by Deidre Berry
After dinner, Tameka took the boys to go see the latest animated Disney movie, and I went back to Vance’s place to shower and get ready for work. I certainly didn’t feel like catering to a bunch of rambunctious drunks, but since the gravy train had come to a screeching halt, it was imperative that I keep the coins rolling in by any means necessary.
After working another shift at Visions, it was around 5:30 AM when I got back to Vance’s apartment. He was in the kitchen fixing Sydney a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, and even though it was our first time laying eyes on each other, she smiled when I walked through the door, as if she knew exactly who I was and was thrilled to see me. Five years old and cute as all get-out.
“Good morning!” I said, smiling at Sydney and trying hard not to stare at Vance’s pecs and biceps, which flexed inadvertently when he moved. He was shirtless, and wore nothing except a pair of Burberry pajama bottoms.
“Hey there,” said Vance. “How did it go?”
“It went well enough to make almost three grand,” I said, waving the cash in the air for him to see.
“Great—” Vance said, but was interrupted when little Sydney asked, “That’s your friend, Daddy?”
“Yes, Syd, this is Eva,” he said. “She’s the friend that I told you would be staying here for a little while.”
“ ’Cause she in trouble?”
Kids say the darndest things, don’t they? Vance looked caught, and I wondered just what he had said to his daughter about me.
“Umm . . . eat your breakfast, Sydney, all right?” said Vance. “Then we’ll get dressed and go to the museum, how’s that sound?”
“Kay!” Sydney wiggled excitedly in her chair, and slopped up her cereal, letting milk run down her chin. Vance wiped her mouth, and then gestured for me to follow him into the living room.
Once we were out of Sydney’s listening range, Vance said, “I have some not-so-great news for you.”
My heart dropped. “Is it Donovan?”
“Well, yes and no. I got a phone call from the district attorney’s office, and they want to talk to you about Donovan.”
“What? And why would they contact you about me?”
“Apparently they got wind of that press release I sent to the media on your behalf, and obviously assumed that I was your attorney.”
I suddenly became a nervous wreck, but Vance remained calm, cool, and reassuring.
“You don’t have a thing to worry about, Eva. You were close to Donovan and were the last person to see him before he disappeared, so I’m sure they just want to ask where you think he might be right now.”
I remained a nervous wreck for the rest of that week. I worked at Visions on both Saturday and Sunday nights, but I felt like Rosie the Robot, just going through the motions.
Monday morning could not have come fast enough for me. Vance and I rode together to the district attorney’s office in lower Manhattan.
Ronald Nash was a mountainous man with cold, piercing gray eyes. When Vance and I walked into his office, he wasted no time with niceties or pretensions. “Well, now, if it isn’t Eva Cantrell. Just the woman I wanted to see,” he said. “Did you have knowledge of Donovan Dorsey’s illegal business dealings but just chose to turn a blind eye?”
“Not at all,” I answered truthfully.
Without pause, Nash proceeded to grill me for almost two hours, not asking, but demanding that I reveal Donovan’s whereabouts.
I told him I had no idea where Donovan was. He didn’t believe me.
“You’re playing dumb right now,” Nash told me. “You don’t get a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago majoring in journalism and English if you’re not highly intelligent.”
“You’ve obviously done a background check on me, so you should have concluded that I am as shocked about all this as everyone else,” I said.
“Actually, I have concluded the opposite,” Nash said with a crooked smile. “You see, more than a few people have stepped forward to say that you were a feeder for Dorsey Capital Management and that they never would have invested with Donovan if you hadn’t practically bullied them into doing so.”
“That’s an outright lie!” I said. “Donovan had a very exclusive client list and was selective about who he took on as a client, so people came to me all the time asking if I could somehow persuade Donovan to let them open an account with them. I never once solicited or ‘fed’ anyone to invest with Donovan’s company.”
“Well, the jury is still out on that,” Nash quipped, grating on my last nerve. “What I do have so far that is undeniable is the two foreign bank accounts that list you as the trustee.”
I gasped sharply. It was all news to me, and I was blown away by the fact that Donovan had constructed such a complex and diabolical scheme that on paper made me look just as guilty as he was.
“How much money are we talking about here?” Vance asked.
“Seventy million dollars,” said Nash, “which leaves eighty million still unaccounted for. Where’s the money, Ms. Cantrell?”
“What? You can’t be serious!” I said, feeling as if I was in the perfect storm with no means of escape. The whole situation was absurd and unreal. Nash’s brutal, relentless interrogation made all of my other problems pale in comparison.
“That money is out there somewhere, and we’re going to find it,” Nash said, “but Ms. Cantrell, you could save us all a lot of time, and the taxpayers a lot of money, by just telling me where that eighty million dollars is buried.”
“Okay, that’s more than enough—Eva, don’t say another word,” Vance said. “Mr. Nash, this meeting is officially over, on the grounds that my client may inadvertently incriminate herself.”
“Ah, so soon?” Nash whined sarcastically. “We were just getting started!”
“I’m sure you were,” Vance said. “Have a good day.”
“We’ll be in touch!” Nash shot back as Vance and I left the office.
