“Yes, he’s very attractive.”
“Pretty,” she repeated. “Like Rudolph Valentino. That’s what they used to call him at Howard. The colored Valentino. All the girls were after him. Another reason, I suppose, why I was so glad, so grateful, when he picked me.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I know I’m not exactly what men call attractive. Just passing, as Mama used to say. So I never expected, I didn’t dare hope that a man like Junior would …”
“Ever have eyes for you?”
She nodded.
“So when he showed interest, you were happy.”
“Thrilled,” she whispered. “Stupid fool, I was thrilled. I remember when I introduced Junior to Mama and Daddy. Mama took me aside later and she repeated something she’d always said, but I’d never really heard before. She said that a woman should never marry a man who’s prettier than she is. And you know what? She was right.”
“Sheila—”
She waved me off. “It’s okay. I don’t need, or want, any false comfort. I made a big mistake, and then I went and made it even bigger. I stayed for the show. Junior is a good entertainer, I have to give him that. And it was obvious that he belonged up there.”
“You really do love him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Even after finding out about his double life?”
“You don’t just stop loving a person because of something like that. Well, I couldn’t. He was still my husband—and I know it sounds crazy to say this—but hurt as I was, it still felt real good to see him up there enjoying himself. I kept thinking, This is the real Junior. Not the man you married, and not the man you’ve been living with.”
“And of course it helped to know that he wasn’t with another woman.”
She nodded.
“But Sheila, you must’ve realized that just because he didn’t have another woman didn’t mean he didn’t have a man.” I didn’t intend to be mean. I simply needed her to be honest. We all needed her to be honest, Junior most of all. If he had started a relationship with someone, then that might well be the person we were looking for.
Sheila stared vacantly out the window at the dark, cold, empty streets and pressed her lips together. “I made sure he didn’t see me. It wasn’t that hard. The place was packed. Obviously, everybody knew about it—everybody but me. I watched most of Junior’s performance. Then I went back to the house and sat up for a long time, thinking. I couldn’t make up my mind what to do, but when he walked into the house just before dawn, I took one look at him and I knew.
“I didn’t say anything to him right then. I wanted to, but a voice told me not to. He came on up the stairs. The makeup was gone and he was back in his regular clothes. And I could see that he was in a good mood, humming to himself. He went straight to his room and closed the door.”
“Did you ever confront him?”
“The next evening, right after dinner. I told him I knew, that I’d followed him, that I’d seen him perform and I knew.”
“How’d he react?”
“He denied everything, said he’d been sleeping in his room the whole night.”
“Was he playacting?”
She hesitated and then shook her head. “That’s the funny part. I don’t think he was. At first, I was furious. I thought he was lying. But then I could see that he really didn’t remember. I told him again that I’d been there, that I’d seen him, so he could just stop with the charade.”
Sheila tensed. “Then his attitude changed. He got all self-righteous. How dare I follow him! A woman is supposed to trust her husband, and so on. Now that, I think, was the act.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t think he cared about me following him. I think he cared about what I saw. There was this fear in his eyes and I think he was a little stunned. Anyway, I just let him talk. After a while, my silence got to him. He quieted down and asked me what I was going to do. Was I was going to leave him? That’s what it all boiled down to. Goodness knows, I had plenty of reason. The answer should’ve been obvious. But it wasn’t.
“I told him I didn’t know. I’ll never forget the look on his face when I said that. He sank down on the edge of our bed, and all that beauty, all that joy I’d seen in his eyes when he was performing, it just went away. He aged right before my eyes, and that’s when I knew. I knew why he’d married me, and I knew that none of it mattered—that I was going to stay.”
“I don’t know many women who would’ve made the choice you did. I’m not sure I would’ve.”
“I’m so ashamed.”
“Don’t be.” I put a comforting hand over her clenched hands. “You’ve got to be one of the most generous women I’ve ever met.”
Her eyes full of gratitude, Sheila managed a smile. “Thank you. But me, generous? I don’t know about that. I love him. It would’ve been harder to leave than to stay. Leaving him meant facing my people. I felt sick just thinking about it. I chose the easy way out.” She paused. “At least, I thought I had. But it didn’t turn out to be so easy, did it? After that, I thought I understood his parents better, why they’d watched us so closely. They knew he had a problem. They knew this could happen.”
“Did you try to talk to them about it?”
“I didn’t know how … No, I was afraid to.”
It turned out that the Bernards had their son under tight-fisted control. During the day, at least, he couldn’t do a thing without their permission, or spend a dime without their say-so.
“But they must have known that he was tipping out at night.”
“Not specifically, no.” She hesitated. “I think they suspected it would happen. Maybe they didn’t realize when it did.”
I found that hard to imagine. How can you not be aware that your son is slipping out of your house every evening? Junior had to be at the Cinnamon Club by eight o’clock at the latest. The Bernards would’ve still been up at that time. Surely, they must’ve seen or heard him leaving. I pointed that out.
“You’re probably right. Like I said, I didn’t have the nerve to talk to them about it. And, to be honest, something about them frightened me. I thought I might lose Junior if I said something. They’d secretly hoped I could fix him, keep him home at night. Well, obviously, I hadn’t done that. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I was scared.”
