Blanche Passes Go

by Barbara Neely

  TWENTY-NINE

  UP CLOSE AND UNIVERSAL

  By the time she talked to Thelvin again, Blanche was missing him so badly he could have told her any old kind of bull hockey. But instead of trying to oil his way back into her good graces:

  “Look, Blanche,” he said on the phone, “I know I’m skating on thin ice with you. I know I made a lotta wrong moves. But don’t you see? I like you, woman! I want to be with you, and it makes me act stupid! It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way about anybody, and I guess I just forgot how…how delicate this kinda stuff is.”

  Who could resist?

  “You haven’t had any more near misses or threats, have you? I know you don’t want to hear it, but I still think you need to…”

  Blanche cut him off with an invitation to come over.

  She’d made them a dinner based on recipes she’d found in a cookbook called Intercourses: the Aphrodisiac Cookbook. She couldn’t afford the book, so she’d jotted down some recipes in the store. Of course, she’d changed some of the ingredients, like substituting catfish for red snapper—she wanted sexy, but she needed colored, too. They’d just finished the baked oysters, grilled catfish with avocado sauce, rosemary-cheese grits casserole, and mixed green salad. Neither one of them was quite ready for the strawberry shortcake.

  They plopped down on the sofa and sighed in unison.

  “You can burn, woman. I never even knew grits could taste like that!” Thelvin took her hand, kissed it, then held it on the sofa between them.

  “Just one of the many, many things I do well,” Blanche teased. “But what about you? I watched you do that conductor thing, Thelvin. You got it down to a bust-out.”

  Thelvin grinned his pleasure, but his smile didn’t last. “My uncle was a redcap in Baltimore in the old days. He useta tell me stories about how they got treated by some of the white people who rode the trains. But he didn’t tell me how bad it was on the inside.”

  “Why, do you think?”

  Thelvin shrugged. “I don’t know. Too proud, maybe. It was one thing being mistreated by riders, but the people who were supposed to be your brother workers…”

  “How long you been working for the railroad?”

  “Thirty-one years. I was fresh back from the Merchant Marine when I got hired on. Long time. Long, long time. Too long.”

  “Would you quit, if you could?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “Oh yeah! I remember hearing about some black folks suing Amtrak over discrimination stuff. Problem is, it’s everywhere.”

  “That’s why I gave up thinking about quitting,” Thelvin said. “On my run, I talk to men who work construction, work for hotels and in shoe stores, work for big corporations. They all going through some brand of the same hell I’m catching. It ain’t like somebody’s in your face calling you a nigger, or putting KKK pamphlets in your locker, although that happens, too, believe me. It’s the other shit. Like I always got to follow the rules like God hisself gave ’em to me, and if you step wrong, then…All the union wants is your dues to use to make sure the leadership stays white. Look how long a lotta the unions kept us out.”

  “Sounds to me like business as usual in the good old U.S. of A.”

  He rubbed his hands across his face as if to wipe away his worry. “The funny thing is, it’s your own hope that trips you up. I worked with white men before. I knew how bad some of them act. But every job, every trip, you start out hoping this’ll be better than the last. That there won’t be nobody in this bunch of people who’s bound and determined to make you feel like shit or like you want to rip their fucking…and then the race crap starts and you feel bad, when you should have known all along that…”

  Blanche could feel Thelvin’s weariness, stretched nerves, and disappointment like a vibration in the room. Did white people have any idea how much energy and hope and downright stubbornness it took to live and work and try to find some fun in a place where you were always the first to be suspected, regardless of the crime? She thought of the two little boys who’d been arrested for rape in Chicago a few years ago, even though doctors said they were too young to produce the sperm found in the dead girl. Would that have happened if they’d been two little blue-eyed blond white boys? Would any cop anywhere in America have been half as eager to arrest Palmer if she’d reported him as the Farleigh Sheriff had been to find a black man responsible for Maybelle’s death?

