Get It Girls (34 page)

“So, you are doing this because you don’t want me to raise my daughter, Kenny?”

Kenny shrugged and answered, “Well, partly. Jessica, I been using you and your friends from the very beginning. I happened to have a problem with my building on 129th Street.” Kenny paused and smiled, “You might know it as the Castle of Greyskull. Since you told me all about you and your buddies in prison, and how you were so good at handling things, I simply put two and two together and decided to use you to my advantage and clean up my problem buildings in Harlem.”

Jessica couldn’t believe her ears. “So, why’d you have to kill Lynn? She wouldn’t have caused you any harm; she was just trying to get away because she was scared.”

Kenny chuckled and said, “Oh, she never tried to run away, I just needed something to get your full attention. So I tracked her down and killed her. You all were expendable to me, damaged goods. Do you really think I would want to marry a fucking convicted murderer?”

“If you didn’t want me Kenny, why did have a baby with me?”

Kenny grew irritated and cursed her. “You think I wanted to get you pregnant, Jessica? That shit was a mistake. I was going to kill you after you finished the job for me, but your stupid ass got arrested and had the baby in jail. But I’m glad you did have her, because I really do love her.”

“You’re not going to get away with this, Kenny. Everyone knows I’m with you up here.”

Kenny smiled again. “Women skier falls to her death off of a cliff. It took three days for officials to find her body, because she went skiing alone when the ski lodge was closed. It was the fifth such incident to happen this year.”

Jessica only stared at him and realized that was the reason he’d bought her the ski set in the first place—he’d been planning this for a while.

Kenny nodded and read her mind, “Oh, yes,” he began to cough, “I’ve been planning this for awhile.”

Kenny’s cough grew louder as he began to perspire through his shirt. He batted his eyes rapidly when his sudden cough began to grow uncontrollable. When he looked at his hands, they were speckled with blood. He looked up toward Jessica who was now smiling wickedly at him.

She spoke to him in French and said, “I overheard you tell your uncle over the phone that you had just put the poison in my drink just now. When you turned your back, guess what I did?” Jessica nodded her head and continued, “I switched my drink with yours.”

Kenny’s eyes grew wider, and when he saw his fate, he panicked and reached over the table and began choking the life out of Jessica with all the strength he had left. Jessica fought, but he was still too powerful as the air in her lungs began to diminish and the whites of her eyes began to burst bright red. She could no longer fight as her eyes began to fall to the back of her head. She felt life leaving her body when suddenly she gasped as air once again returned to her body.

The first thing Jessica saw when she opened her eyes was her friend Vonda, who had her cradled in her arms. The next thing she saw was Chubby brutally beating Kenny to a bloodied pulp.

“No, Chubby!” Jessica managed to scream. “He’s dying anyway, and I don’t want you to be blamed for it.”

Chubby looked down at Kenny as his chest heaved in and out as he spat on him.

“I never like your pretty ass anyway!”

**********

They told Chubby that he had to leave before they call the police because of his extensive record and it would not look good for any of them. Vonda stayed to provide Jessica with support. The local police arrived and took Jessica’s statement and collected the evidence. After they took Kenny’s body away, they took them both to the station to continue their investigation and ran both of their records. It didn’t look good for either of them at that point.

Suddenly, a lawyer appeared in the room where they were being kept and showed the detective his credentials. He announced that the two girls were his clients and were not answering any more questions. He waved for the girls to follow him and they were out of the room.

He handed his card to the lead detective and said, “Here’s my card, and if you want to contact my clients for anything else, you give me a call first.”

As they walked out of the sheriff’s office, the lawyer shook both their hands and said, “My name is Irwin Greenberg and I was hired by a man that only went by the name Mr. Chubby. He supposed to be your brother?”

Vonda raised her hand and said, “That’s my brother.”

“Oh, he said both you were his sisters, but, he is a good man. He came to my office about few hours ago and paid me two thousand dollars cash and said his sisters were in trouble and make it go away.”

