Nickel City Crossfire

by Gary Earl Ross

  The walls were bare but framed photos stretched across the mantel displaying Simpkins and a heavyset woman at different ages, in different places. There were some of Keisha, at first all braces and glasses, then a pretty brown-skinned woman capped and gowned, then one showing her clad in scrubs. Shelves on the left held an old Encyclopedia Americana set and dozens of paperbacks. Shelves on the right displayed a mug commemorating Win’s retirement from the gas company, snow globes from various cities, school awards and science medals, and framed BS and Doctor of Nursing Practice degrees. So Keisha was more than the registered nurse her father’s description had suggested. I looked at her photos again, studied her flawless smile for a long time, and felt a twinge of sadness. Unlike parents proud of their child’s achievements, I was not surprised drugs had entered her life. No profession was immune to substance abuse, and addiction among medical workers was often called a silent epidemic. But I did wonder what Keisha’s tipping point had been.

  I turned as voices drew near and saw Winslow and his wife step into the dining room. Mona was a full head shorter than her husband and clad in a dark maroon winter pantsuit that made her look wider than she likely was. She had a pleasant dark face and short permed hair. Her smile was a stark contrast to the grief in her eyes. Transferring a small notebook to her left hand, she extended her right as she came toward me. “Mr. Rimes, I am so grateful to meet you.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Mrs. Simpkins.”

  “Call me Mona,” she said, shaking my hand and then holding it to lead me to the sectional. I laid my jacket on one end and sat in the middle. She didn’t let go of my hand until she sat beside me. “Win says you agreed to help find my Keisha.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, as Winslow sank into the recliner on the opposite end. “I’ll find her and let you know how she is. But I’ll bring her home if and only if she wants me to.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded. “Win told me that too. I know you can’t force her but long as I know she’s okay, I’ll be happy.” She patted my hand. “Real happy.”

  I took out my notebook, a pen, two business cards, and my cell phone. “I want you to tell me about Keisha. Anything you can. You never know which details will prove helpful.” I handed her the cards, and she passed one to her husband. Then I held up my phone with the picture Winslow had given me. “If you have any other pictures of your daughter on your cell phone, you can text them to the second number on the card.” Returning the cell to my jacket pocket, I opened the notebook and uncapped my pen. “So?”

  For a moment husband and wife looked at each other as if unsure what to say. Then the dam cracked. Leaked. Burst. For the next hour, as I took notes, the tension of the past month drained out of them in reminiscences that painted a portrait of a devoted honor student and daughter whose accomplishments were her parents’ greatest delights. An early reader with limitless curiosity, Keisha had excelled at everything and had been drawn to medical studies by helping to care for her now-deceased great-grandmother.

  “Couldn’ta asked for a better child,” Winslow said. “When she skipped fifth grade, the teacher said she might grow up to be a doctor, but we kinda knew right then she’d wanna be close to folks she helped. She said bein’ a nursing doctor was the best of both worlds.”

  “Even when she was only ten, she had a special understanding of how people hurt,” Mona said. “The way she would help me with Granny. The way she would say things like, ‘Mama, if we turn her this way instead of that, it won’t cause her so much pain’ or ‘If we put it through the blender one more time, it won’t hurt her throat so much going down.’ It’s like she knew without anybody having to tell her. Like her life’s work was right out there for everybody to see.”

  Her father nodded. “She got scholarship offers from lots of schools, even Columbia in New York, but she decided to stay right here at home and go to UB. When she finished and started workin’, we said she oughta get her own place. She did for a while but then moved in upstairs when our last tenant left.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “About five years,” Mona said. “She doesn’t make that much working for a non-profit but she pays us a little rent. We tore up our mortgage a long time ago so we got no house payments to make. Win and me, we don’t need a lot, so we keep most of Keisha’s money in the bank. You see, she said she was saving up to have a brand-new house built for all of us, and for the family she hoped to have one day. When the time was right, we planned to give it all back to her, to help.” Briefly, Mona smiled, as if anticipating Keisha’s reaction to their surprise or maybe the grandchildren she might now never see. Then her eyes welled and she made no effort to wipe them.

