More Money for Good (3 page)

Later that night, after eating the delicious meal Lauren had prepared for dinner—it was baked chicken, cabbage, and sweet cornbread, with a cherry-topped cheesecake for dessert—I grabbed my jacket so I could go finish the conversation I was having with Tavious. He told me there was something he wanted to show me and was unable to tell me at the shop, because our conversation was cut short by the two wreckers lugging in two cars, both with transmission issues.

When she first heard of my plans, Lauren wasn't very happy about me wanting to venture out into the streets, as I still hadn't taken care of her needs and she was ready. She even had on a red baby-doll to insinuate the type of night she was expecting. I kissed her on the cheek and promised her that all would be well when I returned, and she assured me things were okay when she put a smile on her face, and that is exactly the reason we were together.

I drove over to Mrs. Bullock's to pick Tavious up. As soon as he got in the car, he looked around inside and told me that he remembered when his grandfather used to drive him around in it. Then he began to give me directions on where we were going, which took us about twenty minutes to get to.

I parked my car on a borderline creepy street in a residential neighborhood that had only one working, dim streetlight. There was no hiding the fact that the economic downturn was affecting the neighborhood as we passed a few homes that looked as though they had been boarded up for quite some time. Tavious pointed to an old-time colonial-looking number. I stopped the car and parked across the street from it. Through the darkness, this house didn't look nearly as bad as the others. My eyes had to venture past a few stragglers who were walking down the street and had a brown paper bag in rotation as they moved about to their destination.

I looked up at the house. As much as I could see, it was painted white with black trim, with trees between the two houses that sat to either side of it. I turned to Tavious in the car. “So, what's so special about this place?”

Tavious rolled his window down all the way. “It's where my money is,” he said.

I looked back at the house again. I couldn't tell if anyone was home because there was just one light on outside by the porch. “Who lives there?” I asked him.

“Friend,” Tavious shot back.

“Friend got a name?”

“Amara, her name is Amara.” Tavious then lit up a smoke.

“Doesn't look like she's home to me,” I told him.

“Oh, she's there. She's there,” Tavious said, without saying anything else.

After a few minutes of looking up at the house in silence I asked him, “So, what is this friend to you, and why does she have your money?”

“We go way back,” he said. “Known her since we were eighteen, nineteen years old. She was my right hand when I was deep into the drug game, man. I could trust her with my life,” Tavious remembered.

I didn't respond, because it seemed as though Tavious wanted to open up about something, and I thought the sooner he did it would be better for both of us so I could get back to Lauren. There was no doubt in my mind she would be waiting for me as soon as I hit the door.

“There wasn't a time that I didn't trust her,” Tavious mentions.

“That good of a friend, huh?”

“Yeah, the best,” he said. “All the way up to me getting snagged on that possession charge that got me that twenty-year bid.”

Mrs. Bullock never did explain the details of his drug charge conviction and I often wondered what the whole deal was about. I knew for a fact that Tavious wasn't a killer because she told me that much, but the twenty-year sentence that he endured always did give me pause. “So, how'd you end up doing twenty?” I asked him. There was still no type of movement in the house.

“Found with over sixty pounds of weed on me, coming back from Miami,” he said. “But what did me in was the Feds. They waited until I was right in front of a school around the corner from my spot to pull me over. Got me with intent to distribute within a thousand yards of a school on a Saturday night, around two in the morning,” he reflected. “The only good thing about that night was that Amara went with me to Miami to pick up our money and re-up. We decided to split up and ride different buses back here. Her duffle bag was the one packed with the two million dollars,” he explained.

Things were beginning to make sense to me. “So, you did twenty locked up knowing you had two million out on the streets waiting for you?”

Tavious shook his head yes.

“And how long you been out?”

“Damn near three months,” he said.

“Well, if this Amara is such a good friend, why don't you just knock on the door and get it?”

Tavious looked at the house, then took a swipe at his face, then looked at me. “'Cause she's dead, man. She's inside that house, dead.”

When I heard the word “dead” I sat up from underneath the wheel of the car, looked up the street, then into my rearview mirrors for any sign of the police. In my world, a corpse in a house means nothing but police. “What do you mean, dead?”

“Dead, man. Amara's in that house dead,” he made clear.

