Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (37 page)

Boxer hesitated. This is what he'd wanted when he came here, this is how he'd planned this scenario last night, but now he wasn't so sure. “Not legally . . .”

“But as a friend?”

“I'd be on shaky ground, nosing around in what could be a police matter,” I'm also on shaky ground not revealing that I've got a client who's paying me to do this, he thought, and didn't feel the slightest remorse.

“What would make it a police matter?”

“If she's missing. And if some harm had come to her.” Boxer tried to soften the words, but it didn't work. All the fear that Peggy had been holding bubbled up to the surface.

“You've got to do something, Boxer! Please!”

“You have her keys? Apartment keys and car keys?”

She ran from the room and was back in a flash with a key ring. “But her car's not here. I thought she drove wherever . . .”

“We need to check her apartment. You need to let me in, just in case . . . so I can't be accused of breaking in.”

They walked down the hallway and rode the elevator down three floors in total silence. Peggy used two keys to open the door. The apartment was neat and orderly, as sterile as Peggy's was plush, and it didn't feel to Boxer like the place from which a pretty young woman had embarked on a lark. “Follow me and don't touch anything,” he said, as he walked around the living room into the dining room, into the kitchen, down the
hallway, into the office, and finally into the bedroom. Nothing looked out of place. Boxer wanted to do a full search, but not with Peggy Brown watching him. “Does anything look out of place to you?”

She shook her head. “Can I look in the closet?”

Boxer stuck his hand in his jacket pocket and opened the door. Neat to the point of obsession, he thought, but Peggy seemed to be looking for something. “What?”

“I don't—I'm not sure. It doesn't feel right.”

Boxer trusted feelings like that. He'd solved more than one crime with no more to go on than the feeling that something wasn't right. “Any place else you want to look?”

“The refrigerator,” she said, halfway to the kitchen. She used her shirt-tail to open the door. The smell of sour milk and rotting vegetables wafted out. Peggy backed up, her hands to her face, and she wasn't hiding from the stink. “She'd never have left food to rot, because she'd never had wanted to come home to this. Something's wrong, isn't it?”

“When, exactly, did you last see Linda?”

“Let me check my calendar. I can tell you.”

Back upstairs, she went into the kitchen. Boxer heard her fill the teakettle, “Black or green?” she called out.

“Black,” he answered. It was the one thing they had in common—a love of tea. That and AA.

When she returned, she carried a teak tray with a Chinese teapot, two mugs, a plate of ginger snaps, cream, and sugar. The kitchen wall calendar was tucked under her arm. She put the tray on the table, and they fixed their tea. Then she gave him the calendar. “Wednesday the 13th. We saw a movie.”

He looked at the calendar square.
Movie, U, Linda
was written in red, “What's ‘U' mean?”

“U Buffalo. They show old movies on Wednesday nights. You know Linda and old things. She likes to call it ‘classic,' but a lot of it's just old. This was a classic, though:
The Landlord . . .
”

“Diana Sands and Beau Bridges! That's a great movie!”

“I'd never seen it, but you're right, it's something special.”

“And when did you get the E-mail about the vacation?”

“When I got home from work Friday night. I was off Wednesday and Thursday and worked 3-to-11 Friday. I usually wind down from the night-shift playing at the computer. When I saw her E-mail, I picked up the phone and called her right away, but she was . . .”

Boxer was on his feet. “Shit!”

“What?”

“The phone. The answering machine. Where does it live, in her office?”

Peggy nodded, and Boxer picked up the phone. “What's her number?” Peggy told him and he pushed the numbers. After one ring, Linda's voice answered:
“Sorry I missed your call, but please leave a message, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” Boxer said into the phone, and hung up. Then he looked at his watch. Peggy wrote the time on the calendar in the square for Wednesday the 27th, the current day and date. “You saw the movie Wednesday the 13th and got the E-mail Friday the 15th. Any contact on Thursday?”

Peggy's brow wrinkled in thought. “I went to my niece's school play that night, and I remember being a bit surprised that Linda's car wasn't in the garage when I got back. It was after 11, which is late for her.”

“Did you delete the E-mail?”

Peggy nodded yes, Boxer put a whole ginger snap into his mouth, thinking he'd stop and get a box on the way home. He really liked them. Then he drained his cup and stood up. “Thank you for your time, Peggy, and for the tea.”

“You think something's wrong, don't you?”

“You think something's wrong, and that's enough for me.”

“Can you do something?”

“I need to spend some time in Linda's apartment, preferably during the day when people are gone. I need to listen to the answering machine. I need to find her car. And I need to talk to whoever else she's close to.”

Peggy hesitated. “There's a guy she's been seeing, from Rochester . . .”

“The one who called you looking for her?”

