Two Graves Dug

by Penny Mickelbury

  Whatever had been building up in my throat escaped. I tried to push it back down, but it wouldn’t go. Sandra must have learned from her Grandma because she grabbed me and held on tight. I was breathing like I’d just run the marathon. I didn’t want to cry. Not because I was too macho for such a thing, but because I was afraid that once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. I was saved by the bell.

  “You expecting somebody?” Sandra asked.

  “Dinner,” I said, standing.

  “God bless you, Phil,” she said, standing, too, and heading for the kitchen. I pressed the buzzer to admit the delivery guy while she was getting plates and napkins and another bottle of seltzer and bringing it all to the table. She was seated and ready when I put the bags down, and sniffing the air appreciatively. The appreciation changed to delighted horror when she opened the bags.

  “Phil Rodriquez! Yolanda would kill you if she knew you were feeding me not only a heart attack burger, but greasy fries as well!”

  “You plan on telling her?”

  “Hell, no,” she said, getting up. “Where’s the ketchup? Cabinet or ‘fridge?”

  “‘Fridge,” I answered, stuffing too many fries into my mouth. “And get the hot sauce, too. Cabinet next to the ‘fridge.”

  While we ate, we talked about many things—none of them Yolanda—and we both knew that it wasn’t because we were avoiding the subject. There just didn’t seem to be much left to say. Not to each other. I needed to talk to Yolanda and I didn’t need Sandra as intermediary. And that wasn’t a job she wanted, either. We cleaned up the kitchen together, not that there was much to clean. Not a morsel of food was left and the plates practically washed themselves. Sandra had another glass of wine and declared herself exhausted. “I slept maybe two hours last night,” she said. I knew the feeling.

  While I walked her to the subway she told me that she and Yolanda were spending the night apart for the first time ever and assured me that it was a good and healthy thing to do. She also told me that Yolanda would be at work tomorrow and that she would talk to me, would tell me everything. It was on the walk back home, when I was alone again, that the sadness filled up my chest again. The sadness and the pain that represented the loss of beauty and innocence for Yolanda Maria Aguierre.

  But at least she’s still alive, said a voice in my head and I stopped walking, to think about that. Alive, perhaps, but tortured for so many years. Is this what little Pam Starrett has to look forward to? And Carmine’s daughter? Those little girls have Jill Mason. Had Yolanda had a Jill Mason when she was a youngster? Knowing what I know about Puerto Rican families of that time period, I didn’t think so. Knowing what I know about some Puerto Rican families of this time period didn’t reassure me as I recalled the shame and embarrassment of Bert Calle and Daniel Esposito. Yes, they were angry, but they mostly were shamed by what had happened to their daughters and it was only through the efforts of the women that the little girls were getting help. So I doubted that Yolanda had seen a therapist twenty-six or twenty-seven years go.

  I was walking back home from the subway stop but I didn’t want to go home. I felt better knowing that Yo was all right and I definitely needed to sleep, but I also was wired and tense and angry. I’d never sleep with all that emotion roaming around inside me. Then I thought of Gregory Francis Jenkins. Tomorrow, you sick fuck. Tomorrow, your ass is mine. I suddenly wanted to go straight home and straight to bed, because the sooner I slept, the sooner it would be tomorrow.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It beat yesterday morning by a few miles but I still wasn’t ready for the phone ringing before seven o’clock. At six fifty-two.

  “Digame.”

  “Phil, come over to Dr. Mason’s office right away. Right now, Phil, you hear me? Arrive, arrive!”

  Pure stomach-knotting fear got me up and dressed and out on to the street in something less than three minutes, and I was a perfect Buddhist during the eight or nine minutes it took me to run to Jill Mason’s: There were no thoughts in my mind, no feelings, no intentions, no awareness of the world around me. I was merely running. As hard and as fast as my body would allow. The fear resumed its position of dominance when I turned the corner and saw the unmarkeds in front of the building. That’s when I allowed myself to wonder why Yolanda was calling me from the psychiatrist’s office so early in the morning. It wasn’t much more than idle speculation— given Yo’s state of mind, it made perfect sense for her to see a therapist, and if I had to see one, I’d choose Jill Mason. What I willed my mind not to speculate about was the reason for the panic I’d heard in Yolanda’s voice.

