Who Killed Tiffany Jones?

by Mavis Kaye

  Even so, he was not entirely sure of her. He wondered if she didn’t sometimes sell him out to a higher bidder. Some of her acts were signed to other labels, and he wondered if she had given someone else first crack at them or if they’d come to her already signed, as she said.

  No matter what, as an ex-cop Kim Carlyle was useful, Ruff thought as he listened to her telling him how big Cheeno was going to be.

  “Stop selling. I’ll be there.”

  They talked for a while longer, and he related the details of the trouble he had had with the leased jet and forced landing in Baltimore. “You know anyone in Atlanta that might be useful if we need help with anything?”

  “Contact a detective named Freddy Carmichael. I’ll give him a call and tell him to help you with anything you need.”

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  “Hey, what’s up with that Tiffany Jones thing?” he added, trying to sound as if he were making small talk. “Was it as legit as the papers say?”

  “As far as I know, there was no foul play. Just a freak, natural death.

  Anyway, the police don’t know jack. Between you and me though, it seems a little suspicious. Keep your ears open. If you hear anything get back to me, all right.”

  “Bet,” he said, “and you do the same. I ain’t superstitious, but when a star big as Tiffany buys it for no apparent reason I get a little nervous.

  Then there was this airplane incident. Could be something is in the stars, you know what I’m saying.”

  “No, not really, sugar. But I’ll definitely keep you up to date. Mean-while, take it easy. What are the chances of lightning striking twice?”

  Kim laughed. When Ruff Daddy didn’t answer for a full ten seconds, Kim continued. “Look, if you need some help closing that deal with the English dude, I can get a plane today. Things are slow.”

  “Naw, that’s all right. I can handle it, you know that. Like Mo says, I’m probably being a little paranoid. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Ruff Daddy shut down the phone and, after a short pause, turned back to Mo. “You still got heat?” he asked. “Don’t try to take it through the metal detector, dawg.”

  “For real! I’m gon let Wardell take it back to Newark.”

  “On the bus?”

  “Naw, let the nigger take a taxi.”

  “He in yo bank. It’s yo gun,” Ruff said.

  Finally, Wardell returned with two first-class airline tickets to Atlanta. Mo gave him a wad of money, slipped him the gun, and then watched him go outside and get into a taxi.

  “I wonder what the taxi driver gon say when Wardell tells him to go to Newark . . . New Jersey.”

  “I hope Wardell don’t put yo gun to the guy’s head and tell him he gotta go if he wants to or not.”

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  When Mo and Ruff Daddy took their seats in the first-class section of Delta Flight 1720, there was an immediate buzz among the other passengers. Some quickly guessed that they were hip-hop artists or entrepreneurs. Besides the jewelry and attire, they carried themselves with a self-assured attitude that set them apart from the average passenger. Ruff Daddy ignored them, but he did notice that the Asian woman was also in first class and the Hispanic-looking dude was seated in coach.

  Mo still didn’t think they knew each other. When Ruff Daddy pointed it out to him, he grunted, “Naw, no way,” and stretched out, taking full advantage of the spacious seat. “Now this is what I’m talkin’

  bout. You feel me, son?” he said.

  “Got that right.”

  “When I was in Attica, I never thought I’d see daylight again, let alone fly first class.”

  “Yeah,” Ruff Daddy said, “that’s when I was in college.”

  “Hey, dawg, prison wasn’t bad. You learned what you needed to know in college. I learned what I needed to know in prison and on the streets of Harlem working for Shabazz.”

  “You escaped, I dropped out. So did we learn enough?”

  “We’re in first class, ain’t we.”

  The flight attendant came by flashing her blondes-have-more-fun smile. “Can I get you gentlemen a drink?”

  Mo ordered Scotch. Ruff Daddy opened one eye and ordered club soda.

  When the drinks arrived, Ruff Daddy lifted his glass in a toast. “This boy Brixton is hot,” he said. “Definitely the stuff. You don’t have to hide out to listen to it. It’s street. You can pump it up. ’Til it hits big though, some people gonna be afraid of it—Beatles music in hip-hop,”

  he laughed. “What’s that about?”

  “Running through Strawberry Fields forever with a AK-47.”

  “Naw, that ain’t what this dude’s rappin’ about, you’ll see.”

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  Ruff Daddy placed his glass on the fold-down tray and settled back in his seat. We’ll see, he thought as he closed his eyes.

  Atlanta

  Ruff Daddy was livid when he found that his personal driver, Candido, was not at the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport to meet the flight. He had sent Candido ahead so they would have one of the company’s three Lincoln Navigator stretches waiting for them. Instead they had to take a taxi, and Candido met them later in their suite at the Swissotel out on Peachtree Road, not far from the airport.

  He told them that the police had stopped him in North Carolina.

  “They had me sitting out on the ground while they tore all the panel-ing out of the doors just looking for drugs.”

  “Shit, I don’t mess with no drugs. They think any black dude with a car like that must be into drugs. Why didn’t you call me on the cellphone?”

