South by Southeast

by Blair Underwood

  Mother’s heart withered in her frantic chest, more grief than fear. Could it be . . . ? Her medications played tricks on her ears, but she thought she heard him. Why was he back? How had she wronged him? Mother was not easily fooled, but he had fooled her.

  Perhaps he had fooled everyone.

  MY CELL PHONE rang at five in the morning. I’d gotten a new phone and number, so only a handful of people had it. The caller ID identified the caller as LAPD.

  My heart jumped. Maybe Escobar’s body had been found. Maybe another prostitute had been murdered. I was so anxious I nearly dropped the phone.

  “This is Tennyson,” I said.

  “It’s Nelson.”

  Nelson wouldn’t call me so early about anything small. “What is it, Nelson? Escobar?”

  April sat up beside me.

  A long pause. I’d caught Nelson off guard. “What about Escobar?”

  “If it’s not Escobar, why are you calling me this early?”

  “I need you to get to RHD,” Nelson said. RHD was the department’s Robbery-Homicide Division. “I need you here in one hour, by 6:00 A.M. If you’re not here, I’ll send a team to bring you in and get a search warrant, just like old times.”

  April turned on the lamp, which made me wince from the light. She stared at me with concern, and I could only shrug. Four years ago, Nelson had torn up my house trying to build a case against me after a friend was murdered. The memory still pissed me off.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m calling you as a courtesy,” Nelson said. “The alternative is you get pulled out of your house in front of the cameras. Merry Christmas, you stupid SOB. I’m doing you a favor.”

  “At least tell me what it’s about.”

  “Antonija Obradovic,” Nelson said, pronouncing the name slowly. And badly.

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “Mother.”

  I closed my eyes. Shit. April put a concerned hand on my shoulder.

  “Man, come on,” I said. “If you have a case, why do you need me?”

  Nelson didn’t answer me.

  “This is bullshit, Nelson. She’s eighty-three. She has cancer. Why you wanna try to strong-arm me to testify against a sick old lady?”

  “You don’t need to testify against her,” Nelson said. “She’s dead.”

  I heard him, but my next word was a reflex. “What?”

  Nelson’s voice wound away in a long tunnel. “Six A.M. sharp, Hardwick,” Nelson said. “Don’t make me sorry I did it the polite way. I’m only doing it for Preach.”

  As my mind crept to wakefulness, I felt more nerves than grief. How had Mother died? I wouldn’t be invited to RHD if Mother had succumbed to her cancer. I was tangled in it.

  “What happened? I just saw her—”

  “We know,” Nelson said. “You argued with her, an eyewitness said. Take a shower, get dressed, and bring your ass to RHD. You’ll be here a while.”

  “This is harassment, Nelson. Why would I kill Mother?”

  “You tell me,” Nelson said, and hung up.

  I hadn’t told April that I’d gone with Chela to see our old madam. I never planned to keep it from her, but I hadn’t found the right moment to tell the story. As April walked with me up the steps to the Robbery-Homicide Division, I knew I’d put it off too long. She’d insisted on coming to the police station with me, but she was mad enough to avoid my eyes. Maybe she wanted to judge my new chaos up close before she cut me loose again. I was sad that Mother was dead, but April was a bigger worry.

  “This is Nelson’s vendetta,” I told her. “There’s no way he has evidence against me.”

  “Maybe you should have brought your lawyer, Tennyson.”

  “This is a dance he likes to do with me every couple of years. I’m not worried.”

  That’s how simple I thought it was.

  On April’s advice, I had shaved for the first time in three days and found a suit to wear. I didn’t look as if I’d been asleep the hour before, much less as if I’d spent my night killing anyone.

  When Nelson met me in the hall, he gave April a scathing look, wondering why she didn’t know better. April’s father had been Nelson’s college mentor at Florida A&M, I remembered, and he had tried to warn April away from me before. Small world.

  “I’ll be right here, baby,” April said, and kissed me for the department to see.

  “Jesus, leave that girl alone,” Nelson said to me as he walked me down the hall. He didn’t pull on me, but he walked closer than I liked.

