One
I
smelled her perfume before I saw her. It was heady and sweet, like
ripe peaches left out in the sun to rot. The lady sitting next to me
at the funeral this morning had worn the same scent, and I’d
wondered then what madness would drive a woman to wear something
that smelled so bad. I guess if you tack a fancy enough name on a
perfume, hype it big, sell it high, some poor soul will drench
herself in it, even if it sends dogs howling into the night.
First came the perfume, then the tapping of heels and tinkling of
bells as she sashayed her way to my office. She walked like somebody
who knew where she was going, which surprised me since I’m the only
tenant on the floor and didn’t have any appointments.
Business had been slow, as it always is in midsummer. Luckily, I’d
scored some good-paying clients in the past two months along with
the usual losers who darken my door and waste my time. A hotel chain
had hired me in May to catch the light-fingered thief swiping money
from the till, and they were keeping me on retainer. In June, a
local she’s-all-that had set me on the trail of her no-good fiancé,
who was doing the do with her father’s ex-girl. I had two
assignments lined up for the end of the month. And this afternoon, I
had an appointment with Treyman Barnes II, a big-time mover in my
small-time town.
For once in my life, things were sweet.
I had a nice man named Larry and money in my pocket. My son, Jamal,
bless his heart, was plucking my nerves with teenage angst but was
doing okay despite some recent traumas. Except for this morning’s
funeral, the day was going fine.
I’d opened the door because my
airconditioner was broken, and I’d grimly accepted the fact that a
cracked window and an open door would be my only relief against the
summer’s heat. But an open door is an open invitation—any old thing
can come crawling through.
When I first smelled the perfume, I half
expected to see this morning’s funeralgoer. The funeral had been for
Wayne Peters, who had been Johnny’s mentor when he first joined the
force. The woman was Molly Holiday, an old girlfriend of my
long-dead brother. She was a gentle soul with a soft, aging face
that reminded me how young he had been when he killed himself. I’d
be the same age myself in a couple of years, and that thought choked
me up bad when I saw her.
We hugged like good friends and promised
we’d meet for a drink sooner rather than later. I prayed she’d
change that perfume before we met again.
But it wasn’t Molly Holiday who came
through my door.
“Well, here we are, Miss Tamara Hayle
with a y, you and me together again, just like them Delany sisters
or somethin’. I know you remember me from all them years back. You
spend all that money I gave you?”
If I were a smoking woman, I’d have lit
a cigarette.
She had a pretty, nut brown face and a
mop of fake red hair that screamed twenty-dollar hooker. Her build
was slight yet muscular, and she rocked her compact body back and
forth like a bantam fighter eager for a match. Except for her voice,
which pops up in my nightmares, I might not have known her.
“It’s Lilah Love, isn’t it?” I said
after a minute.
“In the flesh. You don’t look as happy
to see me as I am to see you. What’d you do with all that money?”
“Do you want it back?”
She threw back her head and laughed, a
cackle midway between a crazy old lady’s and a kid high on meth.
When she was finished, she glanced back at the man in sneakers who
had crept in behind her.
“This here is Turk,” she said, and the
man lifted his head like a dog does when his master whistles. He was
taller than Lilah by a foot, and thick, like he’d spent a few years
working out in the gym at Rahway prison. His thin, sallow face was
marked by a long, droopy mustache that crawled down to his chin—the
source of his name, I assumed. His white armless muscleman fit him
snugly, the better to show off biceps that were roughly the size of
my fists.
She snatched out a chair and plopped
down in front of my desk.
“You can go now,” she said to Turk. “I
just wanted her to see you.” He nodded with a smirk, then skulked
down the hall, obedient hound that he was.
When he’d gone, Lilah gave me a wide,
crooked grin, revealing a gold crown in the back of her mouth. “I’m
just wondering how you spent all that money I gave you, that’s all,”
she said again.
I saw where she’d spent her money. A
nice chunk of it hung around her neck in the shape of a chain
sprinkled with emerald chips meant to match the ring on her finger.
Her lime green silk suit sure wasn’t retail, and those Jimmy Choos
were roughly the cost of a case of Moët. The one odd touch was a
gold anklet adorned with tiny bells, the source of the tinkle when
she walked down the hall.
When I’d met Lilah Love “all them years
back,” she wore a cheap red swimsuit, pink-tinted sunglasses, and an
innocent grin on her teenage face. We were staying at a run-down
hotel called the Montego Bay about six miles from the nearest beach
in Kingston. She seemed a clueless kid trapped between a husband who
beat her and a lover who didn’t give a damn, and her vulnerability,
along with my drunken boredom, had drawn me into her web.
I’d gotten the round-trip ticket to
Kingston from Wyvetta Green, payment for keeping her baby sister
Tasha out of the slammer. There wasn’t much to do except drink, and
the rum punches were tasting pretty good. But things got hot quick.
