Two Graves Dug

by Penny Mickelbury

  “What happened to him?” Carmine asked, apparently apropos of nothing I could fathom. “The punk who fired on Luciano. What happened to him?”

  I’d asked Itchy the same question, and gave Carmine the same answer I’d received: burial in the Harlem River the same day, body neither searched for nor found. Carmine slapped his hands together in an up and down motion signifying that the matter was and had been resolved with the Mason boy’s execution those long years ago. Whoever was after Jill Mason, it was because of something she’d done herself, not because of who she was related to. And I was truly relieved by that because I had no intention of injecting myself in mob business. Not ever.

  “I think I’ll take a walk over to Dr. Mason’s, then, and introduce myself,” I said, standing.

  Carmine looked at his watch. “She ain’t there,” he said, looking wistfully at his empty glass. “Her last patient leaves at 7:15 and she leaves at 8:00. She walks over to E.7th Street and checks on her parents, then she walks over to 2nd Avenue for a taxi home. Every day but Saturday. She quits at two on Saturdays.”

  Carmine smiled almost charmingly when Yolanda poured him another beer and his bonhomie extended to me. Without my having to ask, he told me that he knew Jill Mason’s routine because, as a new patient, his daughter was the last patient and Carmine, as a gesture of kindness and gratitude, often waited and walked Dr. Mason to her parents’ and then waited downstairs for the fifteen or twenty minutes she was with them, before hailing a taxi for her and seeing her safely into it. “She tries to act like she’s not scared but I know she is ‘cause if she didn’t want me to wait and help her, she wouldn’t let me.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Jill Mason had a routine, just like I did, that anybody paying attention could figure out in a week’s time. I had three additional questions for Carmine. I asked them, he answered them, and he left. Yolanda and I sat quietly for a long time. She broke the silence.

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  I shrugged. “What’s not to like? Carmine paid us double ‘cause he was drooling over your chest.” But her solemn look and feeling didn’t flinch or fade. I knew to pay attention. “What are you feeling?”

  “Bad news. Bad energy. Bad vibes.”

  “Well, yeah. Carmine can have that effect.”

  “Not Carmine!” She snapped the words out of her mouth like she was breaking a twig between her fingers, and her eyes flashed black. Yolanda was my business partner, emphasis on both business and partner. She knew and understood and was fascinated by everything about business and computers and organization and planning and goals. She was so lukewarm to the concept of private investigations that, even after so many years, she still rolled her eyes when forced to confront the true nature of her livelihood. She also possessed a sixth sense that made my Grandma genuflect and cross herself. Whether it involved a potential stock investment or a potential client, if Yolanda had a “sense” about it, I listened and heeded. And waited for her to share. She took her time.

  “What would be a good reason to hurt a shrink?” she finally asked.

  I gave serious consideration to the question and couldn’t think of a good reason to hurt a shrink and said so. Shrinks help people. Save people’s lives, just like surgeons. After all, if you save a person’s sanity, isn’t that the same as saving a person’s life?

  Yolanda’s look told me she agreed with only part of my assessment. “Shrinks know secrets,” she said. “Shrinks know things nobody else knows. People tell shrinks things they don’t tell another soul. And, just like priests and lawyers, shrinks go to the grave with those secrets.”

  Well shit. That certainly cast things in a different metal. I was starting to feel a little bad vibe-ish about this job, too. It had seemed simple enough: Find out who’s terrorizing Jill Mason, who just happened to be a shrink. I’d thought drugs. Doctors, including psychiatrists, keep drugs in their offices. And I’d thought money: even people who didn’t know Jill Mason knew she was loaded. I even thought some kind of racial thing was possible. The world hadn’t changed so much that there wouldn’t be people who harbored resentment toward a Black female professional, especially a rich one. But I hadn’t thought of Jill Mason as being a keeper of secrets. I was about to say that to Yolanda when she got up and started to do stuff: close the blinds and put the empty beer bottles and glasses on a tray and turn on the desk lamps. Then she went across the room, behind the partition to the computer corner, leaving me to my thoughts.