  “But if we need that money to help her get through this...” Winslow began.

  “Or to help you find her,” Mona added.

  For a moment I was quiet, wondering if the pressure to succeed had pushed Keisha off the straight and narrow. Or had it been her involvement with Odell Williamson? Her father thought the teacher was responsible for his daughter’s undoing but was it likely the overdose had been their first time out of the gate together? Surely there had been some hint that things were not as they should have been.

  “Tell me how she was when she was seeing Odell,” I began as gently as I could. “Before she ended up in the hospital. Was she her usual self? Or was she somehow different? Maybe stressed or tired or distant?”

  Without even glancing at each other, Winslow and Mona shook their heads in unison.

  “She was fine,” Mona said. “Working hard as ever but not at all bent out of shape about it. If anything, she was happier than usual. She’d been seeing Odell for ten months or so and liked him a lot. She didn’t think much of most of the men who tried to get with her. Too many with no job, no prospects, nothing they could talk about. But Odell was different. A nice young man from a good family. A gentleman. A professional, she called him.”

  Winslow snorted. “Professional criminal.”

  “We didn’t know, Win.” Mona shook her head. “Truly we didn’t, Mr. Rimes. We had no idea. I’m sure Keisha had no idea either.”

  “What about Odell’s family? I wonder if they had an idea.”

  Winslow sucked his teeth.

  “We wouldn’t know,” Mona said.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m just thinking out loud. Do you have his family’s address and telephone number?”

  Mona smiled. “Keisha keeps everything in her cell phone, but I’m old-fashioned. I have an address book.” She handed me the wire-bound notebook in her left hand. “Under W, Carl and Rhonda. He retired from the post office. She works at Penney’s on the Boulevard.”

  I found two entries for Williamson and laid the address book on the coffee table so I could copy the particulars into my notebook. Odell had lived in an apartment on Main Street near Mercer. Carl and Rhonda Williamson lived about two miles away from their son, on University Avenue near the UB South Campus. Odell had no home number—no surprise, given his age—but Mona had his parents’ home phone number and all three Williamson cell phones. That suggested a deeper level of acquaintance than people who had crossed paths because their children were dating. Keisha and Odell had moved beyond casual. I imagined both sets of parents were excited by the prospect of a good union. If Odell had been dealing drugs, his parents likely had no idea but they might provide me with enough scraps to lead me toward someone who would know.

  “When was the last time either of you spoke to Carl or Rhonda?”

  “Not since the funeral,” Mona said. “Keisha was still in the hospital and couldn’t come.” Her eyes met her husband’s. “Win and Carl had some words after the service.” She turned back to me. “We didn’t go to the cemetery or come back to the church for lunch.”

  I turned to Winslow. “What kind of words?”

  “He want to know how Keisha was doin’ and I told him she was alive, no thanks to his son.” The bitterness of his tone sounded fresh as if the exchange with Carl had
happened half an hour ago and not a few weeks earlier. The tension that had drained away over the past hour left ample space for anger.

  “It wasn’t the time, Win,” Mona said. “Not with them standing by the family limo for the trip to Forest Lawn. They were about to put their only child in the ground.”

  Winslow leveled his eyes at Mona and shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. I was pissed.”

  “How did he respond?” I asked.

  “He said Odell wasn’t the drug dealer, no matter what the news said.”

  “So he thought Keisha brought Odell to the party instead of the other way around.”

  “Yeah.” Winslow crossed his arms tightly.

  “Couldn’t have,” Mona said. “I helped her dress after the hospital. Her arms were smooth as glass, not a track mark in sight, except that one puncture.”

  Needles weren’t the only way to take heroin but I said nothing.

  “Shows what he knows,” Winslow snorted. “Uppity post office motherfucker!”

