Soul Murder

9:38 a.m.

Homewood flashed more depressing vistas past the cruiser’s windows as Beradino drove them back to headquarters: telephone pole memorials to homicide victims, abandoned buildings plastered with official destruction notices. The Bureau of Building Inspection spent a third of its annual citywide demolition budget in Homewood alone. It could have spent it all here, several times over.

Patrese, forcing his thoughts back to the present, tried to imagine a child growing up here and wanting to play.

He couldn’t.

He turned to face Shaniqua through the grille.

‘Is there somewhere Trent can go?’

‘JK’ll look after him.’

Patrese nodded. JK was John Knight, a pastor who ran an institution in Homewood for young gang members and anyone else who needed him. The institution was called The 50/50, gang slang for someone who was neutral, not a gang member. Knight had also taken a Master of Divinity degree, served as a missionary in South America, and been chaplain of a prison in Arizona. He was a good man, but no pushover; even in his fifties, he carried himself like the linebacker he’d once been, and shaved his black head to a gleaming shine every morning.

That was it for conversation with Shaniqua till they reached headquarters. Patrese didn’t bother asking why someone with Shaniqua’s looks, personality, and what he guessed was no small amount of brains behind the front she presented to the world, should have wasted her time on the bunch of losers she’d welcomed into her bed, and her life, over the years.

He didn’t ask for one reason: he already knew the answer.

There were always fewer men than women in places like Homewood; too many men were in jail or six feet under. So the women had to fight for the remaining men, and fight they did. There was no surer way for a girl to get status than to be on the arm of a big player.

But on the arm sooner or later meant up the duff and, when that happened, the men were out of there. Some were gone so fast they left skid marks. They didn’t want to stay around to be pussy-whipped; that was bad for their rep. Far as they were concerned, monogamy was what high-class furniture was made of.

So out and on they went, and in time their sons, growing up without a daddy – or, perhaps even worse, with a step-daddy who cared little and lashed out lots – did the same thing. Beneath the puppy fat, Trent was a good-looking boy. Give him a year or two and he’d be breaking hearts wide open, just as his father had done to Shaniqua.

At headquarters, Beradino logged her arrest with the clerk, found an empty interview room, and turned on the tape recorder.

‘Detectives Mark Beradino and Franco Patrese, interviewing Shaniqua Davenport on suspicion of the murder of J’Juan Weaver. Interview commences at’ – Beradino checked his watch

– ‘ten eighteen a.m., Monday, October fourth.’

He turned to Shaniqua and gave her the Miranda rights off the top of his head.

Detectives had been discouraged from reading the Miranda script for a couple of years now, ever since Patrese had left the card lying on the table during an interrogation. Several hours into the interview and on the point of confession, the suspect had glanced at the card, suddenly remembered he had the right to an attorney, and shazam! No confession and, in that instance, no case.

‘You have the right to remain silent,’ Beradino said. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?’

Shaniqua nodded.

‘Suspect has indicated assent by nodding,’ Beradino said to the tape recorder.

‘You damn right I assent,’ she said.

There’s usually a time in a homicide interrogation when the suspect cracks, the floodgates open, and they tell the police anything and everything. That time may come several hours into questioning, sometimes even days; rarely does it come right at the start.

But Shaniqua could hardly wait.

‘J’Juan dealt horse, that ain’t no secret,’ she said. ‘And sometimes he’d bring his, er, his clients’ – she arched her eyebrows – ‘back to our house, when they were too wasted to get the fuck back to their own homes.’

‘You were happy with this?’

‘You lemme tell you what happened, we’ll get done here a whole lot quicker.’

Beradino was far too much of a pro to take offense. He smiled and gestured with his head: Go on.

‘No, I weren’t happy. I done seen too much of what drugs do, and I don’t want no part of it. Not in my house. Every time he brings someone back – black, white, boy, girl, it don’t matter – I hit the roof. Every time, he swears it’s the last time.

‘And every time, like a fool, I believe him.

‘But today, when it happens, I’ve just had enough, I dunno why. We in the bedroom, Trent and I, sittin’ on the bed, chattin’ ’bout tings: school, grandma – those kinda tings. We talk a lot, my boy and me; we’re tight. He tells me tings, I tells him tings. Only man in my life I can trust. Anyhow, J’Juan comes in, says he off out now, and I says, “You take that skanky-ass bitch with you, like five minutes ago, or I’m callin’ the police.”

