Angel of Darkness by Katy Munger Page B

softened Belinda Swan up. She looked at her watch, but said, ‘OK. But make it quick. That skinny Channel Five bitch with the blonde hair is arriving in ten minutes.’
    A door slammed in the back of the house, startling Maggie and Calvano, but it was only the grandmother. She ambled out of the back hallway dressed to the nines, hair teased high and make-up troweled on. Clearly, both women planned to be on the news that night.
    â€˜Don’t even think about it,’ Belinda Swan warned her mother. ‘I’m the one they want to interview.’
    I felt a flash of impatience at their self-centeredness. They had lost a child, and from what I had overheard from the kids on Michael’s ward, Darcy Swan had been trying as hard as she could to rise above her circumstances. She was going to school, she was paying attention in class, she was trying to find something she was good at it and she was working a job after school on top of it all. She deserved better than what these two women had to offer her memory. But I also felt bad for the two women before me, if only because the bed they had made would be a tough one to lie in going forward. Judging from their hair, their make-up and their attire, their entire lives revolved around attracting the attention of men. Neither one realized that they had long since grown invisible to the male species. They would keep trying to regain their glory, to no avail, until the day they died.
    Calvano dealt with the stand-off by patting the cushion on the other side of him and inviting the grandmother to sit. She perched next to him and crossed her legs conspicuously – I had to give it to her, they were damn fine legs for a grandmother – then promised her daughter that she would just sit quietly in a chair once the newscaster arrived unless a question was specifically asked of her.
    Had Maggie and Calvano not been there, I have no doubt Belinda Swan would have taken her mother to the mat. As it was, she agreed somewhat ungraciously and once again told Maggie to make it quick.
    Maggie and Calvano led the two women through a series of questions. It soon became apparent that neither one of them knew a damn thing about Darcy’s life. They lied about it, too, inventing details, I was sure, because they were vaguely aware that they should be ashamed of knowing so little about her. No, they told Maggie and Calvano, Darcy had never known Otis Parker and, they assured them, neither had either one of them. They seemed titillated by the thought of knowing a notorious killer, but were smart enough to realize that he could not have killed Darcy since everyone knew he was locked up in Holloway. They did not know the names of Darcy’s friends, nor even the names of her teachers, and while they were sure she had boyfriends – all the women in their family always had plenty of boyfriends, they assured Maggie and Calvano – they didn’t know their names or how long they had lasted nor if Darcy had anyone special in her life. They knew Darcy brought home at least $30 in tips per night when she worked at the diner, since the girl had given them $100 a week for room and board ever since the two older women had locked Darcy out of the house once, when she failed to give them the full amount, ‘to teach her a lesson in responsibility.’
    Nice – charging your teenage daughter to live in her own home and then throwing her out on the street when she couldn’t cough up the cash. My burgeoning sympathy for them disappeared. I had visions of them going up like torches, their hairspray fueling a mighty conflagration that would startle even the most seasoned residents of Hell.
    They weren’t even sure what kind of grades Darcy had made, but the mother bragged proudly that no disciplinary notes had ever been sent home with the girl. No doubt. The school officials probably didn’t even know Belinda Swan existed, or if they did, they knew that Darcy had been