Just Wanna Testify (21 page)

“And did he pay in advance?” Regina interrupted Louise gently before they got sidetracked into the details.

“Yes, he did, and I made some improvements to the place, and then he paid some more in advance and things seemed to be working out fine. I didn’t bother him and he didn’t bother me, but then one night real late, I heard somebody hollering next door at Jackson’s, shouting and carrying on something awful. Well, I am a respectable woman, so I put on my robe and I went outside and rang the bell. I could hear his voice, but there was a woman there, too. She sounded like she was crying. When they heard the bell, it got real quiet. Jackson came to the door. He didn’t open it very wide, but over his shoulder, I could see the place was all torn up, broken things lying around like they’d been throwing stuff. And I said, What’s going on? And he said she got mad about a text he got from some other girl and went crazy jealous and jumped on him. Where is she? I said, and he said she was fine, just too embarrassed to come out because she’s not dressed. So I told him to take care of his business with a little more decorum, and I went back to my side of the house and went back to bed.”

“Go on,” Regina said.

“Well, he paid another six months in advance just when my taxes were coming due and I really needed that money, so I was glad to get it. But then he started hitting them.”

“Hitting them?” Blue’s voice was hard and cold.

She nodded. “I never actually saw it, but I heard enough, and I saw a couple of them afterward. Big ol’ sunglasses on their face, like that’s going to cover everything. He used to bounce them off the walls, sounded like to me, but seems like there was always another one to come in whenever he sent one packing. That’s the part I
never understood.” She ran her hands over her hair and patted it nervously. “Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. You know how it is when you know something, you can’t just pretend to yourself that you don’t know it, even if you want to. So I just asked him to move out. He really raised a ruckus, too, but I couldn’t take it anymore, even if I did need the money, especially when he said he wanted me to pay back everything he’d paid in advance. That money been gone, Mrs. Hamilton. You know how it is with everything so high.”

“I understand. Go on.”

“Well, a couple weeks later, Ms. Mayflower came by to tell me Jackson had listed me as some sort of beneficiary and handed me fifty thousand just for signing something.” She looked around at the others who were nodding at her. “So I figured he was sorry for how he’d been acting, and I signed.”

Regina looked at Jerome Smith’s grandmother, who was the only one among them who hadn’t spoken yet. “What about you, Mrs. Smith? Are you really prepared to let them take Jerome?”

“This is the hardest thing I ever had to do,” Mrs. Smith said softly, as every head turned in her direction. “But I am alone in this world. I gave that boy the best years of my life, taking in laundry and catching the bus out to Buckhead to clean up after these white folks whenever I could get the work. I had already raised six of my own, but I didn’t mind doing it. I knew Jerome was a bright child and he deserved a chance, so I got another job cleaning up one of those office towers downtown, and I sent him to the same private school where the smart white kids went and he made the honor roll and the dean’s list and every other list they got. And when I’d come home bone tired, he’d rub my feet and tell me how much he appreciated everything I was doing and how he was going to take care of everything as soon as he graduated and got a job and then I’d never have to work again. I was really glad to hear it because my heart wasn’t so strong anymore and my doctor told me I needed to stop working, but how could I? After high school, Jerome needed money for college. He only got a partial scholarship to Morehouse—he wouldn’t
even consider Georgia State!—but no matter how much I worked, we just couldn’t save enough.”

“Was he working, too?” Blue said.

Kendra snorted and tossed her ponytail. “Not likely.”

“I didn’t want him to,” Mrs. Smith said quickly. “He needed to study.”

Kendra rolled her eyes.

“Go on,” Regina said.

“But then once he got to Morehouse, he got a scholarship—he wouldn’t tell me from who—and he changed.”

Her voice cracked a little and Louise Solomon reached over to pat her hand. “Take your time, honey.”

“He stopped coming home to see me, and when he did, he didn’t have a good word to say. Finally, he said he was too busy to keep coming just to sit around with me and said he’d send some money when he could.”

“Did he?” Regina said.

“He sent me forty-two dollars. That was it. I didn’t know what I was going to do. That’s when that tall woman came to see me. When she told me about the money, I almost cried. I figured it was his way of making it up for how he’d treated me, and even if it wasn’t, no way I was in a position to look a gift horse in the mouth.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “I’m an old woman, Mr. Hamilton. I didn’t abandon that boy. He abandoned me.”

The accusation hung in the air and Regina tried to come up with something that could refute it, but she couldn’t.

“I know it sounds awful, Mrs. Hamilton, but look at it from our point of view,” Louise said. “Each of us in our own way opened up to these boys. By blood or by love or whatever, we bound ourselves to them and tried to do right by them. But what did we get in return? Respect? Kindness? Protection?”

“Love?” Kendra said. “Did a sister ever get a little
love
?”

“We got none of those things,” Alice Smith said.

“What we got was lies,” Jennifer said. “And betrayals.”

“And bullshit,” Kendra added. “Don’t forget the bullshit.”

“But now,” Judy said, “you are asking us to turn down a quarter of a million dollars because these guys might have to finally take some personal responsibility for how they’re living?”

