Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (30 page)

It was down hill after that for both of us. I knew about her. I told her
about me, even about Mary Ella, but not about what she'd wanted me to do. I just felt it wasn't necessary to drag that out, especially since I hadn't done it. Stella listened intently, told me I sure had a way with words, said she could just see Mary Ella's sashaying movements and hear her sassy voice.

After we married, Stella continued telling me I had a way with words. She kept saying I should try my hand at writing stories. I laughed my head off. I'd never written anything besides my name on nothing. I had good learning though. That was one thing about the Midwest; their schooling was the best. But I hadn't kept up with it. She was stubborn, my Stella, kept talking, suggested I go to one of the local junior colleges and take some writing classes. I continued to laugh, but the more I thought about it, the better it sounded, and when she mentioned I could get paid if somebody liked my stories, it sounded even better. So I did it. I hated it, but she was right about one thing, I did seem to have a way with words. They came easy, and the more of them I wrote, the less I hated doing it. Before long, I was addicted. I wrote all the time anywhere and everyplace. Unbeknowst to me, Stella was sending my stories out, and lo and behold, someone was foolish enough to buy one. Didn't pay a whole lot, but it paid. I eventually quit the bartending business and became a full-time writer.

Man, Stella and I were some team. She writing and reading her poems, and me writing my stories, just the two of us, no kids. We were enough for each other, didn't need anything or anybody diluting our love. We never regretted that decision neither. Only after Stella died, did I long for a part of her to continue to love.

Stella. She was probably turning over in her grave 'bout now, me talking to my past and she thinking what a great story had just dropped in my lap.

I pressed the receiver tighter against my ear. “You still there, Mary Ella?” I asked hoping she wasn't.

“I ain't going nowhere.”

“Where you at, anyhow, and what the hell you want?” I asked. The
thoughts of Stella had me teary, and I didn't want Mary Ella picking up on it, thinking it was because of her.

“I'm close,” she said, “San Francisco, thought I'd take a chance on reconnecting. We go way back, you and I.”

“How'd you know where to find me?”

“Easy. You're famous,” she said.

I ignored her bullshit. “What do you want?” I asked again.

“You still love me, Billy?” she asked in that whispery, sexy voice.

Her image popped into my mind, black and lean, with high cheeks and big eyes. I sighed and concentrated, hard, on Stella. “No,” I whispered.

“Liar,” she whispered back.

“No,” I repeated, loud and clear.

“I thought you went through with it, Billy,” she said still in that whispery, sexy voice, ignoring my denial, “thought you aimed and pulled just like you said you would.”

That caught me off guard. I felt that old familiar funny breathing beginning in my chest. Damn her.

“Thought you not only proved your love, but also that you were a man, you hadn't turned tail and run.”

I didn't respond.

“Cat got your tongue, Sugar?”

“Don't call me that.”

She laughed. “Still gets a rise out of you after all these years.”

“I didn't kill nobody,” I said, wanting to slam down the receiver, but I needed this over. All these years, and I hadn't quite managed to push it completely out of my thoughts.

She didn't say a word, but I could hear her breathing. It sounded kinda funny, now, like mine. What the hell was she up to?

“You hear me, Mary Ella,” I shouted, “I never killed nobody.” I was tired of the conversation. None of it mattered anymore no how. It had been way too long, and we were both too old to be playing cat and mouse games. And it sure in hell wasn't worth having a stroke over. I glanced at my watch. She was cutting into my writing time. “You finished?”

“I haven't answered your second question.”

“Say it or forget it. I need to get on with my day.”

“You asked why I was calling. That's a legitimate question that deserves an answer.” She sighed. “Like I said, Billy, I actually thought you'd killed him.”

“How the hell . . .”

“Hear me out. When I asked you to kill Munson Taylor, I wasn't serious, and I sure in hell didn't expect you to go along with it. I expected a good cursing, maybe even a slap or two before you stomped out. But, you were so cute, Billy, so ready to prove your love, so . . . vulnerable. See, I knew it wasn't really me you were in love with. You were in love with love and sex and becoming a man, like so many boys your age. So instead of running away, you called my bluff, and I got caught in my own trap.”

“What are you saying, woman? You didn't want him dead?”

“That's right,” she whispered. “Munson was an old lover. He hadn't done a damn thing to me, and I had nothing on him. And it was no secret he was a crook. Hell, the whole town knew that, including the cops, especially the cops.”

“Why . . . ?”