Out in the hallway, my knees were so weak that I almost collapsed.
“This is not a joke; these people really want to send me to jail!” I said, with my voice echoing through the hallowed halls of “justice.”
Vance put his arm around my waist to keep me steady. “Calm down,” he said. “I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as he tried to make it seem. Honestly, I think Nash was bluffing a bit, hoping that you would crumble and lead them to Donovan.”
“And I wish I knew where he was hiding out, because I swear I would drop a dime on his black ass in a heartbeat.”
Later that day, news crews filed into a conference room at Vance’s firm, where he made a public plea for Donovan to turn himself in.
Shortly afterward, the district attorney’s office put a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar bounty on Donovan’s head.
Enter the bounty hunters. From that point on, anybody anywhere in the world essentially had the go-ahead to track Donovan down and bring him to justice.
What Would Jesus Do?
The next Sunday rolled around, and I got my behind up bright and early in order to be front row and center at the Bread of Life Christian Academy, which was a church that Tameka credited with helping her keep her faith strong while she was going through her painful divorce from Jamal.
They say if you’re scared, go to church. And facing a long stint in prison for something you are innocent of will definitely make you seek the Lord more diligently.
The Bible says, “Raise a child up in the way they should go, and they will not depart from it.” However, I had. Growing up, I stayed in church, and was in attendance pretty much every time the doors opened. However, the only saints I had been acquainted with in the last couple of years were Saint Bart’s, Saint Lucia, Saint Thomas, and Saint Maarten, and I had visited the Virgin Islands rather than the Virgin Mary.
It was shameful. Mama Nita would have a fit if she knew, but fortunately or unfortunately, she may never know the details of the circumstances I had found myself in, because Alzheimer’s disease was
ravaging her memory.
From the minute the news broke about Donovan, I had longed to hear my grandmother’s voice and get some guidance and advice on what I should do, but the last few times I called back home to Chicago to talk to her, she had no idea who I was. She kept calling me “LeAnn,” the name of her oldest daughter who had died in a car wreck when she was just two years old.
As far as the rest of the family goes, they were all crazy as June bugs in a bottle of liquor, so I could not call any of them for good, sound advice.
The only one I could turn to was God, who unfortunately I hadn’t realized was all I needed until God was all I had.
After getting dressed, I went downstairs and waited in front of Vance’s building in what I felt was my not so Sunday best.
Since I did not have much to choose from, I’d had to make the best of a bad situation, and was wearing a recession-inspired number that consisted of a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress from two seasons ago and a pair of flip-flops. It was late November, and my feet were freezing. I was thankful that Tameka had agreed to let me borrow a pair of her heels, because I just could not bring myself to enter the house of the Lord with my bare feet exposed.
Again, Mama Nita would have had a fit. “Don’t you ever let me catch you going to church dressed like some bummy orphan!” she had told me years ago after noticing that the dress code in churches was becoming much more lax than it had been in her day. “Folks coming in any kinda way, with their toes all out, wearing jeans, and doo-doo rags on their heads. . . .”
“They’re doo-rags,” I said.
“Doo-who?”
“Doo-rags! That’s what they’re called, Grandma. Not ‘doo-doo rags.’ ”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s a mess!” she said. “As for me and mine, we shall serve the Lord, and we shall enter the house of worship with some respect and dignity!”
Amen.
Shortly after I had walked outside, Tameka pulled up to the curb and I was dismayed to see that she had brought her rugrats along with her.
Now, I love Tameka’s three boys, the youngest of which is my godson, but they are not the best-behaved children in the world. Six-year-old Jamal Junior was the oldest, and the first thing he said to me when I got in the car was, “Ooh, you ball-headed !”
See what I mean?
“Boy, watch your mouth!” Tameka said, reaching back to swat J. J. on his legs. “And Eva’s not bald, her hair is just a lot shorter than you’re used to seeing her wear it. By the way, girl, you are rockin’ that new ’do. It’s fierce!”
“Thanks, Meka, I like it,” I said, sticking my tongue out at J. J., which made him laugh.
“She looks ball-headed to me!” said four-year old Chavez, and that comment earned him a couple of swats on his legs as well.
Tameka had barely touched him, but the boy started yowling as if she had whipped him within an inch of his life.
I shook my head and thought, This should be fun!
Going to church with small kids in tow was distracting to say the least, what with them fidgeting, whining, having to pee every five minutes, and playing peek-a-boo with the people in the row behind them. With Tameka’s kids, I was certain it would be all of that times twenty-four, but I made up my mind right there in the car that I was going to tune out all of the distractions and stay focused on receiving the word.
The Bread of Life Christian Academy was a megachurch, similar in size to Madison Square Garden. As someone who is used to much smaller, intimate church settings where everybody literally knows everybody, it felt less like a place of worship and more like a concert hall.
Master Prophet Bishop Londell Gordon was the man in the pulpit, and was nicknamed “The Hip-Hop Reverend” because of his large following of rappers and other music industry moguls.
He was a dark-skinned man in his late forties, and not only was he gregarious and handsome, but Pastor was buff, too!
Instead of the usual pastoral robes, the Master Prophet wore black slacks and a matching vest over a white short-sleeved shirt that showed off his bulging biceps and well-developed upper body.