  “I really thought I was going to be to the airport on time. I musta missed you guys by ten minutes. So I ran on over here to catch up with you to tell you in person what happened. They kept me four hours. I was cuffed in the police car. They was driving me toward town when they got a call that there was nothing found in the car and brought me back.”

  “How long was you away from the car?”

  “ ’Bout two hours.”

  Ruff Daddy turned to Mo, who had already turned on the television set and ordered an X-rated movie.

  “Hey, can’t we take care of business before you get into that shit,”

  he said. “There’s an Atlanta detective named Freddy Carmichael, get him on the phone. Tell him I need him or an off-duty Atlanta cop to ride with us while I’m in town. I don’t like this, something funny going 16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 32

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  on here. I need to play this one cool. They might have planted something in the car and be just waiting to bust me for possession of what they planted.”

  “Why would someone do that?” Mo asked.

  “Look, just do what I say, nigga. You don’t need to know everything.”

  “Yo, I didn’t mean no harm, dawg. But you need to chill. You been buggin’ ever since we heard about that thing at the Apollo. What’s up?

  I’m ’spose to be yo chief of security. I need to know about all this.

  What’s going down, Ruff?”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  “Yo dawg, this is a fuckin’ mess.”

  “All I know is these new Brixton tracks better be damn good. C’mon Candido, I need to ride.”

  “Yo, you want me wid you?” Mo asked.

  “Naw.”

  Downstairs, Ruff Daddy climbed into the Navigator and told Candido to drive, anywhere, it didn’t matter. He trusted the security of a cellphone more than he did the hotel phone, and he had to make some calls. The first was to Dallas, and for two or three minutes he spoke with K. J. Hunter about the deal they were involved in. When he signed off, he seemed a little less tense.
K. J. didn’t seem to be sweating a thing. He then tried calling Klaus Svrenson in New York, but got his service instead. He hadn’t talked to him since the night of Tiffany’s death; in fact, no one he knew had. That worried him.

  Finally, he called Audrey Chung, the Chinese woman who ran his office in New York. He affectionately called her “Assistant in Charge,”

  since she was the only person in the world who knew all of his secrets.

  She was the only person he trusted completely. Before meeting her he had thought that loyalty was a fantasy. But she had taught him that it could be real. She was absolutely loyal to the person she worked for, and she worked for the person who offered the best deal, not just the most money, but the environment that suited her best. Except for vari-16470_ch01.qxd 7/12/02 4:33 PM Page 33

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  ous temporary workers and consultants, she was the only person he employed in the office. She answered after two rings. “RuffRoad Entertainment Enterprises,” she said.

  “Whatup dawg?” he said, before asking about the progress of ruff-road.com, the Web site he was having built. It was a perfect pretext for the unexpected call because she knew how concerned he was about the Web site. It was being designed to compete with thesource.com and vibe.com. It was going to be a central cog in his media empire, a Web site like no other, full of the hard-core hip-hop stuff that he wanted to take into cyberspace.

  “Oh, it’s you! Good. I’m so glad it’s you.”

  She always seemed happy and relieved to hear from him. It was as if each time he called he reconnected her to the exotic world that he had initially brought her into. She loved hip-hop, and for five minutes or so they talked about what he was doing in Atlanta and how the site was coming along. Finally, Ruff Daddy broke off the conversation.

  “Did you talk to Clarence?” he abruptly asked, referring to Clarence Johnson, the New York contact who worked on another of his projects.

  “Yes, he checked in, everything is okay on his end.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t say anything about a problem?” he said.

  “Absolutely sure.”

  “Perfect. Now you know why I love you. Anything else, any other calls, Klaus or Lester from Paris?”

  “No, not a thing. Oh, wait, there was a strange call this morning from a guy who called himself John Williams. It was weird because he had a foreign accent. Definitely didn’t sound like a John Williams. I checked caller I.D., but it was blocked.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Well, he said it was urgent that he contact you. He even asked for your itinerary. I didn’t give it to him, of course.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said after a pause. “I got to run. Talk to you later.”

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  Ruff Daddy signed off and closed his eyes, deep in thought. He reassured himself that he had been careful not to say anything that might tip someone off or be used against him. Not in the Lincoln Navigator or on any unsecured phone. His office phone could be tapped and, who knows, maybe the cops had been only pretending to search the car. Maybe they were hiding a listening device. From what he’d been able to determine, no one had been harmed except Tiffany, and, according to Klaus and Kim, that may or may not have been anything but a diabetic seizure. Perhaps, as Mo had said, he was just being “para-noid.” But John Williams. Who the hell was he? Paranoid or not, I got to watch it, he told himself.

  “Candido, let’s get back to the hotel,” he said through the microphone that connected the back of the custom Lincoln to the shielded-off driver’s seat.

  New York City

  Kim paced back and forth in front of the window of her office on 57th Street and Broadway. Below her, a panoramic view of Central Park opened up, lulling her with peaceful scenes of rolling meadows and lush, robust trees swaying in the summer breeze. From her corner office on the forty-second floor, Kim could see all the way uptown to Turtle Pond, with its stone castle perched at the edge of a towering bluff overlooking the water.

