Bed of Lies

by Shelly Ellis

  C. J. frowned. “Who is it?” she whispered, and he shook his head in response.

  “I’m sorry but . . . what?”

  He fell silent and C. J. stared at him, desperate to know whom he was talking to and what he was talking about. Instead she had to decipher the flash of emotions spreading across his face. He looked angry then confused and finally he looked happy.

  “Uh, no . . . n-no thank you,” he said a few minutes later. “Yes. You . . . you have a good day, too.” He hung up the phone and let it fall to the mattress.

  “Well?” C. J. stared at him. “What was it? What happened?”

  “It was the woman who was suing me,” he said dazedly. He finally looked up at her. “She’s calling off the lawsuit.”

  Chapter 20

  Dante

  Dante pounded his fist on the apartment door and angrily paced back and forth as he waited for the door to open. When it didn’t happen within seconds, he banged on the door again.

  He was past angry and beyond furious. He felt like steam was going to burst from his ears. He had gotten the call from Terrence Murdoch’s lawyer this morning saying that he was happy to hear that Mavis Upton planned to withdraw her lawsuit and he looked forward to seeing the filing in court.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken,” Dante had said into the phone, holding the handset so tightly that he felt as if he could crush it in his bare hand. “We are not withdrawing the case! We’re still seeking punitive damages in the sum of—”

  “Well, perhaps you should speak to your client, Mr. Turner,” Terrence’s lawyer had replied in clipped tones. “Terrence and I had a conference call with her yesterday and she told us quite plainly that those were her wishes. She even apologized for letting this drag on for so long.”

  Dante had frowned. “Wait . . . You had a conference call with her?”

  “Yes, as I said, we had it yesterday.” The lawyer had paused. “Ms. Upton is still your client, correct?”

  “Of course she is!”

  “Well, if that’s the case, then I would think you would be privy to this information, Mr. Turner. I thought you would be the first to know she’s withdrawing her lawsuit.”

  Dante couldn’t believe Mavis had done it; not dim-witted, mushy-mouthed Mavis. She had gone behind his back and called Terrence. She even took it a step further and spoke to Terrence’s lawyer, purposely cutting Dante out of the discussions.

  Does this bitch know who she’s fucking with? Dante thought as he paced the dirty, worn hallway carpet. If not, he was about to tell her. She was about to get a rude awakening!

  Slowly, the door creaked open. Mavis peeked her head around the edge of the doorframe and gazed at him guardedly. “Hello, Mr. Turner.”

  “I need to talk to you now,” he said tightly. Gone was the lawyerly, refined pretense he usually used with Mavis. At that moment, he frankly just wanted to choke a bitch.

  “Now is not a good time. We were just about to have din—”

  He shoved his way past her, shocking her and sending her almost stumbling backward against the adjacent wall. On the other side of the room, Renee and her daughter, Tasha, sat at a small dining table. A casserole dish filled with meat loaf sat at the center of the table along with a pitcher of fruit punch Kool-Aid. Renee was reaching for the pitcher. A fork laden with mashed potatoes hovered near Tasha’s mouth. Both mother and daughter gaped at Dante as he stormed into Mavis’s apartment.

  “Dante,” Renee said, quickly rising to her feet, “what . . . what are you doin’ here?”

  “Your mother called off the lawsuit!” he yelled before turning to glare at Mavis. “And she did that shit without consulting me, without telling me a damn thing!”

  Renee stared at her mother, aghast. “Mama, tell me you didn’t do that!”

  Mavis clasped her hands in front of her. She pushed back her shoulders and met Renee’s gaze evenly. “Yes, I did.”

  “But I thought we wanted to hold out for some money!” Renee cried. “I thought we were—”

  “There is no ‘we’ in this, Renee. This all had to do with me and nobody else. It didn’t feel comfortable in the beginning suing that boy. I said I couldn’t remember what happened that night. I couldn’t say for sure that I wasn’t the one at fault. But I let y’all talk me into it.” She reached for the gold cross dangling around her neck and patted it as she spoke. “I thought about it. I prayed on it. I talked to my pastor and”—she took a deep breath—“I changed my mind. It didn’t feel right anymore. I decided I couldn’t sue him.”