Regina looked at each of them in turn. “I’m asking you,” she said quietly, “to take a stand on the side of some flawed human beings whose bad choices should not be punishable by death.”

“Well, that’s the thing about bad choices,” Kendra said. “You can’t undo them just because they come around to bite you in the ass.”

Judy stood up then and so did Jennifer. Louise offered an arm to Alice Smith, who accepted it, and they stood up, too. Regina and Blue stood to face them. Regina had been preparing to hear about outrageous sins, apocalyptic transgressions, epic lapses of honor, but what she was hearing was so ordinary. These crimes were nothing unique or spectacular. Just the slow wearing away of affection and respect and trust and love. And once those were gone, they were gone. There was nothing more to say.

“I can’t believe they hate those boys that much,” Regina said when the last woman had climbed into the stretch limo without a backward glance so Sam could drive them home.

“They don’t hate them.” Blue pulled out a chair for her at the table where he usually sat alone. “They’re just tired of them.”

“That’s even worse!”

He poured them each a cup of espresso and sat down across from her.

“Why didn’t you talk to them harder?” she said. “Why didn’t you paint them a picture of how those boys are going to die, headless and alone, on some uncharted, vampire-infested island?”

Blue dropped a cube of sugar into her cup. He took his black.

“Because it wouldn’t have done a bit of good. If they still had enough feeling to hate them, I might have had something to work
with, but when a woman is really and truly tired of a man, there’s nothing else to be said.”

Regina stirred her coffee and looked across the table at Blue. She knew he was right. He had learned that from her.

“So what are we going to do?”

He swallowed the espresso in one steaming gulp and set the cup down gently.

“Serena and her girls are coming to the benefit on Saturday night to pick up those guys,” he said. “I’ll let them come, and then we’ll take care of it.”

“During the benefit?”

“They won’t be staying until the end,” he said. “I’ll arrange to have a helicopter pick them up on the golf course at ten thirty. They’ll think it’s taking them to Hartsfield-Jackson so they can make their connection.”

The benefit was always held on the grounds of the old Lincoln Country Club. The helicopter pad at the far end of the golf course was there to accommodate Blue and his guests who required a little more privacy.

“Where is it really taking them?” Regina asked.

Blue slid his cup aside and reached across the table for her hands. “We don’t have to talk about this anymore.”

“I don’t want to talk about it any more than you do,” she said, “but anything I make up on my own is probably going to be even scarier than whatever you’ve got in mind, so why don’t you go ahead and tell me. I can take it.”

He looked at her and she could see him considering the options. Their deal was that any question she had nerve enough to ask, he had nerve enough to answer. And she was asking this one.

“All right,” he said. “There’s only one way to kill them and it hasn’t changed as long as they’ve been around. You have to drive a wooden stake through their hearts and bury them nine feet deep.”

Regina put her hands over her ears without knowing she was going to. She had asked the question and he had definitely answered
it. She just needed a minute of silence to absorb the words. To think about how that whole scene would play out. What would it look like? Would they run? Would they fight back? Would they bite?

Blue was watching her silently. His eyes were the clearest turquoise, as if his soul was at peace with what he was now required to do. She pulled her hands away slowly and drew in a deep breath.

“They’re not human, Gina,” he said. “I can’t let them take these guys, as sorry as they are. It sets a bad precedent.”

“I know,” she said, “but they
look
like women. Really tall, weird-looking women, but still the idea of you driving a stake through a woman’s heart …”

“They’re vampires, baby,” he said gently. “They’ve got to go.”

How could she tell him how much the pictures flashing through her mind frightened her? A fight to the death between the man she loved and a bunch of vampires? She found herself wondering more and more about the specifics. How big a stake? What kind of wood? She closed her eyes again.

“I’m going to call Ms. Mayflower to tell her she was right about the witnesses,” Blue said. “And tell her she can collect her boys at the benefit just as she had requested. That will be her last chance to call the whole thing off.”

Neither one of them considered that a real possibility.

“Isn’t there any other way?”

“I don’t think so,” Blue said. “But if you come up with anything, let me know.”

Before he met Blue and Henry at the West End News, Peachy went by Club Zebra to check on preparations for the benefit and found Iona Williams, this year’s chairperson, overseeing the delivery and proper arranging of additional tables and chairs to handle the overflow crowd. Tickets were already scarce because everybody in West End
had
to be there. Tables went first, then single tickets sales, and then people started begging for standing room at the bar. Then the Too Fine Five announced their intention to grace the proceedings and to drop the largest single donation the benefit committee had ever received. After that, the phones started ringing off the hook, and so many people wanted to come that Zeke Burnett, the club’s creator and proprietor, set up a giant video screen in the upstairs ballroom so that anyone who couldn’t get a seat in the club, which
took up most of the building’s ground floor, could still be close enough to mix and mingle.

Miss Iona, as everyone in West End called her, stopped giving directions to her crew long enough to hug Peachy and assure him that she was on top of things. Not that he had doubted it. When his responsibilities at Sweet Abbie’s didn’t leave him enough time to pull together the benefit, Miss Iona was the only person he called. She had been working with him from the beginning, and for the past few years it was her vision that took things to the next level.