Alibi (18 page)

“It was Sticks who set this kid up with the alibi?” Dizzy asked. He had heard little about the story up until now.

“Yeah, and if he didn’t pay the girl, it would explain why she didn’t show up for court,” said Simon as he stood back up,
exhaled, then sat back down.

“You all right?”

“Naw, I’m not,” said Simon, looking at his oldtime friend. “Ay yie yie, you know the only thing is, if the girl was paid fifty
thousand dollars, why she wasn’t there?”

“What did he say? Didn’t you ask him?”

“Of course I asked him. I’m telling you, this guy is not fucking thinking with his head on straight. He’s not covering the
bases. His story to me was that she had a death in the family and had to leave town, that she would be ready the next court
date. I don’t know, just don’t sound right, for fifty thousand, you don’t need to be at no funeral, motherfucker already dead.
Shit, she was supposed to be there.”

“You right, Simon. When you’re right you right. She should have been there and nine chances out of ten, you’re right about
this Sticks character. He’s no good. I’ll put a call into Mira, he’ll be able to track this girl down. If she’s still breathing,
he’s your guy, he’ll find her, no matter where she’s fucking hiding. And Sticks, I wouldn’t keep playing around with him.”

“If I find out he took that money and didn’t pay the girl, Daisy or whatever her name is, I’ll bury him with a stick in his
ass. Fucking stupid-ass kid, what the fuck is this guy thinking?”

“I don’t know what these guys out here today even got going through their minds. But I’ll find you a stick and have it on
hold, ’cause something’s telling me you gonna need it,” Dizzy said, hoping some comedy would ease the tension. He had known
Simon for a long time, and in his heart of hearts he knew that if Simon found out this guy Sticks was up to something, he
would bury him, stick in his ass and all.

Sticks pulled out of the parking lot and replayed his conversation with Simon Shuller in his head. It didn’t sound like anything
was a problem. Simon took the postponement news and moved on to another matter. That eased Sticks’s mind automatically. But
deep down inside, he knew Daisy had to be found, and that was his number-one priority. She really was the straw that broke
the camel’s back with her disappearance.
She knew we had court. She knew we was supposed to be there. Why the fuck did I give this bitch my old car? Fuck, something
told me not to.
He pulled up on the block, but didn’t see the Seville.
Man, where is this chick done disappeared to?

“Fuck!” Sticks commented as he hopped out of his car and quickly made his way up to Daisy’s building. He began ringing her
bell and banging on the front door, so loud that Lester heard the commotion inside Ms. Selda’s apartment on the third floor.

“Hey, hey, what’s all the noise about?” said Lester, after making his way down the stairs, as he opened the door to the building
of the apartment row home.

“I’m looking for Daisy.”

“Daisy’s gone; she don’t live here no more,” said Lester trying to slam the door on the thug standing before him.

“Gone, where she go?” questioned Sticks, quickly using his foot to prevent the door from slamming. He pushed the door back
hard and busted into the vestibule of the row home. “Who the fuck is you?” he asked, lifting Lester up off the ground and
onto the wall. “How the fuck you know she gone?” he questioned, choking Lester half to death.

“I’m… I’m… the landlord. I just know she… gone, that’s all.”

“Where she go?” asked Sticks.

“I don’t know,” said Lester, and it was at that moment that Lester decided to take a stand. He was tired of the young thugs
running wild in his neighborhood. Young men and boys, as young as twelve years old, trying to be gangsters and thugs, carrying
guns, intimidating the community, and running around believing that they was so bad and determined to run something. Lester
wasn’t having it; you wasn’t running Lester Giles.

“Let’s see if this can help you remember,” said Sticks, pulling out a gun and pointing the barrel at Lester’s forehead, his
finger on the trigger.

“You think that gun makes you a man, son?” Lester asked him, coming from the old school and hoping he could talk some sense
into the young man standing before him.

“Nigga, shut the fuck up, don’t ask me no fucking questions.” Quickly, he took the tip of the gun and whacked Lester in the
head. Lester took the blow, falling back against the wall and down to the floor as blood began to run down the side of his
face. He held his hands over his head and face, fearing that Sticks would hit him again. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you in
this motherfucker. Get the fuck up the stairs and let me in this bitch’s apartment,” Sticks ordered, grabbing Lester and forcing
him up the staircase.

