The Fallen

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “I can make coffee. You can look around. Or—”

“Just sit down,” said McKenzie. “You don’t have to entertain us.”

April Holly pointed at the red sofa, then clunked softly into the small dining area and brought a chair over for herself.

“You know that Garrett’s dead,” I said.

She nodded. “I saw the papers. And TV. He told me his name was Jimmy Neal. I saw him the night it happened.”

McKenzie glanced at me as she got out her notepad and pen.

“I want you to tell us about that,” I said. “But first, April, can you tell us who you are and why you’re here?”

She blushed and looked away. “Gee, that’s kind of a lot, isn’t it?”

“It might help us find out who killed him,” I said.

She continued to look away from us. Down at her boots or maybe the floor.

“You know... um, basically what it is... I ran away from home and was heading for some trouble and Jimmy, he was all, ‘You’re ruining your life, April.’ So he made me come here and basically get my act together.”

“Were you working for Jordan?” I asked.

April shook her head and blushed. She wouldn’t look at either of us. I was heartened to see her shame because so few people have it anymore.

“I was about to,” she said quietly. “But Jimmy said no way. He wouldn’t let me.”

McKenzie looked at me again, then scribbled.

“How old are you?” asked McKenzie.

“Eighteen.”

“Tell us about Garrett and how you met him,” I said.

When she finally looked back at us her eyes were shiny with tears. She wiped them with her palm. “Why would anybody want to kill that man? He was the most gentle and kind man I’d ever met. Ever.”

“Talk to me, April,” I said.

April spoke for almost half an hour before we asked her another question. Her colors and shapes were true. She was fairly intelligent but naive. She didn’t seem to harbor illusions about herself. She didn’t make a lot of excuses, which, you learn very early as a cop, is what criminals do, with endless energy and creativity. She felt bad about some of the things she had done, which is something that criminals almost never do, because they’re too busy blaming someone else.

Home was a crammed-in tract in Temecula, a bustling little city north of San Diego. Dad was long gone, Mom involved with boyfriends, little brother a petty thief and drug user. April knew her effect on men, but the boys her age were immature and totally random. At a party one night a friend’s father had gotten her aside and offered her a hundred dollars to take her clothes off out in the pool house but she said no. This was a year ago. Later some of the tough chicks at school said you could get men at the mall to give you two hundred bucks if you’d get in their car and do oral. Use a rubber, never take off so much as your bra, it was over in five minutes and if you did it five or six times a week you had enough for just about anything you wanted. April had said no to that, too, though she’d hung out and watched her friends hustle and had come close to trying it. This was last June, after graduation. By fall she’d had it. Always thought of that Thanksgiving as the most miserable day of her life. So she ran away to San Diego and hostessed in the Gaslamp for a while but that paid minimum and Hooters was hiring but she wasn’t twenty-one yet and it seemed like every time she turned around some guy was hitting on her, guys a lot older than her, half of them with wedding rings on, made her wonder why anybody got married in the first place. Then, you know, she needed some work on her teeth and she got pneumonia and didn’t have health insurance for the antibiotic and her car tanked and she heard about the Squeaky Clean Madam from one of her new friends, Carrie Ann, and... well, yes, she had actually met one of Jordan’s spot callers and got “approved,” and Carrie took her over to meet this guy Jimmy, who she didn’t know until two days ago was really named Garrett Asplundh, and he paid her five hundred bucks to come back to this apartment and they talked for pretty much the whole night and when they were done April wasn’t going to be a Squeaky Clean anymore, she was going to live here, get a straight job, which she did, and save up for a better car and her own place.