Blanche Cleans Up: A Blanche White Mystery (Blanche White Mystery Series Book 3)

by Barbara Neely

  Blanche’s breath caught in her chest. They were nearing her door. She was anxious to get inside, to check on the children and her territory, but she wasn’t about to let Tongues into her house.

  “Did they try to break in the door?” she asked him.

  He shook his head from side to side. When they reached her house, he walked around to the back and pointed at the kitchen window, which was open about an inch. The aluminum frame was bent.

  “There, right there. Un-hunh, un-hunh.” Tongues made prying motions with his hands and arms.

  Blanche left him there and hurried back around front. She unlocked the door and opened it. “Hey, y’all, I’m here. Everybody in?” she called, and was relieved when Shaquita said they were. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She closed the door, making sure it was locked.

  “What did you do, Tongues?”

  He covered his mouth with a nail-bitten hand and giggled. “I tricked ’em, tricked ’em.” His two-person grin was back.

  “How, Tongues? How did you trick them?”

  He spun around in a way that made Blanche fear she’d lost him.

  “Here she come! Here she come!” He shouted toward the window, as though talking to the men who’d tried to pry it open. “Smart, hunh, Blanche, hunh?”

  “What did they look like, Tongues?”

  “I told you, Blanche. Big niggers, real big. I—”

  “Did you know them, Tongues? Ever see them before?”

  He gave her a blank look. “I tricked ’em, didn’t I, Blanche, didn’t I? Now I know you gonna give me some, I know it, un-hunh, un-hunh.”

  Blanche gave up. “Yeah, right, Tongues, I owe you. Maybe I’ll bake you a cake, honey, but forget about getting any.” She kissed him on his forehead. “Thanks for stopping those thieves. Now I got something to do.” She gently pushed him off her stoop and headed back down the hill.

  “Wait, Blanche, wait!” Tongues ran after her a few paces, then gave up.

  Her mind raced along with her feet. What if one of the children had been home? What if those thugs had gotten in? What if they weren’t your everyday thieves but were looking for something specific? How could she be so stupid, so smart-assed as to tell Miz Barker she was going to find out who killed Ray-Ray? If her life was so dull she needed to stick her nose in other people’s business, maybe she should get a second job or volunteer somewhere.

  Blanche looked around the McDonald’s parking lot until she spotted the security guard’s car. She yanked open the door before he had a chance to pretend he was awake.

  “Where the hell were you when those creeps were trying to break into my place!” She grabbed him by his shirt and dragged him out of the car. “The children could have been home!”

  The guard pulled his shirt out of her hands and stepped back. “Hold on there, hold on!”

  He was a short portly man who looked old enough to have retired from some other job before he took this one, and probably had.

  “You don’t have no call to be pull—”

  “Can that shit and listen to me! Somebody tried to break into my place this afternoon. I live in number forty-seven. They were right out in plain sight trying to get in my kitchen window. You tell me where you were when that was going on, and then we’ll talk about me grabbing your shirt. Or should I call your boss and ask him?” She folded her arms across her chest to keep from grabbing him again, from slapping him and kicking him until he was silly.

  “Now, missus, don’t go making no calls. We can work this out. Number forty-seven, you say? I was up there all day, I swear. Musta been when I went in the market to get a…”

  “We ain’t paying your ass to go to no market!”

  “I know, I know. It won’t happen again, missus. I’ll keep a special eye out on your place and make a report about what happened if you’ll tell me wh—”

  “Fuck a report! Keep your eye on my place, or I’m going to report you right out of a job. I got kids, you understand that! Anything coulda…” Shit! He was looking at her as though she was crazy, and she was. She took a couple of deep breaths.

  “Look, I’m sorry about going off, but like I said, the kids coulda been home, coulda come home when somebody…” She shook her head to discourage the tears, hot with rage.

  “Don’t worry none, missus. I swear, I’ll be on the watch. I need this job, I…”

  Blanche raised her hand to stop him. “Okay, okay.” She turned and headed back up the hill. Tongues was waiting in front of her house.