“I always challenged my lovers. That was part of the game. How far would they go to keep my . . . love. You were special, Sugar. I was falling for you, and that was never part of the plan. You were just a . . . you were a very young man with nothing to offer. I couldn't afford to love you, so I thought I'd challenge you with murder, which I knew you'd never do, and drive you away.”

“You led me on, knowing . . . ?” I felt sick all over, weak and dizzy and lightheaded. At that moment I hated her with such fury, if she'd of been there in front of me, I would have killed her with my bare hands. “What if I'd gone through with it?”

“I didn't think you could do it, Billy. I counted on that. That you would get cold feet and not do it.”

“You had days,” I shouted, “and you never even tried to contact me, call it off, tell me it was just some fucking sick joke.”

“I had to save face, Billy, and I knew you couldn't do it.”

“Stop saying that bullshit,” I shouted. “You don't know what a man will do for the woman he . . . thinks he loves.”

She was crying, loud retching sobs, which were having no effect on me, none. I eased into a chair and closed my eyes and tried to stop trembling.

“When I read about his murder in the papers,” she finally continued, “I wanted to scream. I couldn't believe you'd actually done it. I was on pins and needles, panic every time my phone rang. I was crazy. I kept thinking if you could kill somebody you didn't even know, how hard would it be to kill me, the one who had fooled you into it? I waited for you to confess and name me. It never happened. That's when I realized you hadn't done it, cause if you had, you'd told somebody. I was relieved. I wanted to hunt you down, tell you I was sorry, and beg your forgiveness. As you know, I never did. I figured the cops concluded Munson was killed by one of his crime buddies and the darkie got what he deserved. I thought the same thing. And you hadn't done it, so your conscience had to be clear. I just hoped, actually prayed, you had gotten on with your life, married a woman who deserved your love, and was living a long healthy happy life. That's why I'm calling, Sugar, hoping you don't hate me too much and begging forgiveness.”

The quiet was so thick I could've cut it with a knife. I didn't want to forgive her, damn it. She'd almost made me a killer. But, I had to be honest. She hadn't done anything, not really, just brought the shit up, and I, William Sude Jr., had made my own decision. As much as I wanted to hate her, had just hated her, I couldn't continue. Hell, it had been too long and we were too old and time was moving too fast and life was too short . . .

“I don't hate you, Mary Ella,” I finally said, “and forgiving you feels about right.” I heard her damn sobs and funny breathing.

“Just one last question, Sugar.”

“Only one.”

“Did you find a woman worthy of your love?”

“Yes,” I whispered and felt Stella's presence.

“What's her name?”

“That's two.”

“I never could count, Sugar. What's her name?”

“Stella,” I said. “Her name . . . is Stella.”

A Woman's Place had changed a lot in the last year. On this chilly November morning in the nation's capital, it was still not really home to any of the women who found shelter here, perhaps not as unwelcoming as before, but still an unwelcome place to be, even temporarily. Anyway, young women were no longer disappearing, had stopped being swallowed up whole without a trace. And Bernetta Bennett, the B to me, had decided—with just a little help from her friends—to move on, to bring joy to some other unsuspecting souls. The board of directors of A Woman's Place could not recommend her for other work. How exactly do you word a recommendation for someone who has run a hellhole and lost other people's children in the process? The board did, however, give her a big send-off: No gold-plated watch, no severance package, no vacation or additional sick pay. But also no jail time. And she was a criminal. The city is finished with her; I am not.

Every dime the government of the District of Columbia had ever paid Bernetta Bennett was, in fact, sick pay. She was sick, she spread her sickness freely within an already ailing system, and she was paid well for her effort.

Her stench—her legacy of neglect and disrespect—took a while to remove from A Woman's Place. It was sandblasted from the building's redbrick exterior and sandpapered from surfaces tagged with generational graffiti, but it can still be found in crevices of distrust. And, although flowerbeds have overtaken squares of dirt that once subbed as trash bins on both sides of the front door, flowers have seemed uncertain whether it is safe to bloom there, thanks to the B.

It took exactly two months and four days to dethrone the B. The fact that she offered no explanation for the disappearance of a child—mine—or for the return of a runaway to an abusive foster home was damaging. But scrutiny of the organizational accounts proved fatal. Poor handling of money did the job, where cruel, perhaps criminal, handling of people had not.

Taywanda Hammill, who seemed to be everything that the B was not—caring, efficient, human—replaced her as director. In her first interview, she had claimed the job with on-target responses, well-developed plans for improving the shelter, and thoughtful questions. The fact that she maintained direct eye contact and Janice Scott's enthusiasm for her tipped the scales in her favor. Janice, a resident at A Woman's Place who had become the intake administrator, had no official role in the selection process, but I asked her to sit in on the interviews, because she understood resident needs so well.