  “Winslow Simpkins!” Mona snapped her gaze toward her husband and her cheeks darkened as if she were embarrassed at his outburst. “There’s no call for you to be rude or crude, especially when we have a guest.” She drew in a deep breath as if gearing up for an argument, and Winslow tensed and pressed his lips together in a tight line as if awaiting the first salvo. “You apologize to Mr. Rimes for showing your ass in this house!”

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” I said, placing my hand on her forearm. “Twenty years in the army, I heard a lot worse. And I understand how you feel, Win. If it were my daughter—” I shook my head. “But we can’t let feelings get in the way here or keep you from doing what you have to do.”

  Winslow and Mona both looked at me—ashamed, angry, or confused, I could not say—and neither moved.

  “You have to tell me about Keisha’s friends, long-time and recent. Classmates, co-workers, old boyfriends. Anybody.” I tapped the address book still open on the coffee table. “You have to give me any numbers you’ve got and take me upstairs so I can spend time going through her things. As I hunt for her I may come across something I need to know more about, so I’ll call you, again and again if I have to. You have to keep your heads clear and focused at all times, both of you, to help me find your daughter. Can you do that?”

  They exchanged a brief, apologetic glance and nodded. Then Keisha’s mother and father both began to cry, loudly, chests heaving and shoulders shaking. Giving Winslow as much sympathy as I could with my face, I encircled Mona with my arms and held her.

  3

  Keisha’s apartment was smaller than her parents’ flat downstairs and painted in warm colors, mainly yellow and orange. Beside the entry door stood a wooden coat tree that held two coats and two jackets, one with a fur collar, one without. The vinyl storm door in her living room led to a front porch with wrought iron railings, outdoor furniture draped in heavy plastic, and an undisturbed layer of snow.

  For a time after Mona left me in the apartment, I looked out the porch door and the window on either side of it. All the houses I saw up and down the street appeared lived in. Most had Christmas decorations and half-open shades or curtains to admit light. Sidewalks and driveways had been cleared of snow but a hardened crust clung to the pavement. A few driveways held cars. Most had iced-over tire tracks at least to the house, some as far back as the garage. Her parents considered Keisha a victim and believed she had been forced to write the letter they received. Near the end of our discussion, they wondered if she’d been snatched off the street and forced into a car or nearby dwelling, but they could not imagine who among their neighbors would do something like that. Nothing about any of the houses I could see suggested an urban fortress cut off from the world, like the Cleveland house where Ariel Castro had kept three women imprisoned for a decade. Sexual enslavement was, of course, still a possibility, but everything I had learned so far suggested Keisha had gone voluntarily.

  First, she had left her car in the garage rather than take it with her. According to her parents, whenever she used the garage, she entered the house through the back door, just steps away. But on the day she disappeared she had parked in the garage and walked down the driveway to the front porch, where she dropped her keys, wallet, and cell phone through the mail slot. Then, presumably, she got into someone’s car and rode away with nothing but the clothes on her back—and perhaps money and a credit card or two in her shoe. It was possible she had been forced into that car at gunpoint and later forced to write her letter, but a gun pressed against the temple makes the average person’s hands shake. The handwriting in Keisha’s letter—which both Mona and Winslow identified as hers—was so tight and fastidious it appeared not to have been done under duress. If anything, it suggested above-average self-control.

  At last turning away from the window, I faced the interior of her home to see if I could determine why Keisha had left and how I could begin to look for her.

  The living room was configured differently from her parents’—yellow paint instead of wallpaper, no fake fireplace with photos on the mantel, no knick-knacks or souvenirs in sight, a loveseat instead of a couch, a wooden rocker facing the LED TV on the outside wall, and a trio of packed three-shelf bookcases lining the interior wall. Above the bookcases hung three paintings—a coffee-colored nude and a street scene signed by artists whose names I didn’t recognize and a print of the famous Paul Collins painting of Harriet Tubman, gun in hand, leading slaves through the forest.

