A Motive For Murder (13 page)

Many cautious NYC precincts had recorded prior
Miranda warnings on film. But it was doubtful that any Miranda
warning had ever been immortalized by so many cameras before. By
that evening, the Reverend Ben Hampton’s arrest and the meticulous
upholding of his constitutional rights had been beamed into
over  78% percent of all American households, courtesy of
modern technology.

 Auntie Lil did not like to rise before 10 A.M.
and usually consumed four cups of strong black coffee before she
attempted communication with other human beings. Thus she was
annoyed the following morning when her doorbell rang at eleven. She
had not even finished her third cup of coffee and should have been
busy slathering a bagel with cream cheese. A visitor would disrupt
her routine. Even worse, she might have to share.

“Who is it?” she shouted into the intercom. Auntie
Lil did not trust telecommunications devices. She bellowed into any
receiver, no matter how state-of-the-art.

“Mattie Jones,” a modulated voice replied. “Fatima
Jones is my niece.”

Auntie Lil admired the economy of the answer. She was
also curious as to why the aunt of the Metro’s most promising young
ballerina would want to see her. She knew that Fatima’s mother had
been missing on the streets for years and that the identity of her
father had never been clear. But despite the fact that she had
helped underwrite Fatima Jones’s dance scholarship, Auntie Lil had
never met the woman responsible for Fatima’s upbringing. She buzzed
her in eagerly.

When she opened the door, a stout black woman with
hair cut close to her rounded head stood before her. She was
wearing a neatly pressed red suit that Auntie Lil’s practiced eye
pegged as homesewn. It was a good job, too. The finishing work was
beautiful and the tailored lines took pounds off the woman’s frame.
Mattie Jones held a black pocketbook in front of her nervously, as
if shielding herself from possible violence. Auntie Lil noted with
approval that Mattie wore sensible black flats instead of the
crippling high heels that sillier women preferred. She noted with
even more approval that Mattie Jones also held a bakery bag in her
hands.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” the visitor said
politely, holding out the white paper bag. “I brought us some fresh
doughnuts so we could talk over coffee. That is, if you’d care to
invite me in.” She had a clear, rich voice. Auntie Lil wondered if
she was a singer.

“Of course,” Auntie Lil said. “I would be delighted.
I have followed Fatima’s career carefully over the past few years.
You have done a beautiful job of raising the child.”

“Fatima raised herself,” Mattie said, trundling her
big frame into Auntie Lil’s apartment. She stopped in astonishment
at the cluttered glory of what lay before her: rooms full of
fabrics, furniture, mementos, photographs, and the cherished debris
of eight decades of robust living. “My goodness,” she said with
admiration. “What a colorful home you have.”

Auntie Lil thought the comment remarkably tactful.
She couldn’t have put it better herself.

“My nephew Theodore thinks I’m messy,” Auntie Lil
explained as she swept two contrasting bolts of cloth from the
white sofa and dumped a pile of remnants into a chair. “But I know
where everything is. I can put my hands on anything within seconds.
Just ask.”

“How about putting your hands on some coffee?” Mattie
suggested with a musical laugh. When she smiled, she revealed a gap
between her two front teeth that made her look jolly and benign.
But Auntie Lil knew that anyone capable of successfully rescuing a
parentless child in New York City could not possibly be benign.

Auntie Lil fetched the pot of coffee and considered
offering her guest one of her trademark Bloody Mary’s. But since it
wasn’t even noon, a rare burst of discretion won out and she
settled for coffee alone.

“First of all, I would like to thank you for what you
have done for Fatima,” Mattie said. She slipped her shoes off with
a groan and wiggled her toes as she munched on a cinnamon-cake
doughnut.

Auntie Lil could not decide between white powdered
sugar or coconut. She compromised by choosing both, holding one in
each hand and taking alternate bites of each.

“You’re quite welcome,” Auntie Lil replied, her mouth
full. “I’m sure the friend who bequeathed me his fortune would be
delighted to see how much of his money’s worth he has gotten out of
Fatima.”

“She’s a special child,” Mattie agreed. “But I didn’t
just mean the scholarship money. I also want to thank you for
standing up for Fatima at the board meeting and for making sure she
got the role after all.”

