Murder, Mayhem & a Fine Man

by Claudia Mair Burney

  I reached out to him, touching his shoulder. “I’m so sorry we can’t get your son back, Mr. Vogel.”

  He continued weeping, never looking at us again. Jazz and I thanked him for his time and excused ourselves.

  We didn’t speak to each other while exiting the house, but when we got outside I let him have it. “Was that necessary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that, Lieutenant Brown?”

  “Because this is a homicide investigation.”

  “That poor man lost his son. Again. Only this time there’s no hope he’ll get him back. Isn’t there a time and a place for interrogations? Like maybe after the funeral?”

  “That wasn’t an interrogation. That was an interview.”

  “I think it was cruel.”

  He clenched his jaw, but he spoke as if he were unfazed by my comment. “A murdered kid is cruel. Why don’t you let me do my job, which I’ve been doing very successfully for a long time. I didn’t hire you to judge me or lead my investigation.”

  Ouch.

  I sighed. Maybe I was judging him, and maybe that comment was unprofessional of me. The truth is, I wouldn’t have dared to say such a thing if he were anyone other than a man whom I’d been kissing!

  I tried to calm myself. It has to be hard to do what he does day in and day out. The more we worked together, the less it seemed like a good idea. Everything between us felt charged with too much emotion. “I’m sorry, Jazz.”

  “Oh, I’m ‘Jazz’ right now? Not ‘Lieutenant’?”

  “Do you think you can take an olive branch when you’re offered one?” I thrust my hand out, hoping he would shake it, and he did.

  Bad idea.

  I felt those sparks again. He held my hand way longer than a socially acceptable handshake required. We stood there looking into each other’s eyes, when I finally said it. “You feel it, too, don’t you?”

  “Um-hmmm.”

  “It’s pretty bad when we can’t even shake hands, right?”

  “Yep. It’s bad.”

  “You do realize that we’re in violation of our clearly articulated no-touching policy.”

  “You started it when you stuck out your hand, tempting me, you wanton seductress.”

  “Wonton? I don’t recall seducing any Chinese food, but I am hungry. Would you like to go get something to eat?”

  He kept holding. “Sounds good to me.”

  “Will you let go of my hand?”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “Jazz?”

  “Yes?”

  “Let my hand go or I’m going to slap you.”

  “I think you actually mean that.”

  “I do. Fair warning.” I really said it to divert his attention, but he kept holding my hand anyway. Obviously, I didn’t threaten him.

  “I need you to trust me, even though this is complicated,” he said. His eyes told me he was talking about his job and his intentions.

  “I need you to let go of my hand; I’m sure that will simplify things.”

  He nodded, and after a moment, he dropped my hand.

  I felt relieved when he opened the car door for me. I didn’t watch him slide into the car on the driver’s side. But after he’d shut the door, turned on the ignition, and drove off, he slid his hand over mine, and my own hand grasped his in turn. Neither of us said a word, until I asked him fifteen minutes later, “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” he said, and I had no idea what he meant by that very inflammatory response. Coming from him, it sounded like a four-letter word, like M-A-L-E, L-O-V-E, or K-A-T-E.

  I didn’t dare ask where exactly home was.

  I didn’t protest, either.

  Chapter

  Seventeen

  HE TOOK ME HOME , all right. We drove up to a very chichi, brown-brick Tudor house in Palmer Park. Impressive. Jazz apparently lived large. Once again, I questioned the former Mrs. Brown’s sanity, but I soon discovered this house didn’t belong to Jazz.

  It belonged to Jack and Addie Lee Brown. Jack swung the door open, still in his green, raw-silk pants, but he wore a caramel-colored cotton T-shirt instead of the button-down silk one he’d had on earlier. He held a Guinness stout in one hand. Upon seeing us he exploded with laughter, making me laugh, too. He yelled behind him, “I told you he’d bring her. You owe me ten dollars, Addie.”

  He took me by the elbow, guiding me into the house and ignoring his son, but not before planting a kiss on my cheek. “Hello, baby,” he said.