  “I wish every white person, just once, could spend a day being followed around a store by Security like they got ‘thief’ printed on their foreheads. I wonder how they’d deal with not getting a job or an apartment because they got white skin.”

  “That’s why they so scared of us. They know how they act ain’t right. They’re scared one of these days we’re gonna give ’em what they know they deserve.” His voice was full of the smoldering coals that glowed in most black people’s voices when they got on to this particular subject.

  Blanche and Thelvin were both silent for a few minutes, but Blanche’s mind rang with remembered slights and taunts, and echoes of that awful, heartbreaking instant of fear that was a part of every trip into the white world—a fear of being refused or given poor service because she was black, stopped by a cop because she was black. And it wasn’t simply her fear: it was so much a part of what it meant to be black in America it mostly no longer showed itself as fear—it showed up as stress, high blood pressure, asthma, tuberculosis, heart disease, and cancer. It’s like our bodies have been taught to discriminate against us, Blanche thought.

  “It’s good you can talk about it.” She figured some woman in his life was responsible for that. Most men she’d met didn’t come to talking about their feelings through heart-to-hearts with the boys.

  “It’s good to have somebody to talk to about it. Since Ruthie died…” Thelvin squeezed her hand. “I don’t know, seems like a lotta women want you to play the strong black prince no matter how you’re being…no matter how scary shit gets out there.”

  Blanche nodded. Of course, like most man/woman stuff, it wasn’t all one-sided. Who was the famous black woman who, when somebody asked her why she only married and dated white men, said she couldn’t handle black men’s pain? The sister got a lot of back talk from black folks about that, but Blanche respected her for being honest enough to save herself and some black man a lot of grief.

  She moved closer and put her arms around Thelvin, who melted into her as though he needed to be relieved of his own weight for a while. She wondered how much his jealousy had to do with all of this. A person had to feel powerful someplace, even the wrong place. Maybe being a black man—the most hated human being in the country—and mostly working jobs where somebody else had all the say, had something to do with wanting exclusive ownership of a woman’s life. Of course, absolutely none of that made it healthy or all right. She didn’t know if jealousy was a thing that could be cured, but she certainly hoped so. She did know there was nowhere for her and Thelvin to go if he couldn’t get beyond it. He was at least worth a couple more conversations on the subject. She opened her mouth to speak but changed her mind. Let him rest with the fact that he could talk to her, trust her to understand and be on his side. She let her mind float free and gave herself over to giving and receiving the healing comfort that holding provides.

  THIRTY

  ACTION

  Blanche decided to make her calls early in the morning, before either man was likely to have left his house. As the Palmers’ number rang, it occurred to her that she didn’t have a plan for what to do if Palmer himself answered. She needn’t have been concerned. She could tell from the tone that it was help and not family she was talking to.

  “Morning, ma’am. I’m calling for Mr. Jason Morris?” She made sure to make the statement sound like a question, since she was supposed to be of the class that didn’t have any answers. “He say y’all should remind Mr. David to meet
Mr. Jason at one o’clock at the big bench at the Japanese Teahouse in Eno Park?” She remembered the Teahouse from the picnic they’d catered there. It was secluded without being too far away to make shouting for help a total waste of time.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell him. One o’clock. Eno Park Japanese Teahouse.”

  “Y’all take care, now,” Blanche called out before she hung up. Then she called Jason Morris’s house and left the same message for him from David Palmer.

  She now had three and a half hours to get ready. She remembered the tape recorder she’d used in Boston to help find out who’d killed Ray-Ray. How much would a tape recorder cost that could do what she needed? She counted her money. Forty-five dollars and sixty cents she couldn’t really spare, plus twenty dollars of Archibald’s money. Wondering if Ardell had a good one, she punched in her phone number.