“Yo, old man, you need to start talking, for real. I know she left a forwarding address with you, I know she told you something.
She wouldn’t have just left.”

Lester tried to lie. “She didn’t tell me nothing. She just left, that’s why all her furniture is still here.”

The apartment had been cleaned. Sticks began searching, looking for a forwarding address. But Daisy had been pretty clean
about leaving, knowing that she was leaving her apartment to Lester. All her personal stuff she had taken with her, and everything
else, she had bagged up and left behind for trash.

“Listen, I know you know something. You can tell, it’s all over your face. I know she told you something.” Sticks began to
roughhouse Lester, pointing the gun at his head, threatening to pull the trigger, punching him with uppercuts and jabs. Because
the man was old, Sticks had the advantage.

“You know what, I’m not even gonna play with you no more. I tell you what, if you don’t tell me something, I’m going to kill
you right here and now, motherfucker, so this is your last fucking chance,” said Sticks as he spun around, getting madder
and madder at Lester. “Do you hear me?” Sticks screamed at him. “This is it, tell me where she is before the count of three.”

He put his gun to the old man’s head and counted one. Sweat was pouring down the sides of Lester Giles’s face and he saw his
life flash before his eyes. He heard Sticks count two. He knew he was going to die on three.

“Wait, I know where she’s at. She’s down in Tennessee, down in Nashville somewhere where her peoples live at. She’s got an
aunt, I don’t remember her name. That’s where she told me she was going,” he said, shaking his head yes, for certainty.

“Why the fuck didn’t you just say that shit? Why put me through all this shit? Stupid fucking old-ass man,” said Sticks as
he lifted his foot and pounded it down on Lester, kicking his side, cracking his rib.

“Aaarrr, help me, Jesus. Please, mister, please stop,” said Lester, unable to take any more pain. “I’ve told you all I know,”
he said before collapsing.

“You should’ve told me sooner,” Sticks said as he raised his gun and brought it down on Lester Giles’s head again, leaving
Lester Giles lying on the floor.

Sticks kicked him again and turned and walked away, not realizing that the beating he had given the man had caused a stroke.
Lester Giles lay on the floor struggling for his last breath. Blood gushed throughout his brain cavity. He was already paralyzed
by the time Sticks drove down the street and turned the corner, and in twenty-two more minutes he would die lying on the floor
of Daisy’s apartment.

A
gent Vivian Lang and Agent Nathan Chambers were ready to speak to Daisy Mae Fothergill. They had pulled her last known mailing
address and checked every bureau database, collecting a profile on her. They had everything from a prior arrest for soliciting
a police officer to cashing her mother’s Social Security checks after her mother was dead. Yes, they had her entire history.
It all popped up on the screen in black and green. Vivian could see where she even had a subpoena issued in a state court
proceeding. And Agent Vivian Lang had every intention of following up on that lead and seeing where it led her.

Ms. Selda from the third floor was on her way downstairs just in the nick of time. Just as Agent Lang was about to ring the
door bell, the door flew wide open.

“Excuse me,” she said, recognizing them as the police, undercover officers like those on her show,
Law and Order
.
Mmm, I wonder who’s in trouble, probably that girl on the second floor, she looks like a bunch of trouble. Maybe it’s that
damn Lester, they could take him on to jail right now for me before rent comes due next month.

Nathan walked in first, looking up the stairs. He took his gun out of his holster on the side of his suit jacket as Agent
Lang did the same. She carefully closed the door behind her, making sure it locked. They went up the stairs and knocked at
Daisy’s apartment door. No answer. Agent Chambers twisted the knob, and the door opened with a creaking sound as Vivian Lang
pushed it as far open as it would go.

Agent Chambers, gun in hand, moved silently to the right covering the dark and unknown territory as he moved into the apartment
and down the hallway toward the bedrooms, keeping his back against the wall, his eyes piercing the empty apartment. Vivian
Lang made her way to the right of the door and peeked into the kitchen. It was clean. She moved to the end of the wall and
peeked around the corner.

“Chambers, I got a body,” Lang called out, surveying the room and confirming that it was clean. Chambers finished his search
of the bedroom, turned around, and followed his partner’s voice into the living room.