  Beyond the wall with the paintings was a dining room that appeared to double as Keisha’s home office. It had bare orange walls and a square black table with four matching chairs. One side of the table held loose papers, file folders, and a pile of unopened mail. The other held a matching black Dell laptop and inkjet printer and a white iPhone, all plugged in. A quick check showed the phone and computer were password-protected. I’d have to take them to LJ to see if they held anything useful. Then I sifted through the mail—Christmas cards, junk, catalogs, and material from professional associations but no bills because Mona had already covered her daughter’s utilities and credit cards. Their tabs labeled with a fine-point Sharpie, the file folders made it clear Keisha brought her work home. They were stuffed with newspaper clippings, magazine and journal articles, and internet printouts on a variety of topics related to public health, from methodologies for determining disease vectors to strategies for addressing vaccine-resistant parents to clinic protocols for dealing with the homeless. The loose papers consisted of unfiled articles, notes in Keisha’s and other hands, and internal memos from Humanitas. I found an empty folder and slipped the notes, memos, and unfiled articles inside. Then I laid the folder and phone atop the closed computer.

  Next, I went into the pale yellow kitchen, which had glass-doored wooden cupboards, a six-bottle wire wine rack on the counter, a stainless steel sink that dated from 1970, and a bistro-style dinette set with two chairs. The refrigerator had been cleaned out and held only a water pitcher and a few beers. The freezer above, however, was packed with meats, frozen vegetables, and plastic cans of concentrated juice. Mona had disposed of the perishables but left the freezer untouched for her daughter’s return. Her optimism left a knot in my stomach.

  I moved from the kitchen into a hallway with a closed door on either side and at the end. On the right was a guestroom with a neatly made full-sized bed and an empty dresser and closet. On the left was a clean white bathroom with a Mercator projection shower curtain that had brightly colored land masses and transparent oceans. The medicine cabinet held only over-the-counter products—pain relievers, cold medicines, antihistamines, toothpaste. There were no prescriptions and nothing stronger than Nyquil or Listerine. The linen closet beside the bathroom had towels and sheets on the two upper shelves and blankets on the bottom.

  The bedroom at the end of the hall was Keisha’s. It had a queen-sized bed with a bookcase headboard and matching dresser set. The closet was full of pants suits, skirt suits, and stackable
shoe racks. One corner of the closet held a tennis racket, a volleyball, and two paintball guns, a rifle and a pistol. A door perpendicular to the bed led to a back porch with two plastic Adirondack chairs and a covered propane grill. I started with the nightstand and moved to the dresser and bureau. The drawers yielded clothing, from jeans to underwear to nightgowns. Atop the dresser were cosmetics, jewelry boxes, and a box of disposable contact lenses. More women’s clothing was in the bureau but the top drawer had men’s briefs and socks, a few shirts, and a pair of jeans. I didn’t expect to find clues to Keisha’s whereabouts in Odell’s clothing but I went through it anyway. There was nothing special about any of it. No custom labels on the shirts, no silk in the underwear. If these were typical of the clothing in his home, and if Keisha’s costume jewelry was any indication, Odell spent his drug money on something other than what he wore and precious stones for his girlfriend.

  I thought about that as I went back to the dining room. I jotted a note that I must not only interview Odell’s parents, but also see his apartment, and find a way into his financials. Then I pocketed the iPhone and charger, got the file folder and the laptop, and locked Keisha’s front door with the key her parents had given me to use when they weren’t home.

  It was about six o’clock and dark. I had declined Mona’s invitation to stay for dinner because I was meeting Phoenix at seven. In the mid-sized Nickel City, I had plenty of time to reach North Buffalo and deliver the phone and computer to LJ then get back downtown to Betty’s Restaurant on Virginia Street. I went to my dark blue Ford Escape and climbed inside, putting everything in the front passenger footwell. I pressed the START button and punched in my favorite satellite jazz station as I pulled away from the curb. With Sonny Rollins as background, I pushed Keisha Simpkins and her parents and Odell Williamson into a corner of my brain where they could wait until I had enough information to immerse them all in a developer bath that would produce clearer pictures.