The only thing weighted against Taywanda was her name, but her neatly trimmed, unpermed hair offset that. Although I really couldn't blame her, because her mother and father—both of whom, she explained, had abandoned her at three months old—thought themselves creative and probably could not spell, I wondered what they had been smoking, snorting, drinking, or mixing when they'd decided to combine their names—Taylor and La Wanda—to create hers.

Nine months into her two-year contract and into the transformation of A Woman's Place, she E-mailed a two-sentence resignation:

I resign from my position as director of A Woman's Place, effective 5 November. I will be on annual leave until that date.

The note, sent on November 3, was copied to all board members but
addressed specifically to me, then-president of the board. She wasted no time on salutations, niceties, or even a hint of her reasons for leaving. After a momentary flash of anger and disappointment, I thought about offering her a few tips on not burning bridges. Washington is a relatively small, decidedly Southern, city, even as it sports an international, cosmopolitan veneer, and there are not six degrees of separation here. Anyway, it would be difficult to write a recommendation for Taywanda after such a huge gap in professionalism and courtesy.

I waited two minutes before calmly walking down the flight of steps to her office on the second floor. I am practicing patience. After knocking on her door once and suppressing the urge to pound on it, I yanked it open without waiting for a response.

Taywanda and everything she'd brought with her were gone, and the office was spotless. Nothing was left, except donated office furniture and equipment that appeared to have been wiped clean and a trace of lemon-scented Pledge.

In the hallway outside her office, I picked up a pink message slip, glanced at the numbers on it, and dropped it in the trashcan near the stairwell.

The next day, by unanimous vote of the board—that is, by default—I became the interim director. The position was hotly contested; nobody wanted the job, and I protested least vociferously. I still feel a strong connection to the place, a physical and emotional pull toward it. This is where I believe Amani last slept, was last seen.

My first week as interim director of A Woman's Place began with a meeting in a small windowless room in the basement of a library.

“Ms. Bell, please address Mr. Jordan's concern about loitering,” James Palmer, the very pompous, very round ANC president, said. “Actually, it's obvious that if you expand, loitering will increase along with undesirable foot traffic.”

“Although the number of women in the neighborhood will increase, the increase will be relatively small,” I said, while making nonconfrontational eye contact, first with James and then with Lenwood Jordan, his tag team partner. “We will increase—”

“Could we have some numbers?” James said.

They want answers, but they want the appearance of having to drag them out of me.

“As I had begun to explain, the most viable plan is to expand to an adjoining house that will contain fifteen additional beds. Over the past year, we have increased services, providing job search and skills workshops, career fairs, GED classes, and enrichment activities. Additionally, women no longer stand on the street waiting to sign in. All have resulted in reduced loitering and—”

“But wouldn't the increased number of beds return loitering to the previous level? More of these shelter women coming into the neigh—” Now, it was Lenwood's turn on the mat.

“The women are all residents of this city, not
shelter women.
Many were prematurely released from St. Elizabeth's, some are the working poor, others are current or recovering addicts, and still others are people like you—Lenwood—and me who have simply lost their jobs and have no cushion or family to assist them.”

“I stand corrected, but back to the original question . . .”

You stand stupid and obnoxious.

“Obviously, women will have to make their way to A Woman's Place, that is, walk through the streets of this community. So, yes, more women will come into the neighborhood. But, since our services have expanded, there is increased engagement and less idle time. Surely you do not object to the women simply walking down public streets. And, we haven't had one incident of shelter-related vandalism, violence, excessive noise, or vagrancy in the last six months.”

“Well, I'm not sure about your statistics, but—”

“They are not my statistics. They came from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department last week. Do you have more current data?”

Neither James nor Lenwood acknowledged the question. They busied themselves shuffling papers on the only table in the room, perhaps looking for new statistics, perhaps steaming because they had none.

A tall angular woman stood and raised her hand tentatively. She hand-pressed the lapels of her black blazer and offered apology by way of her bowed head even before she spoke. “Well, I don't mean to be
uncharitable, but, well, do we have to shelter every homeless woman in the whole city?” Her soft Southern voice, typical of elderly Washingtonians, quivered; this was not easy for her. “Why can't they expand into Georgetown or on Capitol Hill? I don't mean to sound uncharitable . . . I'm a Christian.”

