But it wasn’t me she came to. It was Deloris. She came about a dress. I just happened to be the person she saw. Though I still wonder about this sometimes.
“The dressmaker is in here?” This is the first thing she said. She was standing at the door to my office. I had buzz her inside. She stare into my face like she was looking for something. Hard high cheekbone, almond-shape eye, and a small mole by her right temple. One second I register it as a flaw, next second I change my mind. Her hair cut low-low and neat and shining with oil. I wanted to touch it, feel how it feel on my palm.
“Yes, she in the back,” I said. Then I shouted, “Deloris, customer!”
She walk by, and I wait for a second and then stand up and walk to my door to see her from the back. Lord, what I thought I saw to be beautiful from the front was a joke. Talk about thighs. And bottom. Firm. Lift up. Savior!
I had to step back into my office because the way I was looking at her, I felt dirty, like I was violating her with my eyes. No, no. I didn’t want to do that. So I stay inside my office and blank out every other sound and listen. She wanted a dress. Black.
“It is for a funeral. I want it to be nice—stylish. Then I want you to make the same exact one, but this time for a eleven-yearold girl.”
Her voice tell me she went to a good high school, but I couldn’t tell anything else. I know she wasn’t a Stony Hills money woman. This woman was like me and Deloris. Poor, but with education, and she must have worked in a nice office or something. Or maybe she was one of those woman who went to America on sports scholarship.
Show you how good I am. On every one of those, come to find out later on, it turned out I was right. St. Jago High. Sprinter. One. Two and hurdles. I even knew her name. I remembered her name from Champs. Yeah man. Had seen her from the stands but never up close. Even see her run for Jamaica couple time a few years back. A vague memory came to me about how she got injured or something like that—that’s why she never made it big. Maybe I just filling that part in now. Yeah, but she was a big name in high school, for sure. Career done early. Promising for a while. A muscle tear or bone fracture break the promise, and that was that.
Be that as it may, as I was leaning back in my chair with my hands cross behind my head and listening, I began to wonder who died. Same time I hear Deloris say, “Sorry for your loss. My condolences.”
And then Cynthia, like she answering me too, say, “No one has died yet. This is for us. This is to bury me and my girl.”
I keep saying Cynthia, but it wasn’t until I took her out that I learned her name. Yeah, I took her out. But that was not my original intention. In a sense it was Deloris fault.
When Cynthia left, I felt very worried. From the footsteps and the buzzer at the door I could tell that Deloris had gone to walk her outside. But that is neither here nor there. I was worried because I was sure Deloris had somehow seen the way I was staring at Cynthia and even had some sense of the thoughts I was fighting in my head. Is like I felt the thoughts were so loud that anyone close to me could hear.
I feel shame to say it now, but somehow in that short space of time—the time in which the two of them went outside the door and Deloris come back by herself—I imagined one of them passing. Which one? I feel shame to say … my wife. Yeah, in that short space of time of listening to Cynthia and watching her, I imagined my Deloris passing, imagined Cynthia coming to give me comfort, imagined us finding a romantic connection, deep as the deepest ocean between us in our loss and need.
Yes, I even imagined what it would be like to make love to a woman with tall legs like that. How she would squat over me, how she would move, how different it would be to see her thighs ripple as she rose and sat on me.
Deloris, you see, have some short legs, and for a while she had stopped getting into acrobatics or anything that would make her sweat even a little.
And I don’t want to disrespect Deloris because she help build me in life and she teach me plenty things. For instance, is she who teach me about A-line dress. She used to say that they were flattering and forgiving to short woman like her who were well-endowed. Well, truth be told, by the time I met Cynthia not even A-line could help Deloris, if you know what I mean.
But she was my wife and I love her, so I never ever tell her anything like that.
But it kinda hard when you marry a woman and you think she going just get a little grayer and maybe get two wrinkle when she get old. Yeah man, when I married her, I was thinking that all woman with Indian blood would stay fine-fine like stick.
Now I am not complaining, but Cynthia, I have to admit, made me have these very unfair imaginings.
When Deloris came back from walking Cynthia outside, I was waiting to hear it from her. I was waiting for her to ask me why I was staring at that woman like that. I was waiting for her to say, in the way only Deloris can, “I don’t like that woman.” But I swear, what I heard was the exact opposite. Exact.
“I like her,” Deloris tell me. “I feel for her. You have to find a way to help her.”
That is what Deloris said, with this look in her face of such care and pity and compassion. So is not like it was me who get myself involved.
I got up out of my chair and walk to my wife. I looked her straight in her face but I didn’t touch her. I looked in her eyes. Then I recognized it. I knew the expression. It was the one she showed for people she liked but felt sorry for. I can’t describe it but when you live with a woman long time you know these things.
And then I saw another look under the first look. Is like when women used to wear slip under them frock and piece of the pinkness hang down. Deloris was enjoying the pity. To her look there was something you’d call relish.