  I looked across my desk at Carmine’s check, being surprised, now, after the fact, that he’d written a check and not paid in cash. Carmine and Theresa Aiello it said, along with the address and telephone number. So ordinary. So like every other normal citizen. Except that it was Carmine, who, not twelve hours ago, I had thought of as slime. Now he was a client. Now I knew stuff about him: he had a joint checking account at a credit union with a wife named Theresa and a daughter he cared enough about to take to a therapist several times a week. And because he cared about his daughter, he cared about his daughter’s therapist. Enough to pay me way too much money, even considering he was trying to make a good showing for Yolanda.

  I looked around my office, half expecting that it, too, had changed at some point during the day. The blinds on the windows that were high enough up the wall to hug the ceiling were closed, and no light reflected through the wall of glass blocks at the front of the building. The nubby gray carpet that covered the center of the floor beneath the desks looked darker, but it always did at night, I told myself, just as the surrounding hardwood didn’t seem so shiny. The modern, brushed chrome goose neck lamps, designed to look from another era, were bowed low on all three desks, as if trying to be incongruous. I wanted to imitate them. I felt vulnerable, suddenly, and I didn’t know why. I wished Mike or Eddie were around. They were retired cops who worked for me part-time— loud, rowdy, irreverent, funny guys, unloved by Yolanda because they were loud and rowdy and irreverent— but damn good investigators and a guaranteed foil against feelings of vulnerability. They were handling a skip-trace way out on the Island and wouldn’t be in the office until next week. I sure didn’t want to feel vulnerable until next week.

  The lights from the computer monitors behind the Shoji screens on the far wall reflected gently. There were three of them and only Yolanda understood why. I understood only that I appreciated the results they produced at her command. Tonight, their presence was comforting, as was Yo’s insistent tapping at the keyboards. But all the plants looked spooky, not alive and vibrant as I knew them to be. The door at the end of the room that led to the bathroom and the kitchen and the storeroom stood ajar, only darkness visible beyond it, and looked sinister. And whatever the hell was wrong with me needed to quit!

  I raised the hinged neck of the lamp, pressed a button on its base and increased the wattage, and looked down at the piece of note paper next to Carmine’s check. On it he’d written Jill Mason’s office and home addresses, and her parents’ address. She lived in Chelsea, in a loft. I knew the building. The cheapest loft in it went for more than a million. Her office was in a building I knew, too. When I was growing up in that neighborhood, sociologists called buildings like it tenements. In it, on the upper floors, lived people who almost certainly had secrets. At ground level are the shopkeepers— sellers of old meat and older vegetables, cheap wine, stale bread, expired milk, fresh cigarettes and cold beer, fifty dollar blue jeans and hundred dollar sneakers. The people upstairs buy the stuff downstairs with angry resignation, as if walking ten blocks or riding the subway two stops to better goods and services was prohibited by law. Same thing was true for the people who lived in Jill Mason’s parents’ building. I looked again at the piece of note paper, at the address of Robert and Leola Mason. I knew that building, too. Full of more people who could— who most likely did— have secrets. Including Robert and Leola Graves Mason?

  I took a spiral notebook from my desk and wrote down everything that I had done that day, including th
e ugly business involving the little girl on Avenue A. I also made a note not to charge the parents, Bert and Angie Calle. Carmine paying double would take care of their fee. I wrote down not just what I’d done but what I’d thought and felt about what I was doing, who I’d seen and spoken with, no matter how casually. Very often, in fact, almost always, I revisit these first day notes during a case, and I always find something helpful. Even though I make case notes at the end of each day, those first day notes and impressions and feelings have a unique perspective that can’t be duplicated.

  When I was finished, I stood, stretched, and gathered the tray of bottles and glasses and carted it back to the kitchen. I rinsed the bottles and put them in the recycling bin and the glasses into the dishwasher. Because I hadn’t eaten lunch at the office today, the kitchen was clean. Demonstrating that it had a mind of its own, my stomach rumbled like Mount St. Helens and reminded me that I hadn’t had lunch anywhere today. And it was almost nine-thirty at night.

