by Mary Monroe
Calvin had changed my life forever, just as I’d predicted he would.
* * *
I returned to work on Monday, and reporters were all over the place. I refused to talk to them. After they left, almost every customer in the store came to my counter to say something stupid or snap pictures of me with their phones. I almost lost my cool when one brazen woman asked, “Was Calvin good in bed?”
I threw up my hands, but before I could say anything, one of my elderly employers rescued me. Mrs. Cottright beckoned for one of the other cashiers to take care of my long line of customers and she ushered me to the back of the store. “Honey, if you want to clock out and go back home right now, that’s fine with me. And you can stay off until things settle down. I’m surprised you ain’t lost your marbles by now.”
I had five more hours to go before my shift ended. I knew that if I tried to finish it, I’d be mincemeat by the end of the day. “Thanks, Maisie,” I mumbled, wiping sweat off my forehead.
Mrs. Cottright gave me a hug. “I’ll pray for you and Joan, baby. Now go home, where you can have some peace of mind.”
I left work immediately. The Red Dog Motel would be home until I figured out what to do next.
I didn’t give my landlady a thirty-day written notice to let her know I was moving like I had agreed to do when I signed the month-to-month lease. I told her in a voice mail message. I didn’t even care if she sued me for breaking the lease. That nice lady called back and told me not to worry, because she didn’t want me to say anything negative and discourage other prospective tenants from moving in. “It’s going to be even more difficult now to attract people who are not afraid to live in a house where such a bizarre crime occurred and is next door to a halfway house,” she told me. She blamed herself for not being more proactive in having the back door lock repaired. I blamed myself for letting Calvin know about it. I had practically opened the door for him myself!
The cops had located his Jeep Cherokee parked in an alley two blocks from the scene of the crime. When they searched it, they found a duffel bag that contained duct tape, handcuffs, garbage bags large enough to hold a petite body like mine, a bottle of chloroform, a claw hammer, and a set of brass knuckles. The sales receipts from the two stores where he had purchased these items were in his pocket. My assumption was that once he got me into his vehicle, he planned to duct tape and handcuff me, then use the brass knuckles and claw hammer if necessary. I knew that he had intended to kill me, I just didn’t know how. I had seen a lot of horror movies, so my imagination flew off the charts.
Within days, there was a full-blown media circus, and Joan and I were the main attractions. It was the biggest crime story involving people connected to Northern California since the Jim Jones mess back in the 1970s. Somebody who knew my cell phone number passed it on—probably for a profit—to the media. Black serial killers were so uncommon, people all over the world wanted to know more about Calvin Ramsey. Joan and I received several voice mail messages from a pesky reporter in Japan. She refused to return his calls. I called him back after he had left four messages, and that was only to tell him to leave me alone.
The story kept growing. Four days later, an escort who called herself Heidi was interviewed on the local six o’clock news. Between sobs, she claimed that Calvin had invited her to his house. “Since he was a regular with the service I work for, I didn’t mind doing a house call. He was real nice at first. Then all of a sudden he went off on me. He roughed me up a little, but when I told him I was pregnant, he backed off and I hauled ass,” she said with tears streaming down her face. When she gave the date of the encounter, I was flabbergasted. It was the same night that I’d met him at the pizza parlor! It was also the same night that Bertha died. Recalling those two events made me shudder.
Several escorts from other dating sites came forward. Unlike the pregnant Heidi, none of them had anything negative to say about Calvin. One woman even called him “one of my nicest tricks.” So far, none of the women from Discreet Encounters who had dated Calvin had been identified or come forward.
When a local reporter tracked me down, I moved to a motel on the other side of town.
My cell phone rang constantly, so I turned it off for the next two days. When I turned it back on, my voice mail was full. When my caller ID identified somebody from the media or some other busybody, I deleted the message without listening to it. Elbert had called eight times, but I had no desire to talk to him anytime soon. Jeffrey had left five messages, so I called him back right away.
“I’m sorry it took so long for me to call you back, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody,” I apologized. “I am so damn tired of all the media bullshit and everything else.”
“I understand. I was just concerned about you. How are you holding up?”
“I’ve had better days,” I said, surprised that I was able to chuckle. “It gets a little better each day.”
“Lola, I’m glad to hear that you’re okay. I hope you come out of this mess in one piece. That might be hard to do as long as you stay around here. If you want to disappear for a while, I’ll buy you a ticket to anywhere you want to go. But I have to warn you, there is probably no place you can go to get away from this. Not for a long time.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll have to go back to work soon so I can afford to eat and pay rent.”
“My father owns an apartment building on Bellflower Street. A young dude who’s been living in one of the units for the past two years just accepted a job in Oakland. He doesn’t want to commute, so he’s going to be moving to the East Bay soon.”
“How much is the rent?” I asked.
“It’s within your price range. The guy was also the apartment manager, so Daddy let him live there rent free.”
“Oh. You think your daddy would let me take over that responsibility so I can live there rent free too?”
“He owes me a few favors, so I promise you he will. After all you’ve been through it’s the least I can do.”