  I was still breathing heavily but able to speak when I reached the door. I knew I’d be stopped so I started talking right away: I identified myself and Jill Mason as my client and the woman inside with Jill Mason as my partner and the person who had placed the call to me and probably to the police as well. The uniform looked at me without ever speaking and pointed me inside, through the small foyer, where I knew I’d encounter a detective who may or may not allow me further, depending on the nature of the crime.

  I got as far as the entry to the waiting room before being confronted by the detective and I began my narrative again, in a slightly louder voice. It worked.

  “Phil!” Yolanda called out from, I imagined, Jill Mason’s office, appearing almost immediately thereafter.

  I took a step toward her but the plainclothes guy blocked me with an arm across my chest.

  I grabbed him and Yolanda materialized like vapor and grabbed me, and a voice from within called out, “Let Rodriquez in!” All that happened almost simultaneously.

  I let Yolanda push me back and away from the plainclothes who clearly wanted a piece of me, and then pull me past him toward Jill Mason’s inner sanctum, where another detective— no doubt the one who’d let me in—was guarding the door. I was walking pretty much on my own, though Yo’s hand was still tight on my arm, when I saw Jill. She was half-sitting, half-reclining on the Mission sofa covered in the African print fabric. Her lovely face already was purpling and puffy— the perp had known how to work on a face. Her hair was a tangled mess and her blouse was ripped.

  I couldn’t look at her any longer so I looked around the office and almost smiled at the sight. It was a mess. The kind of mess that occurs when there’s been one hell of a fight. I looked back at Jill Mason, who was looking steadily at me, and gave her the reaction she was waiting for.

  “Kicked his ass good, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Gave almost as good as I got,” she said, the words quite slurred through her cut and swollen lips, and she might have smiled, too; I couldn’t tell.

  Yolanda was still holding my arm and I pulled her close in a two-arm embrace and kissed the top of her head. She leaned into me and totally released for a couple of brief seconds, before collecting herself and leaving my embrace to bestow the same comfort on Jill Mason, who welcomed it. I was thinking how much they resembled close friends in the way they gave and received comfort, and how much I envied women that ability, when the door to the closet opened and a plainclothes detective I hadn’t seen before stepped into the office.

  “Nothin,’” he said in a dry, expressionless tone, his body language as empty as his voice. “Didn’t nobody see nothin.’ Half a dozen people out there and didn’t nobody see nothin’.” He looked like a TV detective: Ugly coat, ugly hat, ugly shoes, ugly, out of shape body. His eyes redeemed him. They were a clear, light gray, striking and unusual, and they conveyed an unexpected warmth.

  I looked from his eyes to the door to the closet to Jill Mason and back to that damn door again, remembering the first time I’d been in this office. I’d looked at every inch and corner of this room, and I’d decided that the door was to a closet. It was a wooden door, an interior door, not an exterior door. I took a step toward it and the detective who’d allowed my into the room shook his head at me: don’t touch. It hadn’t been processed yet.

  “That door goes to the outside?” I asked h
im.

  He shook his head again. “To a hallway, which goes to a door to the outside,” he said.

  I looked back at Jill Mason, whose face was taking on what I recognized as a look of horror, even through the horror already etched on her face. “You didn’t know about that door,” she said, and it was a statement and not a question. “I didn’t tell you about that door. I am so sorry. Only the patients use it. Nobody but the patients knew it was there. Or so I thought, until he left through it. He knew exactly where it was.”