‘He looks surprised, then he narrows his eyes. Man can look mean as a snake when he wants to, you know?

‘“You do that and I’ll kill you, bitch,” he says.

‘Trent says to him, “Don’t you talk to my mama like that.”

‘J’Juan tells Trent to butt the fuck out, it ain’t nothin’ to do with him.

‘“Come on, Trent,” I say, gettin’ up from off the bed, “let’s go.”

‘“Go where?” says J’Juan. “Go the fuck where? You leavin’ me, bitch?”

‘“No,” I says, “we just goin’ for a walk while you cool the fuck off.”

‘“You leavin’ me?” he keeps sayin’. “You goin’ to the cops?”

‘“You keep on like this,” I says, “then, yeah, we’re leavin’ you. Gonna go live with my auntie in Des Moines. Gotta be better than bein’ stuck here.”

‘I’m nearest the door, J’Juan’s standin’ by the end of the bed. He’s between me and Trent, between Trent and the door.

‘He grabs Trent, and says we ain’t goin’ nowhere.

‘And right then, I see he’s left his gun on the sill.

‘So I pick up the gun, and I level it at him.

‘He’s got his back to me, so he don’t see straight away; but Trent sees, and his eyes go like this wide’ – she pulled her own eyes open as wide as they’ll go – ‘and I say to J’Juan, “You leave that boy the fuck alone.”

‘And he turns to me all slow like, and he says “Put that fuckin’ ting down. You don’t know what you’re doin’.”

‘And I say, “Trent, come on.”

‘And J’Juan looks at me, and then at Trent, and then at me again, and he says – I’ll never forget this – he says: “You walk out that door, I’ll kill this little motherfucker with my bare hands.”

‘And Trent tries to break free, and J’Juan dives for Trent, and I just shoot him. I said I would, and I did, ’cos he was gonna hurt my boy, right before my eyes, and he does that over my dead body.

‘Not my boy. Take me, but not my boy.

‘Trent’s real daddy’s about as useless a piece-a-shit as God ever gave breath to, so no one loves that boy like me. That’s why I tell him I love him for both, you know; I love him as his mama and his pops too. Boy needs a daddy, know what I’m sayin’? Boy needs a father like he needs our Father in heaven. But Trent ain’t got one. So J’Juan can kiss my ass.

‘I shot him, and I ain’t ashamed of it.

‘Shit, if he walked through that door right now, I’d shoot the motherfucker again.’

Patrese was silent for a moment, and then he laughed; he couldn’t help it.

‘Now that’s what I call a confession,’ he said.

Shaniqua looked at him for a moment, and then she laughed too.

‘I guess it is. That’s the way it happened. But it ain’t murder, right? It was self-defense. He was goin’ to kill me and my boy.’

‘How did you feel when you realized you’d killed him?’ Beradino said.

‘Feel? Ain’t nothing to feel. It was him or me. And if it hadn’t been me shot him, it’d have been someone else. He weren’t the kinda guy who’d have lived to take out his pension and dandle grandkids on his knee.’

Many people freaked at the sight of a dead body, certainly the first time they saw one. Patrese guessed Shaniqua had seen more than her fair share.

Patrese had charged dozens of suspects over the years, and he’d never apologized to a single one of them. But he wanted very badly to say sorry to Shaniqua; not just for what the law obliged him to do, but also for every shitty thing in her life which had brought her to this place.

Oh, Shaniqua, he thought. What if you’d been born somewhere else, to another family – to any family worth the name, in fact? If you’d never set foot in Homewood? Never opened yourself up to men whose idea of fatherhood started and stopped at conception? Never had your soul leached from you atom by atom?

‘It ain’t murder, right?’ she repeated.

He was about to tell her things weren’t that simple when Beradino’s cellphone rang. He took it from his pocket and answered.

‘Beradino.’

‘Mark? Freddie Hellmore here.’

Freddie Hellmore was one of the best-known criminal defense lawyers, perhaps the best-known, in the United States. A Homewood boy born and bred, he split his cases between the nobodies – usually poor, black nobodies on murder charges – and the rich and famous. He was half Don King, half Clarence Darrow.

Love him or hate him – and most people did both, sometimes at the same time – it was hard not to admire him. His acquittal rate was excellent, and he was a damn good lawyer; not the kind of man you wanted across the table on a homicide case.

‘I hear you’ve got a client of mine in custody,’ he said.

‘I’ve probably got several clients of yours in custody.’

