I said, “Once started, blackmail never ends.”
“I see that now.”
“Do the tats and body piercings have anything to do with this?”
“Kevin does tats. He did all of mine. He does that part-time at Heavy Gold Tattoo on Eighth. I started tats after the blackmail. It was my idea, not Kevin’s idea. If my ex released the video, I didn’t want to look like the girl in the tape. I did a couple; then I guess I got addicted to the pain.”
“The bleaching?”
“People treat light-skinned people better.”
“On the video, you black or white or some hue in between?”
She asked, “Am I ugly to you?”
“No. You’re beautiful.”
“My skin?”
“I don’t approve, but I don’t have to. You’re a grown woman.”
Silence.
She said, “Rachel Redman is beautiful.”
“She is.”
“She looks like my mother.”
“I don’t think so.”
“A more fun version of my mother.”
“Your mother used to be fun.”
“What happened?”
“Me. I changed her life before you were born. She will never let me live that down.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“I know how she felt. I only saw things my way. Never saw things her way. Was my fault.”
“I read her journals. She was happy, then unhappy. I think she is happy now.”
“Your skin?” I put us back on track. “What hue in the video?”
“I’m darker. My birth color. But my friends and family will know its me.”
“You should have come to me with the truth. A year ago.”
“I don’t know you.”
“Know me or not, you’re my daughter. You need to understand that.”
“I wanted to kill myself.”
“Don’t spread that into existence.”
“Past tense. But I’m pregnant. I can’t do that to my baby. Or my mother. Or my fiancé.”
“Your ex put you in this position.”
“Surprised me. I thought he loved me.”
“He loves money. People who love money will hurt anyone to get it. They don’t hesitate to screw people over. I bet when you were dating him, he cost too much to date.”
“He did. I couldn’t afford to be with him anymore.”
Her body language matched her angst. Most of it. One part was off, a response she had given earlier, but not every truth was easy to confess. We were as close to the truth as Margaux was going to allow me to get. I think I had more of the story than she had given her boyfriend.
She knew she would have to tell me the truth. She was here because she knew she had no other option. She was here because her East African stepdaddy, Yohanes, couldn’t help.
So she needed her true father. She needed the black man she had read about in her mother’s journals. She needed the bad man to ignore his wounds and weariness and fix this.
I had wanted to put that part of me to sleep. Last night had been too much. If I had died, she would have had to face this alone. But I had lived, and maybe this was part of the reason.
I had enough of the truth and I didn’t like this bitter pill. It was hard to hear that my daughter had a sex tape out there. It was hard for her to let me know what had happened.
It was hard to not be angry that some motherfucker was doing this to her.
Rachel Redman came back into the room, walked through our silence singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” She went to the kitchen, came back with cups of coffee for all of us.
In Amharic, Rachel asked my daughter, “Have you eaten?”
In Amharic my daughter replied, “I’m hungry.”
Rachel smiled and in English said, “I can make you some breakfast, Margaux.”
“Can I invite my boyfriend . . . fiancé, up from the car to eat?”
I nodded. “If you want Kevin up here, he’s welcome in my home.”
Rachel handed me my phone. I knew she had already read the text.
It was a message from my coworker Esmerelda.
I forwarded that message to Jake Ellis.
I had a feeling today was going to be like yesterday.
My daughter hugged Rachel Redman, then looked at me. “Our first breakfast.”
“No, just the first one you remember. I made your breakfast all the time.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I do.”
“I don’t want to eat and leave my boyfriend in the car.”
“Go ahead. Tell your pit bull to come up here and eat too. I know you and he are short on money, so you’re short on food, and I know if you’re hungry, then he’s hungry too.”
“He’s scared to come up here.”
“He should be. He should turn and run like Usain Bolt when he sees me.”
“Kevin thinks you’re crazy.”
“He attacked me and I’m crazy?”
“Said you might be a lunatic.”
“He didn’t give me a good first impression either.”
“His nose is broken.”
“Tell him to be happy his neck is okay.”
“I didn’t mean for this to jump the shark. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“Tell Kevin I said to come up, or I’ll go down there and pick up where we left off.”
“You’re going to let Rachel Redman cook for him too?”
I nodded. “One of you can bless the food.”
“You sure this is okay?”
“Depends on how you feel about me.”
“You divorced my mother and never came to look for me.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Not anymore. I see your actions. And I believe in action.” Tears fell and she wiped her eyes. “Action over words, Mr. Swift. I told you the worst part of me, and you didn’t put me out.”
I wiped mine too. “Just like your mother. Hard. Cold. Stubborn.”
“And she says I’m just like you.”
