Darkness Descending: A Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mystery (The Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mysteries)

by Penny Mickelbury

Gianna drove her unmarked sedan up on the sidewalk across the street from Charles Bailey’s Ark of the Covenant Tabernacle Church and to the rear of the crowd and studied the gathering as she worked her way to the front. It was a multi-ethnic, mixed gender conglomeration amazing for the spontaneity of its organization as for the sense of purpose it conveyed. The camaraderie was palpable. Cross-dressers in full bloom sang and danced beside Doms and Ags, butches and femmes joined arms with gay men and lesbians—all of them their own rainbow of Black, white, Latino, Asian. Many of them looked young enough for Gianna to wonder if their parents knew where they were, and several were old enough to be grandparents. Impressive as the gathering was, however, it still was illegal, and Gianna wondered how long Eddie Davis would allow it to continue, wondered how long its sanguine nature would continue in the presence of television cameras, especially once the church contingent put in an appearance

  Police presence was heavy but non-threatening. An unobtrusive phalanx of uniformed officers had the group boxed in on three sides and a line of blue separated the church itself from the demonstrators, which counted, Gianna saw, quite a few undercover cops among its number. They blended in well, under the circumstances, but any cop, or anybody looking for differences, would easily identify them. It wasn’t their purpose, however, to spy; they were there for control purposes should violence occur. And given the number of them, Gianna wondered how much notice Davis had received in advance of this thing, for he certainly seemed to have things well in hand. Squad cars blocked both ends of the street, and though she couldn’t see them, that’s where the riot control personnel and gear would be, ready and available if needed, and if not, unprovocatively out of sight.

  She spied Inspector Eddie Davis coming from the direction of The Snatch and headed toward the cluster of television cameras and personnel at the front of the crowd, and she wondered whether the Phillips sisters has had a hand in organizing the event, whether they controlled its tenor and tone, and if so, whether they could call it off as quickly and as easily as they seemed to have called for its existence. She scanned the crowd and saw familiar faces, among them Baby Doll (Marlene!) and her girlfriend, Terry; Jose Cruz from Metro GALCO and his sister, Emilia, who had helped take care of Joyce Brown; Ruby Dawson, Joyce’s lover; Aimee Johnson, one of The Snatch bartenders and cousin to Dee and Darlene; Darlene herself, though not Dee; Alice Long, and Cassie Ali. As much as she wanted to question Cassie about her presence here, she wanted more to talk to Inspector Davis. Cassie would have to wait until later.

  “Quite a little confab you’ve got here,” Gianna said when she got close enough to Davis for him to hear her over the singing and chanting.

  “It is kinda nice, isn’t it?” His benign gaze meandered over the crowd. He was, she knew, taking the pulse of the people as well as pinpointing the strategic positioning of his cops.

  “How long have they been out here?”

  “Little over an hour.” He looked at his watch. “If they keep their promise, they’ll disperse in about five minutes.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “You didn’t want to break it up right away? I don’t understand.”

  “That would’ve taken force, or at least a show of force, and I didn’t want that. Can’t go from ignoring people to locking them up.”

  “Then I may have created a problem for you.”

  He already was shaking his head and waving his hand at her. “No problem and no conflict and I already told that to Reverend Bailey.”

  “Told him what?”

  “Told him that you had every legal right to break up his demonstration the other night, and that I have every legal right to break this one up when I think it’s time to break it up because this began not as a demonstration but as a memorial service for Miss Hilliard.

  “And was there really was a memorial service?”

  He nodded. “At the crime scene, where her body was found. They laid a wreath and lit some candles and said some prayers and sang a song, then they walked down here. They said they had a message for Reverend Bailey—” Who appeared in the doorway of his church as if on cue, his pastoral robes flowing about him, his congregation surrounding him. The crowd saw him, too, and let out a roar, then began to cheer and sing. They sang, For he’s a jolly good fellow. Bailey was so shocked that he turned and fled back inside his church, closing the door behind him. Then the crowd, as if a single entity, turned away from the church and headed back toward The Snatch, chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, deal with it!”