  No matter how hectic things got, no matter how many inflated egos she had to soothe or how many impossible things her frivolous, pampered clients sometimes demanded, Kim could always lose herself staring out of her window at the breathtaking view of the park. Afterward, she was usually ready to face whatever challenge had been dumped at her feet.

  But today seemed different. Kim felt as if she were off her game.

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  She was confused and unsettled. Luckily, she wasn’t very busy. She’d been scheduled for all-day meetings negotiating film options for two of her clients. But one meeting had been canceled and the other postponed for a week. It was unusual that she had absolutely nothing to do.

  On another day she would have welcomed the break in her gruel-ing schedule. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. Left to its own devices, Kim’s mind played with her. The conversation with Ruff Daddy had reminded her of Tiffany lying on the floor with her eyes still wide open, and her makeup, so carefully and delicately applied, caking into a garish death mask.

  The funeral was scheduled for 2 P.M. the next day. It would be a huge affair at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, with thousands of fans and admirers joining Tiffany’s family and friends in mourning her passing. Kim had tried to call Klaus earlier to see if he wanted her help in arranging any of the details, but she hadn’t been able to reach him.

  She decided that now was a perfect time to try again.

  Thankful to have something concrete to do, Kim strode around her wide mahogany desk, sat back in her plush black-leather chair, and grabbed the phone. She dialed Klaus on his private line at home, thinking that that would be the easiest way to catch him.

  The phone rang five times before a woman’s voice came on the line and instructed her to leave a message.

  That was strange. Even if Klaus wasn’t taking any calls, his personal assistant Denise always picked up the line, usually before the second ring. Kim didn’t want to start worrying over nothing, but this was strange. Where was he?

  That thought made her remember that she’d also planned to call Tiffany’s personal assistant Maria. Kim flipped open her Palm Pilot and scrolled to Maria’s name. Maria lived with her mother and younger sister in an apartment up in Washington Heights.

  Someone picked up the phone almost before Kim heard it start ringing and said, “Hola?”

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  “Good morning,” Kim said. “I’m looking for Maria Casells.”

  “Who is this?” the woman asked in a heavily accented voice.

  “This is Kim, Kim Carlyle—I was Tiffany Jones’s manager. Rita . . .

  is that you?”

  “Oh. Si, Miss Carlyle. It’s me. I’m sorry. I thought I recognized your voice, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “Rita, I’m looking for your sister. I haven’t seen her since the other night and I wanted to make sure that she’s okay.”

  “Maria’s gone, Miss Carlyle.”

  “Gone? What do you mean?”

  “She’s gone. She left the country and said she was going home.”

  “But when? Why so suddenly?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Carlyle,” Rita said. “We were surprised too. I actually thought you might be her calling to tell us where she’s staying.

  We called my dad’s family in Santo Domingo but she hasn’t shown up there and my mom’s family hasn’t seen her yet either. Me and my mom, we’re getting worried.”

  “When did she leave?” Kim asked.

  “The morning after Tiffany died, God rest her soul. She said she had gotten a hold of some money and she was going to use it to go away because the reporters were too much. The phone didn’t stop ringing th
at night or the next day. They kept trying to say things about my sister that weren’t true.”

  “You haven’t heard from her since?”

  “No. Nothing. If she gets in touch with you, will you ask her to call us? My mother isn’t handling this too well. She’s scared now.”

  “Of course, Rita. Anything I hear, I’ll let you know immediately.”

  Kim hung up the phone feeling more uneasy than before. It made sense that a shy, sensitive girl like Maria would run from the unwanted spotlight. But why wouldn’t she tell her family where she was? It didn’t add up.

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  As she sat with her hand resting on the receiver, the phone rang again. She glanced over at the caller I.D.; it was Universal Studios.

  So much for having nothing to do.

  Atlanta

  Although he wasn’t certain of any immediate danger, Ruff Daddy decided to change his schedule. If anyone had found out where he was supposed to be, changing the schedule might throw them off. The plan wasn’t foolproof because, besides Audrey Chung and, maybe, Mo, he wasn’t certain he could trust anybody. Instead of waiting until after the concert to talk to Brixton, at 7 P.M. he went unannounced to the Westin Peachtree Plaza where the rapper was staying.

  Brixton agreed to join Ruff and his posse, and make a quick trip to the in-home studio of one of Ruff Daddy’s friends, where they could listen to more of Brixton’s demo tracks.

  Candido drove the Lincoln Navigator. Sitting with him in the front passenger’s seat was Freddy Carmichael, the off-duty Atlanta detective referred by Kim. They had decided to celebrate and party a little, so they brought Lil’ Luv, a voluptuous dark-skinned exotic dancer with a very flattering short blond bush-baby hairdo. She sat in the second row of seats.

  As the only female in the posse she had already made it known that she was “down for whatever with whoever.” Brixton and Mo sat on either side of her, talking across her.

  “Hey, you know it’s funny,” Mo shouted above the sound of Dr.

  Dre’s “Rat-tat-tat-tat, late at night with my gat” coming from the CD