By the end of that week, five men were dead, a dear friend lay
dying, and Lilah Love, suddenly a very rich woman, had bought
herself a first-class ticket to Rio.
I never figured out the role she played
in those deaths. She had an explanation for everything that
happened: her lover had killed her husband; the bad guys had killed
her lover; all that money “just fell” into her hands. Truth belongs
to the person left to tell it, and, except for me, she was the only
one standing. But one of her “truths” was actually true. That was
the thirty grand “plus a little extra for my troubles” she left for
me in a Cayman Islands bank account.
I didn’t touch that money for years,
then, bit by bit, I dipped into it. The first dip was Jamal’s
braces. Then Wyvetta Green, who owns Jan’s Beauty Biscuit
downstairs, got into some trouble with the IRS and almost lost her
shop.
Naturally, I had to dip in to lend my
girl some cash; she’d saved my butt more times than I care to
remember. The dipping stopped for a while, then Jamal started
spending more time on the street than he should, and I dipped in and
sent him to a fancy computer camp in South Jersey. Only eighteen
thousand dollars was left, and I was determined to save that for
Jamal’s education. It meant the difference between sending him away
to school and having him live at home. The streets of my hometown
were turning bad, and I wanted my son gone while the going was good.
No doubt about it, Lilah Love’s money
had come in handy. Yet every time I whispered the password “Montego
Bay” to the banker in the Caymans, a chill went through me. I knew
sooner or later the girl would show up looking for something I
didn’t want to give. Now here she was, “in the flesh,” asking about
those ill-gotten gains.
“Not talking? Well, that’s your choice,
Tamara Hayle. You a woman who keeps her business to herself. I liked
that about you from the get. You ain’t changed none.” Her grin told
me she had; there was no innocence left, just sharp little teeth.
“What brings you to my office this
afternoon?” I pulled out my professional voice.
“Don’t look like you spent too much of
that money here, do it? How come you didn’t get yourself a big fancy
office with some of them thousands I gave you?” She added a wink, as
if it were a joke between us, but she was back to the money, and
that worried me.
“Because I like my office the way it
is,” I said, at best a half truth. Nothing has changed much over the
years, and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. My walls remain the same
dreary off-white color. The sun shining down on my intrepid orphan
aloe still dims from the film on my windows. The red filing cabinet,
despite the recent paint job, still looks as shoddy as homemade sin.
The one recent addition is my brand-new computer with its wireless
connection. I can be online in seconds, and I need to be able to do
that in the business I’m in. I was as proud of it as I am of
anything I’ve ever bought. I gave it a proud glance; Lilah’s eyes
followed mine.
“Well, wait a minute! Just look at
this,” she said. “You ain’t as backward as I thought. You part of my
generation. Did you know you can find out anything you want about
anybody you want on the Net? I go online and talk to all kinds of
people any time of the day or night. That’s how I found out your
office and address. I know where you live, too. Did you know I could
do that, Miss Tamara Hayle?”
“When did you get back in town?” I said,
ignoring her question.
“It was time to come back. I got some
business to take care of.”
“May I ask what it is?”
“I got to get back something that belong
to me. Something important. Stolen property, you might say. It’s
mine, and I want it back.”
“And what brings you to my office, Lilah?”
I kept my voice neutral.
She studied her long, sculptured nails
tipped on the ends with tiny daisies. “I need your help, Tamara
Hayle.”
“Tamara will do. We both know who I am.”
“I need your help, because there’s
nobody else I can trust.”
I stared at her in amazement. What kind
of a fool did this woman take me for? A thirty thousand–dollar one,
I suddenly realized.
“Besides that, you owe me,” she added
after a minute.
“You gave me that money no strings
attached,” I said.
“Don’t you know by now there ain’t no
such thing?”
“If I had the money, I’d give it back to
you, that’s for damn sure.”
“I ain’t here about the money. That’s
not why I came back,” she said.
“And I didn’t have a damn thing to do
with that shit that went down in Jamaica. Don’t try to hang that
anywhere near me.”
“Jamaica? I ain’t talking about Jamaica.
I’m through with Jamaica,” she said with a shrug of her narrow
shoulders, but I didn’t think she was.
“Then why don’t you tell me what this is
about.”
“A lot has happened to me since I left
you that day in that airport in Montego Bay. Some of it good, most
of it bad. Bad thing is I don’t have no more money. Good thing is, I
know how to get it back. Real quick. I hooked myself up with this
smart-ass boy in Rio, and he told me about all kinds of ways to get
back money you lost. Rich gets richer and poor gets poorer. Did you
know that, Tamara Hayle?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Me? I don’t like being poor.”
“So are you still with Mr. Rio?” I tried
to move her along.
“He long gone.”