Jessica quickly asked, “So we not going to be charged with anything?”

Mr. Greenberg stopped in place and said, “For what? Defending yourself against a suspected murderer?”

Jessica and Vonda were confused and Mr. Greenberg explained further. “They failed to inform you the deceased was under investigation for the murder of two of his former real estate partners who died under mysterious circumstances. They both were found to have potassium cyanide in their systems at the time of their death. There was a clause in their partnership that if any partner would happen to die, his share of the property would revert to the remaining owners, who happened to be Kenneth Duboise and Langston Duboise, who happens to be Kenneth’s uncle.”

Jessica quickly said, “I gave a bottle of the same kind of poison to the police.”

He shook his head, and said, “They already know you are innocent, they just don’t get too many actual murders in these parts, and I guess they wanted to play policeman for a change.” He gave them a smile and said, “You are free to go. Do you want me to give you a ride back to the cottage?”

They suddenly heard a honk and it was Chubby who was parked across the street in Vonda’s car. Mr. Greenberg simply waved to them and drove off.

When they arrived back at the cottage Jessica wanted to leave it immediately and began packing up her luggage. As she packed, she found Kenny’s wallet sitting above the fireplace mantle. She was going to throw it in the garbage but she decided against it.

After driving in silence on their way home, Vonda tapped Jessica on the shoulder and handed her Tiny’s letter to read. Vonda reached over and clicked on the side light so she could read it.

Dear Jessica and Vonda,

Y’all are in extreme danger. You been set up by Jessica’s boyfriend Kenny. I heard him speaking on what I think was a walkie-talkie while I was in the hospital. He thought I was unconscious, but I heard everything he said. He was talking to a man and told him that he set up everything and that they would clear out the building that night and was sure that some of you wouldn’t make it out the building alive. I knew that you were pregnant, Jessica, and I couldn’t allow you to chance it and be part of that so I dropped a dime on you and ratted you out to your P.O. I hope you ain’t too mad at me, but that was the only way I knew to keep you away from that shit. I’m going to the building now to watch my girl Vonda’s back, so nothing would happen to her either. I ain’t got long to live, but I’m going use what little time I have left for the people I love the most, so don’t feel sorry for me, just remember me forever just as I am.

Tiny

GET IT GIRLS

Jessica bit down her lip to prevent herself from crying, but she easily lost. She cried like she never cried before as Vonda hugged her and began to lose it too. Chubby could no longer focus on the highway because his eyes began to water as well, so he pulled off and got out the car to release his emotions so his sister and friend would not hear him. Vonda stepped out of the car, followed by Jessica, and walked over to Chubby. The three embraced in a circle as they cried together in the middle of nowhere while the snow rained down upon them.

T
hree weeks later, Jessica, Ms. Jones, Vonda and baby Silver were at the bus terminal in Times Square, eagerly waiting on a person they hadn’t seen in nearly two years. They watched the bus pull in and could barely contain themselves when he suddenly appeared smiling from ear to ear when he spotted them. It was Jessica’s brother Jordan, who’d been away in Minnesota in a long-term treatment facility for the past eighteen months.

If it wasn’t for his smile they would never had recognized him because he’d packed on so much weight. Ms. Jones was brought to tears as she embraced her son who she hadn’t hugged in four years since he first began using drugs. Vonda hugged him next and then introduced Jordan to his niece.

Jordan held his niece in his arms and kissed her gently as he told her, “I’m your uncle Jordan.”

Jordan finally looked up from Silver and spotted his big sister Jessica and handed Silver back to Vonda. He approached her slowly with his head down and he looked up when they were eye to eye. Jordan suddenly reached out and embraced his sister and cried as he whispered in her ear.

“Thank you, Jessica. Thank you for saving my life. I know why you did what you did, and I understand it now.”

Jessica nodded and embraced her baby brother as she cried happy tears, knowing God delivered him back to his family. They pulled away and wiped away their tears.

Jessica said, “Ok, let’s go home, Jordan.”

