There was a pause, and I heard gurgling in the background. “I see what you mean. This’ll make it hard to rinse off the soap.”
“You’ve got soap? You must have the deluxe suite,” I joked, peering at my soap dish, which was empty except for the layer of mildew. “You FDLE fat cats sure know how to travel in style.”
“Hey,” she squawked, “the way the BP spill screwed our tourism revenues, we’re lucky we’re not sleeping under a bridge. FDLE’s budget had already been cut to the bone in 2008 and 2009. Now we’re amputating whole sections. Won’t be long before we start selling brownies to buy rape kits. Or sending out e-mails to all our friends and relatives: ‘Please sponsor my next crime-scene search! I need to raise five thousand dollars in pledges before the corpse gets cold!’ ” I laughed, but her point was serious.
“It’s worrisome,” I agreed. “Forensic technology—just like medical technology—gets more sophisticated all the time, but that means it gets more expensive, too. Which homicides get the VIP treatment, and which ones do we cut corners on?”
“Black men don’t generally get the VIP treatment.” She paused. “Neither do battered women,” she added softly.
“I’m sorry, Angie,” I said. “I wish there were more we could do.”
“Me, too.” She sighed. “Anyhow. So, astonishingly, there’s not a four-star restaurant here at the lavish Twilight Motor Court. Shall we go back to the Waffle Iron?”
“Fine with me; I like the Waffle Iron. But let me get cleaned up first.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” she said. “Just come knock on my door whenever you’re ready. I’m in number four, the palatial place next door. You’ll recognize it by the duct tape holding the window together. I just talked to Stu, and he’s ready, so once you’re clean and shiny, we’ll saddle up and go.”
I headed for the shower, but the combination of anemic water pressure, rust stains, mildew, dirt, and dead bugs was too much for me. I did find an ancient bar of soap in the rusted medicine cabinet, so I managed to get tolerably clean taking a sink bath.
Ten minutes after we’d talked, I knocked on Angie’s door. The brass number was missing, but beneath the outermost layer of peeling green paint was a four-shaped remnant of peeling red paint. Angie hadn’t been kidding about the duct tape: a missing windowpane had been replaced with cardboard, which was held in place with brittle, curling duct tape.
“Come in,” she called. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed—the same scary-looking bedspread I had, though her stain pattern appeared slightly different, like variations in a modern artist’s series of paintings on a theme of scuzzy bedspreads. Lying open on the bed in front of her was a wallet-sized album of photos. The dozen or so pictures were snapshots of a life: Kate as a baby, swaddled in the arms of a nervous and proud four-year-old sister; Kate riding a pony at her sixth birthday party, a cone-shaped party hat rubber-banded to her head; Kate pitching for her high school softball team; Kate graduating from nursing school; Kate in a wedding gown, flanked on one side by Angie, her matron of honor, and on the other by a groom who’d been scissored from the photo; Kate and Angie standing with a wizened old woman with dyed red hair, too much rouge on her cheeks, and eyes that looked like an ancient version of Angie’s.