Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (24 page)

“Has Sister Venable always been like this?” I asked.

Toni chuckled. “Yeah, at least for the six months, or so, we've known her.”

I wondered about Quintelle and Toni's penchant for using the royal “we” but let it pass. “Where're you from?” I asked more out of politeness than anything.

Toni cleared her throat and said, “Southern California.”

“What part?”

“Oh, you know, LA?” she said, making it sound like a guess rather
than a definite answer. But I knew, all right. The child was perpetrating. I could almost see the dust of San Joaquin Valley stamped in her pores. But who was I to judge.

The weather was trying to make up its mind whether to rain. A fat, lazy drop hit the top of my head; another plopped on the toe of my shoe. Mother was in deep thought, so deep that when she got to the curb, she kept walking right over the edge. I caught her before she could fall, and if Toni hadn't been there to catch me, both of us might have ended up in a heap in the gutter. We helped Mother right herself. She smoothed her skirt down muttering, “Something ain't right.” I agreed, but I don't think we were talking about the same thing. After she'd gotten settled in the car, Mother reached out for the window and took Toni's hand in hers.

“I want to thank you for looking after Sister Venable the way you do. Not many people show such Christian caring now'a days.”

Toni looked embarrassed. She stammered out a couple of “aw, it's nothing” and said, “I know how it is not to have anybody when you need help.”

I pulled onto the street. Toni stood in the gutter where we left her. She was still standing there, her arm extended in an absentminded little wave, when I turned the corner.

I sat at the head of the conference table waiting for my staff to trickle in for the unit's bimonthly meeting. Melissa Bowers and Tracee Witherspoon huddled over a stack of photos. I couldn't tell what they were, but I hoped they weren't more of those “birthing process” pictures Melissa had been foisting on unsuspecting coworkers. Her wide behind as pallid as a hunk of haddock, splayed like road kill, angry red private parts stretched every which way—those photos had made poor Cedric Simmons so sick they'd had to rush him away on a stretcher, and had forced the folks in Labor Relations to work overtime scrambling to redefine sexual harassment in the workplace. Arietta Dunn swished in on her electric chair. Deftly working the chair's controls, she slipped into a spot on the other end of the table. Mick Johnston cracked his knuckles. He was wearing his trademark camouflage fatigues, the same thing he wore every single day, even Hawaiian
shirt Fridays. I had just called the meeting to order when Ada Perkins stormed in, clutching my purse, my brief case with papers sticking out of it, and dragging my raincoat. She dumped them on the table in front of me.

“You quit, remember? You can just take your stuff and get out.”

The others froze, not out of fear, but in joyful anticipation of a juicy confrontation, something with which they could regale more junior staff for many coffee breaks to come.

I said, “Did I ever tell you that before coming to agency I worked in personnel?”

“What's that suppose to mean?” Caution stiffened her.

“Did I sign anything? Do you recall my stating in writing that I quit?”

Ada Perkins froze the way a person might if she came upon a horrible auto accident moments after it happened. Her face grayed over. She started working her stress ball. Then she wound up like Satchel Paige and hurled it against the wall over Mick's head, turned, and stalked out. The ball clung to the wall a second or two before falling to the floor with a dull plop. The room was quiet. Then Tracee said, “Bless her poor, little, ‘I come from private industry' heart.” The others laughed, but I didn't. I was thinking of Brenda Delacore at the moment. Brenda Delacore, my putative subordinate when I labored as personnel officer in my old job, and she as my Iago. Good ole Brenda, my former assistant and nemesis, my friend and sometimes not, the assistant personnel officer, but rank and file's agent provocateur—Brenda would have been proud of the way I'd handled Ada Perkins.

I didn't get to enjoy my small triumph for very long. Both my beeper and cell phone sounded, almost simultaneously. I checked the numbers. They were the same. The agency secretary stuck his head in the door just then and asked if he could see me. He's a soft-spoken, scholarly, brown-skinned man, but his question wasn't really a question, so I stood, the cell phone in one hand and the beeper in the other, and followed him to his office. He took a seat in his leather wing-backed chair, and I found a place on the divan across from him.

“Ada Perkins tells me that your style of interaction is causing her a great deal of distress. She tells me that,” he looked down and read from the paper in his hand, “you are discourteous to her, other staff, and the
public. You foment discord, and you bring discredit to the agency.” He looked up when he finished and stared at me through his rimless glasses. “Now, what do you say to that?”

“It reads word-for-word like that petition support staff signed against her,” I said.

He didn't smile, but I thought I saw some movement around the corners of his mouth. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Ada has built up quite a bit of vacation time, and I'm suggesting she take a couple of weeks of it. Her vacation starts in a couple of days. Why don't you work from home until then?” My pager and cell phone went off again, as I was leaving the secretary's office. I answered the phone.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Is that the way they have you answering the phone for the state?”

“Mother, this is my personal cell phone.”

“Your daddy and I spent all that money sending you to all those colleges, and you can't answer the phone no better than that?”

“Mother, what do you want?”

“I want,” said Mother, “for you to get your behind down off your shoulders. Then we need to check with Sister Venable's cousin to see if she's there.”

Then she told me the rest. The street preacher was dead. A street sweeper found him in a downtown doorway cut every which way by somebody with a strong work ethic when it came to murder. Sister Venable was missing, and this time so was her 1964 Chrysler LeBaron. Quintelle had delivered the bad news. She'd answered the phone when Mother placed her early morning call to check on Sister Venable, and according to her Venable's door was standing open when she got there.