“He's the only person that I know of that Linda would call, and if she didn't call either of us . . .”

“What's his name, Peggy? How do I find him?”

“Sam Bennett. He teaches in the business school at Rochester.”

Boxer got up the next morning going to Rochester. Subconsciously he'd been avoiding this trip; Sharon and his almost eighteen-year-old son were there. Rochester was her hometown. He let the sadness come. He shouldn't have married anybody back then, especially sweet, gentle Sharon. But that's what attracted him, what he thought would save him. Then their baby, Sherry, died. After a few years they tried again and had a boy, and Boxer couldn't shake the feeling that he was destined to grow up just to go to war. His obsession frightened Sharon; then it embittered her. And now the boy was almost eighteen, and that fool president rattling sabers. “OK, enough of that.”

He parked illegally, hoping his FOP emblem would have meaning to the campus cops, and limped into the Business Administration building. The pain journeyed slowly and constantly between his right hip joint and ankle: cold, damp weather and sitting for a couple of hours in the truck had done their work. He groaned when the building directory put Bennett on the third floor. A female academic about his age noticed his limp and put him on the faculty elevator.

Bennett's door was open; it was his office hours. He was a very average man of about forty, distinguished by rimless eyeglasses, a Caesar haircut, and a goatee streaked with gray. He was halfway through grading a stack of papers. Boxer knocked and had his ID in his hand when entered the office.

“My name is Charles Gordon, sir. I'm a friend of Peggy Brown and Linda Schuster . . .”

“What's happened?!”

“Peggy's concerned that Linda hasn't been in touch, and she asked me, as a friend, to . . .”

“That bastard!”

“May I close the door, sir?”

Bennett looked at his watch and shook his head, so Boxer walked close to the desk and almost whispered, “Do you know something?”

“She was terrified of him.” Boxer must have reacted, because Bennett said, “I can tell by your age . . . Vietnam?” And when Boxer nodded, he
said, “He used to tell her the things he did to women and children over there.”

Boxer sped back to Buffalo and directly to the long-term parking lot at the airport. He drove every aisle of every level looking for Linda's car. Then he went to her apartment. He used the garage code Peggy had given him, parked in a visitor space, and rode up, praying that Linda had aspirin—preferably something stronger. He'd take his chances with a tampering with evidence charge; and he was feeling a lot like this was, or would be, a criminal case.

He took two Percodan with tap water cupped in his hand, pulled on latex gloves, and went to work, starting with the answering machine. There were thirty messages; the tape had run out two messages after his countdown the previous night. Three messages were from her parents; four each from County General and Downtown Leasing; one each from him and Peggy; three from Stan Bennett; five from friends checking on lunch or dinner dates. The rest were from Kenny. He wrote down the time, date, and duration of each call, then turned his attention to the computer. It was off. He turned it on, easily bypassed the setup and went directly to her E-mail. The last sent message was Friday the 15th, and there were five of them: to Peggy, Sam Bennett, her parents, and both jobs. He checked the inbox: six messages from Kenny. Boxer shut off the computer and went to the bedroom. He checked the drawers and the closets; useless, but he did it anyway. He didn't know what she owned, so he wouldn't know what was missing, but he was certain that a police investigation would reveal missing clothes and luggage. He rode the elevator down to the lobby and with the mailbox key he'd gotten from Peggy, he opened Linda's box. The mail spilled out onto the floor. Boxer sifted through it, found three letters from Kenny, and stuffed the mail back into the box.

“You motherfucker.” He had just proven for Kenny Schuster that all signs pointed to Linda being on vacation and that he, Kenny, had been looking for her for almost two weeks. There would be no Kenny fingerprints on the computer even though Boxer was certain that Kenny had
typed the E-mails explaining Linda's hasty departure. “You motherfucker.”

Boxer went home and prepared a statement for Kenny—four days' worth of work and expenses—and wrote a check for the balance of the money Kenny had given him. Then he paged him and waited for a call-back, giving up after an hour and making himself some dinner. He was eating when the door buzzer sounded, and he knew who it was. He punched the entry code, opened the door, and waited.

“Hey Boxer Boy!” Kenny blew into the room, snowflakes sticking like dandruff to his jacket. “Got your page and decided to answer in person. You got good news for me?”

“If no news is good news. Linda seems to be a ghost. Told everybody she was going on vacation, then disappeared. No trace of her car, no use of credit cards.” He went to his office and came back quickly with an envelope for Kenny. “Here's my report and your refund.”

Kenny scanned the pages, folded them, and stuffed them into his pocket, then ripped up the
CHARLES GORDON INVESTIGATIONS
check. “You earned the money. This is good work. Boxer Boy, thorough, just like you.” He looked at his watch. “Gotta go.” And he was gone. Boxer looked at the check pieces on the floor and saw Linda, saw Sharon, saw his dead baby daughter, Sherry. “There's more than one way . . .”