  Jazz followed us in. “Baby? You’re going to let him call you that? And he gets to kiss you?”

  “Stop your whining,” Jack said, first frowning at Jazz, then beaming at me.

  Addie Lee joined us in the foyer. She’d traded her Kente cloth duster for an indigo caftan. “Oh, I can’t win a bet with you, Jack Brown.” She gave her husband a playful smack on the arm and gathered me into a mama-bear hug. “It is so good to lose a bet and gain you, honey,” she said.

  Jazz looked annoyed. “Honey? What? Y’all know each other like all that? You just met her today, Mom.”

  His mother gave him a withering look. “Stop being rude,” she said, silencing him.

  They ushered us past a living room that stunned me into silence with its artful beauty and into their kitchen, which I decided I would live in after I honeymooned in Mason May’s office. The floor was made of handmade, hand-painted tiles featuring Addie Lee’s signature-style blocks of African-inspired patterns. The tiles had a Moroccan flavor, full of bright bursts of color and energy. All the furniture in the room was made of wood with warm tones that complemented the multi-jewel-toned fabric covering the windows and table. Wooden utensils with an ethnic flair decorated the walls, along with several whimsical antique clocks. The dishes set on the table were bold black-and-white-striped china.

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s incredible. I want to live here.”

  Addie Lee laughed. “Honey, you hang around long enough and you just might get to do that.”

  “Mom,” Jazz said, sounding horrified.

  I found a seat at the table. The Browns immediately started feeding and spoiling me.

  “You like gumbo, sweetie?” Addie asked, spooning out a huge bowl from a cast-iron pot before I could reel in my overstimulated senses enough to answer her.

  “It smells so good,” I said, sniffing the air in ecstasy.

  She laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Just a taste. I’m watching my figure.”

  “Looks like Jazz has been watching it, too,” Jack Brown said.

  Jazz sat at the table facing me. His dad sat right beside me and occasionally gave my shoulder affectionate little squeezes.

  “Can I get you a beer, baby?”

  “No thanks, Mr. Brown. I’ll have a soda if you have one.”

  “You got it,” he said, and jumped up to get it for me. “There’s some Guinness in that gumbo’s roux,” he said, giving me a wink before he went to the fridge. “That’s not gonna be a problem, is it?”

  “Not at all,” I said, already salivating. “I’ve never eaten anything cooked with beer that I didn’t like.”

  Jack Brown’s hearty laugh warmed the room like the smell of his wife’s gumbo. “And she’s Irish, too!”

  I looked at Jazz and mouthed, “Wow.”

  “I don’t think they like you, Bell,” he said flatly.

  I grinned at him. “It’s Dr. Brown to you.”

  He rolled his eyes at me.

  Addie Lee set a steaming bowl of gumbo and rice in front of me. I was about to enter Cajun heaven.

  She sat at the table on the other side of me, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “So,” she said, “you don’t have a family history of mental illness, do you?”

  I didn’t miss a beat, or spoonful of food. “No, ma’am,” I said. “Unless you count my Uncle Bobby. He gets drunk at all of our family barbecues, and tries to fight everybody. Even the women and kids.”

  She waved away my concer
n. “Everybody has an uncle like that.”

  Jack Brown chimed in, “Do you happen to have latent homosexual tendencies?”

  “No, sir. Could you please pass the bread, Mr. Brown?”

  “Sure, baby.” He handed me a basket of assorted breads and rolls.

  At that Jazz protested. “Wait just a minute, Dad.”

  “She can have carbs. She’s too skinny as it is.”

  “Can I call you Dad?” I said, thrilled to be too skinny.

  He nodded as if to say, “Of course you can. Don’t be silly.”

  Jazz huffed. “I don’t mean she can’t have bread, Dad. I mean, what’s up with this interrogation?”

  “‘Interrogation’?” Mr. Brown said. “It’s just an interview.”

  “Interview for what?” Jazz said.

  “Are you a Christian, honey?” Jazz’s mother asked, ignoring him.

  I nodded vigorously between bites of bread and spoonfuls of gumbo. “Love the Lord with all my heart. So much so that I won’t even let Jazz touch me.” Well, it was mostly true.

