I froze, my entire body growing cold. My chest seemed to cave in as if my heart was plunging to the pit of my stomach.
“Damn…” I said finally, exhaling heavily.
I heard what they were saying but the feeling in my soul spoke loudest. There was no need for any tests, no investigation… something told me that it belonged to her. Tami was dead.
“Of course we will be launching a full investigation to figure out if it is Mrs. Richardson’s blood or someone else’s. There was no body found so it could quite possibly be that she’s still alive. If you hear from her, please let us know. And, in the meantime, we will keep you alerted on the results of our investigation.”
“What motel was she at?” I was asking the question, but I already felt like I knew the answer and the reason why further unsettled me.
In my pocket at that exact moment was the key card to a motel. I’d found it in the pocket of my sweatpants when I took them off and had been hoping that after speaking with Sage, I would know why it was there.
“A rundown spot near Riverdale. Do you know if she knows anyone there?”
“I don’t. I don’t even know why she would be there. The Tami I knew wouldn’t be caught dead in no rundown place anywhere.”
“The Tami you know, is what I’m sure you mean.” Officer Louis looked at me suspiciously. “Like we said, we can’t verify that the blood was hers. But that’s an interesting pun you said… about her not being caught dead.”
Taking out a pen and pad, he jotted something down, wearing a smirk on his face. Watching him closely, I clenched my jaw to keep from speaking.
“A full investigation has been launched,” Officer Meeks continued. “Our office will definitely keep you updated.”
A nod was all I chose to give her. There were too many thoughts going through my head right then. Both officers turned as if to leave but then Louis suddenly turned back to face me.
“Just one quick question. Did you go anywhere between two and six this morning?”
The question didn’t catch me off-guard. Based off his obvious suspicions of me, I expected it.
“No, I’ve been here all night. With my daughter. She’s inside.”
Sliding a small pad and pen out of his pocket, he scribbled something down before lifting his head.
“Can anyone verify this?”
My eyes narrowed. “Should anyone have to?”
“I don’t mean to offend you, Mr. Richardson. I’m simply trying to get to the bottom of all this. As I’m sure you want me to.” He said the last part with a more than necessary amount of sarcasm. “So… can anyone verify what you said?”
“I can,” a voice spoke up behind me.
I watched as both officers’ attention went behind me. I didn’t turn but I could hear Sage’s steps echoing on the tile floor behind me as she walked my way. She’d been listening and now she was lying to cover for me, something I didn’t want her to do. I didn’t even know what the hell I’d done the night before and now she was putting herself out on a limb and lying to the police.
“I arrived while Tami was here yesterday and I stayed the night. I can verify everything that Ink said.” She took my side. “Now, from what I’ve heard, Ink has to figure out a way to tell his daughter that her mother is missing and could possibly be harmed. Please allow him the time to wrap his head around what you’ve told him and to be with his child.”
As Sage spoke, Officer Louis looked her up and down with a sly grin on his face and then, every now and then, cut his eyes over to me. His unspoken thoughts were easily assumed. He was already putting two and two together as to my relationship with Sage.
“We will do just that.” Officer Meeks spoke up and then reached her hand out towards me to extend a card. “Here is my card. If you hear anything, please give me a call. At the moment, this is being called a missing person’s case. Should anything change, I’ll let you know.”
Before they left, I gave the officers my number and Sage gave them her contact info as someone that could be reached if they couldn’t get to me. Like a boss, she took charge, no questions asked.
“You told me that I left out last night,” I said once we were back inside.
She nodded. “I know. But I can tell where that conversation was going and I knew you needed my help.”
From there, she gave me a pointed stare that spoke so clearly, I wasn’t even surprised about what she said next.
“Maybe you should look into hiring a lawyer.”
23
Ink
* * *
“So this isn’t you in the video saying that you were going to kill Mrs. Richardson?”
“No, what Mr. Richardson has stated is that, though that is him in the video speaking to his wife, Tami, who he had just found out had been taking illegal drugs around their daughter, led him to make a remark that he did not intend on being taken literally.”
Officer Louis raised his hands. “I can’t tell! It doesn’t look like he doesn’t mean it to me. He’s obviously angry and he already put his hands on Mrs. Richardson once—”
“He tried to hold her back once she began to assault him. You can’t be serious, Frank.”
“I only mention that as evidence that Mr. Richardson wasn’t in a joking mood and that this was a serious situation. A serious situation in which he spoke, with sincerity, when he stated that if Mrs. Richardson came near him or his daughter again, he would kill her. Now, here we are some weeks later and Tami did come back near Mr. Richardson and his—excuse me—her daughter, and it was on the afternoon of the same day that we received the call about her motel room being covered in blood. Blood that we know now was hers. That doesn’t seem suspicious to you?”
