Player & the Game

by Shelly Ellis

  “Steph,” Lauren began quietly, “are you sure you want to do that?”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well . . .” Lauren hestitated, looking as if she was trying to choose her words carefully. “Don’t you think . . . Don’t you think your overconfidence in your abilities . . . in that area . . . is what got you into this trouble in the first place?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She means exactly what you think she means,” the annoying new voice in her head muttered. “By trying to trick men out of their money for years, you brought this one on yourself! It’s justice due! Those Sheriff’s Office detectives were right!”

  Stephanie closed her eyes. “You think I brought this on myself, Laurie? You think that I deserved this?”

  “No! No, honey, that’s not what I meant!” Lauren argued earnestly. Stephanie opened her eyes. “I meant that because you were trying so hard to seduce Isaac, you didn’t realize he was trying to do the same to you. It blindsided you. Besides, there are better ways to approach this. Instead of trying to use your feminine wiles on this guy, why don’t you just try reasoning with him?”

  “Reasoning with him?”

  Lauren chuckled. “Yeah, I know. In our family, reasoning with a man is a foreign concept, but believe me, it can be done. He gave you his business card, right?”

  Stephanie dug into her purse and pulled out the card. She showed it to Lauren.

  “See, Steph! It has his company address on it. Go to his office and talk to him.” She raised her eyebrows. “And I mean exactly that, Steph. Don’t show him any cleavage. Don’t give him any winks. Don’t fool him into thinking he stands a chance of getting into your pants. Talk to him. That’s all. Talk to the Stokowski guy on his business card while you’re at it. He’s probably Keith’s partner. Maybe he can be reasoned with.”

  “Reason with them,” Stephanie repeated, sitting upright on her stool. She let the words sink in.

  It was a foreign concept to her. She was supposed to approach a man straightforward, with no seduction, no guile?

  “Interesting,” she murmured.

  “Isn’t it?” Lauren asked with another chuckle.

  “Well, if I do by some chance get him to agree to take my case, Isaac stole almost all my money, Laurie, so could you—”

  “You’re going to ask me to lend you some cash, aren’t you?”

  Stephanie nodded.

  “OK,” Lauren said hopping off her stool, “I think I can lend it to you, but I have to talk to Cris first.”

  “You think Cris will do it?”

  “If I reason with him, more than likely,” Lauren said.

  “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just do it the Gibbons way. I don’t think any of my nighties fit anymore though. You wouldn’t believe how much weight I’ve put on in the past few months!”

  Chapter 9

  “Here comes my big cup of hot chocolate!” the almond-skinned, plump, middle-aged woman behind the counter exclaimed as the handsome, dark-skinned man opened the glass-paned front door and walked inside the small greasy spoon.

  The stained and faded sign MARCO’S PIZZERIA AND BURGER JOINT hung on the wall two feet above the cashier’s head. She dropped a hand to her wide hip, stuck out her bountiful chest, and gave a broad smile, revealing the front gap in her teeth.

  “I was hoping I would see your fine ass today! I haven’t seen you in a while! Where you been?”

  “Hey, Retha,” Keith Hendricks replied, giving a lopsided grin that showed off his trademark dimples. “I’ve been away for a couple of weeks handling a case.”

  As he walked toward the counter, he reached into his back jean pocket, pulling out his wallet.

  She raised her eyebrows, pushing back the elastic band of her hairnet by an inch. “You sure you weren’t caught up with some woman? You’re not lying to me, are you?”

  “Now how could you ask me a question like that?” Keith winked one of his dark bedroom eyes at her. “You know damn well no woman could ever compare to you.”

  She laughed. “Boy, you better stop playin’ with me! I’ll jump over this here counter,” she said, pointing at the linoleum, “throw you on the floor, and show you what we big girls are workin’ with! Don’t test me!”

  Keith laughed.

  “So what’ll you have, baby?” She ripped an old receipt from the spool on the cash register. “The usual?”

  Keith scratched his neatly trimmed goatee thoughtfully as he gazed at the menu on the washable board near the counter. “No, not today, Retha. I think I’ll switch it up, if you don’t mind.”