She probably was, but I am always suspicious of people who feel the need to tell me.

“Yeah, I agree with Miss Margaret.” She gave him a puzzled look. “And we will do whatever we have to, to stop shelter expansion. I'm not sorry for wanting to protect my property value and my family,” a very dark, very handsome man said, holding a firefighter's helmet in strong-looking hands. The small group of residents, seated in two rows of metal folding chairs, nodded in unison and mumbled in agreement. James pretended to try to bring order to the meeting, and the handsome man looked disproportionately proud of himself.

I wanted to ask his name, his politics notwithstanding . . . for the record.

And the meeting continued.

One would think women who find themselves in a shelter want to be there, that they pencil into their life plans a nice long stay on a narrow cot in a shelter. Nobody really wants them housed in their community. The haves simply are not having homeless people wandering aimlessly or even with purpose through their neighborhoods. And the almost-haves have worked too hard to become homeowners to be charitable.

At 11:15
A
.
M
., twelve days into my tenure as interim director and within a block of A Woman's Place, Melba Johnson—Mel to her friends, whoever and wherever they were—was found face-down and already stiff on very cold, cracked concrete. She was dressed in a navy fleece jacket and skintight blue jeans, open at the waist. Dead, apparently of blunt-force trauma to the head, was the preliminary finding of the first resident of A Woman's Place on the scene.

Mel was a petite woman, with sad brown eyes and full pouting lips. While others played cards or checkers in the intake room of A Woman's Place, she usually sat on the floor, propped up by her soiled yellow
backpack, reading tattered paperback novels of all sorts. I could see no pattern to her taste in books—except that she liked the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar—and noticed no friendships.

Although I'd had only one conversation of any length with her, at the end of it, she had asked me to please call her “Mel” like all her other friends. She said that she had once held a “good government job” at the Environmental Protection Agency, didn't have much family, and expected to be out of shelter by the end of November. She also said that she'd met a nice man who treated her “like somebody.”

When the news of Mel's death arrived at A Woman's Place by way of one of her sister residents, I thanked the almost-eyewitness and immediately closed the door to my office. I knew there would be much excitement surrounding the rapid spread of the news and probably even an exodus into the street to see just where it had happened. There also might be an opportunity for a little press coverage. “Yeah, I knew her. She was friendly and clean. And, I never had no trouble with her. Never.” James and Lenwood would love that—not the death, perhaps, but the press coverage.

Over the new public address system, I could have suggested that residents not go to the scene of the crime, but such a message would have been resented first and then ignored without a thought, except perhaps of “who the hell does she think she is?” It has taken me too long to build trust and respect to revert to Bernetta-like tactics.

The heavy front door opened and slammed shut repeatedly for several minutes as I began to flip through mail on my self-assembled desk.

Occasionally, residents who have moved on to better things, even homeownership, called or wrote to update the staff. A few children of past residents have sent lovely drawings of their new homes, of meadows and horses—favorite subjects although most have never been in or on either—or of their families. When I picked up the manila envelope addressed to me in large squiggly black letters, a smile played across my face. As I retrieved the orange file card hiding in the bottom and read the message, twice, my stomach churned its discomfort. The card contained seven typed words:
How does it feel to lose one?

I dropped the card, pushed away from the desk, and ran to the bathroom at the far end of the hall. Urinary incontinence, or its onset, is not a
funny thing. I'll have to make another appointment with Dr. Marke. The need to pee—three drops maximum—every half hour, especially when I'm excited or anxious, is debilitating. At forty-six years old, it is also outrageous.

After washing my hands and splashing a little water on my face, I walked out of the single-stall bathroom into complete silence, speedwalked to my office, and closed the door behind me without intending to do so.

My desk was a little less cluttered than I had left it. The large manila envelope and orange file card were gone.

“Ms. Bell, ma'am, I mean Gloria, I don't have anything yet. I'm not working the case officially,” Officer Shirley Morrison said in response to my request for information on Mel's death less than three hours after her body was discovered. “Officers are still on the scene. I'll see what I can find out, but . . . don't expect too much on this one, ma'am.”

I knew better than to expect much, but I didn't like having low expectations officially confirmed. I started to end this phone conversation and call Lew—my almost significant other—to file a preemptive complaint, but then I'd have to listen to his warnings about staying out of the investigation and threats about becoming a guest of the police department if I ignored the warnings. I had heard it all before, when I moved into A Woman's Place to find Amani and got thrown out after complaining about Akua's disappearance. I had helped find Akua, though; she is still in my custody.