Aftermath (6 page)

“Let him go, Camille,” Toya said. Her tone of voice conveyed that she was sick of her friend calling after Frankie. “He just found out that his brother was killed. It's a lot to digest in one night.”

Camille took a deep breath. She knew that Frankie needed time to sort out everything that was happening. Shit, she hadn't processed it all herself. But, as she packed a suitcase to take to Dominique's house, she admitted to herself that it was deeper than just tonight. She knew that things in her family would never be the same again. Frankie had left her for Gillian. Camille was pregnant with his child. Steven was dead. Misa was in jail. And poor Shane had been victimized. In a daze, Camille left her million-dollar home amid the flashing lights of news cameras and the curious stares of her neighbors. As she climbed into Dominique's MKX, shielding her face from the news photographers, she cried for all of them. This was worse than anything she could have ever imagined.

Reckoning

The sun had come up, and Gillian had brewed a fresh pot of coffee by the time Frankie returned to her Manhattan home. By then her imagination had gotten the best of her. Last she'd heard, Frankie was running off to the home he shared with his estranged wife—who, incidentally, had just announced that she was pregnant. Gillian had lain awake all night while Danno and Biggs patrolled her home like pit bulls. She wondered what had happened to Steven, wondered why Frankie hadn't bothered to call. Gillian was worried sick.

When Frankie came through the door at just after seven-thirty in the morning, Gillian was standing near her floor-to-ceiling kitchen windows gripping a coffee mug. Seeing him enter, she set the mug down on the nearby marble countertop and looked at him expectantly. Her eyes seemed sad, and Frankie almost dissolved in a puddle of tears at her feet. He hated having to burden her with more horrible news. But what had happened to his brother was not something he could keep from her.

He walked over to her and pulled her close to him. His strong arms overwhelmed her as he inhaled her scent. With his nose nestled in her hair and her face buried in the crook of his arm, Frankie openly cried. Gillian's hair became damp with his tears and she clung to him, aware that his underlings were still present and that Frankie had never been one to cry in public before. Despite the grimmest of circumstances, he kept a stiff upper lip. But now he openly wept, seeming not to care who saw him fall apart. Finally, he loosened the grip he had on her and she reached up and touched his face, wet with tears. Glancing around she noticed that Danno, Biggs, and Tremaine had had sense enough to withdraw to her study.

She looked at Frankie, his eyes squeezed shut as if to stop the torrent that was pouring forth. “What happened?” she whispered softly. “Come here.” Gillian kissed Frankie's exquisite lips and wiped his face. “Tell me, Frankie. What happened?”

Frankie shook his head back and let out a deep and seemingly calming breath. When he looked at Gillian again, his eyes were red and puffy. She led him by the hand to her living room and got him situated on the couch. Sitting beside him, she squeezed his hand as he began.

“My brother is dead.” Frankie's voice was monotone, his eyes distant. “Misa shot him. She…” His voice caught in his throat then. Clearing it out, he clenched his jaw, folded and unfolded his hands, and then went on. “She went to the house while no one was home last night. She had keys.” His voice got louder. “You know what I'm saying? We trusted that bitch with keys to the house 'cuz her son was over there all the time. She let herself in. And she waited for him. And when he came in, she shot him.” Gillian couldn't believe what she was hearing, but she kept quiet as he continued. “Pulled the trigger six times and then sat there. Camille found her in the dining room.”

Gillian couldn't be silent any longer. She almost didn't believe what he was telling her, but then how could he possibly make up such madness? “Frankie, what are you telling me? Misa shot Steven … for what? Why would she just go over there and kill him?”

Frankie stared at the floor. His mind was reeling. After leaving his home, he had ridden in Tremaine's car to the morgue and signed the forms necessary to perform the autopsy. It all felt like a bad dream to him. Like he was trapped in his worst nightmare but couldn't wake up no matter how hard he tried. Steven, the little brother he had nurtured, attempted to mentor, and protected, was dead. Frankie knew that their mother, whom he hadn't spoken to in at least two years, would be devastated. This might be the thing it took to finally kill her.