“Who told you I stood up for Fatima?” Auntie Lil
asked.

Mattie hesitated, her discomfort obvious.

“O am not a big believer in board confidentiality,”
Auntie Lil promised. “I won’t tell anyone and I don’t really care.
I’m just curious.”

“Calvin Swanson,” Mattie admitted. “He’s a
maintenance man at the theater.”

Yes, we shared a cab uptown one night He’s a nice
man.” Auntie Lil did not add that Calvin had denied knowing Fatima
Jones and her aunt. She understood why he had been cautious. But
she did wonder if he had lied about anything else.

 “Calvin keeps an eye on Fatíma for me,” Mattie
explained. “We go to the same church. Church of Good Shepherd up in
Harlem. Our gospel choir is famous.”

“Yes, I know the church,” Auntie Lil said. “You
attract quite a lot of Scandinavian and German tourists each
Sunday.”

Mattie nodded. “More blondes than you’d find in
Sweden, it seems like some weeks.” She laughed and the musical
notes filled the living room.

“What made you come to see me today?” Auntie Lil
asked. “Fatima is doing well in rehearsal, isn’t she? I understand
she takes over the role of Clara starting tomorrow.”

“Yes, she knew the role already,” Mattie said.
“Played it last year in Philadelphia for a special NAACP
performance. It’s just a matter of adapting to Mr. Martinez’s
style. She’s doing just fine. There’s been a lot of excitement
about her, I know. People protesting and calling other people
names.” She bobbed her head apologetically. “It’s not the way I
like to do things, but people feel strongly about what they believe
in and I think folks have a right to stand up for what they care
about.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Auntie Lil said.

“But I’m not here about Fatima. She is just as calm
as a baby sleeping through a storm about all this. I’m here about
another friend of mine.”

“Oh?” Auntie Lil stopped with a coconut covered
doughnut inches from her lips.

“The Reverend Ben Hampton,” Mattie explained. “He’s
been arrested by the police.”

“You and the Reverend Hampton are friends?” Auntie
Lil asked. “Is he the pastor of Good Shepherd?”

Mattie shook her head. “No. He has his own church and
it’s a little too too for me, if you know what I mean. But I know
him from my work with schoolchildren in Harlem. I help tutor and
his people work with the kids, too. He’s a good man, Miss Hubbert.
I know he hollers a lot for the cameras and says some things that
white people don’t want to hear. But he’s no fool and he’s not a
man who believes in violence. He didn’t kill that boy’s father.
They say they have proof, but I have the proof he didn’t right
here.” She tapped a fist over her heart and scrutinized Auntie Lil.
“He has no one to help him. That’s the funny thing about this all.
If anyone else had been arrested unfairly, the Reverend would be
out on the streets making sure justice was done. But he can’t be
out on the streets because they have locked him up and they want an
awful lot of money for his bail. An awful lot.”

“What’s an awful lot?” Auntie Lil asked.

“It’s a million dollars, but the bail bondsman needs
just one hundred thousand to take it on. Ben’s church is trying,
but they don’t have that kind of money. Their building is already
mortgaged. And he needs a good lawyer, too. He keeps spouting about
how he’s going to represent himself, but you know what they
say.”

“A man who represents himself has a fool for a client
and an idiot for a lawyer?” Auntie Lil said.

Mattie nodded. “He wouldn’t do the right things to
protect himself,” she explained. “He’d be making a speech when he
ought to be making a motion. He’s been arrested lots of times,
mostly for disturbing the peace, when running his mouth didn’t harm
him much. But this is murder.”

“I understand,” Auntie Lil said. “And you want me to
put up the money for this?”

Mattie nodded. “I know it’s a lot to ask. And I can’t
give you much more than my word that you won’t lose any of it in
the end.”

Auntie Lil needed to think about it for only a
moment. A woman who had raised a discarded child, kept her from
drugs, nurtured a dream, and then made that dream possible was a
woman who could be trusted. Still, it might look bad given her
position on the board. And Theodore would throw a fit.

“I wouldn’t expect you to do it if there wasn’t
something in it for you,” Mattie added, as if she could sense
Auntie Lil’s hesitation.

“Indeed?” Auntie Lil asked.