Hello, sexy hip-hop reverend! Not for me, mind you, but looking at the faces of some of the women around me I could tell that they were feeling his vibe, despite the fact that he was a married man of God.
When Tameka and I walked in with the boys, service had already begun and the Master Prophet Bishop was berating people for not paying their tithes, offerings, and love gifts like they were supposed to.
“Listen now,” he said like a stern daddy. “I know times are tough all over for everybody, but no matter how little you have, you must give GOD his share. It is an act of faith that GOD will provide for you and bless you with supernatural favor and abundance. But you must first give unto him, as he has already given unto you!”
At that moment, about fifty ushers sprang into action and started passing silver collection plates around. Tameka wrote out a check for two thousand dollars, and when she passed the tray to me, I saw that it was filled with plenty of other personal checks written for large amounts, and there were a lot more fifty and hundred dollar bills than there were any other denomination. I added my little twenty dollars to the collection plate thinking it might as well have been fifty cents.
The day’s sermon was on Ezekiel and the dry bones. “No matter what you may be going through, brothers and sisters, I serve a God who provides hope in the midst of hopeless situations, even if we are left for dead!” The mothers of the church cosigned by moaning, Mmm-hmm!
“Whatever your trial, and whatever your dilemma, it’s all about faith,” continued the bishop. “You will be tried and tested in ways you never imagined. But oh, ye of little faith . . . put your breastplate on, strap on your helmet, and fight the good fight of faith!”
I took a small notepad out of my purse and wrote down, It is all about faith! Hold on to it even when you think things are dead and hopeless.
It was a good word, one I hoped that I would remember as I tried to dig myself out of the hole I was in.
After church, Tameka dropped her kids off with her soon-to-be-ex-husband in front of FAO Schwarz, and I stayed in the car while they made the exchange. Tameka had said it had come to that, with her and Jamal dealing with each other only in public places to keep verbal and physical confrontations to a minimum.
To me, Jamal Harvey looked like a six foot six almond, with his bald, shiny head and dark brown skin. It was well past Labor Day, but he was dressed in a white linen shirt and pants and wore Carolina blue Florsheim shoes made of alligator skin. With no socks. A hot swamp disaster.
Jamal fancied himself a ladies’ man, but he was country to the bone. Tameka kept the exchange brief. She kissed each of the boys good-bye, and as she made her way back to the car, I could see anger and tension in her face.
“Ooh! He makes me sick, I can’t stand him!” Tameka said through clenched teeth when she got back in the car. “Smiling all in my face like he doesn’t owe me almost three months’ worth of child support and money to pay the bills. I am literally living on credit cards right now, me and his kids just might be out on the street soon, but oh! He can take some barely legal eighteen-year-old white girl on a ten-day vacation to Turks & Caicos, though!”
Tameka was seething, and I could totally see where she was coming from. I had heard all the rumors and seen all the items in the press about how Jamal was tricking dough on groupie hos like it was going out of style. According to the grapevine, Jamal was splurging on expensive jewelry and all-inclusive trips, and just recently, one chick even got an Escalade.
Meanwhile, little Chavez had just had his fourth birthday and all Jamal could manage to spring for was an afternoon at Chuck E. Cheese’s, which was a long way from the elaborate party that Tameka had planned for him.
Jamal had simply refused to pay $15,000 for the party, and that was that.
“Ooh! If I hadn’t just come from church, there were some words I would have loved to say to him.”
“And now I would just love to see him floating facedown in the Hudson River.”
I looked over at Tameka and saw that she was dead serious.
That really blew my mind, because Tameka and Jamal had been college sweethearts back at the University of North Carolina, and until just a few months ago had been totally codependent, joined at the hip like Siamese twins.
Socially, you just did not see one of them without seeing the other, and now she wouldn’t mind if he were pushing up daisies? Scary.
“Girl, don’t say that. Jamal is the father of your children. I know you guys are going through it right now, but to wish death on him? It’s not that serious.”
Tameka stared straight ahead as she drove, looking almost as if she were in a trance. “You know, I was watching that show Snapped the other day, where these women just went off one day and killed their boyfriends and husbands.
“Okay, now you’re really starting to scare me. Will you stop talking like that?” I laughed nervously. “Besides those women on Snapped are stupid, and you’re a smart girl. I know you wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize your kids’ future.”
Tameka looked over at me and smiled. “No, Jamal is definitely not worth me being locked up in prison and away from my children, but I’m just saying, I don’t condone what those women did, but I do understand.”
From FAO Schwarz, we headed over to Bubby’s restaurant in Brooklyn, which, surprise, surprise, was actually open that day. Gasp!
Bubby’s had one of the best brunches in town, and it always felt like eating at Grandma’s house, but the eatery didn’t bother keeping regular, set hours, so all the regulars knew that it was a fifty-fifty chance that they would be open on any given day.
Luckily, they were open that Sunday, and Tameka and I had a long, leisurely brunch. My treat. Since I was making decent money working at Visions, I wanted to start paying Tameka back the money I owed her, money that as I was finding out she could not afford to loan me in the first place.