Gillian stroked Frankie's head and spoke softly. “Why did she do it?” Gillian had to know.

He looked at her, silent for a while.

“She thinks he was molesting her son.”

Gillian's expression changed and she stopped stroking Frankie's head. She frowned slightly and touched her diamond necklace absentmindedly. Frankie took note. He expected that everyone would respond that way, questioning the possibility that Steven was a pedophile. Frankie had seen the local newspaper reporters assembling at his home in the wee hours as word spread of a bloody crime scene in his upper-crust neighborhood. He had heard what Misa said, seen her conviction. He knew that his dead brother would be judged publicly without ever having the chance to defend himself.

“Oh my God,” Gillian managed.

Frankie cleared his throat again. “She sat there and looked me in my face…” He didn't complete the thought, but it was obvious that Frankie was struggling with what had happened.

Gillian had one eyebrow raised. Gently, and in her most angelic voice, she prodded. “Steven couldn't be capable of something like that … could he?”

Frankie didn't move. He didn't respond. He simply stared off into space as if he were mesmerized by some long-ago thought.

Gillian didn't nudge any further out of respect for the fact that he had just lost his brother. But she began thinking about Steven—about all the times she had interacted with him over the years, trying to assess if she had missed any warning signs that he could be a pervert.

“Nah…” Frankie said at last. “I mean…”

Silence lingered between them for so long that Gillian got up and poured herself some of the coffee she'd made earlier. She made some tea for Frankie, since she'd been around him long enough to know that he hated coffee. When she returned to the living room, Frankie was holding his head in his hands. Meanwhile, Tremaine and the goons came in and told Frankie that they were going to leave. Gillian noticed that Tremaine's demeanor seemed just as downtrodden as Frankie's. After all, Tremaine had witnessed the carnage up close and personal. He had seen Steven's bullet-riddled body, watched his friend come to terms with the loss of his brother and what he was accused of. The two friends shared a strong handshake embrace and when they were all gone, Frankie sank back down on the couch, and again the silence came.

“Drink your tea,” Gillian said, wondering how things could get any worse. First her father had been slain, her brother maimed, and now Steven was dead, Camille was pregnant, Misa was in jail. And Frankie sat mute before her.

“I'm so sorry, baby,” she said, watching him ignore the steaming mug in front of him. She knew that he probably wanted something much stronger than peppermint tea. “I know you looked out for Steven all his life.” She thought back to a conversation she and Frankie had only weeks earlier, on the night when they made love for the first time. He had shared with her some painful details of his childhood. They were things that Frankie had never shared with anyone; how his father suffered from some type of mental illness that had gone undiagnosed for so long the family seemed to have just found a way to cope with it.

Frankie looked at Gillian. “I told you that my father was crazy,” Frankie said, as if reading her mind. “He was the type to go off—just snap at any minute.”

“Yeah,” Gillian said, nodding. “You told me that he would sit down for dinner and smile, he'd tell your mom that it was delicious, and then he'd bug out and ask why she was looking at him like that. He accused her of poisoning his food.”

Frankie nodded. “That wasn't the half of it.” He stared ahead before looking at Gillian again. “He was like a psychopath.”

Gillian felt like a psychologist. “You said that he used to bully everybody, and beat you.”

Frankie looked at her in a way that made her stop speaking. “We were all scared of him.” He frowned. “But my brother was the most afraid because he was the little one, you know? He was a little kid, bony and frail, and my father used to tease him, call him Gimpy and shit like that.”

Frankie had told Gillian that his father committed suicide one night as his brother and mother lay asleep. By then, Frankie had fled the home and was working for Gillian's father, Doug Nobles. Frankie admitted to Gillian that he had felt no sorrow when his father died. He had only been relieved that he hadn't taken the rest of the family with him.

“After I left home, I would sneak in and see Steven all the time. He told me that Dad wasn't beating them like he used to. I never knew if that was true or not, 'cuz I wasn't seeing my mother. She was like a slave to my father, you feel me?”