  “Blanche! Blanche!” He ran toward her.

  Blanche gave him The Look, the one she saved for Taifa and Malik when they were closest to making themselves the kind of pain in the behind that she was about to make them regret.

  Tongues saw her face, spun around, and: “Oohgalta majinica sambalala dicoty…”

  Blanche had never heard of anyone scaring Tongues into talking his talk with just a look. He was still doing his number when she let herself in the house.

  Taifa was coming down the stairs. Blanche had hoped to be able to run up to her room and pull herself together before she saw the kids. If she tried to talk to them now, she wouldn’t be able to keep fear out of her voice.

  “Hey, Moms, whatsup? You okay?” Taifa lay her hand on Blanche’s forehead. Blanche pulled Taifa close and hugged her hard. To her surprise, Taifa leaned into her and returned her hug with equal force. We don’t do this enough, Blanche thought.

  “I needed that,” Taifa said as she pulled away. “My gym teacher made me feel so bad today!”

  With half her mind, Blanche listened to the story of how Taifa had tried to weasel out of gym class, got caught, was loud-talked by her teacher in front of the class, and made to do extra exercises to boot. With the other half, she wondered if she might be wrong about the break-in being related to Brindle’s tape. The neighborhood was a pretty high crime area, after all.

  “That’s what you get for trying to get outta class,” Blanche told her. “You didn’t—”

  Taifa sighed with relief when the phone rang, and leapt for it.

  “Hi, Grandma. How you doin’? Yes, I’m fine. Yeah, I mean yes, school’s fine. We were just talking about it.” She looked at Blanche and rolled her eyes. “Yes, Grandma. She’s right here.” She held the phone out to Blanche and escaped upstairs.

  “Hey, Mama.”

  “Blanche? Is you all right? You acted kinda funny last time I talked to you. I wasn’t even done talkin’ and you—”

  “And I will again, Mama, if you don’t let me get a word in edgewise every once in a while. Now, how you doin’?” Blanche waited for her mother to get over her shock enough to answer.

  “Well, I’m fine, I guess. How’re you?”

  Blanche smiled. So much for old dogs and new tricks. She gave her mother a short, clean version of how she was, how the kids were doing in school, and what a handful they both were.

  “Ship them wild things down here. I’ll straighten ’em out. Course, the Lord’s just paying you back for all the grief you caused me when you was coming along.”

  Grief! What grief? She’d had too many chores to be a handful, but she didn’t get a chance to disagree. Her mother was still talking, new tricks notwithstanding.

  “…a shame about Inez’s boy, poor woman. I know how hard it is to lose a child. Charlotte says that granddaughter of hers is a right smart young lady.”

  You couldn’t tell it from the way she’s acting now, Blanche thought, but told Mama what good grades Shaquita got and about her plans to become an archaeologist, as if saying it might help make it happen.

  “Well, I don’t want to run my phone bill up too high. I just wanted to holler at y’all.”

  “Thanks, Mama. I’ll call you soon,” Blanche said, as pleased with this conversation with her mother as she ever expected to be.

  Blanche waited
until they were nearly done with dinner to tell the children about the near break-in. They were full of silent attention when she showed them the bent window frame.

  “That’s why I want you to let the security guard go through the house before you come inside from school.”

  “That weird old man! Why we got to let him go in the house first, Moms?”

  Blanche heard the little squeak of worry in Taifa’s voice.

  “I just want him to make sure everything’s okay. If the thieves come back, I don’t want you to meet ’em. Tongues scared them off this time, but…”

  “Tongues? That fool? He probably made the whole thing up.” Taifa said.

  Blanche almost chastised her for talking about Tongues as though he weren’t still her elder, despite the state of his mind, but thinking Tongues was too foolish to be telling the truth had lessened that squeak in Taifa’s voice.

