by Noire
“Excuse me! Hi, yes. My name is Mink LaRue and I’m from New York. I saw your press conference on a Web site and I think”—I paused like I had to gather my emotions and said tearfully—“I think I might be Sable. Your daughter.”
Selah’s voice was cool as crushed ice. “Is that right? What makes you think so?”
“Well,” I said keeping my voice soft and innocent, “for one thing, I was born on July fifteenth, 1991, just like your daughter was, and when I saw that little girl’s picture on the back of a milk carton I knew it was me right off the bat.”
“Oh, did you now?” Mami sounded kinda New York-salty, like she had some snap about herself. “So who are your parents? Who raised you?”
“My mother’s name was Jude Jackson,” I said, which was the truth. “She raised me by herself. She was a single parent.” That part was mostly true.
“Well, did you think Ms. Jackson was really your birth mother? Or did she tell you that you were adopted?”
I swallowed hard again and sighed. “My mother had a really hard time admitting that I’d been adopted,” I lied, “but when I was about to graduate from high school she couldn’t come up with my birth certificate. I thought that was kinda suspicious, and it made me wonder if there was more to my story. I finally got her to admit that I wasn’t her biological child and I started searching for my birth family. After seeing my picture on the milk carton, I searched the Internet and found you.”
“Yes,” she said dryly. “I’m sure you did.”
I could tell I was losing her. Hell, if I had been expecting Mama Dominion to start jumping up and down and wiring me some of that cool Dominion cash, I was shit outta luck.
“It was good of you to call... What did you say your name was again?”
“Mink. Mink LaRue.”
“Mink, huh? Cute,” she said, and gave me one of those yeah-right-bitch chuckles. “Well Mink, I’m sure you know we get lots of calls like this from young ladies who claim to be our daughter Sable. I must say that one or two were quite convincing. But our daughter’s DNA is on file, and to this day nobody we tested has ever proven to be a match.”
DNA? I pumped my brakes.
They actually checked for that shit? How the hell was I gonna pass a goddamn DNA test?
“Oh, I’d be more than willing to take a DNA test,” I said eagerly. “I can—”
She cut me off. “Oh, that’s probably not necessary. There are other less complicated methods we use for screening these types of calls. You see our daughter has the sickle cell trait—”
“I have the sickle cell trait!” I damn-near shouted. I had forgotten all about it, but I definitely had it.
“Yes, but our daughter also had six toes.”
“I had six toes!” I shouted for real. “On both my feet! They chopped off the little nubs when I was a baby, but I can still see the scars from where they used to be!”
“That’s great, but like I said, before we can talk any further you’ll be required to take a DNA test.”
“That’s not a problem,” I assured her. “I live real close to Harlem Hospital. I’m sure they can do a test.”
“Sorry.” She dropped a bomb on me. “We’d need to have that test run by our own lab. It’s called Exclusively DNA, and it’s right here in Dallas.”
How the hell was I supposed to get around that?
Craziness rolled outta my mouth before I could stop myself. “I understand, Mrs. Dominion. I think I can come to your lab and have the test done. That won’t be a problem either.”
“At what age did you say you were you adopted?” she sounded a little bit more interested now.
“I guess I was about three,” I said quickly. “But all my life I knew I was different.”
“Hmm, different? How so?”
I got to spinning the wacky tale that me, Bunnie, and Peaches had come up with, and less than two minutes after I started talking I knew Selah Dominion was sitting in the palm of my hand. I had Mama’s ass! I had her good!
My little conversation with Selah Dominion had gone down exactly the way I wanted it to. The only thing I was stuck on was how to get around that damn DNA test, but then Bunni looked up the lab on the Internet and came up with a hustle of her own.
“All we gotta do is get on the inside,” she said. “Labs fuck shit up all the time, Mink. People get false results on all kinds of tests. Why can’t you get one?”
“Why can’t I get one what?”