  Too much. It was all too much. I needed to get out of there and to go do something that would allow me to feel that I knew what I was doing. Because standing there made me feel a total idiot. The EMTs were arriving when I got outside and it struck me that I was wondering, while I was standing there watching Jill Mason’s face swell and discolor, where they were. They brushed past me, almost shoving me into the plainclothes whose arm I was going to break just a few minutes earlier, and he looked ready to take up where we’d left off. Just give me a reason, his eyes and his posture said. Only my desire to get to the back of the building, to see that back door, prevented me from obliging him, because smashing something right now would feel really good. And would be a really Neanderthal or pre-historic thing to do. I didn’t care, but Yolanda and Dr. Mason might.

  I nodded politely at the man and jogged down the block, turned the corner, and looked for an approach to the back of the building. If the perp had left by that back door, he had to have gone some where, and despite what the detective said, somebody had seen something. That somebody may not have shared what was seen with him—and given his warm and winning personality, no wonder. It was barely daylight on a frigid, snow-threatening morning. Who needed his shitty attitude under those conditions? Who needed his shitty attitude under any conditions? I never understood why cops never understood the need to be nice to people. Cops resented it like hell when citizens were hostile or rude or non-responsive; yet cops gave citizens hostile or rude or non-responsive behavior a lot of the time.

  There were two heavy-duty steel doors at the rear of the building, one on each end, opening on to a cement walkway. On the far end, the walkway led to a large, green garbage bin; on the near end, to a set of concrete stairs that led up. I went to the stairs and ran down them, to the walkway and to the other end, toward the garbage Dumpster. It was almost as clean here as if Basil Griffin were in charge. If the perp had dropped or left anything in his wake during his escape, it would have been visible. I turned back toward the stairs and took in, on the way back up, the fact that there was a steel railing. Had the perp touched it? Wouldn’t matter, I told myself. That was TV cop shit. Damn railing outside, in the rain and sleet and snow and funky, dirty New York air, God knows who going up and down these stairs, and the prints of Jill Mason’s attacker could be lifted right through all the moisture and the grime? Yeah, right.

  When I reached the top of the stairs I looked up and around, to get my bearings, and looked directly into the eyes of Willie One Eye’s nephew. The short-order cook and manager of the diner. He was holding a black and bulging garbage bag in each hand. He wore a knit cap, but no coat. And he’d obviously been at work long enough...to have seen the perp make his escape? I looked at the man long enough to be certain that he recognized me. Then I turned away from him and back toward the front of the building. I would, I knew, have to wait for this guy to tell his uncle that he had words for me. If, in fact, he did have words for me. That he had information, I was certain. That he’d share it with me, I could only hope.

  Dr. Mason’s receptionist (whose name I still didn’t know) was out front and on the verge of hysteria when I rounded the corner, and she shrieked my name when she saw me. I hurried toward her and she toward me and we met in the middle of the block.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Rodriquez? Is Dr. Mason OK? Why are the police here?”

  “Dr. Mason is...ah...” I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know how she was, really.

  The woman’s hands went to her face. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” Her shrieks reverberated in the frigid air.

  I touched her shoulder. “She’s alive. She’s conscious and talking. But she has been injured,” I said. Then I said it again, to make sure she heard me, and I saw it sink in.

  “Is it...was it the same guy? Whoever has been trying to hurt her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’ve got to stop him, Mr. Rodriquez. Please.” She didn’t finish because my favorite cop came over to tell her that she could go in. He pointedly didn’t look at me, which was a relief. I no longer wanted to smash him. I just wanted to get Yolanda and get to work, and so I followed the receptionist back inside. The paramedics had attended to the patient, who had combed her hair and was wearing a different blouse and sweater, and were packing up their equipment. Yolanda still sat beside Jill Mason, holding an ice pack to her face and another to the splint on her right wrist. She really had put up a hell of a fight.

  “Oh Dr. Mason!”

  “Margo, everything is just fine,” she said, extending her good arm and patting Margo’s shoulder and making comforting noises to the woman. She’s beat to a pulp and was comforting Margo and...and Yolanda! For she was, as much as Yolanda was comforting and supporting her. Maybe the woman really was a saint. Or merely the kind of human being we all should be.