  “Yo!” I bellowed, leaving the kitchen and meeting her scurrying from the warm glow of the computer corner toward me.

  “What?” She wore her computer glasses low on her nose and looked at me over their rims with a wrinkle of concern creasing her brow.

  “Let’s eat. And take a walk past Jill Mason’s office.”

  Nightfall had brought winter. A slicing wind, bearing semi-frozen droplets, cut through my leather bomber jacket like it was tissue paper. I wrapped my scarf around my head and ears— my hair hadn’t grown back all the way yet— and buried my hands deep in my pockets. Yolanda was similarly bundled, the difference being her long overcoat, which no doubt prevented her lower extremities from feeling like ice bars. It was time to move the long underwear to the front of the closet. And find my hats! I shave my head for spring and summer, Hawk-like, and wear it full and long in the winter, like Spenser. Having winter arrive before my hair did was unplanned. And unappreciated.

  As usual, foot and vehicular traffic was plentiful in our ‘hood, and we didn’t talk much en route to Jill Mason’s office because we weren’t able to walk side-by-side on the narrow, crowded sidewalks long enough for conversation. We wove in and out between people and cars, in the street for half a block, back on the sidewalk for a block, back in the street for a block. Heads down, shoulders hunched, eyes narrowed slits staring into the mean wind and watering. A month from now, those tears would freeze before they reached chin level.

  At the corner of First Avenue and East 2nd Street, Yo and I re-united and we locked arms running across the Avenue against the traffic. It was too cold to wait for the light to change and the mayor’s crusade against jay-walking in the city had never taken firm hold in our part of town. We stopped directly in front of the building where I’d spent the first seven years of my life. It looked worn and sad and more than a little shabby, but not lifeless. A lot like New Yorkers of a certain age: you can tell life has been hard on them, but you can also tell there’s still lots of life left in them.

  All of the ground level stores on this side were still open and doing good business: a bodega, a pawn shop, a newsstand and a Chinese take-out. We rounded the corner, putting the wind at our backs. The bank was closed but the cash machine in the lighted lobby was doing good business. Next door, the video store was busy, too. The nail salon next door to it was dark and empty. The iron gate pulled securely across the next doorway and padlocked, was illuminated by an overhead spotlight that shone on a black and silver plaque. JILL MASON, M.D. it said; and in English and Spanish it listed office hours for every day except Sunday. Everything just like Carmine described it.

  “I don’t know how they do it,” Yo said in an almost whisper. “Listen to peoples’ problems all day. Look at that: the woman works six days a week, listening to other peoples’ shit when she’s got enough shit in her own life.”

  “She does more than listen,” I said, stepping closer and examining the metal gate and its lock. “I mean, she must talk some if people like Carmine’s kid get better, right? Otherwise what would be the point?” I grabbed the gate and shook it. It didn’t even wiggle. I walked next door to the coffee shop with its steamed windows. I held the door open for Yo and followed her inside. It was a grungy little place, but the smell of brewing coffee and the sizzle of burgers on the grill were proving a comfort to a dozen trusting souls in from the elements this night. So comforting that, except for the guy on duty behind the counter, not a single one of them looked up as we entered.

  “Wonderful ambiance,” Yolanda breathed. “Why don’t we eat here?”

  I was so hungry I couldn’t even joke about it. I cut her a look as I approached the counterman, an already old thirty-something with the look of drugs and the joint about him, before he could move toward us. I wanted to talk to him without being overheard. Yolanda followed at a near distance.

  “? Que paso?” I extended my hand and he looked at it, then wiped his hand on a towel stuck in the waistband of his khakis and shook. When I had my hand back, I gave him my card and waited for him to read it before I said, low enough so only he heard, “Somebody’s been giving Dr. Mason some trouble and I’m looking to find out who.”

  Nothing moved but the man’s eyes, from the card, to me, back to the card, to Yo, back to me, back to the card, which he finally slipped into his shirt pocket. “You know my uncle,” he said. “Willie One Eye.” Meaning, maybe he talks to me, maybe he doesn’t. But he at least considers it.