Silence filled the room as Officer Louis leaned over, boring his eyes into Elshire, my attorney. I glanced at him. His expression hadn’t faltered a bit and he seemed calm and absolutely in control. I most definitely wasn’t. I already knew from the first time that I met him that Louis wanted nothing more than for my ass to be locked up for Tammy’s murder, but I thought it may have been on some ‘racist cop’ bullshit. The more he began to lay out his case, questioning about events that led up to that moment, the more I began to see why he was so arrogant and aggressive in his pursuit. It wasn’t looking good for me at all.
“What seems suspicious to me is that you are only focused on my client when the real murderer could be getting away. Mrs. Richardson has been using drugs and she was staying in a cheap motel located in an area where crime, drugs and violence are incredibly high. That leaves a lot of alternatives open for you to pursue. As stated, my client has an alibi for the night in question. He was home with his daughter and Ms. McMillian—”
“Oh, I forgot about his girlfriend,” Louis chimed in. “She’s the one who gave you your alibi, right?”
“She’s a friend,” I corrected him with an even tone.
“Only a friend?” His tone was covered in sarcasm. “Well, I’m sure she would do anything to be something more. From what I hear, you’re some kind of celebrity with the ladies.”
I frowned at the suggestive way in which he spoke, like I was using Sage to lie for me. Though she was covering for me, it wasn’t because I’d done anything wrong and I hadn’t asked her to do it anyway.
“Unless you have any additional questions, we are finished here.” Elshire stood sharply.
With my eyes still on Louis and his on me, I did the same.
“You will hear from me again soon.” Louis issued the threat with a scowl on his face, like he hated me. It was beyond just a cop wanting to nail a suspect. It was too personal.
As I walked out of the police department, I tried to ignore the way people looked at me while trying to pretend they weren’t. In only a few days, I’d gone from being a local celebrity that was somewhat known to being discussed nationally.
The news story about the missing wife of the celebrity tattoo artist who was later on found to be dead had gone viral. The old videos taken of me and T
ami arguing in the weeks leading up to her disappearance had almost as many views as a new music video dropped by Beyoncé. People were obsessed with what would happen next. There were articles all over the web of people proclaiming my guilt while others fought in favor of my innocence. Every news station across the globe was reporting any little new discovery as breaking news. In other words... I was the new O.J.
I hadn’t been officially charged yet and that’s what made it that much better. Everyone was on edge, waiting for whether or not the police would be able to bring a case against me based on what they already knew.
“Wayne is about to bring the car around now,” Kale said to me once Elshire and I were at the main entrance of the police department.
Someone in there had leaked it to the public that I would be called in to be questioned today. For that reason, media was camped out in front of all of the exits, ready to swarm me with questions. Reporters were armed with microphones to shove in my face and photographers would be snapping pics.
All the attention made it so that I couldn’t even move around the way I normally did. Just to come in to be questioned, I had to get a driver and ask Kale to come along because he had a license to carry a concealed weapon. When you were like me and from the streets, having someone close to you that wasn’t a felon was priceless for that exact reason. Although I couldn’t carry a gun, he could.
“Yeah, I appreciate you getting him to bring me here. I ain’t think it was going to be thick like that when I got out,” I told him, looking out the glass doors at the crowd of reporters out front.
Kale chuckled a little and shook his head. “Yeah, man, I know you been avoiding the news and shit but you been on damn near every station and blog. White folks keeping up with this shit. So I knew you would be able to get here without people knowing but it would be insane when you got ready to leave.”
I nodded my head with my lips firmly pressed together but didn’t say anything in response. Being that Tami was gone, I was overlooking some of the questions I still had about him and Tami until everything died down. But something still wasn’t right with me when it came to Kale; I just couldn’t place it.
“He’s pulling up now; I see him,” Kale said, staring out the front entrance. “C’mon.”
I followed behind Elshire with Kale to my back and took a deep breath before we all walked out the front door. That was the part that pissed me off because I couldn’t say shit but everyone around me could say whatever the hell they wanted to say.
“Again, remember, let me do all the talking,” Elshire reminded me.
“You tell me that shit every time,” I snapped at him, even though I knew it wasn’t his fault. He was there to help me but I was pissed off that I even had to deal with the bullshit.
“Ink, why did you kill your wife?”
“Ink, do you think that you’ll be arrested for killing your wife?”
“Mr. Richardson, how did it feel being asked to come in for questioning about your wife’s murder case?”
“Ink, did they tell you that you’re a suspect?”
The few seconds I had to wait before we made it to the doors of Wayne’s black Cadillac SUV felt like an eternity. The second I was able to get in, Kale closed the door behind me, cutting off the noise. With my eyes closed, I exhaled out a long breath while dropping my head onto the back headrest.
“Ink, I gotta tell you, this doesn’t look good,” Elshire told me once Wayne started to drive away.
A partition was lifted, cutting off Wayne from being able to hear our conversation; one custom addition of many that he’d had done to his whip. Kale said that Wayne used to be the driver to some major rapper who also was still running work in the streets and that’s how he knew he should be the one to drive me around. His Cadillac was bulletproof, where Elshire and I sat was a soundproof room and Wayne was also licensed to carry.