Fuckin' unbelievable what I was hearing from Tavious. I got out my car and looked behind it and down the street as far as I could see without any reflective help. Tavious even asked me what I was doing. When I was sure not a soul was watching the house or us, I got back into the car. “How do you know she's dead?”

Tavious exhaled to a point where I knew he didn't want to explain. “Look, when I first got out of the pen, after I got something to eat, this was my first stop. I knocked on the door, waited—no answer. So I walked in. I looked around the house and found her inside. Her body was still warm.”

I just about had my bearings back. I asked him, “You sure she was dead?”

Tavious looked at me stern. “I'm sure, man, she was dead. Not moving, not breathing, dead, man. Blood was everywhere.” He paused. “I only looked around for a while, I couldn't stand being in there with her like that.”

I took a long, investigative glance at the house and blurted out to Tavious that I didn't see any police tape around any of the doors, or signs that anyone knew she was dead.

“Nobody knows yet,” Tavious responds.

“Only the person who killed her,” I said back, then looked directly at Tavious and he got my drift.

“Aww, hell no, man, I didn't do it.” He couldn't tell by my looks if I believed him. “C'mon now . . . West. Why would I come back here if I killed her? That would mean I'd have my money, and if I had it, I wouldn't have told you about it in the first place.”

I looked at him longer this time through the darkness and that damn dim streetlight. He looked back at me just as stern. “Yeah, I guess,” I decided.

“Got-damn right,” he mumbled.

We sat and looked at the house for another hour or so without a word. I thought that if her dead body had been in that house for three months the sight and smell would be unbearable. There was still no movement on the street. Nothing from across the street; next door everything completely still.

“There's no one around,” Tavious said. “I can assure you of that.”

“Makes you so sure?”

“Because . . . I've been out here every night since I found her. Damn house has pulled me here every night, like some kind of magical magnet or some shit. Rest on my word, nobody knows.”

“Except the person who killed her,” I reminded him.

The only reason I didn't put my car in drive with the velocity of an Indy car driver, drop Tavious off, and tell him to forget he ever told me about his dead friend was because I thought about Mrs. Bullock and her confirmation to me that Tavious had been leaving the house every night and hanging out for hours at a time. Her suspicions gave him an alibi for the time being and as we sat in the car he propositioned me with an offer that would make any man ponder.

“West, if fifty thousand is not enough then, fuck it, name your price,” Tavious had pushed for the second time in less than thirty seconds.

I looked at the house again and took a deep, long breath, then told Tavious that I brought him out to the house only as a favor. Just to listen to him, to see where his head was at because I promised his grandmother I would. I let him know my intentions were not to get involved with a murder or his twenty-year-old dirty drug money.

“Ohh . . . I get it,” he said. Tavious's tone was completely different now and I even noticed him tapping his foot on the floor of the car in frustration. “You think I'm some kind of halfway-reformed thug who hasn't learned his lesson after twenty years behind bars, don't you?”

I didn't answer him because before I could say anything Tavious began talking again.

“I have my degree, West. In math and sociology, do you have yours?” he challenged.

“Nah, never been much for studying outside car schematics and manuals,” I let him know.

“Well, not that it means much either way. I'm just saying. I have mine and it doesn't mean a damn thing because who's going to hire me anyway even with the paper?”

“Well, I hired you,” I told him.

“Yeah, you did and I appreciate that. But beyond your shop, who's going to give me a chance once they see that I did twenty?” Tavious exhaled. “Man, I was a straight A student all the way through school. I didn't even know what a letter grade of B looked like on a report card when I was coming up. I had scholarship offers, and not for playing sports but for my grades. Name a university and I can crawl up in my grandmother's attic and show you a letter from the college offering me a full-ride academic scholarship. But guess what, West?”

Once again, he didn't give me a chance to get a word in. In addition to that, I was still thinking about his academic success. I gained a different view of him.

“I was too smart for my own good,” he said. “I met the wrong group of people, stand-up people by society's standards, who showed me a process on how the drug game worked, and I used my brain to build the largest marijuana cartel that this city has ever seen.” He paused and swiped his face. “And now, I'm back on the streets as a free man for the first time since becoming a convicted man, with the only friend I've really known lying up in that house because of the money she was holding for me.”