I didn’t ask how long or how gone.
“Second good thing is my little girl. My
sweet little girl. She’s gone now, too, and I want you to get her
back for me.”
So the kid followed the money on Lilah’s
list of good. “Your daughter was kidnapped?”
Her gaze shifted to a spot just above my
left shoulder, always a bad sign in the telling of a tale. “You
might say that, I guess, if you was inclined to put it that way. You
might say that, if you was inclined. Somebody took her, that’s all.”
“Did you call the police?”
“You know I ain’t got shit to say to the
cops.”
“You don’t seem too upset about the
kidnapping.”
“I know who got her. I know why she did
it. I know she won’t do nothing to her, but I want my baby back.
That’s all.
She mine, and they don’t have no right
to her. No matter what they think. And my lying baby sister don’t
got no right to nothing. What the hell do a teenager know?”
She reached into a lime green leather
tote bag, pulled out a worn photograph, and gave it to me. The child
in the picture was about eighteen months old, as color coordinated
in pink and white as Mama was in green. She held a candy cane in her
tiny hand, and her hair formed a soft halo around her plump face.
Her dimpled grin made me smile.
“That’s my Baby Dal,” Lilah said.
“She really is adorable. I can certainly
see why you call her your baby doll,” I said with an appreciative
chuckle.
Lilah looked puzzled. “That’s her name,
Baby Dal.”
“Like a doll?”
“No. Like that food you get in Indian
restaurants. Dal. When I was doing all that traveling in the
Islands, I lived in
Trinidad for a spell, and I got to
liking Indian food, especially that stuff they call dal. That’s my
favorite food, so that’s what I call her—Baby Dal.”
Without comment, I gave her back the
photo. “So your sister has taken your child, Baby Dal, and is
holding her for
ransom?”
“Something like that.”
“So when and where did all this happen?”
I was curious for the child’s sake as much as anything else. (I’ve
always been partial to dimples.)
“Well, I had my Baby Dal while the
baby’s daddy was over there fighting in that Eye-rack-ie war. Damned
fool was in them special forces. Trained killer was what he was.
That’s what he told me anyway. Trained killer. What the hell do I
need with a trained killer? I like my men tender.
“Well, I fell in love with somebody
else, and when he came back, he wasn’t in no shape to keep the baby
or me nohow, so I left him. Then his rich daddy decided he wanted
her, my Baby Dal, too, but by then Thelma Lee, my lame-ass, no-count
baby sister, was keeping her for me, and she won’t give her back.
Claims I’m an unfit mother. Shows you what she know, don’t it? She’s
probably going to try to get money from him herself, from my baby’s
daddy’s daddy, who’s as big a fool as his son. And I want my baby
back for my own self.”
“And what part do you expect me to play
in this . . . situation?” Drama had been on the tip of my tongue,
but I thought better of it.
“I want you to go over there to Jersey
City and get my baby back. That’s all you got to do. One short trip.
I’ll give you some money to give to my baby sister—that’s all she
probably want anyway. You can drive over there in that pretty little
red car I saw you get out of this morning and bring my Baby Dal
back. I’m the baby’s mama, and ain’t nobody gonna say I can’t have
her. She’s mine fair and square.”
As if to prove her point, she pulled out
a birth certificate that stated “Baby Dal” had indeed been born to
“Lilah Love Barnes” on April first. April Fools’ Day. That should
have told me something.
I handed the paper back.
“Me and Turk went over there to talk to
her and try to give her the money, and she slammed the door right in
my face.”
“I thought you said you were broke?”
“Ain’t that broke.”
“So you went over with Turk, the guy who
was just here?”
“He’s my new man. Younger than me. See
them muscles in his hands and arms? He knows how to use them, too.
Turk told me he used to work security
for a big-time gangster who done gone legit, that’s what Turk told
me. You know what security really do, don’t you? And them arms ain’t
the only place Turk’s got muscles, if you know what I mean, but he’s
about as dumb as he looks. That’s one thing I learned from them
old-ass guys used to follow me around with their tongues hung out:
the older you get, the younger you f*ck them.”
I ignored that bit of wisdom and said,
“So you and this Turk went to Jersey City and tried to reason with
your sister, and she wouldn’t take the money you offered?”
“Ain’t no ‘this Turk.’ Just ‘Turk.’ ”
“What makes you think I would be any
more successful than you and Turk?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Bitch don’t know you. You
look official and shit, like maybe you a cop or something. Just go
there, tell her you represent an interested party, and give her the
cash.”
“So she’ll hand the baby over to me for
a fistful of cash even though she doesn’t know me from a hole in the
ground?”
“Believe me. Just act like you represent
somebody important, somebody big-time, and she’ll do it.”
I shook my head in disbelief, but that
didn’t discourage Lilah. “Why ain’t you putting this shit down?