I said, “We don’t know each other, that’s true, but you are the blood of my blood.”
“No, we don’t know each other. But now you know my darkest secret.”
“But I used to know you.”
“I don’t remember.”
Silence.
I said, “That thing I did in Florida.”
“What about it?”
“Never mention it again. Never say that man’s name again.”
“Why not?”
“The person I work for will kill you. Your boyfriend. Your mother. And the dog.”
“We don’t have a dog.”
“I’m serious. You see how rough I look right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Imagine this on your body ten times over. And imagine them making me do it to you, because if they come for you, you will end up buried in five locations in five different states.”
Silence.
I said, “Since we’re being honest. Know this. People tried to kill me last night.”
“Is it safe here?”
“It’s safer here than anyplace in the universe.”
“What happened?”
“You’ll never know. And you’ll never meet people like that, unless you get cute and start talking. Get mad and snitch on me, fine, but I’m connected to other people, some bad people.”
Silence, but she shivered where she stood.
She whispered, “There was a rumor Rachel Redman killed someone in Alaska.”
“Leave that in a box with the other rumors.”
“Momma said you’re a bad man.”
“No matter who I am, I’m your father.”
�
��Her journals.”
“What did she say?”
“She needed to have space to grow without being attached to a man. She didn’t want a serious relationship. You could have gone away and she didn’t care. She would have felt freer if you did. She was too independent to be in a certain type of relationship. People have a hard time understanding an independent person. They take it personal. You took it personal. Your happiness was not her goal. Her happiness was her goal. She wanted Harvard. Leaving was a way of leaving everything behind. She wanted to push reset and move on.”
Her words, that point of view, that realism, affected me. “Then I happened.”
“No. I happened. I changed everything. I changed her life, not you.”
Silence as she held a hand over her stomach, again being protective.
I asked, “We good?”
She nodded.
I asked, “Still hungry?”
“What?”
“Are you still hungry?”
“I’m still hungry. I’m pregnant. Now I’m always hungry.”
“I have some things to give you later.”
“What things?”
I didn’t answer, left it at that, then told her, “You will tell me all about Dawit Wake.”
Hearing that name shocked her. “How do you know my ex-boyfriend’s name?”
“I know his name. I can find him. This is why you shouldn’t lie to me.”
That was enough for her to think that I was much smarter than I really was.
I said, “This is a hard question, but it has to be asked.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m not judging you if you did.”
“Okay.”
“Was part of the blackmail getting you back in his bed?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Because I need to know if there’s a chance he’s the father of your child.”
Right then there was another knock at the door.
It was Kevin. Light-skinned boy who could pass for white. All tats and piercings and images of Buddha in his overstretched earlobes. Skinny jeans, Vans made for riding a skateboard, and a T-shirt with the number 7, same T-shirt Jay-Z had worn in his Saturday Night Live performance. The boy’s eyes were blackened, his nose definitely broken.
I had hit him harder than I had realized.
He looked at me and was ready to take off running again.
I said, “Kevin.”
He could barely inhale and exhale. “Is Margaux here?”
“You begin a conversation with a greeting when you’re at a man’s door.”
“Good morning.”
“Mr. Swift.”
“Good morning, Mr. Twift.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Is Margaux here?”
I nodded, extended my hand, offered him a handshake, shook his hand in a way that told him that when we were together, no matter how smart or rich, he would always be the lesser man.
He said, “I’m sowwy for yestewday. I was diswespectful and weally upset.”
“You okay?”
“Face huwts. Hard to bweathe.”
“You’ll live.”
“Don’t hit me again.”
“Come on in, boy. Come in and have a seat. We’re about to eat.”
“Hard to twallow.”
“I’ll have my girlfriend make you a smoothie.”
He was going to be the father of my grandchild. We were family. Like it or not, we were family. His body language told me he loved my daughter. He would spend his last dime to make sure she was safe. He would do what he had to do to get this blackmail out of her life.
He was a fool in love for Margaux, as I had been a fool in love for Jimi Lee.
I said, “Let’s eat and talk.”
Margaux said, “Talk about what?”
“Tell me all you know about the motherfucking asshole blackmailing you.”
She nodded. “After we bless the food.”
Her boyfriend asked, “When was the last time you saw Tsigeweda?”
“Before yesterday? She was five years old. Her mother took her and left when she was five. She did what she felt was best for our daughter. And I can’t say she didn’t do the right thing.”
My daughter said, “Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth. You know it’s the truth.”
“It’s not my truth. I’ve needed you all of my life. I have. I really have.”
“I’ve needed you too. All I did, all I gave up, I did for you. And I’d do it all over.”