  Keith had ordered lunch at this restaurant in Vienna, Virginia, almost every day for more than a year. Retha and the fry cook in the back practically knew his order by heart; it rarely varied.

  The pizza at Marco’s wasn’t the best—cheap tomato sauce, undercooked dough, and runny cheese—and many of the burgers were more burnt than charbroiled, but convenience won over taste in this case. The office of Stokowski and Hendricks Private Investigators—his place of work—was only a block away, located on the second floor of a two-story walk-up. Their shingle hung above a busy dry cleaner owned by a nice Korean family.

  Keith squinted at the curly script on Marco’s Pizzeria’s white board. “So what’s with the new menu?”

  Retha sucked her teeth. “The manager said we should try to bring in more healthy options,” she muttered, wrinkling her nose. “Some fruit, some vegetables, and sandwiches that taste just as good as dirt to me. So far, you’re the only person who’s even asked about it.”

  “Healthy menu, huh?” Keith contemplated for several seconds. “Well, I’ll have the usual meatball sub and curly fries.” Keith then tilted his head. “And I think I’ll try the turkey on wheat with the bean sprouts too.”

  Retha raised her eyebrows again in surprise. “You sure, baby?”

  Keith nodded.

  He wasn’t just buying lunch for himself today. He was buying it for his partner Mike too, in order to butter up Mike. Mike wasn’t too happy when Keith told him last night that he had lost track of Isaac and let the conman skip town without a trace.

  “You let him get away? How’d the hell that happen?” the older man had lamented.

  No point in crying over spilled milk, Keith had argued. But that didn’t mean Mike would let him off easy. The old man was going to drag Keith through the mud a bit before he used his forty-plus years of police experience to help Keith get back on Isaac’s trail.

  Keith hoped giving him a free lunch would speed up the process.

  Minutes later, Keith climbed the stairs to Stokowski and Hendricks Private Investigators with two lunch bags in tow.

  There was a small black-and-white plaque adjacent to the door that let visitors know this was the office of licensed private investigators. Mike had been lobbying the landlord for the past year to put up something bigger, but the ornery old woman said she didn’t want her tenants “tackying up her hallway with that ugly crap.”

  Keith shifted the lunches to one arm and opened the office door. He walked inside, almost bumping into the water cooler as he stepped through the doorway.

  “Heeeeey, you’re back,” Mike shouted, raising his hands in the air in triumph. “It’s about damn time! I’m starvin’!”

  “For some reason I don’t believe that,” Keith replied as he glanced at Mike’s ample belly. He tossed a paper bag on the gray-haired man’s desk and sat a bottle of grapefruit juice near Mike’s opened laptop before heading to his side of the room.

  It was a large space, painted a stark white with two windows facing a busy street. There were a few paintings on the walls, ones that looked like they could have been found at an old Motel 6 or in a doctor’s office in hell. Mike insisted they made the place look cheery. Keith joked they would probably look better in the Dumpster out back.

  Beside the water cooler were two small chairs and a coffee table. That was supposed to be their “waiting area.” Across the room was
a door that led to a small dinette with a sink, microwave, and mini refrigerator. In the center of the room were their desks, which faced one another.

  Keith’s side was orderly and tidy, with a file cabinet filled with color-coded folders, pens and pencils arranged in an old coffee cup on his desk, and papers and books neatly stacked by his laptop. Mike’s side was a complete mess. His desk was covered with a blizzard of paper, a discarded bag of potato chips, and a half-eaten box of powdered doughnuts. His trash can was filled to the brim and brown circles indicating old coffee stains decorated his desk calendar.

  “What did you get me?” Mike asked Keith as he slid forward, rubbing his pale, hairy hands eagerly.

  “Open it up and see for yourself,” Keith muttered, throwing his jacket over the back of his desk chair.

  Mike opened his bag, tucked a paper napkin into the collar of his shirt, and pulled out a cellophane-wrapped sandwich, small bag of baked potato chips, and an apple. With great trepidation, he unwrapped the sandwich. He frowned as he lifted one piece of whole wheat bread and examined the sandwich’s contents.