A week later, he rang Peggy Brown's doorbell at the appointed hour. She opened the door so fast she had to have been waiting. “Did you see the news?!”

“No, I just left the gym. Why?”

She pulled him in, waited while he removed his snow-caked boots and put them on the mat, took his coat to hang in the bathroom, then pulled him into the den, where the TV was on. “The story is over, but they arrested Kenny for dealing drugs! Called him a kingpin! He had five million dollars in cash and some huge amount of kilos of cocaine and heroin, all stashed in a cabin in the woods, out there near your place!”

Boxer sat down, eyes on the TV screen. “Linda told me once she thought he was into something like that.”

“And you wouldn't do anything about it?”

He shook his head. “I couldn't, not the way she wanted me to.”

Peggy sighed. “Yeah, I know. You said it felt underhanded, sneaky.” She shook her head. “She never understood why you were friends with Kenny. She said you were principled and decent . . .”

“What is it, Peggy?”

“I filed the missing person report last week like you said, and talked her parents into doing the same thing—they found her car today.” Tears streamed down Peggy's face. Boxer fished for a handkerchief for her. “In a field in St. Catherines. There was blood in it.” She wept, and Boxer held her.

“I'm sorry,” he said.
So sorry, Linda. So sorry, Sharon. So sorry, Sherry.

Tempest was working at a restaurant on Broad Street down in the Financial District. When he got off at 2
A
.
M
. I was waiting outside the front door to greet him.

“What are you doin' here?” Tempest asked me.

“I wanted to continue our talk. “We were going so well I wanted to go on.”

“Man, I just don't get it. Here it seems to me that you don't understand a word I'm sayin', and there you are poppin' up in the middle'a night wantin' to hear some more.”

“You agreed that you have sinned,” I said. “That the reason you were condemned in heaven is because the police ended your life too soon.”

Tempest stopped walking and turned to me.

“No,” he said. “Heaven misjudged me, and the cops murdered me on behalf of the state. Everybody sins, even you when you wear a body. Man is a sinner but that don't make him bad.”

Tempest turned on his heel and walked at a fast clip. I kept up with him, though, happy that I had gotten under his thick skin.

“But you must admit,” I said, “the police aren't on trial here.”

“The police ain't never on trial,” Tempest protested. “And if they are, then the judge and jury are just happy to believe whatever they say. A cop on the witness stand is like you angels up in heaven, nobody questions your words or deeds neither. But me, on the other hand, I couldn't do right if I tried. Nobody believes me. I'm just a lie waiting to happen. After thirty-four years of bein' made into a lie, they shot me down and sent me to you, and you then said I should enter into hell.”

“That's not what happened,” I said. “You're twisting the events to make it seem like the whole world is in a conspiracy against you.”

“And ain't it?” Tempest asked. “Ain't it so? The police ready to shoot me. The courts want me in jail, I'm makin' just enough to keep off the landlord, but food and clothes takin' turns at my wallet. I'm an American, at least I was before I died; a citizen of the greatest, most powerful country in the history of the world. A citizen, mind you, not no slave or visitor or foreigner to this shore. My people been here longer than most, way back over four hundred years. And we built without salary, and we died without our right names. We are part of the stone and blood of this nation. How can it be that we strugglin' like this? Livin' with drugs and prejudice, shot down, dragged down, sat on, and lied to. If it ain't conspiracy, then I don't know what is.”

“Nobody planned it this way, Tempest,” I argued. “You must admit that.”

“Who needs a plan when you shoot us like fish in a barrel? Who needs a blueprint when we don't have a choice where to live? Them cops didn't need to lay in wait for me. They loose and armed in my neighborhood seven twenty-four.”

“So your excuse is race,” I said. “That and nothing more.”

“It's not just race, angel. No, it ain't that only. There's brown skins and yellow skins and white ones, too, that share my fate. It's poor men and angry ones, fatherless and motherless and homeless ones, too. No, it's not just race but still, a black man got a anchor 'round his neck and bull's-eye on his back. Other people's got problems, too, but excuse me if I suffer alone.”

“Many, many people suffer.” I countered. “Many climb out of the
ghetto and other grim circumstances. Thousands from your own generation have been faced with odds greater than you've faced, and they've accounted themselves nobly.”

Again Tempest stopped walking. This time he looked angry enough to strike me.

“When I was a boy, there was a nut in my high school,” he said in an exceptionally calm tone. “He was a genius, but he was crazy. Liked to play with fire and get stoned. One day in science class he brought in a cardboard box with wires stickin' out all over the place. It was his project, he told the teacher, a time bomb.”