“Officer Louis handed me this on our way out.” He handed me a piece of paper.
“It’s log from the week that Tami was killed. She wrote her name down saying that she was coming to apply for a restraining order. Now I haven’t been able to look yet into whether it was actually filed but... did she ever mention wanting to get one taken out on you?”
With a frown, I shook my head. “No! Hell, no, I never put my hands on Tami and never would, no matter how mad she’d made me. If she went down there for a restraining order, it wasn’t for me.”
“Well, I’m thinking that has something to do with the reason Louis is so confident. With whatever this is, the videos, your background and the amount of noise being made about this case, any time now they will officially be pressing charges against you.”
Lying back against the seat, I pushed a ‘whoosh’ of air through my lips and turned my attention out the window. There was nothing I could say because he was right. Hell, if I were any other nigga, I would think I did it, too.
To be honest, I didn’t even really know for sure that I wasn’t the one who killed Tami. I couldn’t remember a thing about what happened that night that would lead to me having blood all over my clothes.
Beyond that, there was shit that the police didn’t even know yet that had me feeling like I was losing my mind. They hadn’t been able to find Tami’s phone at the scene but there was one thing I knew for sure. According to what the police told me, she was murdered around four o’clock in the morning. One of the last texts in her phone, possibly the very last, came from me.
At three forty-six, a few minutes before the time that she was murdered, I had sent her a text that I didn’t even remember sending; words that had me thinking I was losing my mind. The text read, Open up. I’m outside.
* * *
“Can you think of anything else... anything that they may have to try to pin this on you? We really need to be talking about a strategy right now. We already know that we need to look into Tami and whether or not she made any enemies you aren’t aware of, but I need to be sure they don’t have anything else they can use.”
I paused for a moment to think. “No, there isn’t anything. I mean, Tami and I had issues, but nothing more than any other couple.”
“There is also the matter of Sage.”
I piped up at the way his tenor slid, like Sage was a handicap of mine in some way.
“What about her?”
Elshire gave me a pointed look. “She was photographed playing in the park with your daughter. It’s not exactly in your favor to have her around. At least not publicly.”
“She’s a friend who I was seeing before all this happened. She’s the only thing that keeps Tamiyah’s mind off her mother.” I tossed my hands in the air. “I can’t help what it looks like but we are just friends.”
Elshire shrugged. “I mean, I like her and all but having her around doesn’t look good for you. The media is painting you out to be some heartless, heavily tattooed, arrogant celebrity who was married to a woman that he publicly disrespected by having open affairs with other women. They even have some law-school student crying on TMZ about how she didn’t know you were married when she had a relationship with you before you tossed her to the side like garbage.”
Brisha’s lying ass strikes again.
I gritted my teeth. “I didn’t have a relationship with her. I fucked her one time in the bathroom at a club.”
“It doesn’t matter. Right now, she’s a hurt little college girl who wants to be a lawyer and you’re the thug who breaks hearts. And sometimes kills.”
Lifting a brow, I gave Elshire a hard look. He was lucky that he was so good at his job because the more it went on, the more I felt like breaking his ass.
He must have felt my anger building because the next thing he did was sit back a little, clear his throat and then continue in a much less aggressive voice.
“Anyway, I merely mean to illustrate to you the severity of everything and how public opinion affects you. The more eyes on this case, the least likely they are to give leniency.”
Frustrated, I blew out
a breath and turned to the window, watching the outside scenery pass me by. Elshire was saying that things didn’t look too good already, but something was telling me that was only the beginning.
24
Sage
* * *
I drummed my hand across my desk, a habit that I was doing now more than ever, and sighed. My anxiety was at an all-time high those days and in more ways than one.
With the case regarding Tami’s murder receiving so much coverage, every day that I went to work, I had to mentally prepare myself for the shit to hit the fan.
The public attention was affecting business and McMillian Enterprises was losing clients. People had me pegged as the evil side bitch who had broken up Ink’s marriage and was responsible for Tami’s death. Most people were split on their opinions of Ink; they either thought he was innocent and felt sorry for him or they thought he was guilty and hated him. No one was split on their opinions of me. The ones who cried guilty said he murdered his wife and my Jezebel ways drove him to it and the ones who thought him innocent said that if weren’t for me, Tami would have been home with her man instead of the seedy motel where she’d died. I couldn’t win for losing.
“Sage? The board is meeting... I know you told me to tell you if they were seen meeting without alerting you.” Her eyes dimmed and she looked away from my face. “So, I wanted to let you know.”
My chest throbbed. Though I knew it was coming, it still hurt to know that it was finally being done.
“Thank you for telling me,” I replied as I let out a huff of air.
“I’m sorry that this is happening,” she added in a quiet voice. “I know that this is a hard time for you and... I’m sorry the board isn’t standing by your side. Your father would’ve wanted them to.”
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