“I left a lot of my property in that house, but I’ll never go back inside that place again. I can’t stop thinking about how scared I was that night, and all that blood the dead cop and Calvin left on the floor and—”
“Stop! I know it’s not easy, but you need to put that shit out of your mind and move on. Don’t worry about your stuff. I’ll hire somebody to pick it up and haul it to a storage facility until you’re ready to retrieve it.”
“Jeffrey, that’s the best news I’ve heard since . . . well, in a long time.”
“I can believe that. By the way, I bumped into Joan’s stepfather at the flea market last Sunday. He told me that the whole family knew you’d be Joan’s downfall someday. I was tempted to set him straight, but I didn’t want to upset the old dude.” Jeffrey laughed.
I laughed for the first time since the night Calvin came to kill me. “They think I was a bad influence on Joan? If they only knew the half of it.” I laughed some more. “I’m glad Joan doesn’t feel that way. We talked this morning and she’s about to go stir crazy being under the same roof with her family again. She moved back into her condo today and she’s cooking dinner for me tomorrow.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I always liked Joan. Do you have plans for dinner this evening?”
“Other than a few crackers and some potato chips, I haven’t eaten a decent meal since . . . since that night.” The words left a bitter taste in my mouth. I was still having trouble wrapping my brain around what had happened. Never in a million years would I have thought that anybody—other than Libby and Marshall—would attempt to kill me. The pain of knowing that the person I thought was going to “rescue” me wanted to kill me was so excruciating, I didn’t know if I’d ever date again. I had already deleted my profile from the Discreet Encounters website.
“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard by now that Libby and I are separated,” Jeffrey said in a low voice.
“I know. Elbert told me. I hope you and Libby can work things out.”
<
br /> “No way. I’m done with her. I ignored a lot of red flags over the years, including mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night when she thought I was asleep. And I don’t want to go into the details, but I have other evidence that she was cheating on me. I’m divorcing her. I’ve already filed the papers.”
“How is she taking it?”
“Oh, you know her well enough to answer that question yourself. She’s fit to be tied.”
“Oh well. That figures,” I said, forcing myself not to snicker.
“And she blames you for breaking up her marriage.”
“The hell I did! She did it herself by being careless enough to get caught with another man. I’m glad she knows I’m the one who put the bug in your ear. She caused me pain for years, and it was a pleasure to finally give her a taste of her own medicine.”
“I hear you. And I hope it makes you feel better.”
“It does.” A wicked smile crossed my face, and I was glad Jeffrey couldn’t see it. Despite what I’d just said, I didn’t want him to know just how overjoyed I was about the outcome of ratting Libby out. “Now, what time are you coming to pick me up for dinner?”
Chapter 60
Joan
MY NEIGHBORS WERE VERY UNDERSTANDING AND SUPPORTIVE. They mentioned the incident as little as possible. A couple whom Reed and I used to socialize with brought me home-cooked meals for a week. Another neighbor did my laundry and grocery shopping. The airline pilot who lived in the condo next door offered to let me and Junior stay with him and his fiancée for a while, but I declined his invitation.
Dr. Weinstein, Reed’s so-called best friend, checked in with me every day to see how I was holding up and to ask if I needed him or his wife to run any errands for me. I was surprised that he never brought up Reed’s name, and neither did I. I was convinced that if he had helped Reed hide his affair with Grace, he regretted it now.
* * *
My landline rang day and night. Because my number was listed in the telephone book, I was a sitting duck for sick puppies all over the country. Some called just to do some heavy breathing. Others called to bombard me with profanity. Last night a man accused me of being the prostitute he had contracted HIV from. A local woman called and swore that Calvin was the father of her three children and she wanted the name of the cop who had shot him so she could file a lawsuit. Another man accused us of luring Calvin to the house and “setting him up to be killed by the cops” because we hated black men. A woman with a German accent, who claimed to be a psychic, told me that another man was going to “finish what Calvin had started.”
After the cops had viewed what I had recorded with my cell phone, somebody on their end leaked the video to the media. It went viral and was shown all over the Internet and on TV news programs almost as much as the Rodney King video. Now everybody knew the reason Calvin had targeted Lola and that he had been killing women for years. Pictures of the three dead women in his freezer, as they had appeared in life, were in every newspaper, as well as TV and the Internet. My likeness was too, but Lola’s was the one that got most of the attention. Everybody agreed that she resembled the women in the freezer. A lot of people couldn’t tell Lola from Calvin’s wife. They looked that much alike. One reporter nicknamed him the “Look-Alike Killer.”
Producers from three national TV talk shows invited us to appear to tell our side of the story. We both refused. The same people kept calling until we had our telephone numbers changed and unlisted. We deleted our profiles from the Discreet Encounters website, but a few members sent messages to our e-mail addresses, not to ask for dates but to beg us not to mention their names. None of the prominent men we had dated came forward and revealed their connection to me or Lola. And I was not surprised. They all had too much to lose by telling the whole world that they belonged to a sex club. I was so glad that Lola and Calvin had never posted any reviews about each other on the club’s review board.