  “You changed your mind?” Dante repeated with disbelief. He barked out a laugh. “You changed your fucking mind?”

  Mavis raised her chin in defiance. “That’s right, Mr. Turner. I changed my mind and no one—not even you—can make me change it again.”

  At that moment, he wanted to backhand her clear across her face. He took a menacing step toward her, feeling his hands itch to take a swing. “Now, you listen to me, you stupid old bitch, I’ll be goddamned if—”

  “Don’t talk to my grandma that way!” Tasha suddenly shouted, leaping up from her chair at the dining room table. Her little face contorted with rage. Her tiny fists were balled at her sides. “Don’t call my grandma that bad word!”

  Dante gave the little girl a withering glance. “Shut up. Just drink your goddamn Kool-Aid.”

  “All right,” Mavis said, marching up to Dante’s chest, “you can call me out of my name as much as you want, but nobody speaks like that to my grandbaby!” She pointed to the door that still sat ajar. “You’re going to have to get the hell out of here!”

  The pot of rage was simmering and it was on the verge of bubbling over now. He could see it: him suddenly lunging forward and throttling Mavis within an inch of her life. The little girl would start screaming. Renee would shout for him to let her mother go, to let her breathe, but nothing would stop him until Mavis lay dead on her living room floor.

  Dante cocked an eyebrow as he considered doing it anyway, but he acknowledged that he was too pretty for prison and he had no desire to serve twenty-to-life for killing this old cunt. With great reluctance, he slowly turned and walked toward her door.

  “Wait, Dante! Wait! Don’t go!” Renee shouted while running after him.

  He strode through the door and she was at his heels, teetering in her knockoff Louboutins. “Dante, please! Baby, listen!” She grabbed his arm. “Don’t walk out like this!”

  He shoved her away as he stalked toward the apartment’s elevators at the end of the hallway. “Where the fuck were you while she was making all these phone calls and talking to her pastor?” he shouted. “I could have used the heads-up!”

  “I didn’t know she called him! She didn’t tell me!”

  He reached the elevator doors, pressed the Down button, turned, and glared at Renee.

  You are so goddamn useless, he thought, shaking his head. He had assumed she would be a reliable ally. Instead she had sat around on her ass, allowing him to get blindsided like this. He pressed the elevator button again, jabbing his finger so hard onto the plastic that his nail bed was starting to hurt.

  “Please don’t be mad at me, baby!” She grabbed his arm again. “Look, I’ll talk to Mama! I’ll . . . I’ll get her to change her mind! Just don’t leave like this!”

  He rolled his eyes and yanked his arm out of her grasp.

  “Okay, then forget Mama! Just don’t let this affect what we have!”

  “What we have?” He laughed, hard and loud. “Renee, what we had was a few sweaty hours in bed and a bunch of used condoms. That’s all, honey!”

  “What?” Her face crumpled. “You don’t mean that! You told me you cared about me! You said . . . you said we were going to go to Barbados.”

  By the time the elevator doors dinged and opened, Dante was laughing even harder. After the day he had had, he needed a good laugh. Unfortunately, it was at Renee’s expense and she didn’t seem remotely amused.

  “So you saying you d
on’t love me?”

  He walked inside the compartment and turned to face her. “I’m saying that question is so ridiculous it’s not even worth answering.” He then reached to press the button that would take him to the first level.

  Her eyes narrowed into thin slits. Her ample chest started to heave like she was the Big Bad Wolf preparing to blow down some poor piglet’s house.

  “Fuck you, motherfucka!” she screeched. “Fuck you! You think you can treat me like some shit? I’ma show you, motherfucka! You’re gonna—”

  The doors shut, cutting her off mid-tirade.

  Chapter 21

  Paulette

  Paulette gazed listlessly at the stacks of lettuce, kale, cucumbers, carrots, and leeks as she pushed her cart down the produce aisle. She paused on the glistening linoleum, closed her eyes, and rubbed her belly, wincing at the spasms of pain that wrapped their way from her spine to her navel in undulating lightning bolts. She breathed deeply in and out, her brown nostrils flaring as she waited for the pain to subside.