Actually, I could understand.
“They clamped down on us,” Sheila said. “At first, it was subtle. Then it grew more noticeable—or maybe I just became more aware of it, more willing to believe what my senses were telling me.”
“So, the kidnapping, it was supposed to be the solution?”
She nodded.
“Whose idea was it?”
“Junior’s. Believe me, I never would’ve come up with something like this on my own. But Junior’s smart and, well, one day he decided he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Did something specific happen to tick him off?”
“It had been building for a long time and one morning, he woke up and the plan was just there, fully formed in his head. He didn’t mention it to me right then, of course. Only later, after he’d walked around with it, turning it over, polishing it. As a matter of fact, he said he didn’t intend to tell me at all. He wasn’t sure I’d go along with it, and he was afraid I’d give him away. But then he realized he’d need my help.”
“You mean, he didn’t trust his parents to follow the kidnapper’s orders. He wanted someone on the inside who could tell him what they were doing.”
She gave a wan smile. Junior also figured they needed an expert, someone who could make the kidnapping seem real. “He knew somebody. Called him Olmo. No last name. Funny name for a black guy. Always made me think of somebody Swedish or something.”
The plan was simple, she said, or started out that way. Junior was supposed to just disappear. He didn’t want a big show of violence, of him being grabbed and pulled into a car, for example, because then there would be witnesses, and witnesses would
call the cops.
“How did that evolve into what really happened?”
“I don’t know. No one was supposed to get hurt. No one. It was all supposed to be clean and quiet. We’d get the dough, pay Olmo, go off, and be free.” Her voice was heavy with regret. “It all seems so stupid now, stupid and naïve.”
I couldn’t disagree with her there. “How much did you offer this character?”
“Two thousand.”
“And you were going to touch his parents for twenty? Didn’t you two figure that this guy might pull a double-cross, make a grab for more, if not the whole thing?”
“We just didn’t think. And it was Junior who set the numbers, not me.”
“His parents, his plan, his numbers.”
“He said his mom and dad could well afford it. I mean, two thousand doesn’t sound like a lot compared to twenty. I give you that. But Junior felt like he’d earned that money. This whole thing was his way of forcing his parents to give him his inheritance early.”
“And then you two were going to run off together?”
She nodded. “I know. It was dumb. Real dumb.”
I could’ve said a lot of things, but chose not to. She was punishing herself enough already. “The important thing now is to locate Junior, because your fake kidnapping has become very real. Did you ever meet Olmo?”
“Nope, never did. The night it happened, Junior kissed me and left the house. He said the next thing I’d hear or see of him would be the ransom note. Olmo would be arranging the drop and I was to carry it out.”
“And where was Junior going to stay?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He said it was best if I knew as little as possible, sort of like in the military. Everybody on a mission only knows their part.”
“But suppose something went wrong. Didn’t he think about you having enough information to back him up?”
“He didn’t think anything would go wrong. Said that if he started thinking that way, he might lose his nerve. And he trusted this guy Olmo.”
“Did he mention contacting me, or that he’d decided to have a big, splashy kidnapping instead of a small, quiet one?” I failed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Sheila flinched and I could’ve kicked myself. The last thing this child needed was to be judged.
“No,” she mumbled. “He didn’t say anything about it, nothing at all.”
“All right,” I sighed. “So the kidnapping goes down. What was supposed to happen next?”
“He was going to let a couple of days go by, just long enough for his parents to start getting worried. Junior had fairly regular habits: he’d stay out late every night but he’d always come home in the morning.”
“So when he didn’t show up, they would notice.”
Sheila nodded.
“How did you hear about what really happened?”
“The radio. It was on the news. I couldn’t believe it. All those people killed. I kept thinking, My Junior can’t be behind that.”
She decided that Olmo must’ve talked Junior into staging the kidnapping in public to scare his parents and make them take it seriously. But the killings went beyond that. The killings convinced her that something had gone really wrong.
The first call came early. Instead of two days after the kidnapping, it came that night.
“I didn’t take the call,” Sheila said. “Phyllis Bernard did. You could see the shock on her face. Dr. Bernard yanked the phone away from her and took it himself.”
The plan was for Olmo to demand the money and give them a deadline for getting it together.
“Junior always said that all his parents would need was two hours at the bank, and that he didn’t want to give them more than that. We needed to keep up the pressure, he said. But then something else went wrong: Dr. Bernard refused to pay. How did he know if they really had his son? Mrs. Bernard was horrified. I was stunned. I’d never thought—It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t pay.”
I supposed it hadn’t occurred to Junior, either.
“Dr. Bernard demanded proof,” Sheila continued. “He told them that he wasn’t going to move until that proof arrived.”
And it had, the next night, on my doorstep.
I grimaced at the memory. Sheila and Junior had made a bad mistake, hiring a gangster and thinking they could control him. I just hoped Junior would survive.
Sheila had talked herself dry. We settled down to wait.
