Drumsticks (8 page)

Aubrey went in to dress then. I had time to ponder the other question of the night: What was Leman going to tell me? I was betting that the police had by now identified Ida, and probably found out where she lived. A shiver went through me at the thought that Justin and I might have been caught in that apartment, that the cops might have arrived at her place, realized that someone was inside, and announced themselves in their own special way—with guns blazing.

The intercom buzzer sounded.

Aubrey called from her bedroom at the far end of the hall, “That's gotta be Numb Nuts. Get it, Nan, will you?”

I did. “Sergeant Sweet to see you,” the doorman announced.

“Let him up,” I responded.

Yeah, let him up. Showtime.

“Hiya, Leman,” I greeted him.

He nodded at me, friendly enough. I guess I was getting away with calling him by his so-called Christian name.

“Y'all ain't busy, are you?” he asked, scanning the room.

“No problem.”

I led him into the living room and saw him to a seat. I stood there, not speaking, while he continued to look for signs of Aubrey.

A few seconds later she appeared. Long legs in white tights. Yellow angora sweater that bared one shoulder. Tresses tousled here, pinned up there. She made that all-important eye contact with Sweet, the look that promised—lied—
Play your cards right and I could get every bit as interested in you as you are in me
.

“Hey,” she said simply, making that a word of at least three syllables.

“You remember my friend Aubrey, don't you, Leman?”

Poor Numb Nuts. He began to laugh idiotically, trying not to stutter. Finally he managed a “How you doing, Aubrey?”

“I'm good.” Long pause, sly grin, eye contact unbroken. “Nanette, did you offer Sweet something to drink?”

“Something to drink, Leman?”

“Naw, that's okay,” he answered quickly, not even pretending to look at me.

“It is
not
okay,” Aubrey said. “I'm gonna get you a beer. I got a Heineken in there with your name on it. How would you like that, Sweet?”

He nodded so vigorously I thought he might break his neck.

“So,” I said, taking the chair across from him, “something's happened?”

“What happened?”

“I don't know. I thought you were going to tell me.”

“Oh. Yeah. Something did happen. I called Loveless about that old lady you been talking about. They didn't find any papers on her, like you told me. But they finally i.d.'d her from prints. Ida Williams was not her real name.”

“Uh huh.”

“More like it, you could say it was only one of her names. She had four or five …”

Aubrey came in with the beer then. She placed it on the glass table along with a stein and then demurely withdrew from the room.

“… four or five aliases and a record going back twenty years.”

“You're kidding.” An automatic response from me. I knew, suddenly, clearly, that he wasn't.

“She did a couple of stretches for forgery, grand larceny—like that,” he added.

It was my turn to laugh idiotically. For the same reason he had done it: I could not find my tongue.

Leman twisted his head around. Aubrey was on the kitchen telephone and he was straining to hear what she was saying. But she remained tantalizingly out of reach, her voice a distant purr.

“Looks like that old lady wasn't 'xactly what you thought she was,” he said. Then he took a long drink of beer and wiped at his mouth with the pink paper napkin our hostess had provided.

“Looks that way,” I said slowly, thinking.

“Why don't we tell Aubrey about it, too? Maybe knowing Ida was a phony'll cheer her up.”

“Hmmm. Good idea,” I murmured. “We'll tell her in a minute.”

I was thinking, quite frankly, Will I catch more hell if I tell him now or later? Can I get away with saying nothing at all about my foray into housebreaking? I looked over at the yearbook, which lay facedown next to the dolls. Aubrey's siren act was my salvation. But would her protection extend to my father if indeed it turned out that he had something to do with Ida's misdeeds—let alone with her death? No way.

I recalled how much Leman resented me, when first we met, for what he saw as my know-it-all “college girl” airs. If my overachieving father had done anything wrong, he'd take more heat than a common criminal off the street. Leman would see to it. That chubby-cheek Negro on the Supreme Court had coined the phrase that seemed to apply here: there would be a high-tech lynching.

“How about some pretzels, Sweet?” That was Aubrey calling from the kitchen.

“Yeah, how about some?” I prompted him, still scheming, putting off the inevitable.