“Dad.”
“That’s not my title. You made that clear.” I shook my head. “Don’t call me that.”
“You’re my dad. My real dad. I’m the prodigal daughter who has finally come home.”
With that she shivered like she had done an Ice Bucket Challenge, and when she let go of her tears, this time for a good two minutes, there was not a dry eye at the table. I had to get up and walk away, cry to myself, pull it together, feel my own deep hurt, then return to the table.
My daughter bowed her head, lifted her palms to the sky. “In the name of Allah . . .”
While we ate vegetarian omelets, toasted bread, and fruit, while we sipped juice and my future son-in-law sipped on his smoothie, there was a coded knock at my back door, followed by four wicked African finger snaps. Battered and bruised, barely able to stand, it was Jake Ellis.
Half past beaten and a quarter to dead or not, we had some nasty work to do.
CHAPTER 35
CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.
When I was a child, I went to a relative’s funeral in Mississippi. The gravediggers had fascinated me. Some of the hardest work a man ever did was digging graves with a pickax and a shovel. I had relatives down in Mississippi who did that job for years, did it the old-fashioned way with a flat chopping blade. The sound of a shovel breaking hard dirt was an unforgettable sound. The sound it made when you dug to softer ground was just as memorable. That crunch, crunch, crunch had to be a horrifying onomatopoeia if you were blindfolded and hog-tied and knew that shallow grave was being dug on your behalf. If you knew that this was what you had earned, and the Postman had come to deliver the mail, each crunch, crunch, crunch was a terrifying sound.
* * *
—
DAWIT WAKE LIVED in Venice, two blocks from the beach in the area many people passed but never knew existed. There were actual man-made canals in one of the neighborhoods, a section that had been made to look like Italy, and that was why that beach was named Venice. Every home was pressed up against the next and each was unique, from a 1950s almost southern-style home to something that looked like it had come back from a thousand years in the future. The area was the Venice Canal Historic District and had been there since 1905, since the days when a lot of people who were black had felt like they had just been freed from the master’s whip.
He had a thirty-year-old, two-bedroom, two-bath number on Linnie Canal. That 1,693 square feet was worth three million dollars. At least that was the asking price. It was on the market. The cheapest home in this community had to be over a million, the most expensive almost five million.
Most of the people didn’t have curtains, and long after the sun had gone down, while people were out walking dogs, occupants lived with their one-, two-, and three-story homes lit up, like they wanted everyone passing to look inside and see how rich they were, to see them with lights on, lounging in white-walled homes, cuddling on their pure white sofas, some at the kitchen table eating, others with computers in one hand, some working on a tall cup of Starbucks.
It was like a zoo. I saw kids running up and down railless stairs playing. Small boats were at the back of most homes. Boats and ducks quacking away in dirty water.
This was my daughter’s ex-boyfriend’
s lavish lifestyle, one that would cost a man like me almost eighteen hundred dollars a square foot. It was a lifestyle that was hard to maintain.
He parked in his garage and came into his home dressed in lime-green Nike gear head to toe, sweating but not winded. The house was chilled at seventy degrees. Outside was still fifteen degrees hotter, even at the beach. He had just left one of the local overpriced gyms. This wasn’t like the Garrett job. There was no magically moist salmon waiting. There wasn’t any conversation.
It was after eleven at night when the man with Moroccan blood came back home.
I had left at seven. I had been waiting since seven thirty.
He walked from the kitchen to the darkened living room and saw the windows he had left open to look out on the canals, saw all the curtains had been drawn. Then he saw Jake Ellis step out of the shadows. Jake Ellis was dressed in all black, African attire from the shop Lagos on Leimert Boulevard. He moved toward Jake Ellis until he saw Jake Ellis holding my second .38 in his gloved hand. Jake Ellis wore a mask from the movie Scream. That was enough to make a man yell like a bitch. He stepped backward and noticed the sound, heard the crinkle, crinkle, crinkle of the thick plastic that was on his floor. He heard the sound, probably saw the words from that onomatopoeia rise before his eyes. Plastic had been put out, and so had tools from Home Depot. He saw them and turned to run. I was behind him, dressed in black Adidas sweats, Chucks, a clown mask, and black gloves. He ran into my fist and dropped to the ground, down for the count, but not unconscious. I picked up a hammer, squatted, and scowled in his face. He couldn’t see my expression through my mask, but he felt the harsh energy. It showed in his eyes.
“How much money did you blackmail her for?”
“Who?”
I brought the hammer down on his thumb and dared him to scream.
Bad Men and Wicked Women Page 33