  “What the . . . What the hell is this?”

  Keith fell back into his chair, twisting off the cap to his soda bottle. “What the hell does it look like?”

  Mike’s gray eyes widened comically, nearly bulging from the sockets. “It looks like a piece of shit!”

  “I would have bought you a piece of shit, but they didn’t have it on the menu.” Keith chuckled, taking a bite from his foot-long meatball sub.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass!” Mike bellowed. “Come on, what is this?” He inspected the sandwich and poked it like it was some science experiment gone wrong. “It looks like grass or somethin’.”

  “It’s a whole wheat sandwich with turkey, Dijon mustard, and bean sprouts. It’s supposed to be good for you. One of the new healthy offerings on Marco’s menu.”

  “So you got me this bean sprout crap . . .” He then gestured toward the sandwich Keith held. “. . . And you get meatballs and curly fries?”

  “You’re damn right I do!” Keith argued with a vigorous nod. “I’m not sixty-two, overweight, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Didn’t the doctor tell you to go on a diet?”

  Mike glared at the younger man. “You should be kissing my big hairy ass right now considering that you need my help! I thought you wanted me to help you figure out how to find this Isaac guy again.”

  Keith sighed. “I do.”

  “So you give me the meatball sub and you can have this rabbit food. Maybe then, I’ll think it over.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Mike raised his bushy eyebrows. “Does it look like I’m serious?”

  Keith rose from his desk and carried his sub and soda across the room. He dropped both on Mike’s cluttered desk. “Fine. It’s you’re funeral, man,” he said, taking the bean sprout sandwich, grapefruit juice, apple, and baked chips from Mike.

  Mike grinned, grabbed the sub, took a big chomp out of it, and closed his eyes in sheer ecstasy. “And what a way to go!”

  Keith laughed and slowly shook his head. He then carried his lunch back to his desk.

  He could never really get mad at Mike. The old guy was like a father to him. His life wouldn’t be what it was today if it wasn’t for the grizzly retired cop. In fact, he’d probably be dead by now with the way his life had been going all those years ago when the two first met.

  When Keith met Mike, he had been ten years old, wearing a backward baseball cap, sporting Nike Air Jordans, and a satin bomber jacket that was two sizes too big for him. Back then, in the Baltimore projects where he and his mother found themselves, Keith had been the prized lookout for a few neighborhood drug dealers, letting out an ear-piercing whistle whenever he saw a police car drive by while his employers were “doin’ business.” He was barely five feet tall and weighed eighty pounds “soaking wet,” as his mother liked to say, but he had a cocky attitude that the dealers liked. They called him Li’l Man and would toss him hundred dollar bills every now and then. He used the money to buy new shoes, a Nintendo game system, and a fake gold chain.

  The other kids in the neighborhood admired Keith, watching in awe as he consorted with some of the roughest, toughest thugs in their neighborhood. Keith’s mother was none the wiser. He hid his clandestine purchases from her and she was too tired from working two jobs to pay attention to what her son did on a daily basis. Every night she would arrive home with an aching back and dark circles under her eyes. She’d ask him halfheartedly if he made himself dinner and if he finished his homework. He’d nod “yes” and she’d smile before heading to her bedroom and collapsing into bed.

  Keith started to skip school after a while. His lookout duties were more important. Whenever he stood on the street corner or hung out near the mouth of the alleyway, he kept a vigilant eye for cops. Pretty soon he started to notice the same police car driving by every day. It raised his suspicions. Having a detective’s instinct even then, he wondered if the cops were starting to catch on to him, but he was too scared to tell the dealers that. He didn’t want them to give his job away to someone else. After all, he had more things he wanted to buy. There was a bike in the pawn shop window two blocks from his home that had his name on it.

  But one day, after doing his whistle routine, he saw the same cop car pull over, screeching to a halt near a broken bench tagged with spray paint. Two white beat cops—a short one who looked to be in his late thirties, and a tall, younger one with blond hair—opened the car doors.