“Naw. I'm watching my salt,” he answered.

“Good for you,” Aubrey said, appearing for a moment in the doorway. She quickly disappeared.

“I still don't think anybody paid to have that woman killed,” he told me then. “The fact she had a record don't prove a thing. This is America—anybody black could have a record. But the best thing you and Aubrey could do is stay out of this Ida Williams business.”

He chuckled maliciously. “You kinda got up Loveless's nose the other night, you know. He sounds like he's a little pissed anyway 'cause of Ida's record and stuff. The case maybe ain't as simple as he thought. Anyway, you don't want him bringing down no kinda heat on you. Believe me.”

A little mouse-squeak “Shit!” escaped involuntarily from my chest.

“What's the matter?”

I pushed down the second bout of idiotic laughter. “Look, Leman. I—I better tell you something.”

He waited for me to go on. I watched his face slowly turn to stone.

I got up and retrieved the yearbook. Little by little, in the course of recounting how I spent my Thursday afternoon, I confessed to unlawful entry, tampering with evidence, and God knows what other lesser included offenses, as the parlance would have it. Told him all about Ida's show business partner, too. And the wad of money in the hatbox.

“God
damn
! Same old Cueball,” he accused. “Why didn't they drown you at birth?” He gestured at the yearbook. “Give that to me, girl, before I—”

“How we doing in there?” Aubrey's bright voice broke the rope of tension in the room.

“I'll let Leman answer that one,” I said. “Come on in, Aubrey. And I'll take one of those beers, too.”

Leman snatched the photograph out of the book, looked at it contemptuously, and tossed it aside. He was furiously turning the pages of the yearbook as he went back to strafing me. “What kind of stupid Cueball idea made you do that shit in the first place? Are you crazy, woman? Or you just determined to drive me crazy? And why the hell would you think your daddy's got anything to do with anything? That's just plain dumb.”

My face was burning. It looked as though, once again, I was taking the superstition stuff much too seriously, seeing ill omens where there were none.

“Look what I got for you, Sweet.”

Aubrey was holding a large plate brimming with snack crackers, looking like a kind of lascivious Welcome Wagon lady. “All low-salt,” she announced giddily.

Leman began to speak, but she had already smeared one of the biscuits with softened cheese and was popping it into his mouth with newly manicured fingers.

She sat near him on the sofa. “Don't let me interrupt,” she said. “Go ahead.”

He cleared his throat.

I sighed, resigned. “Yes, go on, Sergeant Sweet. Where were we?”

But he did not resume his harangue. Instead, he asked, “What's the name of this school again?”

“Stephens Academy,” I answered, needlessly, because he suddenly turned back to the front cover, keeping his place in the book with the other hand.

“This is the graduating class of ninety-six, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

I got up to see what was so interesting. He was looking down at a pretty young girl in cap and gown, a winningly crooked smile on her face. Her face was not so much pretty as arresting, full of dramatic planes, the perfect setting for her huge almond-shaped eyes and full mouth.

“I'm through yelling at you, Cueball.”

“You are?”

“Yeah. I am. You just gave me an idea. Shit, I'll even let you call me by my first name.”

“See?” said Aubrey, pleased as all get out, as if she had just solved all our problems—as if she even knew what he meant.

“No, I don't see,” I said. “What idea did I give you, Leman?”

“Never mind that for the moment. You know what I told you about my assignment over on Twelfth Street.”

“Homicide unit. Dead kids. Rap music stars.”

“That's right. You see this little girl here? She was going with the last one to die—Black Hat. But he wasn't hardly a star. He was a kid with a regular old name—Kevin Benson—who was some kind of gofer for the big guns at the recording company. A wannabe. He and this little girl—Felice Sanders—were supposed to be married.”

Connection! I let out a big breath. Was this what the karmic synchronicity was all about? Not my father but some kid at his school?

But wait a minute. So what? This girl went to Stephens. What did that have to do with anything?

I asked Leman the same question. “So this rap kid had a little white girlfriend who went to my father's school. What difference does it make? You don't think she killed him, do you?”