Gillian nodded, but truly had no idea what that kind of upbringing must have been like. Her father had doted on her from the moment she entered the world and her mother had been smothering, as opposed to distant and nonparticipatory. Her parents' marriage had been a happy one and she had rarely heard her father raise his voice at her mother.

Frankie continued. “I never knew what happened after I left. I got out and got away, but he probably bore the burden of it.”

“You feel guilty about that?” she asked.

Frankie nodded. “Yeah, I do. I left. And Steven and my mother were left behind to deal with my father.”

“Don't blame yourself, Frankie.”

He shrugged. “Nah,” he said, as if trying to shake off the feeling of guilt that so obviously haunted him. “It ain't that. I did what I could to protect him. And I thought I did a good job.” He looked in her eyes. “Camille never understood why I took care of him; why I let him hang around in our kitchen and eat up our food, run up our bills.” He chuckled awkwardly. “I just wanted my little brother to feel like he had a place he could be…” Frankie seemed to lose the words he needed to convey the sense of comfort and safety he had wanted Steven to enjoy after years of being belittled and demeaned at the hands of their tyrannical father.

“I understand,” Gillian said. “I know how you felt about Steven.” She couldn't believe that Misa had killed him. “Frankie, I'm so sorry.” She shook her head, feeling helpless to ease his pain. “Where is she now—Camille's sister?”

“She'll be in court this afternoon,” Frankie said, moving forward in his seat as if he needed to say something. He paused and looked at Gillian. “I can't let her get away with this.”

Gillian wondered for a moment if Frankie was going to hurt his sister-in-law. She searched his eyes for the answer.

Frankie was staring at the floor as if in a trance. “I have to break this to my mother somehow.” He pictured his mother's face—Mary Jane Bingham. She was once a beautiful woman, tall and brown, statuesque and ladylike. She was always quiet, had always been shy and soft-spoken. But it had gotten worse over the years, and Mary had remained a scared and beaten-down wife long after her husband was dead.

“Why didn't you feel the need to take care of your mother the same way you did for Steven after your father died?”

Frankie stared at Gillian, having asked himself the same question over and over. “Because my brother had no choice but to stay there and deal with it. He was a kid, you know what I'm saying. But my mother? She could have left whenever she was ready. She could have got us out of there. She was always so fragile, and … maybe I shouldn't fault her for it.”

Gillian shook her head. “No, I think I would feel the same way.” She wondered how the news of Steven's death would affect poor Mary Bingham. “When are you going to tell her? I want to be there with you.”

He laughed a little. “How do I tell her this shit? It's gonna destroy her.”

“I don't know how we'll tell her. But we'll figure it out, Frankie.”

She made it sound so easy, but Frankie knew that it wouldn't be. He breathed a heavy sigh and sat back against the pillows on the couch. He couldn't block out the recollection of Steven's face in his head. He saw his brother lying in the body bag, his eyes frozen in horror as he lay dead. There was no question in his mind that somebody—Camille, Misa—somebody was going to pay for what had been done to Steven.

Gillian looked at him as if she could read his mind. Frankie realized then how much he loved her. She was all that was good in his life at the moment. In his mind, Camille had held him hostage in a marriage he no longer wanted to be in. He had felt obligated to Camille for all the years of loyalty and love she had given him, but truth be told he hadn't been happy in years. And now, just as he found the courage to leave her and to live his life doing what made him truly happy, she was pregnant with his child. Camille's sister had killed his brother and accused him of an atrocity, dredging up years of Frankie's own childhood nightmares, which he had managed somehow to suppress in order to survive. Now he'd have to face his mother with more bad news in a life that had been riddled with nothing but. His “brother” Baron was laid up in the hospital, responsible for the death of his father figure, Doug Nobles. But as he looked at Gillian sitting there, Frankie felt reassured. She was beautiful, she understood him, she had his back and he was grateful.

“I love you, Frankie. And no matter what, nothing's gonna change that. We're gonna get through this together.”

Frankie kissed her, pulled her close to him. She lay against his chest and he held her, hoping that their bond could indeed stand the trials that loomed ahead of them.