The Discreet Encounters staff remained quiet about Calvin, Lola, and me being members of their club. I assumed it was because they thought it would be bad for business. But I didn’t think most lonely people cared one way or the other, because even after the TV movie about the craigslist killer and other bad publicity about online dating, Discreet Encounters membership had tripled since I’d joined two years ago.
* * *
Reed never ceased to amaze me. Instead of showing the mother of his child some sympathy, he ignored me completely. He was quoted in the newspapers left and right, and he wasn’t saying anything nice. He had the nerve to tell one reporter that he always knew I was going to end up in something over my head. He claimed I’d been “sneaky” for so many years, he didn’t know who he was married to anymore. And even though he knew damn well that I had never pepper sprayed anybody before him, he told another reporter that it was my “style” and that I’d recently used it to assault him. He didn’t mention that he had assaulted me first.
It really hurt when I heard that Reed told some of the people we used to socialize with that he had been trying to get away from me for years because I was so unpredictable, deceitful, and unstable. He claimed that he had stayed with me only because of Junior but that I’d become so volatile he feared for his safety and had had no choice but to leave me. I was so glad that lying bastard was out of my life! I never wanted to see him again, so I planned to have him pick Junior up from Mama’s house when he wanted to see him.
My family got on my nerves big-time the short time I stayed with them. They seemed to be in such awe, you would have thought that Lola and I had parted the Red Sea. No matter how much I balked, they wouldn’t let up. Our dinner table had always been like the hood version of The View, so that was the venue for most of the discussions.
Sunday afternoon, two weeks after the incident, the subject came up again at Mama’s dinner table. I was glad that she and Elmo were the only two present with Junior and me. My stepfather loved true crime stories, so he was in his element. “Girl, this is the biggest news involving black folks since the O.J. Simpson thing. If cops in this town was as smart as they want people to believe, they should have put two and two together and looked into this case better when them three women that looked alike disappeared without a trace. And they should have looked into the killing of them hitchhiking women along the same route that Calvin drove. It took you, a run-of-the-mill, PTA-meeting, everyday housewife, and Lola, a dead-end-ass, low-paid cashier, to bring down one of the most dangerous men in the country!”
Elmo stopped talking, and Mama started spooning collard greens onto her plate and talking at the same time. “I got a feeling them big studio hotshots down in Hollywood will be calling soon about making a movie about y’all! Or one of them Discovery Channel true-crime show producers. This story is right up their alley. Lord, I hope they don’t get no ugly actress to play me,” she said with her eyes sparkling like wet diamonds.
“You don’t have to worry about an ugly actress portraying you, because there is no way I’m going to let the whole world see my life on a screen. And Lola feels the same way.”
Junior sat across from me with an exasperated look on his face and his hands covering his ears. “Do we have to keep talking about that crazy Calvin? I’m sick of hearing about how he almost killed my mother,” he snarled.
“Shet your mouth, boy! Shet it up right now and take them hands away from your ears,” Mama ordered, giving him a menacing look. “We’ll be talking about that crazy sucker from now on. I been a prison guard since Joan was a baby, and I ain’t never been caught up in a situation with a serial killer until now.” With a pat on my shoulder, Mama added with tears in her eyes, “And to think that one almost took my baby girl away from me!”
“I feel the same way Junior feels. I wish everybody would find something else to talk about,” I complained. “I’d like to forget about what happened. Lola and I are fine, Calvin is dead, end of story.”
No matter how much I protested, my folks refused to let up. They kept me up until midni
ght asking all kinds of questions, some that they had asked already several times. They asked me for the tenth or eleventh time when and where Lola had met Calvin. She and I had agreed to tell everybody that they’d met back in February in the food court at one of our favorite malls.
“Humph! I wonder how many other maniacs Lola done picked up in food courts,” Elmo sneered. “Joan, you need to put some distance between you and that sex-crazy woman. Associating with her is too dangerous. Calvin might not be the only serial killer after her with her nasty self! Y’all might not be so lucky the next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” I said firmly.
Chapter 61
Joan
IT SEEMED AS IF EVERYBODY IN TOWN WANTED TO HAVE THEIR FIFTEEN minutes of fame by piggybacking off Lola and me. A former classmate I couldn’t even remember told a newspaper reporter that Lola and I had been two of the most promiscuous girls in South Bay High. The boy that I’d given my virginity to claimed that I’d pestered him for days on end to have sex with me. Patty Baker, a former bully that Lola had helped me beat up in grade school—and hadn’t spoken to since—bragged that she had been one of my best friends back in the day. One of the worst mean mouths was Reed’s mother. “I am so glad my son got rid of that woman! She’s been a thorn in my family’s side since the day we met her,” Mother Riley said during a local TV news interview.
My son was taking everything in stride. “Mama, I don’t care what people are saying about you. I think you’re the world’s greatest mother. And Lola is just as cool as you are in my book.” Junior was the most important male in my life. I was glad that he had “forgiven” his father and resumed their relationship. However, Reed had to pick him up from my parents’ house whenever he wanted to see him.