  Keith stood frozen in place, licking his lips nervously, watching as they walked toward him.

  The older one held up his badge. “We’d like to speak to you, son.”

  That was the trigger Keith needed to wake up from his stupor. He did the only thing he could think to do: he turned and ran like hell. His little feet carried him a good eight blocks, through alleyways and behind Dumpsters, through playgrounds and around parked cars. The younger one finally caught him, grabbing him by the collar of his jacket. After doing all that running, the cop was angry and out of breath. He pinned Keith to the ground and put him in handcuffs, digging his knee into the boy’s back.

  “That’s right! I got ya you little piece of shit! You thought you would get away, but I got your ass!”

  “Man, fuck you!” Keith screamed. “Suck my dick!”

  “Goddamnit, get up! You’re gonna crush his fucking ribs!” the older one shouted, finally catching up with them. His face was red and slick with sweat. He pulled at the other cop’s shoulder. “He’s just a kid! Let him up!”

  “Oh, come on, we’ve been watching this piece of shit for weeks! You and I both know he’s been helping them peddle that shit!” He returned his angry gaze to Keith, shoving him into the concrete again. “I don’t care how fucking old he is!”

  “Get off of me! You hurtin’ my arm!” Keith shouted, feeling saliva clog in his throat.

  “I said let him up, Harris!” the older one ordered through clenched teeth.

  “Or what?” the younger one named Harris spat.

  “Or I’m reporting your ass to internal affairs.”

  “Internal affairs?” Harris paused a beat then he laughed coldly. “You’d really do that for this kid, wouldn’t you? More of your bleeding heart bullshit! You—”

  “Let . . . him . . . up. You got five seconds,” the other cop repeated slowly.

  Something in his voice said that he wasn’t making an idle threat.

  At the time, Keith didn’t know what “internal affairs” was, but he was profoundly grateful it existed. Harris let go of him, but only after giving one final shove that jarred his scrawny shoulder. The cop then leaned against a park yard fence and wiped his sweaty brow. The older one shot him a look before walking toward Keith.

  “Hey,” the older one said, the anger now gone from his voice. He dragged Keith to the sitting position and kneeled beside him, gazing at him with watery gray eyes. Keith could barely see his lips behind h
is bristly mustache. “You all right?”

  Keith didn’t respond. The rule was that you never, ever talked to cops, not even if you wanted their help, not even if your life depended on it. He was covered in dirt and sweat. The front of his new jeans now showed a tear at the knee. His body ached all over, but he would never tell the cop that.

  “Why’d you run?” the older one persisted. “We weren’t going to arrest you. We were just going to ask you a few questions.”

  Keith shrugged, playing stupid. He kept his gaze on a broken seesaw on the other side of the yard.

  “You know you don’t have any business being out here doing what you’re doing. You understand what those guys are selling, what they’re doing to your neighborhood? You don’t wanna get mixed up with that shit, son.” He shook his head. “Does your mother know what you’re doing out here? Does she know how close you are from disappearing for a long time?”

  Keith turned his face into a block of granite, mimicking the hard, often intimidating expressions he saw on the faces of the neighborhood dealers. It was an expression that said he wasn’t a snitch and he wasn’t a punk. He wasn’t afraid of going to jail either. But the hot tears coming from his eyes, searing his cheeks, gave him away. So did his sniffing.

  The truth was that he was afraid. He wasn’t a hardened criminal looking to make a fast grand selling crack on a street corner. He was a lonely ten-year-old boy who really, really wanted a ten-speed bike and was doing what he had to do to get it. He didn’t want to go to jail and never see his mom again.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” the older cop said. He let out a heavy sigh. “Look, we’re gonna let you go. I don’t—”

  “What?” Harris shouted, pushing himself away from the chain-link fence. “No, we’re not fucking letting him go! I just sprinted a goddamn mile so we could bring him in. We’re not—”

  “We’re going to let you go,” the older one began again. He was talking to Keith but he turned his gaze to Harris. His gray eyes suddenly became hard as steel. “We’re going to take off these handcuffs and we’re going to send you on your way.”