  I looked up to see Addie Lee Brown’s eyes misted with tears. “I told you she was the one, Jack.”

  I could hear Mason May in my head saying of Jazz, “He’s the one, all right.” My heart was so moved that I actually stopped eating for a moment and gave Jazz a second of my attention.

  He shrugged, looking confused.

  “By the looks of your son here, I take it that you don’t give every girl he brings home this royal treatment,” I said to Addie, whom I decided I would call Mom, even if I never laid eyes on Jazz again.

  But Jack Brown answered, “He don’t bring nobody home, baby. Nobody.”

  “What size do you wear, Bell?”

  I hoped she didn’t think I was too fat! “Uh, size ten,” I said, tentatively.

  She smiled. “That’s perfect.”

  Jazz slapped his hand onto his forehead like he had been seized by a migraine.

  The three of us looked at him.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That’s the size of her wedding dress—the dress she’ll be furiously preparing for you.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. Surely they weren’t serious, but Jazz didn’t laugh at all. He really is quite fair, but the poor soul, he blanched at that one.

  After his parents got him calmed and fed, Jazz relaxed. He didn’t even seem to mind when his father started calling people on the phone, telling them how nice Jazz’s girlfriend is.

  “I’m not his girlfriend,” I said, but Jack Brown didn’t pay attention.

  I didn’t mind, at least, not too much. Coming from Jack Brown it seemed funny. I hadn’t been anyone’s girlfriend for over a year. Even then I hadn’t been altogether comfortable with a guy who was seven years younger than me, and was my pastor—even if he did have pretty eyes and made me laugh all the time. I always thought, when I’m fifty, he’ll only be forty-three. When I’m sixty, he’ll only be…

  After Addie cleared the table, she brought me some of her work to look at. I kept going back to one piece—a delicate charm necklace she had not yet finished. Strands of tiny white peyote beads, shimmering like pearls, were snuggled next to larger, clear glass beads, alternated with whimsical silver charms. I fingered a cross, a dove, baby shoes, a potbellied stove, a wedding cake, a little man and woman, a Bible, the cutest minivan, a police car, and a prayer box. The necklace delighted me and filled me with sadness at the same time.

  “I made one of these for each of my kids when they got married,” Addie said. “I call it Marriage Wish.”

  I fingered those beads; coveting that necklace, thinking how I had messed up everything. I had given the gift of myself, meant only for my husband, to a man who wasn’t my husband and didn’t deserve that sacred part of me—or any other part. I regretted every man—and God help me there were other men—who I gave myself to after Adam out of hurt, confusion, or desperation.

  I should have waited. There are worse things than being a thirty-five-year-old virgin. There are babies born too early who fit in the palm of your hand. There are broken places and fissures in your soul that never heal. There is no wedding quilt to inherit that your great-grandmother and namesake made for you when you were born—back when everyone had the highest hopes for you. There is the ache of knowing that even if you did find yourself blessed enough to get something as incredible as a Marriage Wish necklace, like the prodigal, once you squandered your fortune you ate with the pigs. And you will never forget it.

  “Did Kate like hers?” I said, ashamed that I asked as soon as it came out of my mouth.

  Jazz took a really big swig of Guinness. “She didn’t get one,” he said.

  I looked at Mom, confused.

  She shrugged. “He said he didn’t want me to give it to her. I called him after we’d found out he’d gotten married, because he hadn’t even brought her over to meet us.”

  “That must have been difficult for you,” I said, sounding like a psychologist. Sometimes I can’t turn off what I do, either.

  She nodded. “He’d been married three months. We found out from his sister. And he said it was already over. Broke our hearts.”

  “Biggest mistake of my life,” Jazz said. “One I won’t repeat.”

  “You sure won’t,” his mother said. “I have no doubt that next time you’ll marry the right one.”

  “Who said there’s going to be a next time?” he said, raising his voice to his mama! “I’m not even sure I believe in remarriage after divorce.”