“A fake test result, dummy! Yo.” Bunni slid the laptop closer to her and brought up Google. “Girl, don’t you watch CSI? What lab did the mother tell you to go to again?”
I looked down at all the notes I had scribbled. “Exclusively DNA. It’s in Dallas.”
“Cool.” Bunni tapped on the keyboard and brought up the lab’s Web site.
“Check this out. They offer immigration DNA, paternity DNA, and siblingship DNA.” I looked over her shoulder as she clicked on a tab that brought up another page. “They got four people working for them and thank God one of them is a dude.”
“Why?” I asked as we both stared at the smiling pictures of the lab’s staff members. There were three white chicks and one black man. The man’s name was Kelvin Merchant and he was light-skinned and big as hell.
“Because, stupid,” Bunni said with a real slick grin, “the dude is the one I’m gonna go after.”
CHAPTER 10
Barron Dominion was in chill mode as he rode down the mean streets of Dallas. He was on his way to a meeting with the shareholders of his father’s company, and he nodded his head to the sounds of Jay-Z that blasted from the luxury automobile’s twenty-one strategically placed speakers.
The rear roof was wide open, and the sun was on full beam as he slid his finger across his iPad and checked the latest stock reports from Dominion Oil. His father, Viceroy Dominion, was a cutthroat oil baron who had come up in the slums of Houston and made his money the good old-fashioned way: he stole that shit.
Rumor had it that Viceroy had come into his mega-millions by swindling one of his business partners in a crooked oil stock deal. The two had invested in a start-up company as equal partners, but at the end of the day it had been Earl Washington who ended up bleeding in the gutter, and Viceroy Dominion who stood on the throne pissing down on him.
At just twenty-five, Barron was one of the state’s best and brightest corporate attorneys, and he had graduated from top-tier schools. He had watched his father bum-rush and connive his way into power positions with some of the richest men in the oil industry, and although Viceroy had learned to walk and talk like an upstanding man of means, there was always that slick hint of hood in him, that switch-blade-carrying, dice-throwing nigga from the trenches that lived just beneath the surface of his skin.
Barron was cruising in the backseat of his 1.5 million-dollar whip and studying the bylaws of the company’s stockholder’s agreement when his cell phone vibrated and the front display lit up brightly. He glanced at the caller ID, then pressed a button on a side panel and spoke into the intercom in the white-on-white 2012 Maybach Landaulet.
“Yo, roll it up, Charlie. I gotta take a call.”
The smoked-glass panel that separated the chauffeur’s compartment from the rear seat area in the luxury sedan slid up smoothly, giving Barron complete privacy.
“Hi Ma. How you feeling today?”
Barron was a momma’s boy and he didn’t give a damn who knew it. Although he had his father’s sharp mind for business and could come off shrewd and cocky with his corporate opponents, Barron had nothing but love for his beautiful mother, Selah Ducane Dominion.
“Hello, baby,” Selah Dominion greeted her oldest son. “I’m doing okay. But I want you to know I got an exciting telephone call from Sam George earlier today.”
Barron sat up straighter in his seat. His moms was tipsy. He could hear the old familiar slur in her voice even though she was trying hard to control it. He adjusted his tie and pinched the razor-sharp crease in his pants
.
“What did he want? What, he found another Sable wannabe? I guess that Internet news conference is getting a lot of hits, and people wanna see what they can get out of us. I’m telling you, Ma, you better brace yourself. With Daddy in the hospital all kinds of nuts are gonna start scurrying around us like project roaches.”
“Hmmm ... ,” Selah said. “Maybe. But this one seemed kind of promising. She called our hotline and they patched her through to Sam. He said he spoke to her for a little while, and she really impressed him. He gave me her number and I called her.”
Barron frowned. The scenery outside had changed from an urban hood to the Dallas business district, and the buzz of a small but vibrant city was in the air.