  “What?! You’re gonna do what?! Are you out of your mind? “Even if I had a tape recorder, I wouldn’t lend it to you. If those boys catch you, they’ll chew you up and…” Ardell stopped shrieking like somebody had just snatched her handbag and spoke more slowly, in a calmer, softer tone, as though she were trying to talk Blanche down off a tenth-story window ledge. “Blanche, think about this. If one of those two really did kill Maybelle and Bobby, what do you think they’ll do to you if they catch you eavesdropping on their conversation? That’s if they even show up. And who’s gonna believe anything you say you heard if the two of them say different? That ain’t changed, you know.”

  “I don’t intend for them to catch me, and I don’t expect nobody to take my word for anything. That’s why I want a tape recorder, the kind that starts right up as soon as somebody starts talking. I guess I’m going to have to buy one. I hope they don’t cost too much. I’ll put it someplace near that bench that goes around that tree in the middle, remember? It’s the biggest bench there and the only place it makes sense for them to meet. I’m gonna try to find a place to hide inside, but if I can’t, I’ll just leave the tape recorder and get it when they’re gone.”

  “You’re taking a terrible chance, Blanche.”

  “I don’t think so. But I need a ride to the mall to buy a tape recorder. How about it?”

  “You need more than a ride! You need to be put in a straitjacket for being so damned…”

  “Didn’t you tell me I needed to do something about David Palmer?” Blanche reminded her.

  “Yeah. But I was thinking something more like, well, I don’t know what I was thinking, but I know it wasn’t this!”

  “It’s the best I can do, Ardell. I can’t sneak up on him and hit him in the head with a baseball bat, ’cause I ain’t prepared to do no time for him. Even if I wanted to, I can’t afford to pay nobody to mess him up for me, and, like I said, the dead don’t suffer. So this is all I can see to do. It don’t show him up to be the raping bastard he is, but it could give me enough information to cause him harm. Even if he never knows I had anything to do with it, I’ll be satisfied.”

  “All right, Blanche. All right. But I’m going with you. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

  “Thanks, Ardell. I’ll be ready.” Blanche decided to wait until after the mall to tell Ardell that this was a one-woman job. If there was any danger, no sense both of them being in it.

  Ardell gave Blanche the $4.68 she needed to make the price of the recorder and to buy a tape and batteries. Ardell also gave her a paycheck from the catering company, although payday was still days away. Blanche stopped in the hardware store and bought a length of clothesline.

  They went straight from the mall to the Teahouse for a practice run. As Blanche had hoped, there were only a few people around and no one in the Teahouse. They scoped out the wooden bench that surrounded the gnarled ficus in its huge terra-cotta pot in the center of the Teahouse. They dithered back and forth, trying to decide if the tree pot was the best place for the recorder, and then decided to put it under the bench. They approached the bench from different directions, and Blanche even stooped in front of it as if to tie a shoelace, to make sure the recorder couldn’t be seen. They went behind the shoji screen in the corner and angled the screen so that, when Blanche stood behind it and peeped from the side, her face was so deep in shadows she couldn’t easily be seen from the area around the ficus, although she could see that area clearly. Then Blanche tied the clothesline she’d bought at the mall across the doorway of the Teahouse.

  “To make people think they’re not supposed to go inside,” she explained. Ardell dropped Blanche off at home and promised to pick her up at twelve-thirty sharp.

  Blanche was too hyped to do much more than pace the floor. She read the tape-recorder manual as she walked, trying out various buttons and recording a snatch of her own voice to make sure she knew how to operate it. By twelve o’clock she was so wound up she was sure she could electrocute someone with a touch. Things could go wrong, like Palmer or Jason saying something that made them realize neither one of them had set up the meeting.

  “Ain’t no sense getting a bad case of the nerves now,” Ardell said as she drove them toward Eno Park. “We got plenty of time to get the tape set up and get situated.”

  “Not we, Ardell. Me. It’s easier for one person to hide than two. Anyway, if they do something to me, won’t nobody know where to look for me if you get caught, too.”

  “Blanche, I ain’t about to let you go in there by yourself!”