“Of course not. From what I been able to gather, she was crazy about him.”

“And besides, she's not at the school anymore. She already graduated, right?”

“Right. I had no idea where she went to school before now. It had no bearing on anything. But I decided yesterday to interview her again, tie up some loose ends.”

He seemed to hesitate there.

“And?” I said.

“The thing is, in the time since I last talked to her, she ran away from home—or at least that's how her mother put it. The point is, we can't locate her now.”

“Oh.”

“Now, since you found this yearbook, it brings me to another way you can help me out.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. And in exchange I'll keep in touch with Loveless—see what's happening with the Ida Williams case. And keep him from eating you alive.”

“You want me to go to Stephens and talk to my father about Felice.”

“You got it, Cue. See what kind of dope you can get me on her. Did she hang with a particular group? Is there somebody she might have stayed friends with, moved in with? Stuff like that. We got limited manpower at the Twelfth Street squad. We're looking for the girl, but we got a thousand other things to do. But you, you got an in there at the school, see, what with your father being the chief. It may be a waste of time, I don't know. Just nose around a little bit, which oughta be second nature to you.”

Better to waste your time than mine
. That's what he was saying. But I pretended not to recognize it. I needed the pipeline to the Ida Williams investigation that only he could provide. And I sure as hell didn't want Loveless to eat me alive.

All I said was “Hey, I'm in there.”

CHAPTER 8

It's Easy to Remember

I remember writing a poem once and showing it, at my mother's urging, to my pop. I must have been nine or ten.

He was impressed by the fact of it—and told me as much—but he had to be honest, it wasn't very good.
However
, he added, that wasn't the important thing. The important thing was, he knew I was capable of better.

For the next three weeks, whenever he came home from work he'd have a different library book for me—the Langston Hughes reader, collected Emily Dickinson, a little leather-bound edition of Jean Toomer's
Cane
, etc.

I never touched one of those damn books. And I was nineteen before I tried to write another poem.

My pop is kind of a stick.

He was an excellent provider. Tireless. Upstanding. Rational. Fair. Generous even—I mean, it was Pop who paid to have my friend Aubrey's appendix removed; her own mother was at a poker tournament in Jersey when Aubrey collapsed. So, I'd have to concede that he usually means well, but he is an unregenerate stick.

Making my peace with that—without benefit of a shrink—has been a pretty long haul. It did not help matters that in the middle of the process, he left my mother in order to marry a white woman some twenty years younger.

He and I have been circling each other warily ever since. We speak periodically, sit together at family funerals, exchange birthday gifts (his to me is invariably a big fat practical check), and at Christmastime he takes me to a grand dinner somewhere. Thank the baby Jesus, he decided his child-siring days were behind him, so there are no half-siblings for me to deal with.

It felt as though we'd go on like that forever, the relationship attenuating inch by inch as the years went on, until he died. But last spring changed that shit.

The violent death of his sister, my aunt Vivian, sent the thing between Pop and me spiraling off in a whole other direction. As if we needed anything else laying there between us, anything else to regret, too hot to handle, too tangled up and painful to talk about. And so Vivian's awful death and my failure to prevent it was now something else to be trotted off to the boneyard and buried.

I was watching my father, but he didn't know it. He was waiting at the traffic light on Hudson Street, that familiar look on his face. When he got that checked-out expression on his face, it wasn't because he was distracted. Far from it, he was thinking up a storm, and almost always about Stephens Academy and what could be done to make it an even finer place. Daddy is a great believer in “planning ahead.” I'm kind of not, to his disappointment.

He had just had his lunch, no doubt, and was taking the air before returning to his office at the school. Stephens Academy—a low-rise building on the western fringe of Greenwich Village—had no beautifully landscaped grounds or grassy commons. But there was a well-kept patch of green behind the iron gates that fronted the street, and at the back of the school, away from the traffic, the lawn fanned out prettily. There were a few picnic tables back there where the students took their lunch on nice days, the flower and herb garden where the botany classes were often held, and a small stone cottage in the Japanese style—for poetry readings? bamboo flute recitals? teenage meditation?