‘Funny. Let me clarify. Mizz Davenport?’

Beradino wasn’t surprised. Someone in Homewood must have called him.

‘Has she appointed you?’

‘Has she appointed anyone else?’ When Beradino didn’t answer, he continued. ‘I’ll take that as a no. Put her on.’

‘I have to tell you; she’s already confessed.’

That piece of news rattled Hellmore, no doubt, but he recovered fast. He was a pro, after all.

‘I’m going to have you seven ways to Sunday on improper conduct.’

‘We did it by the book, every second of the way. It’s all on tape.’

‘Put her on, Detective. Now.’

Beradino passed Shaniqua the phone. The conversation was brief and one-sided, and even from six feet away it wasn’t hard to get the gist; sit tight, shut up, and wait for me to get there.

‘He wants to speak to you again,’ Shaniqua said, handing the phone back.

Indeed he did; Beradino could hear him even before he put the phone back to his ear.

‘You don’t ask her another damn thing till I get there, you hear?’ Hellmore said. ‘Not even if she wants milk in her tea or what her favorite color is. Clear?’

‘Crystal.’

Thursday, October 7th. 10:57 p.m.

She’d been in the hospital almost three days now, in the chair beside her sister’s bed.

She left only to eat, attend calls of nature, and when the medical staff asked her for ten minutes while they changed the sheets or performed tests. Those occasions apart, she was a constant presence at Samantha’s bedside.

Sometimes she talked softly of happy memories from their childhood, conjuring up apple-pie images of lazy summer evenings by mosquito-buzzed lakes and licking cake mix from the inside of the bowl.

Sometimes she fell silent and simply held Samantha’s hand, as if the tendrils of tubes and lines snaking to and from Samantha’s emaciated body weren’t enough to anchor her in this world. And in the small hours, she rested her head against the wall and allowed herself an hour or two hovering above the surface of sleep.

People recognized her, of course, though few seemed sure how they should react when they did, especially in a hospital – this hospital – after everything that had happened here. For every person who smiled uncertainly at her, there was another who glared and muttered something about how she should be ashamed of herself.

She acted as though she didn’t care either way. She was one hell of an actor.

And now, late in the evening, one of the doctors asked if he could have a word.

‘Of course,’ she said.

He cleared his throat. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just be straight with you. Your sister is brain dead. Life support is all that’s keeping her going.’

‘I know.’

‘To be honest, with the injuries she received, it’s a miracle she’s got this far. Multiple gunshot wounds to the head…’ He tailed off, spreading his hands.

‘So what are you asking me?’ she said, even though she knew exactly what was being asked of her.

He swallowed. It was never easy, no matter how often you did it.

‘You’re next of kin. I need your permission to turn Samantha’s life support off.’

It was still a shock to hear it stated so baldly, she thought.

‘And if I refuse?’

‘Then we get a court order.’

She thought for a moment.

‘I understand a certain amount of medical jargon,’ she said. The doctor nodded, knowing – as did everybody – what she’d been through in the past. ‘Tell me.’

‘There’s total necrosis of the cerebral neurons,’ he replied. ‘All Samantha’s brain activity – including the involuntary activity necessary to sustain life – has come to an end. We’ve conducted all the usual physical examinations to find clinical evidence of brain function. The responses have been uniformly negative. No response to pain, no pupillary response, no oculo-cephalic reflex, no corneal reflex, no caloric reflex.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Sorry. Eye tests; reaction to light, movement, contact and water being poured in the ears. As I said, all negative. And her EEGs have been isoelectric – sorry, flatline – since she was admitted.’

‘And you don’t want to waste your time keeping her alive.’

‘It’s not a question of wanting.’

‘It is.’

‘It’s a question of prioritizing. The damage is irreversible. She’s not going to get better. She’s not going to improve even an iota from what she is now. The only way, medically, we could justify maintaining life support would be to remove her organs for transplant donation, but…’ He spread his hands again.

‘But she was a junkie, and no one in their right mind would touch her organs with a ten-foot pole. I get it, Doctor. You don’t have to soft-soap me.’

‘Thank you. Please understand; we don’t have the capacity or resources to keep her here indefinitely. Even if we did, she has no reason, no consciousness. She’s not living. She’s existing.’

She tipped her head slightly and examined him.

‘You really believe that?’

‘It’s fact. It’s a medical fact. Medicine’s what I believe in.’

When she sighed, it sounded to her like condemnation.

‘You square it with your conscience,’ she said.