“Hold on,” said Jordan, “I still got to get my other bags from off the bus.”

They watched the driver unload the passengers’ luggage from the side of the bus and waited for him to retrieve them. When Jordan walked away it was then did Jessica notice for the first time that he now walked with a permanent limp.

She thought back to the night she’d last seen him in the abandoned building and told Shooter to shoot him four times in his legs but not to kill him. It was the only way she knew to get him off the streets long enough to be away from the drugs and enter a long term drug program. Jessica visited him in the hospital not long after while he recovered from his wounds and reminded him again that before he caused their mother another day of pain, she would do whatever it took to prevent that from happening. She gave him an ultimatum to either die a slow, miserable death from the drugs, or die a quick death from a bullet if he continued using. At that moment, Jordan looked his sister’s eyes and knew she was deadly serious and made the smart decision then and there to go away as long as it took to beat his addiction.

**********

Since Vonda received her Master’s in Sociology she went on to run not-for-profit crisis centers for women and girls who were either addicts, homeless, or battered women and provided treatment and temporary shelter until they found permanent residency or long term treatment. Her work hadn’t gone unnoticed as Vonda received millions of dollars of donations from people all over the world who recognized her unwavering dedication to humanity and her community. Not long after she opened her first crisis center, she was able to finally convince members of Tiny’s family to seek treatment, including her mother, and they been they was able to beat their addiction and all have been working at the center clean and sober ever since.

Needless to say, two years after Tiny’s mother sobriety, Vonda gave her a certified check for one hundred thousand dollars and told her it was a gift from her daughter. Vonda saved thousands of lives, but she was unable to save the ones closest to her—her other four brothers over the years lost their lives to the battle of addiction.

Chubby never missed a beat and remained the person he always was. Every Sunday over the years, including holidays, Vonda, Chubby, Tiny’s mother, Cleveland, Sweets and his family, and the entire Jones clan, would meet up at Ms. Jones house and eat Sunday dinner together and have a ball. They would ask Chubby, when he will become a changed person and settle down and have a family instead of being terror in those streets.

Chubby would normally rock back and forth, but this time he got honest and admitted, “I gave that life up long ago, but I am what I am, I love my family and I will do anything to protect you. If you get in trouble with the law, you’d call a lawyer, if you get sick, you’d go see a doctor, but if you get in trouble with these niggas out here, you call on Chubby. I’m a gangster and you can’t change a lion into a lamb.”

As much as they wanted to change him, they knew he was right.

Chubby broke the silence and smiled. “But don’t worry about me, because I’m a businessman now, I don’t bother nobody.” Chubby was in fact a businessman, and was actually well off and had many legitimate businesses, and secretly had enough money to last him a lifetime, but he chose to remain in the same neighborhood, same apartment, and same small room with his mother and walked the streets of Harlem like a king. But, what Chubby truly loved the most were his god-children, Silver Jones and Chancellor Haze.

It was no surprise when Jessica found out her mother and Cleveland had become an item, and soon after they sat her down and told her they were getting married. Jessica couldn’t have been happier for them. A few years after they got married, Cleveland and Ms. Jones moved to Florida and brought a nice house and have been living happily ever since.

It took Jessica nearly two years to finally find the strength to contact Kenny’s family in New Jersey. A year earlier, Jessica went through Kenny’s wallet that and found several contact numbers, one which had above it “Mother.” But she never had the nerve to reach out to her.

But the older Silver got, the more she realized how important it was to know the other side of her family, so one day, out of the blue, Jessica dialed the number and made arrangements to meet them at their home in New Jersey. The day she was supposed to meet them, Jessica did not know what she would be walking into because of Kenny’s connection with his uncle, plus the fact she’d never met any of his family members. So, she asked Chubby to come with her.

When Jessica pulled up in front of the large, Victorian-style home in a beautiful suburban neighborhood, she felt a little more at ease. She looked at Chubby. “I’m going to ring the doorbell first to see if everything is ok, and if anything wrong should happen, forget about me and just get my daughter out of here safely.”