  Yo left Margo to attend to her boss and came over to me. “You see anything?”

  “Maybe,” I said, still pissed as shit about that back door and my ignorance of it. “Maybe somebody else saw something and maybe he’ll tell me about it. I’ll fill you in. Are you coming to the office or staying with Dr. Mason?”

  “Definitely to the office as soon as I get her home and comfortable. Margo will stay here and deal with the patients. And with this mess,” she said despondently, looking around at the mess that was the trashed office.

  I reminded her that we had car services and cleaning services as clients and she gave me a Yolanda Maria Special High Wattage Smile that lit up the room and banished, for a moment, all traces of pain and horror.

  “You mean you’re actually paying attention to who’s paying us?”

  “Not only that, but working at learning how to make good and proper use of our computer friends. Wait ‘til I tell you!”

  She laughed out loud, a sound so beautiful as to almost bring me to tears. “I should nut out and leave your sorry ass to your own devices more often!”

  I didn’t have to work too hard at feigning a look of dread. “Oh, no! Not that!” I hugged her and then went over to talk to Jill Mason. I knelt in front of her and we locked eyes. Some how, in our very brief association, it had become apparent that we could communicate volumes without words. I saw in her gaze a steadiness and a calm that convinced me that she was and would be fine. If some asshole didn’t succeed in killing her. And she saw exactly what I was thinking and feeling because she told me to get over myself.

  “Stop being so noble. You are to be blamed for nothing and to be thanked for so much. Mr. Aiello, too.”

  Oh, shit. Carmine. I’d have to tell him what had happened. I didn’t want to think about how that might play out and so, changed the subject, by telling her that we were sending a cleaning service and a car. Margo would, gladly, direct the restoring of the office to its original state and deal with the clients—most of whom would already have heard about what happened before they arrived and would have come solely for information any way. And Yolanda would go home with her.

  “I’ll send Mike or Eddie over later today.”

  She held up her splinted right wrist to stop my words. “Only on one condition,” she said firmly. “That they’re coming to find who’s doing this to me and stop him, not to be bodyguards. I want to hire you, Phillip. I want to know why this is happening to me.”

  I nodded. So did I. “You understand that will mean talking to me to some extent about—”

  She stopped my words with her hand again. “I know what i
t means and I will share with you what I can. But believe me when I tell you, Phillip, that this madness,” and she waved her injured at the madness surrounding us, “has nothing to do with any current client, and probably not with a past one.”

  I stood up without comment because not only did I believe her, I knew that the truth of her words would make finding and stopping the madness, as she called it, so difficult as to be virtually impossible. For that meant there was no logical reason for her to be victimized. Which left only illogical reasons, of which there were an infinite number. There also was a squirrel...

  I took a taxi home, stripped out of the sweat clothes I’d thrown myself into for the dash to Jill Mason’s, showered, and dressed again, deciding on wool slacks, a silk-and-wool blend shirt, and bucks—not as comfortable as Doc Martens but I could manage a cross-town walk in them if necessary. My head was too much of a jumble for me to have any clear and definite plan for the day, but I had the feeling that it would not be a jeans and sweatshirt kind of day. And I’d heard it from Yolanda often enough: Listen to your instincts, Phil. So I listened. And added a blazer. As much for warmth as for sartorial splendor. No snow was forecast but the temperature wouldn’t get out of the twenties.

  I took a taxi to Willie One Eye’s newsstand. Didn’t need to visit Mrs. Campos since Yolanda wouldn’t be at the office when I arrived, and I didn’t particularly want to talk to Itchy. Willie and I exchanged our normal greetings in the normal fashion and I paid for my papers. His good eye surveyed the area around us.

  “My nephew, he don’t talk to no cops,” Willie said.

  “Can’t blame him,” I said, remembering the jerk from Dr. Mason’s office and his shitty demeanor.