Ain’t that what private investigators do, write down what their
clients tell them?”
I leaned back in my chair and took a
breath. “Actually, Lilah, you’re not my client,” I said. This new
song and dance had the same funky tune as the one she’d sung in
Jamaica. Even the names—Thelma Lee and Turk—brought to mind Sammy
Lee Love and Delaware Brown, the main players in the Jamaican
fiasco. Jamaica had been a long time ago, so I didn’t think she
could tie me to it. But this here was some new Lilah mess, and I
sure didn’t want to get mixed up with her again.
“What you mean I’m not your client?” She
narrowed her eyes.
“Well, Lilah, my schedule simply won’t
permit me to give your case the attention it deserves,” I said with
feigned regret.
“Won’t take no time, I told you that.
All you got to do is take the girl the money and bring back my baby.
What’s you doing that’s so important you can’t help a sister out?”
It was time for the truth, so I told it.
“I’m going to tell it like it is, Lilah. There is no way in hell I’m
working with you. I don’t know what part you played in that shit
that went down in Kingston, but I’m willing to forgive and forget.
You gave me that money with no obli- gation. That was then, this is
now. And this is now. I wish you luck. I truly hope you get back
your child. I think we’re finished here,” I added with a nod toward
the door.
She stared at me hard for a moment, then
reached across the desk and grabbed my wrist, her long fake nails
digging deep into my flesh. “I ain’t finished yet,” she said.
It was at this moment that my son chose
to stroll his lanky frame through that open door.
“Hey, Ma, what’s going on?” Jamal said,
grinning his late uncle’s good-natured grin. Lilah let go of my arm
and sank back into her chair. I checked my wrist to see if she’d
drawn blood. He glanced at her, then at me, then back at her.
“Wow, Ma! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“What the heck are you doing here?”
There was no way he could miss the alarm in my voice.
“I tried to call you, but the phone must
have been off the hook, and I was worried and—” He stopped
midsentence, his eyes big with guilt.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Son.
How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“God, Ma! I’m sorry. You don’t have to
yell!” Those eyes were hurt and angry now.
I glanced back at Lilah, fingers now
folded demurely in her lap. Slowly, she uncrossed her legs, and the
soft, seductive tinkle of the anklet bells drew the attention of
both me and my son.
“This can’t be your little boy!” she
said, rising and approaching Jamal as if she were some long-lost
relative. “He’s so tall and handsome, Tamara. How did you get such a
tall, handsome boy? Honey, come and give your aunt Lilah a great big
hug!”
In that instant, I saw my boy through
this woman’s eyes, and I didn’t like what I saw. Jamal is well on
his way to becoming a handsome man, with the good looks that have
made my ex-husband, DeWayne Curtis, the incurable ladies’ man he’s
aged into. But Jamal also has my late brother’s charm and my
practical sense, although this past year has made me question that
particular legacy.
Confused and unsure what to do next,
Jamal scanned my face for an answer, which I was too stunned to
give. Finally, grinning like my brother used to do when an
invitation from a pretty woman came his way, Jamal took matters into
his own hands and gave his “aunt Lilah” the “great big hug” she
requested. She held him far longer than appropriate and giggled
coquettishly.
“Strong, too. What you doing with such a
big, strong, handsome boy?” she said, patting his shoulders and
running her fingers up his arms.
I visibly flinched, and Jamal knew he
had stumbled across a dangerous boundary. Lilah broke the tension
with a flick of her silver-plated cell phone.
“I’m going to call Turk up here so he
can meet you, honey. I hope he won’t be jealous of such a strong,
tall, handsome boy,” she said, winking at Jamal.
“I better talk to you at home, right,
Ma?” Worry topped with anxiety was in his voice.
“You got that right!”
He delivered a polite, jerky nod in
Lilah’s direction, avoiding my eyes altogether as he headed out the
door. When he was out of earshot, I turned to confront her.
“Put that goddamn phone down before I
snatch it out your hand,” I said.
“What you so damned mad about?”
“If you don’t know, you’re a bigger fool
than you look.”
“What you talking about?”
“Don’t even think about my son that
way!”
“All I did was give your baby a hug. I’m
a mama, too, so you must know how much I miss my Baby Dal.”
“You listen, and you listen good. Stay
away from me and don’t come nowhere near my son. Do you understand
me?”
She dropped the phone back into her bag,
picked up a pen, and scribbled something on a slip of paper.
“This here is the address where my baby
sister stays. She lives with my crazy aunt, Sweet Thing, and Jimson,
that nasty old fool she took up with. Now you listen to me, and you
listen good. If you want your baby staying safe like he is, you’d
best put my Baby Dal back in my arms. And do it right quick—before
this week end is good.”
With that she stood up and left, bells
tinkling faintly as she strolled out of the room.