  “Damn you, Braxton Hicks,” Paulette muttered as she opened her eyes thirty seconds later and started to push the cart again, heading toward a mini-pyramid of navel oranges.

  “Braxton Hicks,” as in Braxton Hicks contractions, according to What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the book she kept hidden in one of her bathroom drawers. It wasn’t quite like contractions, the book said. Those would come closer to her delivery date. These were her uterus’s way of prepping for delivery. Her body was practicing for its grand performance: ushering a baby into the world. Unfortunately, that “practicing” was starting to feel alarmingly real, from the pain that had plagued her since she had stood in the shower that morning, pressing her forehead against the tile as the lightning bolts struck. It had dragged on for a good three hours, coming at varying intervals. As soon as she would regain her breath and start going about her business, it would come in again like a tidal wave.

  “Drink more water to make the pain go away,” the book had advised. She had already downed four bottles today.

  “Make sure you empty your bladder,” she read next. Well, Paulette had that part covered. She peed all the time these days, thanks to her son using her bladder as his personal futon.

  But the pain still hadn’t gone away. To distract herself, she had driven to the grocery store to pick up magnesium supplements (another helpful suggestion for preventing Braxton Hicks contractions) and some badly needed food, since their fridge was getting alarmingly empty at home again.

  Paulette now reached for a plastic bag on a dispenser hanging from a metal bar. She pulled the bag open with the tips of her fingernails. She then picked up an orange, examining it for dents. She dropped it into the bag and reached for another one.

  “Mrs. Williams,” someone said over her shoulder.

  Paulette turned to find a man standing behind her, next to a stack of Gala apples. He was wearing a polo shirt and baggy khaki shorts. A Nationals baseball cap covered his bald head. He was even wearing leather sandals, though he had paired them with black dress socks for some reason. When she realized it was Detective Nola, her breath hitched in her throat. Her eyes widened.

  “D-detective Nola, what . . . what are you doing here?”

  He raised a bushy eyebrow and then the green plastic basket in his hand that was filled with bread, a six-pack of Budweiser, a box of Saltines, and Cheese Whiz. “Just doing a bit of shopping, like yourself.”

  Paulette laughed nervously. “Uh, y-yes. I can see that. I’m just surprised to find you here in . . . in this grocery store, in particular. I-I didn’t know you lived in Chesterton.”

  He nodded. “My place is only a half mile from here. I walk here all the time to pick up things I need around the house.”

  She continued to smile dumbly in response, squeezing the orange so hard in her hand that orange juice might begin to ooze between her fingers. She dropped the battered orange back on the stack.

  “How are you doing, Mrs. Williams?”

  “Oh, fine. Fine!” she cried, placing the bag filled with a solitary orange into her grocery cart, wondering how she could politely walk away from the detective without seeming like she was fleeing. She knew now that Antonio hadn’t murdered Marques, but there was still something about the detective that made her uncomfortable. His discerning gaze, maybe? He stared at her like he could smell the guilt on her from a mile away, like he knew things that he shouldn’t know.

  The detective inclined his head. “And how is Mr. Williams?”

  “He’s also good. Thanks . . . thanks for asking.”

  “I appreciate you and your husband talking to me.”

  “Oh, it was no problem.” Her eyes wandered to the end of the aisle. “Well, it was nice seeing you again, but I really should be going, D—”

  “You know, we still haven’t made much progress in the investigation into Mr. Whitney’s murder.”

  She cleared her throat. Her smile teetered a little as tendrils of pain erupted again in her lower back. Not now, she thought, feeling another Braxton Hicks contraction coming on. “I’m sorry to hear that, Detective.”

  “It’s quite all right. We’re not taking it personally. It’s often the case with a guy like Whitney who had lots of enemies, lots of people with the motivation to do him harm or get rid of him . . . however justified . . . You have so many suspects that you don’t know which direction to look first.” He raised his brows again. “In fact, I understand from one of Mr. Whitney’s friends that in addition to making his money off of the selling of steroids and other drugs, Whitney wasn’t above engaging in a little bit of blackmail to make some extra cash.”