  Three detectives waited in the gray interrogation room. When the door closed behind Nelson and me, I felt as if I was in jail already.

  “I have to Mirandize,” Nelson said before I’d taken my seat. Handcuffs clanked.

  “What?” I said. My thoughts crawled.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Nelson began in a drone, and he recited my Miranda rights in a puff of breath. “Do you understand these rights?”

  “I’m under arrest?” I said.

  When Nelson grabbed my arm, I wanted to snatch it away, but I could only go limp. Four detectives were ready to subdue me. Cold metal was clamped around my wrist. Nelson sat me roughly in the chair and chained the handcuffs to the center ring under the tabletop.

  “This is beneath you,” I told Nelson.

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” said a burly detective, pushing his thick, square-jawed face in front of mine. Like every Bad Cop I’d ever met, he looked as if he wanted ten minutes alone with me. “What were you doing at Antonija Obradovic’s house?”

  None of the reasons I’d gone to Mother’s house was any of their business.

  “Are your ears working, Tennyson?” Nelson said.

  “Just tell me what happened,” I said to Nelson. “Why are you coming at me like this?”

  “Answer my goddamned question,” Bad Cop said.

  Someone slid an eight-by-ten photo toward me, and I glanced down.

  Mother’s bedroom in full color. Mother was nude, a sack of bones bent face-first over a portable toilet near her bed. I flinched away from the photo. My stomach hurt suddenly. I felt sick. I tugged at my handcuffs, ready to go home. The photo reminded me that I had just talked to Mother and kissed her forehead. Her skin was still warm to me.

  “God,” I said.

  “Back to my question,” Bad Cop said.

  “Holy God.” Someone had murdered Mother savagely. I had assumed her killing had been execution-style, antiseptic, the way she herself might have done it. An old debt she owed someone. This was different. Worse.

  “You do remember seeing her?” Nelson said. “Arguing with her?”

  “I wasn’t arguing,” I said. “She was yelling at me. She blamed me for dragging her name into the press.”

  “And then you killed her . . . why?” Bad Cop said. “What were you protecting?”

  “Did she threaten you?” A soft-spoken detective addressed me for the first time.

  A second photo appeared beside the first; the two dogs were dead, too, splayed across Mother’s carpeted bedroom floor, practically side-by-side.

  “Our witness,” Nelson said, “says you told him you hated Mother’s dogs.”

  “Why’d you do her, Tennyson?” Bad Cop said. “And the dogs? Why all the anger?”

  I looked away from the dead dogs. I had to remind myself I wasn’t having a nightmare.

  Nelson came closer to me. “Something to do with Chela?”

  “Your little teenage girlfriend?” Bad Cop said. “We can haul her sweet little ass in here, too. Sit her down in cuffs. She was at Mother’s with you.” He gave a thin, hard smile. “I hear she might enjoy a nice cavity search.”

  Anger twitched my face. The room faded to white. “She’s my daughter, asshole.”

  “That’s Preach’s granddaughter,” Nelson cautioned his colleague. “Have some respect.” I appreciated the gesture, but if Nelson was the Good Cop, I was in trouble.

  “I’m guessing she ha
s a colorful history with Mother,” Bad Cop said to me. “A love-hate relationship, just like you. What do you think?”

  For the first time, I remembered the note I’d found in my mailbox: Night-night, Mommy. Had someone deliberately left me that note to telegraph Mother’s death? To show me that I was being set up as a suspect? It seemed too great a coincidence. The bulldozer that had destroyed my previous life was working on my new one, too. The room spun.

  “I need to talk to my lawyer,” I said.

  The cops groaned theatrically, complaining among themselves, calling me names.

  “Pussy.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Why do you need a lawyer, crybaby?” one said. “Guilty people need lawyers.”

  Nelson hushed his colleagues and opened the door to let them out. “Give me a minute with him,” Nelson said.

  False intimacy was Nelson’s specialty. Whether or not anyone else was present, I was under surveillance from the adjoining room. I could see the red glow of the camera mounted on the wall. My heart pounded with everything I wanted to say.