“I don't believe it,” I said.

“That a black kid would make a time bomb? Or that he'd lie and say that he did?”

“That you were ever in science class. Don't forget I am your accounting angel. I know everything about you.”

“Well, you're right about the classroom. I wasn't in there. But I was at school that day. I heard the story like everybody else.”

“Then go on,” I said.

“This kid, Vincent Moldin, had the box up front. He had never turned in homework or finished a quiz or test, so the teacher thought it was just some retarded joke. Then Vincent said, ‘How do you grade a bomb's inside if it blows up to prove it's a bomb?' The teacher got mad and told Vincent to sit down. Then Vincent got mad and grabbed his box. The heck if it wasn't a bomb and it blew up right there. Set the natural gas for the Bunsen burners on fire. Two kids burned to death right in their chairs. A lotta others were scarred and maimed.” Tempest began walking again, his thought lost in that long-ago explosion.

“What does Vincent Moldin have to do with you blaming racism for your sins?” I asked.

“Not Vincent Moldin but Harold Gee.”

“I thought that it was Vincent Moldin who made the bomb?”

“It was. But Harold was sitting there right in front of him, right in that first row. Vincent was blinded, lost his left hand. Almost every child in that room had a busted eardrum and some kinda concussion and wound. But
Harold came out of it with nary a scratch. When that bomb blowed up, the force missed Harry. He picked up and ran from the room.”

Tempest stopped there, shaking his head in sorrow at the pain of his classmates.

“So?” I asked. “What does that story mean?”

“Don't you get it?”

“No.”

“You walkin' there next to me in the middle'a the night after I done worked fourteen hours awashin' dishes for change. You askin' me why I ain't like the few that crawled out from the slime, but you won't even hear what I got to say.”

“I don't understand you.”

“What did Harold do when he found himself whole after the blowup?”

“He ran, you said.”

“That's right. He didn't stop to face the fire or drag his friends from the room. He didn't call for the principal or look for Vincent's hand. If he'da done that he would have been caught in the aftershock of the gas that ignited from the flames the bomb made.”

“You can't compare running from an explosion with a man or woman educating themselves and rising from poverty,” I said.

“I can and do,” Tempest replied. “To begin with, no one educates himself. Anyone that says that they did is either stupid or a liar. How can you learn without a book? How can you want to learn without food in your stomach and a mother's love? How can you know you right if every time you say somethin' somebody hits and says to shut up? I don't blame Harold for runnin', but I don't call him a hero for it neither. He was lucky and he was quick. That's all you can ask for in the battlefield of black America. And if you get away, more power to ya. But please don't tell me I should follow your lucky feet.”

“You pervert the truth, my friend,” I said. “Many people stay. They work in the community, they help the less fortunate.”

“If they stay, then they feel the aftershock; you should bet your feathers on that.”

We had reached the subway station. It was desolate at Bowling Green. The wary clerk in the token booth watched us closely as we went to wait for the train.

“You must admit it, Tempest,” I said. “Some people have made a life for themselves without resorting to sin.”

“Have you ever passed such a person into heaven? A man who never sinned?”

“No. But ones whose sins were negligible, ones whose virtues outweighed their sins a thousand to one.”

“Many poor fellahs like that?”

“As many as the rich.”

“I don't believe it.”

“But it's true,” I said.

“You got statistics on that?”

“No. No, but I know human nature.”

“If you knew human nature, you wouldn't be here tryin' to convince me of my sins. I'm sayin' that I believe that a poor man has to resort to sin a lot quicker than a man who ain't poor. Just like a man scared for his life don't have time to waste when he's runnin' from a bomb.”

“We don't care about wealth in heaven.”

“Rich kids never do. How can you care about somethin' when you always had it? It's like skin. You don't value it unless half gets burned off in a explosion in science class.”

“Why are you so angry, Tempest?”

“Didn't I just tell you that I'm comin' off a fourteen-hour shift? I'm tired and I got to go to work tomorrow and they won't understand if I say I want a nap.”

“So you're going to bed?”

“With Bronwyn,” he said behind a wolfish grin.

“But you said you're upset.”

“That's what a good woman's for. She take her man's anger in both her hands and squeeze it till it go down.”

Tempest knew how to get to me, too. Every time I thought of Bronywn and him I got angry enough to fight.

“You got to blow off steam, angel,” Tempest said. “Try to sometime. You might see sin in a whole new light.”

The number four train pulled up just then. The doors opened and Tempest stepped inside.

“Ain't you comin'?” he asked.

“I want to think about what we've said tonight.”

He smiled and nodded. The door closed on his smile.

As the train bore him away, I wondered, not for the first time, if Tempest was a spy sent from below to test the resolve of heaven.