And I knew in the moment what it was about. Come on, people, I am a detective. I am people literate. I can read. Something Cynthia must have told her outside was allowing Deloris to feel sorry for her in ways that made her feel good, feel better than her. Cynthia, who was so much more beautiful that Deloris was, had ever been, or would ever be. This was more than being sorry for a woman who is afraid to die. It went deeper.
“She want to kill that man,” Deloris said, shaking her head.
“Which man?” I ask.
“Her husband. Him is a dirty bitch.” Deloris stomp her foot as she walk to the back of the shop. “You going to have to help her.”
Now, I should have stopped it there. I should have put a stop to that kinda discussion right there. It was clear that Deloris had not noticed my thoughts, and I had already gotten away with murder, so to speak. Now was the time to end it. Now was the time to pull away from it and not entertain a discussion.
It did occur to me in that instance that maybe this was a trap. That maybe Deloris was testing me to see how I would react. But something in her tone, something in the way she did not focus on me when she was speaking, something about the distracted interest she had in this woman, made me think that this was no trap—Deloris was not even thinking about me at all. Deloris wanted to help this woman. Deloris wanted to join forces with me to help her. Deloris wanted US to like this woman. Which means that Deloris was giving me permission. Did she not understand what she was doing here?
I followed her to the back room and watched her picking out some black material.
I asked her, “So, you going to make the dresses?”
“Yes, man. Have to make it for her. I understand what she trying to do, and she must get the dress and look good in it.”
“For her funeral?”
“No, man. For his funeral. She wearing it to his funeral.” Deloris stared at me when she said this. “Dat man haffe dead.”
“That is a serious thing to say.” I was trying to stave off what I could sense was lurking in the shadows ready to consume me.
“You going to have to help her,” Deloris said. “She say she want you to help her finish things proper. You can’t say no. I don’t like to get into your business, as you know, but this is one time I am going to beg you to do me the favor. Me
et with her. Find out. And finish it for her.”
There was a lot of things I wanted to say to Deloris, but the thing I said was, “Finish what?”
Deloris told me what the woman said.
“But you don’t even know her,” I responded, trying to muster up some good reason that even I did not believe. “What if she lying?” I asked this question knowing that she was not. I threw out several scenarios. Five or so, including, “What if she had another man?” Deloris threw up her hands. I said to her, “This kinda thing happens all the time.”
“I know women,” Deloris said. “I know when a woman lying.”
“I will have to talk to her first, then.” And that was my first act of deception. But I was pushed into it. As Deloris and I talked, I was already picturing where Cynthia and I would meet. It would not be in the office. It would be in the Shanghai restaurant in the Mall Plaza down in Half Way Tree, an hour’s drive in the usual traffic. I pictured the dark cubicles in the back. I pictured myself choosing the food for her because she wouldn’t know that they have a beautiful steamed sea bass on the menu that they do specially for me. I pictured myself asking her about her life, about her family, her dreams and her fears. I pictured her asking me about my dreams, and me telling her how much I want to visit China—the northern part—to find a nice Chinese woman to marry. I pictured her laughing at my foolish dream and me using that opening to ask her to tell me her biggest secret, and her telling me, and the two of us knowing at once that we are locked. I heard myself tell her while we are pulling the flesh off the fish that I would do anything for her, anything at all.
Maybe it could have all stayed in fantasy if Deloris didn’t push me. Yeah, she definitely did. Look, I didn’t know how to get in touch with Cynthia. At that point I didn’t even know her name. But Deloris, frigging Deloris: “Call her for me. Do. Make it soon. See her number here.”
I examined the paper. Cynthia’s neat and tiny scrawl. Her fat a’s were made with peculiar loops in them, with a distinct backward lean in her lettering. She wrote like a little child.
I shouldn’t have taken that job. I didn’t know what I was doing. Although in a sense I did. Which is also why I should have told Deloris no.
Deloris never knew me to take a case if murder was involved. Most of the work that comes to our little firm is boring stuff. I came into the PI business different from all the other PIs I know in Jamaica. Most of them are ex-policemen who realized they could make more money working private than working for the government. But what they are good at is doing the work police are supposed to do for the legal system. They find witnesses, protect them; or they find a criminal that the police really want and arrange for them to be “caught”—that kinda work. Then, in addition to that, they do a little work for businesses.
Almost all my work is for businesses. You wouldn’t believe how much spying go on for corporations in this country. Is boring work. Easy work. But I make it look hard to the clients them. Make them imagine me breaking into places at night and all that to find files, when most times I just find the cleaning lady and sweet her up and on a Saturday morning she let me in.
Be that as it may, I have a side business. When somebody looking for somebody else, anything liable to happen to the person who they are looking for. So I make it my side business to find the one they are looking for, and to find the one they want that one to meet, if you understand my meaning.
Killing is not really in me. It is around me though.
We Jamaicans are a truly murderous people. Can’t deny it. We are. And in my work I see everything. My friends, the expolicemen, the ones I used to work with before I form my own thing, they still give me the inside tip before anything reach the papers. Some things never reach the newspaper. So I know both the known and the unknown. I know about the people who nearly dead, as much as about the people who dead-dead.