  “You want to explain to me what just happened here?” Gianna’s relief was tempered by annoyance, which increased as she saw Mimi dodging in and out of the crowd across the street, heading for The Snatch. That she could have stayed home was her first thought, followed closely by wondering what exactly had she wanted to happen here, expected would happen, for she realized that she had prepared herself for wide scale violence and, in its absence, felt more let down than relieved.

  “I told you I met with Miss Phillips?” Davis asked. “Well, she came to see me yesterday. Seems that everything that’s happened since the Hilliard girl was killed has created the need for people to do something.”

  “To do something.” Gianna repeated the words, looking for more meaning than existed on their surface, looking to Davis for that meaning.

  “Your response to them was the first positive thing they’d experienced since they opened for business almost two years ago. Then there were the newspaper stories that dealt with them honestly and respectfully. Then O’Connell got the axe because of his treatment of them. Then I showed up offering more of the same support that you’d already given. To paraphrase Miss Darlene Phillips, they felt like it was time for them to stand up for themselves, and in front of Reverend Bailey’s church is where they wanted to make their stand.

  “You gave them permission?”

  He shook his head. “They didn’t ask my permission, they told me what they were going to do, without placards, banners and a bull horn, which they learned from you constituted a demonstration and therefore was illegal.”

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to create a monster for you.”

  He waved her off again. “No need to apologize. Once I understood that a couple hundred people already had planned to show up here for the memorial for Hilliard, my only options were control and containment. So, I made a deal with Darlene: I’d keep the cops at bay if she’d keep the crowd under control and disperse in an hour. We both bargained in good faith, and we both got what we wanted.”

  “And what did they want? To tell Reverend Bailey what a swell guy he is? Did you see the look on his face?”

  Davis turned on his Poitier smile. “Priceless. He’ll be mad at God for that one for weeks! Imagine, a couple hundred homosexuals serenading him!” He laughed out loud. “Miss Phillips—Delores—said they felt they actually owed Bailey and O’Connell their gratitude.”

  “Speaking of which, I need a few minutes, Inspector.”

  He checked up and down the street. “OK, but first I want to make sure all those people get out of here without incident and that the Phillips sisters get that place emptied out and locked up. Technically, they’re not even supposed to be in there on a Sunday night. Meet me at the Command in thirty.” He charged away.

  “All right, everybody! Listen up!” Darlene stood at the end of the bar, a crowd of about a hundred people still energized by the events of the evening milling about. Despite their presence, the place seemed strangely quiet without the pounding music and the roaring fans, and empty with only a hundred people standing around instead of five hundred people bumping and grinding. “What we did out there tonight was very special and very wonderful.”

  A cheer went up, followed by a chorus of For she’s a jolly good fellow when Dee came and stood beside her. Darlene raised her hands to quiet them. “We showed tonight that we can put aside our differences and come together to face a common enemy. We need to remember that and stop getting so hung up on gi
ving ourselves names and labels, ‘cause people out there—they don’t care if you call yourself Dom or Ag or femme or fag or Miss Thing or Stud Muffin. They hate us all the same, which means we got to love ourselves all the same.”

  This time the cheer was deafening, the applause lengthy, and Darlene’s pleas for quiet ignored. Finally, it was Dee who managed to restore order. “I know that we all feel more comfortable with those like ourselves and nobody’s asking you to stop gathering with your friends,” she said. “We certainly don’t intend to stop serving our clientele—” A cheer went up for that announcement. “—but I also promise to keep in better touch with the entire homosexual community in D.C. so no cop or no preacher can ever again cause any one of us to feel any less than any other citizen in this city. Now: Go home, all of you. I’m not allowed to be open on Sunday night. Loving you doesn’t mean letting you cost me my license.”