“Come on now, Ma. You shouldn’t even be talking to those people. They chase stories like ours just for the hell of it. Most of them are just schemers and con artists. They’ll tell you anything to play on your heart and get in your pockets. With Daddy being so sick you just don’t need that kind of distraction right now. Forget about this girl, and I’ll give Sam a call and remind him not to bother you when stuff like this comes up.”
“But I already spoke to her, Barron. I couldn’t tell a lot about her over the telephone, but there are a lot of similarities between her and Sable. She lives in New York, but she’s flying to Texas on Monday to take a DNA test, and we’re gonna get together and have lunch or something.”
Barron cursed under his breath. Sam’s dumb ass was about to get fucked up. Viceroy had been tearing him off under the table for years to keep the Sable imposters away from Selah, and as soon as his father got laid up this fool let one slip through the cracks.
“So did this girl take a DNA test yet? Sam shouldn’t even be calling you unless there’s some DNA results on the table.”
“No, she hasn’t taken the test yet. She’s going to do that when she flies in on Monday.”
Barron sighed. “Mama, I know it’s hard on you, but it’s been almost eighteen years now. Eighteen long years, and every last girl who’s called has either been a mental case or a broke opportunist, and I can’t see this girl being any different. How much cash did she ask you for?”
“None, Barron. She didn’t ask me for a dime.”
“Not even to buy her a plane ticket to get down here?”
“She didn’t ask me for anything. Nothing at all.”
Barron pressed his cell phone to his chest and pressed on the Maybach’s intercom button again.
“Turn it around, Charlie, and get Brian on the phone and tell him to cancel the board meeting. Tell him something came up and we’ll have to reschedule. Cancel my lunch date with my cousin Pilar too. Run me back to the estate real quick,” Barron ordered as his driver made an illegal U-Turn, then muttered under his breath, “So I can see what the hell is going on with my mother.”
Twenty minutes after taking his mother’s call, Barron walked through the front door of the Dominion Estate. His cousin, Pilar Ducane, was standing in the large foyer talking on her cell phone, and she ended the call and stuffed the phone inside her purse the moment she saw him.
“Barron! What the hell—?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you had a meeting in the city today?”
“I thought you had one too!” she said. “That’s why I wanted us to go to lunch. What the hell happened?” she asked, rushing at him with a frown on her gorgeous face. Pilar was a sexy-ass socialite and the spoiled only daughter of Barron’s uncle Digger. Her and Barron had grown up together and they’d always been tight, but lately Pilar had been playing him close and tossing around some steamy hints that let Barron know she wanted them to be a whole lot closer.
“You promised to take me to lunch today, B, and then Charlie calls and says you’re ditching out. What’s up with that?”
“Something came up,” Barron told her. He caught the pissed-off look that flashed across her face as he rushed past. “I’ll take you out tomorrow. I promise.”
“That’s what you said last week!” Pilar whined, and then she smirked at his back. “What? Let me guess. Carla’s got your ass running around in circles again, right? How come every time me and you are supposed to hook up that little hater tries to pull something slick?”
“It’s not Carla,” Barron said over his shoulder as he strode toward the parlor. “I gotta talk to Mama real quick. I just found out there’s another chick out there claiming to be Sable. I’ll tell you more about it later. After I handle this business.”
Pilar crossed her arms across her breasts and her stylish jewelry sparkled. “Oh, I’ve got some business for you to handle,” she muttered under her breath. “You can believe that.”
“A’ight, so we’ve got another nutcase on our hands,” Barron said as he stepped into the stunning, two-story parlor. Selah sat on an expensive sofa drinking a vodka tonic. She jumped up when her son entered the room, and there was excitement mixed with alcohol and hope in her eyes.
“I just got off the phone with Sam,” Barron told her. “He said to tell you he’s sorry for calling you with all that nonsense. The next girl who calls him thinking she’s Sable is gonna get sent straight to the lab.”
