the whole weekend, you know. A real fly-me-to-the-moon sort of thing.” He shook his head gently, and his voice grew darker and more somber. “Well, he used to give Bea a slap once in a while, just for the fun of it, you might say. She let it go. It was just part of the deal, nothing serious. She didn’t like it, she told me, but whoever asked a whore what she liked? One weekend, though, things turned real sour up on Black Mountain, and this fuck did a real nasty job on Bea.” Caleb’s eyes shifted away, as if he were trying to hide what the story made him feel. “Well, I sort of liked Beatrice. She didn’t exactly have a heart of gold, and she’d probably rolled more than one conventioneer in her time, but there wasn’t a really mean bone in her body.” He looked back toward Frank. “Hell, even old Sancho was a stand-up guy. About as good as a pimp can ever be.” He laughed slightly. “Fat bastard with two buck teeth. Like the saying goes, he could eat a ear of corn through a keyhole.”
Frank smiled.
“When things got hot for him, Frank,” Caleb went on, “he did one thing I never knew a pimp to do. He spent his last goddamn dime bailing out his stable, and when he had to leave Atlanta, he run all the way to Kansas City, took every single whore with him, gave them some money, and then you know what?”
Frank shook his head.
“He cut them loose, Frank,” Caleb said. “Just said, ‘Good luck. Hope you’ll have a nice life.’ And then he just disappeared.”
“What are you getting at, Caleb?” Frank asked finally.
“Well, after the double-breasted suit beat up on Bea, Sancho came to me,” Caleb said. “He told me the story, and he said he was going to make sure this guy stayed clear of his girls.” Caleb shook his head. “And he tried to do that. But the suit was hot for Beatrice. Something about her skin, the way it bruised, maybe. Anyway, he wouldn’t leave her alone, and after Sancho said to stay away from Beatrice, just about everybody he knew got busted by the cops.”
“So he looked like a snitch,” Frank said.
“That’s right,” Caleb said. “That’s a dangerous thing to be.”
Frank nodded.
“So Sancho came to me,” Caleb said. “He figured the suit was in on it, that the suit had plugs into the cops, and that they were helping him set Sancho up.” Caleb smiled. “But he was wrong. The suit had a connection to a newspaper, to a reporter on the cophouse beat. That’s the guy that was feeding him.” He leaned even further back in his chair. “Well, it wasn’t long till somebody worked over Beatrice. It wasn’t the suit. It was somebody who thought Sancho had snitched on him. So the way I looked at it, it might as well have been the suit. Know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
Caleb smiled broadly. “Ever heard the expression ‘to take the law into your own hands’?”
“Yes.”
Caleb lifted his arms into the air. “These old hands right here, son,” he said. “One night they grabbed that fucker in the double-breasted suit, and they just didn’t stop working on his face until he was really sorry he’d ever been nasty to a nice little black girl.”
Frank smiled indulgently. “And this all has something to do with Angelica Devereaux?”
“It has to do with me knocking on a few doors around that lot,” Caleb answered. “When one of them opened, it was little Bea behind it.”
“She lives around there?”
“No, she lives in Kansas City,” Caleb said. “Right where Sancho cut her loose. Claims she’s a computer operator. Says she’s long gone from the whorehouse business.”
“You believe her?”
“Yeah,” Caleb said confidently.
“What’s she doing back in Atlanta?”
“Her sister’s just got married for the fourth or fifth time,” Caleb said. “She wanted Bea to come down and mind the kids while she went on her latest honeymoon.”
“And you don’t doubt any of this?”
“Nope,” Caleb said. “Know why? Because she didn’t give me that look whores always give men, even the ones they like. Lord God, Frank, you don’t know what disgust is until you listen to whores talk about men. I know. I listened to a lot of them when I was working Vice.”
Frank took out his notebook. “Beatrice, you said?”
“Beatrice Withers’s what she goes by.”
“And what did she tell you?”
“Well, Beatrice don’t much like kids,” Caleb said. “Fact is, she don’t know a thing about them. So they’ve been running her ragged for the last few days. She’s been walking the floor a lot. She was walking it at around three in the morning the day we found Angelica Devereaux.”
“Tuesday morning,” Frank said.
“That’s right.”
Frank could feel the skin of his fingers tighten slightly, as if they were already stretched out and reaching for the killer’s throat. “What’d she see?”
“I thought you might want to hear it from her own mouth.”
“Where is she?”
“At her sister’s house, like I said,” Caleb told him. He glanced at his watch. “She said she’d be there until around noon, then she was planning on taking the kids to the park so they could have a go at the squirrels. She’s probably there now.” He stood up immediately. “Ready to go?”