A potential dead body in the house and Tavious going a mile a minute about his life had me perplexed and thinking about too many things at one time. I had been at his point of frustration before and I just allowed him to vent. There was absolutely nothing that I could say to him because we had lived two entirely different lives: his in captivity and mine as a free man, trying to never go where he had been. What he said to me did connect. I personally knew how difficult it was trying to get the start-up capital for my business and to sustain what I had, and I understood completely the lack of faith to become anything but an ex-con. More than that, I'd always envisioned myself going where he just came out of. Sort of like an engraved destination that hadn't materialized in reality by the grace of God.

For minutes no other words were spoken between us. We just sat and watched the house. I could hear Tavious mumble something about his friend Amara a few times under his breath but instead of asking him about it, I just let it pass; then I hear him burble a few times more in the darkness. It wasn't without fail that I thought how I would react if Lauren was inside a house, dead after being a rock for me for over twenty years. The notion of it all made me step up.

“So, let's just say I agree to go in there with you.” I almost ate my words when Tavious turned to me so rapidly with hope in his eyes. I put my hand up to let him know that I wasn't finished. “And if I do, we do it my way. That's the only way I'll go in there, Tavious . . . we do it my way.”

I could see Tavious's craving through the darkness. “Yeah, I can live with that,” he said. “I hear you're good at what you do anyway,” he said, as I sensed he was getting himself psyched to get back in that house.

“I'm good at running my shop,” I wanted to let him know.

He snickered, dismissing me a bit. “Yeah, I know. Well if my money is in that house, I hope you can live with a hundred thousand cash, because what you're doing, man, means a lot,” he said. “Let's go.”

With not a lot more said, other than how we were going to get in and out of the house, we made our way. I parked around the corner away from the house. Then we walked around back toward the house passing the same crew of fellows drinking who we noticed earlier. They were getting ready to shoot a game of 7-11 on the corner under a brighter streetlight. I was pretty sure they weren't paying us any attention but we watched our backs as we made our way, just in case.

The front door was locked, just like Tavious said it would be because he'd locked it, and we had to get in through a window on the side. I carried a shop rag in with me and used it to push the window up. I followed Tavious in and we walked directly upstairs and there it was: the body and the awful rotten-egg smell that only came from a dead body that had started its intrinsic breakdown.

“See, what did I tell you?” Tavious said. He took one quick glance at Amara, then turned around, not being able to look at her any longer. Her hair was detached from her body. The closest we could get to the body because of the stench was only a few feet.

I could see a stain next to her head; I guessed blood. “No doubt, she's dead all right.”

Tavious nodded his head in agreement then walked away from her body. I think he was even crying and I noticed him cover his nose with his shirt as he kicked at the floor.

I moved away from her body and looked around. “Did you touch anything in here besides that doorknob when you locked the door, and that window down there?”

He looked back at me. “Nah, man . . . .”

“Well, don't,” I told him. I was already getting paranoid and it was sort of a rush—like the time when my newfound friend Rossi walked into a high-ranking police officer's home to see what we could find a few years back when I caught jury duty.

I went down the steps, wiped the doorknob off with my rag, and made a mental note to wipe down the window when we left. Tavious had no idea where his friend Amara could have hidden the money. After all the years on the inside he never wanted her to tell him because of the taped phone conversations and monitored mail that occurred. We began to look around for it. We searched every place one might think to hide two million cash, and whoever was there before us did too. The house had been made a wreck. The couches, her bed, cabinets, everything turned upside down and searched inside out. Tavious recalled that he didn't remember the house being in that condition, but guessed it could have been because he was half out his mind with Amara being dead and him just being out of prison.

We went over the entire house and didn't find a dime. On the way back down from the second floor I noticed a picture slightly tilted in the stairwell. I looked behind it and there was an opening through the sheetrock with a space that just might have held two million.

“Well, this looks like a good place to hide two million dollars if you ask me,” I mentioned to Tavious as he joined me on the steps.

Tavious moved the picture and looked at the space, then reached inside. He pulled out two duffle bags that were completely empty and showed them to me. “These are the bags, man. These are the bags I placed the two million cash in,” he said. “Amara told me she never touched it. Always made me feel so good when she told me that I was the last one to ever touch these bags. Now they're gone. I want my fuckin' money, West,” he said, as he crumbled the bags up and put them under his arm. “Not only for me, but for Amara, too.