When I think back to that night, that’s what I remember: the wait, the hours going on forever, sitting in that car, freezing. The telephone on the corner never rang and no one approached us. Only two souls walked past; neither one paused or seemed to give us a second thought. So, at the stroke of midnight, we returned to the Mercer Hotel. We hoped that Olmo would still contact us. Fearing the worst, we avoided talking about what the kidnapper’s silence meant.
Once in our room, Sheila became increasingly nervous. “Miss Price?”
“Yes?”
“When all this is over, when Junior comes home, what do you think will happen? With the police, I mean. It was that other man who killed all those people. You don’t think the police will blame Junior, do you? They can’t do that. He didn’t even know the man was going to do that, else he never would’ve followed through with it.”
I tried to keep her calm. “It’s better to just focus on the here and now, on getting Junior back.”
“Oh Jesus,” she whispered. “How could this happen?”
I didn’t know what to tell her. “Try to … try to keep the faith.”
“What do you think Olmo’s doing to him?”
I remained silent.
“If only I could take it all back!”
I sat down next to her, put an arm around her, and drew her to me. I rocked her as she cried. Eventually, she fell asleep. I tucked her in and tip-toed toward the window. The cold night air was clear all the way down the avenue, and I could see the twinkling lights of moving cars. Junior was out there. Somewhere.
What would we do in the morning? Sheila wouldn’t want to leave. She’d want to wait for word from the kidnapper. I could understand that. If I were in her place, I’d wait too.
My thoughts circled back to that last set of instructions. Why weren’t they there? Why hadn’t Olmo left them? Suppose he had. Suppose someone else had found them, mistaken them for garbage perhaps, or a kids’ game, and removed them. Olmo wouldn’t know that. He’d think we ignored him.
If that was the case, then Junior could be paying the price for it right now.
I forced myself to settle down. I’d probably have to stay with Sheila in the morning. Sam would be worried sick, so I’d have to get a message to him. By now the Bernards were probably up in arms as well. They had to have realized that Sheila was gone with the money. They might have even surmised the truth. Or worse, jumped to the conclusion that Sheila, the stranger, the interloper, had simply taken the money and run.
What a mess.
I don’t know how long I sat there worrying. My thoughts went in circles. I reached no conclusions, just went over the same territory again and again. I slept lightly, fitfully. In the hours before dawn, I awoke to the sound of Sheila weeping softly. There was no more sleep for me that night. While she cried, I gazed out the window, wondering.
What next?
CHAPTER 29
I watched the sky lighten and turn gray. I glanced at my watch. Eight o’clock. Sheila was still in bed, curled on one side, the worn blue blanket drawn to her chin. I got up and stretched. Man, I felt stiff. Everything ached, especially my lower back, from hours of sitting in the cold and nodding off in the chair.
Yawning, I grabbed soap and a towel out of my suitcase, then left the room and headed down the hall to the bathroom. Most of the denizens of the hotel were still sleeping. You could hear them snoring through the thin doors.
The bathroom was cold. Frigid air rushed in through an open, narrow window. Despite the fresh air, the bathroom stank of urine and clogged pipes; th
e once-white tiled floors were grimy, and a fat water bug crawled lazily along one wall. The toilet lacked a seat and the bowl carried some substantial flecks and stains. I decided not to use it.
Outside, someone treaded heavily down the hall. There was a knock on a door, sharp and insistent. Some sleepy female guest, sounding puzzled and dazed, answered. Whatever passed next was lost to me as I turned on the water, waited for it to go from rusty brown to clear, and dipped my hands in it to wash my face. As I cleaned up, I tried to figure out what Sheila and I should do.
One thing I had to do was call Sam. That was for sure. Perhaps Mercer had a phone. And I had to get a message to the Bernards.
Throwing my towel over one shoulder, I made my way back to the room. I could see from a distance that the door to our room was ajar. My heart sank.
“Sheila?”
I ran the last couple of steps, kicked the door wide open, and rushed inside. The bed was unmade and empty. Sheila’s small weekend bag was there, but she was gone and so was the satchel carrying the money.
A slip of paper rested in the folds of the sheet. This note was typewritten and smeared with blood: Ditch Price. Come downstairs. Bring the dough. Now.
I pounded down the stairs and out the hotel’s front door. No sign of Sheila. No cars parked out front with a passenger. No sign of a struggle. Nothing.
I ran back inside. Mercer herself was on duty. I slapped the note on the desk and shoved it under her nose. “Did you deliver this?”
Mercer arched an eyebrow as if she just knew I hadn’t spoken to her in that tone. “Maybe.”
“Who gave it to you?”
She shrugged. “Can’t say. Got a bad memory, you know? Gets that way with the stress and strain and all. So many people. So many probl—”
“Yes, yes, I get it!”
I raced upstairs, realizing to my horror that I’d left the door wide open. I prayed that my purse was still there. It was. I snatched it up, returned to Mercer, and pulled out a fiver. I grabbed her fat hand and pressed the bill into it.
“Now, tell me.”
Mercer unfolded the bill, scrunched up her mouth in disappointment, then shrugged and pocketed the money. “It was a gentleman. Very nicely dressed. Said he’d wait for her outside, and he did. She come right down fast after getting that note, so she must’ve wanted to see him, don’t you think?”
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