Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [33]
Standard responses, no better or worse than usual. I wasn’t expecting anything different on 54, but I kept banging on the door anyway. Eventually it opened, and a stringy black woman in her early twenties stood blinking vaguely at me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The woman’s eyes were pinned and a muscle in her cheek pulsed gently. She stopped singing slowly, and internalized my question.
“Fuck that shit,” she said. “I live here. Who the hell are you?”
My real question was answered: She was fucked up, but not so much that any answers she gave me wouldn’t be worth listening to. Always assuming I could get her to tell me anything. She didn’t look too tough, but her heart-shaped face was already beginning to hollow out, and junkies don’t trust anyone at all.
“I need to talk to you about the death of Laverne Latoya,” I said. “Can I come inside?” I glanced up the corridor. The guys on the corner were still there. They weren’t coming any closer, but they were standing and watching carefully. Either they knew the woman I was talking to, or they were on a day-trip up from the 40s, and considering robbing both me and the woman’s apartment. Something told me it was the latter, and that they were only holding off because they thought I was a cop.
The woman’s shoulders slumped. “I already told about Verne,” she said, but she took a step back and let me inside. “I’m Shelley,” she added, vaguely. “Verne was my sister.”
The living room looked like shit. The back half was piled high with stuff, and covered with dirty sheets. I knew why; six days ago Laverne had been spread over it in a mess about one inch deep. Shelley was evidently camping in a small area of the remaining floor; witness a pile of clothes, a half-empty bottle of cheap wine, and some hastily hidden works.
“Did you live here with her?”
Shelley shook her head. “Only been here two days. I found her ’cos I came to borrow some money off her but I wasn’t living here then. Came here because I lost my apartment ’cos I’m not working at the moment. I’m a dancer,” she added, trying to be helpful, before tailing off sadly, “like Verne.”
I looked at her. She was dancing now, in a small and helpless way. She was trying to stand upright, but her legs were doing their best to undermine her. Each time one sagged she compensated with the other, in a tiny weaving side-step. Maybe she had been a dancer once, perhaps even a good one—in her state I’m not sure I could have stood up at all. I briefly considered shaking her down for whatever she was holding, but she didn’t look like someone who carried much spare, instead, I offered her a cigarette.
Easy question first: “Who did you talk to?”
“Two guys. Then one guy by himself.”
“The last guy, was he different from the others?”
Shelley nodded, smoke curling up out of her mouth. “Yeah. He was okay. He seemed…” She paused for a moment as if about to say something she barely credited. “He seemed like he wanted to know who did it.”
“He did,” I said. “He was a friend of mine. What about the others?”
“They was police.” She shrugged. I knew what she meant. They came down here because they had to, they called people to vacuum the body up and take it away and then left, never bothering to leave the impression that anything very much would be done about the fact that someone had dismantled her sister.
“Were you good friends with Laverne?” I asked. A calculated question. Over the course of the previous two addresses I seemed to have started remembering how things were done.
Shelley seemed to crumple. She gave up the attempt to stand, and wove toward the one chair which wasn’t covered in crap. The sleeve of her shirt rode up as she sat, revealing a long series of marks. Possibly the reason she lost her job—but if so she had to have been dancing somewhere at least moderately smart. Most places won’t care too much about needle tracks so long as you’ll take everything off and shake yourself