  “I don’t need that old dude to protect me!” Malik wolfed. “I can take care of myself. If some…”

  Blanche waited him out. There was nothing she could do with that testosterone thing.

  Shaquita was the only one who didn’t seem to have a problem. She promised to be waiting on the stoop when Blanche’s two got home.

  That’s done, Blanche thought, and went in the living room to listen to the news on the radio and to give the kids a chance to mumble and grit in private. She caught the end of All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Her friend Carmen in Harlem had introduced her to NPR. Being able to listen to it in Boston made her feel connected to folks in the other places she’d lived, all listening to the same thing.

  She waited until the children settled down for the night before she took over the bathroom: candles, incense, her jam-box and earphones, and Ida Cox reminding her that “Wild Women Don’t Get No Blues.” She tried to slip into the space between sleep and wakefulness where her body was practically weightless and her mind was free, but she’d had too much of a day for that. She could depend on the security guard for a couple days because she’d just gotten on his butt, but the effect of that wouldn’t last. She needed to find that tape—or whatever Brindle had on Samuelson—something to stop the heat she felt rising around her. But protecting the children couldn’t wait for that. She remembered that at the lead poisoning meeting Othello Flood had said the Ex-Cons provided security. Maybe he could help her. She stretched out in the tub and closed her eyes.

  Ray-Ray’s ghost walked through the bathroom door and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. She’d noticed that the older she got, the more time the dead spent with her. Ray-Ray crossed his legs and arms and gave her another “well, girlfriend” look.

  “Don’t look at me like I’m supposed to do something unless you came in here to tell me where you hid that damned tape. You gave it to Miz Barker, didn’t you? At least tell me what’s on it and whether I’m right about what made this Brindle-bashing year?”

  Although she left plenty of space between questions, Ray-Ray only grinned at her through the rising steam. And when she rose from the tub, he left.

  Before she went to bed, she thanked her ancestors for protecting her house. After all, the thieves didn’t get in.

  In her dreams, the detective Felicia Brindle had hired was peeping through Donnie’s keyhole, which was also in the doorway to the YMCA, except inside, instead of the Y, there was Allister Brindle’s bedroom, where Ray-Ray and Pookie were having a pillow fight, and Wanda was playing the mouth organ in the city pool.

  NINE

  DAY EIGHT—THURSDAY

  The corn on her left baby toe drummed out a rhythmic pain before Blanche was fully awake. A bad sign. She reminded herself she didn’t have to have an attitude all day just because her foot hurt, even though her evilness and her throbbing corn always seemed to hang together.

  This is a new day, she told herself. I can do anything I want. If that were really true, she’d call the Brindles and tell them to cook their own damn meals, then take herself to a podiatrist and have this corn removed. She’d shop for comfortable shoes, have a nice lunch: soup, a mesclun salad, a nice plump piece of cornmeal-battered catfish, and the richest dessert on the menu. She’d read and nap the rest of the day away. If she could really do anything she wanted.

  Instead, she looked back along the path of her life for a point where she had been free of work. She couldn’t find one. Her earliest memories were of baking bread with her mother, her own child nose just clearing their old pine table while her little sister played in the corner under the window. She remembered pulling herself up as tall as she could, imitating her mother’s proud stance. She could still smell that dry, chalky raw wood tabletop and feel the tickle of flour dust coating the inside of her nostrils. Her mother’s loaves had glistened on the table, looking light enough to float to the oven. Little Blanche’s bit of dough, stamped with pudgy fingerprints and heavy and limp with handling, went into the oven right alongside Mama’s loaves. “This is how you learn,” Mama would always say when little Blanche complained about the difference between Mama’s loaves and her own. “Keep trying. Yours’ll look like mine, someday.”

  Child Blanche also loved to climb beneath that hand-me-down table and pretend it was the roof of her snug and pretty little house. She’d mimic her mother’s cleaning behavior—washing and drying her make-believe dishes, polishing her pretend windows until they shone, washing her imaginary clothes, and filling her playhouse with the smell of heated starch as she pressed them. By the time she was ten, her play-baking and –cleaning had become the real thing. Her father was gone before Blanche could form a lasting memory of him.