  I nodded. “For a long time.” Which means, it’s OK to talk to me, Bro. Check with Willie. He’ll stand up for me.

  He patted the pocket where he’d put my card and looked out of the corner of his eye down the counter where a guy had raised his coffee cup into the air, signaling the need for a refill. “I heard there was some shit happened over there, but I don’t know nothin’ about it. I hear anything, I’ll tell Willie.” And he moved off down the counter to refill the coffee cup. I watched him closely. His khakis and white shirt were clean and starched, his black hair long but recently cut. He’d been clean long enough to have a steady gait, and straight long enough to have a steady gig that included responsibility for the cash drawer. If this guy ever told me anything, I could trust it.

  I surveyed the crowd and briefly wondered whether it would do any good to ask if anybody knew or had heard anything about Jill Mason’s troubles. I shrugged off the thought. No point to it. I followed Yolanda out into the cold night and up the street. She was moving with a sense of purpose so she’d apparently decided on a place for dinner, and I was so hungry I didn’t care if she tried to convince me to eat something that was good for me. I could always make detour and grab a slab of ribs from that Southern food joint on Tenth Avenue before heading home; a little something to keep the vegetables company. But she surprised me by running down a taxi stopped at the light, hauling us both inside, and directing the driver to a Chelsea corner that was home to my favorite burger joint. My imagination was already chewing when Yo removed a sheaf of papers from her purse and dropped them in my lap.

  “Jill Mason, her dead uncle, Itchy and Bumpy Johnson, a brief history of race relations between Harlem Blacks and the mob. Jill was driving the car when her husband and children were killed. His family made a stink, but then they’d been bitchin’ about her since her Black self married their white son fifteen years earlier, so I don’t think there’s much fire in that smoke bomb, even though she did collect several mil in insurance.” Yo reached over and pulled one paper-clipped set of papers from the others. “Read this one carefully.”

  I was shifting through the stack of papers, holding them up and trying to decipher a few words here and there from the headlights of the traffic. “Why this one?” I asked, squinting at a sentence that revealed Itchy Johnson’s first name to be Malachi. “What’s in it?”

  “Secrets,” Yolanda said, and I could tell by the way she said it that asking her questions would do me no good. And since I couldn’t read in the dark, I kept quiet, watched the traffic, and thought about Yolan
da.

  Something about this case had gotten to her and I didn’t know whether to be grateful, annoyed, or worried. Yo didn’t like the nature of investigating, though she was able to appreciate the process and the results. She was happy doing the business end— billing people on time and making sure the money was paid on; the part I didn’t like or do well. And because she understood computers much better than people, and because she believed in preparation, I always had access to every piece or hint of information that could be useful to me in any given investigation. But Yolanda didn’t like the ugliness of a world that caused so much pain and made so much of that pain profitable to people like us.

  I massaged the stack of papers in my lap as if they were Braille and I could read them with my fingers. What I had here was information, yes. But also something more. Something here bothered Yolanda. Secrets. I should be happy that she was interested, engrossed, even, in a case, even if I was slightly annoyed that she didn’t show this level of interest in all our cases. But I was mostly feeling uneasy.

  We were in the restaurant, warm and cozy and halfway through a brew, before Yo spoke to me. She had let me read the Itchy Johnson stuff first, had watched me read it a second time, before she said anything.

  “What do you make of it?” she asked.

  “It was a long time ago, Yo, and he’s an old man.” Like any normal person about to be caught in a bind, I tried equivocating to buy myself some time. Since I didn’t know what she was after, better not to take a position on anything.

  “He’s a liar,” Yo said dryly.

  “Understandably so,” I said quickly. “Think about what life was like back then, Yo. About what it’s like now, for that matter. Why wouldn’t a guy like Itchy claim kinship to a powerful figure like Bumpy Johnson? He probably escaped many an ass whipping because some punk thought he was Bumpy’s cousin.”