  Blanche was pleased that Ardell had thought about her before the business, but that didn’t stop Blanche from using Carolina Catering to twist Ardell’s arm: “You ain’t thinking smart, Ardell. What about the business? If they catch us, it would be real bad for business.”

  Ardell eased the car into a parking space in the free lot attached to the park. “It don’t feel right letting you do this by yourself.”

  Blanche looked at her watch, fifteen minutes till one, then gently tapped the back of Ardell’s hand. “I’ll be fine. You can wait right here. If I ain’t back by two, come looking for me. Okay?”

  “No, it ain’t okay, but you ain’t giving me no choice.”

  “Wish me luck!” Blanche jumped out of the car and headed for the Teahouse. She put the tape recorder in its hiding place. She had just decided to relieve Ardell’s mind by leaving the tape recorder unattended and coming back for it but there was Jason Morris heading toward the Teahouse. She barely made it behind the screen.

  Jason paced around the Teahouse. He circled the bench, looking intently at everything he passed, a pale beast sniffing the air, trying to gauge the level of danger. He lit a cigarette and seemed to relax some, but he didn’t sit. When he saw Palmer heading toward him, Jason pulled his shoulders back and sucked in his gut like a model about to hit the runway, but he didn’t move from where he stood. He waited for Palmer to come to him.

  “You heard about the Sheriff?” Jason skipped the Southern-gentleman niceties that would normally have eased them into conversation.

  “Heard what?”

  Jason told Palmer about the Sheriff’s having found something belonging to Maybelle in the bungalow over in Durham and also having something that might be from the killer’s key ring—Katie Crumbley had earned her money.

  Jason spoke with much more ease than he’d shown earlier. “It’s only a rumor. I heard it from one of the maids.”

  “Maybe. But those downstairs darkies always seem to know…”

  “No need to panic, Davey boy,” Jason said as though David was pissing in his pants.

  “Oh, pardon me, Jason, I guess I’m just not used to being an accessory to two murders.”

  Blanche clamped her hand over her mouth to help stifle her desire to whoop with delight. She congratulated herself on thinking of the tape recorder.

  Jason’s only response was to drag on his cigarette.

  “Tell me what happened, Jason. Was she going to leave you? Did she want money? Threaten to tell
your old man if you didn’t pay up? She wasn’t pregnant, or the newspapers would have said.”

  “I told you, Davey, I didn’t kill her. She was just a piece of poor white tail. There was no…”

  Palmer turned his back. “When that boy Bobby was arrested, I thought maybe, just maybe, I was wrong about you. Now he’s dead, too.” Palmer turned back to face his friend. “I wish to God I’d never told you he’d come to see me!”

  “That’s bullshit, old buddy. You expected me to do something. You wanted me to. It was your SOF key he said he had, not mine. I was protecting you!”

  “He wouldn’t have had it if you hadn’t given it to Maybelle. Why the hell couldn’t you have rented a car instead of…”

  “I didn’t give it to her, dear boy, I swear. Maybe she took it off the ring while I was in the shower, or…She loved trinkets, that girl.”

  Blanche wanted to scream at the way Jason talked about Maybelle, as though she’d been a favorite puppy run over by a car.

  Palmer shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. “All for a piece of ass! Two people dead, the Sheriff…Christ! I actually believed you loved her, that you couldn’t live without…”

  Jason laughed and put his hand on Palmer’s shoulder. “You know, you’ve been sappy ever since your little episode. That broken-hearted romantic role you’re determined to play has gotten a bit stale. So some woman jilted you ninety-nine years ago, so what? She was just another cunt, just like all those ball-breaking…”

  Palmer shrugged off Jason’s hand. “Fuck you, Jason. I’m through with all this…”

  Jason took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke out through his nose. “Well, you can’t exactly do that, can you, dear boy? I mean, the flowers, the cottage, the presents, all in your name. On my behalf, but…”