“Okay, I am so not here right now. Don’t touch it!” he ordered with stern conviction.

“How long you think he’s been here?” she asked, knowing that Chambers was forensics’ key guy.

“Looks like days. Come on, get away from it. All you need is a fiber or a hair to fall on this guy.”

“Damn, we’ll make an anonymous 911 call.”

“Yeah, sounds great,” he said, wiping the doorknob with a handerkerchief. “Don’t touch anything. Fuck, I hate finding dead
people.”

“Boo, Chambers,” she said, tickling his side. She pulled out a pair of gloves from inside her skirt suit jacket, put them
on, and begin sifting through the apartment, her gun still in hand and ready.

“There’s nothing here. She’s gone. You think she’s using an alias?”

“Why would we be so fortunate?”

“Hey, we’ve seen stranger, come on, let’s get out of here before someone else sees us. Fuck, man, I see fucking Grayson from
Internal Affairs. I fucking see him with a big light and you know what, he’s flashing it inside my asshole.”

“Oh, Chambers, give it a rest, will you,” Vivian spat. “Where is your heart, man?” she asked, as she fumbled through a kitchen
drawer. “Look, Aunt Tildie’s phone number. What good, loving niece wouldn’t keep in some kind of touch with Aunt Tildie,”
said Vivian, waving a piece of paper. “Isn’t six, one, five Tennessee?”

“Fuck me! Oh, geez, why do I have to get stuck with the partner from ‘I’m-just-looking-land, with a dead man on the floor.’
I’m bent the fuck over. See me now. I see it, I see it now, all for Aunt Tildie’s phone number.”

“Hey, it beats a blank, this could be the lead we need to catch this girl. Stop whining, come on, let’s go.”

“No, from now on we follow the rules.”

“What fun would that be?”

The next morning the police followed up on an anonymous tip, called through the 911 line, along with a missing persons report
the police finally let Lester’s wife, Euretha Giles, put on record.

“So, where do you think she is?” asked Merva, biting into a hot dog, standing outside Daisy Mae Fothergill’s building as the
body of Lester Giles was being brought out on a stretcher.

“I don’t know, but wherever she is, she’s got some pretty ugly people looking for her.”

“Yeah, pretty ugly isn’t the word. Everybody around this girl is coming up dead. Calvin Stringer, her boss, now her landlord,
I mean come on, that poor girl and her son, and for what? And you were so nice to her, caught up in cleavage I guess,” she
said, changing her tone, trying to be funny.

“Um, Merva, for the record I was not caught up in cleavage and I, unlike you, was giving her the benefit of the doubt. I still
am. You can’t blame these deaths on her. She didn’t pull the trigger, or beat anyone to death. She’s running, and she’s scared.”

“She’s a prostitute, a stripper, she’ll do anything for money, anything. Do you think she cares about these people? Why are
you constantly passing out validity to these people?”

“What’s these people, Merva? The less fortunate, to some degree, look at the way of life, I mean, come on.”

“No, you’re right, so everyone gets a pass for crime then? Huh, because they’re impoverished, or just financially inept, or
life’s been so hard, they can’t get right so they can just commit crime in your book.”

“Come on, Bernard Guess is the one on trial, not Daisy. So, if I was nice, if I’m understanding, then so be it. I don’t think
it’s her fault and she should be held accountable. Now, if she testifies against state, I will be the first to put the cuffs
on her and throw her in a cell and make sure she don’t see the fucking sun shine. But, right now, she’s not our problem.”

“She’s not the first. What about the black kid, what was his name, robbing corner stores with a BB gun.”

“Maxwell Brittingham,” answered Tommy, remembering the black kid he had let go two times for trying to rob a corner store
with a BB gun.

“Exactly, and you remember their names, go figure!” she said, scratching her head, looking at him, trying to figure his psyche
and having yet to come close. “Have you ever thought that there’s something off with these people? And this girl; trouble.
Jesus, Tommy, if there’s one more death surrounding this scrawny alley cat, I’m going to scream.”

“Listen, Merva, they’ve named her as a witness, not us. I tried and I offered state assistance, police protection, the whole
nine. She ran, point-blank. So, if she does end up dead, that’s not our fault.”