Details at Ten (19 page)

“I mean I need to talk to you somewhere a little more private. It’s important. I want to talk to you before the police do.”

“Police?
They aren’t coming here.”

“I promise you they are.”

“For what?”

“That’s what you’re going to tell me.”

I was deliberately baiting him. I wanted to see if I could find a crack. Did he know something and was acting out the nut role? If he was acting, and Jason very well could be, how long could he dance around stage with the heat steadily being turned up. Turned up by me.

Jason stepped out onto the porch, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. He turned and pointed at a junky sofa that was smashed up against an outside wall. I sat down in the middle. Jason sat down on the edge.

I slid over. I wanted to be close enough to read his body language, voice change, anything and everything I could when I questioned him.

“What’s so important that you’ve gotta dis me on my own property?”

I do understand his anger, but I wasn’t afraid of it and, to be butt-naked honest, I didn’t give-a-care! Not right now. Butter was still missing and the first link I had to where she might be was sitting next to me on a couch full of fuzz balls.

“I got a call from a man a couple of nights ago asking for money. It was about four o’clock in the morning—”

“I don’t wanna hear about your love life.” Jason smirked.

“You’re not cute.”

“And you’re not making sense,” he said, getting up. “I’m gone …”

“Well.” I shrugged. “I’ll just wait until the police get here and let them ask the questions.”

Jason sat back down.

“As I was explaining, the caller said he would tell me where Butter was. I took a thousand dollars of my own hard-earned money and met him up under an el track—he damn near broke my arm taking the money—and almost got shot by police who tried to run him down, but he got away.”

“Cops can’t catch a brother.”

“But he never said where Butter was. He showed me a piece of her dress—but never said where she was.”

Jason looked at me with a stare that was empty of emotion, even of interest. What was the deal? Was Jason just drained of feeling because of the sudden loss of his sister? Was Jason completely ignorant of the entire situation? Or maybe he knew something and was holding back.

“Guess where the ransom call to my apartment came from?” I asked.

“I’m not in a guessing mood.”

“The call came from your house.”

“From here? Can’t be,” Jason said with a mix of indignation and disbelief. “From here?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a mistake. Gotta be a mistake,” Jason said, moving forward to lean on his elbows. “We don’t know nothing about where Butter is.”

“The police think you do.”

“Aww nah. See, I smell some shit. What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything; I’m trying to hear what you have to say.”

“I don’t need this bullshit! And my sister just got killed, too? You must be crazy or something.”

“Someone in this house knows something, Jason—the trace is no mistake. Who could have made the call?”

“Nobody was even here!”

“Baby? What’s wrong out there?” an elderly woman called out from inside the house.

“Nothing, Auntie Vee,” Jason said soothingly to her, but looking pretty darn hateful at me. “There’s somebody out here trying to sell me some junk is all.”

“Don’t buy it!” she warned.

“I’m not buying it!”

“Jason, you can help me figure it out or you can talk to the police. We both know how funky the police can get.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No, that’s info. The police have been getting a potful of bad publicity on this case. They want to close it and fast so they’ll come down extra hard on anyone they even think is connected to it.”

“No one was home, don’t you understand?” Jason put his head in his hands. “We all spent the night in the hospital. Everybody. We didn’t leave.”

“Jason, it looks funky, man.”

“Naw, you’re the funky one. This is a setup. Nobody was here—”

Jason stopped in mid-sentence, like a bad video on pause. His voice was lost in a hollow space deep in his chest and his face was stuck on blank.

“What is it, Jason?”

Jason’s face stayed stuck on blank.

“Listen,” I said, borrowing the tone I used when I talked to my nephew Satch, “it doesn’t make sense to protect anyone because it will only come out eventually. Your family’s hurt will only be doubled, but if you help me get Butter back safe then I’ll do all I can to help you and your family.”

I heard him breathe and saw him blink. Jason stood, leaned up against the screen door, and pinched the bridge of his nose with long fingers, chewed albino white around the nails. “He wouldn’t grab a little kid. He’s not that kind of guy.”

“He who? Who is he?” I stood up and jerked Jason’s hand down from his face.

“Just—just leave me alone, huh! I don’t need this,” Jason said, turning his face away from me.

“Like Butter’s family does? Like I do? There’s a little girl out there somewhere and no one seems to know where and I’m tired of this whole mess and I want it over with. How about you?”

“Yeah.”

“Not
yeah,
Jason, who?”

“Calvin Hughes.”

“Calvin Hughes? Who is Calvin Hughes?”

Jason spoke slowly, as if he had just awakened from a deep sleep. “He’s a neighbor. Calvin stayed in our house a couple of nights.”

“Why?”

“Big Cal was just watching things. Sometimes folks will hear that you’re gone and try to rip you off.”

“Was it your idea or his idea to stay at the house?”

“Auntie Vee thought it would be a good idea for a couple of nights to have Big Cal stay over. Our families have known each other for years. Been on the block together for ages. His cousin Karen was sitting out with Jackie and T-Bob when the drive-by went down.”

“Wait.” My mind was trying to put together a picture in my head. “Is Big Cal a tall guy around forty, gray at the temples?”

“Uh-huh.”

Calvin Hughes was the man I had interviewed at the drive-by. He was comforting his young cousin Karen at the scene. It’s funny how for a reporter people start to either blend together or they stay with you forever. There are days when I can’t remember the name of a city alderman not ten minutes after doing a sit-down interview on some political issue. Then there are days when I see something, a car smashed up and smoldering from a wreck, or a jet doing a loopdie-lu at the Air and Water Show, or a line at the Pacific Garden Mission on Christmas Eve and the image stays with me forever. Like now, I saw Calvin Hughes, and this second time around, details from our first meeting came to me.

