Gone in a Flash (21 page)

‘Yeah? I got me a cousin who lives in Houston! I’ve been there a couple times. Rockin’ good town,’ she said. ‘What j’all want to drink?’

‘You ever heard of sweet tea?’ I asked her.

She reared her head back and laughed. ‘Honey, I was born and bred in the state of Maryland and I think we done invented sweet tea.’

‘No, now, I think that was Texas, but this is your place so I’ll let you have it. Gerald, you want sweet tea?’

Looking at the waitress, Gerald said, ‘Yes, ma’am, thank you.’

‘I’ll go get those teas while you two check out the menu. Oh, and today’s specials are on that board there,’ she said, pointing at a small blackboard set atop the counter where single patrons were eating.

She went away and I tried staring at the board. ‘Can you read that?’ I asked Gerald.

‘Not hardly,’ he said, squinting.

‘It’s chicken and dumplings or fried chicken and waffles, with peach cobbler for dessert,’ said a lady sitting a table over. ‘I had to get Martha to read it to me earlier. Can’t see that far no more.’

‘I’m telling ya,’ I said. ‘If I could have one thing back from my youth it would be my vision.’ I thought a moment, and added, ‘That might be a close second to high boobs.’

The lady laughed. ‘Ah, baby, I’d settle for an ass that didn’t go around the block!’

I laughed with her, but couldn’t help sneaking a peek at her behind. She was right.

‘Well, I want the chicken and dumplings,’ I told Gerald, and he replied, ‘I’m gonna try the chicken and waffles. That sounds good.’

And they both were. I tried some of his fried chicken and waffles and he tried some of my chicken and dumplings, and then we both had peach cobbler for desert.

When Martha the waitress brought us the check, I asked her, ‘You sure you don’t wanna leave here and move to Codderville with us? Open a little restaurant there and I’d be your first permanent customer.’

‘Oh, now, honey, I ain’t movin’ to no small town. I gotta be in the big city, ’cause I got the moves!’ she said, and did something with her arms and hips and pelvis that seemed to prove she wasn’t lying.

A
ll Mr Jones wanted was his twenty-five gees and his own bed. But that’s not what he got. He didn’t get his money, or his own bed. What he got was a shared room with two queen-sized beds – just like a hotel room, he thought – and Mr Brown.

‘Why we staying here? I really want to go home,’ Mr Jones said to Mr Brown.

‘Shut up,’ Mr Brown said, and began looking around the room.

‘What are you doing?’ Mr Jones asked, following Mr Brown.

‘Jesus! Will you sit down?’ Mr Brown snarled, shoving Mr Jones down on one of the beds.

Mr Jones bounced right back up. ‘Don’t you go shoving me!’ he said to Mr Brown, shoving
him
on the other bed.

Mr Brown bounced back up. The beds both had very good springs.

‘You don’t lay a finger on me, asshole! Never! You understand me?’ Mr Brown shouted, his index finger digging into Mr Jones’s chest.

In Mr Jones’s defense, he’d had a rough couple of days. And it was really just a reflex that made him grab that index finger and bend it backward until he heard it snap.

Mr Brown’s eyes grew wide; he grabbed his broken finger with his other hand, and sank to his knees. His mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, as he fell face first onto the lovely Oriental rug that covered the bedroom floor, out like a light. Mr Jones decided that Mr Brown actually had a very low pain threshold. Who’d have thought it?

Mr Jones, being basically a nice guy, pulled down the covers on the bed he designated as Mr Brown’s – closest to the door, in case anyone came in shooting – and picked up Mr Brown and laid him on the bed. He took off his shoes and socks, although he did regret taking off the socks, and tucked him in.

Then
he
, Mr Jones, began to peruse the room. He checked out the one window, as a possible escape route. It was nailed shut. Mr Jones wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like that. Not a bit. He had a Leatherman tool in his pocket, found a pry bar-type instrument, and proceeded to dig out the nails. Then he unlocked the window and attempted to raise it. With a little nudge from someone as large as Mr Jones, it began to come up, although it was sticking in places. Mr Jones had already taken note of the taper candles in cut-glass sticks on the dresser. He grabbed one and greased the inside frame of the window liberally with candle wax. He continued his work until the window was all the way up and would go up and down smoothly and without a sound. Then he shut it and went to the nearest bed, which he had designated as his own, and sat on it, wondering what Mr Big had in store for the rest of the day.