  “If you have evidence, lock me up,” I said instead. “My lawyer is Melanie Wilde.”

  By law, that was supposed to be the end of our conversation. Yeah, right.

  Nelson pulled a chair closer to mine. “Where’s your poker face this morning, Tennyson?” Nelson said, staring me down. “You’re a mess. You look like you want to puke. You look so bad I almost feel sorry for you.”

  My eyes hurt. I wanted to rub them, but I couldn’t because of the handcuffs. I shook at the chains, frustrated. “Nelson, you know I didn’t do this. Or Chela. We just buried my father—her grandfather. Leave her out.”

  “I can’t leave anybody out,” Nelson said. “I need a head on a stick.”

  My stomach gurgled loudly, and my throat tightened. I was going to throw up. “A bag,” I said with a thin voice. “Now.”

  “Motherfu—” Nelson glanced around, surprised. He leaped from his seat, afraid of getting his Brooks Brothers suit sprayed. He ran for the trash can and pulled out a crumpled white plastic bag. As soon as the bag was in front of me, my stomach emptied. Luckily, I hadn’t eaten breakfast, but the sickly sweet-sour scent of vomit floated above us in the room.

  “That’s it,” Nelson said, as if I were in labor. He gently wiped the side of my mouth with a coffee-stained napkin that had fallen from the bag. “Get it out, Tennyson.” I wanted to tell Nelson to back the hell away from me, but the idea of talking made me vomit again.

  “Here’s how it’s going to be,” Nelson said. “You’re not going to lawyer up.”

  I glanced up at Nelson: That’s what you think.

  “And I’ll tell you why,” Nelson went on. “Because if you lawyer up, I’m going to call a press conference in time for the morning news cycle to announce that we’re holding you. And then we’re going to bring in Chela, look for whatever we can dig up on her, and see what she feels like telling us.”

  Chela would be shattered if she got dragged into Mother’s homicide case. I still had no idea how I would tell her Mother was dead.

  “What do you want from me?” I managed to say.

  “Everything. Why you were there. What you said. If you killed her—tell me why.”

  “You think I killed an old lady?” I met his eyes, man to man. I’d made the mistake of trying to reach Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson’s human side in the past, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Tennyson, I’ve been in this game a long time. All I believe is evidence.”

  “No cameras,” I said. “Just us talking.”

  “No deal. You don’t get to negotiate. Talk. Now.”

  “I didn’t kill her, so you’ve got nothing on me.”

  “You sure about that?” His wild-eyed glint made me not sure at all. He did have something on me. Of course he did.

  “If it’s fingerprints, I told you I was there yesterday.”

  Nelson gave me an acid smirk. Then he pulled a laptop in front of me, where a grainy image was frozen on the screen, too dark to make out the details. A large, shadowy room.

  “This was a very careful woman,” Nelson said. “Security footage from the bedroom.”

  My heart thumped. Something was wrong. “It’s pretty damn dark.”

  “Turns out sound is all we need,” Nelson said. He rewound the footage and pressed play. “The dogs are whimpering at first, but listen for the voices.”

  Sure enough, I heard the pained simpering of the dogs. I guessed they had been poisoned to give the killer access to Mother. I’d never liked those dogs, but I wouldn’t have wished a painful death on them.

  “What?” Mother said suddenly, her voice crisp as life. She was a gray shadow in her bed. She might have been sitting up, but it was hard to see.

  More whimpering. Then, beneath the whimpering, I heard a muffled man’s voice. From the hall? I couldn’t hear him clearly.

  “Our techs will work on that,” Nelson said. “Here comes my favorite part.”

  More whimpering. Then Mother raised her voice to call out: “Tennyson?”

  And the screen went black.

  My body turned to ice in the handcuffs.

  “That’s when the camera lost the feed,” Nelson said. “Disabled by the killer.”

  The killer was technically savvy. He sounded more and more like me.

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “I’m being set up.”

  “Talk.”