Sister Venable's house was locked up tight, thanks to Quintelle. Toni's shades were drawn, and the morning paper was still on the walk. It was obvious no one was home; at least someone wanted it to look that way. We rang the bell and knocked anyway.

An old man in a red flannel shirt came to the porch next door. “How you ladies doing this fine morning?” he said with a slight bow.

Mother broke into a wide grin. I promised myself that if she curtsied I would elbow her to death right there on Toni's porch. Mother patted her hair, leaned toward me, and whispered form the corner of her mouth, “A gentleman.”

I stepped in front of her and said, “We're looking for Toni.”

He said, “They moved. Truck came this morning just before day, loaded up the whole kit and caboodle and drove off.”

I thanked the man and dragged Mother back to the car.

“We should have asked him some more questions,” Mother protested.

“He told us everything we needed to know.”

“Now what do we do?”

“There's nothing else we can do except maybe file a report with the police.”

“I already called the police, and all the hospitals too.”

“Mother, before we go any further, maybe you should tell me what the deal is with Sister Venable.”

“She's missing, that what the deal.”

“No Mother, the real deal, the one that began way back when in the Depression, or World War II, or something like that.”

All of Mother's friends have pasts. One old sister, who's gaining on eighty, did a stint as a hooch dancer during the '40s in some of the less reputable clubs on LA's Central Avenue. One is rumored to have killed a man. Another, in her irrepressible youth, ran an elaborate ponzi scheme fronted by a white man, cheating well-to-do white folks out of a little of their discretionary cash. All are now God-fearing churchwomen, pillars of their communities, grandmothers and great-aunts, some lovingly raising the children of their children.

“She has a cousin she's close to down in the valley, in Pit Pat, I believe his name is Rollie . . .”

“Mother.”

“Okay, okay. I don't know that much about her. I didn't meet her until she joined church a few years back, but she's always been a little peculiar. Annie Mae Williams, she the one we should be talking to. I hear tell, she grew up with her.”

Annie Mae Williams ran a board and care facility for developmentally
disabled adults out of her South Land Park home. She was a big, affable woman, in a spectacularly bad wig. It was impossible to tell her age, she could have been a hard-lived fifty, or a genetically blessed ninety.

“Back in Pit Pat, Venable sent a man to prison for murder,” Annie Mae Williams informed us. “Testified against him. Said she saw him stab a man.”

“Well, did he?”

“Some folks said he did, other folks swore he didn't. Venable the only one said she saw what happened. I'm telling you, people fell out over it, divided the whole town. You go down to Pit Pat and people still arguing about it to this very day.”

“I never heard of Pit Pat. Is it in California?”

Mother and Annie Mae Williams indulged me with a “kids say the darnest things” kind of chuckle.

Miss Annie Mae said, “Pit Pat's in the Valley down near Pixley.”

“Between Pixley and Corcoran,” Mother added.

“Black Okies and Arkies like me, trying to get away from hard times settled Pit Pat—Pixley too—back in the '30s.”

“When did all the killing and lying take place?” Mother asked.

“Nineteen sixty-four, April nineteen sixty-four.”

“Who was the man?”

“Clay. His name was Clay, John Henry Clay. So sad. He had a schoolage child, and another one on the way.”

“Which side were you on?”

“Child, I could'a cared less. Those Negroes were always shooting and cutting on one another just so they'd have something to talk about. I stayed clear of all that mess, minded my own business, got my diploma, and left on the first thing smoking. But I tell you one thing, the wrong man went to prison.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Guts,” said Annie Mae. “My guts tell me he didn't do it.”

Annie Mae Williams had to prepare an asthma treatment for one of her residents, so we thanked her and left.

“What do you think?” I said to Mother. We were back in the car
heading no place in particular. “You think that nineteen sixty-four killing had anything to do with Sister Venable wanting to go to jail herself?”

“How could it? You're forgetting one thing,” Mother said.

“And that is?”

“Venable is crazy.”

“Well, what about the preacher, you think she had anything to do with his death? You think she killed him and then went on the lam?”

“Don't be funny. What reason would she have for doing something like that?”

“Maybe she didn't need a reason,” I said. “Aren't you forgetting one thing—Sister Venable is crazy.”

“You can play if you want, but I'm telling you Venable wasn't scared for nothing. Ask yourself this, just why was she so scared she thought the only place she'd be safe was under lock and key? And when you get finished with that, ask yourself why is she missing.”

“You're the one said she was crazy.”

“I said she was crazy, I didn't say the child was stupid. She didn't go 'round sticking her hand on hot stoves. She didn't put her clothes on backwards. She knew when to come in out of the rain. And she knew when to be scared.”

I was suffering whiplash trying to keep up with Mother's wildly shifting theories. I was also beginning to understand what I'd heard in her voice earlier when she'd told me about the preacher's death and Sister Venable going missing—fear. She was plain, old-fashioned scared, the kind of scared that was likely to make her weekly dose of Black Draught unnecessary.

“Mother, do you know something you're not telling me?”

She bestowed upon me a look straight from the repertoire of Aisha, my seventeen-year-old, one of those “Duh!” looks. I pulled over and dropped my head to the steering wheel. I struggled against the urge to bump it until I lost consciousness.

“Why do you do this to me, Mother?”

“Do what?”

“Drag me into these messes only giving me part of the truth.”

“I didn't drag you into anything.”

“Okay, let's start from the beginning. What's going on? Why are you so scared?”