We left and headed the rest of the way to the police station. It was a rainbow collision the few blocks it took us to get to the police station. Whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and all assortment of Middle Easterners. Never seen so many foreign-looking people in my whole life.

I gotta say this D.C. police station wasn’t what I expected. The only thing I know about police stations is what I see on TV, and this surely didn’t look like that place on
NYPD Blue
, which is as close as this lady has ever been to a police station. I’ve had to bail E.J. out of jail a time or two, but I’ve always done that over the phone. This place in the country’s capital was not what I expected. It was modern. Well, modern when I was a young lady anyway. Very 1950s. Light wood and Formica, vinyl tile floors, and fluorescent lighting. It was very noisy and hectic. People in uniforms rushing around, some of them dragging handcuffed people with them, a lady sitting in a chair screaming for no apparent reason, two little children jumping up and down on visitors’ chairs.

‘Who should we ask for?’ Gerald asked me as we approached the window. ‘Missing persons or homicide?’

‘Let’s call it what we know it is,’ I said. ‘Homicide.’

When the man on crutches in front of us left the window, we stepped up.

‘We’d like to speak to someone in the homicide department,’ Gerald said.

The woman behind the window was looking at a computer screen, not at us, and said, still without looking, ‘Has someone been murdered?’ in a dead monotone.

‘Well, we think so,’ Gerald said.

‘No thinking about it!’ I interjected. ‘She’s dead all right.’

The woman looked up. ‘Well, which is it?’ she asked. ‘Real dead or just a little bit dead?’

‘A friend of ours is missing and we have reason to believe foul play is involved,’ Gerald said.

‘How long this friend be missing?’ the woman asked.

‘Two days,’ Gerald said.

‘Elevator’s over there. Take it to the third floor, see missing persons. Next!’

‘No, we want homicide—’ I started, but the lady interrupted me. ‘Then show up with a dead body. Next!’

I was muttering under my breath as Gerald took my arm and led me to the elevator. ‘We’ll see what they have to say,’ he said.

‘Hmph,’ I said.

There was another window when we got to the missing persons department and we told the lady there – who was about twelve and didn’t seem all that bright – about our problem. ‘Have a seat,’ she said. We did, and watched her. She didn’t get up to go tell somebody we were sitting there; she didn’t use the phone to tell somebody we were sitting there; all she appeared to be doing was texting on her cell phone. I tried to talk myself into believing she was texting somebody that we were sitting out there. I didn’t fall for it.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, another woman came to stand behind the girl at the window and actually looked at us. She said something to the girl, who glanced at us and blushed.

The other woman opened the door to the side of the window and said, ‘I’m so sorry you’ve been kept waiting,’ and came out to greet us. Me and Gerald stood up and we all shook hands. ‘I’m Melissa Vernon. I’m a missing persons detective. How can I help you, Mr and Mrs?’

‘Oh, no, ma’am,’ Gerald said quickly. Maybe a little too quickly. ‘This is Mrs Vera Pugh, and I’m her friend, Gerald Norris.’

‘OK, Mr Norris. Mrs Pugh, is it?’

I nodded.

‘Why don’t you come back to my desk and we’ll talk,’ Melissa Vernon said, and held open the door for us.

She led us through a bullpen of sorts. All the desks were facing one direction, to the right as you come in the door – nine of ’em, three to a row, about five of ’em occupied at that moment. At the back of the room was a desk sitting all alone, turned toward the others. This was the one she led us to. There were two chairs flanking this desk – I noticed the others only had one chair each.

She was a pretty woman in her late forties, early fifties, maybe, about twenty to thirty pounds overweight, with graying blonde hair, amber-colored eyes, a strong chin, and a crooked overbite. She was wearing those high-top boy’s tennis shoes with a nice polyester pantsuit in a muted lavender.

We got settled, denied the offer of refreshments, and then finally got down to business.

Graham burst into Megan’s room. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ he yelled at her.

‘Don’t you come barging in here screaming at me! What are you talking about?’

‘Telling those twins our family business!’ Graham shouted.

Megan’s shoulders fell. She understood now that she’d done a bad thing, but it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she shouldn’t tell the twins. She told them everything. ‘Sorry,’ she said, then stuck her nose back into her iPad.