I love this country, as I say, but it is a murderous place. When them boys murder that professor up in the hills some months ago, take that for instance. The man had his own cocky in his mouth when they find him. Two hundred and twenty-one stab wounds. None of it in the papers. “Police suspect foul play.” Foul play is right.
People dead in this country for the simplest reasons. You can pay somebody five thousand Jamaican dollars—what, that is like ten dollars American, a few pound sterling—and he will kill a person for you, no questions asked. That is how easy it is.
That shake me up sometimes. How much killing goes on. But you know what work my brain the most? And maybe “work my brain” is not the right way to say it, but you will get what I mean. What always hold me is how much people don’t know that killing is not easy.
You know how many people escape murder just because the killer get tired, or the killer change his mind, or the killer just can’t understand how somebody is still living after they chop and beat him. Sometime the victim just run and run and get away. Sometime the victim beg for her life and get it. Sometime the killer find out that the victim is somebody they really know and so change their mind. One man had a gun and was to kill this woman, but he couldn’t shoot her in the head because he felt it would hurt her, so he shot her in the stomach. Well, she never dead. That is how she lived. She said to him, “Not in my head, it will hurt too much.” That is how she lived. So even though we are a murderous nation, the whole business is more complicated than people might think.
And even though I have been around a lot of murder in my life—dead body, killers, courtroom, police, that kinda thing—I never thought I could actually kill a person just so, not without some hatred or anger inside me. That is something I always thought about. I couldn’t kill a person just like that, cold, calculated, and walk off. Not me.
But when Cynthia and I sat down in that restaurant smelling heavy with soy sauce and all kind of spices, I knew right then and there that I could kill without vexation, without being provoked. That I could kill for something like love.
Maybe this isn’t coming out right. What I maybe mean to say is that I realized that I could kill for Cynthia.
I wouldn’t kill for Deloris—not like that. This was clear to me. For Deloris, I would have to be vex, I would have to be under threat—like a man about to hurt me or her, and then maybe I would fight back and maybe that would kill the person. But for Cynthia Kendra Alvaranga, I knew I could kill a man, no questions asked, no fear. I could just kill him. And I would do that for love. Because what I was feeling for this woman, in that dark Chinese restaurant, was something like love.
Now, you might wonder how I know is love, but love is the thing that you can’t really understand. I don’t know this woman but already she was in my head, in my nose, in my mouth. Don’t that must be love? Well, whatever it is, I could kill for that. And even though I didn’t tell her this, I could tell that she knew. She knew.
The waitress asked us nice-nice, “Anything to drink, please?” And I look at her and raise my eyebrow and wait. And she said, without even hesitation, “Gin and tonic.”
I couldn’t help myself, because I same time look at my watch and see it was one p.m., and I feel a sweetness in me. When the waitress look at me, I decided to try something, so I said, “Ting.” And I look at Ms. Alvaranga like I was waiting for her to change her mind out of embarrassment or decorum or whatever, but all I get was dimple. Deep, beautiful dimple. So I smile and say, “With a lickle drop of rum.” And we laugh for five seconds before the sadness and serious come back into her face. But I felt good because maybe what I had here was a drinker, and maybe that would be the way home for me.
The thing is, though, she only took one sip of that gin and tonic, and then no more for the whole two hours we sat there talking.
At first she didn’t talk about herself. She wanted to know about me. What did she want to know? How I got into the business. She listened as I talked. I could see she was taking mental notes. By the time I finished blabbing she knew more than I thought I could tell anybody in such a short time. What she knew, well, she sho
uldn’t know. Some things not even Deloris knew.
And I wasn’t no police, or anything. The opposite. From I leave St. Andrew Technical in fifth form, after I never made the national youth cricket team, I realize that my life would only work hustling for everything I could get. So my background is criminal, of course. Well, I wouldn’t directly call it criminal. Better to say illegal. I start supply the higglers with things from Panama, Dominican Republic, and eventually Miami. Soon I was traveling back and forth, buying and selling back, and that was fine. But then I start to manage the higgler and protect them. And next thing, elections coming around and a politician ask me to help him. So I touch up people, you know, but mostly I find the people anybody looking for. At first I was working for a politician in my area, and then somebody died. I was involve. I never do it but I was there. I was the one to find him, if you know what I mean. Well, things got too hot so they ship me to London for three years until things cool down. What actually happen was the politician lose the election and so he stopped sending me money, so I had to get back to Jamaica. When I reach back, a new party was in and they knew me as a man from the other party, so I couldn’t find work.
Well, I run into one of my friend from school and that guy was working with his father business—selling panty or something such. It was one of the red boys who could do whatever he wanted in school because he had a work guaranteed for him after school. Anyway, the boy was just plain dunce. He was duncer than me, so you must know how bad it was. Anyway, when I run into him he ask me what I was doing, and I tell him I was just hustling, and I don’t know what made me say it but I just put it to him simple: “Look, if you want to find anybody, anybody at all, just shout me. I can handle it cheap.”
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