I remember his close-cropped hair and the gray at the temples.

I remember the muscular arms, the grime of a working man beneath his fingernails.

I remember the anger from his eyes and the tenderness with which he stroked and consoled his crying cousin. I got all that as I listened to Jason fill in more details.

“Big Cal has a garage over on Forty-seventh but I can’t believe he’s mixed up in this Butter business.”

“Why?”

“He has always been one of the straight ones on the block-no gangbanging or nothing.”

“But what made Big Cal act like he had some sense and turn his back on gangbanging?”

“Football.”

“Pro?”

“College. He could have been pro. Big Cal would have gone pro for sure had he not busted his hip his second year in college. They yanked his scholarship but Big Cal was always good with his hands. He can fix anything. When Big Cal opened his garage he gave jobs to a couple of the guys in the neighborhood who are good mechanics, too. In the summer he lets the teenagers pump gas or the girls work the counter. Jackie and Karen both worked for him.”

“Where can I find Mr. Hughes?”

J
ason took me to the garage Calvin Hughes owned, Driven Auto Works. It was a blunt building, gangster leaning to the right. The reddish-orange brick needed a good cleaning. Next to the building was a lot filled with an assortment of parts: bumpers and tires, doors and windshields, headlights and rearview mirrors, even a row of mix-and-match oval bucket seats from the retro Volkswagen days.

There was also an old Camaro, valentine red, sitting propped up on double cinder blocks. I love the old seventies Camaro. It’s still the sexiest car I’ve ever seen. Every Negro in America and overseas looked good driving a red Camaro; it was the car where I got my first tongue kiss on a summer-breeze night. And I remember that Peaches said that she felt the kiss, too, way back home as she pouted in bed, grounded for having too much mouth.

There were two gas pumps out front, and through the window you could see a seating area, a counter, and two desks sitting behind the counter next to a row of file cabinets. Calvin Hughes was leaning over a young lady’s shoulder going over some papers. She looked like the girl he was comforting at the drive-by. Jason confirmed this fact with his greeting.

“Hey, Big Cal,” Jason said as we walked through the door. “Hey, Karen.”

Calvin smiled at him and his eyebrows went up when he saw me. Was it just surprise or fear? I wondered.

“Hello, Mr. Hughes. I’m Georgia Barnett, Channel 8. I interviewed you, the day of the drive-by.”

“Right,” Calvin said, meeting us at the counter and leaning over to shake my hand. Then he cuffed Jason around the neck. “Sorry about Jackie, man. Really. How’s the rest of the family?”

“Holding up, man—just barely holding up,” Jason said, and the sorrow of the situation started to come down on him. His body slumped over the counter and he dropped his eyes and all at once I felt very bad for him.

“Be strong, man,” Calvin said to Jason. “You’ve got to take the lead in the family and be strong.”

I exchanged glances with Karen, Calvin’s teenage cousin, who was almost a shooting victim in the drive-by earlier this week. She gave me a smile as genuine as a strand of fake pearls. I turned my attention back to Calvin and Jason. “Jason, do you want to tell Calvin why I’m here?”

Jason dropped his eyes and looked away. “Naw, you.”

Calvin looked from Jason to me and back again. “What’s up?”

“Thursday morning around four
A
.
M
. I got a call at my house from a man demanding money for information about Butter. I took a thousand dollars to the guy under the el tracks on Sixty-third but he got spooked, took some of the money, and got away. That call to my apartment came from Jason’s house.”

Reporters learn to watch people’s faces for reactions, to get a sense of what’s going on inside. Calvin’s brow wrinkled and his eyes softened and he looked at Jason. “Man, I know you’re not mixed up in something like that, huh?”

“Not me,” Jason said, and he looked Calvin straight in the eye.

Calvin shrugged at me. “What then? I don’t get it.”

“Jason and his family were at the hospital at the time the call was made. You, however, were at the house the night the call was made.”

“What?” Calvin said, rearing back. He made two fists, planted them on the counter, and leaned forward. “What are you trying to say, lady?”

“Just the truth,” I told him. “Now add this. I gave you my card with my home number on the back after I interviewed you at the drive-by scene. You had the number and access to the phone that the call was made from.”

“I don’t even know what I did with the card, probably threw it away. You think I would do something to hurt a little kid?” Calvin was leaning over the counter now pointing an angry finger in Jason’s face. “Jason, you ought to know better than this, man. Why would you bring some mess down on me like this?”

“Cal, I know that. It’s not me, it’s her!” Jason said, directing his anger at me.

Now they were both snorting in my direction. I stood my ground like a bullfighter, continuing to wave the facts at Calvin. “The call came from the Martins’ house. If Jason didn’t make the call, and you didn’t make the call, who did? Somebody is lying because one of you knows something.”

With my peripheral vision, I could see Karen nervously cutting her eyes down at the papers on the desk, then back up in our direction.

I got louder. “Do you both want to go to jail? The police are something like two seconds behind me on this one, but if you’ll just tell me what the deal is and help me find Butter, I’ll do what I can for you.”

Now Karen’s hands were shaking and the paper was making sharp rustling noises.

“Was there anyone else in the house with you?” I asked Calvin.

“Just me and my cousin so I know this is just some kind of crazy mix-up!” Karen dropped the papers she had been reading and began to cry. She cupped her hands to her face and the tears dripped out from a tiny gap near the edges of her wrists.

Calvin rushed over to Karen and tried to stand her up, but she was limp. “What’s wrong?”

I had an idea. I hadn’t thought of it until Karen began to get nervous. I comforted her, saying, “Calvin didn’t make the call, did he? Jason didn’t either. Karen, you found my card and gave it to someone. That someone made the call.”