  Paulette fought back a wince. It felt like a metal belt was being wrapped around her waist and someone was pulling it tighter and tighter. “Is that so?” she said through clenched teeth.

  The detective nodded. “His friend told me that before Whitney died, he boasted about how he was making quite a lot of money off of one of his ex-girlfriends. He was blackmailing her. My understanding is that he managed to get more than two hundred thousand dollars out of her before all was said and done. He bought a new tricked-out car and everything.”

  “O-oh, r-really?”

  She reached out and gripped the handrail of her cart, her fingers wrenching the smooth plastic so hard that she might rip it clear off its metal brackets.

  The detective squinted his pale blue eyes at her. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about this ex-girlfriend, would you, Mrs. Williams?”

  Breathe, girl, she told herself. Breathe!

  But Paulette could feel her throat tightening despite her best efforts. The pain. It had turned from just a feeling into a living, malevolent being with claws that were dragging up and down her back and along her torso. She wanted to swat it away, to tell it and Detective Nola to leave her the hell alone, but she couldn’t.

  “N-no, I’m sorry,” she managed to say between huffs. “I don’t . . . I don’t know, Detective.”

  He took a step toward her and she instinctively took a step back, bumping into the stack of oranges and sending one tumbling to the tile floor and bouncing beneath a table where bananas and plantains were arranged in a spiral under a grinning Chiquita banana placard.

  “Are you all right, Mrs. Williams?” the detective asked.

  Paulette quickly nodded. “Y-yes, I’m . . . I’m fine. I . . .”

  She didn’t finish. She dropped to her knees, doubled over with pain, and the detective rushed toward her.

  “Mrs. Williams!” he shouted before dropping to one knee at her side. “Are you okay?”

  She suddenly felt a clammy wetness between her thighs. She dazedly looked down and saw that she was kneeling in a murky puddle. Where had all the liquid come from?

  Oh God, she thought, shaking with panic.

  Her water broke. It had broken right here in the grocery store. That wasn’t Braxton Hicks contractions she had been feeling all morning; it was the real thing. But it was too
early. . . way too early! Her son wasn’t due for another month and a half. But her body didn’t seem to agree. Paulette fell to all fours as the pain doubled, tripled. Tears sprang to her eyes. She groaned in agony. She had never felt pain like this before.

  “Mrs. Williams, tell me what’s wrong!”

  “I’m . . . I’m having my baby,” she managed to whisper to the detective.

  He blinked in surprise. “A baby? You mean you’re . . . you’re pregnant?”

  She nodded before pressing her head down to the wet floor.

  He turned and frantically waved down a produce boy who was pushing a cart of strawberries. “Call an ambulance! Call a goddamn ambulance! This woman needs help. She’s about to deliver a baby!”

  After that, the world around her seemed to lose all color and sound.

  Chapter 22

  Evan

  Evan casually strolled from the conference room down the corridor leading back to his office. He adjusted the knot in his tie and glanced at his wristwatch. He sighed dejectedly, discovering that he had fewer minutes until his next meeting than he had hoped. He was going to have to have a talk with Morris, their quality assurance officer, about his long-windedness. Nothing like wasting an hour while a guy pontificated on the merits of coated versus uncoated food packaging. Evan was sure half of those assembled at the conference table had started to fall asleep midway through Morris’s presentation.

  Evan looked up to find his secretary, Adrienne, waving her arms wildly, making him pause.

  He frowned quizzically and raised his hands in a “What’s wrong?” gesture.

  “Sir! Sir, you have a message from your brother,” Adrienne said as he approached. Her petite body almost jittered with barely contained anxiety. “He’s been trying to reach you, but you weren’t answering your phone.”

  “He called me?” Evan instantly reached his hand inside his suit jacket to check the inner pocket. “Shit,” he muttered. He had forgotten to bring his iPhone with him. “Is everything okay? What did Terrence say?”