  After a long minute of cheering and foot stomping, the crowd began to trickle out of the door, all except Mimi and Cassie, both of whom were parked in the lot behind the club, the result of Dee’s appreciation for what she called their courtesy, but which both of them insisted was merely the performance of their respective jobs. Still, they both appreciated the convenience and safety of the lot.

  “We were talking about you this morning,” Cassie said to Mimi while they waited for the room to clear.

  “Who’s we?” Mimi asked.

  “The team. We were wondering how you find out so much, how you know so much. The Boss said she didn’t know any more than we did, except she said you reporters have sources like we cops do.”

  Mimi controlled the urge to smile. “If we’re lucky we do,” she said.

  “They were good stories. I especially like that you wrote about the women as people, as human beings, and about the neighborhoods where human beings live.”

  Mimi nodded her thanks and changed the subject. “How’s everything with you these days, Officer Ali?”

  Cassie’s cell phone rang, saving her from having to find an answer, but the respite was short-lived. “Yes, Ma’am,” she said, and Mimi knew who she was talking to, so she stepped away, but not too far. She heard two more “Yes, Ma’ams” before the call ended. “Guess you know who that was,” Cassie said, returning the phone to her pocket.

  “I should go,” Mimi said. “I still want to do a few more interviews.”

  “You doing a story on this?”

  Mimi nodded. “It’s good to see you again, Officer Ali, and I’m glad you’re doing OK.” She turned back to Cassie and pointed to the bar. “I hear the show is something to see.”

  A slow grin lifted Cassie’s lips. “At least once before you die,” she said, “you should experience The Snatch Dancers.”

  The Snatch Dancers. Mimi couldn’t get the phrase out of her mind—the rhythm of the words or the image they conjured up. Snatch Dancers. So alluring that they came and left via a steel gate. As Mimi drove through that same gate, she noticed the speed with which it slid shut. She had taken a good, close look at the steel-reinforced doors inside the club, and the security system inside Dee Phillips’s office. These women were terrified and the people charged with protecting them not only didn’t understand the nature of or reason for their fear, they contributed to it. In a long talk with Dee Phillips following the stories in Saturday’s paper, Mimi had learned that Frank O’Connell had actively attempted to block the Phillips sisters’ application for permission to own and carry a weapon following several attacks on them and their customers. Only the forceful intervention of their City Council representative, bought and paid for with a generous campaign contribution, overrode O’Connell’s interference.

  Mimi drove slowly toward the Metro stop, looking for more people to interview. She already had a dozen interviews but the more she learned, the more she wanted to know. She found herself feeling as guilty as Gianna had felt upon learning of both the existence of The Snatch and of their lack of awareness of the existence of an entity—the Hate Crimes Unit—specifically to aid and benefit them. Gianna thought her ignorance could be due to some heretofore unknown racist tendency or attitude on her part. Mimi, from the vantage point of being Black, thought it something else entirely. She blamed a form of cultural elitism that separated and divided members of the same group, the same way that educated, economically secure Blacks allowed the separation from those not so well-heeled. The cultural arbiters grudgingly had decided on a level of homosexual acceptance: They had to look and sound good on TV. That meant they had to be white, preferably male, and certainly funny. Women who looked and dressed like the feared and loathed boys in the ‘hood most certainly did not fit the bill.

  She slowed her car as she approached a crowd half a block from the Metro station and let down her car window. As she was about to call out a greeting, one was called out to her. “Hey Newspaper Lady!”

  Mimi pulled to the curb and got out as Baby Doll sashayed across the street toward her. “Hey, Marlene. I was looking for you,” she said, giving the girl a quick hug, feeling her surprise and pleasure the open gesture of friendship.

  “You got a new car! ‘Bout time.”

  Mimi was about to defend her former vehicle, a classic Volkswagen Karman Ghia which Baby had mercilessly maligned, when they were joined by three other women, one of whom draped a proprietary arm across Baby’s shoulders. This would be Terry, Mimi thought, the girlfriend. She extended her hand and introduced herself.