  With two children to feed, Mama left for work early and came home late. Blanche could still taste anger—bitter and salty—at always having to drag baby Rosalie everywhere she went, of having to end her game of jacks because she had to peel the potatoes or stop jumping double Dutch to scrub the kitchen floor. She knew better than to sass, and she didn’t really want her mother to have to do all the work, but in her mind, she’d often railed against her mother for making her work so hard so much of the time. By high school she’d stopped thinking of herself as an overworked child and understood that she was simply paying for what she got in the way of food and clothes and a home. A fair trade.

  But no longer. She had done more work than she’d been paid for in her life. She was tired: tired of other people’s houses, other people’s meals; tired of keeping other people’s worlds beautiful and peaceful while risking her own children growing wild as a stand of bamboo. She stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door in a way that told everyone else in the house to back off. For once, the children showed their good judgment by staying out of her way.

  The sight of Jamaica Pond and the sound of a mockingbird running through her repertoire lightened Blanche’s mood enough for her to step back and look at what was bothering her.

  Part of her attitude was worry. She’d given up the dream that she could protect Malik and Taifa from the worst of life, but today, she wished she could follow them around all day to make sure nothing and no one touched them that shouldn’t.

  The rest of her attitude was about the Brindle house: She didn’t want to go anywhere near it. She knew Allister was behind Ray-Ray’s death, but she was positive he hadn’t done his own dirty work. She couldn’t say the same for Felicia. She didn’t feel the kind of disgust toward Felicia that she felt toward Allister because Saxe’s death didn’t touch her the way Miz Barker’s and Ray-Ray’s did. Still, how was she supposed to go to work and act as though she didn’t know that Felicia was a woman who’d killed a man with her own hands? The answer came in a parade of faces of past employers whom she’d seen coked up, giving the chauffeur some head, neglecting to bathe for a week, exchanging tongue with their schnauzer, pilfering money from a guest’s handbag, and engaging in various other acts she’d pretended not to see or know about. Just keep your mouth shut and your eyes straight ahead, she warned
herself.

  The first thing Blanche did when she got to the Brindles’ was call home.

  “You over being evil already?” Taifa asked her.

  “It’s okay,” Taifa told her when Blanche apologized. “Like you always say, Mama Blanche, everybody’s got a right to have a bad day. Did you want something special?”

  “Just to remind y’all to let the security guard go through the house when you come home from school.”

  “Ah, Moms!”

  “I mean it, Taifa. None of you can go in the house until he looks around. You understand?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, I understand.”

  “That’s better, and don’t forget to tell Malik and Shaquita what I said. I’m depending on you. Don’t disappoint me,” she added before she hung up, knowing that Taifa understood the consequences of being an undependable disappointment.

  Blanche’s next call was to Bea Richards. Again, no answer. Was there someone else who might have the dope on Samuelson? Maybe she’d ask Joanie.

  Blanche gathered ingredients for eggs Benedict. Cooking something that needed attention always settled her nerves. After breakfast, she checked the household schedule to see how it meshed with her plans for the day: Felicia would be off to the hairdresser’s shortly. Allister was probably already gone, and neither one of them was in for lunch or dinner. Perfect. They would be home for drinks, but she’d be finished by then. She called Miz Barker’s house.

  “Hey, Pam. It’s Blanche. You okay?”

  “As I can be. You know how it is.”

  “It’s gonna take a while, honey, but the pain will ease. It will.”

  Pam sighed. “I know. But that doesn’t seem to help much right now. I’ve been trying to keep busy.”

  “Well, I may be able to help with that,” Blanche said. “I talked to Miz Inez last night. She reminded me how close Ray-Ray and Miz Barker were.”

  “Yeah. I used to be jealous of him when I was a kid.”