Graham slapped the iPad out of her hand. ‘Sorry’s not gonna cut it!’ he said, his words soft and kind of scary.

He’d left the door open and Alicia and Bess rushed in.

‘Graham, please don’t!’ Alicia said, grabbing his arm. ‘It just happened. I know she didn’t mean any harm by it.’

‘Ha!’ he said, staring daggers at his sister. ‘Don’t bet on it. She’s not stupid, but she is mean.’

Megan burst into tears, which made Bess run to the bed and put her arms around her. ‘Graham! You leave her alone!’ she shouted at her brother.

‘I’m not mean!’ Megan wailed. ‘And I am too stupid!’ She hid her face in Bess’s hair.

‘Graham!’ Alicia said, tears starting up. ‘Don’t do this! I won’t come between you and your sisters! I won’t! I swear I’ll leave!’ And she burst into tears, and with Bess already crying because of Megan, that meant Graham was standing in front of a bed full of crying women.

‘My God, boy, what did you do?’ said Willis from the doorway.

Graham turned to his father with wide, fearful eyes. ‘Not enough to cause this,’ he half-whispered.

‘I just hope you didn’t break them.’

‘Dad!’

‘Girls!’ Willis said upon entering Megan’s room. ‘What’s going on?’

Megan, between sobs, said, ‘Graham hates me! And I deserve it!’

‘No you don’t!’ Alicia, also between sobs, said. ‘You couldn’t help it!’

‘Yes, she could,’ Bess said, drying her eyes.

‘Bess!’ Alicia wailed, and Megan began to cry harder.

Their dad asked, ‘OK, Bess, what’s going on?’

She stood up and headed for the door. ‘It’s not for me to tell, Dad. This is between the three of them. I’m outta here.’ She went down the hall to her room, and they could hear her door slam shut.

‘OK, Graham,’ Willis said. ‘What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do jack-shit, Dad!’

‘Obviously you did something! We have two crying women here.’

Megan stood up, almost knocking over Alicia. ‘He didn’t do any-thing, Dad,’ she said, still sobbing, ‘I … I did! I … did a terr … ible thing, Daddy,’ she said, and fell into her father’s arms.

Looking at Graham, Willis said, ‘Call your mother up here. Now,’ as he patted Megan’s back and then said, ‘There, there,’ a lot.

It hadn’t gone all that well with the missing persons lady, Melissa Vernon. She’d taken down the information all right, but I felt like she just thought we were a couple of senile old coots who, if they ever actually had a friend named Rachael Donley, had simply misplaced her. We left the police station, both of us depressed because we knew we’d get no help from them.

It was getting on toward late afternoon, but the sun was still out and it was warmish, so we found a little park on the way to the metro, and decided to rest our feet when, really, I felt we were resting our souls.

‘Well, that was disappointing,’ I said.

‘She did seem to be a bit patronizing, didn’t she?’ Gerald said.

‘A bit,’ I said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

‘What do we do now?’

I shrugged. ‘Don’t rightly know,’ I said. ‘I guess I could call E.J. again.’

‘Well, now, Vera,’ he said, ‘she’s all the way back in Texas, and we’re here in the nation’s capital. I think we need to figure this out for ourselves.’

‘And how do you propose we do that?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said, frowning deeply. ‘We got any suspects?’

‘Only Brother Joe,’ I said.

‘Why do we suspect him?’ Gerald asked.

‘Because he was fiddling with her,’ I said.

‘And why would he want to kill her for that?’ Gerald asked.

I looked him in the eye. He wasn’t being mean; he actually wanted to know.

‘Got a lot of possible reasons,’ I said. ‘One: she was breaking up with him; two: she wouldn’t break up with him; three: she was gonna tell the deacons that he was a fornicator
and
an adulterer; four— Well, I don’t have a four.’

‘Four: maybe she found out something she shouldn’t oughta have,’ Gerald said, the frown gone from his brow.

‘You got a five?’ I asked him, grinning.

‘Yes. Five: maybe they knew each other before,’ he offered.

‘OK,’ I said, standing up. ‘Which one of those should we tackle first?’

I heard Graham call me and went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘What?’ I said, slightly irritated. I hate it when the kids scream at me from upstairs rather than just come down and speak to me directly.

‘We need you up here,’ Graham said, standing at the head of the stairs.

That’s when I heard the crying. Oh, shit, I thought. What now?