  I didn’t dare tell him about the anonymous note. If Escobar had sent the note and then killed Mother, he might be implicating me in other ways I didn’t know yet. I had no witnesses to verify that I received the note anonymously rather than typing it myself. Escobar might have planted other phony evidence in Mother’s room that would turn the note against me.

  I forced myself to inhale, putting my meditation practice to work. I might have forgotten to breathe for nearly a minute. No wonder I’d been sick. My jabbing heartbeat slowed.

  “What if Gustavo Escobar survived the explosion?” I said quietly.

  Nelson stared at me blankly. “For your sake, I hope and pray that isn’t your story.”

  “His body hasn’t been recovered. That’s a fact.”

  “What would that have to do with a Serbian madam?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But it has everything to do with me. Because if Escobar’s anything like me, he’s real pissed off about our last night together.”

  “So he kills Mother why?” he said.

  “To fuck with me,” I said.

  “And he told her to call out your name.” He didn’t hide his skepticism.

  “I don’t know how he did it, Nelson. I don’t know if it’s him—but it’s not me.”

  “People only get framed in movies,” Nelson said. “In twenty years, I’ve never seen it. But now I get why you asked about Escobar when I called you. That was the first thing out of your mouth. That’s your story.” He sounded dumbfounded. “You’re really gonna make me do it, aren’t you? You’re finally gonna make me put you in prison.”

  His voice sounded as if he was my best friend. As if I had a gun to his head.

  “South Beach Police didn’t want to hear about Escobar, either,” I said. “Hear me or not, but I wasn’t at Mother’s that night. I have alibis all night long. So if there’s evidence against me, you’d better ask yourself where it’s coming from . . . brother. The South Beach cops can tell you it hurts like hell to look like a fool. Again.”

  I didn’t have to remind Nelson that my instincts had bested his in three major cases. Nelson stood up and went to the door. Our heart-to-heart was over, but I’d rattled him, too. A press conference might come back to haunt him, and he knew it.

  “I’m bringing my guys back in,” Nelson said. “Don’t try to float that Escobar shit. Walk us through your visit to Mother’s. No lawyer, or we go public. Cooperate, or we go public. After we hear what you have to say, you’ll go home—or you won’t.”

  I sighed and nodded. I would a
nswer their questions about my relationship with Mother. And Chela’s history with her. I might end up in jail no matter what I did.

  One of Mother’s last acts on earth had been to call out my name.

  I SLOWED THE rental car when I got within a block of the house on Brentwood.

  I’d traded my previous rental for a black Ford Explorer with windows tinted so dark that they should have been illegal. But even inside the cocoon, I felt exposed driving near Mother’s house, especially with Chela and April with me. A black-and-white police cruiser parked at the corner made my heart jump.

  After four hours of questioning and efforts to make me sweat in an empty room, Nelson had let me go. As usual, he tried to paint himself as my generous savior, although he made it clear that he would come back for me soon. I was lucky to be free, and I wanted to stay free. But I couldn’t hide at home.

  The press outside Mother’s house was a horde, not just the tabloids anymore. The Hollywood Madam had just been murdered, another weird twist in the story that had begun with Gustavo Escobar. Three news vans were parked haphazardly across the road, an obstacle course for drivers. Most of the people crowded near Mother’s lawn were in the media, although a few neighborhood teenagers coasted past on skateboards.

  April and Chela, who trusted me most, were my only allies in the hunt for Escobar.

  I drove by the house slowly, our vehicle hushed. Escobar could have been on that street, hidden in sight, his specialty. The frumpy videographer with a mountaineer’s beard could be Escobar. Or the gray-haired man parked in a white van across the street. Escobar could have had plastic surgery, although he would have bruising and swelling from a nose job. But he might be hidden somewhere among the media spectators, basking in his cleverness.

  I heard April snapping photos with the Pentax digital camera she’d saved all year for. She had started taking original photos for her blog, and her photography skills had taken a leap. “I’ll just try to get everybody,” she said. “We’ll study them later.”

  While April photographed the observers, I studied Mother’s house. Mother had no fencing in her front yard, although her windows were too high to reach from ground level. The backyard had eight-foot cyclone fencing. How had the killer gotten into the house?