Barron had lit a fire under Sam’s ass and had the dumb dick apologizing until he was out of breath. For years, Viceroy had been sliding that fool big chunks of cool cash to keep this kind of shit away from Selah. But now that Sam had fucked around and let this crazy broad from New York slide through, all of that extra paper was about to be dead.
“So it’s all good, Ma. He won’t be calling you with no more nonsense.”
“But I told you I’m not really sure it’s nonsense this time,” Selah said as she raked her fingers through her silky, blow-dried hair. The liquor had broken her out in a sweat, even though the temperature in the mansion was always kept extra-cool.
“This girl seems like she might be the real thing, Barron. She had all the right answers. She has the same birthday as Sable, she was adopted at the right age, she has the sickle cell trait—she even has the same genetic mutation that causes babies to be born with six toes just like Sable was. I don’t know ... something tells me she could be the one.”
Barron stuck his hands down in the pockets of his tailored Brioni suit. “That’s the same thing you said about the last two girls, Mama. One of them freaks was trying to get a sex-change operation, and the other one wanted you to give away all your money because the world was coming to an end. C’mon.” He put his arm around her as they walked over to the window. “Right now Pops is enough for you to worry about. I don’t want you to go getting your hopes up high again on Sable.”
“Sable is still my baby,” Selah said as she sipped on her drink. At forty-eight she was still beautiful and classy, and she could have easily passed for thirty. She had a cool, distant air about her, but those who really knew her understood that she was fragile inside and could get broken down by too much stress.
“For real, Ma. I mean it,” Barron warned her.
“I hear what you’re saying, Barron. But for some reason this girl just seemed different to me. She was so convincing. I can’t explain it. I just have a gut feeling this time. Call it a mother’s intuition or whatever you wanna call it, but I have it.”
Selah stood at the window and stared out over the sprawling forty-two-acre estate that her husband had built for her more than twenty-five years ago. She had grown up in a cold Brooklyn tenement, and now she lived in a dream house. A twenty-room mansion that she had helped design and had spent years decorating to her tastes. They had horses, cattle, swimming pools, tennis courts, ponds, and countless fine cars. Her children hadn’t been raised like she was raised—beneath a roaring elevated New York train station with city grime falling down on their heads, but instead, they’d grown up right here in the lap of luxury. And even though she had more money than she could ever spend, and the entire world was at her fingertips, Selah still wasn’t happy.
“A’ight,” Barron said as he stood beside her. He
hated it when she got all silent on him. “So what’s her name this time? Where is she from?”
“Her name is Mink, and she’s from right there in New York. Harlem.”
Barron laughed. “Mink? Mama! Come on now. What? You hold a press conference and tell the world you’re looking for a missing child named Sable, and all of a sudden up pops some broad named Mink? Who’s gonna be on the phone next? A hood chick named Chinchilla? C’mon, Ma. Forget about this girl. I hate to say this, but it’s been a long time, and we don’t even know if Sable is still out there anymore.”
Selah hugged her son. For Barron to be adopted, it was funny how much like Viceroy he was. But Selah knew how to handle both of them. She wasn’t about to forget about finding Sable. She’d taken her eyes off her baby for just a few minutes and she’d lost her to a stranger. What kind of mother could forget that?
“You don’t have to tell me how long it’s been, Barron. I relive that day almost every night in my dreams. And all I can say is I’m sorry. I’m sorry for Sable, and I’m sorry for you too.”
“I know. But it’s okay, Ma. Everything is cool.” Barron put his arms around her again. If nobody else understood the pain she felt over losing Sable, he sure did. After all, the blame was partly his too. He was the oldest. He had been the one in charge. Sable had been snatched out of her stroller right in front of his eyes, and he hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it.
“You were seven years old,” Selah said, reading his guilty thoughts. “Seven. It was my fault for leaving you alone with two babies. That lady was going to take Sable no matter what, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could have done about it. Nothing.”
Barron nodded and kissed the top of his mother’s head. She’d been telling him that same bullshit for over eighteen years.
Maybe one day he’d believe her.