“Calvin told me you were looking into who murdered
that boy’s father,” Mattie explained. “If you help bail out the
Reverend and can find him a good lawyer, I promise you that he will
talk to you about the murder. He knows things, he says.”

“What things?” Auntie Lil asked.

“Things he won’t tell the police,” Mattie said. He
doesn’t like the police. He’s hardheaded that way. Doesn’t
understand that they have their jobs to do.”

“But he’ll talk to me?” Auntie Lil was skeptical.

“He says he will.”

That made the decision easy. She had plenty of money.
But only one opportunity to talk to the Reverend Ben Hampton.

 It took nearly twenty-four hours to get Ben
Hampton released from custody. Not even Auntie Lil’s high-priced
lawyer, Hamilton Prescott, could make the wheels turn faster. At
first Prescott had been reluctant to take on the high-profile case,
but when Auntie Lil appealed to his sense of fair play—and promised
to find another lawyer should the case come to trial—he agreed to
oversee obtaining Hampton’s release on bail.

Given his initial resistance, Auntie Lil was bemused
to see her reticent lawyer beaming in front of television cameras
the next day, his hand on Ben Hampton’s elbow as he steered him
through the courtroom’s hallways to freedom. The phone call she had
been expecting came two hours later.

“Miss Hubbert?” Mattie Jones said in her flawless
voice. “We can send someone to pick you up now if you’re ready to
talk to Ben.”

“I’m ready,” Auntie Lil told her. Theodore would be
angry she had left him out of the loop, but it served him right.
Once again he had disappeared for half a day—as had Herbert—and she
was irritated at being excluded from their plans.

She was wearing a bright red pants suit for the
meeting with Hampton. The color had been chosen carefully. Red made
her feel powerful and she would need considerable self-confidence
to match wits with the Reverend Ben Hampton.

It did not surprise her that the Reverend had a
chauffered limousine at his beck and call. Nor did it surprise her
when the car drew up in front of a magnificent restored mansion in
the section of Harlem known as Sugar Hill. At the turn of the
century, the street had been home to New York City’s finest houses,
stately homes that fell into disrepair decades later. The
real-estate boom in the seventies had brought many back to life
when affluent blacks repaired them to their former grandeur. Ben
Hampton’s was one of the finest examples of Victorian architec–ture
she had ever seen. She passed through an elaborate wrought-iron
gate and up wide wooden stairs to a massive oak door inset with a
huge fan-shaped wedge of stained glass. Perhaps his church actually
owned the home, she thought to herself. This was almost too much
for a man who claimed to be of the cloth.

A neatly dressed teenage girl ushered Auntie Lil into
a high-ceilinged parlor with red velvet drapes exactly the color of
her suit. Ben Hampton sat in a leather armchair pulled up next to a
small fire. To her surprise, Hamilton Prescott sat beside him. The
men—so different in race, temperament, and dress—were sharing a
smoke and glasses of brandy. The show of brotherhood was touching
but not touching enough to stop Auntie Lil from pointedly glaring
at the cigars. Both men obediently ground out their stogies and
rose to their feet.

“My thanks for your financial support,” Reverend
Hampton said smoothly, with a formal bow. He extended a huge hand
and grasped hers firmly. He was so physically immense that she
wondered if he had been a prizefighter or football player in his
youth. Up close, his shock of pure white hair looked even more
startling. It rose straight from his scalp like a patch of albino
lawn left too long in the sun.

“I trust Mr. Prescott has been of service to you?”
Auntie Lil said, casting an amused glance at her straitlaced
lawyer. Prescott paused with the brandy glass halfway to his lips,
as if he had just  been caught by a teacher doing something
naughty.

“It’s a most interesting case,” Prescott said
defensively. “Far more interesting than my usual cases. Except for
you, Lillian, my clients can be downright boring.”

“I can imagine.” She settled herself on a brocade
sofa the color of autumn leaves and accepted Hampton’s offer of a
drink. The man who brought her an extra spicy Bloody Mary at
Hampton’s request was dressed casually in sports slacks and a
neatly pressed golf shirt. His manner was polite without being the
least bit deferential. Hampton’s casual thanks to the man told her
that he was not a servant but, more likely, a member of the
congregation helping to guard him.