  “Thank you for coming,” Terry said.

  “I told you she would,” Marlene said smugly.

  “So how do you know Marlene?” asked one of the other women, who were standing slightly behind Terry.

  Mimi saw Baby stiffen, saw the hunted look return to her eyes, a look that had gradually eroded as the girl shook off her past. Eroded but not gone.

  “She helped me out on a story a couple of years ago,” Mimi said, “and we kept in touch, became friends.”

  “What kinda story?” the woman demanded to know.

  Mimi shook her head. “I can’t discuss that.” She extended her hand to the woman and introduced herself, then waited for their names: Tyra and Kelly. “What did you think of the demonstration?”

  “We’ve been reading your stories in the newspaper,” Tyra said instead of answering the question, which was fine with Mimi, as long as it achieved the objective of moving the discussion away from the nature of her relationship with Marlene.

  “Yeah,” Kelly added, “and they’re mostly OK, except I didn’t like that part where you said a lot of people don’t know anything about us, that we’re invisible.”

  “You are, to most people, including most gay people,” Mimi said.

  “But you made it sound like that’s our fault, that we’re the ones to blame because we’re invisible to people who don’t want to see us in the first place.”

  Mimi snapped open her notebook and switched on her tape recorder and Kelly backed up a couple of steps. “I just want to be certain that I get your words exactly as you’re saying them,” Mimi said, trying to calm and relax the woman.

  “But why you got to turn that on?” She pointed to the micro-recorder as if it were something potentially lethal.

  “Because I won’t remember it otherwise and what you’re saying is too important for me to try and trust my memory to get it right.”

  “You gonna put it in the paper?”

  Mimi nodded. “If that’s all right with you.”

  Kelly shared a look with Tyra who nodded. Then she looked to Terry, and then to Baby Doll, who had recovered her balance and the smart mouth that went with it. “You might as well talk now, that way we don’t have to listen to you talk later. You know how you like to express your opinion. About everything.”

  Kelly took a moment to gather her thoughts. “You asked us what we thought about the demonstration, right? Well, we thought it was something very special because of all the different kind of people who came together like that. Part of it was a tribute to Natasha Hilliard,
but part of it was a tribute to all of us, you understand? And that part felt real good. Then we decided we wanted to go some place and celebrate, but there’s no place for us to go—for me and Terry. Marlene and Tyra could go to the Bayou but not us. We’d have to go some place rough and ugly. You have any idea how that makes me feel?”

  “What do you mean, some place rough and ugly?” Mimi asked.

  “Like the Pink Panther,” Terry answered for her. “A dive, a dump, some place men hang out, the DL kind.”

  “Why can’t you go to the Bayou?”

  “They don’t want us,” Kelly said.

  “They told you that?” Mimi asked.

  “In so many words.”

  “It’s the attitude you get,” Terry added. “They way they look at us. It’s fear and loathing. That’s what we get from them, and it’s worse in a straight place. So if we want to go out, we usually just go to The Snatch, even if maybe you just want to go some place quiet or romantic for dinner. We’re not acceptable looking enough for that.”

  “Some people find your appearance threatening—”

  “Oh, bullshit!” Terry chopped the air with the side of her hand, cutting off Mimi’s words. “That’s just an excuse not to have to deal with us they way we are. Why is it everybody else can be dealt with they way they are, but we have to change, to conform, so people aren’t afraid of us?”

  “Everybody else like who? Give me an example,” Mimi demanded.

  “Muslims, Arabs, East Indians. They come here and they wear their native clothes and we’re supposed to be accepting because that’s who they are. We’re told not to judge Middle Eastern people, not to assume they’re all terrorists no matter how they look, but it’s all right to assume that I’m some kind of gangster because of how I look.”

  “You make a good point—”

  “Oh, thanks,” Terry said, sarcasm thick as honey. “You ever think about making that good point to the people who think I look threatening and treat me like shit on the bottom of their shoe because of how I look?”