  She gave him a look that said “Who do you think you’re talking to, boy?” which Jazz buckled under like he was five.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes at him and turned her attention back to me, patting my hand and saying mysteriously, “Where sin abounds, grace does so much more abound.”

  I smiled, trying my best to be comforted, but still not being able to connect that kind of grace with myself.

  Again Jazz had made it clear that he’d never marry anybody else, myself included. At least not in the timeline I needed to be married in if I wanted a baby. I didn’t have too much longer to wait. We were impossible, Jazz and I, but God knows, I’d never gotten the kind of attention from a man’s parents that the Browns gave me that afternoon. And I let myself love it. It would all disappear as soon as we walked out that door, and I knew I’d never go back there. The thought of it was painful. I’d never be Jazz’s girlfriend or wife.

  Suddenly, I felt exhausted. As if Jazz could read my mind, he was up and standing by my chair. “You ready to get out of here, Dr. Brown?”

  His mother chuckled. “I love it that you make him call you that, Bell.” She got up when I did, and embraced me.

  Dad waved me over, and I went to him, pressing a kiss on his cheek. “See you, Dad,” I whispered.

  He winked, never breaking the flow of his phone-bragging about me. I’d treasure that wink.

  Jazz put his hand at the small of my back in that exasperating way of his, violating our no-touching policy again. Just as he was moving me toward the door, my cell phone rang. I hurried and rummaged my purse for it before my voice mail could pick up.

  “This is Amanda,” I said.

  “You mean you’re actually carrying your phone?” my caller asked. “What are you up to, babe?”

  “I’m working with Jazz, Rocky.”

  Jazz scowled. “Don’t tell me your man is hunting you down.”

  I ignored him. That seemed to be happening to him a lot today.

  Rocky’s voice sounded urgent. “You might want to cut that short and get over to the house.”

  My face must have showed my concern.

  “What’s going on?” Jazz said.

  This investigation was wearing me out, but what Rocky said before we ended the call immediately perked me up.

  Jazz continued to fish for information. “What? Your boyfriend doesn’t trust me with you?”

  “I know you find th
is hard to believe, Jazz, but that call wasn’t about you. Susan Hines is asking for me.”

  His brown eyes lit with enthusiasm. “We’d better go.”

  “Take me back home so I can get my car. I’m going to see her. Not we.”

  He looked flabbergasted. I took that to mean he didn’t get a lot of nos, but he complied. The man got me home faster than a bad date.

  And he didn’t even have to use the siren.

  Chapter

  Eighteen

  AN HOUR HAD PASSED before I made it to the safe house. Rocky was waiting outside on the porch. With him stood Toni Patterson, the music ministry department head. Completely in love with Rocky, she was leaning close, looking all starry-eyed at him. I imagined the willowy blonde sizing him up for the tuxedo he’d wear at their wedding. He could do worse, I thought.

  “Babe,” he said when I got out of the car. That word, a mere annoyance to me, seemed to crush Toni. I felt bad for her—for about two seconds. You’re beautiful, thin, and tall. Don’t expect much sympathy from me.

  “Hey, Rock,” I said. “Where is she?”

  “Um. One thing, babe.”

  This didn’t sound good. In fact, his big brown eyes were saying, “This is bad, but I didn’t want to tell you on the phone.”

  “What is it, Rocky?” I couldn’t imagine. I thought he’d tell me something awful, like she’d jumped out of the window or something.

  “She asked for you—but not verbally.”

  “Not verbally?”

  “Not quite.” Rocky winced a bit, like I was about to slap him.

  “Exactly how did she communicate that she wanted me?”

  “She did it like this.” Before I could stop him, he’d gone catatonic again and was gesturing in his dazed state like he was writing.

  “Rocky, if you do that one more time…”

  Rocky jerked back to consciousness. “Whoa.”

  “I’m beginning to worry about you.”

  “I just do it as a quieting spiritual discipline; she’s the one you need to be concerned about.”

  Leave it to Rocky to find God in a catatonic state.

  I ran my hand through my short, kinky hair. “I burned up I-94 to get here, thinking she was talking.”